The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Madison was born and raised a Virginian. And he never completely shed his Virginia identity in the same way that Washington did. For instance, while he supported most of Robert Morris’s program to establish public credit, he opposed Morris’s proposal for the Bank of the United States. Like most Virginians, he regarded banks as places where “papermen” manipulated numbers to drive the planter class into bankruptcy. Again, he was a Virginian in thinking about wealth in terms of land rather than money. And his endorsement of fiscal reform was driven by the desire to pay off the wartime debt in responsible fashion, not—like Morris and Hamilton—to create the foundation of a truly national economy. Temperamentally the exact opposite of Hamilton in his preference for caution over daring, Madison, also unlike Hamilton, thought politically rather than economically. And it was his experience of the inherently dysfunctional Articles as a political framework that made him an advocate of radical reform.

  Madison’s disenchantment with the confederation model was an evolutionary process that began during his time in the Virginia legislature, then accelerated when he served in the Confederation Congress. Two nearly simultaneous events in 1783 seemed to persuade him that any voluntary alliance of sovereign states was inherently unworkable and doomed to dissolution. The first was the Newburgh Crisis, which he regarded as a dramatic demonstration of the quite shameful treatment of the Continental Army that almost provoked a mutiny and was rescued from catastrophe only by Washington’s elegiac intervention. The second was the failure to pass the impost, an essential source of revenue blocked by Rhode Island’s indulgent sense of its inflated significance. “If the substance of it [the impost] is rejected,” Madison observed, “and nothing better introduced in its place, I shall consider it as a melancholy proof that narrow and local views prevail over that liberal policy & those mutual concessions which our future tranquility and present reputation call for.”32

  To say that Madison became a full-blooded nationalist in that moment would be an exaggeration. His Virginian roots were deep and never really died. But from that time onward he concluded that the current arrangement under the Articles was obviously and desperately in need of reform, though he was unsure how and when that should occur: “The question therefore is, in what mode & at what moment the experiment for supplying the defects [of the Articles] are to be made. The answer to that question cannot be given without a knowledge greater than I possess.” At this stage of his evolution, in late 1783 and early 1784, Madison seemed to believe that the Articles needed to be revised, not replaced.33

  His evolution continued apace in a more radical direction over the next three years. Hamilton, Jay, and Washington had reached that conclusion by an earlier and faster route. Madison arrived at the same destination more gradually and grudgingly, because a national perspective did not come to him naturally.

  Though obvious in retrospect, it came as a revelation to him that a state-based confederation could not regulate interstate commerce because each state had its own economic agenda. “They can no more exercise this power separately,” Madison now recognized, “than they could separately carry on war, or separately form treaties.” And yet cooperation on the economic front was unlikely, because it would appear “unpalatable on minds unaccustomed to consider the interests of their state as interwoven with those of the Confederacy.” The great strength of the confederation model was its flexible accommodation of multiple and diverse interests under one canopy. The great weakness, now being embarrassingly exposed, was its inherent incoherence. The center could not hold because it did not exist. And it did not exist because local, state, and at best regional allegiances remained more potent than any larger sense of national unity. Madison understood that problem viscerally because up until then he had thought of himself as a Virginian rather than an American.34

  While Washington tended to emphasize the great opportunity that was being lost by the failure to function as a coherent collective, Madison stressed the horrific consequences that would ensue if and when the confederation imploded. “The question whether it is possible and worthwhile [to preserve] the union of the States must be speedily decided some way or other,” he wrote to Monroe. “Those who are indifferent to the preservation would do well to look forward to the consequences of its extinction.”35

  But indifference continued to haunt the halls of Congress, which failed to muster a quorum in January and February 1787. Madison customarily kept extensive notes on the deliberations of the delegates but stopped doing so, scribbling “nothing worth noting” in his journal.

  In the course of his campaign to recruit Washington to the cause, he had promised that the upcoming convention in Philadelphia would not be satisfied with temporary solutions, an implicit commitment to replace rather than merely revise the Articles. That, in turn, meant an entirely new political framework would be required to replace the current confederation. Like an assiduous student preparing for a final exam, Madison focused his formidable energies on designing the political architecture for a truly national government that would set the agenda in Philadelphia. His duties as a delegate in the Confederation Congress became abiding irrelevancies. Everything now depended on what happened in Philadelphia.36

  And that, in turn, depended to a great degree on the presence of America’s most indispensable character. After some last-minute second thoughts about the wisdom of it all, Washington rode out of Mount Vernon in early May. His very presence certified the significance of the occasion, as did his willingness to risk his reputation in order to rescue the American Revolution from its own excesses. As for what he referred to as a “remedy,” that was Madison’s department. And one would be hard pressed to find anyone else on the planet with his unique combination of political savvy, psychological intensity, and cerebral power. This would be his finest hour.37

  Chapter 5

  MADISON’S MOMENT

  I am afraid you will think this project, if not extravagant, absolutely unattainable and unworthy of being attempted.

  James Madison to Edmund Randolph

  APRIL 8, 1787

  Madison had a bimodal mind that was capable of functioning with great agility in a complicated political context, then ascending above the fray to a higher level of political theory, the latter a talent that has earned him a reputation as one of America’s preeminent political philosophers. Both sides of the Madisonian mind were operating at full speed in the spring of 1787, though the tactical side dictated the agenda for the theoretical side, meaning that Madison thought less like a philosopher than a lawyer preparing his case.1

  His client, in this instance, was a fully empowered federal government operating directly on the citizenry of the United States rather than indirectly through the states. His opponent was the state-based confederation embodied in the Articles, which had to be exposed under cross-examination as an ineffectual body that must be displaced rather than merely reformed. Unlike a detached philosopher, Madison drew conclusions that were politically preordained, and as he sifted through the piles of evidence, he was not searching for truth so much as building his case in preparation for the looming debate in Philadelphia. The only acceptable verdict was a clear shift in sovereignty from the state to the national level.

  Many observers at the time regarded such a goal as preposterously unrealistic, the eighteenth-century equivalent of hitting the lottery. But Madison had promised Washington, as a condition of his participation, that nothing short of radical change was worth their effort, and in April he reassured Washington that he remembered that pledge. “Radical attempts, although unsuccessful,” he promised, “will at least justify the authors of them.” Better to fail in a noble cause, in short, than to succeed in a more limited effort that would only postpone the inevitable descent into political dissolution.2

  He reiterated his commitment to a radical agenda in a lengthy letter to Edmund Randolph, the current governor and a member of the Virginia delegation with long bloodlines that placed him in the upper echelon of the Tidewater aristo
cracy. Randolph had expressed his belief that modest reform of the Articles was the best one could hope for. But Madison would have none of it. “In truth my ideas of a reform strike so deeply at the old Confederation,” he explained, “and lead to such a systematic change, that they will scarcely admit of an expedient.” He was going to Philadelphia prepared to defend fundamental reform, he insisted, “on a take it or leave it basis.”3

  But then a small crack appeared in Madison’s otherwise nonnegotiable agenda. Once the all-important principle of federal sovereignty over the states was accepted, but only then, he was prepared to be gracious in victory, endorsing a “middle ground” that allowed the state governments, which he called “the local authorities,” to remain in force “as far as they can be subordinately useful.” Madison did not know it at the time, but he was describing a version of the core political compromise that would shape the willfully ambiguous framework of the Constitution.4

  There were two principles, Madison explained to Randolph, that he was prepared to defend to the death because both were essential for the survival of a viable national government. The first was proportional representation by population in both branches of the legislature, since nothing else would permit the Congress to speak for the American people as a whole. The second was an executive veto over all state laws, “much like the K. of G.B. had heretofore.” This was asking a lot, because it conjured up the arbitrary power of George III, against which the American colonists had rebelled. But Madison believed that nothing less than this executive veto power could ensure the supremacy of the federal government over the states.

  “I am afraid you will think this project, if not extravagant, absolutely unattainable and unworthy of being attempted,” he confessed to Randolph. But on the other hand—he was thinking out loud—perhaps his radical goals were not as impossible as they might appear. On the issue of proportional representation in both houses of Congress, for example, Madison speculated that “northern states will like popular representation because of the actual superiority of their populousness, and the southern by their expected superiority on this point.” He was only guessing, of course, and largely because of slavery the population of the southern states fell even further behind that of their northern counterparts. But he was expressing a common misconception of the moment. And however misguided, it exposed the tactical level at which his mind was working.5

  Madison’s cautious confidence was also buoyed by his ongoing analysis of the state delegations to the convention. His calculations, like those of Jay and Knox, grouped the delegates into three categories: first, those who wished to replace the Articles, the radical faction he favored; second, those who wished to revise the Articles, the moderates; and third, those who wished no change at all, the conservatives. His big discovery was that the last group had chosen to boycott the convention. The only exception was the New York delegation, where Hamilton’s efforts to have Jay selected were blocked by Governor George Clinton’s upstate supporters, despite Jay’s status as New York’s most prominent statesman. This meant that Hamilton, the ultranationalist, would be outvoted by two conservative colleagues opposed to any and all changes in the Articles. Apart from New York, however, the delegates seemed to be evenly divided between radicals and moderates.6

  How Madison managed to gather this valuable information remains a bit of a mystery. Obviously, modern technology was not available to communicate with his network of contacts in the different states. And while his correspondence reveals the conclusions he reached about each of the state delegations, it does not provide the evidence on which those conclusions were based. He was in New York, serving in the moribund Confederation Congress, which could do no business because it lacked a quorum. Most likely Madison used the time to interrogate his colleagues about political developments in their respective states in conversations that, for obvious reasons, never found their way into the historical record.

  This was backroom politics in the nose-counting tradition that most Virginian gentlemen would have found distasteful and slightly offensive. But it came to Madison naturally, and he was very good at it. Like a poker player counting cards, he was deciding how to play his hand in Philadelphia. According to his calculations, the odds for radical change seemed about even, much better than most observers believed.

  The theoretical side of Madison’s mind began operating at full power in April 1787. Jefferson had recently sent him several crates of books by English, Scottish, and French writers, a “literary cargo” that represented the most up-to-date European wisdom in the intellectual tradition soon to be called the Enlightenment. Historians interested in undermining the Beardian interpretation of the Constitution have relished the opportunity to point out that, on the eve of the Constitutional Convention, Madison was not studying his financial portfolio in order to assess the economic consequences of the looming deliberations in Philadelphia on his investments, but rather reading Voltaire and David Hume in order to refine his thinking about the historical fate of confederacies and the challenges faced by previous efforts to establish a republican form of government on a national scale.7

  This is true enough and worthy of notice. But it is also necessary to notice, once again, that Madison’s mind was more political than philosophical. Which is to say that his reading was driven by a clear sense of the arguments he anticipated from confederationists and the arguments he needed to make for a nation-size republic. He knew what he was looking for as he read, and chose accordingly. There were, it turned out, three areas of inquiry of sufficient significance to merit his full attention.

  The first was the history of confederacies. Madison’s “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies” seems, at first glance, a tedious and pedantic review of Greek, Italian, Dutch, and Germanic confederations over a thousand years of European history. All the stories were boringly similar, tales of temporary stability, usually based on a political alliance against a common enemy that eventually dissolved into civil war, anarchy, and political oblivion. But the boringly similar pattern was actually Madison’s main point. The kind of confederation the Americans had created in the Articles was an inherently transitory political configuration destined to self-destruct because there was no overarching source of sovereignty larger than the narrow interests of the states. The vast majority of confederations degenerated into smaller political units that then went to war against one another.8

  The implications of this long-standing historical pattern for the current American context were obvious. The upcoming convention in Philadelphia offered the opportunity to avoid the customary fate of confederacies by shifting sovereignty from the state to the federal level. Madison intended his somewhat arcane research into the history of European confederations as an opening argument designed to catch defenders of the confederation framework by surprise and place them on the defensive in a debate where his mastery of the evidence gave him an overwhelming tactical advantage.

  His second research project followed logically from the first: a catalog of the political failures under the Articles, entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” designed to demonstrate that the inherent inadequacies that afflicted all European confederations in the past were infecting the American confederation in the present. “Vices” read like a prosecuting attorney’s brief against the Articles as a viable government.9

  The litany of failures went on for thirteen pages: the states had refused to honor their tax obligations during the war and their promises to fund veterans’ pensions after the war; they had also refused to cooperate on internal improvements like roads and canals and had even imposed domestic tariffs on trade among themselves; they had encroached on federal authority by signing separate treaties with various Indian tribes, essentially stealing Native American land to line the pockets of local land speculators; they had violated provisions of the Treaty of Paris that required payment of prewar debts to British creditors and that forbade persecution of loyalists who had never borne arms on behalf of the
Crown; their obsession with local and state interests had prevented any coherent foreign policy and also created a bewildering variety of county and state laws that rendered any uniform system of justice impossible. Taken together, the multiple failures of the Confederation Congress had demonstrated that any state-based confederation was an inherently inadequate political arrangement, incapable of fulfilling the full promise of the American Revolution. Any delegates coming to Philadelphia intending to defend the political record under the Articles could now expect to be buried under an avalanche of informed Madisonian arguments.10

  Third, based on his analysis of the state delegations, Madison realized that the central debate at the convention would pit confederationists against nationalists. And he also anticipated that the chief weapon in the arsenal of the confederationists would be the claim, articulated in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) by the great Montesquieu, that republican governments could function only in small geographic areas like Greek city-states and Swiss cantons, where representatives remained close to the interests of the citizenry who elected them. Madison knew he needed an answer to this argument, which had achieved the status of a self-evident truth during the American Revolution, when the colonists insisted that only their colonial legislatures could comprehend their interests, and that parliamentary authority was too distant and disconnected to represent them. The most potent implication of this size-based argument was that any national government was inherently incompatible with the political principles and the more proximate version of representation on which the American Revolution was based.11