James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (23 page)

Jefferson reiterated how much he favored a bill of rights, not knowing that he would soon receive a letter from Madison indicating that he did as well. Although their reasons were different, the two greatest minds of the eighteenth century were now in accord on the importance of amending the Constitution.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1788,
after Madison had returned to New York City from the Virginia ratifying convention, he asked a French visitor to attend a dinner with him. J.-P. Brissot de Warville was clearly thrilled at being invited by the “celebrated” Madison: “Though still young, he has rendered the greatest services to Virginia, to the American confederation, and to liberty and humanity in general. He contributed much . . . in reforming the civil and criminal codes of his country. He distinguished himself particularly in the conventions for the acceptation of the new federal system. Virginia balanced a long time in adhering to it. Mr. Madison determined to it the members of the convention by his eloquence and his logic.” Madison was not the kind of fellow who attempted to ingratiate himself on first meeting, Brissot de Warville observed: “His look announces a censor.” But his bearing was appropriate for a serious person about serious business: “His reserve was that of a man conscious of his talents and of his duties.”
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The dinner was at the home of Alexander Hamilton, who had triumphed at the New York ratifying convention. Brissot de Warville called Hamilton “the worthy fellow laborer of Mr. Madison” but also
observed some tension between the two. The price that New York Federalists, including Hamilton, had paid for ratification had Madison concerned. To appease Antifederalists, they had sent a circular letter to the states recommending a second convention to revise parts of the Constitution. “If an early general convention cannot be parried,” Madison wrote, “it is seriously to be feared that the system which has resisted so many direct attacks may be at last successfully undermined.”
²

The talk at dinner turned to North Carolina’s recent and surprising refusal to ratify the Constitution. Madison assured the group that the effects would be minimal, but North Carolina’s rejection was not good news. It proved the power of the bill of rights issue, since one of the arguments against ratification had been the absence of rights guarantees. The defeat also energized Antifederalists. In Virginia, Patrick Henry was rallying support for a second convention, and one of those joining him was Edmund Randolph. The Virginia governor had not finished with his “doublings and turnings.”
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Henry was also agitating the matter of the Mississippi, and Madison made yet one more attempt to reassure his fellow Virginians, arranging for Congress to affirm again “that the free navigation of the River Mississippi is a clear and essential right of the United States and ought to be considered and supported as such.” Madison heard from Edmund Pendleton that the message had the soothing effect for which Madison had hoped, but as if to emphasize the long road ahead, Pendleton also reported that outrage had greeted news that the capital of the newly formed nation would be temporarily located in New York. The decision was seen as evidence of the North’s intention to dominate the South under the new government.
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•   •   •

THE DATE FOR
appointing presidential electors was set for January. Washington would become president. Everyone was sure of that, but who would be in the second spot? For balance, it should be someone from the North, but Madison was dissatisfied with the names being put forward. John Hancock, he wrote to Jefferson in cipher, “is weak, ambitious, a
courtier of popularity given to low intrigue.” As for John Adams, his vanity continued to annoy Madison. He overflowed with self-importance, and that, Madison thought, would be his undoing. People would realize that he could not be “a very cordial second to the general.”
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As Madison turned in his letter to the subject of amendments to the Constitution, he said that a declaration of rights would probably be added and noted that was fine with him. “My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights,” he wrote, a statement that would surely have surprised those who had heard him declare at the Virginia ratifying convention that a declaration of rights was “dangerous because an enumeration which is not complete is not safe” and “unnecessary because it was evident that the general government had no power but what was given it.” But his shift on this issue was nuanced by the caveat he added. He favored a bill of rights “provided it be so framed as not to imply powers not meant to be included in the enumeration.”
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And that was bound to be the case, since he would be doing the framing.

As for a declaration’s being unnecessary, Madison confessed that he had “not viewed [a bill of rights] in an important light,” in part because of his experience in Virginia. There he had seen the “parchment barriers” of that state’s declaration of rights “violated in every instance where it has been opposed to a popular current.” In a republic that was where the danger lay—with oppressive majorities. “This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to,” he wrote to Jefferson, who had spent the last four years observing the court of Louis XVI. In a monarchy, where the possibility of abusing power rested with the government, a bill of rights was useful, Madison wrote. It set forth standards for the king and could serve to rally the people against him. But in a popular government, where power was vested “in a majority of the people,” there was no greater force to rally in opposition. Still, there were noble purposes for a bill of rights. In the first place, it could help citizens internalize the axioms underlying a republic: “Political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest
and passion.” The second argument he offered would hold up equally well over the years. It was possible, he said, that the government in a republic could usurp power. In that case, “a bill of rights will be a good ground for an appeal to the sense of the community.”
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Madison’s comments to Jefferson were philosophical, not political, but in the months ahead politics would be very much on his mind. He hoped to be chosen for federal office, and Virginia friends urged him to consider the Senate. As he thought about his prospects, he decided that Patrick Henry’s control of the Virginia legislature, which would make the choice, ruled the Senate out, but his name was nonetheless submitted. He didn’t lose badly, running a strong third behind Federalist candidates Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson, but he nonetheless lost—and had to endure a verbal assault by Patrick Henry in the process. On the floor of the House of Delegates, Henry declared Madison “unworthy of the confidence of the people” and warned that his election “would terminate in producing rivulets of blood throughout the land.”
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Madison was in Philadelphia when he learned of his defeat and of Henry’s intention to keep him out of the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. At Henry’s direction, the House of Delegates passed an election law that put Orange County into a district with counties in which there was strong Antifederalist feeling. The law also required a year’s residence in the district, eliminating any possibility of Madison’s seeking another place to represent. Henry no doubt also had a hand in finding an attractive candidate to run against Madison for Congress—James Monroe. Madison’s friends were appalled. One called Monroe “the beau,” suggesting that vanity was at work. Others thought that personal hostility was involved. “You are upon no occasion of a public nature to expect favors from this gentleman,” Edward Carrington wrote. So troubled were Madison’s supporters at the effort to keep him out of elective office that when one of them, James Gordon Jr., “lost his reason” and had to be confined, the cause was said to be Gordon’s utter disappointment with the conduct of the House of Delegates toward Madison and the Constitution.
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Madison set out for Virginia, stopping on the way at Mount Vernon,
where he spent the better part of a week visiting with George Washington. While Madison’s election was no doubt one of the subjects the men talked about, the larger part of their conversation probably concerned Washington’s becoming president, which was increasingly likely, and the strength and stability of the new government, which seemed less likely by the day. Under Patrick Henry’s guidance, the Virginia Assembly was petitioning the outgoing Congress for a second convention, writing to Governor George Clinton of New York about cooperating in such an effort, and sending a circular letter to all the states seeking support. Both men were worried about Henry’s power. “He has only to say let this be law—and it is law,” Washington wrote. As Madison saw it, Henry’s aim was nothing less than “the destruction of the whole system.”
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Madison arrived in Orange County to find his opponents whispering that he was “dogmatically attached to the Constitution in every clause, syllable, and letter” and would not therefore countenance amendments on any subject, including fundamental rights. He launched a letter-writing campaign to dispel that notion, particularly among his Baptist supporters, who were being told that he was no longer “a friend to the rights of conscience.” He explained to Baptist minister George Eve that before the Constitution was ratified, he had “opposed all previous alterations as calculated to throw the states into dangerous contentions and to furnish the secret enemies of the Union with an opportunity of promoting its dissolution.” But now that ratification had occurred, he believed Congress “ought to prepare and recommend to the states for ratification the most satisfactory provisions for all essential rights, particularly the rights of conscience.” A letter in which he made the same points to a Spotsylvania County resident ended up, surely not by accident, in the
Virginia Herald
.
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Madison even took to the road, making campaign stops not just in Orange but also in Louisa and Culpeper counties. Soon he and Monroe were making joint appearances, one of which followed a Lutheran church service. After “music with two fiddles,” as Madison later remembered it, “we addressed these people and kept them standing in the snow listening to the discussion of constitutional subjects. They stood it out
very patiently—seemed to consider it a sort of fight of which they were required to be spectators.” Afterward Madison rode twelve miles through the night to his home, acquiring a touch of frostbite on his nose along the way. In later years he would point to the scar with pride.
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For all his insistence that he didn’t like campaigning, Madison proved effective at it. In a district where the deck had been stacked against him, he garnered 1,308 votes to 972 for Monroe. Among the congratulatory letters he received was one from his old friend Baptist minister John Leland, who modestly wrote that if his effort in the late campaign accomplished nothing else, “it certainly gave
Mr. Madison
one vote.”
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Madison received a letter from George Washington that suggested how extensive a role he was likely to play in the new government. Washington wanted Madison’s help with his inaugural address. He had a draft—a seventy-three-page creation produced by an aide—but he was doubtful about it and hoped that as Madison traveled to New York to assume his seat in Congress, he would stop at Mount Vernon and offer his advice. When Madison reached the president-elect’s home on February 22, 1789, he found that Washington was right to have concerns. The seventy-three-page draft was, he later observed, a “strange production.” He stayed with Washington for a week, writing a much shorter speech for him.
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Seven of the ten representatives to Congress elected in Virginia were Federalists, and Madison left Mount Vernon with one of them, John Page, and met another, Richard Bland Lee, in Alexandria. The three men slogged toward New York through wintry weather, but reports of Federalists sweeping other states no doubt took some of the edge off the chill. Outside Baltimore, they fell in with “the bearer of the electoral votes of Georgia,” and Madison was able to write to Washington that “they are unanimous as to the president.”
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•   •   •

LIKE MANY
eighteenth-century events, the First Congress was late in convening—four weeks late, in fact—but after a quorum was finally formed in both houses, what everyone knew became official:
Washington would be the first president. Every elector in every state had voted for him. John Adams, although he received less than half the number of votes that Washington did, still had the second-highest number and would be vice president.

On April 30, Madison took his place in the inaugural procession, his carriage behind Washington’s grand equipage—a bright yellow carriage drawn by white horses. The train of troops and dignitaries made its way through Dock and Broad streets to the splendidly remodeled Federal Hall, where Madison, as part of the official five-man inaugural committee from the House, likely accompanied the president-elect as he walked up the stairs and stepped out on the colonnaded balcony. At Washington’s appearance a great roar went up from the multitudes assembled below. The president-elect, dressed for the occasion in a suit of brown American broadcloth, white silk stockings, and silver-buckled shoes, put his right hand on a Bible lent for the occasion by a New York Masonic lodge and took the oath of office prescribed by the Constitution. At the end of the oath, according to well-established tradition, he added “So help me God.” Then he bent to kiss the Bible.
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In the second-floor Senate chamber of Federal Hall, a splendid room with a high arched ceiling, tall windows, and crimson curtains, Washington, uncharacteristically nervous, read the address Madison had drafted at Mount Vernon. They had doubtless consulted about it as Madison wrote, because it suited Washington well, capturing his modesty, his belief in the providential agency that guided the nation, and his love for his country. But one moment in the address was quintessentially Madisonian. It occurred when the president declared that “the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the Republican model of government are justly considered as
deeply,
perhaps as
finally
staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.” Madison often used the word “sacred” to convey the ultimate nature of such civic concepts as rights, responsibilities, and liberty. He used the word “staked”
to indicate crucial dependencies, once describing the Constitution as a document “on which would be staked the happiness of a people.”
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He had used the metaphor of government as an experiment in more than
a dozen numbers of
The Federalist,
conveying the notion that human arrangements, particularly those aimed at establishing self-government, are fragile and might fail. Their preservation required vigilance.