by Myron Magnet
ONE OTHER REMARK Jefferson made about Hamilton sums up his curious tinge of otherworldliness. The Treasury secretary “avowed the opinion,” Jefferson complained, “that man could be governed by one of two motives only, force or interest.” Government by force was “out of the question” in America, Hamilton added, and that left interest.64 Here one remembers that Jefferson also didn’t take part in the Constitutional Convention, since he was in Paris. Far from envisioning a republic of philosophers, where carefully educated citizens reason their way to self-evident truths about liberty and republican government, the writers of the Constitution created, through politically realistic compromise, a republic of ordinary men, moved by ordinary interests that, checking and balancing one another like the centrifugal and centripetal forces that keep the planets in their orbits, would add up to liberty. Hamilton was merely expressing the fundamental American principle of government. At more than a few moments, Jefferson’s rationalism clouded his realism.
Yet his rationalism proved invaluable to the republic not just at its Founding but at its moment of greatest crisis, when it had to break with its historical past and square the circle he himself couldn’t square. At Gettysburg, in the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln invoked the words of the Declaration of Independence to explain what the war was about: that the nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” needed “a new birth of freedom” to include all men in that proposition. The abstraction, not the history, was at that moment our true national identity. And in the ever-growing consciousness of man’s freedom that is the true meaning of history, as Jefferson might have said, so it became.
“Mine, after all, may be a Utopian dream,” Jefferson said in old age in another context, “but being innocent, I thought I might indulge in it till I go to the land of dreams, and sleep there with the dreamers of all past and future times.”65 He is among the greatest of those dreamers.
9
James Madison: Theory
IN THE ROSTER OF FAMOUS LAST WORDS—from Nathan Hale’s “I regret I have but one life to give for my country” and Lord Nelson’s victorious “God be praised, I have done my duty” to François Rabelais’ “Drop the curtain; the farce is over” and John Maynard Keynes’s debonair “I should have drunk more champagne”—surely the final utterance of James Madison deserves an honored place. Bedridden with rheumatism at eighty-five, the fourth president had spent nineteen years in retirement in Montpelier, the columned brick Virginia plantation house where he had grown up since age nine or ten, where as a young legislator he had pored over history and political philosophy to help frame his plan for the U.S. Constitution, and where, as a forty-six-year-old ex-congressman, he had brought his wife of three years to live with his parents on their 5,000 rich Piedmont acres. That final morning in 1836, Sukey, his wife’s longtime maid, had brought him his breakfast, as usual; another slave, his valet Paul Jennings, got ready to shave him, as he had done every second day for sixteen years; his favorite niece sat by him to keep him company, as the June sun filtered through the twin poplars in the backyard and warmed the book-filled sickroom. The old man, his intellect as sharp as his body was worn, tried to eat but could not swallow.
“What is the matter, Uncle James?” his niece asked.
“Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” the president replied. And then, writes Jennings in a memoir of Madison published just after the Civil War, “his head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”1
A change of mind! How utterly fitting a farewell for the most cerebral of the Founders, the nation’s great political theorist, whose biography is, more than any other president’s, the record of his thought. How fitting, too, for a man whose intellectual journey has sparked debate for two centuries. Was the Father of the Constitution consistent? Did he shift his views—and if so, why?
And thereby hangs a most interesting, and most human, tale.
TRUE ENLIGHTENMENT intellectual that Madison was, the liberty he most hotly defended as the Revolution loomed was freedom of thought, man’s God-given birthright and the engine of human progress. At Princeton, he had wholly embraced the Scottish Enlightenment ethic of President John Witherspoon, an Edinburgh-educated Presbyterian iconoclast (like Madison’s beloved schoolmaster Donald Robertson), who strove to “cherish a spirit of liberty, and free enquiry” in his scholars, “and not only to permit, but even to encourage their right of private judgment.”2 With teenaged bravado, Madison upped the free-enquiry stakes: he persuaded Witherspoon to let him try to do two years of work in one, “an indiscreet experiment of the minimum of sleep and the maximum of application, which the constitution would bear,” an older and wiser Madison ruefully judged. Though he graduated in two years rather than the usual three, he stayed on for another because the effort had left him too ill to travel home. Finally back at Montpelier in 1772, he wrote his college friend William Bradford that he couldn’t settle down to choose a career. His illness, recurring with epilepsy-like seizures at times of stress, “intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life,” he said, so it seemed silly to learn skills “difficult in acquiring and useless in possessing after one has exchanged Time for Eternity.”3
But his lassitude had vanished when he wrote Bradford with flaming indignation in early 1774, shortly after the Boston Tea Party. A handful of Baptist preachers languished in jail in the next county “for publishing their religious Sentiments which in the main are very orthodox,” he wrote his Philadelphia friend. Locked up for their opinions! “I have squabbled and scolded[,] abused and ridiculed so long about it, to so little purpose that I am without common patience. So I leave you to pity me and pray for Liberty of Conscience to revive among us.” After all, he asked, echoing Doctor Witherspoon’s thunderous denunciations of “lordly domination and sacredotal tyranny,” what can you expect when you have an established church that tells everyone to believe and pray alike? Had the Church of England been established in the northern as well as the southern colonies, “slavery and Subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated” throughout British America, since, without a clash of opinions, “Union of Religious Sentiments begets a surprizing confidence” that breeds “mischievous Projects.”4
Two months later, with the dissenting ministers still locked up, he was still fuming, and he expanded his criticism in another letter to Bradford, later George Washington’s attorney general. His fellow Virginians were harming themselves as well as the ministers. They should imitate Bradford’s fellow Pennsylvanians, who have “long felt the good effects of their religious as well as Civil Liberty. Foreigners have been encouraged to settle amg. you. Industry and Virtue have been promoted by mutual emulation and mutual Inspection, Commerce and the Arts have flourished and I can not help attributing those continual exertions of Genius which appear among you to the inspiration of Liberty and that love of Fame and Knowledge which always accompany it.” Freedom of thought and belief, of unbounded speculation, of invention and innovation, make up an indivisible whole. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize[,] every expanded prospect.”5 There is no progress without intellectual freedom.
THAT YEAR, Madison found his vocation when he joined the Orange County Committee of Safety, which enforced the colonies’ ban on British trade: he became a professional politician. Two years later, elected to the Virginia Convention that pushed Congress to declare American independence, the twenty-five-year-old revolutionary made his first public splash on the question, not surprisingly, of religious freedom, since in his view any government attempt to dictate religious belief was an attack on his cherished freedom of thought, which necessarily includes the freedom to hold unorthodox ideas about anything, including church doctrine. When the Virginia Convention, which turned into the state’s official legislative Assembly, drew up a Declaration of Rights, Madison objected to the article declaring that “all men shou’d enj
oy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience.” Toleration, he pointed out, implied that government had the authority to withhold or to grant freedom of conscience. But it doesn’t. Freedom of thought is “a natural and absolute right” not subject to any government control whatever. His suggested amendment, which would have disestablished the Anglican Church completely, proved too radical for the Convention, but its members accepted his second draft, which declared that religious belief and practice “can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, that all men are equally entitled to enjoy the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate.”6
Almost a decade later, in June 1785—when, because of the Articles of Confederation’s term limits, he had left the Continental Congress after four years of toil and had rejoined the Virginia Assembly—Madison made clear that his musings on freedom of conscience had matured into a fully formed political theory that took the ideas William Livingston had voiced thirty years earlier into new, self-governing territory. Patrick Henry and other legislators had proposed a tax to support teachers of the Christian religion; Madison responded with a ringing defense of intellectual freedom, Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, that swept the state—and swept Henry’s bill into oblivion.
“All men are by nature equally free and independent,” he wrote, quoting the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which in turn paraphrased Locke. They voluntarily give up their liberty of aggression upon entering society, to ensure mutual safety and to secure from invasion the rights and freedoms they have retained. These rights and freedoms—which belong to us not because society or government bestows them but because they are the “gift of nature”—are “unalienable,” none more so than freedom of thought, “because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men.” Since on entering society, no man surrenders more rights than any other man, we who glory in our freedom “to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin . . . cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us”—even, Madison implies, if they believe in no religion.
Even under the free, popularly elected government that the Revolution brought into being, man’s God-given rights remain off-limits to state interference. Yes, the “will of the majority” ultimately rules, “but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority,” and such a trespass on fundamental rights is as illegitimate as the arbitrary will of an absolute monarch. Any rulers who “overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people”—even popularly elected rulers carrying out the will of the majority—“exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants,” differing from the Inquisition “only in degree.” A democratic tyranny may seem a contradiction in terms, but when a democratically elected government tramples rights bestowed by nature, that tyranny becomes all too real. How to prevent that oppression became the focus of Madison’s intellectual and political life.
LOVERS OF FREEDOM, he knew, must snuff out such despotism before it has “strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.” So the Assembly’s bill allowing the state to meddle in matters of conscience and to tax all citizens to pay state-approved teachers of a Christianity some citizens may not profess puts the most basic choice before us. “Either then, we must say that the Will of the Legislature is the only measure of their authority; and . . . they may sweep away all our fundamental rights; or that they are bound to leave this particular right untouched and sacred.” If citizens let the legislature overturn a single natural, fundamental right—as if individuals exist for the state rather than the state for individuals and the protection of their rights—then all their rights are at risk, and they have what Richard Henry Lee called an “elective despotism.” In that event, popularly elected rulers “may controul the freedom of the press, may abolish Trial by Jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary powers of the State,” and may even “despoil us of our right of suffrage, and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary Assembly.” Virginia’s growing numbers of Baptists, Methodists, and other Dissenters, who painfully remembered having to support the established Anglican clergy before its tacit disestablishment in 1776 and wanted no further government interference in religion, devoured Madison’s Remonstrance, flooded the Assembly with passionate petitions, and killed the bill.7
As a practical matter, Madison’s view that government should never dream of “making laws for the human mind,” because there are areas of human freedom where government may not tread, made him a firmer believer in the separation of church and state even than Jefferson—as firm a believer as Livingston, whose liberty-of-thought creed he had absorbed through his college reading of the Independent Reflector. He rejected as “an old error, that without some sort of alliance or coalition between Govt. and Religion neither can be duly supported.” On the contrary, “a due distinction . . . between what is due to Caesar and what is due to God best promotes the discharge of both obligations,” he wrote. “A mutual independence is found most friendly to practical religion, to social harmony, and to political prosperity.” When church and state collude, history shows, the result is “pride and indolence in the Clergy” and “superstition, bigotry, and persecution” in the society.8
He came to think it wrong for Congress and the military to appoint tax-funded chaplains; it smacked too much of a religious establishment, and it discriminated against Catholics and Quakers, who, he thought, would never be appointed to such chaplaincies. Congressmen so inclined could hire their own clergymen out of their own pockets. As president, though he had planned to follow Jefferson in never proclaiming days of thanksgiving or fasting, when Congress pushed him to change course, “I was always careful to make the Proclamations absolutely indiscriminate, and merely recommendatory,” he recalled, simply designating “a day on which all who thought proper might unite in consecrating it to religious purposes, according to their own faith and forms.”9
BEYOND SHOWING him that democratic majority rule could turn tyrannical, his early political career proved an education in popular government’s dangers and shortcomings at all levels: individual, state, and national. In his bid for reelection to the Assembly in 1777, he wouldn’t lay out the usual free drinks that voters expected, thinking the custom “inconsistent with the purity of moral and republican principles” that he was “anxious to promote by his example,” he later wrote. The voters, short on the requisite republican purity, viewed his behavior “as the effect of pride or parsimony,” and voted him down as a prig.10 Both as a professional politician and as the framer of a government, he never again made the mistake of expecting ordinary people to be prodigies of virtue.
As consolation for his loss, then-governor Patrick Henry got him named to his eight-man Council of Advisors, where, on his first workday in January 1778, he helped deal with a letter from George Washington that sounded what became a keynote of his next decade in politics. Freezing and hungry that dire winter in Valley Forge, with no supplies coming in, “this Army must inevitably . . . Starve, dissolve, or disperse,” the General wrote two days before Christmas. “Sir this is not an exaggerated picture.”11 The governor and council managed to send meat and salt, “good rum,” and sugar northward, and Madison had his first taste of the desperate, hand-to-mouth difficulty of getting self-governing citizens to pay taxes, and states to cooperate with the national government, even with survival at stake.12
Elected to the Continental Congress two years later, he vividly wrote a week after taking his seat in Philadelphia in March 1780 of the “alarm and distress” prevailing there to Jefferson, his close friend ever since his Piedmont neighbor had succeeded Henry as governor and had begun working hand in glove with Madison on the Council of Advisors. With
the victory at Yorktown still nineteen months in the future, problem piled upon problem: “Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter; the public treasury empty; public credit exhausted; . . . Congress complaining of the extortion of the people; the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature & systematic measures, and the urgency of occasions admitting only of temporizing expedients, and those expedients generating new difficulties”—and that was just for starters. His colleagues were lightweights, often wrong, but even when right they were unable to get the separate states to back their plans without constant second-guessing that bred universal distrust.13
With inflation exploding, Congress took exactly the wrong course. Thinking that inflation sprang only from too much paper money chasing too few goods, Congress called in its paper currency, devalued it forty to one, and vowed to print no more. But as Madison saw, the real problem was that no one believed Congress could ever make the paper it emitted worth anything, so inflation barreled on: Madison’s expenses for his first six months in Philadelphia came to $21,000 for room and board for himself and $6,034 more for his three horses, $2,459 for liquor and mixers, $1,776 for laundry, and $1,020 for barbering. The twenty-nine-year-old congressman, still getting an allowance from his rich planter father, was also “a pensioner on the favor of Haym Salomon, a Jew Broker,” who patriotically refused to charge interest on loans to the “necessitous Delegate.” By May 1781, one thousand Continental dollars equaled one gold dollar.14
