19 “On My Right & Left Hand”

SMALL PLANNING MEETINGS BEGAN ON MONDAY, MAY 14, WITH GROUPS OF delegates meeting in the taverns and guest houses of Philadelphia to plot strategy. The weather mirrored their turgid mood; the first week was plagued by frequent rain and rivers of mud.¹ Madison anxiously wrote Jefferson that the “number as yet assembled is but small.”² By May 27, only seven states had sent delegates, and he wrote his father that he was “suffering” from the “daily disappointment” of the turnout. True, they had received word that three more states would come the next day. Nevertheless, he told his father, every “reflecting man” was “daily more alarmed at our situation.”³

Washington arrived with quiet but unmistakable drama. Philadelphia’s “City Troop,” dressed in white breeches, high-topped boots, and round black hats decorated with silver bands, greeted him at his ferry. They walked along with him downtown, while spontaneous outbursts of clapping, shouting, and cheering broke out among people on the street.⁴ But Madison also observed individuals quietly sharing with the general “more sober marks” of “affection and veneration.”⁵

Madison was delighted that Washington had chosen to spend his considerable political capital on the event, but he was apprehensive all the same. He was hearing from Monroe that there was “great anxiety” back home in Virginia about the convention. Monroe painted its significance in almost celestial terms. “Indeed,” he wrote, “it seems to be the sole point on which all future movements will turn.”⁶

ON THE FIRST DAY OF DEBATE, MADISON AND THE OTHER MEN WALKED up creaking stairs to the creaking second floor of the State House. The building lacked a steeple, which had been removed for structural reasons years earlier. Set well back from the street, the State House had a peaceful and stable feel. A river flowed by six blocks to the east, providing at least a visual respite from Philadelphia’s oppressive summer heat, which some said would be the worst in thirty-five years. Madison’s boardinghouse was at Fifth and Market Streets, a few blocks away, so it did not take long to stroll there—which was good, because rushing was sure to cause him, in the heat and humidity, to sweat ceaselessly.7

In advance of the convention’s first day, Madison had made an important decision. Throughout his research, he had developed a strong “curiosity” not only about what made successful constitutions work, but about the human drama behind their creation—about, as he put it, “the reasons, & the anticipations, which prevailed in the formation of them.” And so he decided to create an “exact account of what might pass in the Convention” to satisfy others’ “future curiosity.”

To that end, on that first day, on the second floor of the State House, Madison walked forward through the delegates down before the chair in front of the room reserved for the convention’s presiding member. As he described it later, all of the other members were then arrayed around him “on my right & left hand.”⁸ He took out his quill and inkpot and, as the others began to talk, began taking meticulous notes of every word said by every delegate present. With his omnipresent quill, Madison became, in some sense, the conscience of the convention. The other delegates, ever mindful of their reputations, were always performing for the young man at the center of the room. His act was even more important because of the convention’s self-imposed decision to keep every word of the proceedings secret. Madison’s record was not journalism or memoir, but history itself.

Years later, Randolph described his friend at the convention: “His lips were never unsealed, except to some member, who happened to sit near him; and he who had once partaken of the rich banquet of his remarks, did not fail to wish daily to sit within the reach of his conversation.” In the same text, Randolph could not resist a jab at Henry. In contrast to the former governor, he remembered, “Madison was enviable in being among the few young men, who were not inflated by early flattery, and could content themselves with throwing out in social discourse jewels, which the artifice of a barren mind, would have treasured up for gaudy occasions.”⁹

IN OFF-HOUR STRATEGY SESSIONS, MADISON WORKED WITH RANDOLPH AND George Mason to refine the Virginia Plan. With an open, unassuming face and a wealthy bearing, Mason was renowned as a man of principle who had lived an at-once rich and tortuous life. He and his first wife had twelve children, three of whom died; she then also died, pitiably, from complications of childbirth. Eight years later, Mason had remarried, but he had no more children. Unlike so many other men at the convention, he was self-educated and had earned his wealth as a planter. He lacked the polish and carriage of Madison and Randolph, but he burned with his own fully realized conscience, particularly for individual rights against the state.

The two other men agreed to include most of the ideas Madison had shared with George Washington in the spring—the bicameral legislature, the three branches of government, the “National Judiciary” as “one or more supreme tribunals,” and the guarantee of a “Republican Government” by the “United States to each state.”10

Madison also urged the two other men to include the aspiration he had revealed to Washington—a negative by Congress on the states “in all cases whatsoever.” Like Thomas Jefferson before them, Randolph and Mason balked. This profound measure of federal control over the whole nation struck them as too extreme. On May 29, Randolph stood on the floor to read out the fifteen elements of the Virginia Plan. While the version had most of Madison’s ideas, he listened unhappily as Randolph announced their milquetoast compromise: that Congress would have only the power “to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature the articles of Union.” That formulation only enabled federal supremacy on laws, and then only when congressional opinion determined that those laws violated the Constitution’s express articles (an arduous process that required debate, and then a majority vote). This was a far cry from Madison’s ideal of unfettered federal legal authority supported by unhampered federal military supremacy.

For a couple of days, Madison stewed. He finally could constrain his frustration no longer. On May 31, he rose on the floor and openly confessed to the other men his concerns about the dilution of federal power. He declared his “strong bias” in favor of a constitution that would, for the first time, enumerate specific and superior authority for Congress. He admitted that he had doubts concerning the “practicability” of such a mandate, given the obvious reluctance revealed by Mason and Randolph. But he stubbornly stated he would “shrink from nothing” that would enable the new government to overcome its existing terminal weakness.11

He suspected that the quest for a resilient nexus imperii between the federal and state governments would become America’s Sisyphean task. And true enough, in the decades since, for every upward advance the nation has made on that front, the boulder always seems to slip back down the slope.

WHEREVER HE COULD, MADISON TOOK ACTION TO PROTECT MINORITIES from tyrannical majorities. In June, for instance, he watched as Charles Pinckney, a young, wealthy, self-important South Carolinian, introduced a motion to require that state legislatures, rather than the people at large, would elect the House of Representatives—removing the people from voting for their delegates to the federal government. Madison stopped taking notes and rose. Seesawing back and forth in his self-calming way, he began in his quiet voice.¹² The election of at least one branch of the legislature by the people themselves, he said, was “a clear principle of free government.” Anywhere a majority is “united by a common interest or passion,” he explained, the “rights of the minority are in danger.” Honorable motives would not restrain the majority—not honesty (which, he said, is “little regarded by bodies of men as individuals”), not integrity of character (which, he noted, is “always diminished” in large populations), and not even conscience—because, he argued, it is “inadequate in individuals.” Even religion, he said, “may become a motive to persecution & oppression.”

With Henry’s incredible power in Virginia clearly in mind, he described the particular danger of demagogues—manipulative and ambitious leaders of the masses: an “influential demagogue,” he said, can “give an impulse to the whole”; their passion could spread like contagion. He declared that large districts were far “less liable to be influenced” by factions and by demagogues than small ones.¹³ The only answer was to “enlarge the sphere”—to embrace, as policy, national expansion. A constantly growing democracy would confuse the demagogues and the factions, pulling the boundaries they sought off into the horizon, rendering them small and ineffectual, just one of a cast of thousands, thus protecting the country from breaking apart.14

IN PHILADELPHIA, HE WAS PLAINLY FASCINATED BY THE MAJORITY’S CAPACITY for cruelty. Months later, during the battle to ratify the Constitution, Madison would tell Jefferson that no majority driven by a “common passion” would ever be able to refrain from crushing the minority. Religion was especially dangerous, “kindled into enthusiasm, its force like that of other passions,” then “increased by the sympathy of a multitude.” Even “in its coolest state,” he said, faith had more often been “a motive to oppression than a restraint from it.” The “only policy” against such a torrent, Madison declared, was “divide et impera”—divide and conquer.¹⁵

That is what he tried to do in Philadelphia through one particular new institution: the Senate. He believed an inflamed majority could be throttled by the house of the legislature designed for the wise and self-governing—the statesmen. When an effort developed to gut the elite body by populating it with many more members, he argued that the Senate must be designed for “enlightened statesmen.” The whole point of the Senate, he insisted, was to “consist in its proceedings with more coolness” and with “more system” and with “more wisdom” than the “popular branch.” Enlarging the Senate would infect it with the “vices which they are meant to correct.”¹⁶

Madison seemed to be imagining himself sitting there. He soon went so far as to contend that senators should enjoy a nine-year term. The House, he explained, would be “liable to err” from “fickleness and passion.” The Senate would provide a “necessary fence against this danger” precisely because it would house “a portion of enlightened citizens” whose “firmness” would “seasonably interpose” against “impetuous counsels,” and would resolve the problem of majority tyranny. The body could defang the enemy within.¹⁷

DESPITE HIS EARLY SETBACKS, AS THE SUMMER PROGRESSED, MADISON doggedly continued his pursuit of coercion. In early June, Pinckney moved that Congress should have the ability to negative all laws it judged “to be improper.” That power would essentially declare illegal even a potentially disobedient activity by a state, and Madison quickly rose to second the motion. He pointed out that experience had shown a “constant tendency in the States to encroach on the federal authority,” to violate treaties, and to “oppress the weaker party.” The states’ intransigence came pretty close to inviting actual violence. Shays’ Rebellion had shown that. What if Massachusetts had been conquered? What if a rebel-led government had then conspired with rebels in neighboring states?

The only alternative, he concluded, was “an appeal to coercion.” The congressional veto on state laws was, he said, the “mildest expedient that could be devised for preventing these mischiefs.” Congress needed to be able to strike down any state law it chose, for any reason. That plenary authority would be, he declared, the “great pervading principle that must controul the centrifugal tendency of the States.” Without it, they would “continually fly out of their proper orbits” and “destroy the order & harmony of the political System.”18 The Constitution, without coercion, would be chaos.

Madison’s stance set him against Jefferson—not for the first time, and not for the last. Hearing about the proposed veto, Jefferson wrote Madison from Paris with barely concealed alarm, “Prima facie,” he told his friend, “I do not like it.” He went on, “It fails in an essential character, that the hole & patch should be commensurate.” He noted that very few states’ acts touched on federal law. To give Congress a veto on all state laws would upset the apple cart.¹⁹ At a subconscious level, Madison probably recognized that Jefferson had exposed a central vulnerability in his adamant case for the veto “in all cases whatsoever.”

Jefferson’s challenge revealed the degree to which control, for Madison, had become an obsession. In other arenas, especially his own political campaigns, he had developed an appreciation for nuance and subtlety. But not here. Not when dealing with the contagious passions of the collectively self-destructive colonies. And so throughout the summer, Madison stubbornly adhered to his argument. Over a month after the contretemps with Jefferson, he was still trying to haul the convention in his direction. In July, with the Philadelphia heat grown stifling, he rose to contend that the federal negative was “essential.” The states, he argued, had a natural “propensity to pursue their particular interests in opposition to the general interest.” Their tendency to fly off on their own trajectories would continue to “disturb the system,” he said, unless “effectually controlled,” going on to say, “Nothing short of a negative on their laws will control it.”20 But he failed, as the convention rejected the negative by what Madison bitterly described as a “bare majority.”

His mind was not eased by continued revelations of disintegration back home in Virginia.

FROM HIS HUMID ROOM, STIPPLED BY CANDLELIGHT, THE COBBLED STREETS outside quiet after the daytime drumbeat of delegates’ shoes, he wrote Jefferson that the appetite for paper money in Virginia was growing stronger with each day. The people were hungering for a quick fix to their inflated money. “Mr. H—n—y,” he wrote (as if the clever trick of removing letters from Henry’s name would also elide his opponent), was the “avowed patron of the scheme.” Most dangerously, Henry was (Madison wrote in cipher) “hostile to the object of the convention.” He “wishes,” Madison coded, “either a partition or a total dissolution of the confederacy.”²¹

A rage was starting against all financial support of government itself. Arsonists in King William County burned down a courthouse that contained tax collection records. Men were physically threatening tax collectors visiting their homes and businesses. A sheriff in Virginia responded by refusing to protect any tax collector. A sick feeling entered Madison’s fevered imagination; the Shays epidemic, it seemed, had infected Virginia. A complete breakdown of law and order seemed within the range of possibility. Amid all of this, the hunger for paper money raged on, with the “people, in general” appearing “very much discontented.”²²

He dramatized the saga in a letter to William Short. There was “no hope” from the existing system, he scribbled, and so the “eyes and hopes of all” were set on Philadelphia. The delegates’ decision would have a “material influence on our destiny,” not to mention the “cause of republican liberty.”²³ The world was the stage for Philadelphia.

No wonder Madison had anxiety attacks.

DURING THE LONG WEEKS IN PHILADELPHIA, MADISON BECAME INCREASINGLY irritated by the convention’s self-imposed gag order. He was, after all, irrepressibly honest, even voluble, with his close friends, and the rule interfered with the fluid relationships so central to his happiness. He admitted to Monroe that he felt “great mortification” at the “disappointment” the silence “imposes on me to throw on the curiosity of my friends.”24 A few days later, he apologized to his brother Ambrose that the rules were forcing him to “disappoint the curiosity you will naturally feel to know something of these proceedings.”²⁵

The secrecy edict heightened the proceedings’ pent-up drama. After about six weeks, Madison wrote Jefferson that the “public mind is very impatient” for the release of the Constitution—and that rumors were, meantime, swirling, “which tend to inflame curiosity.”²⁶ In Williamsburg, the eager reverend was no exception, writing Madison on August 1—after the reign of secrecy had lasted about eight weeks—“We are here, & I beleive every where, all Impatience to know Something of your conventional Deliberations.” With exasperated whimsy—or whimsical exasperation—he exclaimed, “If you cannot tell us what you are doing, you might at least give us some Information of what you are not doing.”²⁷

But Madison, no stranger to self-control, managed to comply with the order.

FOR MADISON, THE MOST SIGNIFICANT EPISODE OF THE CONVENTION occurred when the formidable William Paterson rose to deliver what became known as the New Jersey Plan. The plan rejected almost every aspect of Madison’s political philosophy. Instead of a bicameral legislature, with the populous House and the statesman-filled Senate, it provided for only one Congress with one vote per state. It allowed Congress to collect taxes, but only upon the states’ repeated consent—permanently installing, rather than resolving, the tension that had driven the forced contribution fiasco. Congress—not the people—would elect the chief executive, and it would allow the president to be recalled by a majority of governors, further bending the federal executive to the states’ will.

Six years older than Madison, Paterson was a fellow Princeton graduate who went on to become a Supreme Court justice and governor of New Jersey. He was composed, thoughtful, dignified—and dangerous. Madison was aware that Paterson’s vision of the union differed so starkly from his own that the very sophistication of the Virginia Plan might appear radical by comparison. No matter how well intentioned, the New Jersey Plan would invite the passions already jeopardizing the union to run amok. Yet Paterson himself did not appear radical, which made his proposal, and its messenger, doubly threatening. Madison planned the destruction of the New Jersey Plan with his Method.

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.

He plotted eight distinct salvos, which he delivered with devastating precision on the floor. For his first attack, he headed straight for the heart of the New Jersey Plan. The danger of Paterson’s proposal, Madison claimed, lay in New Jersey’s own recent behavior. He described a current union that resembled the terrifying state of nature in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. If the men there had not read Hobbes recently, they were familiar with his argument: to save themselves from a state of nature that was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short,” free men must yield their liberty to a collective center—to government. Madison recounted a “most notorious” instance when New Jersey herself had “expressly refused” to comply with a constitutional decision of Congress, only later deciding “barely to rescind” her refusal without “any positive act of compliance.” By this point, it was obvious that Madison saw such opposition as insolence; his attack on the state, in turn, was almost ad hominem.

He next approached the New Jersey Plan’s proposal of a Congress with one seat for every state. Madison bootstrapped everything onto his argument for the bicameral legislature. Government, he declared, could not be “feeble.” The centrally weak coalitions of Sparta, Athens, and Thebes were “fatal” to the confederacy. And when men, and states, were “large, strong, and also nearly equal,” they “immediately become rivals.”28 Carthage and Rome, he said, “tore each other to pieces” instead of uniting—meaning that powerful states needed the sort of nexus imperii the bicameral Congress could provide. As for the small states, he pleaded with them to renounce the obvious self-interest in the one-state-one-vote New Jersey Plan—which would “infuse mortality” into the Constitution and, he warned, force the confederacy to “go to pieces.”²⁹

His next assaults were equally damaging.

The New Jersey Plan, he said, would fail to prevent states from raising their own armies and from trespassing on each other.

It would lead to horrible administrative problems within the states.

It would expose the Union to infiltration by foreign enemies.

It would leave the smaller states more vulnerable to the predations of the majority. The “larger States will be impregnable,” he predicted, while “the smaller only can feel the vengeance.”

Finally, it would self-destruct; the states supporting the New Jersey Plan would, through “pertinacious adherence,” lead the union either to dissolve or be divided into “two or more Confederacies.”30

Altogether, Madison painted a picture of ruinous decisions, dismemberment and indulgence, failure and chaos. Finished, he sat down. The vote was soon counted. When the numbers were in, it came as little surprise that the stubborn, slender man from Orange had defeated august Paterson and his New Jersey Plan.

AFTER SIX WEEKS OF DEBATE, MADISON HAD BECOME EXHAUSTED BOTH by the constant quarreling and the daily and nightly task of recording the debates. Every day, the room started cool but became increasingly hot and stuffy. But when someone was speaking, he could never leave—not to relieve himself, not to have a conversation with a friend, not to step into the sun and the fresh (if humid) air. When someone wavered or spoke softly, he had to strain physically to capture their phrases. He complained to Jefferson that the task was a “drudgery,” but he pledged he would finish it as long as illness did not stop him.³¹

Back in Virginia, he knew Henry and his friends were already throwing up barricades to whatever the convention might produce. Henry saw a ripe political issue in Congress’s proposal to settle debts with the British. At the same time, he was agitating for yet more paper money. Prior to that summer, his county, Prince Edward, had opposed paper money, but with Henry’s support, Madison learned that the county was clamoring for more.

Even worse, under Henry’s machinations, a friend warned Madison, the “doctrine of three Confederacies”—of splitting the country into three parts—was gaining more traction.32 While Philadelphia plodded along, Madison’s worst nightmare seemed more real than ever—that Henry and his passions would rip the country apart.

IN LATE JULY, MADISON ROSE TO ARGUE IN FAVOR OF THE POPULAR ELECTION of the president. In doing so, he disclosed a powerful tenet of his emergent political philosophy—one that surely was not in place when he had defied the people of Orange County and their Election Day thirst for free liquor.

Of all the country’s sources for political legitimacy, he declared to the men around him, the general populace was the “fittest in itself.” Because only the people would “know & vote for some Citizen” who had earned “general attention & esteem,” they would select a president of “distinguished Character.”³³ Despite his long observation of the destructive power of simple majorities, Madison still felt that the total of the people would make good and just choices. The sort of man who earned their esteem, therefore, would be healthy for their democracy. In late July, he strove to enumerate for the other delegates the disastrous alternatives. He explained that if the state legislatures instead elected the president, he would “be rendered subservient” to the states. If the governors chose the president, that would be even worse, with the governors “courted, and intrigued with,” by the candidates for president.

The Electoral College, he declared, was the answer. The people would select electors, who would in turn meet away from the seat of government and choose the president. The clever idea threw a barrier between any demagogue who might come into a popular election and the presidency itself, in a process he said would give “little opportunity for cabal, or corruption.”³⁴

By tethering himself to the people—by trusting in them and even looking up to them—Madison was taking a firm stance on an ancient dilemma that still bedevils us today. Do the people get it right most of the time, or not? Can the median of public opinion be trusted when it comes to electing politicians, or not?

That battle went back to ancient Athens. Plato, seared by the violent upheavals in Athens and the mob-led assassination of his mentor Socrates, proposed a fictional state run by elite Guardians that locked the people away from political power. Plato’s student Aristotle rebelled against that harsh utopia, arguing instead that the “principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the few best is one that is maintained, and, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth.”35

Madison’s logic resembled Aristotle’s: When the people come together, Aristotle believed, their collective effort was “better than the few good,” just like a “feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse.”³⁶ So it was with Madison, who had come to value the wisdom of the crowds over the opinion of any planter or merchant. And that belief, more than anything else, was at last making him the American statesman he had always sought to become.

AS THE CONVENTION DREW TO A CLOSE, MADISON BECAME DISTRACTED by the information from his brothers that his father was sick. While robust, the man was still sixty-four, and Madison couldn’t stop thinking about him. On August 12, he wrote his father a meandering letter, enclosing several newspapers, confessing that he didn’t have “any thing worth communicating” and was writing from his “chief anxiety,” which “is to hear that your health is re-established.”³⁷

When his father didn’t write back, three weeks later Madison impatiently sent another letter plaintively accusing him of not responding. “I have been long anxious to learn the re-establishment of your health.”³⁸ But still he heard nothing. His father did eventually recover, but not without reminding Madison of his unbreakable ties to Virginia and the fact that he was, as he had always been, his father’s son.

THROUGH THE CONVENTION, MADISON HAD BEEN WRESTLING WITH THE paralyzing issue of slavery—how much to allow, when, and on what terms. As the convention neared its end, he responded to a proposal to extend the limit on the slave trade from twelve to twenty years by rising and declaring to the delegates that slavery was “dishonorable to the National character.” Twenty years, he said, would “produce all the mischief that can be apprehended” from slavery. In a discussion of the taxation rate for imported slaves, he declared that there should be no rate at all. In fact, he proclaimed, there should be no taxation on slaves whatsoever, because it was “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”

In support of his argument, he advanced a clever logical defense: Slaves, he said, were “not like merchandize.” They were “not consumed.” And therefore they could not be treated as property.39

The other slave-owning delegates must have been deeply irritated by his épée. Indeed, how can we square such a claim with Madison’s own slave-owning? Was it gross hypocrisy, or something more complicated? No answer will be satisfying or even reassuring. But we can still try to understand the paradox. One explanation is the following: Madison applied a different political philosophy to matters concerning the state to those concerning his own house. For him, the private was not the same as the public. To him, the stakes within the private realm of home and family of owning men and women and children were lower, the principle involved of a different kind and scope. At the national level, however, he believed slavery presented an existential threat to a country premised on freedom. At Montpelier, with slaves he felt he treated well, he saw no such conflict. In fact, he thought the men and woman he owned were better off with him than in the predatory violence of the freedman’s life.

In the early 1830s, before he died, Madison received a series of urgent letters from his former White House secretary Edward Coles that culminated a campaign Coles had begun in 1819 to convince Madison to free his slaves. Coles took abolition particularly personally. He had moved from Virginia to Illinois, along with his own slaves, in order to free them in Illinois. He would later become governor of Illinois on an abolitionist platform.

Madison and his wife Dolley loved Coles. Madison saw him almost as the son he never had. But he firmly parted ways with him on the issue of manumission. In 1819, in response to Coles’s first entreaties, Madison rebuffed him, citing “the habits of the slave.” Without the “instruction, the property or the employments of a freeman,” Madison wrote, freeing the men, women, and children he owned would make them worse off. He told Coles he wished the latter’s “philanthropy” could succeed in “changing their colour as well as their legal condition.” Without such a change, he said, they were “destined to a privation of that moral rank & those social blessings, which give to freedom more than half its value.”⁴⁰

For over a decade that followed, Coles never relented. In 1832, he implored the former president at least to free his slaves in his will, as George Washington had, telling Madison that keeping his slaves would be a “blot & stigma on your otherwise spotless escutcheon,” whereas freeing them would be the “finale of your character & career, & to the consummation of your glory.”41

But Madison wasn’t interested in either finale or consummation, even from as loyal and principled a disciple as Coles. He again firmly declined Coles’s plea. In 1834, he explained that the finances of Montpelier were so poor that he either needed to sell slaves or land to survive. He had been selling land, he said, but now could not afford even to support his slaves; therefore he had “yielded to the necessity of parting with some of them to a friend and kinsman who I am persuaded will do better by them than I can, and to whom they gladly consent to be transferred.”⁴²

These answers, over the span of fifteen years, tangle together all of the most frustrating aspects of Madison’s approach to this issue of human justice. He cited the slaves’ “colour” as the root of a social conditioning to which they were “destined”—separate from their “legal condition.” But he did not seek to use the law to change those very conditions, and their destiny. He then sold his slaves to finance the maintenance of lands that he himself could not manage.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that this son of his father, and this eldest brother, would be at once so paternalistic and so controlling on this one issue regarding the rest of his “family” at Montpelier. As a slaveholder himself, his lifelong anxieties about money and his professional difficulties in planting combined with his sense that he should determine and control the outcomes of those for whom he felt responsible. Yet that does not make his words and his actions any less disappointing to history, to Americans, and to his own legacy, as Coles so keenly recognized.

In Philadelphia during the convention, Madison was clearly torn by the conflict between his own slave-owning and the clear principle of equality for all men. Yet he joined the noxious compromise of counting slaves as three-fifths of a freeman on the question of how to count slaves for congressional districts. He defended his support later on the grounds that it was politically necessary to bring the southern states into the alliance.

He never seemed at ease with his own compromise. In his later years, he struggled to find an answer to slavery that would be as systemic and elegant as his other resolutions of the country’s dilemmas. In 1816, when he was sixty-five, he joined the founding of the American Colonization Society, which sought to bring African Americans to the newly created country of Liberia. In 1833, three years before he died, he ascended to the presidency of the organization. Slaveholders and abolitionists alike saw value in the Liberia project—slaveholders wanted the problem of free American blacks solved once and for all, and abolitionists wanted a homeland for African Americans. For that reason, it seemed like an ideal Madisonian compromise—a nexus imperii between the warring factions.

Yet Liberia would not solve America’s most crippling problem. It would not even come close. By the time the American Civil War ended, in 1867, the society had sent about 13,000 free American blacks to Liberia. By that same time, 750,000 Americans died in the failure of North and South to reconcile over slavery.43 It was the singular challenge young Madison had been unable to resolve either in the Constitution or afterward—in his own life as in the country’s.

ON SEPTEMBER 15, THE DELEGATES FILED UP THE WOODEN STAIRS OF THE State House—more worn than at the start of the summer—for the final vote on the Constitution. At about three in the afternoon, two dissenters made their final stands. Madison’s friend Edmund Randolph rose first. The other delegates watched the notoriously open-hearted attorney begin to speak with great interest. Randolph was plainly troubled by opposing the majority in the room. Yet he decried the “indefinite and dangerous power” the Constitution would give to Congress. Scribbling, Madison recorded Randolph’s announcement of an alternative: State conventions should be allowed to amend the plan, with those questions to be decided by “another general convention.” If the men did not follow his proposal, Randolph declared, he would refuse to follow them.

George Mason stood next. He first seconded Randolph’s motion. He then dramatically predicted that the new Constitution would “end either in monarchy, or a tyrannical aristocracy.” He would not vote for it, he announced—either in Philadelphia or Virginia.

Pinckney then rose to attack the attackers. It was well understood that the Constitution, as drafted, would be approved, and the gravity of that decision was settling on the men. Looking around him, Pinckney noted their “peculiar solemnity.” Although Pinckney admitted that he, too, objected to certain aspects of the plan,44 he lambasted the idea of a second convention: Only “confusion and contrariety” could “spring from the experiment.” “Conventions,” he said, were “serious things, and ought not to be repeated.”

The vote on the motions was called. Madison sat, quill poised. Randolph’s motion was read. The delegates were polled, state by state. Madison wrote, with satisfaction, “All the states answered no.” The motion of whether to “agree to the Constitution as amended” was then announced.⁴⁵ The states’ delegates were again counted off. Every one voted aye.

It was six o’clock in the afternoon—the end of what had been the longest session of the summer. Autumn was coming, change was in the air, and Madison and his Virginia Plan had prevailed.

The next day, the men again filed up the stairs for the final day of the long session in Philadelphia. Only forty-one of the original fifty-five delegates had lasted this long. For the first time since the convention began, George Washington rose to speak. He declared his support for an amendment decreasing the size of House districts—then forty thousand—by one quarter, making the House of Representatives more numerous and populous—and his motion was adopted unanimously by the delegates. They knew they were looking at their future president.

Benjamin Franklin then made an epochal comment. Gesturing to the painting of a rising sun painted on the back of the convention’s president’s chair, he said, “I have often and often in the course of the session, looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting.” He paused and then continued, “But now at length I have the happiness to know it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

Every member except for Elbridge Gerry, George Mason, and Edmund Randolph then signed the document. The Constitution—provisionally—was now a certain kind of law. But they all knew—Madison more keenly than any—that it would become reality only if the states ratified it.

Washington then invited the entire group for supper at the City Tavern on Second Street near Walnut. The men walked over in a jumble of emotions—exhaustion, relief, somber reflection, and joy at their release. They “dined together,” Washington recorded in his diary, “and took a cordial leave of each other.”46 But one man among them was neither joyous nor relieved.

MADISON WAS TROUBLED BY HIS FAILURE TO ACHIEVE A CLEARLY COERCIVE power for the new federal government. In the days immediately following the Constitution’s passage, he obsessively returned to that fatal flaw. It soon began poisoning his view of the whole summer and the whole document. He snapped to Jefferson that the plan would “neither effectually answer its national object” nor stop the “local mischiefs” that “everywhere excite disgust against the state governments.”⁴⁷ He told others that the convention had made a mistake in incorporating an “infinite diversity” of views, which had become “as difficult as it was desireable.”⁴⁸ It was a Constitution designed by committee, and looked like it. Instead of balance among its hinged parts, he saw instead a parlous yaw.

His pessimism deepened over the coming weeks. He returned again and again to the lack of coercion. In late October, he complained to Jefferson that without the “check in the whole over the parts, our system involves the evil of imperium in imperio”—of authority within authority, a divided center. He explained that if a “compleat supremacy” could not be achieved, at least the federal government should be enabled to defend itself against encroachments by the states. He cited England as an example. Take away the king’s “royal negative,” he said, and the system’s unity, coherence, and internal order would be destroyed.⁴⁹

The vote was beginning to seem to him like a mere pause in the country’s disintegration. The criticism pouring in didn’t help. His cousin the reverend wrote to say the Constitution had a “Defect” that “perhaps threatens Ruin to Republicanism itself.” The system, he said, failed to ensure that all the government’s branches were distinct and independent. Certain features would breed tyranny—especially the lifelong president who could veto Congress. That provision bore “so strong a Stamp of Monarchy or Aristocracy,” the reverend warned, that the Constitution could not last for long.⁵⁰

And then there was ratification to worry about. In late August, Lafayette confessed to Madison that the tumults in America were disturbing him deeply, that he was “Very Anxious” to know whether the Constitution could actually be implemented. The United States’ reputation, he said, demanded immediate action. The country possessed the “Liberality, Wisdom, and Patriotism” to conquer its demons. But if it could not, Lafayette told his friend, “I feel that the tranquillity of My Life Will Be Poisoned.”51

Madison felt the same way. But one beam of light pierced his gloom. People were so desperate for stability, he felt, that the momentum for ratification would overwhelm even local prejudices.⁵²

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, MADISON LEFT MRS. HOUSE’S IN PHILADELPHIA TO attend the session of Congress in New York. He pulled up to the lodging house of Dorothy Elsworth at 19 Maiden Lane (today, just north of Wall Street in Lower Manhattan) and was soon greeting the other Virginians staying there. He hoped to get to work as quickly as possible. Congress needed to support the convention in Philadelphia by sending the Constitution to the states. To that end, he launched a blitz of meetings with Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, and Henry Lee.

Madison took his seat in Congress and joined other veterans from Philadelphia in a motion to send the Constitution to the states immediately for ratification. They quickly swatted down objections from Richard Henry Lee, and Congress unanimously supported the measure.⁵³ Another obstacle had been overcome, but it was minor compared with what was to come.

Patrick Henry, he predicted to Jefferson, would certainly “wage war against any reform whatever.”⁵⁴