James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (22 page)

Madison spoke again the next day, Saturday, but in the middle of his remarks he suddenly stopped and took his leave. “I shall no longer fatigue the committee at this time,” he said, “but will resume the subject as early as I can.” He hurried to his room at the Swan and for the next few days was incapacitated with what he told Alexander Hamilton and Rufus King was “a bilious attack.” If this was one of his “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy,” the description would have been accurate without giving away too much, since epileptic seizures had long been thought to be the result of an excess of black bile. Later in his life he would, perhaps revealingly, call what happened to him on that Saturday in June “a fit of illness.”
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This particular event also suggests that Madison had learned to recognize certain premonitory symptoms—depression, perhaps, irritability, or a headache—that hours or even days before warned him of a seizure and allowed him to remove himself from public view.

On Wednesday, June 11, though still not feeling well, Madison took
the convention floor to defend the taxing power of the general government. It was a necessity in order for that government to be regarded as strong by the country’s enemies. With foresight, he pointed out that Britain and France might well go to war and Britain had a history of seizing neutral ships. That posed a danger to the United States, particularly if it was perceived as weak. “Weakness will invite insults,” he noted the next day. “The best way to avoid danger is to be in a capacity to withstand it.”
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Madison also expressed hope that the convention would finally begin the regular discussion of the Constitution previously agreed to, but Patrick Henry soon took the floor with another volley of attacks, including one for which Jefferson had provided ammunition. In a letter to a friend, Alexander Donald, Jefferson had expressed the wish that nine states would ratify the Constitution but four hold out until amendments were agreed to. An extract of that letter had made its way to the Virginia Convention, and Patrick Henry made the most of it: “This illustrious citizen advises you to reject this government till it be amended. His sentiments coincide exactly with ours.” Madison felt obliged to take the floor and point out that as long as illustrious citizens were being cited, “could we not adduce a character equally great [that is, George Washington] on our side?” Was the convention “now to submit to the opinion of a citizen beyond the Atlantic”? Besides, he assured the delegates, as only Jefferson’s closest correspondent could do, “were that gentleman now on this floor he would be
for
the adoption of this Constitution.”
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Another of Henry’s attacks played on the old fear that northern states would support closure of the Mississippi to American commerce. This was an assault for which Madison was thoroughly prepared. He declared that he had not only had personal knowledge of the situation but “documents and papers”—no doubt the notes he had taken while serving in Congress in 1787—to back it up. Later in the debate, he offered further assurance. “Were I at liberty, I could develop some circumstances which would convince this house that this project will never be revived in Congress,” he said, “and that therefore no danger is to be
apprehended.” Patrick Henry, who had not been a member of Congress for more than a dozen years, was reduced to bluster. It didn’t matter what Madison knew, Henry said. Madison couldn’t foretell the future. But apparently he thought that he himself could. “This nefarious abominable project will be again introduced [at] the first favorable opportunity,” he proclaimed.
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On June 14, the delegates finally began the point-by-point debate of the Constitution that George Mason had proposed eleven days before. Soon a pattern developed. Henry, George Mason, or James Monroe, who also opposed the Constitution, would claim there were reasons for grave concern in this clause or that one, and Madison would rise to explain briefly and cogently why their worry was unfounded. To Madison it often seemed a Sisyphean effort. He later told Edward Coles, his secretary, that Patrick Henry could undo an hour’s work with a single gesture. It didn’t help that on June 16, Madison had what he called a “relapse.” He wrote to Hamilton, “My health is not good, and the business is wearisome beyond expression.” Three times that day, the convention note taker recorded that his voice was so low that he could not be heard. Two days later, Madison wrote to Washington, “I find myself not yet restored and extremely feeble.” He was, nevertheless, putting in a magnificent performance. One observer reported that although “the division” in the Virginia Convention was very close, a narrow win could be expected for the Federalists—“notwithstanding Mr. Henry’s declamatory powers, they being vastly overpowered by the deep reasoning of our glorious little Madison.” One of the delegates, Archibald Stuart, wrote to a friend on June 19, 1788, “Madison came boldly forward and supported the Constitution with the soundest reason and most manly eloquence I ever heard. He understands his subject well and his whole soul is engaged in its success and it appeared to me he would have flas[h]ed co[n]viction into every mind.” But Stuart, a supporter of the Constitution, was still worried about its fate. While most states that had ratified the Constitution had done so overwhelmingly, that was not going to be the case in Virginia. “The fate of Virginia is thus suspended upon a single hair,” he wrote.
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On June 24, George Wythe, a man widely venerated for his integrity, stood to propose ratification of the Constitution, with “whatsoever amendments might be deemed necessary” to be recommended to the First Congress under the Constitution. Henry objected at length. Surely Wythe was joking, he said: “Evils admitted in order to be removed subsequently and tyranny submitted to in order to be excluded by a subsequent alteration are things totally new to me. But I am sure he meant nothing but to amuse the committee. I know his candor. His proposal is an idea dreadful to me. I ask—does experience warrant such a thing from the beginning of the world to this day?”
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After other speakers took the floor, Madison made his last extended speech of the convention. He began by noting how wondrous it was that Americans had been able in the middle of their revolution to establish free governments. “How much more astonishment and admiration will be excited,” he asked, “should they be able, peaceably, freely, and satisfactorily, to establish one general government when there is such a diversity of opinions and interests, when not cemented or stimulated by any common danger?” It filled him with dread, he said, to think that the Constitution might not be ratified: “I cannot, therefore, without the most excruciating apprehensions, see a possibility of losing its blessings—It gives me infinite pain to reflect that all the earnest endeavors of the warmest friends of their country to introduce a system promotive of our happiness may be blasted by a rejection, for which . . . [the] previous amendments are but another name.” Those of Henry’s amendments “not objectionable or unsafe . . . may be subsequently recommended,” he said, “not because they are necessary, but because they can produce no possible danger and may gratify some gentlemen’s wishes.” But he could not consent to conditional amendments “because they are pregnant with dreadful dangers.”
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Henry took the floor with a passionate refutation: “He tells you of the important blessings which he imagines will result to us and mankind in general from the adoption of this system. I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant. I see it—I feel it. I see
beings
of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision.” Archibald Stuart
described what happened next: “A storm suddenly rose. It grew dark. The doors came to with a rebound like a peal of musketry. The windows rattled; the huge wooden structure rocked; the rain fell from the eaves in torrents, which were dashed against the glass; the thunder roared.” Henry kept on speaking. As Stuart reported it, “Rising on the wings of the tempest, he seized upon the artillery of heaven and directed its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries.” Spencer Roane, Henry’s son-in-law, later described the storm as making it seem as if Henry “had indeed the faculty of calling up spirits from the vasty deep.”
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But delegates were not so transfixed that they stayed in their seats. They fled into the center of the building and, when the storm passed, convened briefly before adjourning. Madison seemed to think he had given too much away when it came to Henry’s amendments and offered a clarification. The only amendments he would oppose after ratification were those that were dangerous, he repeated, but that category, he emphasized, included a “declaration of our essential rights.” Such a declaration implied that the general government had been given the power to violate rights—which it had not. The implication that the government had that power, however, meant that any right left off the list was vulnerable. “An enumeration which is not complete,” he said, “is not safe.”
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The first vote on the next day, June 25, was the crucial one. Antifederalists proposed that before the Constitution was ratified, their amendments be submitted to other states for consideration. The motion was defeated by 88 to 80, ensuring that there would be a positive vote for ratification. In the afternoon delegates voted 89 to 79 to ratify the Constitution and to recommend “whatsoever amendments may be deemed necessary” to the consideration of Congress.
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It was a victory for the Union and, although Madison would never have said so, for him. Even Monroe, who looked with jealousy on Madison’s accomplishments, acknowledged in a letter to Jefferson, “Madison took the principal share in the debate.” A French diplomat reported home: “Mr. Madison is the one who, among all the delegates, carried the votes of the two parties. He was always clear, precise, and consistent in his reasoning and always methodical and pure in his language.”
Madison’s leadership was not simply in the clarity and intellectual force of what he said but in the fact that his thinking informed most of the Federalist speeches at the convention.
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In a sense, the theater on Shockoe Hill was an echo chamber, with Madison’s ideas bouncing off every wall.

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MADISON INTENDED
to go straight back to Congress in New York after the ratification was read and signed, but George Washington wrote with an invitation and some advice: “I hear with real concern of your indisposition. . . . Relaxation must have become indispensably necessary for your health, and for that reason, I presume to advise you to take a little respite from business and to express a wish that part of the time might be spent under this roof. . . . Moderate exercise and books occasionally, with the mind unbent, will be your best restoratives.”
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Madison made it to Mount Vernon in time to salute the Fourth of July with Washington. If the happiness of the two men over the Virginia ratification was weighed down somewhat by the enormity of what lay ahead, news from New Hampshire would have buoyed them. That state had ratified the Constitution four days before Virginia, meaning that there were now ten states committed to the new government. Although New Hampshire’s ratification meant that the Constitution could have gone into effect without Virginia, both Madison and Washington understood that it did not undercut the significance of what had happened in Richmond. If Virginia’s vote had been negative, New York’s, still upcoming, would almost certainly be as well, and no union could long endure without these two states.

For two days, Washington took time off from riding over his plantation. Although the plan had been for Madison to enjoy a respite from politics, the two men could not have avoided the subject of the new nation that they would soon play central roles in forming. It was probably during this time that Washington talked to Madison about his reluctance to do what everyone expected—and that was to become president. With the men in his family dying young, Washington, age
fifty-six, was concerned that he didn’t have many more years to live, which made time at Mount Vernon, which he loved, all the more precious. Moreover, his countrymen lauded him as Cincinnatus, the Roman who surrendered power after victory and returned home to his fields. Washington worried that posterity would regard him as a hypocrite if, having taken leave of power, he now assumed it again. Madison advised that Washington’s friends knew his real situation, that serving was a “severe sacrifice . . . of his inclinations as a man to his obligations as a citizen.” The best public proof of this, he suggested, would be “a voluntary return to private life as soon as the state of the government would permit.”
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A few years might be enough.

It is an indication of the sense Washington had of his own mortality that Madison also told him that “if any premature casualty should unhappily cut off the possibility of this proof, the evidence known to his friends would in some way or other be saved from oblivion and do justice to his character.” A few months later, Washington was writing to Hamilton that should he become president, he hoped “that at a convenient and an early period my services might be dispensed with and that I might be permitted once more to retire.”
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IT WAS MORE THAN
two weeks before Madison sent news of the ratification to Jefferson, suggesting that he had indeed been feeling some estrangement from his friend. In the letter he finally wrote from New York on July 24, 1788, he let Jefferson know, politely of course, that extracts from letters of his had been handed about at the Maryland and Virginia conventions with a “view of impeding the ratification.” Not until August 10, 1788, did he mention to Jefferson that he had been one of the authors of
The Federalist
.
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Meanwhile, between August 5 and November 18, 1788, Jefferson did not write to Madison. “The first part of this long silence in me was occasioned by a knowledge that you were absent from New York,” he explained. “The latter part, by a want of opportunity, which has been longer than usual.” But one wonders if Jefferson didn’t feel a certain
embarrassment at having his attempts to influence the ratification process come to light—particularly since they had failed. In the November 18 letter ending his long silence, however, he was all grace and courtesy, saying he had read
The Federalist
with “care, pleasure, and improvement. . . . I confess it has rectified me in several points.”
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