Founding Brothers (8 page)

Appearances,
in Madison’s case, were not just massively deceptive; they actually
helped to produce his prowess. Amid the flamboyant orators of the Virginia
dynasty, he was practically invisible and wholly unthreatening, but therefore
the acknowledged master of the inoffensive argument that just happened, time
after time, to prove decisive. He seemed to lack a personal agenda because he
seemed to lack a personality, yet when the votes were counted, his side almost
always won. His diffidence in debate was disarming in several ways: He was so
obviously gentle and so eager to give credit to others, especially his
opponents, that it was impossible to unleash one’s full fury against him
without seeming a belligerent fool; he was so reserved that he conveyed the
off-putting impression of someone with an infinite reservoir of additional
information, all hidden away, the speaker not wishing to burden you with
excessively conspicuous erudition; but, if you gave permission, fully prepared
to go on for several more hours; or until your side voluntarily surrendered.
His physical deficiencies meant that a Madisonian argument lacked all the usual
emotional affectations and struck with the force of pure, unencumbered thought.
Or as one observer put it later, “Never have I seen
so much mind in
so little matter.
” His style, in effect, was not to have one.
⁸

It is
customary to think of Madison as Jefferson’s loyal lieutenant, the junior
member of what has been called “the great collaboration.” Certainly
in later years, when Madison served as Jefferson’s political point man in
the party wars of the 1790s, then as his secretary of state, then his successor
as president, there is much to be said for his characterization. The later
pattern was for Jefferson to provide the sweeping vision while Madison managed
the messier particulars. (If God was in the details, so the saying went,
Madison was usually there to greet Him upon arrival.) Even then, however,
Madison’s habitual shyness and his willingness to remain within
Jefferson’s shadow probably concealed the extent of his independent
influence on the partnership. The fairest assessment is that the collaboration
worked so well because questions of primacy never occurred to Madison. Or, as
John Quincy Adams described the seamless character of the partnership, it was
“a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet
in the physical world.”
⁹

However, in
1790, if one wished to talk about “the great collaboration,” the
presumption would have been that one was referring to Madison and Hamilton.
After all, while Jefferson was serving as America’s minister in Paris
from 1784 to 1789, the team of Madison and Hamilton had led the fight for a
vastly expanded national government with sovereign power over the states. Their
collaboration as “Publius” in
The Federalist Papers
was
every bit as seamless as the subsequent alliance between the two Virginians.
When Hamilton began to draft his
Report on the Public Credit
in
September of 1789, Madison was one of the first persons he consulted for
advice. At that very time, Jefferson was writing Madison from France with
expressions of great doubt about the powers granted the federal government over
domestic affairs, powers that Madison had championed more effectively than
anyone else at the Constitutional Convention.
¹⁰

Jefferson
had also shared with Madison his intriguingly utopian suggestion that each
generation was sovereign, so that the laws made for one generation should
expire after about twenty years. Madison had responded in his gentle,
unassuming, but logically devastating fashion to suggest that, yes, this was a
fascinating notion, but if taken seriously, it was a recipe for anarchy and ran
directly counter to the whole thrust of his own political effort to establish a
stable constitutional settlement that compelled the trust and abiding
veneration of present and future generations of Americans. Knowing as we do
that Madison would soon become one of the most ardent and potent Jeffersonians
of all time, it is all the more instructive to note that, prior to 1790, they
had drifted to different sides of the constitutional divide.
¹¹

During the
six months prior to the dinner at Jefferson’s quarters, Madison went
through a conversion process, or perhaps a reconversion, from the religion of
nationalism to the old revolutionary faith of Virginia. It is tempting to
explain the switch in exclusively personal terms: Jefferson returned from
France, recalled his old colleague to the colors of the true cause, and
together they marched forward into history. Except that it was not that simple.
Madison possessed the subtlest and most intellectually sophisticated
understanding of the choices facing the new American republic of any member of
the revolutionary generation. No crude explanation of the decisions he made can
do justice to the multiple loyalties he felt, or the almost Jamesian way he
thought about and ultimately resolved them.
¹²

If we give
chronology the decent respect it is due, it is clear that Madison’s
thinking began to change before Jefferson returned to the scene. The
precipitant was Hamilton’s
Report on the Public Credit,
forwarded to Congress in January of 1790. (Jefferson did not arrive in New York
until March.) The fiscal goals Hamilton proposed were synonymous with the
national vision Madison had advocated at the Constitutional Convention and in
The Federalist Papers.
The total debt of the United States, according
to Hamilton’s calculations, had reached the daunting (at least then) size
of $77.1 million. Of this total, $11.7 million was owed to foreign governments;
$40.4 million was domestic debt, most of which dated from the American
Revolution; and $25 million was state debt, also largely a legacy of the war.
What began to trouble Madison, then terrify him, was not Hamilton’s
goal—the recovery of public credit—but the way he proposed to reach
it.
¹³

The first symptom of the trouble appeared when Madison studied
Hamilton’s proposal for the funding of the domestic debt. On the one
hand, Hamilton’s recommendation looked straightforward: All citizens who
owned government securities should be reimbursed at par—that is, the full
value of the government’s original promise. But many original holders of
the securities, mainly veterans of the American Revolution who had received
them as pay for their service in the war, had then sold them at a fraction of
their original value to speculators. What’s more, the release of
Hamilton’s plan produced a purchasing frenzy, as bankers and investors
aware of the funding proposal bought up the securities in expectation of a tidy
profit. Madison observed the buying frenzy and complained that unscrupulous
speculators “are still exploring the interior & distant parts of the
Union in order to take advantage of the holders.” The picture that began
to congeal in his mind was the essence of injustice: battle-worn veterans of
the war for independence being cheated out of their just rewards by mere
moneymen. Benjamin Rush, the prominent Philadelphia physician and permanently
incandescent revolutionary, urged Madison to stop this betrayal of the spirit
of ’76: “Never have I heard more rage expressed against the
Oppressors of our Country during the late War,” Rush fumed, “than I
daily hear against the men who … are to reap all the benefits of the
revolution, at the expense of the greatest part of the Virtue & property
that purchased it.”
¹⁴

Hamilton was
both surprised and mystified when Madison came out against his funding scheme.
On February 11, Madison delivered a long speech in the House, denouncing the
Hamilton proposal as a repudiation of the American Revolution and recommending
his own plan for payment, which he called “discrimination.” It was
a vintage Madisonian performance: utterly reasonable, flawlessly logical,
disarmingly temperate. The original holders of the securities had justice on
their side, he noted, and justice must be honored. The current holders had the
obligations of contracts on their side, and such obligations must be observed.
The options then revealed themselves with lawyerlike precision: “one of
three things must be done; either pay both, reject wholly one or the other, or
make a composition between them on some principle of equity.” (In the
twentieth century students of this mode of reasoning within policy-making
circles called it “the Goldilocks principle” and later
“triangulation.”) Madison, of course, favored the third option. But
the House voted 36 to 13 against his motion. It was his first major legislative
defeat after a long string of triumphs.
¹⁵

It was not
just that Madison hated to lose. (Unlike Jefferson, he could be genuinely
gracious in defeat.) It was instead that an ominous picture was congealing in
his mind of patriot soldiers being fleeced by an army of speculators whose only
loyalty was to their own profit margins. Or perhaps it was a slightly different
picture, this one of the nascent national government, which he had visualized
as an exalted arena where only the ablest and most intellectually talented
officials would congregate, the finest fruits plucked from the more motley
state governments, now replaced by an obnoxious collection of financiers and
money changers, the kind of social parasites whom Jesus had symbolically driven
from the temple. The promise of the American Revolution, at least as Madison
understood it, was falling into enemy hands.

The debate over
assumption, which followed on the heels of the vote on funding, only
intensified the sense of betrayal and made matters worse. Again, on the face of
it, Hamilton’s proposal looked seductively simple. The federal government
would take on—which is to say, assume—all the accumulated debts of
the states, most of which had their origins during the war. Instead of thirteen
separate ledgers, there would be but one, thereby permitting the fiscal policy
of the new nation to proceed with a coherent sense of its financial obligations
and the revenues required to discharge them. On February 24 Madison rose from
his seat in the House to suggest that the matter was a good deal more
complicated than it might appear at first glance, and that this apparently
sensible proposal called “assumption” struck him as an alarmingly
sinister idea.

If you read Madison’s speeches against assumption
in the House during the spring of 1790, you get the impression that his core
objections were economic. Most of the southern states, Virginia among them, had
paid off the bulk of their wartime debts. The assumption proposal therefore did
them an injustice, by “compelling them, after having done their duty, to
contribute to those states who have not equally done their duty.” A
subsidiary theme, also economic in character but implying grander suspicions,
called for what he termed “settlement” to precede assumption. As
Madison expressed it, “I really think it right and proper that we should
be possessed of the ways and means by which we should be most likely to
encounter the debt before we undertake to assume it.” In other words,
there needed to be an official estimate of the specific amount each state would
have “assumed” and then be obliged to pay in federal taxes
before
the vote on assumption occurred. According to his own rough
calculations, Virginia would transfer about $3 million of debt to the federal
government, then be charged about $5 million in new taxes. Like the failure to
compensate the original holders of government securities, this was
unfair.
¹⁶

If you read Madison’s correspondence during this same time, you get
the strong impression that the problem went much deeper than any shuffling of
account books could ever satisfy. The economic injustice toward Virginia and
most of the southern states—South Carolina was the exception, since it
had not retired much of its debt—was bad enough. But assumption was
symptomatic of malevolent tendencies that transcended mere dollars and cents.
It was about power. Under the guise of doing the states a favor by assuming
their debts, the federal government was implicitly, even covertly, assuming
sovereign authority over the economies of all the states. As Madison put it to
Jefferson in his most typically elliptical style, assumption “would be
peculiarly hard on Virginia,” but was “further objectionable as
augmenting a trust already sufficiently great for the virtue and number of the
federal Legislature.” Virginia, in short, was being asked to trust its
fate to the collective wisdom and virtue of the central government. Assumption,
as Madison came to regard it, was not primarily about money. It was about
control, about trust, about independence.
¹⁷

These were
all major chords in a revolutionary melody that most Virginians knew by heart.
Henry Lee, for example, apprised Madison that the assumption debate reminded
him of those glorious days of yesteryear, when the Virginia Assembly refused to
recognize Parliament’s right to tax colonies. “It seems to
me,” Lee wrote, “that we southern people must be slaves in effect,
or cut the Gordion knot at once.” The radical rhetoric of the 1760s and
1770s, now hallowed by its association with the successful war for
independence, came pouring out of Madison’s correspondents in Virginia,
equating assumption with the Stamp Act, the federal Congress with Parliament,
the so-called “fixed insolent northern majority” with Great
Britain. “How do you feel?” Lee asked Madison rhetorically:
“Is your love for the constitution so ardent … that it should
produce ruin to your native country?” By “native country,”
Lee meant Virginia.
¹⁸

The entire
atmosphere surrounding the assumption debate had become electromagnetic. And
Madison, who had a justifiable reputation for making himself the calm center in
the midst of all political storms, was being buffeted by shrill accusations
from both sides. Northern congressmen, led by Fisher Ames of Massachusetts,
accused him of threatening the survival of the republic by blocking the
centerpiece of Hamilton’s fiscal program, without which, they believed,
the union would dissolve. Southerners, chiefly Virginians, were telling him
that assumption demonstrated how prophetic the Antifederalist enemies to the
Constitution now looked, and how his previous assurances in the Virginia
ratifying convention and
The Federalist Papers
, assurances that the
Constitution would prove a culmination rather than a betrayal of the American
Revolution, now seemed like false promises.