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March 17 - March 17, 2025
Madison’s account is not entirely reliable. The historian Mary Sarah Bilder demonstrated in an intricate 2015 study that Madison fiddled with his notes on the Constitution all his life, combining some speeches, revising others, and omitting some of his comments that would be politically embarrassing if revealed, such as his desire in 1787 to constrain the powers of the states.5
In their deliberations, the delegates had three basic points of reference: how the existing states worked; how the British system worked; and what precedents other republics offered—some recently in Europe, such as the Dutch, and some from the ancient world, with some of those examples from Rome but most from ancient Greece.
At thirty-six years old, Madison was relatively young.
During the Constitutional Convention.
The purpose of a national government, he began, was not just to deal with foreign powers and settle interstate disputes, but also to ensure “the security of private rights, and the steady dispensation of Justice.”
James Madison’s first speech during the Constitutional Convention.
Madison led the charge for a much stronger national system of government.
Madison had the ear of the conventioneers. “Every Person seems to acknowledge his greatness,” recalled one delegate, Georgia’s William Pierce (attended William & Mary).
He blends together the profound politician, with the Scholar. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention, and tho’ he cannot be called an Orator, he is a most agreeable, eloquent, and convincing Speaker. From a spirit of industry and application which he possesses in a most eminent degree, he always comes forward the best informed Man on any point in debate. . . . He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance, and has a most agreeable style of conversation.
“He” is James Madison as described by fellow conventioneer Georgia’s William Pierce (alumni of William & Mary).
“Mr. Maddison in a very able and ingenious Speech ran through the whole Scheme of the Government,—point out all the beauties and defects of ancient Republics; compared their situation with ours.”16 The young Virginian was steering the convention toward a new government that would be very different from the diffuse state of the nation under the Articles of Confederation. It was an extraordinary achievement for Madison.
Fellow conventioneer Georgia’s William Pierce (alumni of William & Mary).
“The great division of interests in the U. States,” he said, according to his notes, “did not lie between the large & small states; It lay between the Northern & Southern.”23 In the long term he was right, unfortunately.
“He” was James Madison.
the other colleges of Madison’s time—Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary—had been regional or even local in their draw of students, while Princeton was administered consciously as a pan-colonial college, with students traveling to it from all the colonies of the American seaboard. At his college, notable also for its encouragement of political discussion, Madison moved among young men of diverse backgrounds, views, and accents, and watched them mix, and perhaps even check and balance one another in their own small, undergraduate ways.
“From the day he entered politics,” they conclude, “the energies of James Madison were involved in continental rather than state problems. . . . His nationalism was hardly accidental.”24 This continental perspective may have resonated with the eight other delegates at the convention who were Princeton graduates—more than from any other college.25 This reflected the geographical reach of the college.
The delegations from Georgia and South Carolina were emphatic: They would not sign any document that carried a whiff of emancipation.
the same Charles Pinckney who had deplored ancient analogies who a month later invoked them to defend human bondage. “If slavery be wrong, it is justified by the example of all the world. He cited the case of Greece, Rome, & other antient States; . . . In all ages one half mankind had been slaves.”30
While secretary of state, he would become deeply involved in the neoclassical design of the new capital of Washington, DC. Those acts alone would have earned him a place in history. As Gordon Wood puts it, “Almost single-handedly he became responsible for making America’s public buildings resemble Roman temples.”39
Thomas Jefferson.
Madison himself emerged from the Constitutional Convention somewhat disappointed. He still worried about the lack of a national veto over state laws. Likewise, Alexander Hamilton had wanted a far more aristocratic or monarchical system, with presidents and senators selected for life terms.
unlike Jefferson, both Madison and Hamilton believed that ratifying the proposed Constitution, with all its flaws and compromises, was far more desirable than continuing the government under the Articles of Confederation. And so in the months after the convention, in the fall of 1787, the two threw themselves into campaigning for its passage by state conventions.
Peter Gay writes of this collection that “it is this document rather than the Declaration of Independence that strikes me as the most characteristic product of the American Enlightenment.”45
The so-called Federalist Papers.
Some twenty-three of the eighty-five Federalist Papers quote or reflect classical authorities, and all of them were published under the pen name Publius.46 There are twice as many references to Greeks as to Romans, mainly because of Madison’s interest in the governance of ancient Greek republics.47
In the world of the Federalist Papers, the pillar of “virtue” has fallen.50 When Madison does write about virtue, it often is not to invoke it but to emphasize that it is a finite resource in humans.
Madison was the most “Scottish” of the first four presidents in his thinking.
Madison also was borrowing a bit from Montesquieu, who wrote that, “Constant experience shows us, that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it. . . . To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power.”56
The high-flying oratory of the pro-Constitution side again rubbed the anti-Federalists wrong. Amos Singletary, himself an informally educated miller, worried biblically that: These lawyers, and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks . . . just as the whale swallowed up Jonah. This is
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It’s ironic that it’s the working class that now supports those looking to suck at the government’s tit. Racism is a powerful emotion. . .
It looked like Massachusetts would vote against the Constitution. In late January, one “anti” delegate predicted that his side would win decisively, with 192 against and only 144 in support.68 Yet when the Massachusetts convention voted in early February, it narrowly approved the new government, by a vote of 187 to 168.
In Federalist 51, he emphasized again how checks and balances were necessary to offset self-interest. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. . . . It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” He concluded the thought with one of his more memorable observations: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”71
James Madison.
Thomas Jefferson had long seen Patrick Henry as a problem, confiding to Madison in a letter in 1784 partly written in code, that, “While Mr. Henry lives another bad [state] constitution would be formed, and saddled for ever on us. What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death.”77
The process was, to a surprising degree, James Madison’s achievement. He arguably had done more than Jefferson (or John Adams, for that matter) to create the United States of America. Jefferson had drafted the more affecting Declaration, but Madison played a central role in the more practical Constitution. It was an extraordinary record for a frail, introverted man without much of a public-speaking voice. That he overcame those obstacles indicates the strength of both his will and his intellect, as well as his dedication to discerning the lessons of the ancient world for the new United States.
George Washington still clung to the concept of having a legislature peopled solely by good men who abhorred partisanship. He still steered by the light of virtue. For him, as for so many in his generation, states one scholar, “Faction was virtue’s opposite.”86
Americans turned against the classical outlook in the 1790s and early 1800s.
As Brackenridge’s hero found, in late-eighteenth-century America, the classical frame of mind had become an impediment for understanding the nature of the place. It especially inhibited traditionalists such as John Adams as they wrestled with the dynamic nature of what one historian calls a “unique, revolutionary, pluralistic, changing, progressive nation.”4
In his first inaugural address, delivered in New York City on April 30, 1789, Washington promised to be a good steward of “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”5 Washington uttered the words, but they almost certainly were drafted by James Madison, America’s first great political insider. As Richard Brookhiser writes, “After Washington gave the speech in Federal Hall, Madison wrote the House’s response, and Washington’s answer to the House’s response.”6 In the same vein, the political philosopher Danielle Allen once remarked that a good part of early American history
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The notion of a “loyal opposition” is that part of the process of good governance is organized questioning and criticism by those out of power, who in turn maintain deference to the larger state. But that concept had not yet developed in the Anglo-American world.
As a result, the founders regarded oppositional activity as suspicious, the result of pernicious plotting. In the 1790s, as political pressures built, this stream of conspiracy thinking grew into a flood. Those in power viewed those who opposed them as enemies of the state. “The Federalists never saw themselves as a party but as the beleaguered legitimate government beset by people allied with revolutionary France out to destroy the Union,” states Gordon Wood.10
We must not imagine that the freedom of the Romans was lost, because one party fought for the maintenance of liberty; another for the establishment of tyranny; and that the latter prevailed. No. The spirit of liberty was dead, and the spirit of faction had taken its place on both sides.15
True to their natures, in building the new capital, President Washington would dwell on questions of land while Jefferson dedicated himself to architectural design. Washington personally selected the site of the White House.22 Under Jefferson’s influence, the major buildings of the new capital would display Roman stylings, shimmering white under the southern sun.
He decided that it would be called not “The Congress House,” as originally listed, but the Capitol, a nod to ancient history. This building, home to both houses of the federal legislature, would dominate Washington, DC, just as the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill had been the most prominent religious building in ancient Rome. The upper house was already called the Senate, after the Roman example. The winning design—classical, as might be expected—was submitted by William Thornton, who had trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh and later received a degree from the
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Jefferson.
Madison was becoming avowedly partisan. Once again he was leading the way in American public life, this time by unabashedly embracing party politics.
he wrote in the National Gazette,
“He” = James Madison.
The purpose of the new newspaper, edited by Philip Freneau (Princeton, 1772), a college friend of Madison’s, was to be an outlet for anti-Hamilton views, which made it the first nakedly partisan punch thrown in American history.30
National Gazette.
Washington had told Edmund Randolph, Jefferson’s successor as secretary of state, that if the nation broke up, he would go with the North.58 It makes sense, given that Washington’s sympathies were with the Federalists, who were more the party of the commercial North.
Adams’ classical orientation would not serve him well when he was president. He would become a man out of time, proving unable to comprehend the rising surge of populism.
The founders always had been acutely aware of the destruction of the Roman Republic and the short duration of the Athenian democracy. But now there was a new, contemporary example of a republic going sour, in France. That was significant because in the late eighteenth century, the world had just two leading examples of “democratic republican” government—that is, nations ruled by the majority of the people.
by mid-1793 it became clear that the French experiment had gone off track—first into a reign of terror, followed eventually by a “first consul,” Napoleon Bonaparte, who would consolidate his power into a dictatorship.
In August 1791, only two years after the start of the French Revolution, slaves in France’s colony of Haiti began their revolt, which ultimately proved successful, with the establishment of an independent republic led by black men. American slaveholders watched this unfold with fear. This was their worst nightmare.
seen in the context of American history, it was the last gasp effort of classical republicanism to stave off surging populism.
the party in power cracking down on the opposition press. In the two years after the Sedition Law was enacted, twenty-five journalists were arrested and ten convicted. There were five major anti-administration newspapers at the time; the editors of four of them were indicted.83
Federalists led by President Adams were in power. The Alien and Sedition Acts were employed to suppress the press and speech.
This was pure political power poured into the judiciary. Enforcement of the law was selective and uneven, to the extreme. “Every defendant was a Republican, every judge and practically all the jurors were Federalists,” records Smelser.89
When Washington was alive, he was all the Federalists needed to make their case. But with him gone, they had almost nothing else to offer the American people.
Not only was Washington gone, but Adams was often absent from his job, spending seven months of 1799 not at the capital but “angrily secluded” at his home in Massachusetts.107
Jefferson drafted the Kentucky Resolutions, a series of statements opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts and toying with secession. Madison did much the same in Virginia, saying the acts were unconstitutional, though he did so more moderately. Both sets of resolutions were adopted by their state legislatures.
As psychiatrists know, sometimes what people don’t talk about is as important as what they do. All of the founders almost certainly were aware of Spartacus, the gladiator who famously led a slave revolt in ancient Rome. But Founders Online, which is compiling the works of the founders in searchable form, shows that in all their letters, speeches, pamphlets, and other writings, only John Adams, the only one who never owned an enslaved person, ever refers to him. To everyone else, slavery was treated as much as possible with a conspiracy of silence. It was the greatest failing of the founders,
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