James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic

Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty (p. 1-2) :

In 1834, when he was eighty-three and many years into a vigorous retirement from a brilliant public life, a correspondent called James Madison the "author" of the Constitution.  This was a "credit" that the sole surviving framer quite deliberately disclaimed, protesting that the federal charter had not sprung, full blown, from any single brain.  Perhaps the least vainglorious of all the famous founders, Madison was conscious, also, that the nation's veneration for the Constitution rested partly on the memory that it had not been framed in anybodies study and had not become the law at all until it was adopted by the people in a solemn act of national deliberation and decision.  Contemporaries, nonetheless, were far from wrong when they accorded Madison a special place among the Founding Fathers.  The writing of the Constitution was indeed, as he reminded this admirer, a summer's work of many heads and hands.  The founding of the federal republic was a larger labor still, which started long before and stretched for years beyond the Constitutional Convention.  yet even after full allowance has been made for all of the achievements of his colleagues, Madison's centrality at every step in the creation of the federal republic marks him as preeminent among the men who shaped, explained, and won an overwhelming mandate for the nation's fundamental law.

 

Madison led Virginia, which led the other sates, in organizing a successful federal convention.  He was principally responsible for the preliminary resolutions used as the initial outline for reform.  By general agreement of the other framers, no one took a larger part in the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention; and after it adjourned, he joined with Alexander Hamilton to write the most important commentary on the plan, defeated Patrick Henry in Virginia's narrowly divided state convention, and assumed a leading role again as the First Federal Congress launched the infant government and wrote the Bill of Rights.  Only Washington, it has been said, was truly indispensable to the experiment's success. Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, at least, proved equally important in establishing its early character and tone.  But it is Madison on whom we unavoidably depend to comprehend its intellectual foundations.  Madison was so essential at so many points in the creation and conceptualization of the new republic that we necessarily perceive the product partly through his eyes.  If we have misinterpreted his conduct or mistake his ideas, we have misunderstood the Founding.  If we can reach a better understanding of the major architect and most compelling advocate of constitutional reform, we cannot fail to gain a fuller knowledge of the new republic's purposes and nature. 

Posted via email from Jim Nichols