by Chris DeRose
Joel Early, an Anti-Federalist member of Virginia’s late ratification convention, seconded the motion. In the debate that followed, Early alleged that while in convention Madison had called the Constitution flawless, “the nearest to perfection of any thing that could be obtained.” Early said that proof could be found in the second volume of the debates, which he insinuated were being held back for sinister reasons. Early had been repeating these allegations throughout Culpepper County to anyone who would listen.
Madison had always freely conceded that the Constitution was imperfect, the product of compromise. The Anti-Federalists were twisting his argument that the Constitution was the best actually viable alternative into an absurd claim he had never made—that the Constitution was beyond criticism or amendment. The Anti-Federalists were by now accustomed to making these allegations without challenge, as they had done for months in meetings, at taverns, and by firesides throughout the district. Having made the same claim in the House of God, Early must have convinced himself of its veracity. On this cold Culpepper night, the Anti-Federalists would finally be confronted with the truth.
Eve held a letter from Madison, dated January 2, explaining his real position regarding amendments. Madison’s brother William had told him that Eve was skeptical of the Anti-Federalists’ accusations against him and stood ready to defend him if Madison would only provide the necessary ammunition. With Madison’s letter in hand, Eve was able to relay Madison’s real sentiments to the Baptist congregation at Rapidan.
In the letter Eve held, Madison confronted the accusations against him—that he was “opposed to any amendments whatever to the new Federal Constitution” and that he had “ceased to be a friend to the rights of conscience.” As a candidate for Congress, Madison wrote, he felt it important “that my principles and views should be rightly understood.” He freely admitted that he did not see the same dangers in the new Constitution as some others did. Madison also admitted to having opposed amendments before the ratification process was complete. He had believed a second convention or conditional ratification to be dangerous.
But Virginia had ratified the Constitution, and “[c]ircumstances are now changed,” Madison wrote. Amendments, he said, “if [they are] pursued with a proper moderation and in a proper mode, will be not only safe, but may serve the double purpose of satisfying the minds of well meaning opponents, and of providing additional guards in favor of liberty.” Now, he explained, “it is my sincere opinion that the Constitution ought to be revised, and that the first Congress meeting under it, ought to prepare and recommend to the states for ratification, the most satisfactory provisions for all essential rights, particularly the rights of conscience in the fullest latitude, the freedom of the press, trials by jury, security against general warrants, etc.”
Madison was introducing the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights as a campaign promise to the most influential constituency in his district in the midst of a contentious election. With this written guarantee in hand, Eve was a powerful advocate for Madison. In addition to these promises, Eve reminded his flock that it was Madison who had shepherded the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom through the House of Delegates and who had been the prime opponent of the dreaded general assessment that would have taxed all Virginians to support the Episcopal Church.
It is a common campaign practice for opponents of candidates with long legislative records to take particular votes out of context to use as ammunition. One member of Rapidan Baptist pointed out that Madison had voted in favor of establishing the Episcopal Church as the official state religion. Madison regretted this vote perhaps as much as anything he’d ever done, but it had been only tactical. Madison had voted for establishment to keep proponents of state-established religion from going even further—actually taxing the people, including dissenters, to support the Episcopal Church. And Madison had passed a repeal of religious establishment in the very next session (a fact his critic ignored entirely). Eve explained this compromise and also pointed out that Monroe had voted for state establishment of Anglicanism, too—despite having promised the Baptists not to.
Ben Johnson was one Virginian present in Rapidan the night that Eve turned the tables on the opponents of Madison. After the meeting, he traveled with some of the attendees to the river. Church meetings were some of the few social outlets for rural Virginians in the 1700s. The isolating nature of farm life prompted them to brave the weather to enjoy the company of friends for a little while longer. In talking with the Rapidan Baptist congregants, Johnson learned that Eve had “greatly damaged Early’s cause”—by answering the Anti-Federalist case against Madison and reminding Baptists of the very good reasons they had for trusting him.
While both candidates were seeking support among the Baptists in Louisa, Madison also wrote a letter to Thomas Mann Randolph, a prominent citizen of Goochland County.9 He admitted and defended his opposition to amendments before the ratification process was completed. Madison also freely admitted that he did not see amendments as the panacea that others did, but acknowledged they could make the Constitution “better in itself; or without making it worse, will make it appear better to those who now dislike it.” Winning the honest critics of the Constitution was the goal. Madison pledged to Thomas Mann Randolph that his “sincere opinion and wish” was that “Congress, which is to meet in March, should undertake the salutary work,” of the “clearest and strongest provision . . . for all those essential rights which have been thought in danger,” with specific promises to protect the “rights of conscience, freedom of the press, trials by jury,” and “exemption from public warrants.” This letter was published in the January 28 edition of the Virginia Independent Chronicle, just six days before the election.
Meanwhile, on January 14, Madison discussed the heated contest in a letter to the anxious General Washington. He wrote, “The field is left entirely to Monroe and myself. The outcome of our competition will probably depend on the part to be taken by two or three descriptions of people, whose decision is not known, if not yet to be ultimately formed.” Madison told Washington that he was campaigning in Culpepper and Louisa, personally asking for votes and pushing back against falsehoods that he saw as the “most likely to affect the election, and the most difficult to be combated with success within the limited period.” Madison lamented the active campaigning he was now engaging in, telling Washington, “I have pursued my pretensions much farther than I had premeditated.”
Monroe and Madison were engaging in a personal campaign that was a dramatic break with tradition. The new congressional districts were the largest that Virginia—which at the time had no statewide elected officials—had ever seen. Madison and Monroe were used to elections in one county; there were eight counties in the 5th District. Previously, the limited number of voters in any district had meant that candidates could (and according to the dictates of the time, should) rely on their reputations in any bid for public office. More active campaigning for votes was regarded as unseemly. It is telling that Madison did not make a public address until eleven years after first being elected to office. But if the voters in the 5th District of Virginia in 1789 were disgusted with undisguised ambition in a candidate for office, they had no alternative—despite misgivings, Madison and Monroe were both campaigning hard to win.
After a bitterly cold and snowy period of campaigning, Madison’s friend David Jameson asked him to come back to Culpepper. Monday would be Court Day, and Monroe would be in attendance. Jameson appreciated and acknowledged his friend’s reluctance to engage in retail campaigning, but prodded him, “When we find there are evil minds using every measure which envy or malice can suggest to our prejudice, it frees us from the restraint we otherwise should feel.”
On January 15, the New York Daily Advertiser printed a letter from “a gentleman in Virginia to his friend in New York City.” He wrote, “In this district Mr. Madison and Mr. Monroe are competitors and I am told will spare no pains to forward their election. In whose favor it will terminate is very d
oubtful.” The author predicted an Anti-Federalist victory in a close race. The letter was reprinted widely in other newspapers in other states, suggesting the national importance of this Virginia congressional race.
On January 17, Henry Lee offered Madison his own update about the campaign. Madison was quickly making up lost ground, building a network of powerful and active supporters throughout the district, and his personal appearances were yielding dividends. But Lee did not dare to make a final prediction, the outcome being shrouded in “much doubt and difficulty.”10 Madison was gaining ground, but were the efforts of the Federalists too little, too late for victory?
While the candidates traveled the district, met with voters, and wrote letters asking for support, the war by proxy continued in the newspapers. A Federalist using the name “Candidus” launched the next salvo against the opposition. He urged his readers to remember that the old government had been far too weak. The Anti-Federalists, he claimed, “would imprudently pull down an edifice of which we all stand in need, and which hath been constructed by able artists, without trying its advantages, because they have dreamed they can improve upon it.” The Constitution was the final product of America’s greatest minds. Could the Anti-Federalists really do better? Candidus urged his countrymen to “elect friends to the union as our representatives in Congress.”
The two candidates made numerous appearances together in front of different audiences. “We used to meet in days of considerable excitement,” Madison later remembered, “and addressed the people on our respective sides . . . .”11 Madison and Monroe rode together, lodged together, and dined together, keeping each other company on the lonely campaign trail. Since it had begun in November of 1784, Madison and Monroe’s relationship had been conducted almost entirely through the mail. Ironically, the most time the men had ever spent together was on the campaign trail against each other. The conversation was friendly, and unlikely to have included the great issues that had brought them there. Each was intimately familiar with the other’s position. And soon enough the decision between them would be in the hands of the voters. Madison knew very well that Monroe had neither started nor encouraged the dishonest attacks on him. “There was not an atom of ill-will between us,” Madison remembered. 12
But there were significant political differences. Since Madison now agreed that the Constitution should be amended with a bill of rights, the chief issue that still divided him from Monroe was the new federal government’s power to impose a direct tax on citizens of the United States. Their opposing arguments shed light on what was really at stake in the battle over the Constitution. Monroe made an honest Anti-Federalist’s case that the new national government had powers that it did not need and that were dangerous to the people’s liberty. And from the Federalist side of the debate Madison, the chief author of the Constitution, made the strongest possible case for the document, and for the absolute necessity of the new government’s powers for the peace and liberty of the United States.
Monroe believed the Constitution’s power for direct taxation was unnecessary. He had written, “The demands and necessities of government are now greater than they ever will be hereafter, because of the expense of the war in which we were engaged, which cost us the blood of our best citizens, and which ended so gloriously.”13 The United States was at peace, with no war on the horizon. Monroe believed that the impost on imported goods could fully fund all legitimate activities of the new government and that if it didn’t, there were several other methods of raising revenue besides resorting to a direct tax. The sale of the great lands to the west, with their navigable rivers and rich, fertile soil, would provide a steady stream of income for the new government. If the impost and the sale of Western lands were insufficient, the government could always secure a loan using those lands as collateral. If funds were still insufficient, Congress could requisition the states.
Monroe believed that direct taxation by the federal government was unnecessary. But he also thought it unjust—and dangerous to Americans’ liberty. He had argued, “Consider the territory lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi. Its extent far exceeds that of the German Empire. It is larger than any territory that ever was under any one free government. It is too extensive to be governed but by a despotic monarchy. Taxes cannot be laid justly and equally in such a territory.”14 Would the direct tax be on land? If so, landholders would suffer, while people engaged in commerce and the arts would be free of paying any tax at all. Should each person be taxed the same amount? If so, large landholders would not be paying their fair share.
In America in 1789, the different regions of the country had very different economies. In the cities of the North, people worked as shopkeepers, tradesmen, artisans, and manufacturers and lived in towns, while the Southern economy was anchored in agriculture conducted on large estates. In eighteenth-century America, it was very easy to imagine that the representatives of some other region might dominate the national government and use direct taxation to impose the costs of that government disproportionately on your own region. Monroe believed that direct taxation, by giving the federal government a power that ran exactly parallel to state power, would ultimate undermine the states’ authority. Virginians could end up being ruled by a distant, alien, and even monarchical government instead of by their own Delegates. In short, they risked losing all they had just won in the Revolution.
Madison knew that fear of the direct tax threatened to destroy his candidacy. His January 29 letter to George Thompson—the longest surviving letter he wrote during the campaign, and the one written closest to the election itself—is entirely devoted to that issue. Along with Madison’s defense of the direct taxation power in Virginia’s ratifying convention, this letter provides a clear picture of what Madison was thinking on this important question. 15
Madison, so used to calling others to the national interest, in this instance also argued that the direct tax was in Virginians’ self-interest. If the power of direct taxation were denied to the federal government, he pointed out to Thompson, the impost alone would be used to fund the government. As revenue demands increased, the impost tax would increase. “Now who is it that pays duties on imports? Those . . . who consume them. What parts of the continent manufacture least and consume imported manufactures most? The Southern parts.” Since the Constitution required the direct tax to be laid by population, it would distribute the burdens more equally than the impost.
Not only would Virginians pay more taxes under the impost than under direct taxation, but if war ever breaks out against America where will it fall? On the least defensible parts. Which are the weakest parts? The Southern parts. Particularly Virginia, whose long navigable rivers open a great part of her country to surprise and devastation whenever an enemy powerful at sea chooses to invade her. Strike out direct taxation from the list of Federal powers and this will be our situation. The invaded and plundered part of the union will be unable to raise money for its defense. And no resource will be left; but under the name of requisitions to solicit benefactions from the legislatures of other states, who being not witness of our distresses cannot properly feel for us; and being remote from the scene of danger cannot feel for themselves.
If the North opposed direct taxation it would make sense, as “a local interest is not always postponed to the general interest. But that a southern state should hearken to the measure, and be ready to sacrifice its local interest as well as the general interest, admits of no rational explanation to which I am competent.”
But the real thrust of Madison’s argument for direct taxation was not from regional interests—quite the opposite. Madison wrote, “I approve of this part of the Constitution because I think it an essential provision for securing the benefits of the Union: the principal of which are the prevention of contests among the states themselves: secondly, security against danger from foreign nations.”
Contests between the states could not be prevented so long as each does not “bear its just share of pu
blic burdens,” Madison wrote:If some states contribute their quotas and others do not, justice is violated.... The question to be considered then is which of the two systems, that of requisitions or that of direct taxes, will best answer the essential purpose of making every state bear [its] equitable share of the common burdens. Shall we put our trust in the system of requisitions, by which each state will furnish or not furnish its share as it may like? Reason tells us this can never succeed. Some states will be more just than others . . . some will be more patriotic; some will be more, some less immediately concerned in the evil to be guarded against or in the good to be obtained. Those who furnish most will complain of those who furnish least. From complaints on one side will spring ill-will on both sides; from ill will, quarrels; from quarrels, wars; and from wars a long catalog of evils including the dreadful evils of disunion.... Such is the lesson history teaches us.
Holland was struggling to defend against Spain with two of its seven provinces failing to pay their quotas. “A government which relies on 13 individual sovereigns for the means of its existence is a solecism in theory and a mere nullity in practice,” Madison wrote to Thompson. What would be the outcome if every county in Virginia were free and independent to pay their due as they saw fit, when they saw fit? Shall the Commonwealth “depend upon their generosity?” Look to the Dominion of New England, Madison argued, in which colonies including Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire had confederated for mutual defense against the Indian tribes and the French. The requisition was “violated with impunity and only regarded when it coincided perfectly with the views and immediate interests of the respective parties.” Massachusetts was less exposed than the others and better armed, and thus refused to render contributions for the protection of its neighbors.