by Lynne Cheney
The twelve amendments passed by the Senate were passed by the House and sent to the states, where early on the first two (one about capping the size of the House, the other about congressional pay) ran into trouble.50 The other ten went into effect on December 15, 1791, when they were ratified by the eleventh state out of the fourteen now in the Union—Virginia. It hadn’t happened easily in the Old Dominion. Indeed, nothing seemed to. Among those who raised objections was Edmund Randolph.
Madison had, almost single-handedly, formulated the amendments, insisted on their introduction, and pushed their passage through the apathy of his friends and the obstructionism of his opponents. By doing so, he not only gave us the Bill of Rights, which, as he predicted, we hold in great solemn regard, but also secured the Constitution against the threat of a second convention. By reaching out to opponents, he undermined the anti-constitutional cause to such a degree that it soon ceased to have any importance. By reaffirming rights, he reassured Rhode Islanders and North Carolinians, and by the following summer both states would be part of the Union.51 Taken all in all, it was a magnificent performance, one unmatched by any congressional leader since.
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CONTENTIOUS AS THE DEBATE over amendments was, the next one before the House was even more so. It concerned the location of the nation’s capital and all the prestige and economic advantage that went with it. Thomas Scott of Pennsylvania moved “that a permanent residence ought to be fixed for the general government,” and Benjamin Goodhue of Massachusetts proposed that the site be on the banks of the Susquehanna. As Goodhue explained it, the Pennsylvania location was part of a deal. He said that “the eastern members,” by which he meant the members from New England, “with the members from New York have agreed to fix a place upon national principles without a regard to their own convenience, and have turned their minds to the banks of the Susquehanna.”52
Madison sarcastically thanked Goodhue for candidly admitting that an agreement had been reached behind closed doors and “that more than half the territory of the United States and nearly half its inhabitants have been disposed of, not only without their consent, but without their knowledge.” Harking back to the Virginia ratifying convention, he made as sharp a comment as he ever would on the floor, declaring, “If a prophet had risen in that body and brought the declarations and proceedings of this day into view … [I] firmly believe Virginia might not have been a part of the Union at this moment.”53
Two days later, when Madison repeated the charge that eastern states and New York had “disposed” of the South in deciding where to locate the capital, Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut felt obliged to correct the record: “It is a notorious fact to the members within these walls that the New England members to a man were opposed to a decision at present… . They refused all bargaining till they were assured there was a bargaining set on foot to carry them to the Potomac.” Wadsworth was right about the “bargaining set on foot.” Members from Pennsylvania had approached southern states and offered a Potomac location for the capital—if the South would agree to move the temporary capital to Philadelphia. Hearing of this, New Englanders and New Yorkers approached Pennsylvania and offered to locate the capital there in exchange for temporary residence in New York. Madison, who seems to have had good intelligence, had actually interrupted their negotiations and, he thought, their plans. But financier and Pennsylvania senator Robert Morris had continued to maneuver, cutting a deal with states to the north.54
Madison spoke at length on the floor of the House about the advantages of a Potomac location, giving special attention to the access it would provide to people in the western country, but the House approved the proposal for the Susquehanna and sent it to the Senate. There, under pressure from Morris, who wanted the capital adjacent to Philadelphia, the location was changed to Germantown. As the other Pennsylvania senator, William Maclay, recorded in his journal, an agreement was reached with New York and New England members in the House to concur in the Germantown site. In exchange Congress would stay three years in New York.55
When the bill with the Germantown location arrived in the House, Madison protested but finally gave in to the inevitable—or pretended to. Pennsylvania, New York, and New England had the votes needed to prevail, but there was one detail, Madison said, a small provision that was needed to make sure that Pennsylvania laws would operate in the district chosen for the capital until Congress took over. That provision was added, meaning the bill had to go back to the Senate, where no action was taken on it before the first session of the First Congress adjourned.56
Madison had promised Pendleton that he would “parry any decision” on a bill setting the location of the capital anywhere besides the Potomac, and he had done exactly that. But he was exhausted. He stayed several days in New York, hoping that the ship bringing Jefferson home on leave from Paris would arrive. On October 9, 1789, he departed from New York, leaving behind a letter for Jefferson telling him that he would stay several days in Philadelphia, where he hoped that Jefferson would catch up with him. “I need not tell you how much pleasure I should feel in making my journey to Virginia coincide with yours,” he wrote.57 Besides, there was a public matter he wanted to discuss. Madison couldn’t be specific in a letter, but he was now doing personnel work for Washington. The president wanted Jefferson to be secretary of state and had given Madison the task of persuading him.
Jefferson’s trip from Paris to Monticello did not bring him through Philadelphia, and the meeting Madison had hoped for did not occur. Madison did manage to get a little political work done, however. Senator Morris approached him about wanting to keep the possibility of an arrangement with the South alive. Having been badly dealt with by Pennsylvania once, Madison warned him that if any future arrangements were made, Pennsylvania must stand by its word. Madison learned in the conversation that Morris considered the bill in the Senate postponed, ready to be acted upon as soon as the next session of Congress should start. He reported this intelligence to Washington and likely used it to complicate life for Morris. It is hard to imagine that Madison did not have some role to play in a rule that would be adopted early in the second session requiring that all legislation begin from scratch.58
Madison left Philadelphia at the end of October, and on November 2, a pleasant day, he reached Montpelier. His mother was still very sick, which might have relieved him of some of the social obligations of the season—the visitors, the dinners that occasioned much slaughtering of hogs, the eggnog and hunting on Christmas Day. Thus, he might have had time to take notice of the trees being planted, a pecan near the slave quarter, another near the horse shed, and a buckeye in the southwest corner of the yard. The aurora borealis streaked the sky red while he was home, and one imagines him standing on the front steps of the brick house his father had built, admiring the dazzle and dance of the northern lights.59
But not even nature’s spectacle could keep politics long from his mind. Shortly after Christmas he rode to Monticello to recruit a secretary of state.
Chapter 9
THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING
MADISON ARRIVED AT A MONTICELLO very different from the architectural wonder we know today. Jefferson had yet to tear off the second story, with which he was dissatisfied, extend the northeast front, and add a dome, and even on the lower floor the interior was far from complete.1 The walls were probably unplastered, making them inadequate to the winter chill, but Madison would have been made welcome by a blazing fire in the fireplace and warm greetings from the friend he had not seen in five years.
Madison found Jefferson reluctant to become secretary of state. If the president insisted, he would, but Jefferson really wanted to sail back to France. Revolution was under way, brought on in no small part by the millions that Louis XVI had sent to the colonies to support the American struggle for independence. The debt France had run up had brought financial calamity, which together with the spirit of freedom emanating from the American Revolution had led to uprisings again
st the king. Jefferson was well familiar with the French Revolution’s violence. Less than two weeks after the fall of the Bastille, he had joked with his paramour, Maria Cosway, that cutting off heads was becoming so fashionable “one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.” But he believed that violence would pass and liberty advance. Rather than be secretary of state, a position he thought would enmesh him in domestic affairs, he wanted to return to France, where he had not only witnessed events that he knew would be “forever memorable in history” but been sought out for his advice, most notably on the Declaration of the Rights of Man.2
Madison tried to correct Jefferson’s view of the secretary of state’s responsibilities, but Jefferson wasn’t ready to commit, and the two moved on to other topics. Jefferson had an idea that had occurred to him in France that he wanted Madison to ponder. It was that “the earth belongs always to the living generation,” and he followed up their discussion at Montpelier with a letter laying out the principle that no obligation of any sort, whether it had to do with laws and constitutions or with debt, should be passed on to future generations. If that were to happen, when the time of those generations came around, they would not own the earth. “The lands would belong to the dead and not to the living,” in Jefferson’s words. “Turn this subject in your mind, my dear sir,” Jefferson wrote, “and particularly as to the power of contracting debts; and develop it with that perspicuity and cogent logic so peculiarly yours.”3 Madison did exactly what Jefferson asked and more, producing a response that is a masterpiece in itself and an enduring example of the nature of his mind. He did not roll up ideas into grand syntheses without testing them. He held them up and turned them this way and that, seeing how they fared by the lights of reason and practicality.
Madison began his response with utter politeness, calling Jefferson’s idea “a great one,” but then he allowed that he did not see it “in all respects compatible with the course of human affairs.” When it came to constitutions, he asked, “Would not a government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires?” Laws that frequently changed would lead to such uncertainty as to “discourage the steady exertions of industry produced by permanent laws.” As for passing on debt to future generations, he pointed out instances in which it was justified, such as “debts for repelling a conquest, the evils of which descend through many generations.”
Using demographic data, Jefferson had argued that nineteen years was the length of time that any generation was at the height of its power and that nineteen years, therefore, was the limit for extending debt and allowing laws and constitutions to be in effect. But how could that work? Madison wanted to know, probing at an embarrassingly weak point in Jefferson’s argument. Generations didn’t come of age all at once. Individuals were continuously entering “ripe age,” as Madison put it, and it was necessary, if one held strictly to the concept that “the earth belongs to the living,” either to revise all the laws with each new entrant or to obtain that individual’s consent to the laws in force. Both schemes were unworkable. For civil society to function, Madison wrote, one had to assume the “tacit assent” of persons entering society to the constitutions and laws then in force.
Jefferson had asked Madison to use his “station in the councils of our country” to bring his idea forward and force it into discussion: “It would furnish matter for a fine preamble to our first law for appropriating the public revenue.” Madison agreed that the theory had cautionary value: “It would give me singular pleasure to see it first announced in the proceedings of the United States and always kept in … view as a salutary curb on the living generation from imposing unjust or unnecessary burdens on their successors.” But, he told Jefferson, he wasn’t sure the country was ready for it. “The spirit of philosophical legislation has never reached some parts of the Union, and is by no means the fashion here, either within or without Congress.”4
Jefferson seemed to take Madison’s critique in stride and even be impressed by it. It was less than a month later that he called Madison “the greatest man in the world.” Jefferson did not give up on his idea, but he did modify it. In a letter written in the last years of his life, he declared that “our creator made the earth for the use of the living and not of the dead.” This time, however, he added Madison’s caveat that “the laws of our predecessors” ought “to stand on our implied assent … until the existing majority positively repeals them.”5
Madison, for his part, came around in his view of Jefferson’s idea as a touchstone. In the contentious years ahead, he would use the idea that the living generation ought not to unduly burden successive ones to try to shape public opinion. The interaction of Madison’s and Jefferson’s thoughts on this subject was an example of what John Quincy Adams called “the mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other.” It was “a phenomenon,” Adams observed, “like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world, and in which the sagacity of the future historian may discover the solution of much of our national history not otherwise easily accountable.”6
Determined that Jefferson would become secretary of state, Madison wrote to him several weeks after leaving Monticello: “Such an event will be more conducive to the general good and perhaps to the very objects you have in view in Europe than your return to your former station.”7 Jefferson finally accepted, joining Alexander Hamilton, who was secretary of the Treasury; Henry Knox, the secretary of war; and Attorney General Edmund Randolph in Washington’s cabinet. But it took him many weeks to get to New York, and by the time he arrived, Madison was locked in a fateful battle with Hamilton. Theirs was an epic struggle that would divide the administration and result in a new political configuration for the young country.
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MADISON AND HAMILTON had never been close friends, but they were friendly colleagues, working together on The Federalist, sharing books and meals, and enjoying each other’s company. An old lady remembered observing how the two of them “would talk together in the summer and then turn and laugh and play with a monkey that was climbing in a neighbor’s yard.” Hamilton had expected to have Madison’s support for his plan to deal with the debt incurred during the Revolutionary War, some fifty-four million dollars on the part of the Congress (twelve million foreign and forty-two million domestic) and another twenty-five million on the part of the states. But on February 11, 1790, the fourth day of debate on Hamilton’s plan, Madison took the floor, and after an eloquent acknowledgment of the nation’s obligation to pay its creditors, objected on moral grounds to the way Hamilton proposed to do it. In his Report on Public Credit, Hamilton maintained that the United States should not differentiate between those who had received government securities for goods and services provided during the Revolution and subsequent holders, who, during troubled and doubtful times, had bought the securities at deep discounts from the original owners. Madison declared it unjust that those who had purchased the securities would now receive something close to their full face value, while the original holders, soldiers in particular, were shut out of any benefit. “The sufferings of the military part of the creditors can never be forgotten while sympathy is an American virtue,” he declared. Madison proposed a plan that would allow present holders of the securities “the highest price which has prevailed in the market” (about half the face value), with the balance going “to the original sufferers.”8
Madison’s proposal was not popular in the House, and for several days his colleagues railed at it. Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts declared that discriminating between original and current holders would be economically destructive: “Little dependence will be placed on the plighted faith of a government which, under the pretence of doing equity, has exercised a power of dispensing with its contracts and has thereby formed for itself a precedent of future violations.” Fisher Ames of Massachusetts demanded to know, “If government has this right, what right of private proper
ty is safe?” Madison pointed out that Hamilton’s proposal had already fundamentally changed the terms of the original bargain by lowering the interest rate to be paid. Moreover, he simply could not agree “that America ought to erect the monuments of her gratitude, not to those who saved her liberties, but to those who had enriched themselves in her funds.” He spoke not just of soldiers but of farmers whose property was “taken at the point of the bayonet, and a certificate presented in the same manner.” He had had something to do with that, having made the motion in Congress in May 1781 that Washington be allowed to impress supplies, and now it was his duty to see that those who had fed and clothed the army were treated justly.9
To opponents who argued that his plan was impractical—that tracking down original stockholders and figuring out what they had paid was simply too hard—Madison admitted that “it would be attended with difficulties and that perfect justice would not be done,” but that was not the point: “It was sufficient that a grievous injustice would be lessened and that the difficulties might be surmounted.”10
Madison did not often let his emotions rule his political judgment, but in this case he seemed to, taking on a political battle that from the outset he looked likely to lose. Even when the inevitable was about to happen, he seemed unable to reconcile himself to defeat, as though his personal investment in his proposal was so great that he could not bear to watch it go down. He was uncharacteristically brusque with Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania, also an opponent of Hamilton’s plan, who came to Madison’s boardinghouse with what he believed was an alternative proposal that could win. “His pride seems of that kind which repels all communication,” Maclay wrote in his diary. A few hours later, when Madison’s proposal lost by a vote of 36 to 13, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, watching the debate, observed that the loss was clearly painful for Madison. “On taking the question,” Cutler wrote, “Mr. Madison had the mortification, which he appeared sensibly to feel, to be in a minority.” Senator Maclay, a dour man, ever the pessimist, concluded that Madison had destroyed any possibility of defeating Hamilton’s plan: “The obstinacy of this man has ruined the opposition.”11