James Madison’s Zigzag Path
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Version 0 of 1. THE THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON By Noah Feldman Illustrated. 773 pp. Random House. $35. In April 1789, James Madison, a member of the House of Representatives and a trusted friend of George Washington, ghostwrote the new president’s opening message to Congress. Then he drafted the House’s official response to the president. As if that wasn’t head-spinning enough, Washington then asked him to compose his response to the response. Madison was truly “in dialogue with himself,” as the editors of the Madison Papers put it. But the congressman was also in conflict with himself. Engaging in that dialogue violated his own carefully crafted blueprint for the separation of powers. As the Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman demonstrates in his illuminating and absorbing political biography, “The Three Lives of James Madison,” Madison would remain in ongoing dialogue and conflict with himself for the rest of his life. Feldman explores Madison’s reactive and improvisational thinking as it played out in the three uniquely consequential roles, or “lives,” he had — as constitutional architect and co-author with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of the “Federalist Papers,” political partisan and wartime president. The new nation, an idea still in progress, would inevitably call for reassessment, flexibility and innovation, and Feldman skillfully navigates the zigzag path of Madison’s recalibrations. Except for his position on the issue of slavery, which Madison’s allegiance to his planter class would cause him to consistently blur in a fog of words, he adjusted his theoretical ideas and practice of politics to the continuous flux of events. Madison’s first life was as a proponent of an enduring constitution for a consolidated, centralized republic to replace the loose and dysfunctional alliance of states created under the Articles of Confederation. The Virginia Plan he brought to Philadelphia in 1787 became the basis for the convention’s agenda. The delegates, however, would not always go as far as he wanted, especially when it came to his wish to clearly establish the sovereignty of the national government over the states. His proposal for a congressional veto over state laws in order to control, as he argued, “the centrifugal tendency of the states” was overwhelmingly rejected, leaving him fearful that the Constitution might codify a constant tension and conflict between the national government and the states. Madison’s adaptive genius was on full display with the Bill of Rights. Much of the opposition to the Constitution turned on its lack of a guarantee of individual rights. Thomas Jefferson also lamented this absence, but Madison initially failed to see the need for such assurances, which he described as mere “parchment barriers,” easy for “overbearing majorities” to override. But less than a year later, Madison, now a representative fulfilling a campaign promise to his constituents, introduced a series of such amendments in the House. “Without Madison, the bill of rights would not have been enacted,” Feldman writes. “The entire episode showcased Madison’s unique combination of theoretical brilliance and practical political flexibility. Although theory had told him a bill of rights was not necessary, political controversy and the need to get elected had shown that it was.” The sharp differences between Madison’s vision of the new republic and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s triggered Madison’s second life as a partisan politician. He was taken aback by Hamilton’s Federalist blueprint for transforming the new United States into an economic powerhouse. The first phase was to be financial centralization through the national government’s assumption of state debts. At a dinner in June 1790, Madison and Jefferson negotiated a compromise with Hamilton, and the mostly satisfied Virginians came away with their own concession, an agreement to locate the new national capital along the Potomac. But a few months later Hamilton raised the stakes once more with a proposal to create a national bank. Once the full scope of Hamilton’s ambitions was revealed, Madison accused him, as he wrote in a newspaper article in 1792, of trying “to pervert the limited government of the Union, into a government of unlimited discretion.” In a move to halt the Federalists and their Hamiltonian agenda, Madison and Jefferson organized the nation’s first political party, the Republicans — even though the notion of party politics ran against Madison’s constitutional design to dampen the effect of factions. His shift away from total national sovereignty over states’ rights became complete in 1798 after Congress passed and President John Adams signed the Sedition Act, targeting Republicans and their newspapers by restricting First Amendment rights. In reaction, an incensed Jefferson wrote his Kentucky Resolutions, arguing fatefully that the states had the power to nullify federal laws and even threatening “revolution and blood.” Troubled by Jefferson’s intemperate radicalism, Madison offered a moderate alternative in his Virginia Resolutions, contending that the states had the right “to interpose” against federal legislation they viewed as unconstitutional. Although the man who had once championed a national veto over state laws now seemed to assert the right of states to reject acts of Congress, Madison insisted that interposition meant only an appeal to public opinion. How exactly that was to happen remained conveniently obscure. In Madison’s third life as secretary of state under President Jefferson and then as president himself, he was forced to reassess repeatedly his own foreign policy positions. As secretary of state, he had preferred to maintain neutrality with regard to the burgeoning conflict between Britain and France. Britain, however, was determined to bring its former colonies to heel by harassing American commercial shipping and impressing American seamen. Madison turned to the tactic of economic coercion with a ban on trade with Britain. “The efficacy of an embargo,” he confidently remarked to President Jefferson in 1805, “cannot be doubted.” But while it crippled the American economy, the embargo did virtually nothing to curb the British, and in June 1812, President Madison backed into war. The nation, he declared, could not remain “passive under these progressive usurpations, and these accumulating wrongs.” After two years of fruitless conflict, both parties were ready for compromise. The signing of the Treaty of Ghent at the end of 1814 re-established the prewar status quo. By claiming that the American effort “cannot fail to command the respect” of all other nations, Madison “set an influential precedent,” Feldman astutely comments, “for subsequent American unwillingness to shine harsh light on wars that produced mixed results,” a precedent that resonates today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Feldman does not discuss the elder statesman’s role in the fraught nullification crisis of the late 1820s and early 1830s, but it’s only a further example of Madison’s political flexibility. South Carolina, furious about federal tariffs, cited Madison’s Virginia Resolutions to argue that every state had the constitutional right to nullify federal laws and even withdraw from the union. For the rest of his life Madison rejected such an extreme interpretation of his Resolutions. The last of the founding fathers beseeched Americans to cherish and perpetuate their union, but the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions along with Madison’s unwillingness to call for the abolition of slavery would continue to imperil the republic he so treasured. By the time of his death in 1836, the political order that Madison the dazzling political theorist had helped to design had been transformed by the partisan co-founder of the Republican Party, and had then barely survived a war under the executive leadership of the same man. Feldman’s deeply thoughtful study shows that the three identities of James Madison constituted one exceptional life, which effectively mirrored the evolving identity of the American republic in its most formative phase. In Feldman’s capable hands, Madison becomes the original embodiment of our “living Constitution.” |