Previous articleNext article FreeEssay ReviewLynne Cheney. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered. New York: Viking, 2014. Pp. x+563. $36.00. David O. Stewart. Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015. Pp. vii+419. $28.00. Joseph J. Ellis. The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789. New York: Knopf, 2015. Pp. xx+290. $27.95.Quentin Paul TaylorQuentin Paul TaylorRogers State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSince the appearance of Ralph Ketcham’s landmark biography of James Madison in 1971, the “father” of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, founder of the nation’s first political party, and fourth president of the United States has been the subject of countless books and articles, both popular and scholarly. Always a favorite among political scientists, Madison continues to inform discussions of the constitutional order: republicanism, federalism, pluralism, and interest group politics. His theory of “factions” and the “extended republic” remains America’s best-known contribution to the science of politics. Historians—both amateur and professional—have hardly been less active, often exploring lesser-known aspects of Madison’s career, including the private man known only to his intimates. When the studies of academic lawyers—well known for their effusiveness—are taken into account, the outpouring of work on Madison since the 1970s is impressive indeed.Books on Madison and his fellow founders tend to fall into two broad categories: those written by established scholars and those by journalists, popularizers, and media personalities. While it is rarely difficult to distinguish between the poles of these categories, recent studies of Madison represent something of a mixed bag. Lynne Cheney is a trained historian who has pursued a career outside of scholarship. David O. Stewart, a journalist-turned-historian, has produced a number of popular volumes on American history. Joseph J. Ellis is a prolific and prize-winning historian. Given the authors’ respective pedigrees, the results are rather surprising.Mrs. Cheney, best known as a former Second Lady and the author of children’s books, would appear ill-equipped to enter an arena populated by the likes of Irving Brant, Ralph Ketcham, and Jack Rakove. The reader is immediately put on guard by Cheney’s suggestion that Madison currently resides in a state of neglect and misunderstanding. (This, of course, is a standard point of departure for biographers—for nothing merits attention like greatness neglected and genius misunderstood.) Yet the general public not so much misunderstands Madison as knows little about him at all. The “transformed image” of Madison—from “a bold thinker and superb politician” to “a shy and sickly scholar” (9)—is not the image held today. Such “misconceptions”—if they ever were widely held—and the “cobwebs” said to obscure Madison’s achievements were cleared away long ago. Fortunately, the author does not pursue this path in her search for “a deeper understanding” of Madison and his unique contribution to America’s founding.Nor does Cheney seek to displace Ketcham’s authoritative study, although hers is a rare attempt at a thorough biography of Madison—a testament to the length and richness of his life. Yet those expecting a derivative work of hagiography will be pleasantly disappointed. James Madison: A Life Reconsidered is the work of a scholar, and the scholarship is solid, creative, and at times inspired. From the arrival of Madison’s Virginia ancestors to his interment beside them, Cheney ably charts the remarkable life of the “shy and sickly scholar” who became “one of the great lawgivers of the world” (11). Deftly staged against the whirl of revolution and the high (and low) politics of the illness-racked, death-stalking early Republic—a lost world of cash-strapped Virginia patricians struggling to found a nation and lead it—Cheney has given readers what promises to become a standard biography of Madison. Here I wish to explore some of the author’s more suggestive reflections on his life and legacy.Many writers have commented on the infirmity—misdiagnosed as epilepsy—that struck Madison as a teen and recurred intermittingly for the balance of his life, but few have linked it to his mental development. Cheney speculates that young Madison—who read religious tracts—may have absorbed the customary belief that traced epilepsy to possession by “unclean spirits.” But he was also absorbing the frank rationalism of Locke and Hume. In a passage Madison paraphrased in his commonplace book, Locke observed that the mentally gifted often suffer bodily infirmities: “The strongest and soundest minds often possess the weakest and most sickly bodies” (33). Locke himself had repaired to southern France to recover his health in the town of Montpellier, the name Madison would bestow on his Piedmont estate. The “misery” that accompanied the realization that “Christian orthodoxy insisted on a supernatural explanation for epilepsy” not only contributed to his skepticism but also likely heightened his “zeal” in the cause of liberty (72). Interestingly, this zeal was first exhibited in Madison’s defense of religious liberty on behalf of Virginia’s persecuted Baptists. His lifelong commitment to the “free exercise of religion,” a phrase he contributed to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, would be balanced by an opposition to all religious establishments. According to Cheney, Madison, no less than Jefferson, envisioned a “wall of separation” between church and state—if not between tar and feathers and the hide of a heretical Tory (61).The “Great Collaboration” between Madison and Jefferson was not, Cheney also recounts, without its tensions. “Even before he met him, Madison was learning how maddening Jefferson could be—and how brilliant” (61). But if Madison found Jefferson’s truculence over the “flawed” Virginia Constitution disconcerting, he agreed with him on the importance of its popular ratification. Madison’s insistence on adoption of the federal Constitution through popularly elected state conventions may have had its origins in Jefferson’s proposal. For a “friendship that … was in some ways unlikely,” the two Virginians had much in common, not least of which was Virginia (69). There was also intelligence and education: “Each was probably the brightest person the other ever knew,” and each contributed to “a vast fund of common learning on which to draw as they talked and planned” (71). Both suffered from “disorders that sometimes disrupted their lives,” and both were slave owners who hated slavery. Jefferson was the more universal in attainments, “the soaring thinker [who] would leave behind some of the most uplifting prose ever written.” Madison found life “too short” and the “real world” too demanding to indulge in the arts (70). Playing Aristotle to Jefferson’s Plato, “Madison’s genius showed itself in the dismantling of conventional wisdom and the creation of new concepts. Jefferson’s ideas sometimes became untethered from reality, but Madison drew him back to solid earth—and often found himself inspired by the adventure. Thus, they complemented each other” (70–71).Perhaps their strongest bond, observes Cheney, was a shared passion for liberty: “In none of the founders did this spirit burn more brightly” (72). As the senior partner, Jefferson led the way in Congress, but Madison quickly emerged as a worthy associate in the Virginia legislature. With his pen he would defeat religious assessments and then boldly proceed to secure passage of Jefferson’s moribund statute for religious freedom, “which both saw as part and parcel of intellectual freedom” (72). This was but an episode in a battle to update Virginia’s laws more broadly. A fellow delegate was starstruck by Madison’s virtuoso performance: “Can you suppose it possible that Madison should shine with more than usual splendor [in] this assembly? It is … not only possible but a fact. He has astonished mankind and has by means perfectly constitutional become almost a dictator…. His influence alone has hitherto overcome the impatience of the House and carried them half through the revised code” (107).Cheney notes the duo’s disappointment in their partial success and aptly chronicles their path forward. Already an acknowledged leader in Congress, Madison sealed his reputation as Virginia’s foremost legislator just as the Confederation was reaching a crisis. While diligently preparing for the Philadelphia Convention, he closely monitored developments in the states and deployed his peerless knowledge to persuade a reluctant Washington to attend—an achievement as vital to the success of the Convention as his applied studies. Those looking for antecedents to the famous theory of “factions” and “majority tyranny” in Federalist 10 often point to Madison’s hostility to the northern majority in Congress on the Mississippi Question. Few, however, have included “the breakup of the northern coalition” as an even “more powerful” illustration of Hume’s idea of the “extended republic” (124). As Cheney observes, “if instead of thirteen state legislatures clashing, the interests of millions of citizens could compete,” then popular majorities might be less likely to become oppressive. (While put forward as a hypothesis, the “breakup” owed less to clashing legislatures than to conflicting sectional interests.) Whatever its sources, Cheney shows how the idea of the “extended republic” as a cure for “faction” was refined in the months prior to the Convention, noting that Madison carried it with him, “like a pearl in his pocket,” to Philadelphia. Its application to nation building, she writes, “was Madison’s first grand act of creative genius—but by no means his last” (5).Cheney also explains how Madison brought his idea of the “extended republic” to bear on the Convention. Despite a number of early victories for Madison and the nationalists, the intransigence of the small states over representation created an impasse that nearly doomed the Convention. A frustrated Madison bluntly informed his colleagues that “the great division of interests … lay between the northern and southern,” the free and the slave states. Cheney suggests that Madison’s proposal to recognize this division in apportioning representation was offered “sarcastically” (137). This is not supported by Madison’s notes, which reflect a sincere attempt to find “some expedient that would answer” this “important truth.” While reluctant to propose giving “the Southern scale … the advantage in one House, and the Northern in the other” because of its divisive potential, the proposal itself was no laughing matter. Madison would offer other modes of representation in order to forestall state equality in the Senate, but these were all thwarted by the Great Compromise. Four decades later, however, he would propose the same solution to the problem of representation as a delegate in the Virginia Convention (1829–30).In the interim Madison had quietly digested Jefferson’s tepid endorsement of the Constitution, ignoring his suggestion that four states withhold ratification until a bill of rights was added. When he learned that this suggestion had been made public, Madison felt blindsided. From distant Paris, Cheney notes, “Jefferson was meddling” (170). Yet a few months later, Jefferson sent Madison a gracious letter and enclosed a pedometer with detailed instructions for its use. “What could one do with a friend who was so aggravating and so amiable?”On occasion, Cheney contends, it was Jefferson who brought Madison down to earth. Madison’s failure to support a bill of rights exposed a blind spot in his own thinking. After securing adoption in Virginia—another command performance—he shifted course and pledged to support suitable amendments in the first Congress. Initially, this move was purely political—designed to head off a second convention that might eviscerate the Constitution—but in time Madison saw the value of what he had previously dismissed as mere “parchment barriers” (Federalist no. 48). His uphill, almost single-handed struggle to secure support for amendments in Congress was a heroic effort crowned with success. The adoption of the Bill of Rights completed the work of the Convention.It did not, however, prevent partisan divisions in the new government. Prior to Hamilton’s appointment to the cabinet, Madison worked closely with President Washington, but soon cracks appeared when the treasury secretary unveiled his bold plan for placing the bankrupt government on a sound footing. Cheney identifies Madison’s support for “discrimination” in funding the debt as a rare instance of his emotions getting the better of his “political judgment,” although his “deep aversion to speculators” was of long standing (210). More fundamentally, Madison’s opposition to Hamilton’s program—including a national bank and an activist government—was rooted in a fear that the American experiment was being hijacked by a moneyed elite who sought to emulate the corrupt British model and reduce the citizenry to a state of abject dependence. As Cheney notes, it was not “ignorance of how to build a commercial nation” that moved Madison to resistance, but an acute awareness of the broader implications of Hamilton’s vision—a vision starkly at odds with Madison’s ideal of an agrarian republic composed of independent yeoman (211). Even before he had read Malthus, Madison brooded over the long-term prospects of maintaining such a society. The example of Britain—“mired in the social decay that occurred when the pressures of population pushed people off the land and into factories”—was the great cautionary tale. The glum prospect may have been inevitable, “but there was no need to hurry” it along—precisely what Hamilton and his well-heeled allies appeared to be doing (211). Liberty, without moral and material independence, was no liberty at all—a shrewd observation by a thinker who has occasionally been characterized as a heartless rationalist.Even at his most libertarian, Madison believed that government should play a constructive role in fostering a nation’s welfare. In a little-known letter to Henry Lee, a fellow Virginian who rebuked Madison for linking the Constitution to American prosperity, Madison defended the political framework as a key ingredient. As Cheney observes, “Security in property rights, which Madison explained in Federalist 10 as one of the purposes of the Constitution, is an essential underpinning of a sound economy. So too is security in contracts, which the Constitution addresses by forbidding states to impair them. So too are the uniform commercial regulations and the checks and balances on power that the Constitution provides” (228).Progressive historians would point to such provisions as evidence that Madison and the framers created a political system made “safe for capitalism.” Cheney’s point—and one of interest to recent scholars—is less ideological, “namely, that a country’s fundamental arrangements are critical to determining its long-term economic growth, even more critical than economic policies” (228). Ironically, the Hamiltonian policies Madison deplored were made possible by his own spadework in Philadelphia. “Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit has been widely praised for moving the nation into the modern financial world, but the opportunity and prosperity that Americans have enjoyed owe at least as much to Madison’s work on the Constitution” (228).Perhaps aware of this irony, Madison would join Jefferson in a campaign to stop the “Anglo-men” and “Monocrats” who were subverting the republic. He would not, however, embrace his friend’s utopian philosophy of man and government. In his famous response to Jefferson’s notion that “the earth belongs to the living,” Madison provided what Cheney calls “a masterpiece in itself and an enduring example of the nature of his mind.” Unlike the idealistic Jefferson, Madison “did not roll up ideas into grand syntheses without testing them. He held them up and turned them this way and that, seeing how they fared by the lights of reason and practicality” (206). Such differences of thought and temperament would count for little, however, when it came to combating the “heresies” of Hamilton and the high Federalists. Jefferson’s visceral opposition was largely predictable, but Madison’s “apostasy” from his earlier nationalism came as a shock to many and has presented historians with an intriguing puzzle ever since.Cheney does not directly address the “Madison Problem” but tacitly takes his side against the charge of inconsistency. With the advent of Hamilton’s national bank, Madison certainly changed course, but it was a change in “emphasis,” not in principle—“from what the federal government could do to what it couldn’t” (221). If Madison’s shift cannot be pinned on the sway of Jefferson or the pull of Virginia, he nonetheless “found himself more in harmony than he had been for years with Virginians who were suspicious of federal power” (238). Insofar as Cheney offers an explanation for Madison’s altered position, it is Madison’s own: “There was more than one way to destroy a republic, and Madison’s strategy changed as his perception of the danger changed” (222). Madison’s flirtation with “interposition” and the “compact theory” in response to the Alien and Sedition Acts is recorded without much ado, although it stands in sharp contrast to his performance in Philadelphia.Madison’s adherence to “states’ rights” and “strict construction,” Cheney explains, did not prevent him from finding in the Constitution an implied power to acquire Louisiana, although Jefferson believed that it required an amendment. Yet he shared Jefferson’s delusion that economic coercion unbacked by military force could persuade stronger nations to change their predatory ways. Such a faith proved “wildly optimistic” (344) to say the least. After 20 years of failure, Madison persisted in the strategy as president. If he “saw possibilities” in playing France off against Britain to gain concessions, the policy betrayed the same mistaken logic with the same results. Cheney puts the best face on Madison’s failed strategy, but it is doubtful that by accepting Napoleon’s disingenuous offer he was consciously “clearing the path toward war” (366).Finally, in her account of his presidency, Cheney highlights Madison’s admirable flexibility in adjusting to changed circumstances and unpleasant truths. “Over the course of a long public life, Madison had learned to learn” (423). The hard lessons of war—including the burning of the capital—forced him to recognize the necessity of a respectable military establishment and the value of central banking. If he was behind the curve in learning these lessons, his remarkable restraint in the face of wartime dissent and sedition was notably progressive: “he had proved that a republic could defend itself and remain a republic still” (426).In addition to providing a readable and balanced account of Madison’s public life, Cheney skillfully renders a side of the man all but lost to the public. Among strangers he was taciturn and dour, but with friends and intimates he became the soul of wit and courtesy, a natural raconteur with a gift for drollery. A foreign visitor to Montpelier was thoroughly captivated by the transformation: “When he goes among company, his brow loses its furrows and his face becomes expansive. He enjoys a witticism, he talks brightly—with a simplicity which does him honor and which is all the more noticeable on account of the high position in which his talents have placed him. No one could be more courteous or have more attention and respect than he has for those whom he has received beneath his hospitable roof” (424). Such was the private man whose contribution to America’s founding was arguably without equal.David O. Stewart, who has emerged in recent years as one of America’s best popular historians, approaches Madison’s life and career through his “gift” for partnerships, namely, with Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, and his wife, Dolley. There is little doubt that each partnership was highly significant for both Madison and the early Republic, and each has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. Stewart assembles them under a single roof in a portrait of Madison’s life and the new nation he helped to build. Given the overlap in time, the author faces the difficulty of avoiding confusion and repetition as he moves from Madison’s early collaboration with Hamilton in Congress to his retirement years with Dolley at Montpelier. In this, Stewart admirably succeeds. The result is a highly readable, engaging, and largely seamless production.Those expecting an in-depth analysis of Madison’s “gift” and a precise account of how his five partnerships “built America” may, however, be disappointed. At the outset, Stewart whets the reader’s appetite with the following observation: “Madison brought many gifts to his public career. He combined a sharp understanding of political and economic forces with an inspiring vision of government that could achieve public goals while respecting personal liberty. But ultimately it was his gift for working with others that allowed him to play an outsize role in building the nation” (6).Clearly, Madison had a “gift” for working with others that contributed to his success as a legislator and nation builder. Not only could he “disagree without being disagreeable” (116), but he could collaborate and compromise without foreswearing his principles, rarely permitting the best to become the enemy of the good. It is doubtful, however, that these qualities were “ultimately” more important than Madison’s high intelligence, mastery of public affairs, and herculean diligence in accounting for his success as a statesman. In any event, Stewart does not explore in detail the relationship between Madison’s social and intellectual personas, but he assumes (correctly) that they functioned in tandem to produce notable and, on occasion, heroic results.The opening section on Madison’s partnership with Hamilton chronicles a decade-long collaboration that started in Congress in the early 1780s and ended with bitter disagreements over foreign and fiscal policy under Washington. In his account of the events leading to the Philadelphia Convention, Stewart records a little-known but fascinating episode in their cooperation. By a fortuitous coincidence, both Madison and Hamilton were in New York City in mid-February 1787, where Congress was struggling to maintain a quorum. Madison had just arrived as a delegate for Virginia, while Hamilton had recently taken his seat in the New York Assembly, a mere stone’s throw from Congress. When Hamilton’s motion to adopt the impost amendment failed (and he knew it would), he motioned for New York’s delegates in Congress to support the pigeonholed Annapolis proposal for a Federal Convention. “When the New York delegates to Congress adopted that position a few days later, Madison pounced. On his motion, Congress finally endorsed the Philadelphia Convention” (24).More interesting still is Stewart’s focus on Madison’s stated attempt to (1) solve the “great difficulty” facing the Convention, “the affair of representation,” and (2) avert the “great danger to our general government,” the clash between “the great northern and southern interests” (34–35). In standard accounts of the Convention, it is a commonplace to cite Madison’s prescient remarks on the salience of slavery in the deliberations: the “real difference of interests,” he observed early in the proceedings, “lay not between the large and small but between the Northern and Southern states.” What is typically absent (and what Cheney fails to take seriously), however, is Madison’s effort to address this problem by a “decidedly odd” scheme of representation (35). In essence, Madison proposed that one house of the legislature should be based on the number of free persons and the other based on both free and unfree. The proposal was largely ignored. Yet after the Great Compromise, not only did Madison persist in his opposition to equal representation in the Senate, but his “odd proposal” grew even “more far-fetched” (36). “He again argued that one house of Congress should represent the slave interests with the other house representing nonslave interests” (36). As a sweetener, “he even proposed that voting in Congress could vary according to subject: votes could be cast on a per-state basis when ‘the government is to act on the states as such,’ but on a proportional basis when the government ‘is to act on the people’” (37). The first proposal would have embedded the institution of slavery even deeper into the structure of the Constitution than the Three-Fifths Compromise. The second drew a line that would be difficult to follow in practice.In the end, Madison’s efforts to (1) base the Senate on proportional representation, (2) prevent the states from electing senators, and (3) divide the legislature on a sectional basis all failed. Along with the doomed “negative” on the states (so vital to Madison’s scheme), these failures illustrate why his reputation as the “Father of the Constitution” is somewhat misleading.Madison’s most famous collaboration with Hamilton—The Federalist—is handled with competence, but Stewart’s description of the effort as “an impossible task” misses the mark. Far from attempting “to justify a structure for self-government by human beings who cannot be trusted to rule themselves, to judge right, or to rule others” (49), “Publius” assumed that the American people possessed a sufficient degree of public virtue to sustain the extended, federal republic created by the framers. Even Hamilton, whose view of human nature was perhaps darker than Madison’s, proclaimed (as Publius) that the very idea of a republic “implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor in mankind, which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence.” This view was shared by Madison, who in the Virginia ratifying convention observed that the republican model presupposed a measure of “virtue and intelligence” among the people at large. It was Publius’s determination “to view human nature as it is”—not “an invincible distrust of human nature”—that forms “the bedrock of The Federalist” (49).Stewart’s handling of Madison’s “defense” of the Constitution’s slavery provisions also calls for refinement. While acknowledging that he “could not escape the assignment,” Madison is said to have “stumbled” in his treatment of the Slave Trade Clause, while his defense of the Three-Fifths Clause was “more embarrassing still” (53). As for the former, Madison strongly condemned the trade as “barbarism” and “wished” that its prohibition would “have immediate operation” (Federalist no. 42). In the latter, Madison places the argument in the voice of “one of our southern brethren,” who provides a brutally legalistic justification for counting slaves as both property and persons (Federalist no. 54). Yet beneath the sophistry, Madison inserts a covert critique of slavery that is at once ironic and devastating. After the southerner concludes that the “mixt character” of slaves is “their true character,” he admits that “it is only under the pretext [of this ‘mixt character’] that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property.” Madison then leads the southerner to the inevitable conclusion: “that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused” representation, that is, a recognition of their “rights.”The southerner proceeds to refer, albeit indirectly, to “the barbarous policy of considering as property a part of their human brethren,” who have been “debased by servitude.” Stewart does not cite these passages or detect in Madison’s pose a covert attack on slavery, although he is well aware of Madison’s antislavery sentiments. He is justified, however, in calling Madison’s acquiescence in the southerner’s argument “shamefaced,” but in his role as Publius he could hardly have done otherwise. Madison’s so-called arguments for the slavery clauses in the Constitution were not so much “missteps” (54) as regrettable concessions to political reality further mitigated by a thinly veiled antislavery critique. Admittedly, the same cannot be said for Madison’s allegorical “apologia for slavery” written during his retirement (322).Stewart’s treatment of Madison’s partnership with Washington is both interesting and enlightening, spanning from the former’s “assiduous courtship” of the general in 1783 to the strain in relations occasioned by Madison’s growing opposition to his administration a decade later. Stewart astutely traces how their relationship changed over time, attributing the source of this transition to the ascendance of Hamilton in the cabinet and Madison’s more remote position in Congress. More than mere policy disagreements contributed to the growing distance between the two men: “Madison no longer stood at the president’s right hand. Now he sat across the table from Washington. With both Hamilton and Jefferson in the cabinet, Washington had less need for Madison on difficult problems; even if Madison gained the president’s ear on a question, his voice was not the only one, and the other voices were intelligent ones” (116).Stewart also traces the cooling of Madison’s nationalism and his greater solicitude for Virginia to this period. Like Cheney, Stewart does not plunge into the “Madison Problem,” but he duly notes that “several forces”—political and personal—“pushed [Madiso