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

by Noah Feldman

Finally Taylor appealed to patriotism: “If you will not save yourself or your friend—yet save your country.”

By 1800, Jefferson and Madison had decided that the only solution was to defeat the Federalists in a national election. To achieve that, the extremism of 1798 would best be forgotten. Jefferson would defer to Madison’s moderation. Jefferson was now implicitly acknowledging that Madison had been right.

Hamilton,

sent Madison a letter reporting that his sources had told him about the secret treaty.

Madison wrote back briefly, politely, and a bit coldly explaining that “the cession of Louisiana by Spain to the French Republic…had been previously signified to his department from several sources, as an event believed to have taken place.”42 It was to be the last communication between the two men.

Madison asked Jefferson to send Congress the entire correspondence among Madison, the British and French ambassadors to the United States, and the American emissaries abroad—including Monroe and Pinkney. These were then read out publicly in Congress over the course of six days. Madison was standing by his record—a record he had himself meticulously shaped in the knowledge that it might someday have to be made public.

Yet ultimately, the presidency had taught Madison that the world would not always conform to the rationality he so prized.

Madison’s approach reflected his refusal to panic in the face of political challenge. It also resulted from his authorship of the First Amendment and his opposition to the Sedition Act as violating that amendment’s guarantee of free speech. Madison would not violate the principles of liberty to save liberty itself.

the White House doorman who had helped Jennings remove the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, stayed drunk for two days.

Insisting that he understood the true meaning of the Constitution reminded the nation that he had done more than anyone else to create it.

Madison had always kept his religious beliefs to himself. Now he was placing the Constitution in the role of secular savior. Madison truly believed that the Constitution would produce domestic tranquility and friendship, then spread those same values of peace globally, creating a world of free peoples coexisting peacefully and ruling themselves under their own free constitutions. No greater or more ambitious legacy could be imagined.

Adams told Jefferson, “his administration has acquired more glory, and established more union, than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, put together.”

the “still small voice” of Madison’s Constitution with “the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the fire” of revolution, war, and civil dissension. It was “the voice that stills the raging of the waves and the tumults of the people—that spoke the words of peace—of harmony—of union.” Those who sought that voice, Adams concluded, should “ ‘to the last syllable of recorded time,’ fix your eyes upon the memory, and listen with your ears to the life of James Madison.”47

Washington had won a great military victory and declined a crown.

Although Washington and Jefferson are more famous, the United States is Madisonian much more than it is Washingtonian or Jeffersonian.

It is the most influential American idea in global political history. It may be the most important political idea of the modern

With its defects and remedies, its flaws and fixes, constitutional government remains the best option the world has known for enabling disparate people to live together in political harmony. It is Madison’s legacy—and ours.

The former was a lawyer’s concern. Jefferson and Madison had corresponded at great length about the design of the judiciary in Virginia, including the question of appeals, and Jefferson quite reasonably thought that appellate courts should not revisit factual matters decided by lower courts or by juries.

Wood, Empire of Liberty, 69–70, writes: “There is no question that it was Madison’s personal prestige and his dogged persistence that saw the amendments through the Congress…when all is said and done the remaining ten amendments—immortalized as the Bill of Rights—were Madison’s.”

Madison to Edmund Pendleton, January 2, 1791, PJM, 13:344. The letter also contains an important discussion of the meaning of the clause of the Constitution making treaties the supreme law of the land. Responding to Pendleton’s query whether a provision of the proposed debt-resolution treaty with Great Britain operated automatically or required subsequent legislation to implement, Madison wrote: As treaties are declared to be the supreme law of the land, I should suppose that the words of the treaty are to be taken for the words of law, unless the stipulation be expressly or necessarily executory, which does not in this instance appear to be the case. Ibid., 342. What is noteworthy about this simple formulation is that it is exactly the opposite of the rule adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States in Medellín v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491 (2008), according to which treaties do not become the supreme law of the land without subsequent legislation unless they expressly state that they are intended to become so.

The system under the Constitution was not perfect, but it was “better in many respects than it would have been under the old system.” In particular, the Constitution limited “certain abuses of state legislation” and it encouraged “uniformity and stability” through “the regulations of commerce, in place of the fickle and interfering laws of the states.”