by Lynne Cheney
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ON OCTOBER 11, 1787, Madison, writing from New York, told his brother Ambrose that the Constitution was being favorably received in the middle and northern states, but a week later his assessment changed. “Newspapers here begin to teem with vehement and virulent calumniations of the proposed government,” he wrote to Washington. He worried about the effect on the public—and he was not alone. On October 27 a concerned citizen calling himself Publius struck back by defending the Constitution in the New York Independent Journal. The ratification of the Constitution, he wrote, would decide “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from ref[l]ection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Publius, in reality Alexander Hamilton, promised a series of articles that would demonstrate to his fellow New Yorkers that the very survival of the Union depended on ratification.8
Hamilton’s doubts about the Constitution ran even deeper than Madison’s, but he had concluded that a failure to ratify it would bring chaos, and he invited Madison to join him in persuading New Yorkers in its favor. He had already drawn his friend William Duer into the project, as well as John Jay, whose experience in foreign affairs Hamilton probably thought would be useful. Madison might have had some doubts about that, given the mischief that Jay’s efforts to negotiate away the Mississippi had caused; nonetheless, he agreed to become part of the writing team. New Yorkers were not the only ones for whom the case for the Constitution needed to be made. Support in Virginia was waning. “All my informations from Richmond concur in representing the enthusiasm in favor of the new Constitution as subsiding and giving place to a spirit of criticism,” Madison wrote to Washington.9
Hamilton was fortunate that Madison signed on. While Duer’s writing was “intelligent and sprightly,” as Madison described it, he was not asked, after submitting a few essays, to write others, and what he did produce was never made a part of what became known as The Federalist. As for Jay, he soon became too ill to write and would author only five of the eighty-five essays. Madison wrote knowledgeably. He had, after all, attended every day of the Philadelphia convention, while Hamilton, after his fiery speech, had been absent for more than a month. Madison also wrote quickly, which the publication schedule demanded. “Whilst the printer was putting into type parts of a number,” Madison later recalled, “the following parts were under the pen.”10
Madison and Jay assumed the Publius pseudonym (for Publius Valerius Publicola, one of the founders of the Roman Republic), which meant that Madison’s finest work would again appear before the public anonymously. But it was customary for writers who had a political point to make to use classical names, and there was additional reason in this case to keep the identities of the authors secret. The people of New York, to whom the essays were addressed, were unlikely to yield to the arguments of a Virginian, nor were Virginians going to find a New Yorker’s opinions persuasive.
As Madison set to work on The Federalist, he did tell a few people, in confidence, of his participation, including George Washington, who he hoped would help him get the essays printed in Virginia, and Governor Edmund Randolph, whom Madison was gently trying to bring around to the Federalist side. Randolph needed a lot of tending. He had come up with a scheme for the Virginia Assembly to propose amendments to the Constitution and then get them approved or rejected by other state legislatures before Virginia’s ratifying convention met. Randolph thought this was a way to avoid having different states ratify the Constitution with different amendments. When Madison failed to comment on his proposal, the Virginia governor was hurt—even though by now he had abandoned the project. “Why would you not give me your opinion as to the scheme I proposed[?],” he asked Madison. “I am now convinced of the impropriety of the idea, but I wish to open to you without reserve the innermost thoughts of my soul and was desirous of hearing something from you on this head.” Madison patiently explained that many legislatures would have already provided for their state’s ratifying convention and adjourned before Virginia could send out possible amendments. In his next letter to Randolph he enclosed two of the Federalist essays and in a gesture of openness let him in on the secret: “I am in myself for a few numbers.”11
One person whom Madison conspicuously did not tell about his essays was Thomas Jefferson. For years he had written frankly to Jefferson about his political views, and he had shared personal details about the failure of his romance with Kitty Floyd, but during the time he was immersed in writing The Federalist and for six months afterward, Madison wrote not a word to his friend about the task he had taken on. After four of his Federalist essays had been published, he sent Jefferson fifty trees as well as other plants, including rhododendrons, and promised he would try to find opossums and Virginia redbirds to ship to him. He also described at length the progress of ratification across the country (every state but Rhode Island had agreed to a ratifying convention) and in Virginia (“Mr. Henry is the great adversary who will render the event precarious”). But he told Jefferson nothing about The Federalist.12
Jefferson had a habit of opining from a distance that might have caused Madison to think twice about involving him. Early in 1787, at the height of concern about Shays’s Rebellion and amid worries that insurrection would spread, Jefferson had airily written from Paris, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” It was a statement that must have struck Madison, who thought that stability in government was paramount, as singularly imprudent. More recently, Jefferson had pronounced on the national veto, writing, “Prima facie I do not like it.” Madison, who had thought long and deeply about the veto, had explained to Jefferson that he thought it necessary not only to ensure national unity but also to guard private rights. Nonetheless, Jefferson denounced it: “It fails in an essential character that the hole and the patch should be commensurate. But this proposes to mend a small hole by covering the whole garment.”13 To Madison, who didn’t view the vices of the states as a small matter, Jefferson’s words must have carried a sting, particularly since he received them when his disappointment at having failed to secure the veto was fresh.
On October 24, after the convention was over, Madison sent Jefferson a letter describing the new plan of government and defending at length the negative on state laws that he had advocated but failed to secure. When Jefferson wrote back, however, he seemed oblivious to Madison’s explanation. His primary complaint now was about something the Constitution lacked. “A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular,” Jefferson proclaimed, “and what no just government should refuse or rest on inference.”14 Madison was extremely good at separating the wheat from the chaff in Jefferson’s thinking, and his friend’s conviction might have spurred his thinking about the importance of a bill of rights for gaining popular support for the Constitution. But even as he took Jefferson’s observation on board, Madison must have been irritated at the implication that he was not concerned with protecting rights. It was in order to defend them in the states that he had fought for a national veto—the instrument that Jefferson had so summarily dismissed.
Jefferson also seemed to ignore his friend’s description of the agreement reached at the Philadelphia convention as nothing “less than a miracle.” Although he had participated in neither the work of putting the convention together nor any of the nerve-racking months of give-and-take that had produced the Constitution, Jefferson put forward the possibility of a second convention as though agreement could easily be reached again. Find out what parts of the Constitution people like or dislike, Jefferson advised Madison, then say to them, “We see now what you wish.”15 As Jefferson viewed things from Paris, a second convention could then perfect the Constitution, but in Madison’s world amendments and a second convention were weapons being wielded by foes in order to destroy the Constitution. Th
e two Virginians on opposite sides of the Atlantic had vastly different perceptions of what was happening on Madison’s side, and if Madison deemed it unfruitful to take up his work on The Federalist with Jefferson, he certainly had cause.
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THE FEDERALIST ESSAY that would eventually become most famous was the first one Madison wrote. In Federalist 10, published November 22, 1787, he set forth the failures of “our governments” (rather than “our states,” where, after all, the Constitution would be ratified), noting the instability and injustices that had caused good citizens across the country to increasingly distrust those governments and feel “alarm for private rights.” The cause of government failures was “faction,” which he explained as people “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” There was no cure for faction. Its causes were “sown in the nature of man.” But an extended republic such as the Constitution proposed could control its effects:
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the confederacy, but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it.
Madison had not forgotten the convulsions charismatic leaders could cause or the injustice that could spring from “a zeal for different opinions concerning religion,” but in Federalist 10 he emphasized the owning or not owning of property as a source of faction. A stable and just society required that property owners and creditors, though they be a minority, have governmental arrangements that protected their rights—as he believed the extended republic created by the Constitution would do.
Madison also wrote in Federalist 10 that a large republic would have the advantage of more “fit characters” for people to choose from for public office and suggested that since a greater number of voters would choose each official in a large republic, the representatives who emerged would be more likely to rise above faction and focus on the greater good.16 This theory, for all its appeal, would not survive the 1790s, when it would become clear to Madison that ideas about the greater good were also subject to fierce and factious controversy. The principles to which he was devoted would not prevail unless he fought for them.
The government Madison described in The Federalist was new under the sun, a point that Antifederalists, as those opposed to the Constitution were being called, advanced as a critique. In his second contribution to The Federalist, no. 14, Madison asserted that novelty was not to be shunned: “But why is the experiment of an extended republic to be rejected merely because it may comprise what is new? Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?” America’s leaders had “accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society,” he concluded, and it should be no surprise that “they reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe.”17
Madison’s goal was a stable republic where citizens were free and private rights respected. His method was that of the Enlightenment: to look to the ages for the lessons of history. And when he did, as in Federalist 18 and 19, what he saw time and again was that confederacies failed without a strong central government. The trick was to be sure that government did not become tyrannical—and here again the extended republic came into play. So many people of so many diverse opinions, living across such vast territory, made it difficult for “an interested and over-bearing majority” to gain “superior force.”18
A second protection was the partition of power that Madison explained in Federalist 51. Authority was to be divided between states and the general government, among the branches of the government, and within the legislative branch. The structure was devised, he wrote, so “that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” Separated powers and countervailing forces could make swift and decisive action difficult, but the point of this plan was not efficiency. We are familiar with Madison’s words “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” but his next sentence is equally important: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”19
Countering critics in his own time who believed that the Constitution made the central government too strong, Madison wrote that the powers given to it were “few and defined.” Critics called particular attention to the first provision of article 1, section 8, which grants Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” They argued that the last phrase granted unlimited power, an objection that Madison called “extraordinary.” It was, he said, simply a general expression of the enumerated powers that followed, such as the powers to declare war and provide post offices. Moreover, he pointed out in Federalist 41, the language had come straight from the Articles of Confederation, where it had certainly never been used to exercise unlimited power.20
The last provision of article 1, section 8, brought objections even more strenuous from Antifederalists. It granted Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States.” Answering those who saw this as opening the way for Congress to “exercise powers not warranted by [the Constitution’s] true meaning,” Madison declared, “No axiom is more clearly established in law, or in reason, than that wherever the end is required, the means are authorized; wherever a general power to do a thing is given, every particular power necessary for doing it is included.”21 Madison had argued for general and implied powers before, but it was the case he made in Federalist 44 that would come back to haunt him.
The Federalist essays did more than answer the Constitution’s critics. In them, Publius set forth the reasons that a new form of government was necessary and explained in great detail how government under the Constitution would work. And he did so in an overwhelming torrent of words. “Publius has already written twenty-six numbers, as much as would jade the brains of any poor sinner,” wrote one wag, when the series was less than a third complete. “In decency, he should now rest on his arms and let the people draw their breath for a little.” Twenty-seven subscribers to the New York Journal, sounding very much like Antifederalists, instructed the newspaper to stop “cramming us with the voluminous Publius.”22
Hamilton was practicing law as he wrote The Federalist, and Madison, a member of Congress, was also collecting and disseminating intelligence on the progress of ratification with a network of correspondents. Madison, later remarking on “the haste with which many of the papers were penned,” observed how vital to the effort were the “historical and other notes which had been used in the convention.”23 The reading he had done on the structure, strengths, and weaknesses of ancient and modern confederacies was still serving him well, as were his reflections on vices of the political system of the United States.
Madison and Hamilton quickly learned to save time by dispensing with the process of reviewing each other’s essays, which makes their achievement all the more remarkable. Writing at breakneck speed, thirty-six-year-old James Madison and thirty-three-year-old Alexander Hamilton created a classic of Western political thought, a document that stan
ds alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a fundamental text of American history.24
Although he had not told Jefferson of his work on The Federalist, Madison seems to have kept his friend in mind as he wrote. Jefferson did not understand how difficult the creation of the Constitution was, which might have prompted Madison, in Federalist 37, to set forth the obstacles that delegates had faced. They had to balance not only “the interfering pretensions of the larger and smaller states” but also “energy in government” with stability, as well as the authority of the general government with that of the states. The diversity of interests in the United States that would be of such advantage when the country was formed had been, in the forming of it, a great challenge: “The real wonder is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted, and surmounted with an unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor to reflect on this circumstance without partaking of the astonishment. It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that Almighty Hand which has been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.” In Federalist 49, published some three weeks later, Madison specifically cited what seemed to him Jefferson’s misplaced faith in conventions. After praising his friend’s creativity and enlightenment, Madison brought up a proposal that Jefferson had made in his draft of a constitution for the state of Virginia. Jefferson’s idea had been for successive conventions, which would provide ways to change periodically the framework of government. But, Madison noted, it would inevitably lead to instability. “A nation of philosophers” might have no need for the steadiness of venerable institutions, Madison observed, “but a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato.”25