NINE STATES WERE NEEDED TO RATIFY THE CONSTITUTION. SIX WERE supporting it so far. The states who had not yet concluded their conventions were Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York—and Virginia. Of those, Rhode Island was a lost cause. On February 22, New Hampshire had concluded a first session of its convention without voting at all. If New Hampshire ultimately fell out, Madison knew, the Constitution’s survival would depend on the remaining five states. That political reality was ratcheting the stakes to an almost unbearable level in the states. From New York, Cyrus Griffin wrote Madison on March 24 that the discussion of the Constitution “seems to deaden the activity of the human mind as to all other matters.”1
Madison arrived back in Orange from a horrible trip over rutted, muddy late winter roads. He had just turned thirty-seven. He had an ominous feeling about what lay ahead. His initial conversations did not improve matters. While he experienced great “satisfaction” in seeing all his friends, he discovered that Orange was “filled with the most absurd and groundless prejudices against” the Constitution. And he needed those very people to give him a seat to the convention.
On a very windy day, he walked up to a rostrum that had been set up outside. A crowd restlessly shifted before him, stamping their feet to stay warm. Many obviously opposed the Constitution. He had grown accustomed to campaigning before individuals and small groups, but for “the first time in my life,” as he later wrote Eliza Trist, he would now need to deliver a speech before a large crowd in public. As he wryly recalled later, Madison “launch[ed] into a harangue” in favor of the Constitution. His speech was choppy but successful. The people elected him a delegate to the convention by the decisive margin of four to one.2
IMAGE 22.1. JAMES MADISON IN 1792, FOUR YEARS AFTER THE RATIFYING CONVENTION, BY CHARLES WILLSON PEALE. COURTESY OF GILCREASE MUSEUM, TULSA, OKLAHOMA.
From nearby Charlottesville, George Nicholas informed Madison that Henry had become “almost avowedly an enemy to the union.” He was also conniving and secretive, his “real sentiments industriously concealed” within the Trojan horse of his amendment strategy.3 Madison responded that any conditional amendments, much less a second general convention, would be “fatal.” From his work ramming through legal reform in Virginia and pushing the Constitution through Congress, Madison had learned that momentum was crucial to victory. The delay alone that amendments would entail, he said, was “too serious to be hazarded.”
As April arrived, Rhode Island took the expected but still unsettling step of rejecting the Constitution outright. However, on April 28 in Maryland and May 3 in South Carolina, large majorities voted for ratification. Eight states had ratified the Constitution. The fate of the Constitution fell on Virginia, New York, and New Hampshire. Those three states had called their conventions for June 2, 17, and 18, respectively. Virginia’s would be over two weeks before the others, but because of delays in travel, and the uncertainty of the other two conventions’ ending dates, there would be no real way for any of the three to know when the crucial ninth-state threshold had been reached. Every day of the convention in Richmond, therefore, would need to be fought as if the very country depended on it.
Meanwhile, Henry was driving Virginia’s north and south further apart. From Richmond, Edward Carrington wrote Madison that the upper and middle parts of Southside—Henry’s territory—had “been made in Phrenzy.” Under Henry’s sway, they were sending to the ratifying convention “weak & bad Men,” who had already “bound themselves to vote in the negative.” They would “in all cases,” Carrington predicted, “be the tools of” Henry.4
Speaking of Henry, Madison predicted to Randolph that “desperate measures” would be his “game.”5 To Jefferson, he confessed his concern not only about Henry but about the conscience-driven gadfly George Mason, worrying that the “violence of his passions” against the Bill of Rights–less Constitution might lead him to be “thrown into” Henry’s camp. If the pair succeeded in their crusade for amendments or a second convention, he wrote, “I think the Constitution, and the Union will be both be endangered.”6
As May arrived, hearts raced across Virginia whenever the Constitution rose in conversation. Tench Coxe predicted the Constitution was “now hastening to a crisis.” “The decision of Virginia,” he said, “ensures its existence.” If Virginia rejected the Constitution, he fretted, then New York, New Hampshire, and North Carolina probably would also.7
In Orange, Madison feverishly began plotting his battalion’s plan for Richmond.
MADISON WORKED THROUGH ISSUES WITH HIS FATHER, HIS FRIENDS, and his political allies. In response to a friend who asked for help with Kentucky’s new constitution, he said he would not “have a moment’s leisure before I set off for Richmond.” And once he was there, he said, he would not have time for “any subject distinct from” the Constitution.8 Totally immersed in strategy, he was preparing to hurl himself into a critical test of 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 LEFT ORANGE ON SUNDAY, JUNE 1, 1788, AND PULLED INTO RICHMOND that night. The next day, he walked into the New Academy on Richmond’s Shockoe Hill. The New Academy’s cornerstone had been laid only two years earlier, and the auditorium still smelled of freshly cut wood—and sweat, wigs, and horses. Everything had a feeling of newness; the auditorium sat only blocks from the new capital building, which was busily under construction.9
One hundred and seventy delegates were roaming the room, but just twenty would participate in the debates. Of those, only a few would emerge as key players. In every respect, the scene that would play out in the coming three weeks was a battle between upstarts and the establishment. Madison’s Federalists were, for the most part, a generation younger than their opponents. On his team was the emotional Edmund Randolph, now thirty-five, who at long last had buckled under his friend’s pressure. As Madison happily told Rufus King, Randolph had decided to throw himself “fully into our scale.”10 There was young John Marshall, just thirty-three, who would go on to become chief justice of the US Supreme Court. There was loyal Henry Lee, thirty-two, who would later become Virginia’s ninth governor. Their elders included George Wythe, the law professor who, at sixty-two, had taught many of the men in the room, and Edmund Pendleton, also sixty-two, who was one of Virginia’s great judges and who had first helped select Madison as a delegate from Orange County.
On the other side was a daunting triumvirate. First was Patrick Henry, a robust fifty-two years old, both father and grandfather of the anti-Federalist movement. Second was George Mason, an august sixty-three, considered wily and authoritative. Third was Benjamin Harrison, sixty-two, now governor. The junior member was Madison’s friend James Monroe, just thirty, who had in recent weeks turned decisively against the Constitution, to Madison’s great consternation.
The ratification was still Henry’s to lose and Madison’s to win—and Madison knew it. In the coming weeks, his anxiety about what would happen if the new country disintegrated would become, at certain points, simply too much for him to bear.
ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, HENRY ROSE BEFORE THE CHAIRMAN, THE delegates, and the hundreds of onlookers to make his opening remarks. He held his leonine head impressively; his craggy brow seemed to foretell ominous things. “I consider myself as the servant of the people of this commonwealth, as a sentinel over their rights, liberty, and happiness” he proclaimed. “I represent their feelings when I saw, that they are exceedingly uneasy, being brought from that state of full security, which they enjoyed, to the present delusive appearance of things.”
Henry was laying out his terms, assuming the mantle of protector of the people and of a status quo that was superior to the radical changes advanced by the Federalists. Pompous, florid, and alarmist, he forged ahead, describing the new Constitution as “perilous and uneasy” and the people as “exceedingly uneasy and disquieted” and the new federalist scheme as an “annihilation of the most solemn engagement of the states.” He painted a pastoral past imperiled by the young men’s adventure in Philadelphia. In a fatherly tone, he told the crowd, “You ought to be extremely cautious, watchful, jealous of your liberty, for instead of securing your rights, you may lose them forever.” They had been deceived. “Here, sir, no dangers, no insurrection or tumult, has happened—every thing has been calm and tranquil.”
The Federalists were reckless adventurers. “We are wandering on the great ocean of human affairs,” he said. “I see no land mark to guide us. We are running we know not whither.” The cure would be far worse than the disease. “A wrong step made now will plunge us into misery, and our republic will be lost.”11
The faces of the men in the arena reflected the force of Henry’s emotional beginning. Madison could not have been surprised. Intending to make the most of Randolph’s Saul-to-Damascus story, Randolph and Madison had agreed that they would begin with Randolph’s story, from his own lips. He rose and admitted that he did not sign the Constitution in Philadelphia—and said he would not do so again. Yes, he conceded, he was often “too candid,” but he would nonetheless here “depart from the concealment belonging to the character of a statesman.” Politics, said Randolph, was “too often nourished by passion, at the expense of understanding.”
He then aimed at Henry. “No man,” he asserted, had a right to “impose his opinion on others.” His remarks were tinged with melancholy. He knew he had alienated thousands of people with his weak middle road in Philadelphia—to be “moderate in politics,” he mused sadly, “forbids an ascent to the summit of political fame.”12 The next day, he headed farther down this somber path, abjectly stating that “ambition and popularity are no objects with me.” He said he expected to retire in a year to private life.*13
Randolph’s stance was that of a martyr for the Constitution. He urged the convention to stand with the men who had fought for them—his friend Madison first among them. The Federalists had the “most enlightened heads in the western hemisphere,” he claimed. When he had refused to support the Constitution in Philadelphia, “I had not even the glimpse of the genius of America.”14 The fight to come was his penance.
Two of the four main players had now entered the floor. The next up was George Mason, of the anti-Federalist contingent. He regarded the assembly quietly. He began, “I solemnly declare that no man is a greater friend to a firm union of the American states than I am.” But the union could not be reached without “hazarding the rights of the people.” The power of taxation, he said, was “calculated to annihilate totally the state governments.”15
The stark contrast that day between Henry’s delusional imaginings and Mason’s principled recalcitrance must have put a lift in Madison’s step as he left the assembly room. That night, he sat in his room, dipped his quill into his inkwell, and rejoiced to George Washington that Henry and Mason together had “made a lame figure,” that they appeared to be separated, putting them on “different and awkward ground.” Each had managed to throw an unfavorable light on the other, and Madison said he was “elated” by that development. But he hastened to say, “I dare not however speak with certainty as to the decision.” His adversaries, after all, were relentlessly stoking “local interests & prejudices.”16 In another letter to Rufus King, Madison admitted that “several perplexing circumstances” could mean “the majority will be but small, & may possibly be defeated.”17
IMAGE 22.2. GEORGE MASON BY ALBERT ROSENTHAL, PRINT OF GEORGE MASON OF VIRGINIA BASED ON A PAINTING IN THE POSSESSION OF THE FAMILY. COURTESY OF THE FIRST AMERICAN WEST, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS RESEARCH CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARY.
But he was still careful to hedge his bets—“I dare not however,” he told Washington, “speak with certainty as to the decision.”18
THE NEXT DAY, HENRY ATTEMPTED TO DESTROY WHAT HE HAD ONLY damaged the first day. His skill lay in his maddening elusiveness; while his reputation was of a mighty man, he went to great lengths to seem ordinary, to put himself on the side of those mystified by the need for elaborate changes issuing from the cosmopolis of Philadelphia. “I wish I was possessed of talents, or possessed of any thing,” he wheedled, “that might enable me to elucidate this great subject.” He proceeded to excoriate the Constitution. Like a spider, he spun a poisonous web around the Constitution, using the word radical again and again to describe its provisions. He disingenuously mourned his inability to support it: “[I] am fearful I have lived long enough to become an old fashioned fellow,” he said. “Perhaps an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined enlightened times, be deemed old fashioned: If so, I am contented to be so.”
One onlooker later said that he unconsciously touched his wrists as Henry spoke, as if he were wearing chains of bondage.19 Henry wove into his remarks a constant, cutting sarcasm about the “refinement” and “enlightenment” of Madison and the other Federalists. He brandished his own history, depicting himself as a gnarled patriot, a sort of human touchstone. “Twenty-eight years ago was I supposed a traitor for my country. I was then said to be a bane of sedition, because I supported the rights of country: I may be thought suspicious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger.” He attacked and attacked. “Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it, but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.” It was clear he had read the Federalist Papers, and carefully. He granted that the new Constitution would guard against factions and licentiousness—but it would also, he seethed, “oppress and ruin the people.” Countering Madison’s vision of an energetic government, Henry retorted that the idea was “extremely ridiculous” and “cannot be in earnest.” The new federal government, he said, “will trample on your fallen liberty.”
He pushed ahead, the Federalists in his crosshairs. “However uncharitable it may appear,” he believed that the “most unworthy characters” would get into power and prevent amendments to improve the Constitution. Those were true ad hominem fighting words, and the crowd reacted accordingly. Henry proceeded to bombard every foundation stone of Madison’s philosophy. A “contemptible minority,” he warned, would be able to prevent policies favoring the majority. The standing army would “execute the execrable commands of tyranny.” The unlimited taxation power would be “madness.” And the Constitution itself, he charged, was illegitimate: The delegates in Philadelphia had only been empowered to consolidate the existing government—not craft a new one.
He even embraced the very charge he knew the Federalists would drop over his head like a noose. “When I thus profess myself to be an advocate for the liberty of the people,” he admitted to the crowd, “I shall be told that I am to be a demagogue.” But he did not mind such “illiberal insinuations,” he shrugged. He wanted to own and to embody, to become, the role of protector of the people—to be a demagogue. After all, he said, the first thing he had in his heart was “American liberty,” while only the second was “American union.”
Thus Henry sought to expose a hidden Janus face of Madison’s statesmanship ambition. Again and again, he ridiculed Madison’s vision in the Federalist Papers (particularly Numbers 10 and 51) of an elegant marvel of political engineering. The entire Madisonian scheme was, he declared, just the opposite: reckless, dangerous claptrap. Instead of checks and balances, Henry told the men, they would get “specious, imaginary balances” and “rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances.” The Constitution was supposed to have “beautiful features,” but they were instead “horribly frightful.” Among its “other deformities,” he claimed the Constitution had an “awful squinting—it squints toward monarchy.” The citizens of the eight states that had already acted to ratify the document had been “egregiously misled.”
The debate was supposed to proceed clause by clause, but Henry had just stampeded through the document—ironic for one who had attacked the Constitution itself for “chain-rattling.” As he closed, he conceded, guiltlessly, that while his speech had been “out of order,” his passion was to blame.20 He had been going on his gut.
IT WAS ALL RETURNING TO PLATO. THE DARK STEED OF THE PASSIONS WAS running rampant in the New Academy, loosed and goaded by Patrick Henry. Henry’s anti-Federalist creed contained real ideas, to be sure—about the sanctity of states, the difference between a confederacy and a nation, and the existence of a bill of rights. But what Henry’s beginning made clear was that he intended the debate not to be primarily about ideas, but about fears and self-interest. And thus Madison’s great challenge: breaking the dark steed and lashing the chariot of state to reason.
Years later, a mysterious man who claimed to have been one of Madison’s “warmest opponents” told a historian that he listened with “more delight” to Madison’s “clear and cunning argumentation” than to Henry’s “eloquent and startling appeals.”21 Thus Madison, like Henry, would seek to transform his defining weakness into his capital strength.
RANDOLPH FIRST STOOD TO TAKE ANOTHER RUN AT HENRY, REFRAMING his intransigence not as a brave stand but as a stain on patriotism. Through the “most gallant exploits” and by overcoming the “most astonishing difficulties,” America had won the “admiration of the world.” “Let no future historian inform posterity,” he cautioned, that they had failed now to “concur in any regular efficient government.”22
Randolph sat down. Madison steeled himself. It was a warm Friday afternoon. For two full days, he had absorbed the proceedings, gaining a handle on the breadth of the anti-Federalists’ planned assault. Randolph had fought back—but on many of Henry’s same terms. Madison saw a clear need for someone to change those terms, to recast the debate and seize the field. As in Philadelphia, he took that burden squarely on his small shoulders.
Much had changed since his earliest days as Henry’s councilor. The group of men now beheld before them not an upstart or an effete young intellectual, but an accomplished and formidable (if diminutive) man. He had grown out of his fragile and slender physique, becoming “muscular and well-proportioned.” No longer as pale as during his youth, he had a “ruddy” complexion. He was well and expensively dressed, in a single-breasted coat and a doubled straight collar. Expensive ruffles decorated his wrists and breast. He had lost even more hair, and he still vainly combed what was left from the back of his head over his forehead, but he had also powdered his hair, creating a dignified, almost British impression.23
Although he comported himself more formidably than in the past, he did not begin auspiciously. He began speaking in such a low voice that the official transcriber of the proceedings scribbled in frustration that Madison’s “exordium could not be heard distinctly.”24
Yet Madison pushed forward. In his methodical manner, he began by baring the bankrupt basis of Henry’s appeal. “I shall not attempt to make impressions by any ardent professions of zeal for the public welfare,” he declared. “Professions of attachment to the public good, and comparisons of parties ought not to govern or influence us now.”25 He was targeting Henry’s very passions. He pounded that theme again and again. The convention must not “address our arguments to the feelings and passions,” he said, but to “understandings and judgments.” He looked at the audience and, in a rare personal note, admitted that it “gives me pain” to hear men like Henry “continually distorting the natural construction of language.” After all, he said, it wasn’t the majority that needed protecting in these troubled times. History showed that “turbulence, violence and abuse of power” in fact followed from the “majority trampling on the rights of the minority,” producing only “factions and commotions.”26
Henry had abandoned the clause-by-clause plan of debate in favor of sweeping assaults. Madison now responded in kind. He mockingly recounted Henry’s dumbfoundingly pastoral view of the confederacy. If America was “at perfect repose” and in “perfect tranquility and safety,” why, he challenged, had so many states already voted for the new Constitution? Why, he pleaded, had the government been so “shamefully disgraced,” and the prior constitution so grossly violated?27 Henry, he said, was recklessly casting embers around a bone-dry country, sparking “the heart-burnings of a majority.”28 Henry must be held to account.
Openly reinstating rationality in the hall, Madison returned again to his research. He explained why the history of confederations dictated the necessity for direct taxation. There would always be a balance between federal and state government. “Direct taxes,” he promised, “will only be recurred to for great purposes.” That power was “necessary for the preservation of the union.”29
In that manner, Madison proceeded to bat down every arrow Henry had slung at the Constitution—from its separation of powers to its apportionment scheme. Madison’s defense concluded with an emotional peroration: “I hope the patriotism of the people will continue and be a sufficient guard to their liberties.”30 He was saying that the people would require patriotic faith to transform his scheme from a blueprint into a living and breathing government. His “rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous” scheme depended precisely on the conviction that men could at last transcend the violent spiral of history. By contrast, Henry’s attacks masked a cynical disbelief that men could ever truly govern themselves.
He finally sat down. The people beheld the keeper of the flame of the Constitution from Philadelphia. That night, Madison, exhausted, tried to recover as best as he could. But he suspected he would face another equally draining assault the next day.
RISING THE NEXT MORNING, MADISON LIKELY ALREADY FELT APPREHENSIVE and jittery. He arrived at the New Academy. Henry, as ever undaunted and assured, rose. He coyly invited Randolph to “continue his observations” from the prior day. Randolph immediately lashed into Henry and the anti-Federalists, lambasting the current system as rife with “imbecility” and but a “ship-wrecked vessel.”31 If the government could not rely on regular taxation, it would have to go begging for donations from the states. Randolph scorned the “absurdity and sophistry” of any argument supporting such voluntary contributions. “You would be laughed at for your folly,” for thinking “human nature could be thus operated upon.”32 By holding back such a “necessary power,” he warned, the men in the New Academy would “unwarily lay the foundation of usurpation itself.”33
With this dire warning, Randolph returned to his seat. The fervor of the man, previously so wobbly, must have astounded the crowd. Now it was Madison’s turn; precision would follow rage. He dispensed with any pretense of humility or deference. Instead, he drove directly at the heart of the matter. Taxation, he tersely said, was “indispensible and necessary” to a “well-organized government.”34 He attacked Henry’s absurd pastoral vision of the status quo. The present system was “pernicious and fatal.” History was riddled with similar failures. In ancient Greece, the Amphictyonic confederation had ended in “sanguinary coercion,” and the Achean League had been “continually agitated.” An early German federal system had collapsed into a “nerveless body.” A confederate government in Holland had displayed “characteristic imbecility.”35 “Governments destitute of energy,” he concluded tightly, would “ever produce anarchy.”36
In a fell swoop, Henry’s former subaltern had confounded and upended every one of Henry’s assertions, capsizing, along with them, the former governor’s entire narrative and his self-assumed savior role. Fuming, Madison’s former mentor rose in rebuttal. This time, he appealed to the now-hoary authority of the American Revolution itself. The “great principles of a free government,” he complained, were being “reversed.” The states were being “harassed,” while individuals were being “oppressed and subjected to repeated distresses.” Like the British empire before it, the federal government was now overseeing the “wanton deprivation of property.”37
In high dudgeon, Madison rose in response. He summoned, in absentia, George Washington, the greatest authority of all. He referred to the general, mock-obliquely, as “that man who had the most extensive acquaintance with the nature of the country.” “I did not introduce that man,” he said disingenuously, to “bias any gentleman here.” But even Washington, Madison asserted, had himself declared, “Some great change was necessary.”38
As strong as these words were, the fight with Henry was clearly draining. Madison visibly sagged and told the crowd, “I shall no longer fatigue the committee at this time.”39 He fell back into his chair, his stomach churning, yearning to flee the room—but he could not.
MADISON’S TRUMP CARD OF GEORGE WASHINGTON INFURIATED HENRY, who responded by scorching everything his former aide had said. If the Constitution was a “little or a trifling evil,” it should be adopted. But if it would “entail misery on the free people of this country, I insist rejection ought to follow.”40 In this political hothouse, his rhetoric flowered even more lushly than usual. The Constitution, he fumed, was “impiously irritating the avenging hand of heaven.” People “in the full enjoyment of freedom” were launching “out into the wide ocean of human affairs.” The Federalists, those wild-eyed radicals, were fecklessly discarding “Poor little humble republican maxims” that had “stood the shock of ages.”41 As for Randolph, he ominously insinuated that “something extraordinary” must have occurred to cause “so great a change in his opinion.”42
But within the violent bluster, the defiant provincialism, and the obvious hatred of the upstarts, the delegates listening closely also heard an idea worth taking seriously: self-reliance. Henry told the assembly, “We have the animating fortitude and persevering alacrity of republican men.” The collective conviction among the men in the room about their mission for freedom against tyranny, he thought, could be a potent source for his own crusade against the Constitution. “Sir,” he addressed the crowd, with his endearing habit of addressing an entire audience as a single man, “it is the fortune of a free people, not to be intimidated by imaginary dangers.”
He proclaimed, “Fear is the passion of slaves.”43
This must have hit Madison with the force of a cannon blast. Of all of the former governor’s many faces—the flatterer and the agitator, the executive and the military man—this was the most dangerous: muse of men’s dreams and their nightmares. This was the Henry who could effortlessly weave optimism, pessimism, and action. This was the Henry who could connect more explosively with men’s hearts than anyone in the country, let alone a guarded man like Madison who resisted public oratory like a disease. This was the Henry who had proclaimed so loudly and infectiously, “Give me liberty or give me death!” in St. John’s Church in 1775.
And this was the Henry who squarely stood between Madison and the nation he so desperately wanted to achieve.
Having found this electric current, Henry slashed away at Madison and his allies with barely hidden contempt, cannily allying himself with the men in the room. The “middle and lower ranks of people,” he slyly admitted to the assembly, lacked the “illumined ideas” that the “well-born”—an absurd attack on Madison and his brethren, given Henry’s own “well-born” family—were “so happily possessed of.” He mocked the “microscopic eyes of modern statesmen”—completely flipping Madison’s proud lifelong pursuit—for obsessing about an “abundance of defects in old systems.” In contrast, “My fears are not the force of imagination—they are too well founded.” He thundered: “I tremble for my country!”44
He then wheeled on Randolph, who had earlier innocently used the word herd to describe the people. Henry seized that mistake and battered the lawyer with it. Randolph, he declared, had transformed Virginians from “respectable independent citizens” into “abject, dependent subjects, or slaves.” Randolph was “degradingly assimilating our citizens to a herd”—likening the proud men in the assembly to chattel.45
Randolph sprang to his feet, at once angry and flummoxed. He protested that he had not used the word to “excite any odium,” but simply to “convey the idea of a multitude.”46
Henry lightly deflected Randolph’s umbrage. With an air of self-satisfaction, he countered that Randolph’s choice of words had “made a deep impression in my mind.” The Federalists believed the federal government “must have our souls.” He employed the strongest condemnation available in genteel Virginia: “This is dishonorable and disgraceful,” he trumpeted. “I tell you, they shall not have the soul of Virginia!”47 He sat down only after declaring that a bill of rights was “indispensibly necessary”—meaning that the Constitution must be destroyed without it.
Absorbing all of this, Madison felt ill.
HE ROSE AND EXCUSED HIMSELF. HIS BOWELS FELT LOOSE, HIS STOMACH churning. He returned to his boardinghouse and fell into his bed. But his condition did not improve. He felt fragile, as if he might break, as if his very mind could shatter and he would go mad. He remained in bed. After two days, his symptoms were unabated, and he wrote to Rufus King, “Writing is scarcely practicable & very injurious to me.” The last sentence of his painfully short letter was telling: “I think we have a majority as yet,” Madison said, “but the other party are ingenious & indefatigable.”48
James Madison, the man, was in revolt against James Madison, the statesman. He was painfully aware that he had abandoned his Federalist allies, deep in combat on the field of battle in the New Academy. He knew they desperately needed his quiet intellectual force to combat the wrathful anti-Federalists. It was as if he was back in militia exercises in Orange County sixteen years ago. There, he had choked and retreated into himself in the face of adversity. Now, like then, he was conspicuously absent from the battlefield. In his absence, tensions grew between the foes. By Monday, Henry and Randolph’s verbal animosity threatened to turn into physical violence.
BACK IN THE HALL, IT BEGAN WHEN HENRY ROSE AND SNEERED THAT THE Federalists were “illumined genii,”49 who viewed ordinary Virginians as a “mobbish suspected herd.” Virginia’s 180 state legislators lacked “virtue enough to manage its own interests. These must be referred to [as] the chosen ten”—meaning Virginia’s federal congressmen.50 He cast suspicion on the vaunted conclave in Philadelphia, lambasting the “most wicked and pernicious schemes” that had occurred there “under the dark veil of secrecy.”51 He ridiculed the proposal to pass the Constitution with only the possibility of amending it later as an “insult” to himself and the modest folk he mirrored. “I am at a loss what to say,” he claimed. “You agree to bind yourselves hand and foot—for the sake of what?—Of being unbound!”52
The scholar who later wrote a thorough analysis of the ratifying convention, Hugh Blair Grigsby, reported that Henry’s speech was “delivered with transcendent effect.” Grigsby also wrote that one witness specifically recalled an instance—conspicuously absent from the official transcript—where Henry “painted in the most vivid colors the dangers likely to result to the black population from the most unlimited power of the general government” and then “suddenly broke out with the homely exclamation: ‘They’ll free your niggers!’ Henry evidently made that proclamation in a sort of outrageous humor, ingratiating himself with the slaveholders in the audience in a spirit that was both satirical and serious. The audience “passed instantly from fear to wayward laughter.” Grigsby’s source recalled, “It was most ludicrous to see men who a moment before were half frightened to death now with a ‘broad grin on their faces.’”53 Such was Henry’s quicksilver ability to manipulate an audience like a marionette on a string.
“Tell me not of checks on paper,” he lectured the crowd—a shot at the absent Madison—but of “checks founded on self-love.” Henry clearly intended to conceptually destroy Madison’s hoped-for “energetic” new center of federal gravity. Henry was arguing that the spokes should govern instead of the hub. The “real rock of political salvation” was “self-love perpetuated from age to age in every human breast, and maintained in every action.”54
Thus encouraged to love themselves, many in the room began to feel the Federalists were standing in their way, and Henry seized the momentum. With Madison gone, he blasted away at Randolph, who he said had “withheld his signature” in Philadelphia precisely because he was “not led by the illumined—the illustrious few.”55 Henry damned Randolph with vanishing praise, acerbically observing the clash between his prior “noble and disinterested conduct” and his now-ardent support, while insinuating that there had been a dastardly quid pro quo for Randolph’s conversion. “Such is my situation that as a poor individual, I look for information every where.” Perhaps Randolph, notorious for his family’s financial troubles, had traded his surprise political support for a financial reward.
Infuriated, Randolph rose. “I find myself attacked in the most illiberal manner,” he cried. “I disdain his aspersions and his insinuations,” he sputtered, pointing at Henry. Randolph protested Henry’s charge of inconsistency and said he had always been “invariably governed by an invincible attachment to the happiness of the people of America.” If he did not “stand on the bottom of integrity, and pure love for Virginia,” he threatened, “I wish to resign my existence.” The “imbecility of the confederation” was obvious. In Philadelphia, he had been “impressed” with the arguments, then swayed by the need for an “intimate and firm union.”
Randolph then charged at Henry anew. “I understand not,” he said, why Henry would give such “full scope to licentiousness and dissipation,” who would, by rejecting the Constitution, “plunge us into anarchy.”56
Randolph, clearly rattled, was accusing Henry of intentionally trying to destroy the new country, and Henry again jumped up to respond. He “had no intention of offending anyone,” he shot back, with crocodile tears. Randolph hurled back an equally insincere thanks—were it not for Henry’s concession, he claimed, he would have disclosed “certain facts” that “would have made some men’s hair stand on end.”57 Angrily, Randolph then defended himself against the assertion of being “one of the illumined” with a tirade, ominously saying that in Henry’s reckless attacks, “I see a storm growling over Virginia.” By the end, Randolph was still unsated, still attacking Henry for having “perverted my meaning.”58
The session broke, the hall nervously buzzing. The vitriol between the two men was palpable. Word quickly spread that the two men would duel that evening. That night, in the muggy Richmond air, Colonel William Cabell—Henry’s ally and friend—strode out as Henry’s second, pistol in hand, ready to duel Randolph’s second. A reconciliation was evidently negotiated, as no shots were fired by the men.59 But the unresolved anger festered like a raw wound.
The proceedings tested all the parties. James Monroe and James Madison had previously been so close they had traveled and invested together. Yet the following Tuesday—with Madison still inert and miserable in his sweltering boarding room—Monroe rose to share his “great anxiety” and “gloomy apprehensions” about Madison’s beloved Constitution.60 He boldly went where no anti-Federalist had dared go before—to confront Madison’s supposedly impervious historical proof that confederacies require a strong central government. Monroe picked his way through the same ancient confederacies Madison had studied for a shockingly different conclusion. “Nothing,” he declared, “can be adduced from any of them.” In fact, he said, foreign interference and foreign aid mattered far more in a confederacy’s success or failure than federalism (or the lack of it).61
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MONROE’S VOLLEY CANNOT BE OVERSTATED, FOR IT shows just why young Madison—here, at the peak of his powers—was so much more than the sum of his parts. His reputation as a research-driven logician by this point was mighty indeed. What Monroe did was present a perfectly respectable replica of Madison’s own Method. Monroe marshaled reams of historical studies to assert that the Constitution in fact would create a “dangerous government,” founded on “haste” and “wild precipitation.”62 He did so with preparation and conviction, and with the benefit of Madison’s absence.
Yet the sine qua non of Madison’s Method was not any of the elements individually. It was the chemistry among them, the unique forcefulness of the man as realized in his unique brand of pugilism. And so Monroe’s worthy effort still paled next to Madison’s.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN HIS BOARDINGHOUSE, MADISON LEARNED OF Monroe’s onslaught—and steeled himself to return to the arena.
* Perhaps because of confessionals just such as this, Randolph would be pulled back into public service soon enough; he would go on to serve as attorney general and then secretary of state in the new federal government.
