American Dialogue by Joseph J. Ellis

Author:Joseph J. Ellis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

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Madison was initially incapable of such equanimity. In late September he went back to New York, prepared to cast his final vote in the Confederation Congress, which would send the newly minted Constitution to the state ratifying conventions. At this stage he was convinced that the document was fatally flawed and that ratification, if it should succeed, would provide only a temporary fix. He had done his best; his fellow nationalists had all done their best. But they had failed.

Hamilton, on the other hand, was not predisposed to allow the prospect of failure to cross his mind. On the last day of the convention, he made a plea for unanimity on the final vote. As Madison recorded in his notes, “No man’s ideas were more remote from the plan than his were known to be.” But despite profound reservations, Hamilton asked rhetorically, “Is it possible to deliberate between anarchy and convulsion on one side and the chance of good to be expected from the plan on the other?”32

It took six weeks for Madison to muster an equivalent resolve. By late October personal appeals from Washington to assume leadership of the looming debate over ratification in Virginia could not be ignored. (A request from Washington was a de facto command and represented a neat reversal of Madison’s recruitment of Washington the previous spring.) In November Hamilton, conveniently living a block away in New York, extended an offer for Madison to join him and John Jay in writing a series of essays under the pseudonym Publius, aimed at the New York ratification convention and entitled the Federalist Papers. Madison was back on board.

Initially he regarded his role as primarily strategic—that is, to plot a course of action that maximized the prospects for influencing the voting blocs within each state. This was Madison in his familiar nose-counting mode, a talent that he had exhibited so proficiently before the Constitutional Convention, now deployed across a larger canvas of twelve states and more than sixteen hundred delegates. Extensive newspaper coverage of what was being called “The Great Debate” made his task somewhat easier, even though a reliable count pro and con was maddeningly difficult because each state was different and divided into local coalitions that defied any coherent principle of preference.

His early estimate was that the New England states could be counted in the safe column, except for Rhode Island, “whose folly and fraud,” he observed caustically, “have not finished their career.” The middle states looked reasonably safe—Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware easily, and Pennsylvania as long as Philadelphia held strong against the western counties. New York would be very difficult because of Governor George Clinton’s patronage influence upstate, though the rumor mills suggested that New York City and its environs might threaten to secede if the Clintonites succeeded in blocking ratification. Virginia, the largest and most important state, was leaning pro but was too close to call, and it carried a momentum factor into the overall calculation, influencing voting patterns in the Carolinas and Maryland.

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