Graduating in , he stayed on a while longer to continue his studies with the school's president, Reverend John Witherspoon. Returning to Virginia in , Madison soon found himself caught up in the tensions between the colonists and the British authorities.
He was elected to the Orange County Committee of Safety in December and joined the Virginia militia as a colonel the following year. Writing to college friend William Bradford, Madison sensed that "There is something at hand that shall greatly augment the history of the world.
The learned Madison was more of a writer than a fighter, though. And he put his talents to good use in at the Virginia Convention, as Orange County's representative. Around that time, he met Jefferson, and the pair soon began what would become a lifelong friendship. When Madison received an appointment to serve on the committee in charge of writing Virginia's constitution, he worked with George Mason on the draft. One of his special contributions was reworking some of the language about religious freedom.
In , Madison lost his bid for a seat in the Virginia Assembly, but he was later appointed to the Governor's Council. He was a strong supporter of the American-French alliance during the revolution, and solely handled much of the council's correspondence with France.
In , he went to Philadelphia to serve as one of Virginia's delegates to Continental Congress. In , Madison returned to Virginia and the state legislature. There, he became a champion for the separation of church and state and helped get Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom, a revised version of a document penned by Jefferson in , passed in The following year, Madison tackled an even more challenging government composition—the U. In , Madison represented Virginia at the Constitution Convention.
He was a federalist at heart, thus campaigned for a strong central government. In the Virginia Plan, he expressed his ideas about forming a three-part federal government, consisting of executive, legislative and judicial branches.
He thought it was important for this new structure to have a system of checks and balances, in order to prevent the abuse of power by any one group. While many of Madison's ideas were included in the Constitution, the document itself faced some opposition in his native Virginia and other colonies.
He then joined Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in a special effort to get the Constitution ratified, and the three men wrote a series of persuasive letters that were published in New York newspapers, collectively known as The Federalist papers.
Back in Virginia, Madison managed to outmaneuver such Constitution opponents as Patrick Henry to secure the document's ratification. In , Madison won a seat in the U.
House of Representatives, a legislative body that he had helped envision. He became an instrumental force behind the Bill of Rights, submitting his suggested amendments to the Constitution to Congress in June Madison wanted to ensure that Americans had freedom of speech, were protected against "unreasonable searches and seizures" and received "a speedy and public trial" if faced with charges, among other recommendations.
A revised version of his proposal was adopted that September, following much debate. While initially a supporter of President George Washington and his administration, Madison soon found himself at odds with Washington over financial issues.
He objected to the policies of Secretary of Treasury Hamilton, believing that these plans lined the pockets of wealthy northerners, and was detrimental to others. He and Jefferson campaigned against the creation of a central federal bank, calling it unconstitutional.
Still, the measure was passed by Around this time, the longtime friends abandoned the Federalist Party and created their political entity, the Democratic-Republican Party. Eventually tiring of the political battles, Madison returned to Virginia in with his wife Dolley. The couple had met in Philadelphia in and married that same year. She had a son named Payne from her first marriage, who Madison raised as his own, and the couple retired to Montpelier.
Madison would officially inherit the estate after his father's death in Similarly, Congress and the Supreme Court would combine personal motives and constitutional powers to resist any intrusion by the other branches.
Madison, Hamilton, and Jay wrote The Federalist as part of a campaign for ratification of the Constitution. Their writings have since become a classic text for representative democracy, translated and read by many people around the world.
What contribution did Madison make to establishing the principles of religious freedom? From his first year in the Virginia legislature in , Madison was an advocate of religious freedom. In colonial Virginia, the Anglican Episcopal church was established by law as the official religion and received public funding.
Madison became convinced such favoritism was wrong, because it discriminated against Baptists and other religions in Virginia. Madison believed that allowing a diversity of faiths to exist together on an equal footing was the best assurance against religious persecution and strife.
Though he helped persuade George Mason to endorse the "liberty of conscience for all" in the Virginia Declaration of Rights , he was not able to separate church and government in Virginia's new constitution. Madison, however, did not give up. Ten years later in the Virginia legislature he led the effort to adopt the Statute for Religious Freedom drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The law provided the basis for ending a state church in Virginia and granting equal freedom to all faiths.
In Madison's words it "extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind. Madison's strong belief in religious freedom is also evident in his drafting of the U. Bill of Rights. He had originally opposed adding a bill of rights to the Constitution because he doubted the effectiveness of mere "paper barriers" to tyranny and because he did not see a need for such formal guarantees in a government limited to enumerated powers.
He had promised his Baptist friends and others, however, that he would work for the addition of a bill of rights if the Constitution were adopted. He also became convinced that a formal declaration of rights would widen support for the new Constitution and would help the nation's courts protect the rights of minorities against majority encroachments.
Almost single-handedly, Madison worked through the summer of to draft and secure agreement on the measure. Overcoming the apathy and skepticism of congressional colleagues and working out an acceptable draft from among many proposals required all of Madison's political skills. Though many among the Framers could claim to have had a hand in "fathering" the Constitution, the Bill of Rights was primarily Madison's offspring.
In his Federalist essays and earlier writings Madison reflected the negative view of party and faction that was common to eighteenth-century thought. In Federalist 10 he defined a faction as a "number of citizens Madison changed such views when he himself became a partisan in the s. Believing that Hamilton's financial, economic and diplomatic plans for the young republic were both bad policy and contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution, he organized an opposition in Congress that was called "Mr.
Madison's party. Their party efforts in the press and through local political clubs helped to bring about Jefferson's defeat of Adams in the presidential election of Madison maintained that his partisan activity had not betrayed his earlier principles. Popular elections, as he had said in his Federalist essays, were a legitimate way of preventing bad government.
A party that represented the true majority in the nation, he argued, was consistent with the ideals of representative government and republicanism, especially in opposition to those who sought to undermine such principles.
Madison's critics, however, accused him of hypocrisy. He had drafted the Constitution with the object of shielding those in government from popular passions.
As a party politician, his critics argued, Madison was now playing to such passions for his own ends. It is doubtful that Madison realized in the s that his partisan activities were laying the basis for a national party system in the United States. In his later years, however, he concluded that political parties had become unavoidable in America because "the Constitution itself must be an unfailing source of party distinctions.
He hoped that for the sake of the Union Americans might overcome their partisan animosities and emulate the Framers' spirit of compromise. Another issue on which Madison had difficulty living up to his ideals was the institution of slavery. Slavery remained a moral dilemma for him.
He denounced the institution but lived off the fruits of slave labor all his life. Financial difficulties late in life led Madison to sell some slaves and he decided against freeing his slaves upon his death in order to provide for his wife's later years.
Nevertheless, Madison remained a consistent and persistent critic of the institution of slavery throughout his public career. The influence of Dolley Madison's Quaker background may have strengthened his anti-slavery sentiments. At the Philadelphia Convention Madison denounced slavery and was instrumental in keeping the words "slave" and "slavery" out of the Constitution in order that it not acknowledge expressly a "property in men. Madison believed that slavery harmed both slave and slaveholder.
It violated the natural rights of the former and corrupted the civic virtue of the latter, undermining the slaveholder's moral integrity and instilling in him a contempt for honest labor. Madison also believed that slavery tainted the American experiment in self-government, which he regarded as an important turning point in the history of the world. Madison hoped that the end of the foreign slave trade in would force planters to hire free labor and that westward expansion would disperse the slave population and diminish the economic value of slavery to the south.
Pessimistic about the ability of freed blacks and whites to live together in one society, however, he actively supported colonization efforts that sent free blacks back to Africa.
Madison also feared that a quick solution to the slavery problem threatened the Union. Even though he regarded the institution as "this dreadful calamity which has so long afflicted our country and filled so many with despair," Madison, like Lincoln a generation later, placed the survival of the Union first.
In his last public statement, "Advice to My Country," Madison declared it to be "nearest my heart and deepest in my convictions" that "the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.
Why did Madison decide to publish his notes of the Philadelphia Convention? The wisdom of compromise, even with so difficult an issue as slavery, was one lesson Madison hoped his fellow citizens might learn from the work of the Philadelphia Convention.
The last surviving Framer, Madison feared that with the passage of years the significance of that work was in danger of becoming a lost inheritance to future generations of Americans. He therefore arranged for his notes of the Convention to be published after his death. A public record of the Framers' deliberations, he hoped, would put their work in its proper historical context and help to secure its legacy for the future.
Brant, Irving. The Life of James Madison 6 vols. The Federalist available in several editions including Clinton Rossiter, ed. Carey et al. Farrand, Max. Hein, Ketcham, Ralph. McCoy, Drew R. Madison, James. Norton, William T. Hutchinson et al. Writings , ed. Jack N. Rakove New York: Library of America, During the 20th century, the Supreme Court also became both more powerful and more divided.
The Court struck down federal laws two times in the first 70 years of American history, just over 50 times in the next 75 years, and more than times since Beginning with the appointment of Anthony Kennedy, in , the Court became increasingly polarized between justices appointed by Republican presidents and justices appointed by Democratic presidents. Exacerbating all this political antagonism is the development that might distress Madison the most: media polarization, which has allowed geographically dispersed citizens to isolate themselves into virtual factions, communicating only with like-minded individuals and reinforcing shared beliefs.
Far from being a conduit for considered opinions by an educated elite, social-media platforms spread misinformation and inflame partisan differences. Indeed, people on Facebook and Twitter are more likely to share inflammatory posts that appeal to emotion than intricate arguments based on reason.
The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.
Unless the Supreme Court reinterprets the First Amendment, allowing the government to require sites like Twitter and Facebook to suppress polarizing speech that falls short of intentional incitement to violence—an ill-advised and, at the moment, thankfully unlikely prospect—any efforts to encourage deliberation on those platforms will have to come from the platforms themselves.
Still, some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read. But these and other solutions could have First Amendment implications. Of course, the internet can empower democratic deliberation as well as threaten it, allowing dissenters to criticize the government in ways the Founders desired. And although our national politics is deadlocked by partisanship, compromise remains possible at the local level, where activism—often organized online—can lead to real change.
Federalism remains the most robust and vibrant Madisonian cooling mechanism, and continues to promote ideological diversity. At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries.
Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election.
Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically. Voters in several states are experimenting with alternative primary systems that might elect more moderate representatives.
The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. To combat the power of factions, the Founders believed the people had to be educated about the structures of government in particular. The civics half of the educational equation is crucial.
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