James Madison: A Federalist and a Republican (Part 2 of a Review of Lynne Cheney's biography, James Madison, a Life Reconsidered)

{This is PART 2 of a Review of James Madison: A Life Reconsidered, by Lynne Cheney.  For PART 1, See:  http://dadsbookreviews.blogspot.com/2014/10/some-thoughts-on-religious-liberty.html}


Lynne Cheney, in "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered" is not simply writing a biography.  Rather, like McCullough on Adams and Chernow on Hamilton, she is engaging in an act of advocacy. Cheney likes Madison, agrees with his views, and wishes to promote his importance in the American pantheon. Thus, she arbitrates every historical argument in his favor, and places him in the best possible light on every question and in each episode of his life.  I don't have a problem with this.  I actually like to understand how people saw themselves, and a sympathetic biography which argues its subject's side of every story is not a bad place to start.  I'm always in favor of a little hagiography when it comes to the founders.  I do love the Fourth of July.

Nevertheless, such advocacy can have its pitfalls, if it causes an author to gloss over tough issues, and thus skip over the most fascinating questions. Hence, the second big problem I had with Cheney's book is that it leaves largely unexamined the great conundrum of Madison's life: how to explain his sudden shift, once the Constitution was created and its Bill of Rights securely in place, from being the nation's leading Federalist, to its second most important Republican.  Indeed, given Cheney's sympathetic tone throughout, the reader can be excused for feeling a bit of whiplash as Cheney warmly admires Madison's achievements on behalf of nationalism in one chapter, only to have his arguments against federal power spoken of with equal fervor and admiration in the next.

Madison left the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia terribly concerned that, should the delegates' handiwork be ratified, the resulting U.S. Government would not be nearly as strong as he had hoped. If he was bitterly disappointed that the small states had won the battle for equal representation in the Senate, he was even more completely mortified that the national government would have no veto right over state legislation.  This national veto over state laws had been a key element of Madison's Virginia plan, which, to his horror, had been unceremoniously rejected from the Constitutional text.  How is it possible that a man with such views would, just a few short years later, work with Jefferson to craft the nullification resolutions in Virginia and Kentucky, arguing for exactly the opposite policy: that federal legislation should be subject to state veto?  How exactly does one understand this great irony?

For Cheney, a few brief remarks from Madison suffice:  Madison was interested in equipoise.  Under the unwieldy articles of confederation, the power of the individual states had made it impossible for anything of national importance to be accomplished in a unified fashion.  Once the Constitution had rectified this imbalance, it became equally important to prevent the national government from becoming overly powerful, and prevent the individual states from pursuing their own best interests. But such equipoise would never have been maintained under the Virginia Plan which Madison had brought to Philadelphia, and which he was so disappointed to walk away from Philadelphia without achieving (until he realized his original handiwork could never have been ratified by the States). So other factors were clearly at work in Madison's turnabout.

As it turns out, far more interesting theories than his own self-serving explanations abound.  Cheney's book would have been more interesting if she would have examined them. Instead, the reader is left to other sources.  For a pro-Madison viewpoint, one can review Gordon Woods' book, Revolutionary Characters, in its chapter entitled "Is There a James Madison Problem."  For a more cynical and much more interesting take, Joseph J. Ellis, in his book, American Creation, has examined the question in a chapter entitled "The Conspiracy." Both are great reads, and examine theories such as the following:

Was it Jefferson's influence?  This seems highly likely.  Madison always deferred to Jefferson's wisdom (although he also played an important role in bringing Jefferson's poetic rhetoric down to practical earth: a subject which Cheney does a great job on in some of the most enjoyable passages of her book).  Madison's turn away from Federalism and towards Republicanism accompanied Jefferson's return from France to take up a post in Washington's first Constitutional administration and was developed during a cruise up the Hudson river the two of them took together in 1791.  The fact that, late in his life, Madison would, once again, become an important voice in favor of the Union, during the nullification crisis of the 1830s, after Jefferson had passed away, lends further credence to this idea.

Was it just good politics?  The debate over whether to ratify the constitution had been particularly ugly in Virginia, where it had taken all of Madison's abilities to withstand the arguments of Patrick Henry and his fellow anti-Federalists against ratification, and eke out a narrow victory for the union cause. To the extent that anything the federal government did ever seemed to favor northern over southern interests (an inevitability in future compromises), the narrow support the Constitution had received in Virginia was likely to soon vanish.  Madison could only hope to remain in politics if he was elected to national office from his home state of Virginia.  And since only States-rightists were going to get elected in Virginia, Madison's about-face may be explainable via the most prosaic of all political realities: he simply did what he needed to do to get elected.  The same practical politcal strategy which has been followed by every politician who has ever tacked to the left or right during a primary, and back towards the center in a general election, was, perhaps, invented by Madison, who has been called not only the father of our Constitution, but also of our politics: If you want to serve in elective office, stand with the people whose votes you need.

Was it about slavery?  Any purely political reasons for Madison's turnabout raise the question of why Virginia politics required successful politicians to be wary of federal power in the first place. One obvious answer is the "peculiar institution" of slavery, which sourtherners feared a northern dominated federal government might one day abolish, as indeed ultimately occurred. The niceties and political hypocrisies of the day prevented any open reference to this subject by Jefferson or Madison as a motivating cause of southern political preferences.  (It was apparently somewhat annoying, when waxing eloquent on the thesis that the greatest capacity for republican virtue lay among southern agrarian planters, to be reminded that those same planters were engaged in the most obviously immoral, unvirtuous, and tyrannical activity ever known to man.)  Nevertheless, as argued by Ellis, the very silence of the southern founders on the question of slavery may be the best proof of its elephant-in-the-room status, and later Virginia politicians would be more forthright: "Tell me if Congress can establish banks, make roads and canals, whether they cannot free all the slaves in the United States."  Nathaniel Macon, as quoted by Joseph J. Ellis in American Creation, (Vintage 2007) at p. 175.  Slavery certainly played a role, and Americans who, today, find themselves overly enamored with Jeffersonian rhetoric about about republican virtue, would do well to temper their enthusiasm with a little salt.  In the ultimate test of regional virtue, the Civil War and the fight to abolish slavery, the Republican Jeffersonians were not only on the losing side of history, but the morally wrong side as well.   As Lincoln said, if slavery isn't wrong, nothing is wrong.  It took a strong federal government to end slavery, and then to end Jim Crow, and it took a union much stronger than anything Jefferson envisaged to fight the 20th Century's various forms of anti-republican totalitarianism.

Was it about economic ignorance?  Madison's shift from federalism occurred when he opposed the financial programs and policies initiated by his former friend (and collaborator on the Federalist Papers) Alexander Hamilton, during Washington's presidential tenure.  Hamilton's financial program was modelled after British institutions and policies which had allowed that nation to become among the most prosperous on earth.  Hamilton had spent years of private study learning about those institutions, and the implementation of Hamilton's proposed legislation during his tenure as America's first Secretary of the Treasury make him the most successful and important person to ever hold that office.  The Hamiltonian program allowed the new nation to finally gain a secure financial footing, which it had sorely lacked from the date it declared its independence, and laid the foundations for subsequent free market capitialism which would make Americans among the most socially mobile people on the planet.  Nevertheless, that program's implementation was fought by Jefferson and Madison every step of the way, and with an increasingly paranoid righteous fervor, which, as Ellis points out, can only be completely understood in light of the fact that Madison and Jefferson didn't understand the first thing about economics, and couldn't begin to comprehend many of the principles which Hamilton was talking about.  For all their political genius, Jefferson and Madison were no economic Einsteins: both men would die broke and deeply in debt.

Whatever the cause of Madison's dramatic turnabout, Cheney need not have shied away from this fascinating question, which ultimately strengthens her hero's claim to preeminent importance in American history.  Because Madison's reversal may be the most important thing he ever did for the Constitution.

In a sort of "only-Nixon-could-go-to-China" moment, by joining the ranks of the anti-Federalists, Madison turned them into something other than anti-Federalists.  He tranformed the anti-Federalist movement into Jeffersonian-Republicanism, whose new agenda no longer included overturning the Constitution, but, instead, simply seeking to interpret the Constitution narrowly, and in such a way as to limit federal power.  There is probably nothing Madison could have done to more powerfully secure the ongoing existence of the Constitution, then to thus end any debate over it's continued existence.  By converting the political movement known as anti-Federalism into small federal government republicanism, Madison ensured that the Constitution would survive.  When Jefferson came to office, he did simplify and shrink the size of the Federal Government.  But he didn't overthrow it.  Much of the Federalist program which had been developed over the past 12 years remained in place.  And Jefferson was canny enough to ignore his own limited-government principles when they might stand in the way of important national interests, such as the Louisiana Purchase.

In the meantime, Madison became the father of America's first opposition political party, and introduced party politics into American life.  As much as Americans may claim to hate partisanship, political parties played an important role in the ongoing existence of the union, and continue to stabilize the country today. After the Republicans replaced the Federalists in office, it was no longer possible for any future government to treat its mainstream political enemies as insurrectionist threats to the legitimate government, as the Federalists had done when they passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.  Rather, political parties, and the eventual tradition of those parties finding themselves peacefully rotating in and out of power, gave us a nation which had to tolerate and give credence to the idea of a loyal opposition.  This helped America avoid the fate of other post-revolutionary societies, where the guillotine or the coup d'etat was the only way for transitions of power to occur.

All hail to James Madison, one of the most important fathers of our freedoms.  Someday someone will write a book about him which does him greater justice.  But for now, Cheney's extremely readable and engaging tome will have to do.