Madison and Jefferson (29 page)

Madison’s argument differed from Randolph’s only in a tactical sense. He would have begun by rejecting the “incroachments” of the states. Had he done so, expressing opposition to the monetary policies of single states that adversely affected other states—and a Congress unable to put a stop to such disruptions—he would surely have had some delegates squirming in their seats. Randolph’s was a more diplomatically framed argument. Only gradually did he move toward Madison’s position, when he linked monetary issues to the larger cause of collective security.
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Having established a mild persona, Randolph presented the Virginia Plan in full. Its fifteen resolutions showed that the “corrected & enlarged” Articles of Confederation was in fact a radically new system of government. Here Randolph incorporated Madison’s key principles. He would establish a bicameral national legislature and proportional representation in each chamber, based on state population or wealth. Direct election by the people would be the rule for the House of Representatives, and the Senate would be comprised of those elected
by the House
from a list of nominations submitted by the state legislatures.

As to Madison’s insertion of the absolute negative, or nullification of state laws by the Senate (Resolution 6), Randolph and Mason established boundaries that Madison would have done without. The negative, they said, would apply only to those laws “contravening the articles of the Union”—what we call “unconstitutionality.” Madison’s unyielding phrase “
in all cases whatsoever
” was modified to read: The new national legislature would interfere in “all cases to which the separate states are incompetent.” The absolute authority of Congress would apply
only
to matters deemed outside the purview of the states. The central government would exercise coercive force when a delinquent state “failed to fulfill its duty” to supply funds as required. By minimizing the Senate’s veto power, Madison’s two colleagues increased the possibility that Congress would resort to military power against recalcitrant (presumably small) states.
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The Virginia Plan also called for officers of the national executive and judicial branches to be chosen by Congress. A council of revision (composed of members of the executive and judiciary) would be given authority to veto acts of Congress. The chief executive would serve a single term. As
for defining the states’ eventual role in weighing what was agreed upon in Philadelphia, the Virginia Plan stipulated that as the convention completed its business, the new federal Constitution would have to go through an approval process in special ratifying conventions rather than in their existing state legislatures.

The guiding principle of the Virginia Plan was still Madison’s: the desire to limit the influence of state legislatures on national policy. The new House of Representatives would be elected by the people, unlike the Confederation Congress, whose delegates were named in the state legislatures. The Senate would be elected
by the House
, and the president and judiciary voted into office by the Congress. The only influence the states could exert was to submit nominations to the House of potential U.S. senators.

Defending the Virginia Plan two days after Randolph announced it, Madison described the whole system as one that provided “successive filtrations.” Once the sentiments of the people were expressed in the composition of the House, decisions and appointments would be filtered, or refined, through ascending branches of government. As the most powerful branch, the bicameral Congress would have broad authority in making national policy, vetoing state laws, and appointing the president and federal judges. If the Senate failed to check the House, and a bad law slipped through, then the joint executive/judicial council of revision would serve as a second filter in eliminating the unwise legislation.
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The Virginia Plan was bold and far-reaching. Madison counted on a coalition of southern states and large northern states to back it. He underestimated his opposition. The small states had no intention of bending to the will of the large states. Almost immediately a bloc formed to challenge the Virginia Plan. Delegates from Delaware, Connecticut, and New Jersey whittled away at the Virginians’ design and eventually dismantled it. Madison was getting an education.

First the Delaware delegation threatened to leave the convention; only after some cajoling did its members change their minds. Picking up the pace, Roger Sherman of Connecticut fixed attention on the composition of the Senate: he proposed that the state legislatures—not the House—elect its members. The Senate was the body Madison was most intent on separating from state control, but Sherman had other plans.

The Connecticut delegate was gearing up to be his main rival at the convention. In appearance, they were an odd match-up. Sherman’s manner of address was described as unschooled, “laughable & grotesque.” But he was a very shrewd politician; no one understood the dynamics of the convention
floor better. Over the course of the debates, he would speak, make motions, or add his second to motions 160 times, nearly as often as Madison himself.
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Chinks appeared in the armor of the Virginia Plan. Dickinson of Delaware proposed that the state legislatures be given the power to impeach the president. Madison quickly dismissed the idea as one that would grant small states excessive influence while corrupting a president who would be beholden to favorites in certain states. Not to be outdone, Dickinson and Sherman teamed up to press again for state legislatures to determine the composition of the Senate. Dickinson found Madison’s successive filtration theory untenable. And he insisted that there was no logic in having proportional representation in both branches of the national legislature.
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Madison rushed to defend his plan. To eliminate proportional representation in the Senate was, he said, “inadmissible” and “unjust.” He battled tooth and nail to realize his vision of a small body of senators able to govern “with more coolness, with more system, & with more wisdom, than the popular branch.” Dickinson was unwilling to concede.
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With this heady debate, the tide began to turn against Madison. Things got worse on June 7 when one of his closest colleagues, George Mason, rose and acknowledged the merit of Dickinson’s argument. Dickinson was the author of Revolutionary essays in opposition to British taxation. Mason was one to listen respectfully to a gentleman scholar, an elder statesman like himself. So after Dickinson had had his say, Mason conceded that the state legislatures needed the power to defend themselves against encroachments, just as much as the national government did. Madison’s system was one-sided, because it recognized only the trespasses of the states against the national government. The Virginia Plan did not provide for “self-defense” all around, Mason reasoned. “Shall we leave the States alone unprovided with the means for this purpose?” he questioned. Clearly Mason’s conversion tipped the scale in favor of Dickinson’s motion, and the convention voted unanimously to permit state legislatures to appoint members of the U.S. Senate.
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Madison had lost ground, though one of his undeterred supporters, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina (cousin to General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney), stepped forward with a modified Virginia Plan, which endorsed Madison’s expansive version of the absolute negative. At twenty-nine, Pinckney was one of the youngest members of the convention. He shared Madison’s love of learning, would master five languages,
and eventually acquired a two-thousand-volume library, nearly as diversified as Jefferson’s collection. (At the convention both he and Madison advocated the establishment of a national university.) Building on Pinckney’s motion, then, Madison returned to the theme of finding means to control the “centrifugal tendency” of the states, which were prone to spin away from their proper orbits. The choice of metaphor was deliberate: Dickinson had just compared the states to planets as part of his defense of state influence.
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Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was to be Madison’s on-again, off-again, ally (and many years later his second-term vice president). At this moment he confessed to finding difficulty in imagining how the absolute negative would work, given that the states and their laws were so diverse. It would be onerous, if not impossible, for the national legislature to supervise them all. Gerry was revealing a glaring hole in Madison’s theory.

The unapologetic nationalist James Wilson rose to Madison’s defense. He reminded the delegates of the “impotent condition” of the Confederation. State jealousies were responsible for frittering away national unity, each one cutting “a slice from the common loaf” to enrich itself. To correct vices was the business of the convention, Wilson reiterated, and one of the most prevalent vices was the absence of “effectual control in the whole over its parts.”
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An unheralded delegate to the convention, Gunning Bedford, Jr., saw in this view a poorly concealed plan of attack on the small states. Under proportional representation, his state of Delaware would have no redress, a one-ninetieth share in the “General Councils” of government, while Virginia and Pennsylvania would together possess one-third of the vote. In pursuing their ambitions, he said, the large states would “crush” the small ones. Where military action was taken against a defiant state, the Virginians would have “an enormous and monstrous influence.” Instead of calming him, Madison chided the Delaware delegate with imagery no less extreme. Would the small states, he posed, be any safer from the “avarice & ambition” of the large states if the Union collapsed?
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As the debate wore on, Madison could see that his reasoning was failing to convince. It was entirely obvious that the large states benefited exclusively from having proportional representation in both houses of Congress, and that Virginia had the most to gain. Madison was juggling contradictory theories: it was impossible to keep the Senate small and apportioned by population, and at the same time grant the small states a real
voice in government. Madison’s basic problem was his lack of sympathy for the small states; it was to them that he had assigned the largest share of the Confederation’s failures. The large states would continue to make the greatest contributions to the Union, and thus they deserved more of a say in policy. But who else could he convince?

Madison’s plan continued to lose traction as the New Jersey delegation did the math. Under proportional representation, Virginia would have sixteen votes in the House, and Georgia only one. William Paterson, a Princeton graduate like Madison, bluntly charged that the Virginia Plan struck at the very existence of the small states. He deliberately provoked Madison by proposing, tongue in cheek, that the states should all be dissolved at once and reconstituted along new boundaries to create fair and proportional units. New Jersey refused to be “swallowed up,” as Paterson put it, saying he would rather “submit to a monarch, to a despot,” than consent to the Virginia Plan. He then presented what became known as the New Jersey Plan, drafted by a coalition of small-state delegates and rejecting virtually every major tenet of the Virginia Plan. Dickinson of Delaware pulled Madison aside and lectured him: “You see the consequence of pushing things too far.”
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By this time the motion to expand the absolute negative (“
in all cases whatsoever
”) had failed by a vote of seven states to three. More disturbing to Madison was the fact that Randolph and Mason had deserted him, and Washington did not vote. Few of Madison’s colleagues felt comfortable with the absolute negative once they considered its potential for abuse. Some saw his plan as a Virginia power grab, and others thought it a simply unreasonable answer to the weaknesses of the Confederation.
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On June 19, four days after Paterson introduced it, the New Jersey Plan was voted down. But it had achieved its purpose of dividing the ranks of delegates and weakening the resolve of the moderates in Madison’s coalition.
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The course of debate was not very productive at this point—one step forward, two steps back—principally because the issue of representation refused to die. On June 29, as the convention voted to grant the lower house proportional representation, Connecticut delegate Oliver Ellsworth took up the small-state cause: equality in the Senate. He called for a “middle ground,” making the new government “partly national; partly federal.” Some powers would be retained by those at the seat of government, while in other respects, built-in limits would guarantee that the states could never be consumed by an omnipotent power center. To deny the small states an equal vote in the Senate would be, Ellsworth claimed, just like
“cutting the body of America in two”; three or four large states would end up governing the rest. At this point, the small-state advocates were sounding the most republican.
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Madison was not beaten, not yet. He refused to acknowledge that the small-states faction owned the moral high ground, and he accused the Connecticut delegates of inconsistency, if not rank hypocrisy. While they were claiming to have supported the Confederation government in principle, they refused to pay their tax requisitions. According to his logic, the New Jersey Plan would create a national government with no more teeth than what the Confederation had.

Rufus King of Massachusetts (who would be on the opposing ticket when Madison ran for president) was his staunch ally at the convention. He called the idea of an equal vote in the Senate a “vicious principle.” But Delaware’s Gunning Bedford, a rotund character who dwarfed Madison, stole the show by resorting to theatrics and threatening secession. “The large states dare not dissolve the Confederation,” he bellowed, for if they do, “the small states will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith.” He was tired of talk and dubious assurances, stating unequivocally: “I do not, gentlemen, trust you.” Paterson, too, complained of Madison’s rudeness.
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