James Madison: A Son of Virginia and a Founder of the Nation

THREE: From Ratification to the Bill of Rights

57 E gate John Blair and left for New York. Madison’s return to Congress broke a deadlock in the Virginia delegation. Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson opposed the Constitution; Henry Lee and Edward Carrington supported it. Richard Henry Lee wanted to amend the Constitution, or at least send it to the states with proposed amendments. Madison hoped Congress would recommend it be approved as written. The eventual compromise favored the Federalists, as supporters of the Constitution would be called. Without endorsing the substance of the document or proposing changes, Congress voted unanimously to ask the states to call conventions to consider ratification of the new charter.1 As the ratification debate began, articles in the New York newspapers criticizing the Constitution provoked Alexander Hamilton to plan a series of essays in its defense. His first essay appeared in the New York Independent Journal on 27 October 1787, but busy with his law practice and hoping to publish several articles a week, Hamilton needed help. Gouverneur Morris turned him down. William Duer wrote several essays, but they proved unusable . The capable John Jay was a better choice, but bad health and bad luck limited his contribution. After Jay wrote Nos. 2 through 5 of what history knows as The Federalist, he was disabled by a bout of rheumatoid arthritis . Jay recovered to write No. 64, which appeared on 5 March 1788, and then he was badly injured in April defending a group of doctors, wrongly accused of grave robbing, from a mob.2 Madison also agreed, apparently early in November 1787, to contribute. hortly after the Philadelphia convention adjourned, the Virginia legislature reelected James Madison to Congress by a vote of 126 to 14. Broke by the end of the convention, Madison borrowed one hundred dollars from fellow dele- { C H A P T E R T H R E E } From Ratification to the Bill of Rights 58 } FROM RATIFICATION TO THE BILL OF RIGHTS He had known Hamilton since November 1782, when the New Yorker first entered the Continental Congress. Eventually, Madison wrote twenty-nine essays. Hamilton wrote the remaining fifty-one. As was the custom of the day, all the pieces appeared under a pseudonym, in this case “Publius,” from Publius Valerius, an early Roman politician who, as a sign of his commitment to republicanism, tore down his forbidding mansion on a hill and built a more modest dwelling below. Rumors of Madison’s involvement in The Federalist began to circulate immediately; his authorship was not publicly acknowledged until 1792, when a French edition of the papers appeared . Historians once debated the authorship of some of the essays, but it now seems certain that Madison wrote Nos. 10, 14, 18–20, 37–58, 62, and 63.3 Madison, Hamilton, and Jay churned out The Federalist over a tenmonth period, with a break in the spring and early summer of 1788. To publish three or four articles a week in an era when there were no New York dailies, they used four papers: the Independent Journal, the Packet, the misnamed Daily Advertiser, and the New York Journal. From 11 January to 20 February, Madison wrote all the essays. The first thirty-six articles were published in a bound volume in March, when Madison returned to Virginia to run for a seat in the state ratifying convention. The rest of the essays appeared in a second volume in May, with the last seven essays appearing first in book form. What Thomas Jefferson called “the best commentary on the principles of government which ever was written” has since been reprinted in twenty foreign languages and roughly a hundred English editions.4 Madison recalled years later that most of the essays were written “in great haste.” His intimate knowledge of the Philadelphia convention allowed him to work quickly, and he drew on his earlier writings. Federalist No. 10 repeats arguments from “The Vices of the Political System of the United States.” Madison lifted material for Nos. 18, 19, and 20 from his “Notes on the Ancient and Modern Confederacies.” At first Madison worked closely with Hamilton.The Virginian could walk from his rented room at 19 Maiden Street to Hamilton’s house on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway . An aggressive publication schedule ultimately made close cooperation impossible. As Madison wrote Jefferson in August 1788, “The writers are not mutually answerable for all the ideas of each other, there being seldom time for even a perusal of the pieces...