‘Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America’
By Tyson Reeder
Oxford University Press, 424 pages

“Everything hinged on Pennsylvania, Madison gauged.” Tyson Reeder is describing the presidential election of 1796, which might just as well have been a description of today: “If Adams and Jefferson split the North and South, Pennsylvania would cast the deciding votes — a ‘swing state’ in modern parlance. Republicans might take the presidency if they won Pennsylvania.”

After much jockeying in the electoral college President Jefferson lost to President John Adams by just three votes in the first election after President Washington’s decision not to run for a third term. 

In a farewell address, Washington warned against “entangling alliances.” John Adams took office, boxed about by Federalists who feared French interference in American elections and who accused Madison and his partner-in-crime, Jefferson, of being French agents.

The Republicans, headed by Jefferson, suspected Adams and his cohort of Anglophilia and an ambition to transform the presidency into a monarchy. 

According to the chief architect of the American constitution, Madison, it was not supposed to be this way. He had made a considerable study of republics and parliamentary systems and believed he had created an elaborate system of checks and balances which would prevent any one party from dominating government.  He had not supposed that the polity would devolve into two party contests.

Madison worried that the partisanship of contending parties would make the new country, composed precariously of individual states intent on preserving their sovereignty, especially susceptible to foreign intervention in American political life.

In spite of his own early efforts to moderate partisanship, Madison himself became a partisan as he accepted the post of Secretary of State and then election to the presidency. As Mr. Reeder emphasizes, partisans never see the irony of their attacks on others for their partisanship.  

The list of foreign diplomats who attempted to sway and even to corrupt American politics is very long in this book’s account of their intrigues. In a fledgling country, still working out how to implement its constitution, without the strong military forces of European powers, America seemed ripe for subversion and even dismemberment.  

Perhaps the Spanish could pick off parts of the lower Mississippi, deny Americans the right to trade on the river, and promise Americans, with no certain allegiance to their own new government, a profitable alliance. 

Or maybe the French, and their ambitious emperor Napoleon, might split off New Orleans and the Louisiana territory relying on disaffected Southerners or Westerners to see how becoming part of an established empire was to their advantage. 

Certain British diplomats thought the same about the West and that they would be able to pick off American dissenters and the remaining Loyalists to the Crown and recapture parts of the continent for the British Empire.  Up North, Canadians successfully beat off American invasions, so just maybe American expansion was not so manifest.

Foreign agents and diplomats were not delusional. Plenty of American adventurers were at hand — like Vice President Burr, although no one ever seemed able to figure out exactly what Burr had in mind.  He told different stories to different parties, making it seem he was for sale and was willing to sell off parts of the country.

Mr. Reeder does not forget the “Indians,” as they were then called. They still had considerable power, and were making treaties that recognized them as sovereigns themselves — except when Americans disregarded the treaties their own governments made and seized the land they coveted, no matter what “rights” the Indians claimed. 

The trouble always returned to a central question, Mr. Reeder explains: Who was sovereign? The people or the government? Foreign diplomats often appealed to public opinion, citing the notion that the public was sovereign, not its representatives. Madison himself waffled on the issue, depending, it seems, on whether he was in or out of government.  

In an epilogue, Mr. Reeder shows how the problem of foreign interference is not likely to go away in a nation created out of separate sovereigns and a people who think they are in charge. Madison, prone to siding with different sovereigns at different times, seems the perfect symbol of the contentiousness of American history.

Mr. Rollyson’s work in progress is “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”