America's Greatest 19th Century Presidents (9 page)

During the first few months of the fighting, the British tried on several occasions to lift the siege with force. The strongest attempt took place in June, when the British fired on Charlestown and then landed 3,000 British regulars on the peninsula. This attempt, which came to be known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, would end up being the bloodiest battle of the war. On June 17, 1775, 3,000 British soldiers attempted multiple charges up Bunker Hill against 1,200 defenders who were fairly well entrenched. The third attempt forced the colonists back to Cambridge, but the British suffered a heavy price, with over 1,000 British soldiers killed or wounded, compared to only 450 casualties for the colonists.

The Battle of Bunker Hill was technically a tactical victory for the British, but it did not break the siege of Boston, and it provided a morale boost for the colonial forces. General Gage was replaced by General Howe as commander of the British forces, and the siege would continue until the British quit Boston in March 1776, nearly 11 whole months after the first shots were fired.

Second Continental Congress

The petitions of the First Continental Congress had no effect on King George III or Parliament in 1774, and the Second Continental Congress would convene in June 1775. But by then, colonists in Massachusetts took things into their own hands. The First Continental Congress had convened for barely more than 6 months, but the Second Continental Congress would end up lasting for nearly 6 years.

After the shot heard round the world at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775, the colonies sent representatives to the Second Continental Congress. During their initial meetings, some delegates at the Second Continental Congress were still considering ways the colonies might reconcile with the British Empire, but when the colonial militia forces laying siege to Boston won the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, the delegates became more determined to cast off what they perceived to be British tyranny.

The Virginia Constitution

Madison was already a zealous Patriot by the time the Congress decided to declare independence in the summer of 1776. His contribution to the Revolution remained limited to Virginia for the next few years, however.  In 1776, as the Continental Congress was drafting the Declaration of Independence, Madison was elected to serve in the Virginia Convention, which was tasked with writing the state's constitution.  Together with George Mason, Madison wrote the draft that would eventually become the state's constitution, and Madison later used it as a reference and odel for the U.S. Constitution. Madison wrote the bulk of the constitution that related to the separation of powers, while Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which would later influence the Bill of Rights.  Madison was accomplishing this impressive task at just 25 years old.

With a Constitution in hand, Virginia assembled its first state government, and Madison was honored to serve in it.  In late 1776, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he first met Thomas Jefferson that October.  Destined to become Jefferson’s protégé, during his two years in office, Madison and Jefferson worked tirelessly on issues pertaining to religious freedom, and they disestablished the Church of England in Virginia.  After the Revolution, Madison also helped Jefferson write the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, one of the first documents that established the separation of church and state, an ideological underpinning that became one of the hallmarks of the U.S. Constitution. 

Madison's time in the House of Delegates was short, however.  In 1778, he was defeated for reelection, in part due to his puritanical opposition to a long-standing tradition of treating voters to whisky.  Despite his defeat, Madison was shortly thereafter appointed to the 8-member Governor's Council, which directly advised Virginia’s first sitting governor, Patrick Henry. 

Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris

A year after he had been appointed to the Governor’s Council, James Madison began serving as a delegate at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia after he was elected for a three year term in 1780. Madison was replacing Jefferson, who had been a delegate but was moving back to Virginia to serve as its governor. Jefferson had been the youngest delegate at the age of 33 when the Second Continental Congress convened in 1775, and Madison was not yet 30 when he took Jefferson’s place.

During Madison's first year in Congress, the Revolution was winding down, with victory at Yorktown coming in 1781.  With the French and American artillery shelling Yorktown from three sides, General Cornwallis was forced to surrender. Over 7,000 British officers and soldiers were captured, and the battle was the last major battle in North America, thus effectively ensuring the independence of the United States. Just thirteen days later, Cornwallis surrendered to Washington, handing him his sword.  It is said that a British regimental band, recognizing the gravity of their defeat, played a popular tune of the time called “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Cornwallis' surrender in Yorktown effectively, but not officially, ended the war in 1781.  Throughout 1782 and 1783, Washington moved his army back up to New York City to bottle up the British there, making sure his army was on guard and ready to fight.  Although hostilities ended in North America after the American and French victory over British forces in the Siege of Yorktown in 1781, the war raged on elsewhere between Great Britain and France, Spain and the Netherlands for two more years.

In 1783, all sides were finally ready to negotiate peace. John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams negotiated the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain, which established the United States as an independent nation. The Treaty of Paris, signed on September 3, 1783, only ended hostilities between Great Britain and the United States, but the other countries also negotiated separate treaties ending the war.

In a move that would help create political divides within the young nation, the United States reneged on its agreement with France to negotiate jointly with the British, going behind the French’s back to reach peace with Great Britain. This was done in spite of the fact the French had been the colonists’ principal ally and had contributed greatly to the victory in terms of manpower and expenses, to the point that the French Empire practically bankrupted itself and brought upon its own Revolution nearly a decade later.

Ultimately, the United States would receive much of the territory that was once New France, from the Appalachian Mountains west to the Mississippi, and north to the Great Lakes. In addition, Great Britain and the United States agreed that both countries would have free access to the Mississippi. The United States also agreed to recommend that states compensate Loyalists for their lost property, though both sides were aware that the states would likely ignore this provision, which they did.

Chapter 3: The Father of the Constitution, 1783-1787

Serving in the Continental Congress

Madison's time in the Continental Congress proved to be an aberration from his later political alignment.  While at the Congress, Madison took positions that would subsequently be argued by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, in particular his opposition to the Articles of Confederation.  During the Revolution, Madison thought a stronger central government, at the expense of the states, was needed to strengthen the colonies.  While Jefferson, who was best remembered for authoring the Declaration of Independence, was relatively reserved in actually participating in debates during the Congress, Madison was an important figure in ongoing deliberations despite his young age.

With independence secured, Madison's time in the Congress thus involved settling and managing the new nation.  The major accomplishment of the first post-war Congress was the creation of the Northwest Territory, which took land from individual states and gave it to the federal government.

In the Continental Congress, both Madison and Hamilton were strong advocates for a powerful centralized government, but their calls mostly fell on deaf ears during the first few years of independence. Though the system seems entirely foreign today, the decentralized nature of the government during the Revolution made a lot of sense to the colonists at the time. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress began working on a permanent system for a national government, eventually drafting the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. The Articles of Confederation were formed in a political atmosphere of rebellion against the overbearing and powerful government in London. The drafters did not want to substitute for Parliament an equally powerful national legislature.

Among the grievances the Patriots had with Parliament was that by overruling their colonial legislatures, Parliament was infringing on the colonists' natural and legal rights. Therefore, when the Patriots drafted their own system of government, they made sure that the new national government would not have the power to overrule the state legislatures except in very few areas. Thus, the Congresses of the United States under the Articles of Confederation were intentionally limited in power and intentionally made dependent on the cooperation of the colonial legislatures.

Back to Virginia

In 1884, Madison left what he considered a too weak national Congress and returned to Virginia, to serve again in the House of Delegates. During his second tenure in the House of Delegates, Madison again championed religious freedoms.  He opposed efforts to establish state support for churches or to mandate contributions to the state that could be redistributed to various churches. Those were positions that had been advocated by Patrick Henry, which was somewhat ironic since Henry would rail against the U.S. Constitution for centralizing too much power in government.  Madison authored the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” during this time and supported Jefferson's “Bill for Religious Liberty.” These documents foreshadowed the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

Madison also developed his political philosophy further during his second term in the House of Delegates.  He was disturbed by the body's increasing democratization and tendency to support special interests ahead of the interests of the entire state.  In essence, Madison was complaining about common citizens having too much say in the direction of government, which sounds quite undemocratic today. Instead, Madison supported a more aristocratic style of government, in which legislators were disinterested and removed from impulsive and emotional interests. For his part, Hamilton supported establishing an executive position at the Constitutional Convention that would resemble a monarch more than an equal branch of government. These views of the two men most closely associated with the drafting of the U.S. Constitution would shock Americans today. 

Problems with the Articles of Confederation

The drafters of the Articles of Confederation had deliberately avoided giving the national legislature the power to tax, because Parliament had so abused that authority against the colonies. But this proved to be a severe limitation on the national government. Besides hampering the Continental Army, the inability of the national government to raise revenue made foreign policy difficult. After the end of the Revolutionary War, the United States had no navy and was no longer protected by the British navy. As a result, American commerce was pillaged by the Barbary pirates, yet the Congress could do nothing to stop the pirate attacks, because it could raise no money to fund a navy to defend American shipping.

Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress was also completely unable to pay any of the debts it incurred to foreign powers during the Revolutionary War. Though allied powers had lent to the American government on favorable terms and no repayment was expected until the end of hostilities, the hope of ever paying national debts without a national government that could tax was slim. In particular, the prospect of the new nation defaulting on its loans from France led to the end of the Articles of Confederation.

To top it all off, the Articles of Confederation also had no judiciary or executive branch. Therefore, laws passed by the Congress could not be enforced by the national government: the enforcement of laws was left to the mercy of the states. Likewise, there was no national judiciary to decide disputes over national law.

During his time in the House, Madison remained concerned that the federal government was too ineffective.  He served as a delegate to the Annapolis Convention in 1786, which sought to improve interstate trade and eventually culminated in a proposal for a new convention to reform the Articles of Confederation.  By 1787, even prominent Americans like George Washington were beginning to publicly voice their displeasure with the Articles of Confederation. Along with Hamilton, Madison proposed a new convention in Philadelphia to write a new Constitution for the United States.  The idea took hold, and a new assembly, the Constitutional Convention, was set in motion.

The Constitutional Convention

By 1787, it became evident that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for the new nation.  With these problems hampering the national government under the Articles of Confederation and the threat of default on the nation's massive war debt looming, plans began being made to fix the problems of the Articles of Confederation.

In the summer of 1787, Madison left the House of Delegates to serve in a role that would eventually prove to be the most important work of his life.  The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was a watershed moment in American history, ushering in the opportunity for the enhanced interconnectivity of the states, and Madison understood the gravity of the occasion.

Thus, that summer a constitutional convention was called, and each state sent delegates to Philadelphia. Among the delegates were prominent patriots and former members of the Continental Congress, including George Washington and Ben Franklin. But while most of the delegates came to Philadelphia virtually starting with nothing, the zealous Madison arrived in Philadelphia well-prepared and well-studied. In preparation for the Convention, Madison used his extensive knowledge of ancient and foreign languages to study constitutions from across the world.  He had done this prior to helping craft the Virginia Constitution and was thus already considered something of an expert on constitutionalism.  Given that background, and the fact that he had done more legwork than anybody else at the Convention, delegates looked to him as a leader on the subject. Even Hamilton, whose previous loud calls for a stronger national government had helped establish the Convention, took a backseat to Madison.