UNDER A NEW CONSTITUTION PASSED IN 1780, MASSACHUSETTS HAD launched a wave of oppression of the poor by the rich. The state had severely limited political participation (including both voting and running for office) to men who owned certain amounts of property. In several western towns, not one single citizen was qualified to hold statewide office. Supported by state law, landed interests had also been loaning money to farmers at usurious rates, which they could not afford to pay back in the current recession. Bankrupt farmers were being thrown into debtors’ prisons by the hundreds.1
On August 29, 1786, the resentment at this onslaught erupted. A veteran and farmer named Daniel Shays led an angry crowd of 1,500 men to a courthouse in western Massachusetts where judges were meeting to imprison debtors. Shays strode up to the courthouse doors and delivered a petition demanding that the judges shut down the proceedings.
Terrified by the mob outside, the judges shut their doors. Massachusetts soldiers were summoned, who quickly repulsed the rebels. Regrouping, they marched thirty miles through the bitter cold to the town of Petersham. After launching a second rally, they were again overtaken by a small state army while they were sleeping. One hundred and fifty prisoners were taken; the rest of the rebels (including Shays himself) scattered and escaped.2
That was the real extent of what came to be known as Shays’ Rebellion. The rebels never again appeared in any collective force, instead disappearing into dispersed cells. Those were gradually suppressed by soldiers and prosecuted in the courts.3 But the revolt radiated alarm through the colonies. Four days after the courthouse rally, Massachusetts governor James Bowdoin issued a proclamation condemning Daniel Shays for introducing “riot, anarchy and confusion” and for “destroying the fairest prospects of political happiness.”4 From Congress’s seat in New York, Henry Lee wrote Madison that the rebel force was attracting more and more men in the east and was “becoming very serious.”*
Madison felt his research had predicted the rebellion. But his overheated imagination exaggerated the speculation in the gossip traveling the country. Calculating that Massachusetts’ overall population was 75,000, and that of several Berkshire counties 40,000, he estimated that over half of Massachusetts’ population could be involved in sedition.5 A week later, he agreed with Lee’s prediction that the rebellion would “portend extensive national calamity.” Lee predicted, “The contagion will spread and may reach Virginia.”6
Madison swallowed that rumor whole. He wrote his father, “We learn that great commotions are prevailing in Massts.” The “appeal to the sword,” he said, was “exceedingly dreaded.” In fact, the rebels were “as numerous as the friends of Govt.” Not only was a minority of the lawless becoming a majority—the tipping point in Madison’s calculation of checks and balances—they were fiercer than their foes, “more decided in their measures.”7
Despite Madison’s fears, the rebellion was quickly put down. On February 12—just five weeks after its beginning—the rebellion was “on the point of being extinguished.”8 Three days later, Madison wrote Randolph a letter stating confidently that the “insurrection will be effectually quelled.”9
In Paris, Jefferson got wind of the rebellion, whipping up in him a cyclone of new thoughts. He sent Madison a famous letter on January 30, 1787, admitting that he was “impatient to learn your sentiments on the late troubles in the Eastern states.” He argued that as far as he had seen, the rebels “do not appear to threaten serious consequences.” On the contrary, he said, “Malo periculosam libertatum quom quietam servitutem”—“I prefer dangerous freedom to peaceful slavery.” He explained that “even this evil” was “productive of good.”
Jefferson expanded in what would become one of his most famous dicta: “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, & as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” Not only did Jefferson believe the Shaysites’ actions were salutary, he also advised amnesty for them. The “honest republican governors,” he declared, should be “so mild in their punishment” so as “not to discourage them too much.”
Madison, reading Jefferson’s letter, could not have disagreed more. A breach opened between the two friends. Despite their agreements on the need for federalism, they had perpendicular opinions on rebellion against the government, with Jefferson seeming to countenance rebellious attacks against both state and federal institutions.
And that got to the very point, for Madison, about what Congress ought to be able to do about its own security. In Richmond, he listened as debate among the delegates swiveled to the question of whether Congress could direct federal troops to repulse a rebellion against a state government. Madison rose to argue that “popular commotions if not thoroughly subdued” did, in fact, threaten the “tranquility of the Union.” When faced with internal rebellion, he said, the states essentially belonged to a federal alliance for self-defense; they must act accordingly.10
Yet he found Jefferson’s argument lingering with him. Weeks later, as the dust from Shays’ Rebellion settled, Massachusetts began taking precisely the punitive approach Jefferson had warned about, disenfranchising most of the rebels, creating a new state-run militia to maintain “tranquility,” and asserting a right to federal support to quash future insurgencies. Madison thought these steps would render the rebels more “silenced than subdued.”11 He wrote Washington in cipher that although the rebellion was “nearly extinct,” the efforts for “disarming and disfranchising” the rebels could indeed spark a new crisis.12
In fact, the Massachusetts legislature eventually chose Jefferson’s tolerant path, pardoning most of the rebels and not even requiring them to refrain from rebellious activity as a condition of their amnesty. Intellectually, Madison appreciated the policy’s strategic intent; emotionally, he still despised the beneficiaries. As a consequence, for their “insolence,” Madison sniped, some rebels were even claiming their insurgency as “badges of their character.”13
The clash between Madison and Jefferson on Shays’ Rebellion, though muted by long distances and the passage of time, was revealing. Madison, the control freak, saw disaster in rebellion. Jefferson, the free spirit, saw raw potential instead. For Madison, the passions posed an existential threat to the state; for Jefferson, the state’s resiliency lay in its embrace of them. That tension has never been resolved in American democracy. Over time, Jefferson’s permissive approach would prevail on Shays’ Rebellion. But the event would also help prompt the total constitutional overhaul that Madison was demanding. Madison wrote a friend that though the “melancholy crisis of things in Massachusetts” was “distressing beyond measure,” it did provide even more proof for the “necessity of vigour” in the federal government—and of the need to “restore health to any diseased part of the federal party.” A federal convention, he declared, was the only solution.14
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1786, MADISON WAS STUNNED TO SEE A PROPOSAL ARISE to print yet more paper money in Virginia. Reprising his Method, he sat down and scribbled out an elaborate outline for a series of assaults that would destroy the noxious weakness once and for all. It included categories he titled “Unjust,” “Unconstitutional,” “Antifederal,” “Unnecessary”—and “Pernicious.”
Find passion in your conscience. Focus on the idea, not the man. Develop multiple and independent lines of attack. Embrace impatience. Establish a competitive advantage through preparation. Conquer bad ideas by dividing them. Master your opponent as you master yourself. Push the state to the highest version of itself. Govern the passions.
Rising in the assembly, he began his performance, using his blueprint as a script. But he reserved his harshest attacks for the flaws he had enumerated under the category of “Pernicious.” He assaulted paper money as a symptom of Virginia’s deeper spiritual failings. It was, he railed, “fostering luxury,” “serving dissentions between States,” “destroying confidence between individuals,” “vitiating morals,” “reversing [the] end of Govt which is to reward best & punish worst.” It was a “disgrace” of republican governments “in the eyes of mankind.”15
Word about Madison’s powerful speech quickly circulated around Virginia. On November 1, Washington sent his young colleague an approving letter from Mount Vernon. “Wisdom, & good examples,” Washington wrote, were necessary to “rescue the political machine” from the “impending storm.” Only a radical overhaul would do. “Without some alteration in our political creed,” he concluded, the “superstructure we have been seven years raising,” which had cost so “much blood and treasure,” would fall. With thirteen separate states pulling each other apart, the center would not hold. But a “liberal, and energetic Constitution,” that was “well guarded, & closely watched”—that, he said, would restore the nation to “respectability & consequence.”16
Madison barely looked back. On November 6, he stood in Richmond to introduce a bill to send delegates to a real national convention. Virginia must support and attend the convention, he urged, for the “crisis is arrived” to address the “solemn question” of whether America would “by wise and magnanimous efforts reap the just fruits of that Independence which they have so gloriously acquired.” He directly challenged the other men. Would the country yield to “unmanly jealousies and prejudices” and the “partial and transitory interest” that would “renounce the auspicious blessings prepared for them by the Revolution”?17
1786 WAS THE YEAR BEFORE EVERYTHING HAPPENED, THE YEAR when the grandest questions played themselves out as leading men struggled to divine the basic purpose of their half-born confederation. Madison’s frustration now bordered on a frenzy. In December, he wrote Jefferson to ridicule the Virginia legislature’s failure to fund the government through taxes. He exclaimed that “our internal embarrassments torment us exceedingly.”18
His predicament mirrored that of the nation. He was forced into joining sordid compromises precisely when there was a clarion need for statesmen. Embarrassed, he admitted to George Washington that he had joined the state assembly’s absurd but unavoidable decision to allow Virginians to pay the “Specie part” of their taxes with tobacco. He had done so, he said, from purely political motives, as a “prudential compliance with the clamours within doors & without” and to avoid “more hurtful experiments.”19
John Blair Smith, from Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College, wrote Madison that “virtuous & enlightened statesmen” might still “devise the means of extricating us from our embarrassments.”20 Madison now saw Washington, the nation’s most prestigious leader, as the key to victory. He began courting the general with his usual cheerful assiduity. In October, on the way back from the Annapolis convention, he stayed at Mount Vernon for two nights. He tried to convince Washington to both attend and support the constitutional convention. On November 18, Madison received a letter from Washington that suggested his campaign was working. Although the general said he had “bid adieu to the public walks of life,” he told the younger man, from the “sense of the obligation I am under for repeated proofs of confidence in me” in the “business of revising the foederal system,” he could envision having “obeyed its call.”21
But what did the oblique construction mean, exactly? Would Washington actually attend, speak at, and endorse the convention? Madison again visited Washington in late January. He argued carefully and forcefully for the need for federal coercion in a new constitution. During his visit to Mount Vernon, Washington “prudently authorized no expectations of his attendance.” But he left open the possibility that he could step “into the field if the crisis should demand it.”22
Gradually, steadily, Madison continued to wear down the general’s resistance. Two months later, Washington wrote Madison to express doubts about “whether any system without the means of coercion in the Sovereign, will enforce obedience to the Ordinances of a Genl. Government.” Without such a general government, he concluded, “every thing else fails.” Even better for Madison, when it came to specifics, Washington demurred to Madison, asking him, “But the kind of coercion you may ask?” and answering his own question, “This indeed will require thought.”23 Washington seemed happy to allow the younger strategist to fill in the details, and Madison was happy to do just that.
AFTER THE LEGISLATIVE SESSION IN RICHMOND CONCLUDED, MADISON returned to Orange for about a week, then left for New York, where Congress at long last formally authorized the constitutional convention in Philadelphia. Throughout his travels, he was preparing himself for the battle ahead. In the pattern that began at Princeton, where he took a double load of courses and made himself ill by overstudying, he planned to bunker down in New York among his books and his thoughts to apply his Method to the battles to come.
As the country’s new capital city, New York was rich with the seductions and intrigues he had come to know from Philadelphia. He recognized that the catholic militancy of his preparation for the convention would isolate him not only from the world but from women, extending his sad bachelorhood. He admitted to the ever sympathetic Eliza Trist that his “unsocial plan” would probably expose him to “greater reproach” from society. But he could see no other option. He resigned himself this bitter fruit of his self-appointed role as savior-statesman.24
He arrived in New York City on February 9 and settled into his boardinghouse. He established his day-to-day routine in Congress. But his mind wandered to the project waiting in his private quarters—a majestic memorandum that would tear away, once and for all, the restraints on America’s greatness. He was so distracted by the endeavor that he could only summon muted disgruntlement when he learned that a large majority in Virginia’s Senate had put a “definitive veto” on a proposal to support a new federal government. “It would seem,” he murmured, Virginia’s politics were being “directed by individual interests and plans,” which would be “incommoded” by the “control of an efficient federal government.”25
In February, debate again erupted in Congress about whether to actually go through with the constitutional convention, now mere months away. He jotted down notes as the convention’s foes blasted away with amendments. But amid the dissension, he also observed a collective soul-searching. The “reserve of many members,” he wrote, “made it difficult to decide their real wishes & expectations from the present crisis of their affairs.” He perceived general agreement that the status quo was “inefficient & could not last long.” The “southern and middle” states wanted “some republican organization” of the country that would preserve the union” and give “due energy to the Governmt. of it.” But the eastern members were “less desirous or hopeful of preserving the Unity of the Empire.”26 The final verdict would depend on each state, one by one.
Back in his room, he toiled away, hunting for ways to make democracy succeed in America’s unique nation-state. As momentum gathered for the convention, his anxiety grew. While it seemed the meeting would take place, and be “pretty full,” he felt its actual result belonged “among the other arcana of futurity” and was “inscrutable.” The country’s rope was fraying. Shays’ Rebellion, he said, had done “inexpressible injury to the republican character,” even creating “a propensity towards Monarchy” among leading men.
Worse, he observed the idea of splitting the country—of partition—was spreading. He predicted that the majority could turn toward breaking the country into “three more practicable and energetic Governments”—south, north, and west. In that terrifying event, he gloomily concluded, it was “not possible that a Government can last long.”27
He amplified on his concern to Monroe, predicting that without a “radical amendment” of the movements for monarchy and for partition, one of those “revolutions” could very well take over. He urged his friend, “I hope you are bending your thoughts seriously to the great work of guarding” against both.28 For that is what Madison was doing back in his room amid all those books. He knew, back in Virginia, Henry was stamping and stirring.
ON MARCH 5, JOHN MARSHALL TOLD MADISON THAT HENRY, WHOSE “opinions have their usual influence,” was preparing for war against the new Constitution. He was publicly threatening that he would leave the confederation before relinquishing any navigation of the Mississippi.29 It was absolutely crucial to Henry that Virginia be able to unilaterally control the country’s most important river and all the trade and commerce that came along with it. Many also suspected Henry had commercial interests in the region that were the real root of his passion. Randolph predicted that Henry would only support a “negative with some emphasis” on the idea.30 In late March, when it became clear to many that Henry’s concerns were overblown and speculative, because there was no general intent among the Federalists to yield the Mississippi, the damage was already done. Madison angrily predicted to Jefferson that Henry’s implacable disgust, which “exceeded all measure,” would create “very serious” consequences.31
With such wreckage strewn around him, Henry loomed ever larger. In March, Madison learned that Henry had “positively declined” to attend the convention. By boycotting, Madison suspected Henry intended to “leave his conduct unfettered on another theatre.” Unsullied by his personal participation in what he saw as a corrupt conclave, Henry would remain pure in assailing the product of Philadelphia. The convention, Madison darkly predicted, could “receive its destiny from his omnipotence.”32
Meanwhile, however, Henry was suffering in his own right. Short on cash, he was being hounded by his creditors.33 Those troubles did not diminish his fury against the Federalists—perhaps they even aggravated it.
Madison kept his promise to himself and redoubled his ambitions for the convention. He wrote Jefferson a long letter praising the “political experiment” the nation was about to enter. The principle that must tower “Over & above” all else, he said, was the need to give the federal government “a negative in all cases whatsoever” on the states. Arrayed around that coercive authority, the other elements would fall into place. The nation would be protected from invasion, the states prevented from “thwarting and molesting each other,” and minorities insulated from “unrighteous measures which favor the interest of the majority.”34
The only piece missing was a statesman to drive the scheme home.
* Henry Lee is not to be confused with Richard Henry Lee. Henry Lee served as a cavalry officer in the Continental Army, where he earned the moniker “Light-Horse Harry.” Henry Lee attended Princeton with Madison, graduating a year later and greatly admired his senior fellow student.