No, not Rick Scott’s Supreme Court-abetted reelection scheme — the clandestine coup orchestrated by the Madison administration.

In The Plot to Steal Florida: James Madison’s Phony War, military historian and former CIA agent James Burkholder Smith tells the secret – or at least obscure – history of how the Father of the Constitution™ attempted to wrest the Floridas from a crumbling Spanish Empire during his first term as President using off-the-books money, discredited military men, and a staggering degree of plain dishonesty.

If it sounds familiar, the author thinks so too: “History does not repeat itself, but lives by analogy. The analogy between the covert operation of 1812 and the covert operation [to depose President Salvador Allende of Chile] in 1970 illuminates understanding.”

In fact, Smith contends that the sub rosa adventure whereby President Madison and Secretary of State James Monroe colluded to bypass Congress and stage a carpet-bagging insurrection amongst Spanish “Patriot militias” contracted by U.S. agents is the first covert military action in American history. Subverting the usual story of a noble republic born blameless and raised in an Era of Good Feelings only later to be corrupted by modernity, Smith, our man on the inside, reveals a much grubbier portrait of our 4th president and co-author of the Federalist Papers than is generally deemed tasteful (did you know he had hemorrhoids?).

But the facts are the facts, and in this case they are these: Madison and Monroe, exploiting an ambiguity in the terms of the Louisiana Purchase that may or may not have entitled them to some land near present-day Mobile decided that they would go ahead and take it. And the rest of Spanish West Florida. And then East Florida, whose capital in St. Augustine is not exactly in the same neighborhood as Alabama.

Their tools included General George Mathews, a bloated old Tory out for land and glory; his sidekick Colonel Ralph Isaacs, referred to by one Spanish official as Mathew’s “confidential Jew” and, incidentally, the subject of much antisemitic abuse from all sides throughout the conquest; $10 million set aside to “survey” lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase, certainly among the earliest bloody euphemisms in U.S. history, which was of course used for weapons and bribes; and the increasing insolvency of the Spanish Crown under Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte, which created status-deprived colonial officers and hungry soldiers, both who would prove to be open to treason, given the right inducements.

What followed was, to borrow from Henry Kissinger’s description of one of the many state-sponsored murders he oversaw, “amateurish, being improvised in panic and executed in confusion.” As with Nixon, much of the panic emanated from Washington, and much of the confusion from Madison’s fear of being found out.

Spoiler alert — the Spanish lose Florida, though many racist uncles will tell you they didn’t. And when the time comes for Washington to make good on those inducements to the many “patriots” who took part in the scheme, they paid for Florida exactly the same way many Yankee retirees did a dozen decades later: on the installment plan.

This substantial yet readable account of the Madison-Monroe adventure in pre-Florida is recommended to all lovers of espionage, intrigue, and renderings of Founding Fathers as Otto von Bismarck with hemmorhoids.

The Plot to Steal Florida: James Madison’s Phony War by James Burkholder Smith
Arbor House, 1983. 314 pp.
http://www.amazon.com/The-plot-steal-Florida-Madisons/dp/0877954771