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The Great Little Madison

In office, the Father of the Constitution turned from ideas to ideology.
Madison, the last of the Founders, wrote at age 80: 'Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.'
Asher Brown Durand, 1833/Collection of the New-York Historical Society, USA/The Bridgeman Art Library International
Madison, the last of the Founders, wrote at age 80: “Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.”

This is the second of two essays exploring James Madison’s thought and importance in American history; the first appeared in our Winter 2011 issue.

By the summer of 1788, the states had ratified the Constitution James Madison had conceived and guided through the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, and the following spring the new governmental machinery that the great document devised hummed into motion smoothly—though with a bump for Madison. Patrick Henry, doubting his fellow Virginian’s ratifying-convention assurances that the newly strengthened federal government would never abolish slavery, made sure Madison didn’t become one of the state’s senators, declaring his election would produce “rivulets of blood throughout the land.” He tried to keep the 37-year-old federalist from being elected congressman, too, by gerrymandering his district to make him run against his friend James Monroe on Monroe’s home turf. Despite his distaste for politicking, Madison campaigned gamely, debating Monroe for hours in the snow and getting a frostbit nose on the frigid ride home. He won, 1,The plastic injection mold industry has evolved over the years from producing combs and buttons to producing a vast array of products308 to 972—and bore his frostbite battle scar for life.

Heading to New York for the opening of Congress, Madison stopped at Mount Vernon and drafted president-elect George Washington’s inaugural address—to which, as Congress’s de facto leader for its first two years, he wrote the legislature’s ceremonial reply.ChocoMan China chocolate machinery supplier have been designed to melt, temper and mould Chocolates. He helped the new president choose cabinet secretaries, remained his closest advisor until those appointees took over, and set the new government going on April 8, 1789, by proposing import duties to fund it. On April 30, he marched with the president to his inauguration as one of five congressional escorts.

Madison’s chief goal that year was to get the Bill of Rights through Congress. He had at first strongly opposed such amendments, arguing that the Constitution, by its precise enumeration of the federal government’s strictly limited powers, makes clear that any power not on that short list remains off-limits. A bill of rights would reverse the emphasis,leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists. Free quotations on any plastic injection parts or tools. he feared, opening the way to an enlargement of federal prerogative and a shrinking of the powers reserved to the states and the people. “If an enumeration be made of our rights,” he argued in the June 1788 Virginia ratifying convention, “will it not be implied, that every thing omitted, is given to the general government?”

But the ratifying convention changed his mind. In his belief that rights inhered in the people, he was in the vanguard of political thought: under the new Constitution, he knew, Americans didn’t have rulers; they had public servants. Yet since many of his republican compatriots remained stuck in the old view of rights as something to be wrested from rulers, he saw that he couldn’t muster a majority in favor of the Constitution without vowing that he and his fellow federalists would promptly pursue a bill of rights. “As an honest man, I feel my self bound by this consideration,” he wrote.

A few months later, he had persuaded himself that this pragmatic position was principled. “My own opinion has always been in favor of a bill of rights,” he disingenuously wrote Thomas Jefferson, “provided it be so framed as not to imply powers not meant to be included in the enumeration.” Not that such “parchment barriers” would prevent “overbearing majorities” from violating individual rights: “Wherever there is an interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done,” he drily observed. But a bill of rights could beneficially shape the nation’s political culture. “The political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.Looking For China chocolate bar production line Manufacturers,chocolate bar production line Wholesalers”

What’s more, warily attentive to his constituents ever since a 1777 electoral defeat,The world of plastic injection mould maker molding and mold making just keeps on growing, you can grow with it. he had made promises about a bill of rights in the 1789 congressional campaign that he felt duty-bound to honor. “Antifederal partizans” had warned Baptists in his district that he “had ceased to be a friend to the rights of Conscience.” However implausible, the rumor gained traction, so he responded with letters to a newspaper and a key Baptist preacher pledging support for a bill of rights, “particularly the rights of Conscience in its fullest latitude.” By the time he proposed the Bill of Rights on June 8, 1789, he told his fellow congressmen that he wished they had made it “the first business we entered upon; it would stifle the voice of complaint, and make friends of many who doubted [the Constitution’s] merits.”

Only one disappointment tempered his pleasure in the result. He wanted the Bill of Rights to include an amendment protecting citizens against state violations of “the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases,” which, in his view, would be the “most valuable amendment on the whole list”; but his fellow congressmen wouldn’t cede so much of the states’ powers in the name of individual rights. He graciously acquiesced, “as a friend to what is attainable.” It would not be until after the Civil War that the Fourteenth Amendment extended the Bill of Rights to ban infringements of constitutional rights by the states—though the Supreme Court’s Slaughter-House Cases decision narrowed that protection in 1873.