James Madison and the Dynamics of the Constitutional Convention

by Lance Banning

Studies of the Constitutional Convention, both "empirical" and more "impressionistic," almost always emphasize its multiplex divisions: small states vs. large, "pure" federalists against proponents of a large republic, planting states against commercial interests, south against north. There is no denying the necessity of close attention to these conflicts. The Convention was a battleground for disagreeing politicians and competing state and sectional concerns. It succeeded, as the textbooks say, because the clashing delegates discovered ways to compromise their sharpest disagreements. Analyses of its divisions have taught us much of what we know about the way in which the document emerged.[1]

For all its benefits, however, there are also ways in which a fascination with conflicting coalitions may have interfered with insight and imparted partial and misleading images of how the meeting worked. I do not merely mean that a repeated emphasis on conflicts and divisions can encourage a neglect of the cooperative dimensions of the meeting (though this, of course, has sometimes been the case).[2] I mean to call attention also to another sense in which we have repeatedly applied a static method of analysis to a dynamic situation and thereby missed a major aspect of the story.

The Aim of Every Political Constitution

The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.

The elective mode of obtaining rulers is the characteristic policy of republican government. The means relied on in this form of government for preventing their degeneracy are numerous and various. The most effectual one, is such a limitation of the term of appointments as will maintain a proper responsibility to the people.

– James Madison, Federalist No. 57, "The Alleged Tendency of the New Plan to Elevate the Few at the Expense of the Many Considered in Connection with Representation," New York Packet, February 19, 1788

An Excerpt from: James Madison and the Making of America

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

James Madison, Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of March 16-17, 1751.[1] By chance, he was an American prince.

James Madison, Sr., the master of Montpellier in Piedmont Virginia’s semi-frontier Orange County, was the wealthiest man in the county. His lands were extensive, his slaveholdings were notable, and his family connections were impressive. In a society that privileged the wealthy to a notable degree, James, Jr.’s world was his oyster.

Piedmont Virginia lay west of the Tidewater region that had been dominated by Virginia planters for well over a century. Life was cruder there, and tradition less powerful. Social status figured very strongly in a young man’s life, but not to the degree that it did in the coastal counties. If James Madison, Jr. ever experienced having a common Virginian doff his hat as young Madison passed, then, he was not quite so snobbish as a Byrd, Carter, or Harrison. Still, like them, Madison knew his place.

James Madison and the Making of America

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America takes what we thought was a familiar story and gives it a fresh and important interpretation that challenges old orthodoxies and helps us better understand important episodes in American history.

For instance, proper credit for the world-historic Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is at last granted not to its draftsman, Thomas Jefferson – who had his gravestone list the statute along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia as his proudest achievements – but to James Madison, who actually managed to get the statute enacted (and who would have nothing inscribed on his gravestone).

Quote of the Day: James Madison on the Meaning of the Constitution

“If we were to look, therefore, for the meaning of the instrument beyond the face of the instrument, we must look for it, not in the general Convention, which proposed, but in the State Conventions, which accepted and ratified the Constitution.”--James Madison

Second Amendment/Right To Arms: Smearing Madison

by Dave Kopel (from NRA-ILA News)

Will the Second Amendment still protect your rights a few years from now” Perhaps not, for it only survives today by a single vote in a sharply divided U.S. Supreme Court.

In December, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced on national television his continuing opposition to a real Second Amendment right. If President Barack Obama has the opportunity to appoint one more Supreme Court justice--and he almost certainly will have the opportunity if he is re-elected in 2012--any meaningful Second Amendment right will be erased from the Constitution.

Having opposed the Heller ruling in 2008, Breyer took the first opportunity available to vote that it be overruled. He did so in a dissenting opinion in McDonald v. Chicago, which was decided in June 2010. That vote to overturn Heller was joined by President Obama’s first Supreme Court appointee, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and also by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In a December 2009 speech to the Harvard Club in Washington, D.C., Ginsburg suggested that she hopes one day the Heller dissenters will become the majority, and Heller will be no more.

With anti-gun Justice Elena Kagan replacing the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, the anti-Second Amendment bloc on the Supreme Court is just one vote away from victory.

Breyer, meanwhile, is intensifying his public relations campaign against the Second Amendment. On Dec. 12, 2010, Breyer appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to promote his new book, “Making Our Democracy Work.”

(The interview video is available at http://video.foxnews.com/v/4456313/justice-stephen-breyer-on-fns.)

Breyer told host Chris Wallace that James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, had no interest in protecting the right of self-defense. Instead, Breyer said, Madison had been fighting to get the Constitution ratified by the state conventions, and he was “worried about opponents who would think Congress would call up state militias and nationalize them.” So Madison proposed the Second Amendment because he was working on the principle, “I’ve got to get this document ratified.”

“If you’re interested in history, and in this one history was important, then I think you do have to pay attention to the story,” Breyer continued. “If that was his motive historically, the [Heller] dissenters were right. And I think more of the historians were with us.”

Breyer is correct that there were more than a dozen American historians who filed “friend of the court” briefs in District of Columbia v. Heller and in McDonald v. Chicago, opposing the right to own firearms for self-defense. The problem with their contention is that the historical record directly contradicts those claims. For a good summary of the numerous errors by the history professors on whom Breyer and the other anti-Heller justices relied, see David Young’s excellent article “Why D.C.’s Gun Law Is Unconstitutional” at http://hnn.us/articles/47238.html.

During the state ratification debates on the proposed Constitution, there were, indeed, many concerns raised about the militia powers that would be granted to the new government. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the power to call the militia into federal service in order to “execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions.” Further, Congress has the power to provide for arming, training and disciplining the militia.

Many people worried that Congress might abuse its militia powers by calling the state militias into federal service, marching them from state to state and thus depriving the states of the protection of the militias. Or, Congress might destroy the militias by neglect or by design--such as by enrolling only a tiny portion of the people into a “select militia” that would be loyal only to the national government, but that would not defend the states.

But here, the argument of Breyer, et al. collapses. To begin with, when Madison introduced the Second Amendment on June 8, 1789, he could not possibly have been thinking, “I’ve got to get this document ratified.” The Constitution had already been ratified by 11 states, two more than the nine required for ratification. Pursuant to the ratified Constitution, George Washington had been elected president of the United States.

Quote of the Day: James Madison

The first question that offers itself is, whether the general form and aspect of the government be strictly republican. It is evident that no other form would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.--James Madison, Federalist 39

"Madison and the Compound Republic"

by Kevin Gutzman

James Madison is widely known as the "Father of the Constitution," author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In his old age, the prevailing account goes, he stood up to a heretical off-shoot of Southern constitutionalism, and it was fortunate that he, the "last of the Fathers," was still around to gainsay those who would have distorted and perverted the national institutional inheritance to their own destructive, sectional ends. Although his tenure as president of the United States was at best undistinguished, his reputation benefits in the same way as does that of Thomas Jefferson from the appellation "President," and most historians view Madison as his fellow Virginian and colleague's intellectual peer and theoretical superior. 

This is only part of the Madison story. He was a major figure in the establishment of the constitutional regime of 1787, but Madison was also the single man most responsible for insuring that Virginia would one day leave that regime. A devoted American nationalist, Madison often knowingly worked backstage to make the United States more national - less federal - than his fellow Virginians were willing to endure. While he was one of the leading formulators of the doctrine of state sovereignty that would eventually provide Virginia a constitutional argument for the legitimacy of secession, he also threw his prestige behind the cause of impressing Americans outside Virginia with the illegitimacy of what Andrew Jackson called the "Virginia doctrine." 

In his lifetime, James Madison was widely perceived as Jefferson's political and intellectual lieutenant. Despite his achievements in Congress and his eminent role in the movement culminating in the ratification of the constitution of 1787, Madison was remembered as a second-tier figure, at best, in the nineteenth century. In the wake of the War of 1861-5, attitudes toward Madison hardened. He and Jefferson were blamed by the Yankee-dominated historical profession for their part in laying the ideological groundwork of secession. Henry Adams published his nine-volume History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison in 1889-1891, and he argued that the Jeffersonian platform of hyper-limited federal government and international pacifism was simply impractical, and that the main fruit of the Virginia Dynasty had been the laying to rest of the Republican program of 1800.