James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (21 page)

When George Washington wrote to Madison to say that it was “of indispensible necessity” that he be in the Virginia Convention, Madison confessed that a March journey from New York to Orange County was not an attractive prospect, nor was he looking forward to the convention, where he was going to end up contending with men whose friendship he valued.
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Nevertheless, he was coming. Six states had ratified the Constitution so far, and none had turned it down—although Rhode Island had refused to call a convention. Madison was worried about New Hampshire, where the ratifying convention had adjourned without taking action, but hopeful for Maryland and South Carolina. Their conventions would precede Virginia’s, and their ratifications would bring
the total to eight. The Old Dominion could make it nine—the number required to bring the new government into being.

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TO BREAK UP
the long trip home, Madison stopped in Philadelphia for several days, and then on Tuesday, March 18, 1788, he arrived at Mount Vernon. The weather was cool, and Washington had been out riding all day, tending to his plantation as slaves repaired fences, prepared some fields for planting, and sowed peas, beans, and oats in others. Madison was in time for dinner—and in time to escape the hard downpour that started toward night. The next day, Washington took a rare break from riding over his fields, and he and Madison discussed the upcoming convention. Washington was feeling optimistic. Just two days before, he had been present when Fairfax County had elected two supporters of the Constitution as delegates. Madison was likely more cautious. He knew from his correspondence how divided opinion was in Orange County.
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The next morning Washington lent Madison his carriage to take him to Colchester. There he caught the stage to Fredericksburg, where he found a letter awaiting him. It contained another warning about the Baptists. “Fearing religious liberty is not sufficiently secured,” Joseph Spencer wrote, leaders of that community were opposing ratification. Spencer recommended that Madison spend a few hours with John Leland, one of the most influential of Virginia’s Baptist preachers, who happened to live between Fredericksburg and Orange. It was a suggestion that Madison found appealing. There were many Baptists in Orange County; he needed to do something about their opposition, and John Leland was a very good place to start. Just a few years younger than Madison, Leland, a tall, thin man who radiated warmth, was at the height of his powers. He had mastered the use of reasoned argument in his preaching and in 1788 alone had baptized three hundred people in Virginia’s waters. Second only to his dedication to saving souls was Leland’s determination to see religious liberty prevail. “Should not government protect all kinds of people, of every species of religion, without
showing the least partiality?” he asked. “Has not the world had enough proofs of the impolicy and cruelty of favoring a Jew more than a Pagan, Turk, or Christian; or a Christian more than either of them?”
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There is no firsthand account of Madison’s meeting with Leland, but one story has it that the two men sat for many hours on a grassy hill underneath a shade tree, and by the time they took leave of each other, Madison had won Leland’s support for the upcoming election—an outcome for which there is a good deal of circumstantial evidence. Leland would have known going into the meeting that Madison, like himself, was a champion of religious freedom and that he had stood by the Baptists in a time of great need. Perhaps Madison told him of things he would not have known—such as Madison’s anonymous authorship of the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” written to prevent a religious tax that Baptists had opposed. Perhaps he shared with him the difficulties that would be created if the Constitution were to be amended before it was fully ratified. At some point, Leland concluded that “the plan [for the Constitution] must be good, for it has the signature of a tried, trusty friend.” Leland also drew comfort from knowing that the new government would almost certainly be presided over by George Washington, whom he greatly admired.
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When Madison finally reached home on March 23, he found “the county filled with the most absurd and groundless prejudices against the federal constitution,” as he described it to Eliza Trist. Although he had managed to be elected repeatedly to the Virginia legislature and the Continental Congress without ever giving a campaign speech, now one was required. On the day following his arrival, he reported, “I was . . . obliged . . . to mount for the first time in my life the rostrum before a large body of the people and to launch into a harangue of some length in the open air and on a very windy day.” When the balloting at the Orange County courthouse was over, he had finished first in a field of four, winning support from some 80 percent of the voters. Leland later attested he was one of those who had backed Madison, and judging from Madison’s success in becoming a delegate to the Virginia ratifying convention, he brought more than a few Baptists into Madison’s camp with him.
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AT THE URGING
of George Nicholas, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and a supporter of the Constitution, Madison worked to get copies of
The Federalist
(now being printed in two volumes) for convention delegates, “the greater part” of whom, Nicholas wrote, “will go to the meeting without information on the subject.” Nicholas also wanted Madison to lay out for him arguments to counter the fear that the government being proposed would cede navigation rights on the Mississippi. Madison obliged in a lengthy letter, pointing out that the stronger, more competent government outlined in the Constitution would be more likely to have its way in a face-off with Spain. It was an idea that he would hear echoed back to him when Nicholas spoke on the subject of the Mississippi at the ratifying convention.
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Madison’s skill at planting ideas in other people’s minds was also evident with Governor Edmund Randolph. Still bringing him along, Madison wrote to him that the only acceptable kind of amendment to the Constitution was “recommendatory”—the kind that Massachusetts had passed with its ratification. If Virginia’s amendments were added as a condition of ratification, there was no certainty that states that had already ratified wouldn’t reconsider, and the result might be, as Madison ever so tactfully put it, “something much more remote from your ideas and those of others who wish a salutary government than the plan now before the public.” Moreover, those who didn’t want a new government would use conditional amendments “to carry on their schemes.” Soon Randolph was writing back that he had always had two doubts about previous amendments: that they would be frustrated if too many other states had already ratified and that “under their cover, a higher game might be played.” But he wasn’t ready to make a final determination, he said, “until I hear something from Maryland at least.”
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After that state overwhelmingly ratified the Constitution at the end of April, Madison apparently felt secure enough about Randolph that he did not write to him on the subject again.

George Mason, on the other hand, seemed to become more hostile by the day. Shortly after he had returned to Virginia from the Philadelphia
convention, he had declared that despite his objections he would rather have the Constitution than not, but by spring he was dead against it. George Nicholas reported that Patrick Henry had also become unyielding: “Mr. Henry is now almost avowedly an enemy to the Union and therefore will oppose every plan that would cement it.”
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On top of all this, Jefferson was meddling. Less than a week before the ratification convention was to convene, Madison received word that a letter from Jefferson had been circulated at the Maryland convention in Annapolis. It was, in fact, an excerpt from the long missive that Jefferson had sent to Madison on December 20, 1787, describing his dissatisfaction with the Constitution. Marylander Daniel Carroll was appalled at the letter, calling it “not consistent with that delicacy of friendship I thought he possessed,” and Madison was unhappy as well. But within a few months, he received a typically generous letter from Jefferson, reporting that he had sent the pedometer Madison had requested and offering instructions: “Cut a little hole in the bottom of your left watch pocket. Pass the hook and tape through it and down between the breeches and drawers, and fix the hook on the edge of your knee band, an inch from the knee buckle. Then hook the instrument itself by its swivel hook on the upper edge of the watch pocket. . . . When you choose it should cease to count, unhook it from the top of the watch pocket and let it fall down to the bottom of the pocket.”
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What could one do with a friend who was at once so aggravating and so amiable? Madison ignored the letter circulated in Annapolis—for the time being.

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RICHMOND WAS PACKED
when Madison arrived. The people of Virginia wanted to see and hear the giants of the commonwealth debate their future, and they flooded into the capital in unprecedented numbers. Madison took a room at the Swan, an unpretentious tavern known for good food, good wine, and its beckoning sign, a gilded and graceful swan painted on a board high above the street. The tavern was only a few blocks from the theater on Shockoe Hill where the ratifying convention was meeting, and on June 3, 1788, Madison probably walked to
the gathering. The day was given over to rule making, and he listened as George Mason insisted that the Constitution be debated clause by clause before any vote was taken on it. Since the Pennsylvania and Maryland conventions had ratified quickly, Mason’s goal was to have Virginia move slowly. He apparently expected some objection to his proposal, but Madison quickly took the floor to concur in it.
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Mason’s motion played to Madison’s strength. No one in the country was better able to explicate the Constitution in detail than he.

On the next day, June 4, Antifederalists suffered a number of setbacks. Almost as soon as the convention dissolved into the committee of the whole, the chief Antifederalist spokesman, Patrick Henry, made a motion intended to show that the Constitutional Convention had exceeded its mandate. Edmund Pendleton, the sixty-six-year-old chairman of the convention, objected. On crutches since falling from a horse and dislocating his hip in 1777, he probably had to struggle to his feet, but there was no doubt about his authority, and in the face of Pendleton’s opposition Henry withdrew his motion. He was soon back, however, with another attack. By what right had the delegates at the Philadelphia convention used the words “We, the People”? he wanted to know: “My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask, who authorized them to speak the language of
We, the People,
instead of
We, the States
?” Before the delegates to the Philadelphia convention had worked their mischief, “a general peace and an universal tranquility prevailed in this country,” Henry said. Their proposal to change the government might well result in liberty being lost and tyranny arising. “Instead of securing your rights you may lose them forever,” he thundered.
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Edmund Randolph, taking the floor immediately after Henry, noted that politics is “too often nourished by passion at the expense of the understanding” and asked to be forgiven for having thought the convention would be “one exception to this tendency of mankind.” Then he took up Henry’s question of “why we assumed the language of ‘We, the People’”: “What harm is there in consulting the people on the construction of a government by which they are to be bound? Is it unfair? Is it
unjust? If the government is to be binding on the people, are not the people the proper persons to examine its merits or defects?” But the most important part of Randolph’s speech was a dramatic announcement. He would support the ratification of the Constitution without previous amendments. Although he had been in favor of them before, he said, he now realized that it was too late in the day. They would result in “ruin to the Union,” and he said, raising his arm, “I will assent to the lopping of this limb . . . before I assent to the dissolution of the Union.”
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The governor’s stand was a blow to the Antifederalists, as was news arriving that day of South Carolina’s ratifying the Constitution. George Mason seemed unsettled when he spoke after Randolph. He had a potent point to make: that the general government should not have taxing power. But he made his argument in a weak and wandering way, and by the time of the day’s adjournment Federalists were elated. Madison wrote a short note to George Washington, telling him that Governor Randolph had “thrown himself fully into the Federal scale.” He also observed that “Henry and Mason made a lame figure and appeared to take different and awkward ground.” But positive as he was feeling, Madison sounded a note of caution. “I dare not . . . speak with certainty as to the decision,” he wrote.
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Henry continued his attacks the next day. The new plan of government was “radical,” he said. It represented a “relinquishment of rights.” It “squints toward monarchy.” At one point, the convention’s note taker became so overwhelmed by Henry’s barrage that he resorted to summary: “Here Mr. Henry strongly and pathetically expatiated on the probability of the President’s enslaving America and the horrid consequences that must result.” Why, Henry demanded, would America want to abandon the “strong and vigorous” government currently in place and expose itself to such dangers?
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On the following day Madison struck back, declaring that the question of primary concern was whether the Constitution would “promote the public happiness”: “We ought not to address our arguments to the feelings and passions, but to those understandings and judgments which were selected by the people of this country to decide this great
question by a calm and rational investigation. I hope that gentlemen in displaying their abilities on this occasion, instead of giving opinions and making assertions, will condescend to prove and demonstrate by a fair and regular discussion.” He addressed Henry’s claim that the Constitution endangered liberty. “Let the dangers which this system is supposed to be replete with be clearly pointed out,” he said. He also noted the foolishness of Henry’s assertion that “the people of this country are at perfect repose”: “I wish sincerely, Sir, this were true. If this be their happy situation, why has every state acknowledged the contrary? Why were deputies from all the states sent to the general convention[?] . . . Wherefore have laws been made to authorize a change, and wherefore are we now assembled here?” Madison went on to defend the Constitution “with such force of reasoning and a display of such irresistible truths that opposition seemed to have quitted the field,” in the words of Bushrod Washington, George Washington’s nephew. Or at least opponents should have. In truth, Washington confessed to his uncle, for all the good Madison had done, the outcome of the convention was still uncertain.
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