Patrick Henry, the greatest orator of the age. Henry had no doubt that Madison was defending the creation of “one consolidated empire in America…whose features, Sir, appear to me horribly frightful.”38 In response, Madison repeated the arguments he made in the Federalist Papers about the limits imposed on federal power and the hybrid character of the proposed Constitution. “It is in a matter unprecedented,” he claimed, “it stands by itself. In some respects it is a government of a federal nature; in others it is of a consolidated nature.”
