Madison and Jefferson (28 page)

The fifty-five men who sat in convention were, without exception, drawn from a ruling elite. None of them could be called representative of the common man. Most had received a superior education, having attended the finest colleges in Great Britain or the best schools in the colonies—Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. Hardly a disinterested lot, they were either wealthy merchants or large planters with experience in overseas trade. Many were large-scale speculators in land and government securities.
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Even the few delegates whose origins were humbler had married into families with large fortunes and imposing connections. Up-and-coming lawyers Alexander Hamilton and Rufus King wed the daughters of two of New York State’s richest men. James Wilson had studied the law with Philadelphian John Dickinson, now a delegate from Delaware; Virginia-born John Francis Mercer, a member of the Maryland delegation, had Jefferson to thank for his legal apprenticeship. New Jersey sent its chief justice and its former attorney general. Maryland’s attorney general, Luther Martin,
was present. Connecticut dispatched Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, both of whom sat on the superior court. All were committed to the protection of property rights and class privilege. Madison had reason to expect that they and he were of one mind.
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A considerable number of delegates had been officers in the Continental Army, or had served in state militias. There were brigadier generals, majors, cavalry and garrison commanders, one military chaplain, and a quartermaster for the Continentals. John Langdon of New Hampshire combined his service as a regimental commander with blockade running and privateering, amassing great wealth during the war. For others, personal fortune and military service were foreordained. General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, born to one of the first families of South Carolina, had commanded an elite regiment of grenadiers before joining Washington’s staff.

As defenders of the law and as military men, the delegates came to the convention hoping to restore social order. Forty-one of the fifty-five had served in the Continental Congress and were well aware of the existing government’s weaknesses. At sixty-six, Connecticut’s Roger Sherman was the second-oldest member and had probably held more posts than anyone but the oldest member, Benjamin Franklin. He had been a county surveyor, justice of the peace, superior court judge, assemblyman, state senator, and delegate to the Continental Congress; he had joined Jefferson and Adams on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence and subsequently helped to draft the Articles of Confederation. He and his colleagues were comfortable wielding power. They were prepared to take action. Like Madison, they were deeply disturbed by the social and economic turmoil brewing in the states.
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That turmoil was not imagined. Though pockets of unrest existed elsewhere, Shays’s rebellion created havoc in Massachusetts in 1786–87 and formed the backdrop of the convention—the most immediate and compelling evidence that the Confederation was in trouble. The rebellion began when a group of armed men marched in military array to shut down several courts and stop foreclosures on debtors’ property. Their protest was sparked by high taxes worse than any stamp requirement or duty on tea that the British had formerly imposed. At the first sign of trouble, the governor of the Bay State took punitive action and called out the militia to suppress the rebels. When the militia showed itself well disposed toward the insurgents and failed to make arrests, the governor hired a private army. A Revolutionary War veteran, Captain Daniel Shays, somehow came
to be called “generalissimo” of the uprising and lent his name to it for the history books. Hearing that a large contingent of troops was headed their way, the rebels moved to seize the federal arsenal in Springfield.
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News spread quickly throughout the country. Washington was horrified by the men’s blatant disregard for law and order. He told Henry Knox that he feared “combustibles in every state.” His views were widely shared. More than any other factor, it was the actions of the Shaysites—Regulators, as they called themselves—that had convinced Washington to attend the convention in Philadelphia.
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The Regulators hit a nerve, raising the specter of class warfare. Even Madison believed early rumors that the revolt was connected to a secessionist plot to reunite with Great Britain by forming an alliance with British Canada. Shays’s Rebellion earned a place on Madison’s list of “political vices,” when he ruefully observed that the Articles were silent on the point of mobilizing the government against “internal violence.”
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For Madison, the Massachusetts uprising was a symptom, not a cause, of the Confederation’s maladies. Although the Shaysites lost on the ground, they won at the ballot box: all the governor’s men who bore responsibility for tax hikes, and who had backed the military response, were voted out of office. In March 1787 Madison informed Jefferson that many of Shays’s men refused the offer of a conditional pardon, because in so doing they would have been disenfranchised. While that may sound noble to us, Madison was appalled that they appeared in public wearing their “insolence” as a badge of honor to win popular favor and got elected to “local offices of trust and authority.” As new legislators, they granted debt relief and drastically cut direct taxes. Madison regarded this as a perfect example of the “perfidious” irresponsibility and instability exhibited in state legislatures. He feared democracy’s power.
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While Madison regarded debtor-relief legislation and debtor-court closures as “vices” of the Confederation, it was not Massachusetts but little Rhode Island where he found the most glaring display of a state’s weakness on this score. In 1781 Rhode Island had single-handedly derailed passage of the impost bill in Congress, though every other state had backed the funding measure. In 1786 its state legislature issued paper money, stipulating that such currency could be used to pay off debts. But paper currency suffered rapid depreciation, and as Madison told Jefferson, “shops were shut,” “supplies were withheld from the Market,” and the state was thrown into “a sort of convulsion.” The same year that Rhode Island issued
its paper money, New Jersey refused to make voluntary payments to Congress to settle the nation’s war debt—it seceded (in fiscal terms, at least) from the Confederation.
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The allure of paper money reached into Virginia. In 1786 Madison defeated one effort in the legislature to issue paper money, only to see another campaign mounted in early 1787. As plans for the Constitutional Convention were being laid, Patrick Henry backed a new paper money scheme, leading Madison to update Jefferson on the activities of their chronic political adversary. Who would be able to stop the emission of paper money if Henry was pushing it? he posed. In June, as his anger rose, Madison wrote Jefferson that Henry could not be stopped unless the voters of his county “shall bind him hand and foot by instructions.”

It turned out that paper money was the tip of the iceberg. Not only was Henry hostile to a bill introduced by Madison to reorganize the courts and ensure a more efficient system of debt collection; he was opposed to the stated goal of the Constitutional Convention. Madison was convinced that Henry was engaged in nothing short of fomenting a state rebellion (albeit one waged with words, not arms) and in promoting “
either a partition or total dissolution of the confederacy.
” When the subject was Patrick Henry and the intended recipient of Madison’s letter was Jefferson, an ordinarily calm pen could become quite agitated.
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It is not an exaggeration to say that Madison considered Patrick Henry’s political style, in and of itself, to be one of the major vices of the Confederation. In his treatise on political vices, he spelled out why it was dangerous to trust in the state legislatures: “How frequently too will the honest but unenlightened representative be the dupe of a favorite leader, veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with glowing colours of popular eloquence?”
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Henry was the archetype for this scathing portrait. Genuine reform demanded a political mechanism that would check the seductive sway of the popular orator over his comparatively unenlightened colleagues. It also explains why Madison was so insistent that the federal government exercise an absolute negative over all state legislation.

Modern Americans would, of course, prefer to focus on the nobler motives of the framers, but money matters doubtless roused most of the delegates to come to Philadelphia. With only a few exceptions, they despised paper money and recognized debt as a combustible issue capable of fomenting class war. Most felt, as Madison did, that Congress needed additional power in order to raise revenue, protect property rights, and
discipline rogue state legislatures. Rhode Island became the symbol of everything that was wrong with the Confederation—a small state with more power than it deserved, whose local representatives actually courted disaster by the degree to which they were responsive to their constituency. Rhode Island was the only one of the thirteen states that refused to send any delegates to Philadelphia.
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A minor diversion pertaining to the composition of Virginia’s delegation rattled an already tense situation. James Monroe believed that Edmund Randolph, the governor, and Madison, his bosom friend, had turned on him. In the summer of 1787 he wrote to Jefferson of his dismay at being excluded from the Virginia delegation: “The Governor I have reason to believe is unfriendly to me and hath shewn (if I am well inform’d) a disposition to thwart me; and Madison, upon whose friendship I have calculated, whose views I have favored, and with whom I have held the most confidential correspondence since you left the continent, is in strict league with him and hath I have reason to believe concurr’d in arrangements unfavorable to me.” Monroe often jumped to conclusions and was prone to feeling slighted. His relations with Madison would suffer, time and again, from these tendencies. In fact, many in Virginia believed that Monroe was unavailable for the convention. Neither Randolph nor Madison harbored any ill will toward him.
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As the convention opened for business, Madison took his seat front and center in the room. He wanted to be certain he could hear the speakers on his left and right and take down notes of the proceedings. He later explained that his notes were for “future curiosity,” preserving for history an “authentic exhibition” of the road map that led to an improved republican government.

Scholars have long debated whether the account Madison kept was completely authentic. Some praise his meticulous and honest reporting, while others charge him with a deliberate manipulation of the record. He probably did edit portions of his notes later in life, but he certainly did not alter the evidence so flagrantly as to paint himself in the most favorable light. His notes from the convention belie the customary portrait of Madison as the “Father of the Constitution.” The patriarchal metaphor is itself false, because even in
his own
telling Madison is clearly
not
the hero of the
convention. He is shown to be less adept than Connecticut’s Roger Sherman in getting his way. James Madison emerges not as the proud parent of a government made in his image but as a frustrated composer whose grand symphony has been left unfinished.

Nevertheless he tried aggressively to direct the course of the convention. Well before the other state delegations had assembled, he was already busy convincing his fellow Virginians to put together that agenda that came to be known as the Virginia Plan. And while Madison did the most to shape the proposal, the final draft shows the marked influence of Randolph and Mason. Deciding how to present their case to the convention was very much a collaborative effort.

Rules for the convention were largely the same as those used in previous congresses. The votes of all state delegations would be of equal weight, a concession the Virginians felt was necessary to avoid alienating the small states too soon. A simple majority would carry the day. Though the most visible of the Virginians, Washington, came with no intention of presenting to the convention, he was given the royal treatment—rules of adjournment dictated that “every member must stand in his place, until the President shall pass him.” One can visualize the tall and sturdy general rising from his chair at the end of each day’s discussion, marching from the room with all eyes upon him as delegates waited a decent interval before moving toward the door.

The most celebrated rule was seemingly the hardest to guarantee: preserving the secrecy of the proceedings. Nothing that emanated from the convention could be published, and delegates were constrained from discussing the debates in their confidential communications. As Madison explained to Jefferson, an “expedient” was needed “to secure unbiased discussion within doors, and prevent misconceptions and misconstructions without.” Jefferson was dismayed and told John Adams that it was an “abominable” precedent, this “tying up the tongues” of the delegates. But he conveyed none of his displeasure to Madison.
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With rules in place, business began in earnest. On May 29 all eyes and ears were directed at Edmund Randolph, as he took the floor and gave an elaborate speech. He told his audience that he was opening the “great subject” of the convention as head of the Virginia delegation, in view of the fact that the very idea of the convention had originated in his state. To avoid launching into controversy on day one, he emphasized national security rather than economic measures as a means to strengthen the Union, wondering aloud what was to be done collectively in the event of a foreign invasion.
As things presently stood, Congress could not prevent a war if provoked by a state or states, and the Articles of Confederation conferred no authority to fund any response to external threats. Additionally, the existing forms prevented government from checking quarrels between states or intervening in the case of a domestic rebellion.