Madison and Jefferson (124 page)

Madison maintained a continuing interest in Franklin’s and later the British writer
Thomas Malthus’s argument on population growth. In 1791 he wrote an essay in the
National Gazette
, entitled “Population and Emigration,” drawing on Franklin’s thinking. See
PJM
, 14:117–22; for other scholars who recognized Madison’s debt to Franklin, see Dennis Hodgson, “Benjamin Franklin on Population: From Policy to Theory,”
Population and Development Review
17 (December 1991): 639–61; also I. Bernard Cohen,
Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison
(New York, 1995), 156–64; Drew R. McCoy, “Jefferson and Madison on Malthus: Population Growth in Jeffersonian Political Economy,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
88 (July 1980): 259–76;
Notes on Virginia
, Query XIX.

8.
For use of the terms “vicious arts” and “mutual animosities,” and a more developed statement on “factional leaders,” see “
The Federalist
No. 10,” in Jacob E. Cooke, ed.,
The Federalist
(Middletown, Conn., 1961), 64.

9.
JM to TJ, October 24–November 1; TJ to JM, December 20, 1787,
RL
, 1:499–500, 514.

10.
TJ to JM, December 20, 1787,
RL
, 1:512–14.

11.
There is disagreement over the authorship of some of the essays, but the evidence favors Madison’s claim to have written the disputed numbers (50–52, 54–58, 62–63). See Cooke,
Federalist
, xi–xv, xxvii; JM to TJ, August 10, 1788, and “Madison’s Authorship of
The Federalist:
Editorial Note,”
PJM
, 10:259–63, 11:226–27; on the pseudonym “Publius,” see JM to James K. Paulding, July 24, 1818,
PJM-RS
, 1:310.

12.
Hamilton, June 4, 18–19,
Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787
(Athens, Ohio, 1966), 61–62, 66, 134–39, 152; Nathan Schachner,
Alexander Hamilton
(New York, 1946), 197–206.

13.
Hamilton, September 17,
Notes of the Debates
, 656; Hamilton to Washington, July 3, 1787; Washington to Hamilton, July 10, 1787,
PGW-CS
, 5:245, 250.

14.
Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, February 29, 1802, in
PAH
, 25:544.

15.
JM to Randolph, October 21, 1787,
PJM
, 10:199–200.

16.
“The people in Georgia and New-Hampshire would not know one another’s mind,” “Brutus” reasoned, “and therefore could not act in concert to enable them to effect a general change of representatives.” He felt that federal officials, no less flawed in character than those they governed, would be unable to resist personalizing power, and the people would be left out of public deliberations. See “Brutus I,”
New-York Journal
, October 18, 1787, in John Kaminski and Richard Leffler, eds.,
Federalists and Antifederalists
(Madison, Wisc., 1987), 6–13; Saul Cornell,
The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 28–31, 95.

17.
“
The Federalist
No. 10”; “
The Federalist
No. 57,” in Cooke, ed.,
Federalist
, 62–63, 384–85; also see “
The Federalist
No. 46,” in which Madison stresses the need for more “impartial guardians of the public interest,” ibid., 318; and “
The Federalist
No. 56,” in which Madison argues that representatives will possess sufficient knowledge of state laws and local concerns to legislate for the nation; ibid., 378–86; for an excellent discussion of Madison’s debate with “Brutus,” see Emery G. Lee III, “Representation, Virtue, and Political Jealousy in the Brutus-Publius Dialogue,”
Journal of Politics
59 (November 1997): 1078–83.

18.
For the most complete discussion of why
Federalist
10 was not an influential piece of political theory during the Constitutional Convention or the debates over ratification,
but was elevated to its status as the “ur-text” only in the twentieth century, see Larry D. Kramer, “Madison’s Audience,”
Harvard Law Review
112 (January 1999): 645–46, 657–58, 665–67, 670–71, 679.

19.
One Boston paper claimed that “the arguments which have been adduced in support of [the Constitution] are conclusive and unanswerable; while
every objection
 … has been fully and entirely answered, by that incomparable writer,
PUBLIUS
, the author of the
FEDERALIST.
” Such blanket praise was purely partisan. A Philadelphia newspaper named “Publius,” among other defenders of the Constitution, as “full of profound political wisdom,” then dismissed the antifederalists for offering only “impudent assertions,” “scurrility,” and “seditious falsehood.” In response, an antifederalist used the same wording but reversed the praise, highlighting “Brutus” and other critics as “full of profound political wisdom”; it dismissed the “dry trash of Publius in 150 numbers.” See
Massachusetts Centinel
, May 7, 1788;
Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser
, May 3, 1788; and
Independent Gazetteer
, May 9, 1788.

20.
See “Aristides, Remarks on the Proposed Plan of the Federal Government,” in John Kaminski and Gaspare J. Saladino, eds.,
The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
(Madison, Wisc., 1984), 15:517; Kramer, “Madison’s Audience,” 665; Robin Brooks, “Alexander Hamilton, Melancton Smith, and the Ratification of the Constitution in New York,”
William and Mary Quarterly
24 (July 1967): 349;
Freeman’s Journal; or the North-American Intelligencer
, December 12, 1787 (signed “
SQUIB
”); other essayists attacked “Publius” by assigning his “long winded publications” to paid “hirelings” and verbose lawyers hiding a weak case behind a smoke screen of words. See
New-York Journal
, February 4, 1788; and “Letter from a Gentleman in Dutchess County,”
New-York Journal
, February 14, 1788.

21.
See JM to Washington, November 18 and November 30, 1787; and JM to Randolph, December 2, 1787,
PJM
, 10:254, 283–84, 290.

22.
Washington sent Madison a copy of Mason’s “Objections.” See Washington to JM, October 10, 1787; JM to Washington, October 18, 1787,
PJM
, 10:189–91, 196–98; Cornell,
Other Founders
, 74–75.

23.
Washington to JM, October 10, 1787; Archibald Stuart to JM, October 21, 1787; JM to Randolph, January 10, 1788,
PJM
, 10:189–90, 202, 355. Stuart told Madison: “Mr. Henry has upon all Occasions however foreign to his subject attempted to give the Constitution a side blow.” Charles Tillinghast reported that Mason “means to sound the alarm through the southern states.” Madison received a letter from George Lee Turberville, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who echoed most of Mason’s objections, demonstrating their influence among elite Virginians. See Charles Tillinghast to Hugh Hughes, October 12, 1787; Washington to Henry Knox, October 15, 1787, in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 8:54, 57; and Turberville to JM, December 11, 1787,
PJM
, 10:315–24. For a revealing analysis of the elements leading to the eventual falling-out of Mason and Washington, see Peter R. Henriques, “An Uneven Friendship: The Relationship between George Washington and George Mason,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
97 (April 1989): 185–204.

24.
In
Federalist
no. 38 Madison made mention of many of Mason’s objections, using some of the same language of his rival. He listed the “want of the bill of rights, the tendency toward monarchy or aristocracy, the Senate’s dangerous power of trying impeachments,
and the lack of a council of state.” He also argued that another major complaint of Mason’s, a restriction on the importation of slaves, was an improvement over the Articles of Confederation, which had no such limitation. In no. 44 Madison dismissed Mason’s concern over the restriction placed on states in the collection of export duties; in no. 45 he refuted Mason’s charge that out-of-state tax collectors would oppress the people; in no. 46 he refuted Mason’s charge that the states would “dwindle into insignificance”; in no. 47 he rejected Mason’s fear that the government would produce an aristocracy; and in nos. 53, 55, 56, and 57 he argued against the notion that the House would have only, in Mason’s words, “a shadow of representation” and would lack the proper information to govern or to inspire confidence in the people; in his last essay, no. 63, Madison defended the Senate against the charge that it would possibly become a “tyrannical aristocracy.” Out of Mason’s twelve objections, Madison directly responded to eight. In addition to circulating his objections, Mason also wrote an anonymous newspaper essay in which he focused on the fear of New England revenue officers entering the homes of Virginians and dragging them off to court in another state. A friend sent Madison a copy of this essay. See Cooke, ed.,
Federalist
, 244–47, 302, 312–31, 362–63, 372–83, 384–90; Mason’s “Objections to the Constitution of the Government” and his anonymous essay, “Cato Uticensis,”
Virginia Independent Chronicle
, October 17, 1787; and “Landholder IV,” written by Oliver Ellsworth, in
Connecticut Courant
, December 10, 1787, all in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 8:41–45, 73–75; John Dawson to JM, October 19, 1787,
PJM
, 10:198–99, 230–31.

25.
“The Expositor, No. 1,”
New-York Journal
, February 7, 1788.
Federalist
no. 54 was published on February 9, 1788; see Cooke, ed.,
Federalist
, 359.

26.
In these years, manumitters of slaves in Virginia rarely used the Enlightenment’s secular precepts of sympathy and justice to overturn the accepted notion that their slaves were born
un
free. They tended instead to rely on their religious values to justify the humane action of releasing human property into the world and “recommending” them “to the publick” as people who could be counted on to contribute to society and not to cause trouble. It seems obvious that at this pregnant moment in history, the conversation was limited—too equivocal for the laws to advance far at all. “
The Federalist
No. 39”; “
The Federalist
No. 54,” in Cooke, ed.,
Federalist
, 253–57, 367–69; Malick W. Ghachem, “The Slave’s Two Bodies: The Life of an American Legal Fiction,”
William and Mary Quarterly
60 (October 2003): 811–15; Eva Sheppard Wolf,
Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion
(Baton Rouge, La., 2006), 49–52.

27.
Peter S. Onuf,
Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
(Charlottesville, Va., 2000), 147–51.

28.
Nos. 48 and 49, in Cooke, ed.,
Federalist
, 333–35, 338–43. In
Federalist
no. 63, Madison offered his strongest statement on the subject of limiting the people’s capacity to restructure their government. He favored the “
total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity
from any share in” administration. See ibid., 428.

29.
Carrington to TJ, May 14, 1788,
PTJ
, 13:156–57; JM to TJ, August 10, 1788,
RL
, 1:548.

30.
JM to George Washington, February 20, 1788, JM to Eliza House Trist, March 25, 1788,
PJM
, 10:526, 11:5; on his attack of bilious fever, see JM to Alexander Hamilton,
June 9, 1788; to Rufus King, June 9, 1788; to Tench Coxe, June 11, 1788,
PJM
, 11:101–2; Ketcham, 258.

31.
JM to TJ, December 9, 1787, and April 22, 1788,
RL
, 1:507–11, 534–35.

32.
TJ to William Carmichael, December 15, 1787; to Uriah Forrest, December 31, 1787; to Alexander Donald, February 7, 1788,
PTJ
, 12:475–79, 570–72; Daniel Carroll to JM, May 28, 1788,
PJM
, 11:64–66; Eric Robert Papenfuse, “Unleashing the ‘Wildness’: The Mobilization of Grassroots Antifederalism in Maryland,”
Journal of the Early Republic
16 (Spring 1986): 92–95; “The Virginia State Ratifying Convention,” in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 9:1088, 10:1223.

33.
To understand how the votes of the delegates could be accurately forecast a month before the convention, see the letter from David Henley to Samuel Henley, April 28, 1788, in which Henley compiled a record of 151 of 168 delegates, showing that 82 of 85 of the federalists voted as predicted. F. Claiborne Johnson, Jr., “Federalists, Doubtful, and Antifederalist: A Note on the Virginia Convention of 1788,”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
96 (July 1988): 333–44; Archibald Stuart to John Breckinridge, June 19, 1788, in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 10:1651 (Stuart wrote “suspended on a single hare,” but meant “hair”); JM to Ambrose Madison, June 24, 1788,
PJM
, 11:170–71.

34.
Monroe to TJ, July 12, 1788,
PTJ
, 13:351. Richard Henry Lee urged George Mason to try to win over Pendleton; see Lee to Mason, October 1, 1787; and Pendleton’s unanimous election as president, in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 8:29, 9:897. Madison wrote Washington confidently that Pendleton viewed the Constitution “in its true light,” and that “his support will have great effect.” JM to Washington, October 18, 1787,
PJM
, 10:197. For praise of Henry’s eloquence, see Spencer Roane to Philip Aylett, June 26, 1788; on Henry’s harangues against Randolph and forced apology, see John Brown Cutting to TJ, July 24, 1788, in Kaminski and Saladino, eds.,
Documentary History of Ratification of Constitution
, 10:1707, 1713.