Madison, Jame
(b. March 16, 1751; d. June 28, 1836) Father of the U.S. Constitution, coauthor of The Federalist, draftsman of the Bill of Rights, and fourth President of the United States (1809–1817).
James Madison was centrally concerned, throughout his public life, with war or the prospect of war. He became a member of the Continental Congress in December 1779, perhaps the darkest moment of the Revolutionary War, and rose to be regarded as the most effective member of that body. He helped secure approval of the Articles of Confederation, struggled constantly with the financial problems facing the union, and supported proposals for a set of independent federal taxes. After 1783, he returned to the Virginia legislature's lower houseand came to be committed to elemental changes in the structure of the new republic. This commitment to reform led to the drafting of the Constitution.
Madison believed that the continental union was not just ineffective, but increasingly in danger of a speedy dissolution. Moreover, he was convinced that the Revolution could not survive disintegration of the union. It was the union that protected the Revolution's experiments in republican governance from foreign intervention and secured the states against the rivalries and fragmentation that had splintered Europe and condemned its peoples to oppressive taxes, swollen military forces, tyranny, and wars. As it was, he reasoned, federal inability to act against the postwar economic slump, which he attributed to European regulations limiting the country's trade, was probably the leading cause of popular commotions in the several states and local legislation violating basic rights or sacrificing long-term public needs to more immediate considerations. "Most of our political evils," he wrote, "may be traced up to our commercial ones, as most of our moral may to our political."
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison assumed the lead of delegates who urged a thorough federal reform. Although the full convention greatly altered his original proposals, he soon concluded that the finished Constitution was the best solution to the classic riddles of a liberal democracy that humankind had yet devised. He collaborated with Alexander Hamilton in writing theFederalist Papers, the most impressive public defense of the reform. He then ensured the Constitution's success by taking on himself, as leader of the new House of Representatives, the preparation of a Bill of Rights.
In 1793, however, revolutionary France initiated twenty years of war with Britain and much of Europe. Madison and Thomas Jefferson were already at the fore-front of opposition to Hamilton's financial policies. They now took the lead, as well, of swelling numbers who supported the French Revolution and condemned a foreign policy that seemed to favor Britain, although the British posed the greater threat to neutral trade. During Washington's administration, Hamilton and others favored diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis with Great Britain, backed by stronger military preparations. Madison and Jefferson, at the head of what was rapidly becoming the first political party, the Democratic-Republican Party, preferred commercial warfare with the British. Both regarded John Jay's Treaty of 1795 as an abject surrender to the British and the leading cause of rising trouble with the French.
During the later 1790s, several factors—a quasi war with France, enlargement of the army, and legislative efforts to suppress domestic opposition—persuaded the Republicans that a conspiracy to undermine the constitutional republic had burst into the open. Federalist conspirators, they feared, were moving toward a permanent alliance, maybe even a reunion, with Great Britain. With all three branches of the federal government in their opponents' hands, Madison and Jefferson used the legislatures of Virginia and Kentucky to challenge the federal Alien and Sedition Laws, developing a compact theory of the nature of the Constitution and initiating the campaign that led to Jefferson's victory in the election of 1800.
From 1801 to 1809, Madison served not only as Jefferson's secretary of state, but also as a principal advisor on domestic policy, which they were mutually determined to revise. They also decided to employ commercial confrontation as a viable alternative to war. By the time that Madison succeeded Jefferson as president, however, the Great Embargo had failed to achieve that goal. Madison was preoccupied throughout his presidency with a search for ways to use the economic weapon that would damage France and Britain more than the United States. By the winter of 1811–1812, commercial warfare had been pressed, in one form or another, for a full four years without securing a repeal of the damaging and nationally demeaning British policies to which the Jeffersonian Republicans objected. Before thenew, Twelfth Congress met, the president reluctantly decided that his only choices were submission to these British policies or war. On June 18, 1812, in what was basically a party vote, a declaration of war passed the Congress.
