“Suspended upon a Single Hair”
June 24, 1788, Richmond, Virginia, Late Afternoon
Even the gods seemed to be listening to Patrick Henry.
As the fiery statesman boomed his opposition to the U.S. Constitution before a rapt audience in a packed theater on Richmond’s Shockoe Hill, he told his fellow Virginians that he saw “beings of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision.” He looked “beyond the horizon that bounds human eyes” and saw “intelligent beings which inhabit ethereal mansions” sitting in judgment of the decisions Virginia would make on this day. As if on cue, the afternoon grew dark, a summer storm arose, and strong wind slammed the doors “with a rebound like a peal of musketry,” according to one delegate in attendance. “The windows rattled; the huge wooden structure rocked; the rain fell from the eaves in torrents, which were dashed against the glass; the thunder roared.”
As the crowd stirred, Henry recognized the drama of the moment and continued his oratory, his voice soaring above the crash of thunder and roar of the wind. He warned of the “awful immensity of the dangers” presented by a constitution that called for a strong central government and lacked a strong citizens’ bill of rights. As the darkness swallowed the theater, Henry appeared to be “rising on the wings of the tempest,” as he “seized upon the artillery of heaven and directed its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries.” The suddenness of the storm, on the heels of Henry’s visions of “beings of a higher order” had a profound impact on his audience, causing “every nerve [to] shudder with supernatural horror … the spirits whom he had called seemed to have come at his bidding.” Later, Henry’s son-in-law said the scene had the effect of bestowing upon Henry “the faculty of calling up spirits from the vasty deep.” Soon, the storm became too violent for Henry to continue. Delegates and much of the crowd fled to the center of the building, away from the windows, until the wind and rain passed.
Among those seeking shelter was another Virginian who disagreed profoundly with Patrick Henry’s point of view. James Madison had worked tirelessly over the past year to ensure the ratification of the Constitution. But as magnificent as it was, as important as it would eventually become to all Americans, the Constitution approved in Philadelphia the previous September was merely an advisory document until the states approved it. And that had been far from a foregone conclusion.
* * *
MADISON WATCHED AS EIGHT of the nine states needed for ratification approved the sweeping document (he did not know yet that New Hampshire, the ninth state, had ratified just three days earlier). But he also knew that Virginia’s endorsement was critical to the nation’s long-term success, as was New York’s, whose decision he and other supporters also awaited. If Virginia rejected the Constitution, New York would follow suit. North Carolina might also reject it. And Rhode Island, which had not even sent delegates to the convention, would remain opposed. A constitution with a bare majority of support would be imperiled from the start—Americans would doubt its effectiveness, foreign governments its validity. Madison and his 169 fellow Virginia delegates held the fate of a nation in their hands. All he could do at this point was wait for the final vote, which, unlike in other states that had ratified, he expected to be close. Only days earlier, he had written: “I dare not positively decide,” when he was asked how the vote would go. His fellow delegate Archibald Stuart agreed: “The fate of Virginia is thus suspended upon a single hair.”
In many ways, the Virginia vote—the entire ratification debate—would be the culmination of work that began a dozen years ago with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The principles of freedom, equality, and self-governance espoused in the nation’s founding document were first secured through hard-fought victories on the battlefield, and then, in late summer of 1787, codified into a framework of laws and governmental structure when delegates had debated and approved the new Constitution. To complete their task, they had returned to the Pennsylvania State House made famous by the work of the Continental Congress in 1776.
Over the last weeks and as late as this day—just prior to Patrick Henry—the thirty-seven-year-old Madison had labored to convince his home-state countrymen that the Constitution was America’s best hope and that their worries were unfounded. Point by point, he had explained the benefits of the document and the government it would implement. But his efforts had taken their toll: “My health is not good,” he wrote to New York’s Alexander Hamilton, “and the business is wearisome beyond expression.” In another letter to George Washington, he said: “I find myself not yet restored and extremely feeble.”
Yet his performances on Shockoe Hill were stellar, even inspirational. One letter writer said Patrick Henry’s “declamatory powers” were “vastly overpowered by the deep reasoning of our glorious little Madison.” Archibald Stuart, a supporter of the Constitution, summed up Madison’s efforts in a letter to a friend: “Madison came boldly forward and supported the Constitution with the soundest reason and most manly eloquence I ever heard.” With admiration, he added: “He understands his subject well and his whole soul is engaged in its success.”
Madison had plenty of practice. For several years, he had thought about and championed a strong national government, recognizing that the Articles of Confederation were insufficient to govern a new nation, and he had supported his overall goal with persuasive arguments, brilliant essays, subtle arm-twisting, and indefatigable conviction.
In many ways, he seemed the least likely statesman to undertake such an effort. At just under five feet, six inches tall, with a sharp nose and a receding hairline, he was neither physically imposing nor a gifted orator. One observer said the diminutive Virginian was no bigger “than half a piece of soap.” He often spoke in such a low voice during meetings that attendees asked him to speak up or repeat himself. He suffered from chronic ailments, including gastrointestinal problems, fevers, and debilitating seizures that he described as “somewhat resembling epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions.” He had a “constitutional liability” to these sudden attacks, which proved most distracting to prolonged work and often drove him to despair. At the age of twenty-one, Madison had written: “I am too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world, for I think my sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.”
Despite his physical infirmities, James Madison was a brilliant strategist, a tireless reader, a lover of deep thinkers and philosophers, a man who was most comfortable delving into history and the classics, and constructing and deconstructing ideas about government and its relationship to people. In 1776, while the Continental Congress was debating the Declaration in Philadelphia, Madison, age twenty-five, was helping to draft Virginia’s state constitution. When he joined the Continental Congress in 1780, he was its youngest member. There he worked with Thomas Jefferson and others, articulating his passion for religious freedom and his dedication to human liberty.
All this preparation served James Madison well in May 1787, when he began in earnest the most important intellectual and political pursuit of his life. One day Madison would become president of the United States, but even that heady responsibility could not compare with the charge and the prospect of creating a new American government.
He relished the challenge. Madison plunged into the work of the Federal Convention immediately upon his arrival in Philadelphia—and he had not stopped thirteen months later.
May 1787
UNLIKE REVOLUTIONARY WAR HERO George Washington, who entered Philadelphia by troop-escorted carriage on May 13, 1787, amid a dramatic crescendo of church bells and cheering crowds, James Madison had arrived quietly and alone by stagecoach a week earlier from New York, where he had represented Virginia in the country’s Confederation Congress.
He was determined to prepare for and prevail in a debate that he believed and hoped would dramatically alter America’s expectations for and view of its future. Essentially, he and a handful of others hoped to launch the second revolution in American government in fewer than a dozen years.
Madison certainly was not alone in his feeling that the Articles of Confederation, which had been adopted in 1781 in an attempt to implement some sort of central government, were woefully inadequate to govern the fledgling and ambitious nation. But he was among the most outspoken. The articles granted the government no real taxing authority, he argued, and little ability to provide for the nation’s defense. They provided insufficient power to regulate commerce on land or when foreign ships sailed into American ports, offered no way to handle accords and treaties, and delineated no clear path to settle disputes among the states. For example, the articles had left the nation largely incapable of forcing the British to live up to the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that had ended the Revolutionary War. “It is not possible that a government can last long under these circumstances,” Madison warned.
In the past few years, Madison had witnessed all the drawbacks of a weak central authority. The federal treasury was depleted and the country was in danger of defaulting on loans from both private creditors and European nations such as France and Holland. Individual states balked at the confederation’s efforts to impose tariffs on top of their own. Paper money—printed by states to help them pay off debts, meet their pension obligations to veterans, and assist farmers in covering their mortgages—flooded the country, causing rampant inflation and a financial crisis. As a result, small businesses and farmers continued to struggle, merchants were thrown into jail unable to pay their debts, and many owners had their farms or shops confiscated and sold to pay debts or back taxes.
The economic conditions led to violence in 1786, when Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental army, led an insurrection of armed, defiant, and impoverished farmers in Northampton, Massachusetts. The men who took part in what is today known as “Shays’ Rebellion” blocked western Massachusetts courts from sitting and ordering further foreclosures and threatened to seize muskets and other arms in the nearby arsenal in Springfield. In Northampton, Taunton, Worcester, and Great Barrington, mobs took over courthouses, threatened judges, and even fired upon citizens who had business with the courts. Although the rebellion was put down by state troops, the incident highlighted in stark terms the fear of many that a weak central government could lead to anarchy.
And while Shays and his men were responsible for the most violent uprising of the period, other places felt the undercurrent of unrest. “There are combustibles in every state,” wrote George Washington, “which a spark may set fire to.… Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a Briton predicted them?” Later, he wrote to Madison: “Wisdom and good examples are necessary at this time to rescue the political machine from the impending storm.”
Madison had articulated the problems with the Articles of Confederation in a long treatise entitled Vices of the Political System of the United States. In it he talked of the “encroachments by state on federal authority,” the “trespasses of the states on the rights of each other,” and “violations of the law of nations and of treaties,” all glaring problems that the weak Articles of Confederation had fostered.
Was this what America had fought for in seeking independence from Britain?
Contrary to the perception of many Americans who feared, in the wake of the revolution, that a large central government would threaten their liberty, Madison fervently held the opposite view—American liberty and freedom were far more likely imperiled by an impotent federal government, unable to protect the country from foreign predators and helpless to offset state excesses and disputes.
Writing to his friend Thomas Jefferson in Paris, Madison said that a strong federal government would not only “guard the national rights and interests against invaders,” it would also serve to “restrain states from thwarting and molesting each other.” In April 1787, he explained to George Washington that he had “sought middle ground” that could be palatable to all, a plan “which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities wherever they can be subordinately useful.”
* * *
MANY WOULD SOON DISAGREE vehemently with Madison that his desire for a strong central government constituted “middle ground.” Indeed, he must have understood that the phrase stretched even the loosest definition of compromise. In his letter to Washington, he proposed that the national government “should be armed with positive and complete authority in all cases which require uniformity,” including the regulation of trade and the right to tax exports and imports. He proposed that “national supremacy” be extended to the judiciary, that the national legislature be divided into two branches, and that a national executive be included in the federal structure.
He also believed it was “absolutely necessary” for the national government to supersede the legislative authority of states. Without a federal check on state power, “the States will continue to invade the National jurisdiction, to violate treaties and the law of nations, and to harass each other with rival and spiteful measures dictated by a mistaken view of interest.”
These commercial and trade disputes among states threatened peace and economic recovery. For example, New York and Vermont often imposed restrictions and usurious taxes on interstate commerce, while Virginia and Maryland argued over navigation rights on the Potomac River.
In an attempt to settle these disputes, Virginia and Maryland asked the Continental Congress to invite states to discuss whether a more “uniform system” of trade regulations would satisfy their common interests. Congress responded by calling a meeting in Annapolis in 1786, but delegates from only five states—New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia—attended, all of whom favored a stronger central government. Without a quorum, they had no authority. But the delegates—among them Madison, Alexander Hamilton of New York, and John Dickinson of Delaware—recommended that Congress call for a federal convention in Philadelphia to determine what action could be taken to “render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.” Virginia again took the lead in appointing delegates, and other states followed suit. In February 1787, Congress endorsed the idea but was deliberately cautious in its resolution, calling on the Federal Convention to gather “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation.”
Most delegates who would trek to Philadelphia for the gathering would do so believing their task was to do exactly that: to modify the articles in places, to strengthen and broaden them in others, to adapt them to meet what was a clear need for an expanded role for the federal government.
Madison had other ideas. He and a handful of other great thinkers—including fellow Virginian Edmund Randolph, Alexander Hamilton of New York, Pennsylvania’s Gouverneur Morris, Robert Morris, and James Wilson—had come to Philadelphia not to alter the articles but to abolish them. Assisted by the support, guidance, shrewdness, reputation, and wisdom of George Washington and the sagacious Benjamin Franklin, these men would direct the convention toward a plan for a federal union that was unforeseen by most of their peers or the general population.
“It is an unsettling but inescapable fact,” one historian wrote, “that several of the principal authors of the U.S. Constitution … would never have made it to Philadelphia if their constituents had known their real intentions.”
* * *
MADISON WAS GRATEFUL FOR Washington’s support and, more than anything, desired the great general’s attendance at the Philadelphia convention. No one in the new nation was more beloved and more respected than Washington. For the convention itself and for any document produced by its delegates to carry credibility with the American people, Washington’s gravitas, wisdom, and virtue were essential.
Pennsylvania’s Benjamin Franklin would lend a certain level of prestige and celebrity to the gathering—outside of Washington, he was perhaps the most famous American in the world—but it was George Washington’s attendance that was a prerequisite to the convention’s success. As early as December 1786, Virginia’s governor, Edmund Randolph, urged Washington to attend the Philadelphia convention, so that “those who began, carried on, and consummated the revolution can yet rescue America from impending ruin.” This, Randolph said, was the “one ray of hope” that shone through the nation’s “gloomy prospects.”
Washington was reluctant at first. Fiercely protective of his esteemed reputation, he saw two potential pitfalls of lending his prestige to the convention. On the one hand, he did not want to attend if the convention had little or no chance of success; any association with a failed convention, or even one that fell short of its goals, could sully Washington’s image in the eyes of the American public. On the other, if he did attend, he feared being perceived as an opportunist who would exploit his own reputation to achieve personal gain, particularly since some advocates were suggesting he would be selected by acclamation to lead the convention. He also wondered about the legality of a federal convention whose goal was to significantly alter the Articles of Confederation.
Madison and others persisted. Without Washington’s presence, they argued, the very thing he feared—a failed convention—was likely a foregone conclusion. Conversely, Washington’s very presence as a prominent member of the Virginian delegation would convince other states to send their most competent and respected statesmen, which in turn increased the odds of the convention’s success. Greatness would attract greatness, in other words, and Washington was the lynchpin, the sturdy axis on which a productive convention would turn.
To further nudge Washington, Madison even sent him a list of some of the prestigious names who would be attending: Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, a Declaration signer; John Rutledge, governor of South Carolina, a member of one of the state’s most powerful families, and brother to Edward Rutledge, also one of the signatories of the Declaration; and Washington’s protégé, former senior aide-de-camp, and confidant, the irrepressible, opinionated, and brilliant Alexander Hamilton of New York.
Washington weighed his options: the danger that an inept or feeble convention would fail to create a government that could cure the nation’s ills versus the argument that the Philadelphia convention could represent the last best chance for the new nation’s future success. This was a nation for which Washington had fought and led men on the battlefield, in many cases watching them suffer terribly or die from British fire, starvation, or prolonged exposure to bone-numbing cold. He was steadfast in his opposition to the Articles of Confederation, writing in 1784 that they saddled the nation with “a half starved, limping Government that appears to be always moving upon crutches, tottering at every step.”
Still, he hesitated.
* * *
FINALLY, WASHINGTON TURNED TO one of his most trusted friends and courageous officers from the revolution, General Henry Knox of Boston. The Virginian outlined his dilemma and asked Knox “to inform me confidentially, what the public expectation is on this head—that is, whether I will, or ought to be there?”
Washington trusted Knox implicitly. The former Boston bookstore owner had served with immense distinction during the revolution from the moment Washington had plucked him from the ranks in late 1775 and selected him to lead a daring, high-risk, against-all-odds mission, one that provided Washington with a stunning first victory and infused the Americans with a deep sense of confidence that the powerful British could be defeated.
With boldness, vision, imagination, and inexhaustible perseverance—and with Washington’s pleas for haste ringing in his ears—Henry Knox and his brother led the successful mission to transport nearly sixty cannon from Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain in New York to Continental army emplacements outside British-occupied Boston. This improbable 300-mile trek in the dead of winter had made Knox a hero and forever solidified his relationship with Washington. Knox transported the heavy artillery—which weighed 120,000 pounds in total—on an unprecedented and perilous three-month journey that would come to be known as the “noble train of artillery.” He and his men hauled the artillery pieces, strapped to more than forty ox-drawn sleds and horses fitted with thick rope harnesses, across frozen Lake George, ice-encrusted streams, and rutted roads in upstate New York, and through narrow and sometimes treacherous mountain passes in the Berkshires and snow-draped forests in western Massachusetts, unbowed and undeterred on their march toward Boston.
Historians have called Knox’s march one of the great logistical achievements in military history. He finally arrived in Boston in early February, his “precious convoy” a welcome sight to Washington, whose men mounted the cannon on Dorchester Heights, just south of the city of Boston. On March 2, after replenishing their supply of gunpowder, Knox’s men relentlessly bombarded the British, whose ships, with great ceremony, evacuated Boston on March 17, 1776, a sight that “amazed” Abigail Adams as she watched.
When a victorious Washington rode triumphant into Boston, Knox was at his side, and for the rest of the war, he remained there. Washington put Knox in charge of field artillery, including men, ammunition, and cannon; he played a key command role when the Continental army crossed the Delaware on Christmas Eve in 1776, and the repeated bombardment from Knox’s heavy guns was critical in bringing about Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, ending the Revolutionary War.
Now, six years after the war’s end, Washington asked his dear friend whether his “non-attendance” at the Federal Convention would be “considered as a dereliction to republicanism,” something that would bring him profound embarrassment. With an unbreakable bond between them, Washington would value and weigh Knox’s opinion most of all.
Should he go to Philadelphia?
* * *
KNOX’S RESPONSE WAS SWIFT and unequivocal, confirming the argument that others had made: Washington’s presence by itself would lend the convention the serious weight it needed to accomplish its goals.
“Were the convention to propose only amendments, and patch work to the present defective confederation, your reputation would suffer,” Knox posited. However, he urged his friend to consider the more optimistic scenario: “But, were an energetic and judicious system to be proposed with Your signature, it would be a circumstance highly honorable to your fame, in the judgment of the present and future ages.” In addition, Washington’s attendance at such a gathering would “doubly entitle” him to the “glorious … epithet—The Father of Your Country.”
In the end, persuaded by the arguments of Knox and other men he respected, and bound by a sense of duty to the new republic he had been so instrumental in forging, Washington decided he would travel to Philadelphia for the convention. His journey and the country’s again were destined for entwinement.
Immediately upon his arrival on May 13, 1787, Philadelphia basked in the aura of his presence. The next day, the Philadelphia Packet reported on the enthusiasm that engulfed the city: “Yesterday His Excellency General WASHINGTON, a member of the grand convention, arrived here. He was met at some distance and escorted into the city by the troops on horse, and saluted at his entrance by the artillery. The joy of the people on the coming of this great and good man was shown by their acclamations and the ringing of bells.”
In midsummer, after the convention was well underway, James Monroe wrote to fellow Virginian Thomas Jefferson of Washington’s impact on the delegates. It was obvious, Monroe noted, that “the presence of General Washington will have a great weight in the body itself … and that the signature of his name to whatever act shall be the result of their deliberations will secure its passage thro’ the union.”
* * *
JAMES MADISON WAS THE first delegate outside of Pennsylvania to reach the city, ten days before anyone else and nearly three weeks before a quorum of seven states was achieved on May 25. He had hoped his fellow Virginians would have arrived as well, suggesting to Governor Randolph that Old Dominion delegates “ought not only to be on the ground in due time, but to be prepared with some materials for the work of the Convention.” He asked Randolph to arrive more than a week before the convention began.
Madison’s desire to begin work on a new way of governing the nation had been heightened by his mounting frustration in the past months with a decided lack of action in Congress. Time and again, legislation had stalled, debates had gone nowhere, individual states had erected roadblocks to any sort of congressional authority, and their representatives often seemed paralyzed and despondent at their inability to make progress. Even when Congress had the occasional piece of important business before it, delegates found it difficult to take their duties seriously and were often absent, rendering the body “so thin as to be incompetent,” Madison lamented to Jefferson.
As May drew near, Madison’s feelings about the convention’s prospects for success ascended to peaks and dipped into valleys, sometimes day-to-day. The truth was, neither he nor anyone else knew what to expect. Perhaps, he admitted to his father, the best hope for success would come from the “existing embarrassments and mortal diseases” of the current Articles of Confederation. His hope was that “a spirit of concession on all sides may be produced by the general chaos.”
If not, if delegates could not agree on a remedy, Madison was convinced that a “very different arrangement would ensue” to govern the country. Some people had whispered that a monarchy was needed; others that “partitioning” the nation into geographic regions would be necessary to preserve peace and a working relationship between states.
Privately, to Jefferson, Madison admitted: “What may be the result of this political experiment cannot be foreseen.”
* * *
BY THE LAST WEEK of April, most states had agreed to send delegates to the convention; only Rhode Island had refused outright. The state’s governor said Rhode Island lawmakers were concerned about “breaking the compact” established by the Articles of Confederation, lest “we must all be lost in a common ruin” that could result if small-state sovereignty were encroached upon by an abusive central government. Despite Rhode Island’s decision, Madison believed that “the prospect of a full and respectable convention grows stronger every day.”
He was pleased that delegates would gather, grateful that a debate about the tepid Articles of Confederation would finally occur, but he was also fully cognizant that the Philadelphia meeting would represent a watershed moment. The irony was not lost on Madison that the convention would occur in the same city and the same building in which America had declared its independence eleven years earlier; yet, in the same east assembly room where John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin had signed the Declaration of Independence—to which they had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor—a failed convention could spell doom for the young nation they had created. The 1776 delegates had achieved something they believed was inspirational and eternal, and had done so with the threat of prison and death hanging over their heads. Their brave political actions had then been backed up by the valiant sacrifices of patriots who had died or suffered grievous wounds and great deprivation on the battlefield.
With the American victory settled several years earlier, the men who would gather in Philadelphia in May 1787 faced no such risk; how grave a disservice to their courageous predecessors, then, if mere pettiness, stubbornness, hubris, regionalism, or factionalism led to the end of the brief American experiment without a single enemy shot having been fired.
Madison felt the burden of his charge and the weight of the task ahead. As the convention date loomed, he confided to a friend: “The nearer the crisis approaches, the more I tremble.”