Madison, James

Madison, James (b. Port Conway, Va., 16 Mar. 1751; d. Montpelier, Va., 28 June 1836), “father of the Constitution,” coauthor with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of The Federalist, architect of the Bill of Rights, Secretary of State, 1801–1809, and president of the United States, 1809–1817.

Throughout his career Madison maintained a consistent philosophy regarding the role of the Supreme Court as a key institution able to check legislative excesses by either states or the federal government. As a proponent of constitutional reform in the 1780s, Madison analyzed the weaknesses of the Confederation in his “Vices of the Political Systems of the United States.” The key problem Madison identified was factious majorities in state legislatures. The solution: a national council of revision with the authority to “negative” both state and federal bills. Failing to establish such a council in the Constitutional Convention, Madison accepted in The Federalist, no. 39 the Supreme Court as the institution of the federal government best suited to enforce the limits of the Constitution and federal statutes on state legislative majorities, judicial officers, and executives.

Madison retained this view throughout his life. Following Chief Justice Marshall's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland in 1819, Republicans in Virginia, among them former President Thomas Jefferson and Judge Spencer Roane of the Virginia Court of Appeals, challenged the authority of the Supreme Court to determine the distribution of powers and responsibilities between the state and federal governments. In a letter to Jefferson, Madison responded that the framers intended the Supreme Court to be “the constitutional resort for” deciding which powers belonged to the states and which belonged to the federal government. In similar terms, Madison insisted to Judge Roane that the federal government could review and overrule state courts on constitutional questions.

Likewise Madison earlier supported the responsibility of the Supreme Court to check state executives. He refused, for example, in 1809, to support Pennsylvania Governor Simon Snyder's request for assistance in resisting the decision of the Supreme Court in United States. v. Peters, a decision he told the governor he was legally obligated to enforce.

Madison also, from the drafting of the Constitution, envisioned a role for the Supreme Court as one institution among many that could check the legislative excesses of the federal legislature. In the Virginia Plan introduced by Governor Edmund Randolph at the Constitutional Convention, Madison proposed that the Council of Revision possess the authority to review and “negative” federal as well as state legislation. In Federalist #39 too he articulated his view that in the event of federal legislation contrary to the Constitution, a variety of mechanisms existed to counter it, including, implicitly, federal judicial review.

Following the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 Madison turned not to the Supreme Court but to the state legislatures to protect the citizenry against what he believed to be a unconstitutional exercise of federal legislative authority. Ambiguously phrased in the Virginia Resolution of 1798, two years later Madison drafted clarifying ones. In those resolutions Madison emphasized that while the Supreme Court was one institution that could interpret the Constitution, the state legislatures could at minimum petition Congress to repeal what they deemed unjust or unconstitutional legislation, that those same states could cooperate in a united effort to petition Congress to introduce a constitutional amendment, and that the state legislatures could propose a constitutional amendment to Congress. These actions were, in Madison's view, alternatives to federal judicial review, not replacements of it.

Only once during Madison's lifetime did the Supreme Court strike down a federal statute. In contrast to President Jefferson who vigorously criticized the Court for its decision in Marbury v. Madison (1803), Madison said little. The decision in Marbury was consistent with the widely held view that each department of the federal government had responsibility to guard against encroachments from the other branches. Madison implicitly accepted a broader definition of judicial review and role for the Supreme Court by 1819. Although critical of Marshall's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, the grounds for his disagreement emphasized Marshall's broad interpretation of federal legislative power. In criticizing the content of the decision, Madison nonetheless accepted the right of the Court to determine the extent of that legislative authority.

Madison's differences in degree with the judgments of Chief Justice Marshall before his retirement did not disrupt his personal friendship with his fellow Virginian. They did, however, influence his efforts to appoint to the Court men who would be more “Republican” and independent of the chief justice. In that Madison experienced only marginal success. Failing to secure the appointment of his first three choices to replace Associate Justice Cushing, who died in 1810, Madison nominated and the Senate confirmed as an associate justice Joseph Story of Massachusetts. Story, arguably the greatest associate justice of the nineteenth century, did not challenge Marshall on either of the two matters Madison desired. He supported Marshall's broad interpretation of federal legislative power and he concurred with Marshall in having only one opinion of the Court rather than the seriatim opinions Madison favored. In this Madison experienced like disappointment in his other Supreme Court appointment. Gabriel Duvall of Maryland likewise supported Marshall during his tenure on the Court.

Madison did, after his term as president, upon occasion, criticize privately the decisions of his fellow Virginian although he remained true to his defense of the Court as a final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution. In particular, Madison disagreed with Marshall's broad interpretation of federal legislative power in McCulloch v. Maryland even as he affirmed the responsibility of the Court to act. As he stated it to Jefferson in 1823, “I have never yielded my original opinion as expressed in Federalist #39.”

Madison also stood firm in the 1830s in opposition to the nullifiers in his own state and throughout the South in insisting that neither nullification nor secession were constitutional under the system of law he helped establish nearly fifty years earlier.

Bibliography

William T. Hutchinson et. al., eds. The Papers of James Madison (1962–).
Ralph Ketcham , James Madison: A Biography (1971).
Jack N. Rakove , James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (1990).
Charles Warren , The Supreme Court in United States History, 2 vols. (1922).

Robert A. Rutland

; revised by

Steven R. Boyd