THIS BOOK HAS MOSTLY BEEN ABOUT JAMES MADISON’S YOUNGER YEARS, the period of his life that ended soon after the Constitution was ratified in Virginia, and the meaning of those years for a more vital understanding of statesmanship and the role for leaders in a healthy and vibrant democracy.
The young James Madison had a singular impact on the country’s future and—this is not overstating matters—human history. Madison’s narrow but irrefutable defeat of Patrick Henry at the convention was the result of the near-genetic force of two entwined strands: his political philosophy and his personal character. As Stanford’s Jack Rakove has observed, “In the end, among a generation of leaders well steeped in the literature of political theory, [Madison’s] greatest contributions to the founding of the republic flowed from the force of his intellect.”1
His ideas included intricate checks and balances; enmeshed factions; the collective embrace of a great but uncertain future; bending the states to the federal government’s will; granting the federal government only enumerated powers; and grounding the entire enterprise on both optimism about humanity’s potential and skepticism about our innate moral goodness. Together, it was a seductive, and all-encompassing, philosophy of political life.
His character was forceful without declaring it; controlling in subtle (and often infuriating) ways; dauntingly logical and precise against his opponents; sweepingly well-prepared with facts, history, and seriatim arguments; good-humored and self-deprecating; bold; endearing to those he trusted and his allies; and, overall, surprisingly charismatic.
Those two strands—his philosophy and his character—married in his quest for governance. He believed the passions possessed tremendous destructive force. His political mission became mastering them by channeling them—not denying their existence or cutting them off.
And so young Madison helped transform raw democracy into something subtle and exquisitely cantilevered, giving human form to philosophical ideas. Bernard Bailyn, the celebrated Harvard colonial historian, has observed that the hundreds of American revolutionary pamphlets, with their heavy emphasis on new ideas, were the “distinctive literature of the Revolution.”2 The historian Gordon Wood notes that Bailyn illuminates the sheer “importance of ideas in bringing on the Revolution.” The “idealist” explanation helps explain Americans’ profound concern—then and now—with tyranny and freedom and government itself.3 Ideas, in the founding period, could not be translated into action—could not change political reality so profoundly—without a human being like Madison to research, reflect on, improve, innovate, and proselytize for them.
In young Madison’s case especially, this was the essence of his statesmanship. His statesmanship inhered in his restless, impatient drive to push a nation to achieve the highest version of itself. Statesmanship was young Madison’s lodestar. It lit his path through the darkest of nights and over the rockiest of roads. And it gave him the inspiration to defeat the most formidable of obstacles, including the rebellion of his own body against the mission his mind had foisted on him, as well as Virginia’s most formidable political figure, Patrick Henry.
This is the story of young James Madison, statesman. He not only changed his country, but his example can change us today. The United States and all modern democracies face profound internal tensions not dissimilar to those of young Madison’s young country. His enemies were at once ruthless and unashamed about their pursuit of the lowest common denominator. They brazenly pursued self-interest rather than the common good. And they reacted with hostility to the attempts to create a vigorous, effective, and united nation-state.
On all of these frontiers, young Madison employed his Method. He hurled himself into the gears of power. He did so not without fear (because he was human), but he overcame that fear. What was weakest in him became the fuel for his fight. He exhausted his whole being for the sake of the republic he loved.
Perhaps most remarkably, he accomplished all these things without seeking to become the story. Young Madison almost always sought to elide himself as the protagonist. This was in the days before Freud had invented the ego; yet had the ego been invented, he would have ignored the topic. While all of his founding brethren were busy polishing their legacies for history, Madison simply seemed uninterested. The ideas were the thing, and the accomplishments were, for him, the end of the story.
That he has been punished for his active disinterest in his fame seems at once unfair to America’s history and damaging to any prospect for resuscitating statesmanship. Madison’s presidency is unpopular not only because of the controversial War of 1812 and his role in it, which will probably continue to be debated for centuries. It is hard to celebrate his presidency because it is hard to celebrate James Madison. The way in which he conducted himself in his ending years—the pleasant smallness of it all, the defiance he showed when falling on the sword of his principles—only compounds the problem.
Just as the people of Madison’s day were seduced by Henry—until Madison taught them not to be—so today we are seduced by celebrity’s hall of mirrors. In the age of Pericles, ancient Athens routinely celebrated statesmen. After the demagogue Cleon ruthlessly engineered Pericles’s downfall, he unleashed a spate of ruinous demagogues on the city. The city responded by instituting harsh punishments for whoever catered to their own benefit at the expense of the state. Today, we should elevate those, like Madison, who do not particularly seek to elevate themselves.4
The great idea in Madison’s young life was that a constitutional democracy like America’s could only function properly if it cultivated statesmanship within society itself. Democracy was not just checks and balances, which, taken alone, are the machine without the ghost. To survive, constitutional democracy also requires both statesmen who will lead and the “certain classes of men” (of course, including women) that John Witherspoon said in 1775 must support them. The two are symbiotic, these statesmen and these stewards. Together, they compose a self-sustaining culture that gives life and energy to democracy itself, where leaders are supported in tackling the most intractable of problems and realizing the greatest of visions.
Most significantly, young Madison was not merely envisioning these ideas on paper—they were the practical guide to what he did. The logic of his young life was the kind of democracy he wanted to build. He could only build it if he built it.
These are costly battles, as young Madison’s life showed—but the victory of helping a nation achieve greatness is worth fighting for. Young Madison was such a statesman with such a cause. His story means the democracy he loved can still be refreshed and invigorated today by the sorts of leaders—by the statesmen—essential to our flourishing.