The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President

by Noah Feldman

IN ANY HISTORICAL ERA but his own, James Madison would not have been a successful politician, much less one of the greatest statesmen of the age. He hated public speaking and detested running for office. He loved reason, logic, and balance.

If the Constitution was a new kind of governmental physics, Madison was its Newton or its Einstein.

Madison believed that creating a republican state free of faction was the greatest political problem the world had ever known. He also believed the U.S. Constitution would make this ideal an institutional reality.

But when the disagreement extended to fundamental matters—like what political system should be in place—the rules changed. True enemies should be fought, and their opinions defeated and eliminated.

The draft’s reasoning followed the views of John Locke. Religion was a matter of individual conscience.

Madison proposed changing the phrase “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience,” so that it would read, “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of it [that is, religion] according to the dictates of conscience.”

He would spend most of his adult life in public office, and devote himself to the idea of the republic as the rule of the people. But Madison was not a man of the people.

The ordinary person did not want to have a pint of ale with James Madison; and the feeling, Madison demonstrated, was mutual.

With audacity that verged on cockiness, Madison disagreed with the giant Hume. There was no natural level of money in a given place, he reasoned. Rather, the global supply of money set its value.

The future of the United States turned on finding the right solutions to the questions Madison considered worthy of focus.

Madison lacked glamor. Martha Bland described him: “Mr. Madison, a gloomy, stiff creature, they say is clever in Congress, but out of it there is nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.”

“But of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”69 There was no knowing exactly why humans do what they do.

“While Mr. Henry lives another bad constitution would be formed, and saddled forever on us. What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death.”

He thought establishments were bad in principle, and had no sympathy for the institutional realities of trying to make a living as a minister.

The Memorial and Remonstrance amounted to a document of historic significance—the most important systematic defense of equal religious liberty that had ever been written. It went far beyond Locke’s argument for toleration. It went beyond religious appeals for the protection of conscience. Combining rational argument with stirring rhetoric, Madison’s essay was the cornerstone of the theory that would become essential to the American conception of the separation of church and state.

“I flatter myself,” he wrote to Jefferson with more pride than he usually allowed, that its adoption “in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”

In the crisis-driven year that follows, Madison experiences a period of extraordinary creativity. He works out his ideas in a series of essays, developing the view that factions, springing from economic interest, ruin republicanism. He invents a solution: enlargement of the republic. Madison’s emerging vision dovetails with his ideal of friendship. He will create a government that can control and reduce the effects of faction, enabling friends to reason and deliberate without becoming enemies or creatures of self-interest.

Indeed, Madison would never take an ocean voyage in his life.

It is difficult to overstate the creativity and intellectual precision that went into Madison’s notes on “ancient and modern confederacies.”

His method was to describe first the origin of each confederacy, then its form of “federal authority,” and finally what he labeled the “vices” of each one.

The Achaean Confederacy suffered from too much power asserted by the center, leading Rome to “seduce” its members away through individual negotiations. This was a warning against subjecting the states to unpopular authority and thus driving them into the arms of Britain. The

Dutch confederacy had articles of union that specified that “everything done contrary to them [is] to be null and void”—Madison’s first reference to the principle of constitutional supremacy. But because the Dutch articles, like the

Madison was slowly deriving a theory of constitutional balancing. Central authority made the court’s decrees relevant. Simultaneous fear of that necessary authority kept the federation from pulling apart.

In thinking about paper money, Madison was beginning to develop a theory of minority protection. The legislature that adopted paper money was serving the interests of the majority. This was a fundamental principle of republican government—the idea that, as Madison put it in a letter to Monroe, “the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong.”

For a country that had made a revolution in the name of republicanism, the danger that the majority might oppress the minority to serve its immediate interests was the single most significant political problem. Madison was grappling with a challenge that seemed to doom republicanism itself.

Now he also recognized that the majority might govern in its immediate interest rather than the “true” interest of the people. Whether these concerns might be reconciled—and if so, how—was the question on which the future of the United States rested.

Jefferson’s view rested on his more general view of government. He allowed that he tended to think that anarchy was best, but “inconsistent with any great degree of population,” and so impractical.

Jefferson the libertarian

The next best arrangement was a government in which the will of the people exercised real influence: “The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness.”

The corresponding danger was “the turbulence to which it is subject.” But this concern “becomes nothing” when “weigh[ed] against the oppressions of monarchy.” Government by...

The rarity of uprisings in the United States was a function of their weak governments, in which the will of the people could be expressed. The stronger the government,

the more the rebellion, Jefferson argued. The Ottoman Empire was “despotic,” he

Finally, “Rhode Island can be relied on for nothing that is good.” Madison’s contempt for Rhode Island was tempered by his belief that “on all great points [Rhode Island] must sooner or later bend to Massachusetts and Connecticut.”

The explanation for Washington’s sympathy to the possibility of monarchy lay in his reduced confidence in the public.

Washington, lauded globally for not seeking a crown after the Revolution, had been so affected by Shays’s Rebellion and the states’ unwillingness to help the federal government that he was flirting with monarchism.

He formalized the concerns he had first raised in his letter to Monroe. “All civilized societies,” he wrote, “are divided into different interests and factions.” The divisions included “creditors or debtors—rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants and manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property etc. etc.”

Madison was suggesting—in the form of a novel, general rule about politics135—that republicanism itself might have a fatal flaw.

Writing for himself, Madison made no effort to hide his belief that there was a natural elite who would govern not out of self-interest but on behalf of the general good.

Madison did not argue that it was possible to change the motives of already elected representatives. Rather, the solution, if any existed, must lie in choosing those of character and relying on them to govern.

Congress must either dominate the states or be dominated by them.

Madison frankly called it “the most oppressive dominion” that had ever existed.

Why had Madison kept the idea of the federal negative private prior to the convention, expressing it only to his closest associates? The answer, no doubt, lay precisely in its radical nature.

For the first time, the states had voted purely by size. Interest, it seemed, was trumping reason. The convention was about to get ugly.

To Madison, the vagaries of British colonial organization that had produced state boundaries seemed irrelevant to the question of how to run a new country in America.

The reality was otherwise. When it came to agreeing on a constitution, the accidental divisions of history mattered enormously.

Mercer believed that by giving the judges the power of review before a law took effect, they would not have the power of judicial review after the law was enacted. Mercer thought “laws ought to be well and cautiously made, and then to be uncontrollable” by the judiciary.

On the question to agree to the Constitution, as amended. All the states ay. The Constitution was then ordered to be engrossed. And the House adjourned.

As a republican, Mason should have had faith in the people’s virtue as a guard against the tyranny he purported to fear.

In Massachusetts, Gerry explained, “there are two parties, one devoted to democracy, the worst he thought of all political evils, the other as violent in the opposite extreme.”

Well, Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy? A republic, replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.

full discussion of this question would, if I mistake not, unfold the true principles of republican government, and prove in contradiction to the concurrent opinions of theoretical writers, that this form of government, in order to effect its purposes, must operate not within a small but an extensive sphere.