The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
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The size argument, then, was obviously going to be a key ingredient in the agenda of those opposing any kind of national government, so Madison knew that he needed to have a rebuttal prepared, designed to disarm the opposition of one of its most potent weapons. Believing that the best defense was a strong offense, he decided to attack on two fronts.
His first assault was aimed at the assumption that small republics, like the state governments created during the war, were inherently superior to large ones. But the historical record, as Madison read it, contradicted that assumption. The state governments had failed to meet their troop quotas and financial obligations throughout the war, thereby prolonging the conflict by several years, and in several desperate moments putting the eventual outcome at risk. (One could almost see Washington nodding with approval in the background.) Smallness in size, in effect, facilitated the smallness in thinking that had almost proved fatal to the cause of independence.
Another long catalog of failures at the state level then ensued, suggesting that the previously described inadequacies of the Confederation Congress were in great part a consequence of the prevalent provincialism and localism within the states. The much-vaunted intimacy between elected representatives and their constituents, it turned out, had a quite deplorable downside, as representatives, in order to appease the voters, told them that they did not have to pay taxes, could settle on land promised to the Native Americans, could confiscate loyalist estates regardless of legal prohibitions against doing so, and were perfectly justified in accepting vastly inflated currency, since it permitted debtors to pay their creditors with money that was nearly worthless.12
There was in Madison’s critical assessment of the state governments a discernible antidemocratic ethos rooted in the conviction that political popularity generated a toxic chemistry of appeasement and demagoguery that privileged popular whim and short-term interests at the expense of the long-term public interest. Fifty years later such a posture would be regarded as unacceptably elitist. But at the time, Madison felt no need to apologize for his critique, which derived its credibility not from some theoretical aversion to the will of the majority, but from a critical assessment of the popularly elected state governments during and after the war. He harbored an eighteenth-century sense that unbridled democracy was incompatible with the political health of a republic.13
His second assault was a counterintuitive companion to the first, an argument that large republics were actually more stable and politically accountable than small ones. The core of this claim was that a larger republic increased the number of factions beyond the merely local sphere to create a new kind of political chemistry that generated its own discipline. As he put it in “Vices,” a large republic produced “a greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions, which check each other…. So an extensive Republic meliorates the administration of a small Republic.” This also meant that the central fear of the confederationists—namely, that a consolidated national government would tend toward tyranny—was misguided, because the interaction of interest groups in a large republic would prove self-regulating, making a coercive federal government unnecessary.14
Where did the inspiration for this novel idea come from? Because political scientists have identified Madison’s argument, most fully expressed later in Federalist 10, as one of the earliest expressions of a pluralistic version of modern politics, the answer to that question has attracted considerable scholarly attention. Some of the histories of David Hume, which were included in the “literary cargo” Madison received from Jefferson, contained an embryonic version of the idea. Madison had also read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), which provided an economic argument—the self-regulating character of a laissez-faire marketplace—that he might have transported to the political arena. And Madison’s battle for religious freedom in Virginia had exposed him to the argument that the sheer proliferation of religious sects and denominations made toleration politically preferable because no single creed could achieve dominance. All these intellectual influences are eminently plausible.15
But they all assume that Madison was functioning as a philosopher most interested in exploring the frontiers of political thought. Instead, in the spring of 1787 he was behaving as a highly sophisticated political partisan, mobilizing his considerable resources to defend the prospects for a truly national government. He knew he needed to counter Montesquieu’s classic condemnation of large republics because the confederationists were sure to deploy it as a centerpiece of their agenda in Philadelphia. So his research that spring was highly selective. He harbored no desire to make a contribution to modern political science. His primary goal was to win the argument for a new constitution.
That said, Madison’s tactical motivations ought not obscure his courage in taking on the dominant assumptions about the limitations of republican governments. Montesquieu’s case against large republics was not just a theoretical argument. During two thousand years of European history, no republic of the scale and size of the United States had ever survived for long. And the political arguments that American patriots had thrown at Parliament and George III stigmatized any political power that was not proximate to its constituents. So Madison was implicitly arguing that the meaning of the American Revolution had to be revised. He did not put it that way explicitly, since such a statement would have alienated delegates still basking in the afterglow of those revolutionary embers. But that was the inescapable thrust of his argument. Once you moved from a local and state to a national scale, the definition of political representation would have to change.
The “spirit of ’76” had served its purpose in justifying American independence, he thought, but it was now an anachronism because it stigmatized any energetic projection of political power as inherently tyrannical. There needed to be a second founding in which the “spirit of ’87” replaced the “spirit of ’76,” establishing and institutionalizing a national political framework capable of functioning on a much larger scale, yet doing so without threatening the hard-won liberties of the first founding. Madison realized that he was asking his fellow Americans to abandon their local and state-based orientation, to regard themselves as fellow citizens in a much larger enterprise, and to modify their view of government as an alien force. The federal government must become “us” rather than “them.” One might credibly call this change a second American Revolution.16
Madison’s third area of thinking and reading in preparation for the Philadelphia convention is more difficult to categorize. It was not driven by the need to anticipate and counter the arguments of the confederationists. It was more a question of language or vocabulary, how to talk about the principle of representation in a large republic.
For there were no precedents. The state governments, to be sure, were mini-republics, but their limited size sustained the sense of proximity between representatives and voters that obviously did not translate to a nation-size republic. And the current Confederation Congress did not work as the model for a republican government, since it had never been designed to be a representative government or even a government at all.
Moreover, Madison did not believe that the orthodox answer to the problem was tenable. Once they had rejected the authority of George III, so the story went, sovereignty had shifted from a monarchy claiming to derive its authority from God to a legislature claiming to derive its authority from “the people.” Political power flowed not downward from the heavens but upward from the citizenry. Indeed, this was the fundamental change that had made the war for independence a revolution.
But experience during and after the war had demonstrated beyond any doubt that romantic descriptions of “the people” were delusional fabrications, just as far-fetched as the divine right of kings. Madison’s experience at both the state and the federal level had convinced him that “the people” was not some benevolent, harmonious collective but rather a smoldering and ever-shifting gathering of factions or interest groups committed to provincial pers
pectives and vulnerable to demagogues with partisan agendas. The question, then, was how to reconcile the creedal conviction about popular sovereignty with the highly combustible, inherently swoonish character of democracy. Perhaps the most succinct way to put the question was this: How could a republic bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty be structured in such a way to manage the inevitable excesses of democracy and best serve the long-term public interest?17
Madison’s one-word answer was “filtration.” He probably got the idea from David Hume’s Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth (1754), an uncharacteristically utopian essay in which Hume imagined how to construct the ideal republican government from scratch. Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who would elect the next tier of representatives, and so on up the political ladder in a process of refinement that left the leaders at the top connected only distantly with the original electorate and therefore free to make decisions that might be unpopular. A republic under this filtration scheme was a political framework with a democratic base and a hierarchical superstructure that allowed what Madison described as “the purest and noblest characters” to function as public servants rather than popular politicians.18
Some semblance of the filtration idea was already embodied in several of the state constitutions, where the upper house was elected by the lower house, and in a few instances the governor was chosen by the upper house. Even Jefferson, perhaps the most democratically inclined member of the founding generation, implicitly accepted the filtration principle, acknowledging “a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom, that the first secretion from them is usually crude and heterogeneous.”19
Madison’s aversion to unfettered (or unfiltered) democracy was less theoretical than practical. The state governments created during and after the war for independence were the closest thing to laboratories for democracy ever established beyond the local level in recorded history. And there was little doubt in his mind that these political experiments, Virginia’s included, were demonstrable failures, clear examples of how easily demagogues could manipulate popular opinion and provincial prejudices, thereby rendering any considerations of the larger public interest impossible.
His argument about the inherent advantages of a large republic represented his way to bring demography and geography to the rescue by enlarging the political arena. His argument for filtration represented his attempt to achieve a similar goal—that is, to harness the raw energies of that semi-sacred thing called “the people” while simultaneously controlling and refining its inevitable excesses. A large and properly layered republican government, therefore, would have a popular foundation and a meritocratic infrastructure, which was the political equivalent to having your cake and eating it too.
These were Madison’s major goals, key ideas, and core convictions on the eve of the Constitutional Convention. It is difficult to imagine a lawyer more fully prepared to prosecute a defendant, which in this case was the moribund Articles, or to defend a client, which here was a fully sovereign government of the United States.
Bad weather up and down the Eastern Seaboard, especially in New England, delayed many delegates, but the obsessively prepared and prompt Madison managed to arrive in Philadelphia more than a week early, on May 3. The seven-man Virginia delegation trickled in over the next two weeks, the all-important Washington on May 13, as they waited for a quorum to arrive. That left eight days for the Virginians to caucus over food and drink at the City Tavern and the Indian Queen. Madison seized the opportunity to lobby his Virginia colleagues, some of whom, like George Mason and Edmund Randolph, needed convincing, to assume a united front in support of a radical rather than a moderate agenda.
For obvious reasons, no record of these conversations has survived. But we know, based on his comments beforehand, that Washington strongly supported Madison’s radical strategy; indeed, his reluctant decision to attend the convention was prompted by Madison’s assurance that halfway measures would not be attempted because they were not worth the effort and therefore not worth his presence. We also know, based on their comments during the debates over the following months, that Mason and Randolph had serious reservations about any fully empowered federal government that put Virginia’s primacy at risk. And so while we are only guessing, it seems quite possible that the Virginia delegation eventually endorsed Madison’s radical strategy, not so much because of his argumentative skills as because Washington made his continued presence in Philadelphia contingent upon its adoption. And without Washington the entire enterprise was almost surely doomed.20
During these preconvention sessions, the Virginians were joined by two members of the Pennsylvania delegation, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson. Both were committed nationalists destined to play crucial roles during the ensuing months. Morris rose to speak, peg leg and all, more often than any other delegate, and he had a greater influence on the final wording of the document than anyone else. Wilson was a bespectacled former Scotsman with a degree from St. Andrews who combined a Madisonian command of the issues with an impressive presence on his feet that Madison lacked. With the exception of Hamilton, who arrived late, all the prominent advocates for replacing the Articles with a fully empowered federal government spent a week together, planning how to set the agenda of the convention.21
The fruit of their clandestine labors was the fifteen-point Virginia Plan. It proposed the creation of a tripartite government modeled on the state constitutions with an executive branch, a bicameral legislature, and a judiciary. Unlike the Articles, it was designed and intended to function as a government representing the American citizenry rather than the states. Madison got all that he wanted on the all-important representation issue, since both branches of the legislature would be allocated by population. He got most of what he wanted on the highly controversial issue of an executive veto over state legislations. Borrowing from Jay’s language in the New York constitution, the Virginia Plan vested veto power over state legislation in an executive council that included federal judges. But the crucial principle was uncompromisingly clear: sovereignty was to be shifted from the state to the federal level.22
For all defenders of the status quo, the Virginia Plan represented a second coup. The first coup, as they saw it, was the calling of the Constitutional Convention itself, which represented a hijacking of the ongoing debate about the Articles by an organized minority of alarmists, who had somehow recruited Washington to lend legitimacy to their dubious cause. Now the Virginia Plan represented a capture of the convention itself by imposing a national agenda as the basis for the looming debates. No one on the moderate side of the argument had come up with equivalently clear alternatives, so the Virginia Plan commanded the field by default. This tactical victory was sealed on May 30, when a majority of the delegates endorsed the resolution, proposed by Gouverneur Morris, “for a national government…consisting of a supreme legislature, executive, and judiciary.” The national agenda was now firmly in the saddle, and Washington, as everyone expected, after a pro forma nomination by Robert Morris—his only public utterance at the convention—stepped forward to chair the convention. Madison could hardly have hoped for more.23
Indeed, the majority vote on the core plank of the Virginia Plan was really another coup of sorts, since only seven states were present for the vote—none of the New England states had yet arrived—and based on subsequent voting patterns of the absent delegations, it seems unlikely that the Morris resolution would have garnered a majority if all the delegates had been in attendance. For that matter, there was never a moment during the entire summer when all fifty-five delegates were present. Given our sense that this was almost assuredly the most consequential conclave in American history, it strains credibility to realize that the Constitutional Convention was an ever-shifting, highly transitory body of men with different degrees of commitment to the enterprise. One of the intangible advantages the nationalists enjoyed in this swirling context was that, thanks largely to Madison,
they were better organized and—though this is impossible to prove—more invested in the outcome.24
But neither superior organization nor greater commitment was likely to translate into an assured victory for the nationalists. On the second day of the convention a procedural motion was made, without fanfare or opposition, that the one-state-one-vote principle enshrined in the Articles would continue to apply in the convention. This was a huge decision, for it meant that Delaware, with only 60,000 residents, enjoyed equal political status with Virginia, at 750,000. As a result, the small states, which depending on how you counted enjoyed a roughly two-to-one advantage over the large states, could block any national initiative.
And this in turn meant that any robust national agenda on the model of the Virginia Plan was going to be forced to run a very challenging gauntlet in order to win acceptance. For the same state-based principle that Madison and his fellow nationalists sought to replace remained the operative mode of proceeding in the convention. And the small states, which were sure to oppose proportional representation in both branches of the legislature, had the votes to do it.25
Before the convention had barely begun, then, some combination of gridlock or compromise between nationalists and confederationists was virtually inevitable. Under Madison’s leadership the radicals had seized control of the agenda. But given the powers of the small states under the one-state-one-vote policy, the proponents of the radical agenda would have to make concessions to win their way, thereby creating a document in which the salient question of federal versus state sovereignty could not be resolved, only conveniently obscured. While hindsight makes that conclusion almost unavoidable, the delegates lacked access to hindsight, so they spent the summer arguing their respective convictions in the belief that their arguments, not the inherent structure of the debate, would decide the outcome. In fact, the parameters of the possible were predetermined.