First Principles by Thomas E. Ricks

Author:Thomas E. Ricks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2020-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Madison and Princeton at the Convention

Madison’s time at Princeton may have influenced his beliefs. Remember here that the other colleges of Madison’s time—Harvard, Yale, and William & Mary—had been regional or even local in their draw of students, while Princeton was administered consciously as a pan-colonial college, with students traveling to it from all the colonies of the American seaboard. At his college, notable also for its encouragement of political discussion, Madison moved among young men of diverse backgrounds, views, and accents, and watched them mix, and perhaps even check and balance one another in their own small, undergraduate ways.

Just as Madison had chosen a nationally minded college, so, too, in his political career he looked to national issues, note historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick. While a member of the Virginia Governor’s Council during the Revolution, he had worked on supplying the Continental Army. When elected to Congress, he served on the committee overseeing the military operations of General Nathanael Greene in the South. “From the day he entered politics,” they conclude, “the energies of James Madison were involved in continental rather than state problems. . . . His nationalism was hardly accidental.”24 This continental perspective may have resonated with the eight other delegates at the convention who were Princeton graduates—more than from any other college.25 This reflected the geographical reach of the college.

For all that, Madison’s influence at the convention peaked early, in June. The Virginia delegation’s draft proposal dominated the early sessions, and as one of its authors, he engaged in defending it. Also, the early sessions were about broad structure and other fundamental questions, while later ones descended into the lesser issues such as the role of the vice president, and whether it should be the Congress or the Supreme Court that held the authority to impeach the president.

But Madison’s classicism, at first so impressive, also may have started to grate on his listeners. In late June, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina rejected all the analogies being made to ancient history. “The people of this country are not only very different from the inhabitants of any State we are acquainted with in the modern world; but I assert that their situation is distinct from either the people of Greece or Rome, or of any State we are acquainted with among the antients,” he griped. For example, he asked, “Can the orders introduced by the institution of Solon, can they be found in the United States? Can the military habits & manners of Sparta be resembled to our habits & manners? Are the distinctions of Patrician & Plebeian known among us?”26

Benjamin Franklin a few days later would make a similar remark. “We indeed seem to feel our own want of political wisdom, since we have been running around in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of Government, and examined the different forms of those Republics which having been formed with the seeds of their own dissolution no longer exist.”27

For whatever reason,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.