The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Perhaps worse, “the situation of Congress has undergone a total change,” Madison wrote Jefferson after the currency reform. “Whilst they exercised the indefinite power of emitting money on the credit of their constituents, they had the whole wealth and resources of the continent within their command, and could go on with their affairs independently and as they pleased.” With the money presses stopped, “they are now as dependent on the States as the King of England is on Parliament. They can neither enlist, pay nor feed a single soldier, nor execute any other purpose,” unless the state legislatures vote them money the states themselves have printed. Otherwise, “every thing must . . . come to a total stop.”15

  TO SOLVE the economic meltdown and the military-supply problem it exacerbated, Madison saw, America had to inspire confidence by showing it could win its Revolution—which for most of 1780 seemed uncertain—and it needed to borrow hard currency from abroad. Since France was both its chief foreign lender and its main military ally, Madison saw the French alliance as a strategic sine qua non. Moreover, he liked the French, whose diplomats began wooing him soon after his arrival in Philadelphia with glittering dinners at their lavish legation, which “Mr. Mutterson,” as a French nobleman called him, attended weekly. Unlike some of his fellow Founders, Madison had never traveled abroad (and never did), had never before lived in a big city, and found these hyper-refined blossoms of the ancien régime fascinating—too fascinating, as it turned out.16

  The French diplomats, for their part, quickly saw his value. Madison joined Congress when the feud between two of America’s secret commissioners to France raged most fiercely, with Arthur Lee accurately accusing Silas Deane of harboring British spies and colluding with French agents to profiteer, while Deane falsely accused Lee of double-crossing America’s French ally by seeking a separate peace with Britain. The feud split Congress for the first time into two factions, one pro-French, the other anti. By late 1780, Madison had emerged as deputy leader of the pro-French party; and the French minister in Philadelphia, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and his secretary, François Barbé-Marbois, lobbied him with indefatigable suavity.17

  They had their own national interest to advance, and they used Madison to further Foreign Minister Comte de Vergennes’ geostrategic vision. France aimed to humiliate, weaken, and impoverish Britain, its longtime adversary, through a costly war that would end by splitting off a precious chunk of its empire; but it wanted the independent United States that emerged to be weak, hemmed in by irritating and predatory foreign powers, and dependent on Versailles for protection and trade.18 John Adams, who had arrived in France in 1780 as an American peace commissioner, sniffed out these intentions and wrote Congress that France meant to “Keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” By July 1780, the wily Vergennes fathomed the undiplomatic Adams’s increasingly anti-French views, declared he would deal with him no further, and got Congress to recall him.19

  To counter the John Adams–Arthur Lee Francophobes, Ambassador Luzerne, mainly by playing Madison like a violin, inveigled Congress to instruct the American peace commissioners in June 1781 to keep no secrets from “the ministers of our generous ally the King of France; to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce without their knowledge or concurrence; . . . and ultimately govern yourself by their advice and concurrence.” The next June, Madison and Barbé-Marbois took this message to the American public, collaborating on a letter to the Pennsylvania Packet, signed “a gentleman in office” in Philadelphia. They extolled “the happy alliance which unites us to France,” from which “we have every year received new benefits, . . . without being able to make any other return than barren acknowledgments,” and they suggested that America should at least repay that debt “with an unlimited confidence and constant communication of every thing which relates to our mutual interests.”20

  But once George Washington, with crucial French military backing, ended the fighting on American soil with his victory at Yorktown in October 1781, America’s need of France ebbed. Moreover, the new chief U.S. peace commissioner, John Jay, had reached exactly John Adams’s conclusions about French duplicity and sent proof of it to Congress in an intercepted letter from Barbé-Marbois to Vergennes, which showed that in the peace negotiations France planned to oppose key U.S. aims (as Chapter Six recounts). Ignoring Congress’s instructions to defer to the French, Jay, unknown to Vergennes, hammered out a peace treaty with Britain infinitely more beneficial to the newly independent United States than the aghast French foreign minister ever dreamed.21

  Madison was scarcely less aghast. He had incredulously insisted that the Barbé-Marbois letter was a forgery, and he feared, as Jay negotiated, that America was “more in danger of being seduced by Britain than sacrificed by France.” When he saw the treaty’s text, he couldn’t help applauding the “extremely liberal” terms Jay had brilliantly won from Britain, but he was scandalized not only that Jay had acted without consulting Vergennes but also that he had settled a key border issue with Britain in complete secrecy. Unless Congress revealed that secret treaty provision, Madison exploded, “all confidence with France is at an end which in the event of a renewal of the war, must be dreadful as in that of peace it may be dishonorable.” And squirming under Luzerne and Barbé-Marbois’ dark mutterings that even though Vergennes diplomatically didn’t complain of Jay’s conduct, he “felt and remembered,” Madison urged not just disclosure but abject apology.22

  He was dead wrong but utterly sincere, and he remained sincere and wrong about France for the rest of his political career, with unhappy consequences for his nation. But his original premise—the indispensability of French economic and military support in the dark days of the Revolution—was sound, and the affection he formed for America’s French allies ran deep. One of his most vivid memories was the 1784 visit he made with Barbé-Marbois and the Marquis de Lafayette to the Oneida Indians near present-day Rome, New York, a six-day wilderness ride west from Albany and the farthest Madison ever ventured from home in his life. Barbé-Marbois volunteered as chef and whipped up “delicious” soups over the campfire, especially welcome in the freezing, wet autumn; Lafayette was “as amiable a man as his vanity will admit”; the servants enjoyed the Indians’ custom of temporarily marrying their girls to visitors for the duration of their stay. Nevertheless, Barbé-Marbois sniffed, “These children of nature are not at all what the writers of Europe say, who have never seen them.”23

  BUT THE FRENCH ALLIANCE solved only part of the economic and military-supply problems that Madison faced daily in Philadelphia. The larger solution, he saw, had to address a deeper political problem. Under British oppression, American colonists had focused on the free, self-determination part of “free self-government.” Having declared independence, and fighting a war that demanded concerted national effort, Americans now had to stress the government part of that formula—a formula Madison knew was almost an oxymoron, with irresolvable tension at its heart, since, as he later quipped, “an advisory Govt is a contradiction in terms.”24 The politics of the 1780s taught him “that liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty, as well as by the abuses of power.” As he rhetorically phrased the issue, “Can any government be established, that will answer any purpose whatever, unless force be provided for executing its laws?”25

  To win the war, therefore, Americans would have “to give greater authority and vigor to our public councils.”26 Just days after the ratification of the 1777 Articles of Confederation in March 1781, Madison proposed an amendment giving Congress “a general and implied power” to force the states “to abide by [Congress’s] determinations.” As he explained to Jefferson, “The necessity of arming Congress with coercive powers arises from the shameful deficiency of some of the States which are most capable of yielding their apportioned supplies.” All it would take to jolt the needed food, materiel, and cash out of them is “a small detachment” of soldiers or “two or three vessels of force employed a
gainst their trade.” But he changed his mind about the amendment: as he explained to Jefferson, he believed that Congress already had “an implied right of coercion,” which if push came to shove “will probably be acquiesced in.” Therefore, it made no sense to give balky states the chance to deny preemptively that such government power legitimately existed.27

  Congress also needed the power to tax, Madison saw. After the fighting ended at Yorktown, he, Alexander Hamilton, and other congressmen worked out a financial plan that not only would provide for federal levies but also, at his instigation, would have had the federal government assume responsibility for the states’ war debts and would not discriminate among the various classes of public creditors—positions he repudiated when his and Hamilton’s close alliance later turned to enmity. Congress approved a watered-down tax but not Madison’s two war-debt proposals a few months before the Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, brought the Revolution formally to a close.28

  BACK IN THE Virginia Assembly in 1784 after his congressional term ended, he relearned firsthand just how little the state legislatures cared about the national interest, strengthening his wish for “greater authority and vigor” in the federal government. He tried and failed to get the Assembly to let British creditors sue Virginia debtors in the state’s courts as the peace treaty required, so that Britain would ship all its troops home, as it had agreed. Moreover, he grumbled, other states wouldn’t pay contributions due to the central government or join in an embargo to counter new British trade restrictions.29 And the central government itself seemed ready to pit one region against another; John Jay, now foreign secretary, was negotiating with Spain to swap America’s right to navigate the lower Mississippi for twenty-five years in exchange for commercial agreements that would most benefit northeasterners—a scheme that enraged southwestern pioneers. Jay reasonably but impoliticly thought that, because U.S. population growth over twenty-five years would inevitably swallow up the lower Mississippi without the need for a war the nation couldn’t presently win, it made sense, for now, to “forbear to use, what we know it is not in our power to use,” in exchange “for a valuable consideration”—but not, he finally realized, if that deal would be “disagreeable to one half of the nation.”30 As Madison realized much sooner—since he and Jefferson had first discussed the river’s crucial importance in 1779—Jay’s negotiations, soon broken off, could only make southerners and westerners feel “sold by their Atlantic brethren” and “absolved from every federal tie.”31

  Madison also saw how willing the popularly elected legislatures were to harm a minority to please the majority, above all in their “general rage for paper money.” Backed by little or nothing in most states, “this fictitious money” inevitably depreciated, and the resulting price inflation aided debtors by decreasing the real value of the sum they owed, while “Creditors paid the expence of the farce.” Since debtors are many and creditors few, the “clamor for [paper money] is now universal,” Madison wrote Jefferson in 1786, and state legislators opposed to printing it—and in effect transferring wealth from creditors to debtors by government fiat—were likely to get turned out of office or, if not, “will require all their firmness to withstand the popular torrent,” as he himself found when he successfully kept Virginia from joining the paper stampede.32

  In the same letter, Madison told Jefferson that all these problems made him support a meeting of deputies from the various states scheduled for September 1786 in Annapolis. He and others hoped that meeting would lead to “a Plenipotentiary Convention for amending the Confederation,” he wrote, “yet I despair so much of its accomplishment at the present crisis.”33 As it happened, only five states sent delegates to the Annapolis Convention; but two of them were Madison and Hamilton, and out of their determination came the next year’s Constitutional Convention.

  DESPITE HIS PROFESSION of despair, all through the spring and summer of 1786 leading up to the Annapolis meeting, Madison crammed for constitution making by ravening through a “literary cargo” of books that Jefferson, then U.S. minister in Paris, had sent him by the hundreds from Europe—histories of confederations from ancient Greece to modern Switzerland in French and Latin as well as English, works of political theory from the Enlightenment and earlier, Diderot’s great Encyclopédie—all in the faith that “the past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of history is no more than anticipated experience,” Madison wrote. “When we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.”34

  Most men have a hard enough time learning from their own experience; the theoretical Madison, to his great credit, paid close attention to realities and consequences, and repeatedly adjusted his theories to the lessons of experience, both personal and historical. In his second-floor library looking west to Montpelier’s spectacular panorama of the Blue Ridge mountains twenty miles away, the zealous student absorbed over 2,000 years of experience of why past confederations failed. All this he summarized in a handwritten booklet—the library’s floor still bears his ink splatters—which he consulted in debates at the Constitutional Convention and mined freely for three of his twenty-nine Federalist papers. His reading reinforced what his congressional experience had already suggested: confederacies fail when they lack a strong central authority. So he undertook the “political experiment” of the Constitutional Convention with the aim of “combining the requisite stability and energy in government with the inviolable attention due to liberty, and to the republican form.”35

  Before the Convention opened on May 25, 1787, in the Pennsylvania statehouse, where eleven years earlier eight of the fifty-five delegates had signed the Declaration of Independence, Madison prepared zealously. In December 1786, he persuaded George Washington that his “name could not be spared from the Deputation to the Meeting” as “a proof of the light in which he regards” its importance; as for the rest of the Assembly, Madison wrote Jefferson, “the names of the members will satisfy you that the states have been serious in this business.”36 The list of governors, judges, congressmen, and war heroes, Jefferson wrote John Adams, read like “an assembly of demi-gods.”37 In April 1787, Madison drew up a brilliantly lucid analysis of the Vices of the Political System of the United States, in which he worked out fully the constitutional theory that guided him in the months ahead. On May 3, he arrived in Philadelphia, and a week or so later, when the other six Virginia delegates had settled in, he led them in adopting an outline of an entirely new government, which Governor Edmund Randolph, young, tall, handsome, and eloquent, presented to the Convention on May 29, four days after it began. The Virginia Plan, which Madison almost certainly wrote, served the delegates as a blueprint during the nearly four months of debate that followed—debate that Madison, seated in the front row opposite presiding officer George Washington’s thronelike chair, tirelessly transcribed “with a labor and exactness beyond comprehension,” as Jefferson judged, never missing a day and scarcely even an hour. In his “researches into the History of the most distinguished Confederacies,” Madison explained, he had yearned to know “the principles, the reasons, & the anticipations, which prevailed in the formation of them,” and now he wanted to make sure that posterity would have the “materials for the History of a Constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people great even in its infancy, and possibly the cause of Liberty throughout the world.”38

  THE DRAMA that followed is part of American legend: everyone knows how the delegates locked themselves into their forty-foot-square room with its twenty-foot ceiling and swore themselves to secrecy, so they could debate freely and air even their most unformed ideas without public censure; how they kept the windows locked all through the sweltering Philadelphia summer, so that eavesdroppers couldn’t overhear their deliberations; how, in Benjamin Franklin’s calming phrase, they came “to consult, not to contend, with each other” in a spirit, said Madison, of “mutual deference and co
ncession,” compromising even up to the Great Compromise of July; how the aged Franklin, who wafted in every day in his Paris-made sedan chair, unique in Philadelphia, pronounced at the end that he had wondered if the sunburst painted on the back of Washington’s chair represented dawn or dusk: “But now I have the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.”39 Summed up Madison, “There never was an assembly of men, charged with a great & arduous trust, who were more pure in their motives, or more exclusively or anxiously devoted to the object committed to them, than were the members of the Federal Convention of 1787.” And given “the natural diversity of human opinions on all new and complicated subjects,” he wrote, “it is impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.”40

  After persuading the Annapolis Convention to call for the Constitutional Convention (with Hamilton) and conjuring up the Virginia Plan that became the assembly’s road map, Madison further earned his title of “Father of the Constitution” by taking a leading role in the debates, writing twenty-nine of the eighty-five Federalist papers urging the Constitution’s ratification (and those twenty-nine the most profound in the collection and classics of political thought), and pushing a balky and fractious Virginia Ratifying Convention, with Patrick Henry and George Mason forcefully leading the opposition, to approve the new government by a cliffhanging 89 to 79 vote in June 1788.

  And out of all these writings and speeches, what theory of government emerges—and how much of that political theory grew out of Madison’s experience of the Convention itself?

  THE VIRGINIA PLAN—which outlined a federal government with an executive, a judiciary, and a bicameral legislature, and sketched procedures for ratifying and amending the Constitution as well as admitting new states to the union—proposed that the legislature assume all of the old Congress’s lawmaking powers, plus the authority “to legislate in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent, . . . to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening . . . the articles of Union, and to call forth the force of the Union agst. any member of the Union failing to fulfill its duty under the articles thereof.”41 Strong stuff, this using force against the states and the citizens. It was one of Madison’s key ideas, and it rested, as all political theories must, on a psychological theory—a view of human nature—that he luminously set forth in Federalist 51.