James Madison and the Making of America by Gutzman Kevin R. C

Author:Gutzman, Kevin R. C. [Gutzman, Kevin R. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Inaugurating the Constitution,

1788–1800

Ratification of the U.S. Constitution marked a tempered success for James Madison. He had devoted months to the task of bringing the Philadelphia Convention into being. He had coordinated a private campaign to persuade General Washington to attend. He had taken the lead in composing the Virginia Plan. He had helped make the U. S. Constitution markedly different from the Articles of Confederation.

In the wake of the convention’s adjournment on September 17, 1787, Madison had worked tirelessly to shepherd the proposed Constitution first through the Confederation Congress, then through the state ratification conventions. Before leaving New York for Richmond, he had joined Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in authoring The Federalist, a series of pro-ratification newspaper essays destined to have a significant effect on American constitutional history. He had also worked assiduously to persuade his longtime friend Edmund Randolph to put aside his objections to the Constitution and his desire to amend it first and join Madison in advocating immediate ratification. In Virginia’s own convention, with Randolph serving as the chief spokesman for ratification, Madison had also been—insofar as his health allowed—a principal spokesman for ratification. Friend and foe alike admired Madison’s performance, both because of his characteristic mastery of all the issues and because of his adeptness at parrying opponents’ objections.

Yet he was discontented with the Constitution. He thought that, absent the federal veto of state laws and with the Senate elected by the state legislatures, it was doomed to failure. Still, Madison could not rest. As before, he determined to make the best of things, always looking toward further reform where it seemed indicated.

Madison’s performance over the past two years had won him continental renown—among certain people. Among others, he was viewed as the key figure in a coalition that had deceived the state legislatures into sending delegates to Philadelphia with the task of proposing amendments to the Articles, when in fact they had intended to substitute the national Virginia Plan for the Articles all along. Where Madison saw the Constitution as likely to fail because it was not a completely national one, his critics thought it national enough to augur the end of the American republican experiment.

George Washington responded with great anxiety to the news from New York.1 Taking the matter up while the Richmond Convention still sat and voting on it soon after the Virginians adjourned, New York’s ratification convention voted both to ratify (by the very narrow vote of 30–27) and to call for a second federal convention.

Washington’s response was to press Madison to enter the General Assembly. Only having Madison there, he thought, could defeat Patrick Henry’s likely move for a second convention. Madison stayed in New York.

Unfortunately for him, chief among the enemies he had made in the effort to write and ratify the new Constitution were Virginians, such as former governor and longtime House of Delegates speaker Benjamin Harrison and, more notably, the undisputed kingpin of Virginia politics, Patrick Henry.

Since the Constitution empowered the state legislatures to elect senators, Madison would be at Henry’s mercy.

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