Madison, James (1751-1836)

James Madison (1751-1836)

Sources

Member of congress, delegate to the constitutional convention, secretary of state, president of the united states

Founding Father. James Madison’s achievements as secretary of state and president have never compared favorably with his role as “Father of the Constitution.” He has also been overshadowed by his close friend and political associate, Thomas Jefferson. Madison’s shyness and unimpressive oratory created a public image of ineffective leadership. But he excelled as a political thinker, essayist, and organizer who could persuade and conciliate in legislative committees and political meetings. Madison used those considerable talents to become a Founding Father of both the U.S. government and the Republican Party.

Early Life. James Madison, the oldest of twelve children of James Madison Sr. and Nellie Conway Madison, was born on 16 March 1751 at the home of his maternal grandparents in Port Conway, Virginia, and grew up at his family’s plantation, Montpelier, in Orange County. His membership in a large extended family descended from several generations of Virginia planters gave Madison a strong sense of his place in Virginia society. The daily presence of slavery imparted a hatred of the institution that he nonetheless was involved in all his life. From 1769 to 1771 Madison attended the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where a progressive curriculum encouraged “a spirit of liberty, and free enquiry” into all fields of knowledge. Dr. John Witherspoon, president of the college and later a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a Presbyterian minister who had fought the church hierarchy in his native Scotland. He instilled in his students an opposition to all forms of religious and political tyranny. After college Madison experienced a prolonged period of poor health and personal crisis caused by uncertainty over a career. Like other young men of his generation, Madison found a cause—liberty and republican government—and a political career in the American Revolution. In 1774 he was elected to the Committee of Safety, the revolutionary government in Virginia. Two years later he served on committees of the Virginia Convention that framed a new constitution and declaration of rights. In the Virginia Assembly from 1776 to 1777 and on the Governor’s Council from 1778 to 1779, Madison worked closely with Thomas Jefferson on the bill for religious freedom, and he was deeply involved in all issues of war and government while Jefferson was governor. Their friendship would last until Jefferson’s death in 1826.

The Nationalist. Madison’s experiences in the Continental Congress (1780–1783) and the Virginia Assembly (1784–1786) made him a supporter of a strong national government. After only one week in Congress he wrote Thomas Jefferson about the depressing situation of an inadequately supplied army, an empty treasury, and a weak Congress, “recommending plans to the several states for execution and the states separately rejudging the expediency of such plans.…” The situation was no better on the state level. In a letter to Jefferson written in 1788 Madison described “the danger of oppression” caused by state legislatures acting as “the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” As a delegate to the Annapolis Convention in 1786, Madison knew that strengthening Congress by giving it the power to regulate internal and external trade would not solve the national and state problems of factionalism, sectionalism, and the danger that majority rule posed to minority rights. In a long essay written in 1786, “Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies,” Madison described what he had in mind. The solution was the creation of a government that would act as a “disinterested and dispassionate umpire” to control “disputes between different passions and interests in the State” but that “would itself be sufficiently restrained from the pursuit of interests adverse to those of the whole Society.” Madison feared that the final version of the Constitution approved in September 1787 allowed the states to retain too much power through equal representation in the Senate and the lack of a national veto of state legislation, but in The Federalist (1788) and at the Virginia ratification convention he vigorously supported the new federal government as the best means to protect national union and liberty.

Republican Party. The Virginia Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry blocked Madison’s election to the U.S. Senate, but he could not stop Madison’s election to the House of Representatives in 1789. When Madison emerged as leader of House opposition to Alexander Hamilton’s financial program in 1790, Federalists, including Hamilton, condemned Madison as a traitor. Madison, however, believed that Hamilton had betrayed the principles of the Constitution. Hamilton’s alliance between the federal government and merchant/speculators did not conform to Madison’s concept of the federal government as a “disinterested and dispassionate umpire” that would guarantee liberty and equality for all citizens. He was also alarmed at how support for Hamilton’s policies in the legislative branch created a dangerous consolidation of power in the executive branch. Madison also opposed Hamilton’s pro-British foreign policy, believing that it continued the subservient relationship of the colonial period. In the early 1790s Madison, with the assistance of Clerk of the House John Beckley, was far more active in organizing the Republican Party than Thomas Jefferson, especially after Jefferson retired as secretary of state in 1793. Despite his efforts in Congress and in the press, the Federalists scored one victory after another. The final blow was ratification of the Jay Treaty in 1795, which Madison regarded as obvious proof that the Federalists were “a British party.” In 1797 Madison and Dolley Payne Todd, the young widow whom he had married in 1794, retired to Montpelier. The continuing “transformation of the republican system of the United States into a monarchy,” most evident in the Alien and Sedition Acts, ended Madison’s political retirement. As the anonymous author of the Virginia Resolutions in 1798 and as the author of a report to fellow members of the Virginia legislature in 1800, Madison maintained that the states must “interpose” their authority in order to defend civil liberties from the encroaching power of the federal government.

Secretary of State. Madison’s opportunity to restore republican principles to the federal government came when Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 and chose Madison as his secretary of state. Because of their long friendship and shared beliefs, foreign policy in the Jefferson administration was very much a partnership between Jefferson and Madison. Madison’s primary role in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 may have been to implement Jefferson’s instructions, but his interest in access to the Mississippi River and American settlement of western lands dated to his first term in Congress in 1780, when he argued for American claims to navigation on the Mississippi and territory in the Mississippi River Valley. Madison shared Jefferson’s devotion to territorial expansion as the key to ensuring that the United States would remain a peaceful republic of independent, property-owning farmers. As secretary of state he aggressively pursued the expansion of the “Empire of Liberty” through attempts to acquire Florida from Spain, finally annexing West Florida during his presidency. As the Jefferson administration’s most ardent supporter of commercial coercion as an effective method of defending American commerce and American honor, Madison was instrumental in establishing and enforcing the embargo, especially after he became president-elect in December 1808. As president Madison would continue to implement the republican principles of foreign and domestic policy that he had helped formulate as secretary of state.

“Mr. Madison’s War.” When President Madison assumed office in March 1809, he faced the prospect of a war that would endanger the property and liberty of the American people through the introduction of high taxes, a standing army, and increased executive authority. Madison’s continued reliance on commercial coercion as a substitute for war seemed naive after Britain repudiated the Erskine Agreement in 1809, which promised the removal of British restrictions on neutral trade, and France duped the United States into resuming nonintercourse with Britain in 1811 with false assurances that French trade restrictions would be removed. However, Madison’s determination to maintain his republican ideals and to save the country “from the dilemma, of a mortifying peace” or war with both Britain and France compelled him to gamble on this risky policy. At the least, commercial coercion might buy time to make defense preparations and rally public support for a war against one enemy—Britain—whose long history of contempt for American economic and political independence made her the more appropriate target than France. The failure to seize Canada quickly and force Britain into peace negotiations turned the War of 1812 into a protracted struggle filled with military disasters and political opposition from Federalists, which reached its climax in the Hartford Convention of 1814–1815, as well as from antiadministration Republicans. Prosecution of the war also suffered from the mediocrity, incompetence, and political rivalry in Madison’s cabinet; military and financial weaknesses due to the Republican Party’s horror of standing armies, taxes, and a National Bank; and Madison’s own reluctance to damage the separation-of-powers doctrine of the Constitution by consolidating power in the executive branch. Ironically, Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans and the signing of the Treaty of Ghent erased the many humiliations of the war, including the invasion of Washington and the burning of the Executive Mansion in August 1814, and rehabilitated President Madison’s image. In 1817 Madison left office, credited with the defense of republicanism and national honor.

Elder Statesman. In retirement Madison kept a close watch on political and social issues. President James Monroe sent him diplomatic dispatches, and Madison offered foreign policy advice. He assisted Thomas Jefferson in establishing the University of Virginia, and after Jefferson’s death in 1826 Madison succeeded him as rector of the university. As the number of slaves in the country increased each year with the spread of the “Cotton Kingdom,” Madison believed more than ever in emancipation, but he also concluded that racial inferiority and prejudice would prevent the integration of freed slaves into American society. In 1816 he helped establish the American Colonization Society to resettle freed slaves in Africa. The Virginia constitutional convention of 1829 approved Madison’s democratic proposal to extend the vote to all householders and heads of families who paid taxes. However, his proposal to use the federal three-fifths ratio to apportion representation in the lower house of the state legislature failed. Instead, the convention maintained the political dominance of slaveowners in both houses of the legislature by allowing the total slave population to be counted for representation. During the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1828–1833, Madison denied the right of states to nullify federal tariff laws that they considered unconstitutional. Madison now regretted the loose language of his Virginia Resolutions in 1798, which suggested that a state’s right to “interpose” its authority included the nullification of federal laws. He explained that states should work cooperatively to repeal unjust laws. The terrible alternative was nullification, secession, and the dissolution of the Union he had worked so hard to create. James Madison died at Montpelier on 28 June 1836.

Sources

Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 volumes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941–1961);

Ralph Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).