James Madison, proceduralist
Fears of "so gloomy a chaos" in the 1780s and 1830s feel like the 2020s
James Madison is one president for whom the presidency was a footnote. Since his death in 1836 he at turns has been lionized or faulted but never overlooked as the putative “father of the Constitution.” Conversely his tenure as the nation’s chief executive is perhaps encapsulated by one action taken by his wife on August 23, 1814. This was the day Dolley Madison had Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington rolled up and spirited to safety before the Executive Mansion and much of the rest of the capital were put to the torch by an invading British army.
Fortunately for Madison’s standing in popular historical imagination, the British were more interested in burning Washington D.C., than in keeping it. Today we remember him not as a refugee in flight from his own capital but as the seminal thinker and deft compromiser who was there at the creation of our constitutional system.
The genesis of that constitution has always taken on different casts depending on one’s era. The framers have variously been venerated as geniuses, dismissed as yet another rapacious cadre of elite rent-seekers, and damned as defenders of and apologists for slavery. Like that of his friend Thomas Jefferson, Madison’s biography threads all of the above needles nicely. As one of the main authors of The Federalist Papers, Madison in the 1780s owned 118 enslaved persons who toiled on the largest estate in Orange County, Virginia. Across the decades, as paradigm succeeds paradigm, the fourth president always remains at or near the center of the discussion.1
If Madison himself could have his say in the 21st century, he might suggest one additional frame through which to view the Philadelphia convention of 1787. A good many delegates who disagreed on a good many things nevertheless gathered that May to address what they saw as the Confederation period’s debilitating, national, and worsening disarray. If anything, Madison’s signal objection to the status quo was that there was no occasion to even use the adjective “national.” There was no noun worthy of the term “nation.”
Or such was Madison’s memory some 40 years later. During Andrew Jackson’s first term John Calhoun and other South Carolina die-hards elevated opposition to the federal tariff from a mere difference in policy to a systematic theory of constitutional “Nullification.” From Madison’s perch at his Montpelier estate, the 80-year-old former president followed the Nullifiers with growing disbelief. In 1831 he invoked the dark specter of the 1780s in a private letter. Madison recalled “the state of our commerce and navigation…abortive efforts and conflicting regulations among the states…the distracted condition of affairs at home, and the utter want of respect abroad, during the period between the peace of 1783 and the convention of 1787.” He believed that instead of creating exotic new branches of constitutional theory, the modern generation coming of age in the 1830s should exhibit “a love for a constitution which has brought such a happy order out of so gloomy a chaos.”
Possibly the sequence of ratification by the states can be read as lending support to Madison’s portrayal of calm brought about by the Constitution. Initially that sequence radiated outward from Philadelphia itself, with Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey leading the way in voting to approve the Constitution. But the next state to do so broke that geographic mold decisively. In a letter to a friend, no less an observer than George Washington offered a theory on why the fourth state to ratify was so eager. Georgia was, Washington wrote, “a weak State with the Indians on its back and the Spaniards on its flank….[If the state’s legislators could] not see the necessity of a General Government there must I think be wickedness or insanity in the way.” Georgia ratified with the speed of a state seeking its own happy order.
Then again even an eminence like Jefferson was rather less sanguine about a constitution drafted and ratified while he was in France. The stark contrast exhibited by two longtime friends who were close if not inseparable political allies perhaps furnishes a useful reminder. Wherever we think we see ignorance in the ascendancy our impulse is to make a fetish of intelligence. The example supplied by Madison and Jefferson however suggests that mere brilliance isn’t everything. The mode of ratiocination matters as well.
The historian and author George Tucker knew both men, having written a biography of Jefferson with the assistance of Madison. Long after both presidents had passed away Tucker wrote that "Jefferson was occasionally somewhat dictatorial and impatient of contradiction, which Mr. Madison never appeared to be.” Tucker’s assessment was presaged by one offered in the first decade of the 19th century by Daniel Clark. As the elected delegate to Congress from the New Orleans Territory, Clark visited then-President Jefferson. The two talked for three hours, as described by Drew McCoy:
During their interview Clark discovered that the president [Jefferson] had been “falsely informed” on several points. When the congressman attempted to correct him, however, Jefferson continually recurred “to his own sentiment founded on such false reports.” The exasperated Clark concluded that Jefferson’s aim was to try to get him to commit himself, “by hook or crook,” to the president’s own theory, “getting at the real fact appearing with him to be of quite inferior importance.”
Jefferson was in his grave by the time Nullification reared its head in the 1830s. Still, the late president’s tendency to state a case in its baldest form and hold to that position come what may played its own role in tariff debates of the Jacksonian era. Indeed, Madison was chagrined to find Jefferson’s writing cited to support the position that an individual state could nullify federal law. In his correspondence Madison insisted that when reading his friend’s writings “allowances” had to be made for “a habit in Mr. Jefferson, as in others of great genius, of expressing in strong and round terms impressions of the moment.”
In Madison’s view Nullification threatened nothing less than the reversal of the Philadelphia convention. He warned that South Carolina’s theory of the Constitution “would convert the federal government into a mere league.” The author of Federalist No. 39 scoffed at the idea that states were uniquely, supremely, or indivisibly “sovereign.” The Constitution wasn’t ratified by state governments, Madison reminded all who would listen. Instead the federal government’s charter had been adopted “by the people in each of the States, acting in their highest sovereign capacity.”
The Nullification crisis ended in a de facto compromise in early 1833. Though 25,000 men swiftly enlisted in a new South Carolina army to enforce Nullification, one thing the state lacked was a navy. That absence became critical when the Jackson Administration shrewdly moved the custom house five miles out to sea beyond Charleston harbor. Tariffs continued to be collected, even in South Carolina, but new legislation was passed in Washington to lower duties over a 10-year schedule to the level demanded by the Nullifiers.
Madison was shaken by the Nullification crisis because it raised questions on the very matter that he saw as fundamental. Individual states in the Confederation period had “forfeited the respect and confidence essential to order and good Government, involving a general decay of confidence and credit between man and man.” Now, in the 1830s, the same thing was happening again, and not merely with regard to Nullification.
The so-called Panic Session of the 23rd Congress convened in late 1833 to address President Jackson’s “war” with the Second Bank of the United States. Many who supported Jackson’s veto of the Bank’s recharter were troubled when the president unilaterally cut off the institution’s funding. Jackson insisted he was preserving “the character of our government for ages to come…the morals of the people, freedom of the press, and the purity of the elective franchise.”
Business confidence plunged, and interest rates doubled within weeks. Presenting a petition from citizens of Richmond, Senator John Tyler summarized the quandary in words that were downright Madisonian.
The memorialists look to Congress for relief. They ask not for a renewal of the Bank charter, but for the introduction of some stable financial system; not one depending on eccentric will; not a treasury resting on agents appointed by the president, liable to be displaced at his pleasure…but resting on law, not to be changed but for high reasons of state policy, approved by the wishes and sanctioned by the experience of Congress.
Madison’s entire career was an effort to replace eccentric will with republican order. He didn’t master his moment as president, but his actions in the 1780s and writings in the 1830s underscore the value of the respect and confidence essential to order and good government.
These are of course far from the only plausible frames through which to view the founding. Other tellings of the story tend to be cast aside as the salience of this or that previously “central” issue declines. Madison and his contemporaries would think us strange for so cavalierly glossing over the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, for example. If today we view the Revolution and the Philadelphia convention though the lens of the Civil War and other subsequent upheavals, the framers were no less conscious of something like the legacy of the Salem witch trials. McCoy put it well in his classic study of Madison’s post-presidential years: “[T]he disestablishment of the Anglican church in Virginia had exploded, once and for all, the crippling myths that civil government could not stand without the support of established religion.”