About what James Madison said...

At the end of the Constitutional Convention, the delegates set aside their remaining differences and signed the new Constitution, knowing their work was not yet complete. The road ahead included convincing fellow Americans to accept and ratify their new governing proposal.

Debates around constitutionalism were already in full swing by 1787, so the delegates jumped right into the ongoing dialogue as the convention concluded.

The U.S. Constitution wasn’t written at the end of the war for independence; instead, the Articles of Confederation, which bound the thirteen colonies together during the war, became the nation's new governing agreement.

This was partly due to a post-war lack of a unifying American identity, but, more importantly, newly minted Americans focused first on ensuring state governments would not slip into tyranny.

Consequently, between 1783 and 1787, the 13 new states drafted written constitutions. This was revolutionary as it demonstrated the American people's commitment to representative democracy.

While written agreements between the governed and government date back to the Greeks and beyond, most nations, let alone local governments, did not write constitution-like documents. For Americans, however, this was a priority, and unsurprising given the problems colonists faced in the decades preceding independence.

Many felt Parliament had easily abused the colonists due to the lack of a definitive document that clearly defined their rights. The colonists clung to the Magna Carta and the 1689 English Bill of Rights, as well as English case law, to justify disobeying royal orders. Parliament and the King, however, repeatedly found ways to circumvent their legal resistance.

Early Americans, therefore, engaged in robust debates to craft strong protections for their newly won freedoms.

The early state constitutions represented a broad spectrum of governing philosophies and organizational structures. For instance, under the state's original constitution, Pennsylvania had no governor and a unicameral legislature, while New Jersey briefly enfranchised women. What connected all the constitutional experiments was the delineation of rights and protections.

Once the state constitutions were written, many national leaders turned to the federal government, expressing concerns about its limitations. Under it, leadership lacked the authority to raise taxes, sign treaties, and regulate commerce between the states. Most importantly, they lacked the power to put down rebellions.

This weakness was borne out when Shays's Rebellion erupted in Massachusetts in 1786, sparking debates over the need to revise and strengthen the Articles.

When Daniel Shays and his fellow veterans laid siege to their county courthouse to avoid foreclosure on their farms due to unpaid taxes, men such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton openly worried about the consequences if Massachusetts failed to quell the uprising.

The Constitution's authors, therefore, gathered in Philadelphia in the Summer of 1787 under the pretext of revising the Articles of Confederation for this purpose, and the gathering was presented to the public under these terms. Once the men came together, however, a general feeling quickly emerged to ditch the Articles and instead start a new governing document from scratch.

They had no authority to do this, but pushed ahead undeterred. The delegates elected George Washington as their presiding officer, and he swore the men to secrecy.

Washington sought to avoid a public debate until the document was complete.

James Madison became the convention's secretary and took copious notes on the proceedings. You can look at his commentary in “Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787” here: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/debcont.asp.

We are fortunate to have this level of insight into Madison’s thoughts, as historians consider him to be the father of the United States Constitution. As a student of history and politics, Madison had a broad familiarity with various forms of representative government dating back to the Greeks and Romans. Most importantly, he was a scholar of the English system of government.

Madison's plan was, therefore, ready for review by the convention delegates once the men reached consensus on the need to address two significant issues. First, how to create a genuinely representative government? Second, how to balance between competing factions?

The Virginia Plan was Madison’s most significant contribution to the debates.

While it is easy to assume Madison created a brand-new form of government, this was not the case. Instead, he was a masterful pragmatist who blended the best aspects of the English system of government with the realities of American life.

The English system of government consisted of a legislative branch comprising a House of Commons and a House of Lords; an executive branch consisting of the monarchy and royal ministers; and a judicial branch comprising the courts.

Madison knew Americans would never accept the English system of government whole cloth after just rejecting it as tyrannical. He therefore modified aspects of the English system that had contributed to Parliament and the King's abusive behaviors.

Under the Virginia Plan, there would be three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial, but there would be no monarchy or lords, and the judiciary would be independent of executive interference. People, not artificial entities such as social classes, would be represented in the bicameral legislature based on proportional representation, with the largest share of power residing in the legislature.

Some convention delegates believed Madison’s plan was overly favorable toward the larger population states. Consequently, New Jersey's delegates proposed a similar plan, albeit with a single legislative house, where each state would have equal representation.

This plan favored the states with smaller free populations. Not small states, but states with smaller free populations, such as most of the southern states.

Throughout the convention, the delegates negotiated various compromises (which I will discuss in a separate post), and in the end, no one was entirely satisfied. However, Benjamin Franklin pressed the men to sign the document and prepare to lobby Americans to vote for ratification.

He praised their work and realistically declared that the document was as good as it could be before providing the people with an opportunity for assessment and evaluation.

Once the delegates dispersed, they faced an uphill battle to win ratification. Yet, the men had agreed that the American people deserved the opportunity to accept or reject the new governing document, especially considering that the convention had turned into a drafting session for a brand-new constitution.

All agreed that a document creating a representative government could not be forced on the people without undermining the spirit of the American experiment.

The delegates assumed that some states, like Rhode Island, would vote no, so the number of states needed to vote affirmatively for ratification was set at nine out of the thirteen.

The northern states were the most vocal in their adverse reaction to the document.

States like New York and Massachusetts were strong proponents of direct forms of democracy, so extra care was needed to argue for ratification in the North. Three supporters of the Constitution agreed to write persuasive arguments in “The Federalist Papers” to secure ratification. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/full-text

“The Federalist Papers” are a series of published essays written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. Each man contributed to the collection by focusing on different parts of the Constitution and addressing various arguments against ratification.

Interestingly, despite the convention delegates agreeing that the new nation was too divided into factions for true political parties to form, once the ratification and anti-ratification sides drew up their arguments, the beginnings of our party system emerged. What’s confusing about these two nascent parties is that their names were the opposite of their position on ratification.

The Constitution’s authors knew that the American people were opposed to creating a large and powerful national government so soon after their victory over England. The convention delegates, however, believed that a strong and centralized national government was necessary to manage such a large country and to suppress rebellions, such as the one led by Daniel Shays.

So, instead of calling themselves centralists or nationalists, the supporters of the constitution called themselves Federalists. Federalism, however, implies a liberal sharing of power down to the local level, which was what opponents of the Constitution wanted. In short, our nation’s founders pulled a semantic sleight of hand to lure people into voting for something. Things never change.

The group that rejected the new constitution because they wanted power to be kept at the state and local levels, which is a form of federalism, therefore, had to call themselves the Anti-Federalists.

The Anti-Federalists claimed that government governs the best when it operates in plain view of the people being governed. They strongly argued that giving power to men who would be out of sight would lead to the same type of tyranny exercised by Parliament and the King. They made a compelling case, so James Madison addressed it directly in “Federalist No. 10.”

If you’ve ever heard about the “factions” argument in “The Federalist Papers,” that’s No. 10. Madison agreed that problems with government would always exist and then flipped the Anti-Federalist argument on its head. He argued that the Constitution was needed to prevent the type of tyranny that Anti-Federalists feared. He also argued that the best way to address another of the opposition’s concerns — corruption among elected leaders — was to have a large national government.

Madison argued that in local and state government, which are small and oriented toward a subset of the population, it is much easier for a majority faction to form and oppress the minority. And once in the majority, a faction could become corrupt.

He laid out that if all factions from every state are represented at the federal level, federal representatives of the people will be divided into many groups of varying sizes, which would nullify any one group’s ability to seize power.

Instead, putting all interests and factions together at the federal level would force collaboration to get work done and would check the power of corruption. Thus, Madison's vision saw Congress as a place of collaboration and coalition-building.

Unfortunately, we have yet to realize Madison's vision of a collaborative government based on coalition building, primarily due to the rise of the two powerful political parties. The parties incentivize aligning with one faction and punishing those who cross ideological lines to join other factions.

However, we may have witnessed something that reflects Madison's principles in New York's recent mayoral primary, where ranked-choice voting encouraged collaboration and coalition-building.

Eleven candidates ran in the race, bringing many factions into the election contest, and then at least two candidates collaborated to lift their combined factions to the finish line. Campaigns have agreed not to attack other campaigns in the past, but this is a new level of coalition building.

Stay tuned.