Madison and Jefferson (31 page)

While this plan overcame the impasse over election of the president, it also left considerable power in the hands of the Senate. Madison spoke to the issue. So did James Wilson, who claimed that the president “will not be the man of the people as he ought to be, but a Minion of the Senate.” Roger Sherman, the master of compromise, came up with the solution: If there was no clear winner, the House of Representatives would decide among the top five, voting as state delegations rather than as individuals. Each state delegation would have one vote, ensuring equality for the small states. Sherman’s revision passed by a vote of 10 to 1.
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So now Madison would seek to vest in the presidency the powers he originally wanted to confer on the Senate. As a paternal guardian of the national interest, the chief executive would be wise enough to filter out bad laws and strong enough to control the propensity of the states to enact “pernicious measures.” Madison would then strengthen the presidential veto, compensating for the loss of the absolute negative that he had originally intended for a Senate that no longer resembled his guardian ideal. Here, when all was said and done, he made out well.
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Madison could only feel pleased that the president was to have “more latitude and discretion” than Congress or the judiciary. The president would be able to make treaties and appoint ambassadors and judges. In insisting on the president’s veto authority, Madison was willing to grant the Senate the right to override that veto on the strength of a two-thirds vote (though he preferred a three-quarters vote). The president could be impeached for “incapacity, negligence, or perfidy,” Madison wrote—a more colorful rendering, perhaps, than the eventual phrase, “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In the short run, at least, he was not deeply concerned about presidential “perfidy” and was content to confer to the president power over the military. This was because George Washington was the model (and likeliest candidate) for the office. Since 1779, Americans had been celebrating his birthday and calling him “godlike” for the constancy of his devotion to the nation.
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In this and other ways Madison was sensitive to appearances. He opposed a prohibition against the foreign-born holding offices, suggesting (it sounds quaint today) that such a pose would “give a tincture of illiberality” to the Constitution and discourage the most desirable class of people from immigrating. Madison also supported an immediate prohibition on the
importation of slaves, but he did not have an answer, or even the beginning of an answer, to the larger sectional issue of slavery.

It was not Madison, whose strongest feelings concerned the division of power in a federal system, but Rufus King of Massachusetts who ignited discussion of the slave trade. King was furious when the Committee of Detail refused to place any restrictions on the importation of slaves. George Mason voiced his own strong disapproval of this “infernal traffic,” only to be mocked by Ellsworth of Connecticut, who reminded the Virginian that if slavery was truly to be regarded in a moral light, “we ought to go farther and free those already in the Country.” South Carolina and Georgia refused to budge on the importation of slaves, and the dispute was handed over to the Committee of Eleven. Madison was a member of the committee, which voted to forbid Congress from interfering with the slave trade until 1800, though it did approve a duty on imported slaves. But even this was not enough for the Deep South. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney called for extending the deadline to 1808, at which point Madison took offense. He countered, without the least subtlety, that “twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves” and would seriously tarnish the national character. He reported to Jefferson: “S. Carolina and Georgia were inflexible on the point of slaves.” The Deep South got its way.
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As of early September, Madison could not have been feeling triumphant. The coalition of Virginians he had worked to create no longer existed. He was unable to convince Mason and Randolph to embrace his way of thinking about the presidency—they instinctively distrusted the office. In Randolph’s words, making one man the chief executive would constitute the “Foetus of Monarchy.” To protect sectional interests, the pair preferred a three-person executive, with a representative from each of the coastal regions—New England, the Middle States, and the South.
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By midsummer Mason and Randolph were railing against the “aristocracy” of the Senate. They insisted that money bills and the taxing of exports be kept out of its “mischievous” (read: northern) hands. In the final days of the convention, trying to salvage some of his ideas for weakening power at the top, Mason called for a privy council, comprised of six regional advisers, to surround the president. This idea gained no ground either. When all was said and done, Randolph and Mason were left even more dispirited than Madison. The convention’s refusal to make commercial treaties negotiated by the executive subject to a two-thirds approval in Congress was, for both men, the last straw.
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Thus Edmund Randolph, Virginia’s current governor, and George Mason, Washington’s longtime neighbor, both refused to sign the Constitution. Randolph demanded that participants in the upcoming ratifying conventions be authorized to add amendments. Mason made an even more improbable demand, calling for a second convention. Madison informed Jefferson, somewhat colloquially: “Col. Mason left Philadelphia in an exceeding ill humour indeed.” Among the remaining delegates, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts was the only other one to refuse to sign the Constitution.
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Given the sour atmosphere and the almost constant wrangling, it is remarkable that only these three voiced their dissent at the end of the convention. To read the proceedings as “the miracle at Philadelphia,” as tradition has dubbed it, is a willful oversimplification, if not a delusion. The participants in debate found it a byzantine experience, more wearisome than glorious. As for Madison, it was as a Virginia partisan that he attended the convention; given the utter failure of the Virginia Plan to take root, it was as a Virginian, once again, that he saw the presidency as the one office wherein his state might still retain preeminence.

On September 17, the last day of the convention, Benjamin Franklin offered up a conciliatory speech, admitting that the document to which those assembled had just agreed possessed flaws. But he was astonished, he said, that it approached “so near to perfection as it does.” Looking around the room, the eighty-one-year-old Boston-born Philadelphian implored the delegates to join him in expressing their unanimity by putting their names to it.
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One can only assume that George Washington was inspired by Franklin’s words when, as president of the convention, he rose for the first and only time to address the delegates. He said he hoped they would not be offended by his decision to break his silence, but he felt compelled to speak. A Massachusetts delegate had moved to change the ratio in the House from one representative for every forty thousand persons to one for every thirty thousand, and Washington wished for the delegates to back this proposal.

Why had he chosen this moment to say something? Washington had more than the one, relatively minor, alteration in mind when he spoke up. It was his subtle way of announcing to his colleagues that he endorsed the Constitution and that they should do so as well, before it went to the states for ratification. As the convention was adjourned, delegates dined together one last time before they parted company and returned home.
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On September 25–26, 1787, one week after the Constitutional Convention ended, Princeton College held its graduation, which was reported in newspapers as “a large and polite, and learned assembly.” A series of orations were given, some of them delivered in Latin and Greek. One addressed “the Abuses of Independence”; another took as its subject religious liberty. Before the event concluded, a doctor of laws degree was conferred on a distinguished member of the class of 1771, “the Hon. James Madison, Esq.”
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Just days before, Madison had stopped briefly in Princeton, as he hurried from Philadelphia to New York City to resume his duties in the old Congress—the Confederation Congress. There he had to protect the Constitution from any who would undermine it. Virginian Edward Carrington sent him an urgent letter warning that Richard Henry Lee was going to stir up trouble, offering amendments to the Constitution that would actually be used to oppose it.

A heated debate took place in Congress before it was agreed that no amendments would be added to the text of the Constitution. Congress would remain neutral, then, and send the Constitution on to the states without directly endorsing it. In Philadelphia, Madison had stood firmly behind the principle of ratifying conventions and now helped to word the congressional resolution so that it expressed unanimous agreement to the procedure. He confessed to Washington that a “more direct approbation” would have been better for their home state of Virginia, but he hoped that the indirect endorsement from Congress would be enough. Carrington wrote to Jefferson in the same vein: “The people do not scrutinize terms: the unanimity of Congress in recommending to their consideration, naturally implies approbation.” Others disagreed. R. H. Lee wrote to George Mason that approval was of a limited character, applying only to “transmission” of the Constitution to the states. Battle lines were already being drawn between so-called federalists and antifederalists, proponents and skeptics of the new Constitution.
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Forbidden to divulge anything of substance during the debates, Madison finally wrote to Jefferson at length in October, elaborating on what he saw as imperfections in the final document. Madison’s tone was one of anger and frustration. Unlike Randolph, Mason—or even Jefferson, as he would soon learn—Madison felt the new government was going to be too weak. He remained convinced that his fellow delegates had acted foolishly in rejecting the absolute negative, the only conceivable tool for subordinating the states and bringing selfish local interests under control.
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ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1788 AN ODE APPEARED IN THE
VIRGINIA
Journal
, celebrating the statesmen of the commonwealth and the glory and splendor of the Revolution. It recognized several members of the state’s delegations to earlier congresses, but the choicest lines were reserved for the Virginian who had made his voice heard most often at the convention in Philadelphia. His physical meekness made his accomplishments all the more dramatic:

Next in the poetic procession came the fatherly legal scholars: Wythe, who “drank the source of truth”; and Pendleton, who, “with locks of age,” seemed so wise as to have been “lent from other worlds.” The Lee family was “a glorious band,” but only one of its sons was singled out, Richard Henry Lee, for he had “spoken an empire into birth.” In case the reference was unclear to some, the anonymous versifier added a footnote: “R. H. Lee made the motion in Congress for the declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.”

But R. H. Lee was not a proponent of the Constitution. Given his illustrious role in the Revolution, “millions” (according to the poet) mourned his “loss,” or defection, to antifederalism. He was, in fact, the only antifederalist who received mention in the poem: former governors Patrick Henry, who refused to attend the convention, and Edmund Randolph, who did but decided not to sign, were ignored.

The absent Thomas Jefferson was given his due some lines later: “Light and glory of the age / Jefferson the learned sage.” His association with the Declaration went unmentioned, as it was not yet a part of the national lore. Washington, so revered that he need not even be mentioned by name, was symbolized by his capital achievement: “
PRIDE
of
PEACE
and
STRENGTH
of
WAR
!” The essence of the poem was its prediction that brighter days lay ahead on the western horizon, and that a golden age loomed for America.
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But the human character is mixed, and the conduct of politics is never as tidy as patriotic poetry teaches. From early 1787 to late 1788—pre-convention through ratification—Madison and Jefferson expressed significantly different views about republican government, the American character, and majority rule. As confidential correspondents, they could read each other’s ciphers, but their master narratives for America had diverged.

Their lack of common ground was most striking in their dueling attitudes toward Shays’s Rebellion. When he corresponded with Washington, Madison rebuked the Regulators as a band of traitors; to another ally, he identified the Shaysites as a “diseased part” of the body politic and contended that they were “secretly stimulated by British influence.” But he must have known what to expect from the pen of the American minister to France, because he censored himself when writing to Jefferson.