Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater

Author:Jeff Broadwater [Broadwater, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), Political Science, History & Theory, Constitutions
ISBN: 9781469651019
Google: M72luwEACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:46:57+00:00

SEVEN

Opposition Enough to Do Good

1787–1788

THE VIRGINIA DELEGATE Edward Carrington had urged James Madison to hurry from Philadelphia to New York City, where Congress was sitting. The Constitution had split the Virginia delegation. Carrington and Henry Lee supported the document; Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson opposed it. Madison’s vote would break the impasse. As Madison reported to George Washington in late September 1787, “I found on my arrival here that certain ideas unfavorable to the Act of the Convention which created difficulties in that body, had made their way into Congress.”1

He should not have been surprised by the opposition. Rhode Island had boycotted the Philadelphia convention. Two of the three New York delegates had walked out in protest. Fifty-five delegates had attended at one time or another, but only forty-two had stayed until the end, and of those, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and two Virginians, George Mason and Edmund Randolph, refused to sign the Constitution. Mason’s “Objections to This Constitution of Government” would appear in Philadelphia in early October. Mason, Madison later wrote Jefferson, “considers the want of a Bill of Rights as a fatal objection . . . and most probably of all” opposed the proposed new government because of its “power of regulating trade, by a majority only of each House.” Although Madison did not consider Randolph to be “inveterate in his opposition,” the Virginia governor harbored reservations about the breadth of federal power and the possibility of collusion between the president and the Senate, and he favored holding a second convention to address objections to the Constitution.2

The Philadelphia convention had hoped Congress would bless the Constitution and forward it to the states for their approval, but Richard Henry Lee and the Massachusetts delegate Nathan Dane argued that it conflicted with the Articles of Confederation, which strictly speaking it did, and that Congress could not, therefore, lawfully consider it. Madison and his allies overcame that obstacle. As Madison put it, not to approve the Constitution would imply that Congress considered the document flawed since “Congress had never scrupled to recommend measures foreign to their Constitutional functions, whenever the public good seemed to require it.” Richard Henry Lee next proposed amendments, including a bill of rights and a provision requiring proportional representation in the Senate. It must have irritated Madison to defend, in effect, state equality in the upper house, but had Congress made changes to the Constitution, it arguably would have triggered the amendment process of the Articles, requiring the unanimous consent of the state legislatures, and would have doomed the Constitution to defeat. By 28 September, however, the delegates had agreed on a unanimous resolution simply sending the Constitution to the state legislatures for referral to state conventions, which gave the impression that Congress supported the Constitution without actually saying so.3

Madison sent a copy of the Constitution to Jefferson around the first of November, weeks after he had mailed copies to other correspondents. “Jefferson,” Dumas Malone has written, “may have suspected he was not in Madison’s full confidence.

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