In Federalist 51, Madison described the benefits of a multiplicity of interests and sects:. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects.
The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government. We know from the examples of violent disunity around the world that multiplicity is not enough to assure personal liberty. Multiplicity works for freedom only in the context of a stable society with sufficient unity.
Did Madison ignore this? National unity was the reason he was for a bill of rights when all was said and done, and national unity was why he put so much weight on adding provisions just because others desired them. Starting almost from the moment the Constitutional Convention ended, Madison grew increasingly aware that there was a genuine constitutional problem to be addressed, but the problem was not in the document; it was in the widespread public mistrust of the document and of the powers of the new government it established.
Madison was confident that mistrust was mistaken, but for a constitution establishing popular government—based on consent of the people and majority rule, with powers limited so as to secure the rights of the minority and of individuals—it is not enough to have majority support, even a majority strong enough to carry every vote. Thus Madison found in public opinion another facet of the remedy for the great republican problem, the oppressive majority.
He saw a bill of rights, his Bill of Rights, as the perfect solution. If he wrote the amendments, he could win the support of those who were still uneasy, without making any change at all in the constitutional structure. His primary objective was to keep the Constitution intact, to save it from radical amendments, and he did it by proposing in their place his own amendments, taking great care to be certain that they changed nothing in the original Constitution.
In place of provisions put forth in the state ratifying conventions and supported by popular demand, he proposed seemingly similar but quite different amendments, to which, as it turned out, the same public gladly gave its consent, thus establishing the Constitution as the focus of national unity, to which the whole community, regardless of faction, could pledge their allegiance. If we think of countless nations all around the globe on the edge of self-destruction because of internal strife, we realize that division can lead to deprivation of all rights, especially the right to physical safety under lawful authority.
Diversity based on a multiplicity of interests can be the basis of personal liberty only if there is an underlying foundation of unity in support of the fundamental principles of the regime. In our case, those principles include limited government and security of individual rights. Other countries in the past adopted constitutions very close to, if not identical to our Constitution, to no avail, because those constitutions had little or nothing to do with the way those other peoples were in fact constituted.
It tells us nothing, or practically nothing. A table of contents of the Constitution would read something like this: After the Preamble, the first four articles deal with the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, and the states. The three remaining articles provide for amending the Constitution, establish the supremacy of the Constitution and the laws pursuant to it, prescribe the ratification procedure, and finish with the signatures. Although Madison did not intend to append the amendments at the end of the document, that is where the Congress decided to place them, all together in one place rather than dispersed and interwoven in the body of the text, as Madison preferred.
What does the Bill of Rights tell us about the People by and for whom this Constitution is ordained? This is a People who take religion seriously enough to insist on being free to choose how they will worship, if they do, and not just follow either ancient custom or governmental instruction. This is a People who insist that their voices will be heard, in speech and print, who have things to say about the running of their own lives and the life of the community, and will gather together if and when they choose to speak their individual and collective minds.
A People who will live under laws they expect to be enforced and who insist on participating in judging and being judged by peers; that is, a people who acknowledge no superiors, only equals. A People who insist on their right to participate in the defense of their community, not to be defended by others not of their community.
A People composed of homeowners who do not welcome uninvited guests, certainly not troops in time of peace. And so on. In this sense it might be argued that the amendments were a completing of the Constitution, not by repairing a defect, not by correcting an imbalance, not by introducing elements in tension or opposition to the body of the text, but by closing a parenthesis that had been left open.
Robert Allen Goldwin — was an American political scientist specializing in the study of the Constitution, who left academia to enter government at the invitation of his friend Donald Rumsfeld, serving as adviser and "intellectual-in-residence" for the presidential administration of Gerald Ford.
He was subsequently a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Reading Poetry Will Save the World. Defeating the Cancel Culture with Kindness. Trump is Owed a Second Term. Crisis Magazine is a project of Sophia Institute Press. Advertise on Crisis Design by Perceptions Studio.
Crisis Magazine. Subscribe Daily Weekly. By Robert A. Goldwin Robert Allen Goldwin — was an American political scientist specializing in the study of the Constitution, who left academia to enter government at the invitation of his friend Donald Rumsfeld, serving as adviser and "intellectual-in-residence" for the presidential administration of Gerald Ford.
Go to Crisis homepage. Join the conversation in our Telegram Chat! Crisis Cartoon. Industry and Virtue have been promoted by mutual emulation and mutual Inspection, Commerce and the Arts have flourished and I can not help attributing those continual exertions of Genius which appear among you to the inspiration of Liberty and that love of Fame and Knowledge which always accompany it.
Two years later, elected to the Virginia convention that pushed Congress to declare American independence, the year-old revolutionary politician made his first public splash on the question, not surprisingly, of religious freedom, the intellectual freedom that civil authorities most often have tried to crush.
They voluntarily give up their liberty of aggression upon entering society, to ensure mutual safety and to secure from invasion the rights and freedoms they have retained. He came to think it wrong for Congress and the military to appoint tax-funded chaplains; it smacked too much of a religious establishment and discriminated against Catholics or Quakers, who, he thought, would never be appointed to such posts.
Congressmen so inclined could hire their own clergymen out of their own pockets. Both as a professional politician and as the framer of a government, he never again made the mistake of expecting ordinary people to be prodigies of virtue. His colleagues were lightweights, often wrong, but even when right unable to get the separate states to back their plans without constant second-guessing that bred universal distrust.
With inflation exploding, Congress took exactly the wrong course. Thinking that inflation sprang only from too much paper money chasing too few goods, Congress called in its paper currency, devalued it 40 to one, and vowed to print no more. T o solve the economic meltdown and the larger military-supply problem it exacerbated, Madison saw, America had to inspire confidence by showing it could win its revolution—which for most of seemed far-fetched—and it needed to borrow hard currency from abroad.
Since France was both its chief foreign lender and main military ally, Madison saw the French alliance as a strategic sine qua non. The French diplomats, for their part, quickly saw his value. The feud split Congress for the first time into two factions, one pro-French and pro-Franklin, the other anti. They had their own national interest to advance, and they used Madison to further the geostrategic vision of the Count of Vergennes, their foreign minister. France aimed to humiliate, weaken, and impoverish Britain, its longtime adversary, through a costly war that would end by splitting off a precious chunk of its empire; but it wanted the independent United States that emerged to be weak, hemmed in by irritating and predatory foreign powers, and dependent on Versailles for protection and trade.
Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude. Moreover, the new chief U. The letter, which reached Philadelphia just before Christmas , showed that France planned to oppose key U. Madison was scarcely less aghast. He was dead wrong but utterly sincere, and he remained sincere and wrong about France for the rest of his political career, with unhappy consequences for his nation. B ut the French alliance solved only part of the economic and military-supply problems that Madison faced daily in Philadelphia.
The larger solution, he saw, had to address a deeper political problem. Jay reasonably but impoliticly thought that, as U. Paper currency had sparked a beggar-my-neighbor race to the bottom, as states passed laws allowing their citizens to use paper money to pay off creditors in other states where such currency was legal tender.
Most men have a hard enough time learning from their own experience; the theoretical Madison, much to his credit, paid close attention to realities and consequences and repeatedly adjusted his theories to the lessons of experience, both personal and historical.
His reading reinforced what his congressional experience had already suggested: confederacies fail when they lack a strong central authority. Before the Convention opened on May 25, , in the Pennsylvania statehouse where, 11 years earlier, eight of the current 55 delegates had signed the Declaration of Independence, Madison prepared feverishly.
He became an advocate of a stronger central government, helped bring about the Philadelphia Convention in , and was elected as a Virginia delegate to the Convention. Madison was a slim man who stood just five feet, four inches tall. One colleague described him as "no bigger than half a piece of soap. Lacking physical charisma, he influenced others primarily by the force of his intellect and his political skills.
Madison's knowledge of constitutionalism, as well as his willingness to find compromises, made him one of the most influential delegates at the Constitutional Convention. After the Convention, Madison helped lead the effort to win ratification of the Constitution. He wrote many of the most important essays that became known as The Federalist. In Virginia's ratifying convention, his knowledge and reasoning overcame the firebrand objections of Patrick Henry to secure approval of the Constitution.
In the new government Madison was elected to the House of Representatives, where he became its most influential member, drafting the Bill of Rights and supporting legislation that gave strength to the new federal government.
He was a close friend and advisor of George Washington in the first years of his presidency. With Thomas Jefferson, Madison formed the nation's first political party in the s in opposition to the policies of Alexander Hamilton.
Madison served as secretary of state during Jefferson's presidency and was elected president in He led the new nation through its first major war the War of His wife Dolley was so successful in establishing the hospitality of the presidency that she inspired the term "First Lady.
He died there in What role did Madison play at the Philadelphia Convention? In later years Madison denied that he was the "Father of the Constitution," observing that the nation's charter was "the work of many heads and many hands" rather than the "the offspring of a single brain.
Madison showed this blend of abilities in his preparation for the Convention. He researched texts examining every form of government that was known. He summarized his conclusions in two papers, one on "Ancient and Modern Confederations," the other on "Vices of the Political System of the United States. Madison designed an alternative constitutional framework that would avoid these problems.
Introduced at the Convention by Virginia's delegates, it became known as the Virginia Plan. Madison's Virginia Plan determined in large measure the direction the Philadelphia Convention would take. It ensured that the work of the delegates would focus not on whether the Articles of Confederation should be replaced, but rather on the composition of the new government to replace it. Madison's views, however, did not always prevail at the Convention. Of the seventy-one suggestions he proposed or supported, forty were voted down.
He was disappointed that the Convention delegates rejected proportional representation for the Senate in favor of equal representation of the states the Great Compromise. He considered this a breach of republican principles of representative government.
He also opposed giving the selection of senators to state legislatures. The Virginia Plan's call for Congress to have a veto power over some state legislation was also rejected in favor of the more general Supremacy Clause. This compromise, however, would later provide the basis for judicial review and for accomplishing much the same purpose Madison had in mind.
The delegates' work on the executive branch, to which Madison had given little thought beforehand, sharpened his appreciation of the Constitution's use of checks and balances, a benefit he would emphasize in his Federalist essays.
Madison was probably the most active Convention delegate. His role in the debates, in which he spoke over times, and as the Convention's unofficial secretary, taking detailed notes of the proceedings in his own special shorthand, required Madison's almost constant attendance that summer. The effort, he later confessed, "almost killed him. Why did Madison take a front seat at the Convention? What were the major themes of Madison's Federalist essays? Along with his co-authors, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Madison wrote as a partisan defender of the Constitution against the attacks of the Anti-Federalists.
Madison wrote twenty-four of his twenty-nine Federalist essays in seven weeks, at the remarkable pace of three essays a week. Many of these essays rank among the best political thought ever produced. His Federalist writings allowed Madison to expand upon his vision of republican government and on his belief that the proposed Constitution would accommodate both the ideals and the political realities of the young republic.
In Federalist 10 , which many scholars consider to be Madison's masterpiece, he redefined the traditional concepts of democracy and a republic.
He demonstrated that by "extending the sphere" of republican government to a national scope, the nation could avoid many of the problems of such a form of government at the local level. The greater diversity of large republics minimized the evils of faction and popular passion, making it more difficult for tyrannical majorities to combine.
The representative government provided by the Constitution for such a republic, he argued, would also shield those in government from local passions. Larger constituencies and the indirect procedures for selecting a president, senators, and federal judges would encourage the choice of the most qualified. Madison described such provisions in the Constitution as a "republican remedy" for the "diseases most incident to republican government. In Federalist 51 Madison offered what is perhaps the best explanation of a system of government based on separation of powers that has ever been written.
Acknowledging that if "men were angels" no government would be needed, Madison argued that any government "administered by men over men" must be so constituted so as to control itself as well as the governed.
The electoral process provided a primary means of controlling government, but "auxiliary precautions" were also needed. The Constitution would provide these precautions by so constituting the national government in its separate branches as to discourage the abuse of power. A system of checks and balances, Madison believed, would give "to those who administer each department, the necessary constitutional means, and personal motives, to resist encroachments of the others.
Similarly, Congress and the Supreme Court would combine personal motives and constitutional powers to resist any intrusion by the other branches. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay wrote The Federalist as part of a campaign for ratification of the Constitution. Their writings have since become a classic text for representative democracy, translated and read by many people around the world.
What contribution did Madison make to establishing the principles of religious freedom? From his first year in the Virginia legislature in , Madison was an advocate of religious freedom. In colonial Virginia, the Anglican Episcopal church was established by law as the official religion and received public funding.
Madison became convinced such favoritism was wrong, because it discriminated against Baptists and other religions in Virginia. Madison believed that allowing a diversity of faiths to exist together on an equal footing was the best assurance against religious persecution and strife.
Though he helped persuade George Mason to endorse the "liberty of conscience for all" in the Virginia Declaration of Rights , he was not able to separate church and government in Virginia's new constitution. Madison, however, did not give up. Ten years later in the Virginia legislature he led the effort to adopt the Statute for Religious Freedom drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The law provided the basis for ending a state church in Virginia and granting equal freedom to all faiths.
In Madison's words it "extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind. Madison's strong belief in religious freedom is also evident in his drafting of the U. Bill of Rights. He had originally opposed adding a bill of rights to the Constitution because he doubted the effectiveness of mere "paper barriers" to tyranny and because he did not see a need for such formal guarantees in a government limited to enumerated powers.
He had promised his Baptist friends and others, however, that he would work for the addition of a bill of rights if the Constitution were adopted.
He also became convinced that a formal declaration of rights would widen support for the new Constitution and would help the nation's courts protect the rights of minorities against majority encroachments.
Almost single-handedly, Madison worked through the summer of to draft and secure agreement on the measure.
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