Faith and Freedom by Robert D. Gingrich

Author:Robert D. Gingrich [Gingrich, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-62029-084-2
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2012-04-22T04:00:00+00:00

As a theological writer, Doctor Witherspoon had few superiors, and as a statesman he held the first rank. In him were centered the social elements of an upright citizen, a fond parent, a just tutor, and humble Christian; and when, on the tenth of November, 1794, at the age of nearly seventy-three years, his useful life closed, it was widely felt that a “great man had fallen in Israel.”

Chapter Seven

James Madison

Father of the Constitution

We have all been encouraged to feel in the guardianship and guidance of that Almighty Being, whose power regulates the destiny of nations.

JAMES MADISON

At the young age of twenty-three, James Madison was already committed to independence from Great Britain and to the formation of a republican form of government in America. Often referred to as the Father of the Constitution, he has been acclaimed by his biographers for his energy, his determination, his character, and his deep-seated devotion to the principle of religious freedom and the individual liberties associated with it.

While serving as a member of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Madison spoke more than 160 times, helping to keep the oftentimes contentious proceedings from getting hopelessly bogged down. He is said to have been the best prepared of the Convention delegates, arriving in Philadelphia well ahead of its scheduled opening date armed with ideas gleaned from his extensive studies of confederacies. According to William Pierce, delegate from Georgia, Madison possessed “the most correct knowledge [of] the affairs of the United States” to be found among the political leaders of his generation.

Described as “an indefatigable reporter,” Madison is credited with keeping the most detailed and reliable records of the convention’s proceedings. “I chose a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right and left hand,” Madison later wrote. “In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted in terms legible and in abbreviations and marks intelligible to myself what was read from the Chair or spoken by the members; and losing not a moment unnecessarily between the adjournment and reassembling of the Convention I was enabled to write out my daily notes during the session or within a few finishing days after its close in the extent and form preserved in my own hand on my files. I was not absent a single day, nor more than a fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech unless a very short one.”

Without Madison’s journal, many interesting and informative details of the proceedings leading to the writing of the U.S. Constitution would be left to conjecture. In reference to Madison’s Convention journal, Thomas Jefferson stated in a letter to John Adams in 1815, “Do you know that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed, of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia? The whole of everything said and done there was taken down by Mr. Madison, with a labor and exactness beyond comprehension.”

While not necessarily

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