James Madison prepares for the Constitutional Convention.

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Hello and welcome to the Political History of the United States.

Episode 5.10 Madison's Project when we last left off, we had spent our time talking about the reluctant acceptance of many throughout the United States that the Confederation government was in need of substantial reforms.

Between the insolvency of Congress concerns over the ability of the Confederation to project power not only into its far flung western territories, but within the states themselves, the fact that change was necessary had become an agreed upon fact.

Although many did remain skittish about the scope of such reforms, for others this was an unparalleled opportunity.

Today we are going to shift our focus onto that group that traveled to Philadelphia with grand plans for what the Convention could mean.

We will spend our time looking at some of the ideas and motivations coming into the convention before we get into the actual meeting next time.

No single person would come to define the Constitutional Convention quite as much as James Madison.

Madison has been in a handful of our most recent episodes.

However, it occurred to me that I never actually formally introduced him.

Seeing as how he is going to be one of the leading players in this season of the podcast, I'm going to go ahead and rectify that right now.

Per Madison biographer Richard Ketchum, there is little direct information about Madison's early life, and much of what we do know can be ascertained via his father's account books and farm notes.

His father was a significant slave owner whose plantation grew substantially during Madison's boyhood.

We know that the mansion that would eventually come to the property, which would become known as Montpelier, was still in the planning stages at this time.

One of the things that would have directly influenced Madison's worldview was the French and Indian War.

Now, he was a young child at the time of the war.

However, Indian warfare along the frontiers was something that struck close to home for him.

Although the Madison plantation was never really in that serious of danger, they did have neighbors who were casualties of the fighting against the tribes.

If you recall back to the episodes on the aftermath of Braddock's march, there was a real fear that Indian tribes would push deep into Virginia.

This, if you'll recall, caused a crisis in the eastern part of the state as those frontier settlements in the west fled to the security of the coastal towns.

Madison's place in American history has him sitting in that inner circle of political thinkers.

As we are going to see, really beginning today.

The Constitution that would emerge from the Philadelphia Convention was largely the work of Madison.

Despite knowing what he would later become, very little is known about his early education.

We do know that when he was 11, he was receiving something of a more formal education.

What is something of a surprise is that upon reaching college age, Madison did not attend William and Mary's, which so many of his contemporaries amongst the upper class of Virginia did.

His decision to forsake the local university came from a couple of places.

First, Madison seemed to have a real fear of contracting smallpox and was eager to avoid Tidewater, Virginia.

Beyond that, however, the reputation of William and Mary's had taken something of a hit in the years before Madison's potential attendance.

As a result, the bookish Madison instead chose to attend Princeton.

As the relations between the colonies and the mother country broke down, the young Madison found himself increasingly involved in Virginia politics and supported economic sanctions in the form of boycotts against the British.

Madison was himself slightly ahead of the curve calling for war, believing that the more time that passed prior to the beginning of hostilities, which were looking increasingly likely, the more the British would be able to sow the seeds of disunion.

During this period, right before the outside of fighting, Madison found himself becoming deeply interested in revolutionary ideas.

When British control over Virginia began to wane in the months leading up to the outbreak of fighting, Madison found himself becoming a member of the Orange County Committee of Safety, a committee that was chaired by his father.

Now recall that these committees of safety, somewhat inadvertently ended up stepping way beyond their authority and essentially became a transitional government in the absence of British control.

This was the first time that Madison would hold an elected office and he was just 25 years old.

The task before this committee was no less than forming a new government for the soon to be state, something which was the exact kind of task that Madison was itching to undertake.

Out of this committee came George Mason's Declaration of Rights, which would, if you'll recall a short time later, help influence Jefferson's own drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

Now, although Madison was present for this, being just 25, he was more or less an interested spectator as opposed to a meaningful participant in the drafting.

The one contribution that he did make was suggesting the specific wording regarding religious toleration something which the committee accepted.

This would become the first time that the right to religious liberty was seen in any self governing constitution.

This loss was to be blamed at least partially on not adequately bribing the voters with alcohol.

A few months after this defeat, Madison would find himself back in the Virginian government when Patrick Henry recommended him for the Council of State when she was duly elected.

Now this is something to pay particular attention to.

This all begs an important question that you might have been wondering.

Madison was a male in his mid-20s at the outbreak of the war.

It is a fair question to ask why Madison did not actually serve in any function in the army.

Madison would explain it by blaming the feebleness of his personal constitution.

He makes mentions of suffering from sudden attacks of epilepsy.

However, in his biography of Madison, the Three Lives of James Madison, author Noah Feldman points out that Madison did not actually suffer from epileptic seizures and that more likely the ailment that he was complaining of was migraines.

During his time in Congress, Madison was a supporter of the proposed imposter in conjunction with Alexander Hamilton, somebody whom he would later co author the Federalist Papers with.

Madison would be involved in writing a letter to the states, encouraging them with all sorts of flowery words to pay those requisitions.

Although the letter was well written, I think it goes without saying that by this point everybody just pretty much ignored it.

Madison would play a significant role in bringing about the Annapolis Convention, although the exact role he played in the convention is somewhat up for debate.

Either way, he had assumed from the time that the convention was called that ultimately it would result in there being some kind of a national convention.

Recall that the delegates that did show up to Annapolis, all 12 of them, were there to discuss commerce issues that were plaguing the states.

Just a few days after getting together, the decision was made that it was impossible to address the subject of interstate commerce without first addressing the critical flaws plaguing the Articles of Confederation.

This was, as James Madison would tell another future President who will be getting his own introduction soon, James Monroe, that he fully assumed that this was going to be the outcome of the Annapolis convention.

He did not head off to Philadelphia that May with the intention of reforming the Articles because the issues with them were so deeply systemic that no amount of reform could save them.

Plus, as we have seen previously, the process of amending the Articles was burdensome to the point of being impossible.

Madison told his colleagues that he believed that if reform in Philadelphia proved unsuccessful, there was a real risk of the emergence of a monarchy or the dissolution of the current union into smaller, regionally based confederations.

As he arrived in Philadelphia, therefore, James Madison was just about as excited as anybody about the prospects of the convention.

Now, this should come as little surprise as we discussed a few minutes ago.

Even before the official outbreak of hostilities with Great Britain, Madison was busy dreaming up questions of statecraft.

With the opportunity now presenting itself to him to create a wholly new government, he was not about to let it slip away.

He spent much of his time in the months leading up to the Congress refining his plans and figuring out just what direction he believed the country needed to move.

To that end, he wrote extensively during this period, primarily to Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph, and George Washington, about what he believed to be the necessary changes to the government.

What is critical to understand of Madison here is that he held a deep fear over the tyranny of the majority.

What this means is that Madison was worried that the majority of the population could easily trample on the rights of the minority.

Now, I want to take a second and make sure that we all understand what Madison meant by minority rights.

Today, when we think of terms like minority rights, we are generally thinking about somebody who wants to protect the interests of historically marginalized groups.

These minority groups often fall along the lines of things that we all know, things like gender, race, and sexual orientation.

But that's not what James Madison was worried about.

This might sound like an odd position.

However, Madison had plenty of evidence that this was enough of a problem that it threatened the entire country.

Remember that several states had taken actions towards debt relief, which included requiring the acceptance of that worthless continental money.

As a result, the nation's creditors had substantial amounts of their wealth wiped out.

This had been one of the most prominent problems with the confederation and is something that we have come back to time and time again recall from last time that it was this style of debt relief that was one of the major concessions that was being demanded by Shay's regulators.

Madison believed that there were only three things that would prevent the majority from opposing minority interests.

First, there may be some restraint as a product of the majority trying to protect their reputations.

If we take this in the context of things like paying off creditors, the thought here is that the majority might feel the acute shame that came from stiffing their creditors and thus not meeting their obligations and agreements.

Religion was another potentially moderating force that would help keep the majority honest.

If self restraint was an important part of a person's religious beliefs, that might be enough to temper their worst indulgences.

Finally, maybe the majority would understand that fulfilling their obligations was in the best interest of the country, which in turn meant that it was in their best interest as well.

Unsurprisingly, Madison was able to recognize that all three of these motivations were woefully inadequate to secure the future prosperity of the nation.

Contemporary belief was that republics were only possible on a small scale, where those who were elected to represent the citizens were in close proximity to them.

The United States, however, represented an absolutely massive body, both in terms of land, population and variety of interests.

Knowing this meant that Madison's task became figuring out how to run a republic, while at the same time still ensuring minority privileges were protected.

Now, Madison did think that to some degree the size would actually prove beneficial.

The wide range of interests between the multitude of populations would act as something of a natural check on each other.

Furthermore, the sheer size of the country would help keep like minded individuals from easily working together towards a common end.

Madison therefore did not believe that republicanism was impossible in such a large society, but rather that used properly, it could be a tool used to strengthen the government.

Madison wrote that the real challenge was finding the correct balance that would give the government sufficient sovereignty, that it would in a sense become more or less neutral towards all of those interests.

In other words, if the national government could take enough of the sovereignty away from the states, the broader interests of the various states would help to temper each other.

Whereas stronger governments at the local level were more likely to function to protect those local interests.

A stronger national government would be free from influence from local issues as a result of its sheer size.

Virginians were always going to have particular issues that were important to them, for example the tobacco trade.

Likewise, Massachusetts was going to always value those critical cod fisheries should those two things come into conflict with each other.

In A system with a weaker central government, as was the case under the Confederation, there would be little that the national government could do.

A large enough government, however, would not find itself beholden nearly as closely to any regional interest and would be free to act in a manner it deemed fit.

As Madison saw it, this would protect those minority rights because the government would not find itself shackled to any particular local interest.

Madison still had a problem, however.

Although creating a powerful national government could have the effect of helping to temper some of those local interests and thus protecting minority rights, should the plan go too far, you could end up with a government acting with its own self interest that was not in line with the rest of society.

Whereas Madison had his concerns over the tyranny of the majority, he was not blind to the fact that under the correct circumstances, a more powerful national government could also move in a tyrannical direction.

Somewhat ironically, what Madison turned to here was none other than the British government, an institution that just a few years earlier, these same Americans were fighting to separate from.

What Madison saw here was a government, or those limitations that were imposed on the monarchy kept it from slipping into a state of absolutism.

The rights of the British people were secured through those limitations that Parliament had placed upon the monarch.

This isn't to say that Madison was a monarchist, as he very surely was, determined for the republic to survive.

What Madison wanted, however, was to find a way to limit the power of that republic to the extent that it prevented the government from falling into the trap of becoming a tyranny of the majority.

To expand on this, Madison would write to Thomas Jefferson about his idea of a national negative.

The national negative, as Madison referred to it, was a veto that would allow Congress to overturn state law.

If the idea was that the national government was working in the interest of the entire population while the state governments were fighting to protect local interests.

The national negative would allow the federal government to veto any legislation at the state level that was injurious to the nation as a whole.

Thus, the national government could reach in and pour cold water as needed on local majorities.

Now, if you are sitting there thinking that a national veto over state level legislation would essentially render the states toothless, well, yes, that's exactly what it was meant to do.

This is not to say that Madison necessarily supported stripping the states of all of their sovereignty, something which others at the convention were interested in.

Rather, he wanted to strip enough of the state's power away and transfer it to the national government that no question could remain over who the supreme sovereign actually was.

As Madison would write to Edmund Randolph, although he did not believe that the total elimination of the states made sense, he wanted to limit their power to the point where their continued existence would only be to the extent that they proved themselves useful.

Here he would again turn to the British for an example.

The whole recent revolution business aside, Madison liked the idea of how the national British government could give charters to the colonies while retaining the right to reach in and extend their own prerogative upon them and veto laws that they felt were not in the national interest of the greater empire.

In other words, the colonies were allowed to continue existing right up to the point that their actions caused problems for the greater overall government, at which point the national government would swoop in and exercise their supreme control.

Madison now envisioned something of this nature for the new government of the United States, although surely he was going to be very careful in his wording.

Historian George Van Cleave criticizes Madison's proposal for a national veto as being an exceptionally tone deaf proposal.

He explains that in a country where many were still very weary of a strong central government, Madison's plan for a national veto would do little more than to convince reluctant states like New York that the plan of the nationalists all along was to establish Congress as being a monarch by another name.

Despite Madison considering the national veto to be at the very core of his national plan, it is something that had little chance of ever coming to fruition and in fact carried a significant risk of derailing the entire convention.

It is likewise in a letter to Randolph that we learn that at the head of this system, Madison envisioned an executive officer.

From Madison biographer Noah Feldman, we see here that Madison still envisioned a system where Congress was going to be the centerpiece the national negative, that veto power over the states was going to belong exclusively to Congress.

Not extending such a power to the chief executive indicates that Madison was not interested in a terribly powerful executive branch.

Madison would likewise send the same plan to Washington, espousing the need for a national level veto.

Now, although it was largely the same information that he had sent to Randolph to Washington, Madison included one more bit of information that he believed might be of interest to the former military commander.

One of the biggest problems with what was being proposed is how to get the states to go along with it.

Under the confederation, the states were supposed to do things like pay the required requisitions.

However, as we have seen, that wasn't happening.

What therefore was to stop the states from refusing to obey any of the new central authority.

Madison explained that in These instances, the national government would have the right of coercion via the use of a blockade.

If a state decided to go rogue, the national government would have the right to send the army out to blockade the troublesome state, blocking their trade routes until compliance with federal legislation was ensured.

Although he downplayed it, Madison at least acknowledged that that in the event that a state remained obstinate and refused to play ball long enough, military intervention may be required to force compliance.

Although we are not really going to see it much this season, beginning next season and then really ramping up in season seven, we are going to see exactly what happens when a state ignores the central government.

Spoiler alert.

It isn't good.

In what would become one of the single largest sticking points in the upcoming convention, Madison also expressed his desire to change how representation was chosen.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Virginian Madison believed that representation should be based on the population instead of one vote per state.

Madison believed that under the Confederation, the national legislature was essentially beholden to the state legislatures.

Decisions were made by the state legislatures.

Their delegates to the Confederate Congress were given instructions, which they then followed.

Therefore, the real power rested with those state legislatures.

Under Madison's proposal, the state legislatures would become far less powerful and Congress would reign supreme.

Under a system like that, it made no sense for Rhode island to have the same number of representatives as Virginia.

As Virginia was a much larger state, should each state maintain equal representation, it would mean that Rhode island citizens would have a far greater amount of power proportionally as compared to a state like Virginia and its far larger population.

What Madison was banking on here was that the northern states would agree to such changes as at the moment they were more populous.

The southern states would get on board because in the future they would become more populous.

The smaller states that fell outside of this equation would just have to get on board with the plan.

In this regard, Madison seems to underestimate just how much this would prove to be a sticking point.

In fact, here he was shockingly dismissive of the rights of the smaller states, arguing that if a majority of the larger states got on board with the plan, the smaller states would have to give in to their demands.

For a man who is spending a whole lot of energy preaching about the rights of the minority interests, it is noteworthy that for this specific issue, Madison seems completely dismissive of the rights of the smaller minority states.

As we are going to see in the weeks to come, those smaller states are going to be far less willing than Madison would have hoped to simply see their representation in Congress slashed.

Fair or not, the small states were eager to maintain their disproportionate amount of representation and were not about to give it up easily.

Madison likewise proved to be short sighted here in believing that the states were all completely self interested.

Although everything we have seen on this podcast so far this season might support the idea that the states were totally self absorbed, the reality was a bit more complicated.

It is true that the states were doing everything in their power to ensure their own advancement.

However, especially in New England, they realized that their own personal self interest was predicated upon the power and stability of the entire region.

Massachusetts absolutely wanted to be a leading state and were eager to sit at the helm of a strong New England.

What they did not want to happen, however, is to see themselves sitting at the center of a weak New England.

Sure, on paper, they would potentially have the same amount of power.

Under Madison's plan, however, the strength of the region directly influences the power of the individual state.

In this way, it was important for states like Massachusetts to ensure that their entire region, and not just the state, remained powerful.

As James Madison arrived in Philadelphia for the convention, he was coming into the city with a clear plan in mind.

Yet upon arrival, the first thing that Madison would be met with was disappointment.

As it turns out, despite him arriving on time for the May 14 opening of the convention, he was pretty much the only guy there on time.

The United States was a big place, and a particularly wet winter had made for slow traveling conditions nationwide.

Making matters even more stressful for Madison was the fact that he wasn't really sure that anybody was planning on showing up, as communications were equally as slow.

Conditions in Philadelphia were not exactly comfortable either.

The wet winter had given way to a hot and very humid spring.

Adding to the general misery in the city was that a huge number of flies had infested the city and had taken up residents in basically every nook and cranny available.

Despite this misery and anxiety, however, as more and more delegates arrived, especially those from Madison's state of Virginia, he jumped into the task of ensuring that everybody was on the same page about what needed to be done.

As Madison waited for enough delegates to show up for there to be a quorum, he used his time to work with the nationalist faction and formulate a plan on how to move forward once things officially began.

Starting on May 15, the Virginia delegates, including Washington, George Mason and Edmund Randolph, began meeting daily to solidify their plans.

With enough present to form a quorum, the meeting was gaveled into session.

The Constitutional Convention had officially begun.

Next time we are going to pick right back up with those early days of the Constitutional Convention.

As Madison was about to learn, not everybody was as excited about the radical changes as he was.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time for the opening sessions of the Constitutional Convention.