Madison and Jefferson (26 page)

Richard Henry Lee, relieved to learn that George Mason had agreed to attend, vowed that he would be amenable to “alterations beneficial” in the Articles. He suspected, though, that the real problem government faced was in the hearts and minds of citizens. “I fear,” he wrote, “it is more in vicious manners, than mistakes in form, that we must seek for the causes of the present discontent.” Lee went on to voice the same complaint Madison had over the noncompliance of the independent states when it came to necessary federal expenditures, especially debt repayment and matters of trade. In Virginia and elsewhere, leading voices argued that the states were powerless as agents of moral correction.
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As for Madison, the busy constitutionalist continued to lay the groundwork for his performance at the upcoming convention. He had formulated two essentials: first, to attain national strength by creating a national legislature with sufficient weight to counteract “dangerous passions” at the state level; second, to empower the center to expand national power westward. In devising his strategy, Madison was thinking of protecting a national intellectual elite class of men. He was less concerned with the financial health of the common man, and still less with democratic principles.

Jefferson was too far from home to feel the pressure as Madison did. In fact, he was acquiring in France a strong sense of the damage done to society by ever-widening distinctions between those possessing land and those
without land or opportunity. In 1786 Madison received a letter from Jefferson, written with extreme pathos, that recounted a solitary walk he had taken while aiming to discover something about the laboring poor. Encountering a “wretched” French peasant woman, he listened to her tale of woe and gave her a sum of cash; she burst into tears of gratitude. Why was her life this way? Because most of the French people had no choices. “The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands,” he explained. “These employ the flower of the country as servants.” The poorest of the poor could not find work and lived close to starvation. He prescribed an axiom: “The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on.” Government had to provide opportunities for the poor to become industrious. Morality and the presumption of natural rights demanded it.

Responding eight months later to the story of his encounter with the peasant woman, Madison agreed with Jefferson that America had to avoid the trap France had fallen into. “I have no doubt,” he wrote, “that the misery of the lower classes will be found to abate wherever the Government assumes a freer aspect, and the laws force a subdivision of property.” But Madison also believed that the more consequential factor in explaining why the mass of Americans lived better than their European counterparts was their low population and not any political advantages they might claim. Feeling less than Jefferson did the struggle of the poor, Madison continued to concentrate his thinking on the imposition of a guiding structure that would condition citizens’ behavior.

It was not simply that Madison had little desire to reduce inequality. He was fearful that a state legislature composed of less elite men would eventually result in a dangerous leveling of society, with the jealous poor demanding a redistribution of property. He did not agree with Jefferson that the poor represented the nation’s potential, or that they were the glistening “flower of the country.”

If Jefferson could derive a universal truth from a single encounter, Madison could not. Refusing to think in terms of human perfectibility, Madison spoke philosophically to principles of political economy. He surmised that no form of government could cope with a surplus population (“the redundant members of a populous society”), no matter what land distribution laws were in place. He concurred with Jefferson only to the extent that “a more equal partition of property must result in a greater simplicity of manners” and fewer idle poor. But the improvement must be partial, not general. There were no absolutes to be found in Madison’s thinking, because
there was no perfectibility to be had. He suggested to Jefferson that, before he jumped to conclusions, he should compare French conditions to those of other societies—“the indigent part of other communities in Europe where the like causes of wretchedness exist in a less degree.” With sufficient data, they would then be able to direct American lawmakers toward practical policies.
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When James Madison left for Philadelphia to attend the Constitutional Convention in the spring of 1787, he was eager to debate the science of government. Four years earlier, after his retirement from Congress, he had committed himself to an intense course of legal study, spurred on by any new book Jefferson sent his way. Jefferson supplied him with the principal texts of the French Enlightenment, which supplemented works in classical political theory that he already owned. Madison then began to compile notes on the “defects” (the word he and Jefferson both used) of confederated governments throughout history. His collected papers show that he relied on extensive outlines whenever he was gathering his thoughts for a public presentation. In this instance he produced thirty-nine pages of notes, which he titled, “Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies.” By exposing what had gone wrong in the past, he would make sense of the defects in America’s imperfect union of states.
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Building a case against the Articles of Confederation, he needed to explain why the United States was so ill equipped to accomplish the basic tasks of raising money, making treaties, and regulating commerce. By April 1787 he had a diagnosis in hand. He called it “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” and it became his working manifesto, a summary view at the end of his first decade as a state and national politician.

Chief among the vices Madison identified was the undue power lodged in the individual states. Having held a seat in Congress longer than anyone else (four years), he had come to feel that the Confederation was barely a government at all. Like most confederations, the U.S. system was a voluntary compact, a weak “league of friendship” among the states, and subject to internal dissensions. It lacked executive and judicial components; it rarely if ever represented the collective will of the people.

At best, Congress was an auxiliary arm of the thirteen states, a quasi-diplomatic body whose members were emissaries. The Articles of Confederation
granted Congress certain prerogatives but no real authority. Madison had seen revenue legislation blocked at every turn, often because one or two states voted against tax bills endorsed by the majority. States routinely violated treaties, while imposing commercial restrictions on each other. Such “irregularities,” Madison complained in “Vices,” damaged the reputation of the United States in Europe. Beyond his extended term in Congress, his three years in the Virginia state legislature had exposed him to what he called the “imbecility” of government on the local level. Laws were “indigested,” rather than carefully devised, and often rushed through the legislature at the last minute. He adjudged many of his fellow state representatives to be intellectually meek and unable to appreciate the elements of good government.
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Madison saw little to be gained in rescuing the Confederation. It was a dysfunctional system, its flaws too ingrained for it to be made energetic or even stable. Congress was a headless body, and the Confederation a government at war with itself. Moreover, the aggrandizing state legislatures of the 1780s resembled nothing so much as a group of rambunctious children refusing to play together fairly. They endangered property rights and by undoing one session’s laws the next year failed to take their own legislation seriously. Damning the states unmercifully, Madison found his solution in a centralizing government.

Paternalism and moralism ran deep in his assessment. He found “want of wisdom,” “vicious legislation,” and “impetuosities” in the state legislatures. By this Madison meant rash, unthinking, and impulsive behavior. Virginia assemblymen struck him as uninformed and undisciplined, their actions dictated by selfish motives. He envisioned a strong central government with the authority to give guidance and even provide moral supervision.

Anger lurks below the surface of Madison’s austere prose. It was not simply that the Confederation was inefficient: the childlike states wielded power unwisely, and they were too easily misled by self-serving demagogues. If the states could not be trusted to govern themselves, how could they unite a nation? Madison explained his thinking to George Washington shortly before the Constitutional Convention was set to open. There was only one way to save the nation, he said. The states had to be made “subordinately useful.”
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Washington was instrumental. Any cause was helped by his participation. His national stature as the soldier-turned-statesman and his reputation for promoting national unity were invaluable assets. As a member of
the Virginia Assembly in 1785, Madison had urged the state to dispatch commissioners to meet with representatives from Maryland at Washington’s Mount Vernon home. The immediate agenda of the meeting was to convince the two states to agree on navigational rights along the Potomac. The meeting was, in fact, a preview of the Annapolis convention of 1786, where several more states came together to discuss commercial remedies for defects in the Confederation. Step by step, and with growing purpose, Madison rose to advocate decisive, large-scale government reform, with Washington on his side.
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A number of historians have dismissed the Annapolis meeting as a ruse, whose only purpose was to justify calling a second, more representative convention in Philadelphia. But for Madison, the value of Annapolis derived from his success in corralling members of the Virginia Assembly. Their unanimous recommendation to proceed made him more optimistic about the Philadelphia convention. As he put it to Jefferson, even the “most obstinate adversaries to reform” were now in agreement that the Confederation suffered from “dangerous defects.”
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With Jefferson abroad, Madison turned to his friend Edmund Randolph, the former state attorney general who was Virginia’s governor in 1787. Randolph had attended the Annapolis meeting, where he convinced Alexander Hamilton to revise his heavy-handed draft of the call for a Philadelphia convention. Convivial yet cautious, Randolph possessed other skills that appealed to Madison. In a world where eloquence mattered, he was a natural orator, more fluid and pleasing in his style than Madison, whose manner of speech was impressive and methodical but unexciting. As governor of their state, Randolph was able to shape the delegation that went to Philadelphia. He was Madison’s point man as well as the head of Virginia’s delegation. He would be the one to present Virginia’s proposal to the convention.
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Washington had to be recruited. Both Madison and Randolph bombarded him with letters, urging him to attend. Eventually Madison persuaded Washington that his presence in Philadelphia was essential—not as a Virginian but as a unifier. He would reinforce the bond between the Virginia and Pennsylvania delegations. The Virginians could accomplish little unless another large state backed them, and their most likely ally was Pennsylvania. Madison would cozy up to Robert Morris, former superintendent of finance for the Confederation. Since 1782, as Morris called for the federal impost (tax on imports), a funding program, and a national bank,
Madison had consistently defended his agenda. This kept the flagging finances of Congress afloat in the crucial days before Yorktown. Both Robert Morris and Gouverneur Morris (no relation) would be delegates from Pennsylvania to the Constitutional Convention, two men who shared an economic outlook and were extremely close to Washington.
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George Mason was another major player. Mason, Madison, and Washington were all aggressive promoters of western expansion, envisioning commercial growth based on a direct water route from the Chesapeake Bay to the Ohio River. As a prominent speculator in western lands, Mason had had a material stake in securing an agreement with Maryland at the Mount Vernon meeting. Both inside and outside the state, he was respected for his draft of the Declaration of Rights and for his help in shaping the Virginia Constitution of 1776. But at sixty-two, Mason was the oldest member of the Virginia delegation. Madison knew he was unpredictable, “not fully cured of Antifederal prejudices” with respect to national control of international trade; but on the “great points,” as he told Jefferson, Mason could be counted on.
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Virginia sent three other men, George Wythe, Judge John Blair, and James McClurg, to Philadelphia, for a total of seven. The final three, however, contributed little at the convention. Wythe was still a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. Blair was recognized for his superior legal training at Middle Temple in London; his uncle was a founder of the College of William and Mary. Madison had put McClurg’s name forward after Patrick Henry, then former governor Thomas Nelson, and finally Richard Henry Lee all turned down the appointment. “He was on the spot,” Madison confessed to Jefferson. McClurg had earned an M.D. at the prestigious University of Edinburgh and had no legal training at all.

When, in April 1787, the Virginia delegation was complete, Madison sent carefully crafted letters to Randolph and Washington, prodding them again to think about what the convention should accomplish. He told Washington forthrightly that he felt radical change was needed; but he took a slightly softer tone with Randolph, arguing that the most “valuable articles” of the Confederation should be preserved, but only as part of a new system that did more than simply “engraft” onto the old.
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The first change had to be in the principle of representation. The unicameral Confederation Congress, in which the vote of Delaware meant as much as the vote of Virginia or Massachusetts, was acceptable no longer. “No one,” he told Washington, “will deny that Virginia and Massts. have
more weight and influence.” Proportional representation made the most sense: the number of legislative seats should be allocated according to a state’s total population or its aggregate wealth.