Madison Then and Now

...Some members of Congress who were opposed argued against entry on the grounds that the Constitution forbade the transportation of slaves from one state to another under a clause that referred to barring "the migration or importation" of slavesafter 1808...

...In 1821, four years after Madison left the Presidency, a " record" of the debate at the Constitutional Convention was published by Robert Yates, chief justice of New York's judiciary, who had been a delegate in Philadelphia and had left the Convention in disgust...

...With a mind to the preservation of the republic, he also thought that their scattered location would make a rebellion among slaves less likely in the South, where blacks outnumbered whites in many counties...

...Other "heirs" of Madison did not go the way of Rives...

...Within months after leaving the Presidency, Madison—now the country's most authoritative interpreter of the Constitution—found it necessary to face head-on the insupportable paradox of slavery practiced in a democracy...

...Accordingly, that North and South should have opposing concerns did not disturb him...

...Despite the fact that he was Madison's ideological heir, Rives turned antidemocratic under the pressure of the Civil War and embraced slavery...

...For another thing, the finished product could hardly avoid being profoundly influenced by the particular circumstances in which the Notes were readied—at long last—for publication...

...These questions provoke a rereading of The Last of the Fathers with an eye to contemporary concerns...

...While edging further and further to the right did he, in his biography, play puppeteer with Madison's spirit for his own ideological purposes long after the mind and voice were gone...

...If the South were forced to give up its "peculiar institution," Dixie would secede and the precious Union dissolve...

...This became starkly apparent in the Panic of 1819...

...So it appears that the most relied upon account of what happened in Philadelphia is seriously flawed...

...Foronething, they were transcriptions of jottings that had to be fleshed out some 50 years after the event, and the recollection of detail was necessarily colored by the passage of time...

...And Madison himself repeatedly startled some of his closest associates with his idiosyncratic insights into changing times and his ability to adjust to them...

...In thus eliminating the obstacle to Missouri's incorporation into the Union with a "strict"—or, some might say,"loose" —reading of the controversial clause, he may have been moved as much by expediency as by principle...

...This is especially the case in the last chapter, a kind of coda where he relates the story of William Cabell Rives, an earlier biographer of Madison...

...A third striking—and quite surprising—parallel is Madison's economic evaluation of America's future...

...It was too productive, especially after the Old South was enlarged beyond the Mississippi, prompting Madison to declare that Southern politics was "exclusively charged with the inevitable effects of a market...

...Madison had good reason to eschew the use of his own Notes...

...Overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem, and by its contradictions, he retreated to a fantasy that was utterly foreign to his eminently pragmatic nature: Liberia...

...See my review of Leonard W. Levy's Originallntent and the Framers of the Constitution, NL, March 6...

...In Philadelphia it was Madison, more than anyone else, who was responsible formaking"amoreperfect Union" out of 13 separate states...

...McCoy contends that "in Rives' strange career...

...Madisonianism eventually unraveled, laying bare the tragic underside of a noble— and profoundly flawed—legacy...

...Indeed, although McCoy's focus is on events that took place a century and a half ago, there are moments when the reader has the impression that the historian is pointing to the present as well— that he is using the Thucydidean device of instructing us today by telling tales about our forebears...

...Whether McCoy is right to conclude that Madison would have behaved as Rives did had he lived into the Civil War era is arguable...

...In Madison's post-Presidential years, he was consulted as if he were the oracle on original intent...

...But the South's slave economy did irk him, because slavery was incompatible with liberty, and he could not find a satisfactory way to deal with the troublesome matter...

...Reviewed by Gus Tyler Assistant President, International Ladies' Garment Workers Union The story of James Madison's last years (1817-1836), as splendidly told by Harvard historian Drew A. McCoy, may be read as a requiem for a hero or as a prelude to our current predicament...

...When Madison was consulted on the intended meaning of those words, he replied that they applied only to the "importation" of slaves from other countries...

...American agriculture, the foundation of Southern society, could not find a market for its wares...

...The painful irony of Madison's solution was that it violated his faith in what latter-day political scientists refer to as his "pluralism"—his belief that the cure for the disease of contending interests, or "factions," was simply to multiply them...

...So he would have to find another means of ending slavery without shattering the Union...

...He preferred to consult the debates at the ratifying state conventions—a crazy quilt of contradictions, providing sufficient variety to enable anyone to prove anything by skillful selection...

...As tensions began to develop between North and South over the "Tariff of Abominations," followed by South Carolina's "nullification," followed by Andrew Jackson's "Force Act"—all omens of the "impending crisis"—he began to search for the economic origins of these political conflicts...

...But because human beings are misguided by their pride and prejudice, he thought the "incorporation of the two peoples" was impossible...

...Madison did not think the separation of blacks and whites was moral...

...he considered such differences vital to the public good...

...Was it to make this particular point—and evoke all of its current implications—that McCoy ended his book with a lengthy chapter on Rives' revision of his mentor, rather than with Madison's death as would be expected...

...Madison said then: "Whatever be the abundance or fertility of the soil, it will not be cultivated when its fruits must perish on hand for want of a market.' We may say today:" Whatever be the productivity of our factories, they will soon lie idle when their output rots in warehouses for want of a market...

...The Emancipation Proclamation did not confront that question...

...He believed this would benefit the slaves because they would be owned by small holders who might establish a familial relationship with them, perhaps leading to early manumission...

...Missouri's request to be admitted to the Union as a slave state had polarized the country...

...But regardless of the author's intentions, if you believe the keys to the future are in the treasure house of the past, then you should read this gem of a book—at least twice...

...We now know, too, that his natural bent may have been even more bent by the hand of Edmond "Citizen" Genet, who had heavy input in editing the manuscript...

...Yet in practice, Madison discovered, diffusion only extended slavery to parts of the country where it did not exist before...

...The Madisonian dilemma of the 1830s —how to find an outlet for produce— is the central economic dilemma of the industrial world today: how to find an outlet for the produce of mechanized, automated, robotized industry...

...The slaves could only be let go on the condition that they return to Africa...

...The "liberation" debate is over...

...Yet when confronted with the additional "interest" of the liberated black he drew back from his own logic...

...His genius was to understand that the constitutional guarantee of checks and balances by itself would not suffice to preserve liberty against the tyranny of a popular majority, unless the country was populated by people of diverse and conflicting interests...

...Whenhespoke out, those who agreed with him called him "the Sage, " and those who disagreed called him senile...

...Yet as long as slavery continued, the nation's dedication to freedom would be a mockery...

...Apparently Madison despaired of blacks and whites ever living peacefully side by side...

...It is both a tale of the melancholy revision one agent of posterity worked on the ideas of "the Father of the Constitution" and a humbling reminder of how the same problems may bedevil a society in different forms for generation after generation...

...In his inclination toward what later pundits called "economic determinism," Madison was a pre-Marxist Marxist...

...Whether McCoy intended to subliminally sneak in all these items of modern concern while writing about Madison is not openly revealed by the author in this delectable, didactic, disturbing work about a flawed hero who participated in the making of a flawed nation...

...The "diffusion" of slavery—spreading it out across a greater area—had its appeal for Madison...

...This idea—spelled out in Federalist No...

...It is not unusual now for those dedicated to original intent to quote Madison's Notes, his privy scribblings during the Constitutional Convention...

...Was Rives, the erstwhile young radical and champion of democracy, a "neoconservative" of his time...

...Madison himself did not consider his record of the Convention a proper source to determine "intent...

...glutted with the products of the land...

...Perhaps the reason for this was Madison's conviction that human beings are fallible and egocentric, "more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good...

...In the early 1830s Madison again noted the imbalance between America's capacity to produce agricultural products and the market's propensity to consume them: "The depression felt is mainly and palpably the result of the great fall in the value of land and in the price of its produce...

...no one advocates a return to slavery...

...It was the publication of Yates' "record" that goaded Madison to do his Notes, and he would have had to be less than human not to be influenced in his final version by the judge's provocations...

...Wrong as he ultimately proved to be, full equality between the two races does remain a national challenge...

...But when Europe got back on its feet American farmers lost that market and began to go into a sharp slump...

...Instead, the issue has become "integration" and its consequences...

...Nevertheless, McCoy quotes Rives' characterization of Madison (and of Washington) as "republicansoftheconservative school...

...The second striking parallel with the present is the unresolved tension between the races...

...None of that is likely to deter a Robert H. Bork or a William H. Rehnquist, or their ideological opponents from trying to read the minds of the Fathers—who often as not, didn't know their own minds...

...The first striking parallel between the Madisonian years and ours involves the fierce debate over the "original intent" of the Fathers...

...10—became his single greatest contribution to political thought...

...Yates was an anti-Federalist, and his report reflected his prejudices...

...The ancient query is restated in new form every time the races clash on campuses, on streets, in parks, on the job...

...During the years up to 1817 (Madison's last year in office), the prodigious output of American farming found an outlet inaEurope that had been devastated by the Napoleonic Wars—a situation almost exactly like the one enjoyed by American producers after World War II...

...Early on, he discovered the glut implicit in our market economy and recognized the need to pursue political policies that would enable the society to overcome "depressions...

...When Lafayette came up with a blueprint for the gradual liberation of the slaves, Madison told him: "No such effort would be listened to whilst the impression remains, and it seems to be indelible, that the two races cannot coexist, both being free and equal.' In other words, liberation would have to be accompanied by separation...

...Whether real integration can be achieved is as much a matter of debate between liberals and conservatives in the United States today as it was in Madison's day...

...and this double fall is as palpably the result, in the former case, of the quantity of cheap and fertile land at market in the West, and in the latter case, of the increase of the produce of the land beyond any corresponding increase in the demand for it...