James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (20 page)

Jefferson also seemed to ignore his friend’s description of the agreement reached at the Philadelphia convention as nothing “less than a miracle.” Although he had participated in neither the work of putting the convention together nor any of the nerve-racking months of give-and-take that had produced the Constitution, Jefferson put forward the possibility of a second convention as though agreement could easily be reached again. Find out what parts of the Constitution people like or dislike, Jefferson advised Madison, then say to them, “We see now what you wish.”
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As Jefferson viewed things from Paris, a second convention could then perfect the Constitution, but in Madison’s world amendments and a second convention were weapons being wielded by foes in order to destroy the Constitution. The two Virginians on opposite sides of the Atlantic had vastly different perceptions of what was happening on Madison’s side, and if Madison deemed it unfruitful to take up his work on
The Federalist
with Jefferson, he certainly had cause.

•   •   •

THE
FEDERALIST
ESSAY
that would eventually become most famous was the first one Madison wrote. In
Federalist
10, published November 22, 1787, he set forth the failures of “our governments” (rather than “our states,” where, after all, the Constitution would be ratified), noting the instability and injustices that had caused good citizens across the country to increasingly distrust those governments and feel “alarm for private rights.” The cause of government failures was “faction,” which he explained as people “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” There was no cure
for faction. Its causes were “sown in the nature of man.” But an extended republic such as the Constitution proposed could control its effects:

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy, but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.

Madison had not forgotten the convulsions charismatic leaders could cause or the injustice that could spring from “a zeal for different opinions concerning religion,” but in
Federalist
10 he emphasized the owning or not owning of property as a source of faction. A stable and just society required that property owners and creditors, though they be a minority, have governmental arrangements that protected their rights—as he believed the extended republic created by the Constitution would do.

Madison also wrote in
Federalist
10 that a large republic would have the advantage of more “fit characters” for people to choose from for public office and suggested that since a greater number of voters would choose each official in a large republic, the representatives who emerged would be more likely to rise above faction and focus on the greater good.
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This theory, for all its appeal, would not survive the 1790s, when it would become clear to Madison that ideas about the greater good were also subject to fierce and factious controversy. The principles to which he was devoted would not prevail unless he fought for them.

The government Madison described in
The Federalist
was new under the sun, a point that Antifederalists, as those opposed to the Constitution were being called, advanced as a critique. In his second contribution to
The Federalist,
no. 14, Madison asserted that novelty was not to be shunned: “But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be
rejected merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” America’s leaders had “accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society,” he concluded, and it should be no surprise that “they reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.”
¹⁷

Madison’s goal was a stable republic where citizens were free and private rights respected. His method was that of the Enlightenment: to look to the ages for the lessons of history. And when he did, as in
Federalist
18 and 19, what he saw time and again was that confederacies failed without a strong central government. The trick was to be sure that government did not become tyrannical—and here again the extended republic came into play. So many people of so many diverse opinions, living across such vast territory, made it difficult for “an interested and over-bearing majority” to gain “superior force.”
¹⁸

A second protection was the partition of power that Madison explained in
Federalist
51. Authority was to be divided between states and the general government, among the branches of the government, and within the legislative branch. The structure was devised, he wrote, so “that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” Separated powers and countervailing forces could make swift and decisive action difficult, but the point of this plan was not efficiency. We are familiar with Madison’s words “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” but his next sentence is equally important: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
¹⁹

Countering critics in his own time who believed that the Constitution made the central government too strong, Madison wrote that the powers given to it were “few and defined.” Critics called particular
attention to the first provision of article 1, section 8, which grants Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” They argued that the last phrase granted unlimited power, an objection that Madison called “extraordinary.” It was, he said, simply a general expression of the enumerated powers that followed, such as the powers to declare war and provide post offices. Moreover, he pointed out in
Federalist
41, the language had come straight from the Articles of Confederation, where it had certainly never been used to exercise unlimited power.
²⁰

The last provision of article 1, section 8, brought objections even more strenuous from Antifederalists. It granted Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States.” Answering those who saw this as opening the way for Congress to “exercise powers not warranted by [the Constitution’s] true meaning,” Madison declared, “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it is included.”
²¹
Madison had argued for general and implied powers before, but it was the case he made in
Federalist
44 that would come back to haunt him.

The
Federalist
essays did more than answer the Constitution’s critics. In them, Publius set forth the reasons that a new form of government was necessary and explained in great detail how government under the Constitution would work. And he did so in an overwhelming torrent of words. “Publius has already written twenty-six numbers, as much as would jade the brains of any poor sinner,” wrote one wag, when the series was less than a third complete. “In decency, he should now rest on his arms and let the people draw their breath for a little.” Twenty-seven subscribers to the
New York Journal,
sounding very much like Antifederalists, instructed the newspaper to stop “cramming us with the voluminous Publius.”
²²

Hamilton was practicing law as he wrote
The Federalist
, and Madison, a member of Congress, was also collecting and disseminating intelligence on the progress of ratification with a network of correspondents. Madison, later remarking on “the haste with which many of the papers were penned,” observed how vital to the effort were the “historical and other notes which had been used in the convention.”
²³
The reading he had done on the structure, strengths, and weaknesses of ancient and modern confederacies was still serving him well, as were his reflections on vices of the political system of the United States.

Madison and Hamilton quickly learned to save time by dispensing with the process of reviewing each other’s essays, which makes their achievement all the more remarkable. Writing at breakneck speed, thirty-six-year-old James Madison and thirty-three-year-old Alexander Hamilton created a classic of Western political thought, a document that stands alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a fundamental text of American history.
²⁴

Although he had not told Jefferson of his work on
The Federalist,
Madison seems to have kept his friend in mind as he wrote. Jefferson did not understand how difficult the creation of the Constitution was, which might have prompted Madison, in
Federalist
37, to set forth the obstacles that delegates had faced. They had to balance not only “the interfering pretensions of the larger and smaller states” but also “energy in government” with stability, as well as the authority of the general government with that of the states. The diversity of interests in the United States that would be of such advantage when the country was formed had been, in the forming of it, a great challenge: “The real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with an unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor to reflect on this circumstance without partaking of the astonishment. It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty Hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” In
Federalist
49, published some
three weeks later, Madison specifically cited what seemed to him Jefferson’s misplaced faith in conventions. After praising his friend’s creativity and enlightenment, Madison brought up a proposal that Jefferson had made in his draft of a constitution for the state of Virginia. Jefferson’s idea had been for successive conventions, which would provide ways to change periodically the framework of government. But, Madison noted, it would inevitably lead to instability. “A nation of philosophers” might have no need for the steadiness of venerable institutions, Madison observed, “but a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato.”
²⁵

•   •   •

WHEN HAMILTON
was called away from New York City on legal business early in 1788, Madison took over the writing of
The Federalist
. In an amazing burst of creative energy, he wrote nos. 37 through 58—twenty-two essays—in forty days, a record that not even the frenetic Hamilton matched. After Hamilton returned to the project, Madison wrote nos. 62 and 63. Then he had to leave New York, and the task, except for a single essay by Jay, fell to Hamilton. When
The Federalist
was finished, Hamilton would have contributed 60 percent of the essays—and later he would claim even more. Shortly before his duel with Aaron Burr, Hamilton tucked a memorandum into a book in the law office of his friend Egbert Benson claiming authorship of sixty-three of the essays, or nearly 75 percent of
The Federalist,
attributing fourteen essays to Madison, five to Jay, and three to a joint effort by him and Madison. After he retired from public office, Madison offered a correction: Hamilton had written fifty-one of the essays; he himself, twenty-nine; and Jay, five—an accounting that, after years of controversy, scholars have generally accepted.
²⁶

Madison attributed Hamilton’s erroneous list “to the hurry in which the memorandum was made out,” but Hamilton’s claim clearly irritated him. It wasn’t surprising that Hamilton’s memory should have failed him on the occasion of attributing authorship of the
Federalist
essays, Madison wrote many years later, since there was an even more startling
example of his forgetfulness. Hamilton had claimed that during the convention he had favored a three-year term for the president, “when in fact . . . he desired a president ‘during good behavior’”
—
a ruler for life, unless impeached.
²⁷
It was risky to remember wrongly what happened at the Constitutional Convention since Madison had his notes.

•   •   •

MADISON HAD TO BREAK OFF
his work on
The Federalist
to return to Virginia. He had agreed in November 1787 to let his name be put forward in the contest for delegates to the ratifying convention. In light of the fact that in the previous month he had been overwhelmingly reelected to Congress without returning home, he apparently assumed he would not need to travel back to Orange in order to be chosen for the convention. But then he began to get word of growing resistance to the Constitution. His father wrote that “the Baptists are now generally opposed” to the Constitution. “I think you had better come in as early in March as you can.” Governor Edmund Randolph urged, “You must come in.” By this time, Randolph had buried his reasons for not signing the Constitution so deeply in strong arguments for it that he was seen as more helpful than not to the ratification effort. Madison was sympathetic to what he called Randolph’s “particular way of thinking on the subject” and in years to come would continue to be tolerant of his friend’s inclination to bend with what he thought were prevailing winds.
²⁸