BY LATE SEPTEMBER, THE FULL EXTENT OF THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS IN Philadelphia had worked its way back to Henry in Virginia. By boycotting the convention, he had hoped to maintain the purity and force of his opposition. Yet he must now have understood that by absenting himself, he had allowed the movement to gain more traction. He betrayed his mounting frustration in September, when he “assembled, and harangued” a crowd of his constituents in Prince Edward County to support paper money. When it was clear that a large majority would defy him and oppose paper money, he lost his temper and shouted that “they should no longer consider him as their representative.”1
In mid-October, Monroe warned Madison that the convention would “perhaps agitate the minds of” Virginians more than any topic since the Revolution itself. That Henry was against the Constitution, he told his friend, would ensure a “powerful opposition.”2 Monroe himself was, in fact, in the process of deciding to join Henry—a perilous development indeed.
Madison was coming to realize that the new Constitution would face blistering opposition around the country. He was particularly distressed by the prospects in Virginia where, he wrote his father (now healthy and cheering on his son) that for “obvious reasons opposition is as likely to arise in Virginia as any where.”3 He told George Washington, “I am waiting with anxiety for the echo from Virginia, but with very faint hopes of it corresponding with my wishes.”4 While the political developments in many other states seemed auspicious—Maryland was “well disposed,” he thought, and Delaware would “fall in of Course”—his home Commonwealth, he said, “I fear will be divided and extremely agitated.”5 With disarming candor, he told his old friend Edmund Pendleton that it would be “truly mortifying” for a state that had “generally taken the lead on great occasions” to fail now.6
Madison wrote Washington, “Much will depend on Mr. Henry.” He willed himself to believe Henry was still up in the air, arguing that his “favorable decision on the subject may yet be hoped for.”7 But then he learned that Henry was scheming, “however foreign his subject,” to hit the Constitution with “a side blow.”8 Henry had initially wanted to abort the Constitution by preventing a ratifying convention in Virginia entirely. But by October, he realized that the momentum was too strong. So he quickly switched tacks, declaring that it “transcended our powers to decide on the Constitution; that it must go before a Convention.” Washington ingenuously told Madison that “much pleasure was discovered” at Henry’s announcement.9 But Madison knew Henry’s newfound enthusiasm for a ratification convention was, at best, a Trojan horse.
In Richmond, Randolph—who was starting to lean toward supporting the Constitution he had so painfully attacked on the convention’s last day—confronted Henry several times on his opposition to the Constitution. The former governor became so upset during these exchanges that he actually could not continue speaking—“He recedes so far from me,” Randolph recounted to Madison, “that we must diverge after a progress of half a degree further.”10
Madison’s anxiety spiked. In late October, Henry, joined by Governor Harrison, devised a stratagem to call a convention with the purpose “to adopt—reject—or amend—the proposed Constitution.” This poison pill would allow the single state of Virginia, by amending the Constitution with one all its own—thereby replicating the very problem Madison sought to solve. After heated debate, Henry lost his motion.11 But the loss only provoked him.
In the weeks to follow, Henry grew even more wrathful. Archibald Stuart wrote Madison that Henry was becoming “loud on the distresses of the People” and “makes us tremble” with threats of a rebellion if the people were “driven to despair.”12 In mid-November, Madison heard the enthusiasm for the new Constitution was “subsiding” in Richmond, giving way instead to “a spirit of criticism.” To Washington, he confessed that he felt “fearful of the “influence and co-operation” of enemies like Henry.13
Henry Lee confessed to Madison his “real Grief” that Henry was successfully gathering a base of supporters in the Virginia legislature who “manifested hostility to the new constitution.” His “art is equal to his talents for declamation,” Lee declared, admiring Henry despite himself.14
Henry seemed to be approaching some sort of climax. Madison heard that his “anxiety was too great to be concealed.” In debates, Henry’s very body appeared agitated by his spite toward the Constitution; Archibald Stuart said his anger affected his “whole frame” and made him “sweat at every pore.” But that was not a good thing for Henry, Stuart reported, for he then appeared at a “greater disadvantage.”15
In perfect contrast to his younger nemesis, who seemed to have everything under control, Henry was losing his. The closer the men got to their duel, the more they resembled their respective political philosophies. Like a trimmed and well-captained schooner navigating swells, Madison’s subtle checks and balances reflected his psychology and temperament and Method. Henry’s gusty swells, by contrast, mirrored his tempestuous revolutionary ethos. The country could follow either course—the ship or the sea.
MADISON PLOTTED HIS JOURNEY TO THE RATIFICATION BATTLE WITH care. He would first need to be elected a delegate to the state convention in Richmond. He approached this seemingly minor hurdle with deadly seriousness. Although he still professed the humility drilled into him by his father—writing his brother Ambrose decorously, “I shall not decline the representation of the County if I should be honoured with its appointment”—he also asked his brother to spread the word. His false modesty dissolved entirely as he soberly instructed Ambrose to let him “know what competition there will probably be and by whom.”16
Once he was a delegate, he had no doubt Henry would be his primary obstacle—as Madison put it, “the great adversary who will render the event precarious.” Henry, he wrote Jefferson, was “working up every possible interest.” He was latching onto any cause that might provoke the people. He began fulminating against the importation of all foreign goods, proposing new duties on popular items from foreign rum to British leather, which Madison derided as “little short of madness.”17 Yet there was a method to it. Through such machinations, Henry was nimbly recasting himself as a passionate nationalist in the months after the Philadelphia cabal and before the Virginia ratification battle.
But Madison clung to his faith that Henry’s blustery manipulations would no longer suit the freshly enlightened nation. He believed, he said, that the “body of sober & steady people, even of the lower order, are tired of the vicicitudes, injustice and follies which have so much characterized public measures.” The people, he told Jefferson, were “more likely to cherish than remove” the Constitution.18 He was certain that reason would out. It must.
IN NEW YORK, MADISON UNDERSTOOD HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH ONE NEW Yorker in particular would have outsize importance in the mission ahead. He and Alexander Hamilton had first come to know each other five years earlier in Philadelphia, when Madison was entering his third year in Congress, and Hamilton was beginning his first term there. Hamilton, like Madison, had a fierce impatience with what he saw as the small-minded men who were throttling the country’s potential. Yet the two men had traveled vastly different paths to their alliance.
Hamilton was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Nevis. His father was a fearsome, violent man; after giving birth to Alexander, his mother made the courageous but scandalous decision to flee the marriage. But she died when her son was just eleven. His vindictive father gave him little property, effectively leaving him an orphan. With stunning perspicacity, the slender, five-foot-seven, red-haired boy became an autodidact. He read everything he could get his hands on. He authored precocious essays, likely including one titled “Rules for Statesmen.” (Madison was not alone in his early infatuation with achieving that ideal political type.) Hamilton caught the attention of the island’s leading men, who sent him to the mainland, to New York, to gain an education and to enter society.19
At eighteen, the self-assured and ambitious Hamilton idolized John Witherspoon and set his sights on attending Princeton. He secured a meeting with Witherspoon. The Scot grilled the brash young man on his knowledge of the liberal arts. But then Hamilton announced he had his own condition for attending Princeton—he must be allowed to skip through all of his classes “with as much rapidity as his exertions would enable him to do.” Witherspoon was taken aback; he did not like the young man’s abrasive ambition. Weeks later, he rejected Hamilton.20
Chagrined, Hamilton quickly arranged instead to attend King’s College in Manhattan (later Columbia) instead, where he excelled. He left school for a time to fight valiantly in the war, founding volunteer militia, then becoming aide-de-camp to George Washington, and spent a winter at Valley Forge. He married into the wealthy Schuyler family. After successfully commanding a battalion of Lafayette’s at Yorktown, he moved with ease into law and politics. By adulthood, he had become refined and striking, with piercing eyes, volcanic intensity, and overpowering brilliance. A friend said that when he was animated by a subject, “you could see the very workings of his soul”—so different from the guarded, private Madison.21
IMAGE 20.1. ALEXANDER HAMILTON. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
In Madison’s first term in Congress, he generally maintained an appreciative but critical distance from Hamilton. In April 1783, Congress debated a revenue scheme whose commissioners could allow states to make claims against federal tax revenue. Madison criticized Hamilton’s “rigid adherence” to a different plan that Hamilton “supposed more perfect,” that would have prevented states from spending the monies without federal permission.22 Madison’s cutting remark was revealing; he saw Hamilton, at the time, as a man who did not understand politics, persuasion, or compromise.
Much changed, however, in the coming years. Hamilton resigned from Congress in 1783 to open a private law practice, where he controversially defended Tories. The next year, he founded the Bank of New York. He also advocated for the doomed Annapolis convention, which he saw as necessary to a coherent commercial union.
At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton became famous for a brash, six-hour speech where he proposed scrapping both the Virginia and New Jersey Plans for one modeled on the British king, Parliament, and courts. He proposed a lifelong Senate chosen by electors, a House of Representatives serving three-year terms, a twelve-member Supreme Court with lifelong appointments, and, most significantly, an “elective monarch.” Madison wrote that Hamilton “had no scruple in declaring that the British Govt. was the best in the world and that he doubted much whether anything short of it would do in America.”23
But when his plan failed to gain support, Hamilton gradually supported the compromise product of Philadelphia. On the last day of the convention, when Edmund Randolph, George Mason, and Elbridge Gerry refused to sign the document, Hamilton became visibly agitated. He rose before the assembly and argued that the refusals of even a “few characters of consequence” could do “infinite mischief,” pointing out that he himself was signing the Constitution, despite the fact that “no man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his were known to be.” He explained his decision as one between “anarchy and convulsion on one side” and the “chance of good” on the other.24
Hamilton and Madison were more like brothers in arms than brothers, their union a consequence of their cause rather than any deep sympathy between them. And it was in that spirit that they joined forces in a campaign to drive the country forward.
HAMILTON BOARDED A SINGLE-MASTED SCHOONER SAILING ON THE North River from Manhattan to Albany. With his quill wavering in his hand and the waves rolling underneath, he wrote the first installment of the long newspaper opinion pieces that would come to be known as the Federalist Papers.25 Hamilton had concocted the plan to persuade the leading men of his state to support the Federalist cause. He hoped the essays would in turn spark a chain reaction throughout the colonies.
He began his first essay by beseeching his readers to recognize the gravity of their role. The subject, he wrote, “speaks its own importance.” He described with venom certain enemies of the Constitution: those who had “begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”26 While he did not mention Patrick Henry’s name, he might as well have; Hamilton cast popularity and flattery as grounds for suspicion rather than worship.
Thus began the familiar refrain in the Federalist Papers—an injunction for citizens to defy the passions, to defuse demagogues, and to join their nation at the frontier of reason and restraint.
Hamilton’s essay appeared in New York’s Independent Journal on October 27, under the name “Publius.” Copies took days to travel from hand to hand down the coast. On November 9, Archibald Stuart clipped a copy in Richmond, folded it into a letter he sent to Madison, and declared himself “extremely pleased,” because Publius had given him “the highest expectations.”27
Madison was pleased as well, for he was joining Hamilton’s campaign. Hamilton knew from the start that only a star team could address the dizzying range of questions ahead about how the new constitutional government would function, from foreign policy to the separation of powers to the new court system. He had first approached John Jay for assistance. Jay was a gaunt, brilliant, rheumatic New Yorker who had drafted the New York Constitution. Jay had readily agreed to participate. The two men worked up a blueprint of topics that Hamilton crisply meted out in Federalist Number 1: the “utility of the UNION to your political prosperity,” the “insufficiency of the present Confederation to preserve that Union,” the “necessity of a government at least equally energetic with the one proposed,” the “conformity of the proposed Constitution to the true principles of republican government,” the Constitution’s “analogy to your own State constitutions,” and, finally, the “additional security.”28 It was a daunting list, but they felt that only such a wave of maneuvers could fortify the Constitution against its enemies.
Hamilton then made the fateful decision to ask James Madison to join as well.29 Madison could not help but be flattered. He also thought the operation was strategically necessary, given the anxiety flooding out of Virginia. He believed that precisely those citizens who could be influenced by essays in newspapers—the nation’s leading men, the merchants, planters, and lawyers—could breathe life into the contraption from Philadelphia. Madison agreed to participate. He then urged Hamilton to enlist his friend Rufus King, a New Yorker of whom Madison thought highly. But Hamilton, with characteristic sharpness, dismissed King as not “altogether of the sort required for the task in view.”30 Madison was the only one he wanted.
Madison kept silent about his enlistment in Hamilton’s project. After so many years of cipher, his insistence on anonymity for the Memorial and Remonstrance, and the gag order of the Constitutional Convention, he found the shadows familiar terrain. He began writing at 19 Maiden Lane. His boardinghouse became the headquarters of a burgeoning national operation whose tentacles reached throughout the thirteen states, gathering intelligence from the people while inducing them to support the Constitution. Madison was in the very brain of the new body politic.
FOR MADISON, THE THRALL OF THOSE DAYS WAS NOT DISSIMILAR TO A political or even a military campaign. Decades later, his fine hair almost completely gone, his thin fingers still turning out his precise, curved script, he telescoped the experience of writing the Federalist Papers with the dramatic shading only time can afford. He remembered a great rush of activity, as if he and Hamilton and Jay were almost hurtling toward the states’ ratifying conventions. Most of the papers, he remembered, were written in “great haste.” He and Hamilton put themselves under such tremendous pressure to produce what ended up being eighty-five essays—many of them several pages in length—that they often hurried new ones to the newspaper as “the printer was putting into type the parts of a number.” They were always already at work on new papers, constantly aware of the printers’ deadlines. They were almost literally cranking the essays out, their own drive to crush every quarter of resistance requiring constant battle.
In the beginning weeks, the demands of their outline and the hungry maw of the New York papers drew the three writers together, and Madison and Hamilton and Jay collegially exchanged drafts of everything. But when Jay dropped out for health reasons after two months, Madison and Hamilton took up the slack by increasing their own shares of the outline. Soon enough, the “shortness of the time allowed” simply made their prior level of coordination impossible. They began sending their essays directly to the papers, the typesetters scrambling madly to get their scrawl into type, so their ideas could reach a hungry public.31
Hamilton—who had proven himself a masterful military commander during the Revolutionary War—astutely assigned Madison the topics he had already mastered: constitutional history, separation of powers, the different governmental departments, and the nature of the social and economic ills they were trying to prevent. Madison went on to write twenty-nine of the essays, Hamilton fifty-one, and Jay eight. Ranging through a vast landscape of topics—some sweeping in scope, others more narrow—the two independent men, as the elderly Madison later remembered, discovered it was “most agreeable to each” not to try to “give a positive sanction to all the doctrines and sentiments of the other.” They wanted to let breathe the “known difference in the general complexion of their political theories.”32 Through that remarkable freedom, Madison would directly share his most deeply felt convictions with those he felt most desperately needed guidance.
As he prepared to write his first essay, he heard from Joseph Jones that minds in Virginia were not yet “ripe for the great change which the new plan will ultimately effect.” It was impossible to tell, Jones said, whether the Constitution was gaining or losing ground in the legislature.33 With that discomfiting intelligence, Madison began employing, again, 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 COMPLETED WHAT WOULD BE KNOWN AS FEDERALIST NUMBER 10 ON November 22. It was a cathedral of his philosophy.
He knew that Americans found their state governments far more comfortable and accessible than their federal counterpart. He also believed that the democracies that had developed so well in the thirteen colonies had succeeded because they developed in states. Consequently, he felt the new nation could fail precisely because it was so large, so remote, and so new. He suspected Henry would attack on that front, preying on the Virginia farmer or merchant who feared the new federal government would destroy their familiar apparatus in Richmond. It was to them he addressed his argument.
The country was afflicted, he declared, by “unsteadiness and injustice.” The culprit was faction—a “number of citizens” who are “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion” that sets them against the rights of other citizens and the “permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The Anglicans in Culpeper, the enemies of the forced contribution, the opponents of legal reform, and the supporters of the religious assessment—they were all faces of the same demon.
There were, he explained, only two ways to cure the “mischiefs” of faction: the first, to remove its causes, the second, to control its effects. Removing the causes led to a fork in the road with another two—and only two—options. The first was to destroy the liberty that is “essential to [faction’s] existence.” He brusquely dismissed that cure as “worse than the disease.” The second possibility was to give every citizen of America the “same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” That, he observed flatly, was as “impracticable, as the first would be unwise.”
His point was not to choose between those equally bad options, but to escape the fork entirely. He told his readers to consider one central truth: that the “latent causes” of faction are “sown in the nature of man.” We cannot, in other words, eliminate the cause of faction, because it is natural to us. The passions are part of being human. He enumerated examples from his readers’ own lives—their “zeal for different opinions” about religion or government, their attachment to politicians “ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power.” Those appetites, he said, lead all humans to “mutual animosities,” where even the most “frivolous and fanciful distinctions” can “kindle their unfriendly passions” and “excite their most violent conflicts.”
So, he concluded, we must accept the passions, and even embrace them, for not even leadership—not even statesmanship—can stop such forces of nature. It is “vain,” he wrote, to believe that even the “enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests.” And, anyway, even if statesmen could solve the problem, that was beside the point, because if history proves anything, he said, it is that “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.”
But there was a solution. The new country, he explained, had been designed to be a republic rather than a “pure democracy” where a common passion would be quickly “felt by a majority of the whole.” And in a republic, the goal was to “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” In spite of all of his adverse experiences in Richmond and Philadelphia, his optimism about the public’s ability to self-govern was remarkable. Madison had come to believe that a special class of citizens—standing sentinel over the country, almost like stewards—not only should be created, but could be.
With that, he drove toward the essay’s stunning conclusion, which matched his vision for the nation in sweep and scope. A larger rather than a smaller republic, he declared, would make it more difficult for “unworthy candidates” to be successful in the “vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried.” He obviously relished making such a counterintuitive case. The country should be larger and more federal in order to become more just and more stable. “Extend the sphere” of the republic, he told his readers, and you “take in a greater variety of parties and interests.” That would deprive the majority of their “common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
It was his grandest effort yet to channel the torrent of passions. In the larger republic he envisioned, leaders of factions would still be able to “kindle a flame within their particular states.” But they would be rendered unable to cause that conflagration to spread through the other states. That applied as well to Daniel Shays as to Patrick Henry. The very government Henry hated would finally govern him—which was, of course, why he hated it.
MADISON HANDED THE ESSAY TO HAMILTON AND JAY, WHO QUICKLY reviewed it. It was sent to the New York Packet on Friday, November 23. One of Western history’s most profound statements of constitutional values was about to reach the reading public. Madison again was relying on his anonymous words to seize the public’s imagination—and they would.
ONLY A WEEK LATER, HE SAT DOWN TO WRITE HIS SECOND ESSAY. HENRY had attacked the “novelty” of the Constitution. Madison took up his quill to write a near-parody of a Tom Paine–style pamphlet in response. “Hearken not to the voice which petulantly tells you,” he urged, that the Constitution was a “novelty in the political world,” and that it belonged to the “theories of the wildest projectors.” He implored his “countrymen” to “shut your ears against this unhallowed language,” condemning the “poison” of the attacks for polluting the “kindred blood which flows in the blood of American citizens.” The Constitution, he countered, was in fact the Revolution’s sweetest fruit, the result of a “manly spirit” and “numerous innovations displayed on the American theatre.”
In his zeal to defend innovation, he ignored any hesitations he had previously held about the Constitution. The men in Philadelphia, he declared, had achieved something which had “no parallel in the annals of human society.” They had “formed the design of a great confederacy,” and if it had any imperfections, he wrote, “we wonder at the fewness of them.”
So it was that a skeptic, in the heat of defending the vulnerable Constitution from his enemies, fell in love with it.
MADISON WAS NOT THE ONLY AMERICAN SHIFTING POSITIONS. THE colonies themselves, like an alarmed animal, were at once bucking and stampeding forward. On December 7, a worried Washington sent Madison a note observing that the Constitution seemed to have lost so much ground in Virginia that it no longer had a majority.34 But that same day, Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution, by a unanimous vote. Pennsylvania followed four days later with a large majority, and then New Jersey on December 18, with another unanimous vote.
Madison set to work mining his research on confederacies for three rapidly written new essays. In Federalist Number 18, which he wrote on December 7, he praised the ancient Greek Achaean league for mastering popular government through a central authority and laws.35 In Number 19, written the same day, he described the “violent and bloody contests” that can result from religious factions.36
Three days later, he pressed on with Number 20, where his concern was the current system’s imperium in imperio—its divided center. He hammered on that vulnerability repeatedly, even obsessively. A “sovereignty over sovereigns, a government over governments, a legislature for communities,” he explained, was “subversive of the order and ends of civil policy” by “substituting violence in place of law.” He acknowledged that his blizzard of facts and histories demanded a lot from readers, but he wrote, “I make no apology for having dwelt so long on the contemplation of these federal precedents.” Ever Witherspoon’s student, he explained that experience was the “oracle of truth,” and that where history’s lessons were “unequivocal,” they should be “conclusive and sacred.”37
Would that a majority in every state could share his historically informed conviction about the Constitution. But as winter gripped Manhattan, and as he burrowed deeper into Mrs. House’s to study the letters arriving every day from Richmond, it seemed Henry and his band of anti-Federalists were growing even more aggressive.
MADISON LEARNED FROM VIRGINIA THAT CITIZENS WHO WERE OTHERWISE “equally respectable in every point of character” were still “marshalled in opposition to each other.”38 He thought Richmond was “rapidly degenerating.” He sniped to George Washington that the legislature’s shameful weakness proved the need for an “anchor against the fluctuations which threaten shipwreck to our liberty.”39 The time for him to fight in the arena was nigh. But he began to have second thoughts.
His friends were pressuring him to return, and soon. On December 16, from Rose Hill, Virginia, Lawrence Taliaferro, a friend from his youth, pled with him to come home to lead the Federalists at the ratification convention. Then fifty-three years old, Taliaferro had a nephew at Princeton, but he himself had never been properly educated and could barely write. He wrote Madison anyway: “I am a vary pore Penman & dont wish to take up two Much of you time in reding a Long Letter.” But he plowed ahead. “I am sorry to inform you,” he went on, that the “Federal Sistum is rufly Handeled by sum vary Able Men in this State.” It was the “sincere Wish & desier of Myself & a Grate Many others,” he said, that Madison lead the ratification effort in the spring. Goading Madison, the wily Taliaferro informed him of a rumor that he was “Opos’d to the Sistum” and even that he was “Actually writing a Pece against it.”40
Henry Lee, too, implored Madison to attend, warning that a conspiracy was gaining ground in Orange to prevent his election. He told Madison he ought to undercut it, regardless of “any delicacy or any other motive.”41 A friend named Andrew Shepherd also sent word from Orange warning that “artfull persons” were “injecting their poison into the unwary.” He begged Madison to allow him to “recommend your presence as soon as you conveniently could.”42
But Madison refused to tell his friends he would be coming back. Even in his own mind, he wasn’t sure he wanted the political fight ahead.