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29 ; which I have no claim. . . . This was not like the fabled goddess of wisdom the offspring of a single brain. It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.”1 He had reasons to be modest. He knew he had shared the stage at the Philadelphia convention of 1787 with a remarkable collection of political talent. His colleagues often got the better of him. The historian Forrest McDonald has calculated that of seventy-one proposals Madison supported in Philadelphia, he lost on forty. After months of preparation, he took his seat in the convention with only the vaguest notions about how a new national government might operate. He advanced some bad ideas, and he clung tenaciously to some unworkable ones. McDonald called him “an ideologue in search of an ideology.”2 If Madison had won on the issue of allocating seats in Congress, the convention probably would have broken up without reaching a consensus. If the delegates had adopted the constitution Madison wanted, it never would have been ratified by the individual states. But Charles Ingersoll did not miss the mark by much. From supporting the idea of a constitutional convention to laboring tirelessly for ratification of the convention’s handiwork, Madison remained in the thick of the battle for constitutional reform. He attended every session of the Philadelphia convention and spoke up, by one count, two hundred times. Only Pennsylvania ’s dapper Gouverneur Morris may have been more voluble.3 And the other delegates listened. Madison’s blandness in formal settings served him well. As Joseph Ellis puts it, “He seemed to lack a personal agenda because he seemed to lack a personality.” Madison never allowed himself to become the issue. In the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, who was n a speech in 1827, the Philadelphia lawyer and politician Charles J. Ingersoll called James Madison the “Father of the Constitution,” and the appellation stuck. Madison denied it, writing another admirer, “You give me credit to { C H A P T E R T W O } A Republican Constitution 30 } A REPUBLICAN CONSTITUTION not in Philadelphia, after a decade of public service, Madison had acquired a self-control and a wealth of information that “rendered him the first of every assembly . . . of which he became a member.”4 The Georgia delegate William Pierce, who was in Philadelphia, called him the “best informed man of any point in debate.”5 To be sure, the Constitution that Madison more or less fathered was more a matter of improvisation than the result of a master plan. Contrary to Charles Beard’s notorious claims a century ago, it was not a plot to protect the financial interests of delegates who held unusual amounts of government securities. Nor in Madison’s case should the Constitution be seen simply as an effort to preserve aristocratic rule in the face of democratic tendencies unleashed by the American Revolution, as some modern historians might argue.6 Instead, by 1787, Madison had become convinced that the failures of the young republic’s political institutions at both the state and national levels presented a threat to minority rights and a potential hazard to the very idea of republican government. Madison’s most important contributions to the cause of a republican constitution are a matter of reasonable debate, but two stand out: the insight that ideas about constitution-making that had been developed in the states could be applied at the national level and the notion that a reformed national government could be used to protect individual liberties within the states. To achieve his larger aims, Madison compromised grudgingly and accepted, however reluctantly , defeat on lesser points. Notwithstanding his occasional stubbornness and a penchant for ideologically elegant but impractical solutions, his greatest assets would prove to be his intelligence, persistence, and a rather remarkable adaptability.  The American economy struggled in the 1780s. Wages and prices fell, and the new nation suffered an unfavorable balance of trade. Before the Revolution , the British Navigation Acts protected American merchants from foreign competition. These acts went away with independence. Among other new restrictions, the British West Indies were closed to American shipping, and Great Britain prohibited its subjects from buying ships in the United States. Before the war a third of the vessels in the British merchant fleet had been built in America.7 The economic woes undermined an already feeble political system.Without the power to tax or to regulate trade, Congress could neither pay its bills nor...

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