Civic Literacy Curriculum

Background

James Madison (1751-1836) was one of the many Virginians who played a central role in the founding of America. After studies at Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) with the Presbyterian minister and Declaration of Independence signer John Witherspoon, Madison returned to the family plantation at Montpelier. 
 A young Madison had helped George Mason work on the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Virginia Constitution of 1776; later, Madison, a protégé of his older neighbor Thomas Jefferson, helped the latter disestablish the Anglican Church in Virginia on grounds of religious freedom, writing the famous “Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments.” He served both in the Virginia legislature and as a Virginia representative to Congress. Madison brought not only these practical experiences but careful study to the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Madison was generally regarded as one of the best-prepared members of the Convention: he had carefully studied political history, as well as the problems of the Articles of Confederation and the state governments in the 1780s. 

Although the finished product was quite different than the one Madison proposed, his influence in first developing the Constitution and then defending it as one of the authors of the Federalist Papers and in the Virginia ratifying convention mean he is often celebrated as the “Father of the Constitution.” Madison himself had advocated a more centralized national government than the Convention’s finished product, which in some ways reflected the more decentralized views of others like Roger Sherman more than his own preferences. Nonetheless, Madison believed himself bound by the Constitution, especially what the state ratifying conventions, far more skeptical of central power, had agreed to; that was what he defended, both in writing the Federalist Papers and in Congress.

As one of the three co-authors of the series, Madison wrote a number of the most important and well-known Federalist Papers. These included No. 10 (on the benefits of an extended – or large – republic), No. 37 (on the challenges that the Constitutional Convention had to overcome), No. 39 (on the distinctive form of federalism embodied in the Constitution), and Nos. 47-51 (on the separation of powers). In these essays, Madison penned some of the most famous lines in American political writing. For instance, in Federalist No. 10, he reminded his readers that “enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” and, in Federalist No. 51, he observed, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” 
      
During the First Congress, Madison led the effort to consider constitutional amendments of the kind requested by the state ratifying conventions. Although all of Madison’s proposed amendments were not ratified, he drafted the amendments that, with some revisions, became the Bill of Rights. As a member of the early Congresses, Madison was initially a close ally of George Washington before becoming more closely aligned with Thomas Jefferson’s views on the Constitution, believing that Alexander Hamilton and his faction were not being faithful to the limits on the federal government that had been agreed on in the writing and ratifying of the Constitution. 
As a result, Madison and his mentor Jefferson helped to found the Democratic-Republican Party, which they viewed as committed to defending the Constitution’s meaning. As a key part of this, Madison authored the “Virginia Resolutions” by which the state of Virginia critiqued the Federalist Party’s Alien and Sedition Acts as violating both the Tenth Amendment’s general limits on federal power and the First Amendment’s specific limits on restricting free speech. 

Madison eventually succeeded Jefferson as the fourth president of the United States and led the country during the War of 1812. (He also succeeded Jefferson as head of the University of Virginia). Madison, who had been younger than most of the other participants in the Constitutional Convention, outlived them to become the last of the Founders. Although Madison believed that the original meaning of the Constitution as agreed to by those ratifying it, rather than the original intent of those who drafted it in secret, bound the American people, Madison nonetheless prepared his copy of his notes from the convention for release after his death. Even as he similarly criticized slavery and ensured the term slave never appear in the U.S. Constitution, like almost all other Virginia leaders, Madison was a slaveholder, and did not free his slaves on his death. 

One of Madison’s final major political acts was coming out of retirement to criticize South Carolina Senator John Calhoun’s doctrine of “nullification,” which Calhoun claimed had been inspired by Madison’s Virginia Resolutions, and by which Calhoun asserted the authority of states to unilaterally veto federal activity. As did the similarly states’ rights committed Andrew Jackson, Madison argued that limiting the federal power to the enumerated powers in the text of the Constitution did not include a veto power in the states, which was nowhere lodged in its text or an inference of that text.