MADISON'S DENIAL: THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON: GENIUS, PARTISAN, PRESIDENT.

• Author: Johnson, Calvin H.
• Position: Book review

THREE LIVES OF JAMES MADISON: GENIUS, PARTISAN, PRESIDENT. By Noah Feldman. (1) Random House. 2017. Pp. xviii + 777. $35.00 (Cloth).

Professor Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School has a new biography of Madison, Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President, which helpfully condenses some 33,000 pages of Madison's papers into single literate 777-page narrative. Madison had an extraordinarily interesting life, all three of them.

Feldman's biography is short of a full and accurate, critical biography because Feldman does not get into the sources beyond Madison's papers. When Madison is wrong in fact or policy, Feldman has no fulcrum from outside sources to evaluate it. When Madison errs, Feldman cannot see the error. Feldman also gives Madison credit for arguments that were in fact well established, without Madison, and before Madison turned and accepted them. On the enumerated power doctrine, for example, Madison is not only not original, but also wrong. From a path that follows Madison's papers, Feldman becomes an apologist for Madison, when we need more skepticism.

The most extraordinary aspect of Madison's life story is his turn from being an advocate, indeed the primary cause, of a strong national government, over to a Jeffersonian partisan trying to keep the national government within a newly-created narrow corral. That turn, that denial of his creation, is the focus of this essay. Madison's denial of his magnificent prior creation, a constitution that created a strong national government, where none existed beforehand, is important enough to our history that we need to understand it. A full and accurate critical biography of Madison would at least try to help us digest Madison's first and most important turn.

Historical arguments, even those looking quite abstract and philosophical, are best explained in context, as an attempt to accomplish or defeat some specific set of programs. (3) Madison's turn to form an opposition party against Hamilton and the Washington Administration occurred, we can see, over three specific issues, that are, in chronological order, redeeming federal notes at their full promised value rather than their depleted fair market value, national assumption of the state war debts, and creation of bank notes to serve as paper money. On all three issues, Hamilton is clearly right and Madison and Jefferson are wrong.

Feldman treats the Bill of Rights as Madison's first incident of his second, anti-national life. There is no turn or inconsistency there, however. Madison is a consistent member of the Revolutionary generation, which fought a long, hard war for the fundamental rights of Englishmen, even when they ceased to want to be Englishmen. Madison is a consistent defender of individual rights. Madison is not, however, sympathetic to the package of hobbles on the national government that the Anti-Federalists were offering under the label of their "Bill of Rights," nor to AntiFederalists' use of minor rights as an excuse to defeat the new national government as a whole. It is not the protection of rights that Madison is objecting to, but the impairment of the national power.

It may well be that Feldman might want to push back and defend Madison on some of these controversies. Madison might be more ably defended in his move to his second life than I conclude here. Still, Feldman is by style glib, giving conclusions without weighing evidence, especially evidence from outside Madison's papers. Joseph Story, quoted in Feldman's front piece, stated that "I wish someone who was perfectly fitted for the task, would write a full and accurate biography of Madison." To satisfy Story's call, we need a critical review that draws on all the available outside evidence and cares to evaluate the positions.

James Madison is first the efficient cause of the Constitution. The Constitutional movement started in the Virginia legislature arising out of Madison's attempt from 1784-87 to get the national war debt paid and in reaction to the dominance and policies of Patrick Henry. (4) In March of 1787, only Madison thought the confederation mode of government, a friendship league among sovereign states, could and should be replaced with a strong national government able to walk on its own legs. (5) Plausibly only Hamilton joined Madison in thinking that the confederation should be replaced. (6) By early May 1787, however, Madison had convinced the Virginia delegation to the Philadelphia convention to adopt the aggressively centralizing Virginia Plan (7) and by the end of May, he had convinced the Philadelphia Convention as a whole (8) to adopt the core of the Virginia plan, a strong three-part national government. By June of 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by enough states that the new national government could be established. Once the national government began operations, opposition to the Constitution ceased to be a viable political position. (9) Madison pushed the whole cascade.

Madison wanted an even stronger national government than he got in the Constitution. He wanted a national veto on state law in any case whatsoever, and the Convention would not let him have that. Still, what he got was a three-part national government able to raise taxes on its own to maintain payments on the war debts, to provide for the common defense and general welfare, able to nationalize the state militias, and able to enact laws that would be paramount over state laws and constitutions. He shifted the United States from a meeting house of diplomats into a single nation.

Madison's Federalist 10, moreover, is the most interesting systematic argument in favor of the new Constitution. Federalist 10 was proof that the new national government would better protect fundamental individual rights than had the states. The Episcopalians might abuse the Presbyterians and Baptists in Virginia, as they had. Congregationalists might abuse Baptists and Quakers in Massachusetts, as they did. Presbyterians and Quakers might abuse each other when each was in office in Pennsylvania. But on the national level, no one sect could obtain a majority, and every sect and faction would be at perfect liberty to follow their own conscience. (10) Only the new national government, the extended republic, could protect the fundamental rights for which the Revolutionary War had been fought.

For generations of political scientists, moreover, Federalist 10 was the invisible hand for political science, parallel to Adam Smith's invisible hand for economics. Federalist 10 proved that a special interest might prevail unjustly in an individual instance, but that over time, the law of large numbers would ensure that the special interests would offset each other. All that was needed was an extended republic with large enough numbers and the machine would run of itself. (11)

Having accomplished his strong national government, Madison denied it, so to speak, three times before the cock crowed. (12) By 1791, less than four years after Federalist 10, Madison had become Jefferson's lieutenant in the endeavor to defeat the administration of Washington and Hamilton, foremost and irretrievably on the issue of use of national bank notes as paper money. In a series of pseudonymous essays written in service of Jefferson's party, Madison called, among other things, for small ideologically homogeneous states, like Virginia, to be a check upon the national government. (13) For Jefferson, the states were the "surest bulwarks against anti-republican tendencies." (14) The ideological stance had a specific programmatic purpose: defeat of the national bank. The Jefferson-Madison opposition party was created, moreover, within a polity in which it was not yet clear that organized factions were a good thing nor that opposition could be either loyal or legitimate.

Madison in his first life is a strong, consistent nationalist. Madison's Virginia Plan gave the new national government power over "common defence, security of liberty, and the general welfare" without further limitation. (15) In the 1787 convention, Madison had argued that it was in the states, "the small communities where a mistaken interest or contagious passion, could readily unite a majority of the whole under a factious leader, in trampling on the rights of the Minor party." (16) Patrick Henry is the factious leader described by Madison's more abstract words. As Madison had to explain to Jefferson, when Jefferson first returned to America, "[t]he evils suffered and feared from weakness in Government... have turned the attention more towards the means of strengthening the [national government] then of narrowing [it]." (17) The complaint was not that Congress "governed overmuch," as James Wilson put it, but that they governed too little. (18) But by 1791 Madison was trying to narrow the national government for the purpose of defeating Alexander Hamilton's programs of assumption of the state war debts, payment of war debts at the face amount rather than depreciated value of the debt, and, most of all, of creation of bank debt to serve as paper money.

Madison transformed yet again into a war president willing to override local interests, but that flip is less interesting. In the election that Jefferson justly called the Revolution of 1800, Jefferson and Madison became the victorious establishment that controlled the national government. A major issue for most of the duration of both the Jefferson and Madison administrations was trying to get the French or British belligerents in the Napoleonic wars to respect the United States' rights of shipping as a neutral. Neither belligerent would allow U.S. shipping to supply their enemy. Ultimately, Madison declared the War of 1812, unnecessarily: Britain was willing to make concessions that should have avoided the war. The United States was grievously unprepared for war on land or on sea. (19)

Jefferson and Madison sponsored a broad embargo which destroyed...