Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater Stuart Leibiger Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2019). Pp. 296. $30.00 cloth. About Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, John Quincy Adams wrote, “the mutual influence of these mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet” (xiii). In Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution, Jeff Broadwater, professor emeritus of history at Barton College, traces the evolution of the political thought of these two Founders from the drafting of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to the adoption of the Madison’s Bill of Rights. As young adults, Jefferson and Madison read law, but only Jefferson became a lawyer, and neither made a career in that profession. Instead, writes Broadwater, both men gravitated to the political realm, where writing legislation and designing governments fascinated them. Jefferson dominates the first quarter of this book. Eight years older than Madison, he was already authoring the Declaration and proposing a constitution for Virginia when Madison entered public life as a delegate to the 1776 Virginia Convention. Jefferson and Madison first met at the 1776 session of the state legislature, but they did not become friends until 1779, when Jefferson became Virginia’s governor and Madison sat on the governor’s council of state. “A friendship was formed,” Madison later wrote, “which was for life, and which was never interrupted . . . for a single moment” (69). Broadwater suggests that a shared commitment to religious liberty and the separation of church and state also brought the men together. Before becoming governor, Jefferson had taken the lead in proposing revisions to the state’s laws. Thanks to Madison’s leadership in the 1780s as a member of the state legislature, most of Jefferson’s bills became law, especially the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which ended established religion in the state. Broadwater shows that as members of the Confederation Congress (Jefferson succeeded Madison as a delegate from Virginia in 1783), both men pursued the same goals: securing Virginia’s cession of its western land claims to the Confederation government, obtaining Mississippi River navigation rights from Spain, and granting to Congress the power to collect revenue and regulate commerce. This work continued when Jefferson became the U.S. Minister to France and Madison took a seat in the Virginia legislature in the mid-1780s. Although Jefferson and Madison concurred on the need to reform the Articles of Confederation, they did not agree on how strong the national government should be. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison helped to create a strong and independent executive and argued successfully against including a federal bill of rights but failed to obtain a Congressional veto power over state laws. He came away from the convention convinced that the Constitution would neither sufficiently bolster the national government nor rein in the states. Jefferson preferred a much less muscular central government, commenting that three or four amendments to the Articles would have been sufficient. Fearing Jefferson’s reaction, Madison hesitated to send him a copy of the proposed Constitution. While not opposed to the document’s ratification, Jefferson desired a one-term limit for the president and the addition of a bill of rights. “Jefferson and Madison, for the first time in their careers, had dramatically different views on a great political issue,” writes Broadwater. “The debate over the Constitution tested their friendship as nothing else ever had or ever would” (153). [End Page 246] Despite the embarrassment Madison faced at the Virginia Ratification Convention over Jefferson’s critique of the Constitution, the friendship between these two men helped lead to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Madison recognized that adding rights-related amendments to the Constitution would quiet lingering Antifederalist opposition to the document. Broadwater traces the process by which an exchange of letters with Jefferson convinced Madison that a bill of rights would also genuinely improve the new framework. Madison had initially opposed a bill of rights, insisting that mere “parchment barriers” could not stop majority tyranny (164). In discussing the issue by mail with...