The Virginia Plan
To review then, Madison went to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 armed with several convictions. First, that the Articles needed replacing, not amending; second, that a strong central authority was needed to counterbalance the state governments; and third, that an extended republic was the key to arranging the institutions of government in a way that would ameliorate the majority tyranny so prevalent in the states, and therefore protect private rights and promote the public good.
All of these convictions, and many more, found their way into the Virginia Plan, which Madison, in consultation with Edmund Randolph, James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and in his extended correspondence with Tom Jefferson in Paris, submitted to the convention as a basis for discussion. This Virginia Plan proposed a national government complete with executive, upper house and judiciary, and a popularly elected lower house of representatives. That Madison was its principal author there can be no doubt, and despite its numerous alterations, this plan would prove to be surprisingly resilient.
Indeed, despite being "on the losing side 40 times," the Constitution that Madison imagined and worked to achieve is remarkably similar to the one we are governed by today -- not on all the little points, but on the big ones.
With two exceptions. While Madison believed that an extensive republic would, on a national level, prevent or at least minimize the mischiefs of the majority that he had perceived in the states, that still left him with one question: How does one cure these mischiefs within the states themselves?
Although Madison's remedies for the state's maladies underwent many changes, by the time of the convention he had formulated his plan. His strong central authority "would operate directly on individuals and have the power to negative (sic) state laws," as Charles Hobson put it. This "negative" would, as Madison wrote Jefferson in March of 1787, "restrain the states from thwarting each other, and even from oppressing the minority within themselves by paper money and other unrighteous measures which favor the interests of the majority." Or to put it another way, it would compel the state governments to behave themselves and thus give people a confidence in their government that was sorely lacking in the unbridled chaos of the states. Such a confidence, Madison and others had concluded, was critical to the economic health of the individual states, and to the nation as a whole.
Concerning Madison's work on the Constitution: "He was the first-among equals, he was the driving force, he was the number-one idea man, and every other superlative or cliche one can think of."
History records that Madison lost the battle over this "negative," and that the defeat sorely shook his confidence in the result. Indeed, some historians -- Charles Hobson and John Roche among them -- look at Madison's bulldog attempts to force this negative power into the Constitution (even to the point of trying to reinstate it later on in the convention) as evidence that Madison was much more of a nationalist in the Hamiltonian sense than he let on, and therefore the final federalist character of the Constitution was far from Madison's original intent.
"It is indeed astonishing how those who have glibly designated James Madison the 'father' of Federalism have overlooked the solid body of fact which indicates that he shared Hamilton's quest for a unitary central government," Roche writes.
Hobson goes further, claiming that the "image of Madison as 'Father'... is "not accurate," and for proof he points to Madison's "immoderate digression" in his now-famous letter to Jefferson of October 24, 1787. That "digression" was an attempt on Madison's part to explain the importance of his "negative power," and Hobson's analysis of this "digression" leads him to conclude that Madison was so dismayed by his failure to get his "negative" that he (Madison) was "highly dissatisfied with, not to say contemptuous of, the proposed government."
To this writer, however, it misses the point to say that Madison's disappointment in the final result shows he was not the "father" of the Constitution. (It is also historical hyperbole to imply that Madison was "contemptuous of" the final document. Nowhere have I found in Madison's writings regarding the Constitution anything that even approaches contempt.) For one thing -- to borrow their parental metaphor -- a man's dismay at a child's fate has no bearing one way or the other on whether he is the child's parent (then again, as the wise King Solomon intuitively understood, a manifest concern for the child's condition usually argues for a person's parentage!). Indeed, Hobson and Roche present an "apples and oranges" argument. That the Constitution did not end up being the document Madison originally proposed does not speak to the extent of his work on, or contribution to, the document the Founding Fathers did fashion in Philadelphia. So the final product was less "national" than he originally wanted; he was still instrumental in devising the more "federal" government that was enshrined in the Constitution, and he was just as instrumental in getting it ratified.
What's more, in the long run Madison's failure to get his negative didn't matter, both because -- as historian Roger Brown has written -- the convention delegates "instead proscribed the states from undesirable actions by specific prohibitions, including a ban on coinage and paper money...," and because, "the Framers approved the supremacy clause that made the Constitution, treaties and federal laws 'the supreme law of the land'..." This effectively made Madison's "negative" unnecessary, as did the delegates decision to make the judiciary the umpire in any dispute between the states and the central government. Hobson himself writes, "the decision to discard the negative was made easier because a judicial means of achieving the same ends had emerged during the deliberations."
In other words, although Madison lost his negative, he gained the larger victory; the convention accepted a strong, energized central government with sufficient power to regulate the behavior of the states. The convention also accepted those other parts of the Virginia Plan that conformed to Madison's two-part vision: 1. That the institutions of government be arranged in such a way that the "interests and factions" so prevalent in humans be "turned to the support of liberty and republican government," and 2. That this is best done in an extended republic (or in this case by extending the republic) that would have larger constituencies from which to draw representatives. This happy result would make these public servants free from local attachments and thus more likely to promote policies that are in the public interest.
Another big debate that Madison lost was over proportional representation in the Senate, and while this defeat also stung, he and his allies did manage to gain proportional representation in the House. What's more, Madison -- supported by James Wilson, Charles Mason and Gouveneur Morris -- managed to ensure that the lower house of representatives would be elected by popular vote.
Again, one might say that Madison lost a battle but won the war, for as Edmund Morgan has illustrated, getting direct, popular elections in the House was the key to tying this new central government to "the people," and thus giving it the legitimacy it clearly needed if it was to compete with the states. What's more, Madison's theory of the extended republic and the large constituencies it would spawn lent credence to his argument in favor of these popular elections. Large constituencies, Madison explained, would produce elected officials less influenced by parochial concerns. This argument helped him win over those delegates whose misgivings about "pure democracy" (which, as we have seen, Madison shared) had been bolstered by the sorry performance of the state governments.
Thus, thanks mostly to Madison, this new government would have "a plausible claim to the sanction of popular sovereignty on a national scale."
