Virginia’s American Revolution: From Dominion to Republic

by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Virginia’s revolutionary May Convention adopted its three resolutions of May 15, 1776. In doing so, it decided to craft a declaration of rights, a republican constitution, federal relations with other former British colonies in the New World, and foreign alliances for the fledgling Virginia republic. It did more than that, however:  it also touched off a decades-long dispute about the meaning of republican self-government, about the shape the Virginians’ new republic would take. On the mid-May day that it ran up a continental union flag atop the old colonial capitol at Williamsburg, James Madison said, Virginia staked its claim to self-government.  What proved more difficult was deciding what self-government would mean.

The American Revolution proceeded simultaneously on two levels:  the state and the federal. The federal Constitution ratified in 1788 provided an international context in which the sparsely populated, weak new states could conduct the experiment in republicanism the Revolution was meant to inaugurate,[1] and the founding of the federal republic has naturally drawn the bulk of historians’ attention. While federal reform was essential, and while Virginians took the lead in achieving it, the state-level activity of those years struck contemporaries as more important. As Thomas Jefferson noted in 1776, independence would have been for naught without success in state-level reforms of government and society.[2]

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).

"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.