Feb. 20, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Rubin Report Presidents Week with five shows in five days on five former presidents of the United States | ||
| in partnership with Learn Liberty continues today. | ||
| And joining me now is a professor of history at Western Connecticut State University and author of James Madison and the Making of America. | ||
| Kevin Gutsman, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| I'm happy to be here. | ||
| I am excited to talk to you. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Because this is big, because you are both an expert in James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Now, everyone that's watching this knows that Thomas Jefferson is my favorite founder. | ||
| I'm going to give you a little room here to play and by the end see if you can convince me that James Madison should be my favorite founder. | ||
| Well, I'm not sure I want to play that game because actually the reason I wrote a book about Madison is because over time I had come to think that his reputation was generally exaggerated among scholars. | ||
| That although he did very important things, and I think he should be remembered, he wasn't as important as People were remembering him as having been. | ||
| In fact, in this he's similar to Alexander Hamilton, who doesn't deserve all the accolades he's received from the musical Hamilton. | ||
| Oh my, well, you're shooting everyone down before we start! | ||
| I'm saying they were admirable people, but there's a tendency among biographers to make their guys the central guys. | ||
| So Hamilton becomes the greatest American ever, Madison becomes the smartest man ever, You don't need to do that. | ||
| If you make him the real fellow, he's still extremely interesting and important. | ||
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All right. | |
| And I think that really is what your book is about, making him the real fellow and showing some of the flaws and some of the mistakes he made along the way. | ||
| And we're going to get into all of that. | ||
| So let's just start at the beginning. | ||
| What should we know about James Madison's childhood? | ||
| Ah, well, Madison was born, he was the first child of the most important man in his county, which was Piedmont, Virginia, Orange County. | ||
| In those days, the Piedmont region, which is the area just off the coast of Virginia, just out of Tidewater, was the westernmost extent of European settlement. | ||
| And his father, James Madison Sr., was the wealthiest man in the county. | ||
| He was the largest landholder. | ||
| He was the largest slaveholder. | ||
| He was the county lieutenant, which means he was the commander of the county militia. | ||
| He was the head of the vestry, which means he was the head of the lay organization that ran the county parish of the established church. | ||
| He was just the most important person. | ||
| What this meant for James Madison Jr. | ||
| was, he was set. | ||
| He was going to inherit all that. | ||
| He was going to be able to have the kind of education that virtually nobody else in Orange County would get. | ||
| In fact, he's maybe the only person in his cohort of Virginians who went off to Princeton to college. | ||
| Most people would go to the colonial college in Virginia, William & Mary, far inferior institution in those days to Princeton. | ||
| We could talk about whether it still is today. | ||
| That's probably a different show altogether. | ||
| It's an interesting question. | ||
| But anyway, and James Madison Jr., because of his tie to his father | ||
| and his father's eminent place, ended up having not only a more elite kind of education, | ||
| but also a different outlook when it came to human nature, the relationship between government and individuals, | ||
| individual rights, and especially what I think is the area in which he was most important, | ||
| freedom of religion, than other people. | ||
| Yeah, and he was key in making sure that separation in church and state was part of the US. | ||
| Constitution and everything else. | ||
| We're gonna get to all that. | ||
| Do we know anything about his father's politics, or even just, was he even interested in politics when he was young? | ||
| Well, there wasn't what we would call politics in colonial Virginia. | ||
| There weren't parties. | ||
| There wasn't kind of party division. | ||
| Essentially, people were More or less all the same elite group. | ||
| They had common interests. | ||
| Virtually everybody who lived in Virginia was either tobacco grower, a slave on a tobacco plantation, somebody who lived in a small town, that's the only kind of towns there were in Virginia, and sold tobacco, or was a lawyer who worked for tobacco farmers. | ||
| Notice a common theme here. | ||
| So because people had a very similar kind of economic life, they didn't have the kind of political division we think of as normal. | ||
| It's interesting, it almost, it sort of sounds pre-politics altogether, like they were just sort of local and you kind of had to do what you did. | ||
| Yes, pretty much. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| So he goes off to school, and is this where he starts becoming more political? | ||
| Yes, well, what happened was he went off to school in New Jersey, and unlike William & Mary, which was Episcopalian, the established Church of Virginia was the Church of England, Is that one of the reasons he didn't want to go there? | ||
| Because we're going to get into a little more about his feelings about religion, but obviously he wanted to go to a bigger school, but was it also very much about the religious component? | ||
| Well, we don't have any indication that that had anything to do with it. | ||
| It seems that the reason he went off to New Jersey was because Of the very crude state of scientific knowledge in those days. | ||
| So, if like James Madison Jr., who remains the smallest man who's ever been president, if you had what he called a sickly constitution, then you would want to avoid the vapors around Williamsburg. | ||
| People thought there was something in the air that made you sick. | ||
| They had no idea of mosquito-borne illnesses or anything to do with sanitation. | ||
| He went off to New Jersey because he was afraid he'd get sick if he went to Williamsburg, which is on the James near the coast. | ||
| It was kind of fortuitous that he ended up at Princeton under the tutelage of somebody who was a minister but not an Episcopalian. | ||
| Episcopalians at the time had a kind of latitudinary and a very liberal religious understanding of people's motives and people's personality and so on. | ||
| If you had gone to Princeton and studied under John Witherspoon, who would also be a signer of the Declaration of Independence in time, You would have been under the tutelage of somebody who was a Presbyterian. | ||
| That is, somebody who took Calvinism seriously, somebody who thought men were naturally corrupt, somebody who was skeptical of the motives of other people and taught that this is the way a Christian should understand human psychology. | ||
| And so if you think about, if you're familiar with and think about Madison's key political writings, for example, famous Federalist number 51 where he says, Interesting. | ||
| no government will be necessary, but until we're governed by angels, | ||
| let ambition counteract ambition. | ||
| That sounds like John Witherspoon. | ||
| He wouldn't have been saying that if he had gone to school at William and Mary. | ||
| Interesting, so a lot of his individualism was really born there. | ||
| Yeah, and the funny thing about that is though, that although the various elements | ||
| of what I've been saying have to do with Witherspoon's religion, | ||
| and the religion of Princeton generally, Madison was not a Presbyterian. | ||
| We have very limited information about what Madison's own personal religious beliefs were, but it happened that he came back to Virginia and within a couple of years there was one of the intermittent waves of persecution of non-Episcopalians And then he ended up in a correspondence with a fellow he had known at Princeton. | ||
| This guy was from Pennsylvania, so he had gone back home to Pennsylvania. | ||
| Pennsylvania, like New Jersey, had been founded by Quakers and so never had any kind of established church. | ||
| Quakers disbelieved in established churches. | ||
| So Madison ends up writing to this friend of his from Princeton who's in Philadelphia and saying, oh, I'm ashamed of what's going on here. | ||
| Nearby county we have half a dozen men who are in close jail, he said, close jail for no other offense than just preaching the gospel, teaching people the Baptist understanding of spiritual reality, and of course that was illegal in Virginia, so they were thrown in jail. | ||
| Madison and this fellow then think through The question, well, how ought government to be involved in the individual's religious lives? | ||
| And the conclusion that Madison came to was, it shouldn't. | ||
| That is, he thought, and he was going to come to this conclusion in helping to write the first American Declaration of Rights, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776. | ||
| That's a traditional English liberal and Anglo-American liberal position on religion, which is we should have toleration. | ||
| In England they had a rule that you could be any kind of Protestant you wanted, which sounds very oppressive to us. | ||
| It's a sort of slim version But the thing is, though, that in the context in the 18th century, if you were French, you had to be a Catholic. | ||
| If you were Turkish, you had to be a Muslim. | ||
| If you were in England and you were not an Episcopalian, you couldn't be in the House of Lords, you couldn't be in the House of Commons, you couldn't go to Oxford or Cambridge. | ||
| But in general, the English rule was, we'll tolerate you, we won't punish you for not being an Episcopalian. | ||
| So that's not like France or Spain or Turkey. | ||
| And Madison ends up with this idea that toleration isn't enough. | ||
| So when they're drafting the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the first American Bill of Rights, the committee version of a religious article of the Declaration of Rights said, Virginians will be entitled to the fullest toleration in matters of religion. | ||
| That was George Mason's formulation. | ||
| He was a very liberal fellow when it came to these questions. | ||
| In Madison, age 25, the youngest man in the room says, I disapprove of this. | ||
| I think that toleration implies that the government, one, knows more than the individual. | ||
| Two, is in a supervisory role over the individual. | ||
| And I think these are both incorrect ideas. | ||
| The government should just stay out of these things. | ||
| So Madison said, I propose an alternative that we should say Virginians are entitled to the free exercise of religion. | ||
| And when Mason heard this explanation, he said, I endorse this. | ||
| And then the whole convention voted and they voted unanimously for Madison's formulation. | ||
| So, in my book I say, and this is not a common view, I say, I think this is the most important thing Madison ever did. | ||
| He came up with this idea that government should not be telling people what to think. | ||
| About the afterlife, about religious ethics, about what church to attend. | ||
| It shouldn't say, we're going to be tolerant of you if you're wrong, but we're going to have our own right views, as was going on in England. | ||
| And he would, of course, later be the one who ensured that this phraseology free exercise would be in the federal Constitution. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Gosh, you gave me a lot to work with there. | ||
| So it's such an interesting point, though, that you're making, because we talk so much about tolerance these days. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he was saying back then, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Tolerance isn't enough. | ||
| We need true freedom here. | ||
| Was it really worked through that easy? | ||
| I mean, everyone, George Mason and everybody heard it and that quickly were like, Well, they agreed to include it in the Declaration of Rights, and they agreed as soon as they got to this question of formulating their own new form of government during the Revolution, they agreed that they would discontinue taxing people to support the Anglican Church, the Episcopal Church. | ||
| But it was going to be a long struggle to have formal disestablishment of the Church of England in Virginia. | ||
| So Madison was central to that too. | ||
| He and Jefferson wrote a bill called the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom now, but he proposed it. | ||
| It was defeated. | ||
| Madison ten years later ensured that an alternative Taxing people to support whatever form of Christianity you wanted would be defeated. | ||
| And then he brushed off Jefferson's bill and said, we need to pass this. | ||
| So it happened. | ||
| Virginia became the first officially secular society ever anywhere. | ||
| It's really incredible. | ||
| He was 25 when he started this. | ||
| So how old are you? | ||
| What have I done? | ||
| I'm 54 and I've done nothing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Madison came up with this one. | ||
| If he had dropped dead when he was 25, he would still be one of the 10 most important Americans. | ||
| Yeah, it really is incredible. | ||
| And we're going to get to all the other things he did that are through line to all the freedoms that we have right now. | ||
| You briefly said that we don't know much about his actual religious beliefs. | ||
| Do we? | ||
| Do we know anything, actually? | ||
| Because there seems to be this debate these days about what most of the founders actually believed, because they were talking about rights from God, and yet so many of them, obviously Madison, but Jefferson included, and others, it was so important to talk about a separation of church and state. | ||
| Were they all just deists? | ||
| Do we have a sense of any insight into that? | ||
| Well, we have information about some people, But the term founders is very nebulous. | ||
| Whom do you mean by that? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Often people say, well all the founders believe this and they're talking about six guys or eight guys. | ||
| My own view is that that term should be understood to include people who signed the Declaration of Independence, who were involved in the Philadelphia Convention and writing the Constitution. | ||
| Who were in the ratification conventions and agreed to the Constitution. | ||
| Who were in the Congress that proposed the Bill of Rights. | ||
| Who were involved in the debate about whether to adopt the Bill of Rights. | ||
| So I use that term far more broadly. | ||
| And if you understand the term broadly, as I've just... Most overwhelmingly Americans were very religious. | ||
| In general they were evangelical Christians. | ||
| And so they did not have this kind of So in an interesting way, was there reasoning for church and state to be separated? | ||
| Not so much that they were anti-religion, but because they saw the way religion was so intertwined with the monarchy and the government. | ||
| Back in England. | ||
| Was that really the key of it? | ||
| It wasn't necessarily an anti-religious stance? | ||
| Well, it wasn't only in England. | ||
| Madison wrote a pamphlet in the 1780s called Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. | ||
| And there he was answering that proposal I mentioned before for having a general tax in Virginia to support the Christian congregation of one's choice. | ||
| Patrick Henry had said we've had a decline in morals in Virginia during the war. | ||
| We want to resuscitate them, and one way to have that happen would be to return to a situation in which people actually go to church, in which they support a church. | ||
| So we're going to say, not that you have to support the Church of England anymore, but you have to choose something. | ||
| You have to choose one and designate it. | ||
| And so Madison, in response to this, among other things, wrote a pamphlet called Memorial Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, where he argued against having the government support any religion at all. | ||
| And his grounds for making that argument was that this had been a harmful tendency of governments Forever. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So it wasn't only in England. | ||
| It wasn't only a particular time. | ||
| He argued that it had been harmful to people and to societies in general, wherever it had been tried, which was essentially everywhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he wanted that to stop. | ||
| Do we know anything about what they all thought, this whole crew, whether you count the founders as the six to eight or sort of the broader group that you're talking about? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That they really realized how important the work they were It's funny, although John Adams in Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia didn't know each other at the time, each of them, when he was a very young man, wrote a letter in which he closed by saying, save this letter, people are going to want to read my letters. | ||
| Jefferson was a teenager when he said that, and by the time he died, Sixty-eight years later, sixty-seven, something like that, by the time he died he'd saved over 30,000 documents he'd written. | ||
| And the same John Adams, an attorney, writing to his beloved Abigail Smith, later Abigail Adams, said, Save this letter. | ||
| People are going to want to read my letters. | ||
| And actually, people like Jefferson, Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Washington, they saved all their documents, they saved all their notes. | ||
| They had the idea that what they were doing was really important, and they also had the idea that there was inadequate information about the fundamental commitments and decisions of most other societies, so they wanted to make a record. | ||
| Yeah, it's just fascinating to think about. | ||
| It's truly before the birth of a nation, and they were doing this in places where they couldn't tweet at each other or get on the phone with each other and really figure this out. | ||
| Well, if they'd been able to tweet, they wouldn't have written much, right? | ||
| So that's the thing, you know. | ||
| Nowadays, I mean, I feel kind of sorry as a historian of late 18th and early 19th centuries for people who want to work on contemporary stuff, because we've seen, I mean, even if the law says save all your emails, you might find 60,000 of them just disappeared. | ||
| You know, who knows what happened? | ||
| The plan is that nobody will ever read that, right? | ||
| Well, of course the Special Counsel found it, but for most people I have a feeling that just reams of this stuff is trashed, and that means future historians have no information. | ||
| They think they're gonna have a cascade of stuff, and there are big libraries full of books, but most of the secret things we'd actually like to be able to read that went into their decision-making, they've intentionally wrecked. | ||
| Yeah, that's why there's such richness to this, you know, hundred year period or so. | ||
| Do we know anything about who the other formative people were around him? | ||
| Who were the other people that really influenced his ideas? | ||
| Well, there are people he read, but Witherspoon is in a place for him, like William Small, who was a professor at William & Mary who had the foremost influence on Jefferson. | ||
| And then Madison had particular past writers who were really influential with him. | ||
| One was the Baron de Montesquieu, a French political scientist who wrote a book called | ||
| "L'Esprit des Lois," "The Spirit of the Laws," in which he examined Roman history and British | ||
| history and tried to deduce rules of political science. | ||
| So Madison carefully considered Montesquieu's writing and adopted some of it as his own | ||
| and then morphed other parts of it so that you couldn't recognize him as having come | ||
| from Montesquieu. | ||
| But you can see that the influence of Muncheski is very significant for him. | ||
| So that's one example. | ||
| Sir William Blaxton, who is a leading English legal thinker, was influential virtually across the spectrum of American legal and political thought. | ||
| Jefferson said negative things about him, but he was influenced by him anyway. | ||
| Besides that, historians, Greek and Roman writers, if you have little kids reading C. Spot Run, they're going to learn that when they're little, but if you have little kids reading about Cincinnatus and his short-lived dictatorship in Rome and renunciation of dictatorial authority at the end of the war, then they're going to learn that kind of thing when they're little. | ||
| So this is one reason why I think C. Spot Run is very harmful to people. | ||
| Even if we have our youngest children learning to read, That way we might think, well that's the best way to have the kid come out with a 3,000 word vocabulary, but when he gets through he hasn't learned, he doesn't know anything! | ||
| So the point was that there are a few Roman historians and Greek historians whom we can see having influenced virtually all these people. | ||
| They were all influenced I'm sorry, they were all educated by learning Greek, learning Latin, reading the Greek poets, reading the Roman poets, reading the Greek historians, Roman historians, Greek philosophers. | ||
| They actually argue about which Greek philosophers they like and don't like. | ||
| Can you imagine, you know, let's have a debate between, I don't know, Joe Biden and Mitt Romney over your favorite Roman historian. | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Yeah, so we just know, nowadays, people who are quote-unquote educated, even in our supposedly finest institutions, they don't come out of it knowing much. | ||
| Yeah, well that's why I like asking these questions, because it's like, wow, these guys really were the thinkers of their time, did all the intellectual work to become the people they are, versus now, I mean... And it just happened that the educational establishment of their time was Pumping stuff into their brains that would be not only useful for politicians, but also useful to make a man a good man, to help him decide what good meant, to help him decide how he might follow that path. | ||
| And today, again, I think the education system, of which I'm part, is kind of void of this consideration. | ||
| We could probably do a whole other show on that. | ||
| Well, James Madison was slight. | ||
| He was reserved. | ||
| We talk a lot about the education system in general here. | ||
| You mentioned his wife briefly. | ||
| What else do we have to know about his personal life as he's somewhere in his 20s now | ||
| before we get to all the other stuff? | ||
| Well, James Madison was slight. | ||
| He was reserved. | ||
| He was quiet. | ||
| There are various people who met him and said he was unattractive. | ||
| He was not good in a group. | ||
| So he ended up, when he was in his thirties, he had a kind of flirtation, which apparently became serious, at least on his end, with a much younger woman. | ||
| And it seems from his cryptic statements to Jefferson that maybe he was planning an engagement and then that fell through. | ||
| And then later on, we all know of Dolly Madison, who was a widow whom he ended up marrying. | ||
| She had Uh, been married and had children, one of whom had died, and then she had a surviving son. | ||
| The two of them were married for a very long time. | ||
| People who saw them together said they seemed very happy. | ||
| Somehow they never had any offspring. | ||
| So we, I guess we're left to deduce that more likely than not he was physically incapable, but we don't know that. | ||
| But in any event, he didn't have any physical offspring. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What about the nature of his friendship with Thomas Jefferson? | ||
| Because they definitely had a lot in common, but there were definitely stark differences as well, right? | ||
| Well, they had quite a lot in common. | ||
| I think nowadays it's interesting for scholars to ponder the extent to which they were divergent, and I think If either of them recognizes the divergence, it was more Madison who realized that they weren't exactly alike. | ||
| Can we just briefly, let's do some of the things that they basically agreed on. | ||
| Okay, what did they agree on? | ||
| Well, they agreed on republicanism. | ||
| They agreed on freedom of conscience. | ||
| They agreed that the state and the church shouldn't be related. | ||
| They agreed that in general you'd like to have a Nowadays what we call a non-interventionist foreign policy because that had all kinds of, or I should say that the opposite of a non-interventionist foreign policy would have all kinds of negative political, philosophical, social, economic consequences. | ||
| So both of them agreed where possible stay out of wars, where possible just have free trade, don't try to jigger your economy and your network of trade relationships to favor yourself. | ||
| And the two of them agreed about Um, monarchy and how harmful it had been over time in various European countries and that that was to be avoided. | ||
| So, these are the main things. | ||
| And I think also, although I said before we don't have good proof of Madison's own religious commitments, Jefferson was one who, you may know people like this, who didn't have any friends who disagreed with him. | ||
| About major questions. | ||
| Somebody like Madison or John Marshall or John Randolph of Roanoke or some other contemporaries of theirs had friends with whom they had market disagreements, but Jefferson, no. | ||
| That goes very much against my ethos. | ||
| You're moving on Madison here. | ||
| So I think the thing is that At least insofar as Jefferson understood it. | ||
| They must have been pretty close when it came to these kinds of questions. | ||
| Yeah, so what were those divergent points? | ||
| Well, Jefferson was a more radical thinker. | ||
| He was less trepidatious about trying the novel, about overthrowing the established. | ||
| So, for example, he wrote that he thought that every constitution should be void after nineteen years. | ||
| While Madison had played the key role in writing the U.S. | ||
| Constitution, he thought it had been a near-run thing. | ||
| At one point he said he thought it was a miracle. | ||
| By which he meant it was very unlikely that you'd end up with any kind of agreement in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, let alone that it would be ratified by all 13 states within, you know, three years. | ||
| So he didn't want to try that again. | ||
| And for Jefferson, the pragmatic question of whether this was feasible was less an issue than Well, is it a good idea? | ||
| Is this what we should do? | ||
| Do we want to be able to say that you have literal consent from everybody every once in a while? | ||
| Where did the 19 years come from? | ||
| Well, Jefferson had calculated that a generation was more or less 19 years. | ||
| So he thought that if you had an end to every constitution every 19 years, then every person who lived in a Standard lifespan would have at least once or twice when he was involved in agreeing to a constitution agreeing to a Political system and in general you should live under a political system to which you had agreed But nowadays we have the idea that well, okay society in general Americans agreed to the US Constitution even though you didn't and I didn't I guess if you're an immigrant you have to agree to it and | ||
| But if you're born here, you don't. | ||
| Jefferson thought this was a problem. | ||
| We want to avoid this. | ||
| We need to figure a way around it. | ||
| For Madison, don't talk about that. | ||
| This was really hard to do. | ||
| It's not likely it'll be better if we try to remake it. | ||
| What was his feeling there, really, that we would sort of forget about the freedoms that we started with, and that every generation would kind of forget, and we'd sort of keep whittling away? | ||
| Well, there was that, too. | ||
| Actually, he said, at one point, I wish I could recall the exact words, but he said something like, from the moment the revolution ends, we'll be on the decline, right? | ||
| So his feeling was that people's attentiveness to these questions of political legitimacy, the proper structure of government, the extent to which individuals Humanity ought to be respected by the system and society. | ||
| The acuteness of people's awareness of these things would immediately drop off, and it would continue to drop off. | ||
| And so how do you prevent that from ending in, well, the people in government pay attention and nobody else does? | ||
| Periodically, you have a new constitution created. | ||
| You have to go through the whole process again. | ||
| Everybody's going to be involved. | ||
| It'll be a hot topic. | ||
| And so, for Madison, this is speculative, and wow, this could have really bad results. | ||
| It's interesting, because I think you can make probably really strong arguments on either side of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So this must have really been a point for the two of them. | ||
| Yeah, they disagreed about it in print, in writing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| James Madison wrote, I mean, there's so much stuff that either he was directly writing, like the Federalist Papers, or that he was editing, and a zillion other things. | ||
| Is this a good point to talk about the Federalist Papers? | ||
| Or do we need to lead up to any? | ||
| Is there anything else we should lead up to? | ||
| Let me just say about them in general that their influence is highly exaggerated in the general understanding. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
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Yes, because... I told you I've got a bottle of wine that's called the Federalist. | |
| It's Madison's picture on it. | ||
| Maybe it's good wine. | ||
| If it's that standard issue silhouette of Madison, I celebrate the person who designed the logo. | ||
| But the thing is, among those of us who are specialists in this area, there's a kind of consensus that the Federalist did not persuade, we cannot prove, we cannot identify one person who was persuaded to vote yes in a ratification convention because he read the Federalist and was persuaded so in other words the idea that you're kind of taught in eighth grade and then in high school you know and in law school if you do that is well here are these here these papers that were used to go out and get the people to support the constitution that was their purpose | ||
| But we don't know that they did. | ||
| And in fact, by the time the last of them was published, that is by the time the last of them was seen by anybody anywhere, eight states had already ratified the Constitution. | ||
| So clearly there are eight states that weren't persuaded by at least those last ones, and then there were some states where none of them were published in any of the newspapers, and there was no state other than New York where they were all published. | ||
| Besides which, in New York, it was not the Federalists that persuaded people to ratify the Constitution. | ||
| We know that for a fact. | ||
| Well, what happened was that by the time New York came around to considering it, okay, well, maybe people don't know, but the Constitution says in Article 7 that the Constitution will go into effect among the ratifying states as soon as nine states have ratified, although there were 13, so as soon as two-thirds of the states have ratified. | ||
| And what that meant was that each state was supposed to have like a state legislative election, except it would be an election just for delegates to this convention, that would decide one question, do we agree, yes or no, to the Constitution. | ||
| So by the time New York met, there were already eight states that had ratified the Constitution. | ||
| Then while the New York Convention was meeting, New Hampshire ratified, that made nine. | ||
| Then Virginia did, that made ten. | ||
| New York was going to be eleventh. | ||
| When they had their election in New York State for delegates to the Ratification Convention, | ||
| two-thirds of them were people who had promised, "Vote for me and I'll vote no in the convention." | ||
| But when they had the convention, they got word while they were at it that New Hampshire had agreed, that made nine, so now it's going to go into effect. | ||
| Then they heard Virginia had that, made ten, now it's really going to go into effect because George Washington could be the president. | ||
| And so that leaves us, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. | ||
| If we stay out, we're going to have an independent country of New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island. | ||
| And then the Federalists from New York City had a newspaper publish an article that said, in case New York votes no on ratification, New York City will secede from New York State and join the Union as a state. | ||
| So then you'd have the independent country of upstate New York. | ||
| And at that point, one of the leading anti-federalists in the convention made a speech in which he said, we don't have a choice now, we have to vote yes. | ||
| So notice, I didn't mention the federalists in this whole discussion. | ||
| It had nothing to do with it. | ||
| That's really fascinating though, because I was gonna ask you, before you started answering, I was gonna ask you, well, would the states that had said no, would they have had any recourse? | ||
| But basically you're saying, their own people- They were independent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Actually, by the time George Washington was inaugurated president in April of 1789, There were 11 states that ratified the Constitution. | ||
| So there were 22 senators. | ||
| There were 11 states represented in the House of Representatives. | ||
| Two of the 13 states were independent countries. | ||
| North Carolina and Rhode Island. | ||
| And they were treated as independent countries. | ||
| And eventually they talked in Congress about the question, well, what should we do about the fact that Rhode Island won't join the Union? | ||
| Maybe we should cut off trade with Rhode Island, make it a little dot on the North American map that doesn't have a fridge. | ||
| Yeah, and anyway, finally, because what else are we going to do? | ||
| Rhode Island agreed to the Constitution. | ||
| But when they first had their election in Rhode Island about, instead of having an election for ratification convention, as soon as the Philadelphia Convention ended and said, okay, here you need to ratify the Constitution, become a member of the Union, Rhode Island had a referendum on should we have an election for a convention and they voted like 90% no. | ||
| We don't even want to vote on whether to vote no. | ||
| We just no. | ||
| And so when they finally got around to having it Most people were overwhelmingly opposed to it, but they finally ended up agreeing to it because what else are we going to do? | ||
| The other 12 states are already in the United States. | ||
| And besides that, our staying out means they're talking about things like creating the judicial system, recommending a Bill of Rights. | ||
| Rhode Island's got no congressman. | ||
| They're not participating in any of this. | ||
| They're going to end up in the Union anyway, so they finally joined. | ||
| Notice again, this has nothing to do with the Federalist Papers. | ||
| Yeah, so I still want to get to the 8th grade version of the Federalist Papers, but what would have been the argument for people saying no at that point? | ||
| I guess there really wasn't much left. | ||
| You mean in Rhode Island? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, during the, this is gonna be hard for people who are listening to understand, but in the 18th century, if you said money, when I say money and you think of an image in your mind, money, that's not what they thought of. | ||
| They thought of gold and silver coins, right? | ||
| That's called specie. | ||
| And what they had begun to do in Rhode Island was print notes, what were called bank notes, paper money, and printing these notes was just a way to inflate your way out of debt. | ||
| And so there were a lot of debtors in Rhode Island who liked this printing money and getting them out of debt, so they just kept voting for people in the legislature who would do this. | ||
| Well, the Constitution said that a state could not make anything but gold or silver. | ||
| Currency. | ||
| So in other words, if you join the Union, you can't keep printing money. | ||
| Rhode Island had this paper money party that was not going to agree to this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's why they put it off forever. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So let's just do... 1790 was when they joined the Union. | ||
| 1790 was when they joined the union. | ||
| Yeah, it's over a year after Washington was inaugurated. | ||
| All right, so I wanna do the eighth grade version. | ||
| It has nothing to do with the Federalist Papers. | ||
| Right, okay. | ||
| That's why I want to circle back there for a second. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's really fascinating and I don't think most people know that, that they didn't have the influence that we now believe them to have. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So for the eighth grade version of this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really, he was just trying to get people on board signing the Constitution. | ||
| That was the general idea. | ||
| But what actually was in there? | ||
| Was it a real sales pitch? | ||
| For people that just really don't know. | ||
| Okay, what to know about the Federalist... Actually, the people who... You keep saying the Federalist Papers, and I keep saying the Federalist. | ||
| The title of the Federalist Papers was not given to this document until 1961. | ||
| Originally it was just called The Federalist, and the author was Publius, which was a pseudonym for John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. | ||
| They wrote different essays. | ||
| There are two or three where we think Madison and Hamilton cooperated. | ||
| So that was the compilation? | ||
| Yeah, so they put them all together and it's one series under the same pseudonym. | ||
| Noted, I will not make that error again. | ||
| But the purpose of the series was that Hamilton lived in New York and he knew, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, that they had their election for a ratification convention in New York and two-thirds of the people they elected voted no. | ||
| Or promise to vote no in the convention. | ||
| So what do we do about this? | ||
| At the Philadelphia convention, Hamilton had been one of three delegates from New York. | ||
| The other two left after a few weeks. | ||
| They gave speeches in which they explained, we were sent here to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation, not create a new government. | ||
| One of the two who left was the Chief Justice of New York. | ||
| And when they got home to New York, the governor of New York was entirely against this, right? | ||
| He agreed with them entirely. | ||
| We're not going to have a new constitution. | ||
| We don't want any of this stuff. | ||
| We don't want to transfer a lot of authority out of New York. | ||
| And so, no, we're against it. | ||
| So Hamilton knew that most people in the New York political establishment didn't like it. | ||
| They had elections voted against it. | ||
| What are we going to do? | ||
| Well, maybe I could go directly to the people. | ||
| So his idea was to have a series of newspaper essays, maybe to get voters to change their minds. | ||
| I'm not going to persuade the governor or the chief justice. | ||
| They're both definitely set. | ||
| But maybe through a newspaper series we could get people to change their minds. | ||
| So it's kind of interesting. | ||
| He went to a friend of his named Gouverneur Morris, the guy who actually wrote the Constitution. | ||
| So if you think of The expression, the actual Constitution. | ||
| You see that fancy handwriting? | ||
| That's Governor Morris' handwriting. | ||
| He was one of the delegates from Pennsylvania to the Philadelphia Convention. | ||
| He wrote the Constitution. | ||
| Hamilton asked Morris, will you please help me write this series of essays for the papers to persuade New Yorkers to support the Constitution? | ||
| And Morris said, no, I don't write for newspapers. | ||
| So then he went to another friend of his, a former congressman named William Doerr, and he said, would you please write some essays? | ||
| So Doerr wrote three essays that were going to be in this series, and Hamilton read them and said, no, these aren't good enough. | ||
| So Doerr published them as a separate pamphlet. | ||
| And then he talked to John Jay. | ||
| John Jay was actually probably the most famous New Yorker at the time. | ||
| And Jay said, yes, I'll do it. | ||
| But after he wrote a couple of them, he got extremely sick. | ||
| He was bedridden for weeks. | ||
| And so he ended up writing only five of the 85 essays. | ||
| So now Hamilton's, now what? | ||
| And it turned out that this Virginian congressman who had been in the Philadelphia Convention, Madison, was back in New York City where Congress was meeting. | ||
| He was a member of Congress, too. | ||
| And he asked Madison, would you help me write these for the newspaper? | ||
| I've got to do something. | ||
| And Madison said, sure, I'll do it. | ||
| So that's why Madison ends up being kind of second most important author of the series. | ||
| The thing about the series is, in my book on Madison, James Madison, The Making of America, I devote a lot of space to the Federalists, not because it was important at the time, but for two reasons. | ||
| One, it's important now. | ||
| People tend to, even people in Congress, the presidents, people who are on federal courts, they tend to start To answer the question, how do you understand the Constitution by saying, well, here's what Federalist 48 says, you know? | ||
| So that's one thing. | ||
| But another thing is... | ||
| This is one of the most important things Madison did. | ||
| Even if no one had read them, they're brilliant. | ||
| So, you know, if you have a painter, you're writing a book about a painter and he made a brilliant painting and nobody saw it until last week, you'd have a chapter on it because it's important, it's an interesting part of his life. | ||
| So I think the fact that Madison was this brilliant political scientist sheds light on the rest of his career. | ||
| He had an extremely important political career besides his career in a short-lived career as a political scientist. So | ||
| that's why I paid him a lot of attention. | ||
| But the point is, and I said before I wrote this book about Madison partly because I thought his | ||
| significance has been exaggerated in several ways. One is the Federalists didn't sell the Constitution. | ||
| Actually in the play Hamilton, there's a song where you know, "You sold it, you wrote it," | ||
| all this stuff about Hamilton which is all also totally exaggerated. | ||
| But the same thing goes for Hamilton, you know, the same series, it didn't sell it. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| They didn't make people ratify the Constitution, the two of them. | ||
| All right, well now that you've changed the lore of the Federalist or the Federalist Papers, depending on what year we're talking, that we're referencing them, let's talk about some of the other things that he drafted. | ||
| So he actually did draft the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. | ||
| I think people are very confused what that actually means or how many people actually did this together. | ||
| Were they all sitting in a room? | ||
| Were they mailing pieces back and forth? | ||
| Were they sending edits to people? | ||
| How did the whole process actually go? | ||
| Well, you mean you want to start with the U.S. | ||
| Constitution? | ||
| Let's start with the Constitution. | ||
| Okay, so Madison is often called the father of the Constitution. | ||
| I think this is exaggerated. | ||
| So did he. | ||
| In his own lifetime, people gave him accolades like that, and he would always reject them. | ||
| In fact, at one point he said the Constitution was the work of many heads in many hands. | ||
| And what he meant by that was that the Constitution was largely unlike what he had proposed. | ||
| So, essentially, he had an idea, and he wasn't the only one. | ||
| He was part of a movement in the 1770s and 80s called the Federalist Movement, which is kind of confusing because we have different groups in American history are called Federalists. | ||
| There's going to be a Federalist Party, not the same people who were the Federalists who were behind creating the U.S. | ||
| Constitution. | ||
|
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So who were those originally? | |
| Okay, the later party is the one that congeals around Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s over his platform, his program as Treasury Secretary in the Washington administration. | ||
| But before that, there had been people who wanted to strengthen the central government in the 1770s and the 80s. | ||
| They're called Federalists, too. | ||
| You have Hamilton, Madison, Richard Morris, who's the chief financial expert in the Continental Congress, and the Secretary for Finance of the Confederation Congress, the guy who has to pay for the war, basically. | ||
| General Washington was a Federalist, various other people. | ||
| Generally, people who were Federalists in this first sense, people who wanted to strengthen the central government in the 1770s and 1880s, had either been in Congress or they had been officers in the military. | ||
| Or some of them had been diplomats. | ||
| So they saw that during the revolution we literally had American soldiers who starved to death in the field, who went into battle literally without muskets, who in the winter didn't have boots and their feet, you know, broken bled. | ||
| They didn't have blankets. | ||
| There were people who were diplomats like John Jay and Thomas Jefferson who went overseas. | ||
| John Jay, for example, in the 1780s when he was American minister to Spain showed up in Spain and the first thing he had to ask the foreign minister's assistant was, can you loan me some money so I can buy some food? | ||
| I need to borrow money so I can get myself a place to sleep. | ||
| So in other words, the federal government had no money. | ||
| It couldn't do anything. | ||
| And it also, during the revolution, it had not only did it have to ask Congress for money | ||
| to pay for things, but it had to ask, I'm sorry, did it have to ask the states to pay | ||
| for things, but the Congress had to ask the states for men. | ||
| And always they got less. | ||
| They had less money than they had asked for. | ||
| They had fewer men than they had asked for. | ||
| And there were some times when states said, no, we're not sending anything. | ||
| So by the time the Philadelphia Convention met in 1787, every single state had Sometimes sent less than requested. | ||
| Some of them had sent nothing in response to some of these requests for men or money. | ||
| Was there a punishment related to that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No, what could you do? | |
| There was no central authority, I guess that's the point. | ||
| As if today, for example, we have the situation that President Trump made famous in the 2016 campaign in which we have 27 members of NATO and only 5 of them meet the 2% of GDP threshold of military spending that they have all committed to. | ||
| What can the other 22 of us, including the Americans who pay more than anybody, what can the rest of us do to Germany or the Netherlands or Spain for not spending 2% of GDP on the military? | ||
| And the answer is nothing. | ||
| There's nothing we can do. | ||
| So the same thing was going on. | ||
| Actually, the worst transgressor in this regard was Rhode Island, which repeatedly said nothing. | ||
| These guys are the real rebels. | ||
| They were scofflaws and actually they were going to send, they were the only state that didn't send anybody to the Philadelphia Convention because they didn't want to strengthen it. | ||
| We're not paying, why should we want to strengthen it? | ||
| That would mean we'd have to pay. | ||
| And they actually, they were what economists call a free rider. | ||
| They realized that if Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia were going to defend themselves, they're going to be defending Rhode Island. | ||
| They were good to go. | ||
| Yeah, so why should we pay for this? | ||
| So anyway, people like Washington, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Army and seen his men in these dire straits in the field, and Madison, who had been in Congress and tried to get money to send to Washington, or men, they realized this is inadequate. | ||
| We have to have something else. | ||
| So Madison drafted what's called the Virginia Plan. | ||
| Which envisioned a new national government unlike the one we have now, unlike the one that was created by this process. | ||
| So people credit him with having written the Constitution. | ||
| He wrote a rough draft. | ||
| You could say a couple of major features were made part of a new Constitution, but many of the major features were rejected over and over. | ||
| And some of them, after he repeatedly brought them up again and again, when they got to the last week of the Philadelphia Convention, they voted on one of his major pet ideas and every single state, including Virginia, voted no. | ||
| So he was not the author of the Constitution. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| He played a very important role which should be remembered. | ||
| But I don't think it makes him look better to make up something that he didn't actually do. | ||
| So it's so interesting. | ||
| So this group of federalists at the time, they were really trying to strengthen the federal government. | ||
| It sounds like it really was mostly for military purposes. | ||
| I mean, you mentioned for some overseas posts. | ||
| Well, you had to have diplomats. | ||
| If you're going to have a military, you want to have diplomats overseas. | ||
| Mainly what the diplomats were doing was trying to get alliances to help fight the war, to get foreign countries to loan the United States money. | ||
| So it was all one cause. | ||
| Essentially, it was about foreign policy. | ||
| That's what the federal government was for. | ||
| This is classic federal government, where you have some countries that can't defend themselves, and so they league together for mutual defense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so if he wasn't the author of the Constitution in the way that we think, what were the contributions that we need to know about? | ||
| Well, first, he was one of the main people behind the fact that there was a Philadelphia Convention. | ||
| So if there ended up being this meeting of delegates from 12 states to talk about amending the Articles of Confederation so that the Congress would be able to raise men and money to, you know, send diplomats and raise an army, Madison was one of the two or three people most responsible for there being a Philadelphia Convention. | ||
| And then when they got to Philadelphia, he persuaded the other Virginia delegates, who included some of the most prominent men in the country, to propose what's called the Virginia Plan, which laid out that there should be three branches of a federal government, that the legislature should be bicameral, it should have a taxing power. | ||
| These are very important ideas. | ||
| I mean, these are all the ideas that ultimately made it into the Constitution. | ||
| These are some ideas that ultimately made it into the Constitution. | ||
| Not all. | ||
| These are important ideas that made it into the Constitution, but again, if we had time, I could go through many other ideas that Madison proposed that were rejected. | ||
| In fact, one of them Yeah, give me like two of them. | ||
| Well, one example is Madison proposed that there should be three branches of a new national government. | ||
| It should have a national legislature, a national executive, and a national judiciary. | ||
| The national legislature should be bicameral. | ||
| Okay, so far this sounds like the U.S. | ||
| Constitution. | ||
| So far I'm with you. | ||
| Okay, so the lower house should be elected by the people. | ||
| The upper house should be elected by the lower house. | ||
| Both houses should be apportioned by population. | ||
| The Congress should have a veto over all state laws. | ||
| The Congress should be able to legislate about anything it wanted. | ||
| Now about half of what I just said is not in the Constitution. | ||
| The veto over all state laws Madison said was his favorite proposal. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And that sounds so counter. | ||
| He thought it was essential for the central government to be able to say if Rhode Island wants to print paper money, no. | ||
| Veto. | ||
| You can't print paper money. | ||
| So that was one thing. | ||
| So this must have been one of those points that he and Jefferson had a major difference, right? | ||
| Well, Jefferson was in France while the Constitution was being written, so he only saw it afterward. | ||
| He couldn't have been thrilled. | ||
| Actually, this is kind of funny, because it's good that you asked me this, because when Jefferson received the Constitution, first, the Philadelphia Convention ends on September 17, 1787. | ||
| And you have 11 states sign the Constitution. | ||
| Rhode Island never showed up, so they didn't. | ||
| New York couldn't sign because two of their three delegates had left. | ||
| So Hamilton signed it, but he couldn't vote yes for New York because he was only one of three delegates. | ||
| So he was not a quorum himself. | ||
| So 11 states sign it. | ||
| And then Madison waited from September 17th until October 24th to send Jefferson a copy. | ||
| Usually two of them are writing each other all the time. | ||
| He waits a month and a week before Before he sends him a copy, why does he wait so long? | ||
| Well, there are two parts of the answer. | ||
| One is, he's writing a very long letter. | ||
| There are hundreds and hundreds of surviving letters between the two of them over their 50-year friendship. | ||
| Very long, very large body of missives back and forth. | ||
| But he waited a long time. | ||
| One thing he did was he wrote a description of the convention, which is several pages. | ||
| But another thing seems to be, he probably knew that Jefferson wasn't going to like this thing. | ||
| So Jefferson, by the time he got Madison's cover letter and copy of the Constitution, had already received it from someone else. | ||
| And when he read it, he looked at it and he wrote to his friend John Adams, who's in Britain. | ||
| Jefferson's in France and Adams is in Britain. | ||
| So Jefferson sends Adams a letter and he says, I've seen, have you seen the product of the Philadelphia Convention? | ||
| I own it. | ||
| I'm disappointed in this. | ||
| I would have expected more from the people who were in the Philadelphia Convention. | ||
| I don't know whether it's more good or more bad. | ||
| So that's his original response to it. | ||
| And when he finally gets it from Madison, he says, OK, I like bicameralism, and I like that Congress has a taxing power, and I like that there's an independent executive and you have a judiciary, but there are a couple things I don't like. | ||
| One is perpetual re-eligibility of the president. | ||
| That's a terrible idea. | ||
| The president will be able to make friends all over the country, he'll be able to hand out contracts and make appointments, and pretty soon the president will serve for life. | ||
| This is a bad idea. | ||
| You should have a term limit. | ||
| He thought. | ||
| And the second thing was, he says, there's no Bill of Rights. | ||
| So then he and Madison, this is one of the other areas where they had a serious disagreement. | ||
| They went back and forth over this question, whether there should be a Bill of Rights. | ||
| And Madison's answer was, well, okay, I might like the principles you would include in your Bill of Rights, but the thing is, I don't think a Bill of Rights really is going to bind anybody. | ||
| So, over time, the government will ignore or violate or, in some sense, practically void the Bill of Rights, and what will people learn from that? | ||
| So I think it's better that the people should have their insistence on particular rights, and when they vote, they should ensure that their representatives stand for these rights, but you don't want to put them in the Constitution. | ||
| And Matt Jefferson says, well, okay, it's true that occasionally that people who hold office will violate provisions of Bill of Rights, but on the other hand, It's something you can point to. | ||
| You can say, this guy shouldn't be reelected because, look, the Fourth Amendment, he violated it. | ||
| He doesn't care about it at all. | ||
| So they went back and forth. | ||
| And Madison says, well, in Virginia we have a Declaration of Rights and it's ignored. | ||
| The legislature violates it. | ||
| And Jefferson says, that's true, but you and I are both complaining about it. | ||
| And other people complain about it too. | ||
| At least we can point to that. | ||
| Besides that, Jefferson says, I think a Bill of Rights has an instructive, it's got an educational function. | ||
| People maybe, they don't think about these kinds of questions, and if you didn't mention them to them, they might never come to mind for them. | ||
| But if you have a Bill of Rights listing particular rights that people should be able to count on, then they'll realize that somebody's violating one of their important rights, and then they'll care what otherwise they would never notice. | ||
| So he says, I think Even if only for that a Bill of Rights is a good idea, Madison comes back and says, well, yeah, I think it would take a lot of work and probably people are going to be really disappointed if they think that we're going to have to amend the Constitution. | ||
| And Jefferson, finally, you can tell he gets angry. | ||
| So his answer to that is, look, a Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government in the world, general or particular. | ||
| So by this point, Madison has already gone to the Philadelphia Convention. | ||
| He's worked through the whole convention. | ||
| When they got to the end of it, his friend George Mason and his friend Edmund Randolph, both from Virginia. | ||
| One's the George Mason, the leading constitutional thinker in Virginia, and the other one is Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia and former Attorney General of Virginia. | ||
| They both refused to sign it, partly because it didn't have a Bill of Rights. | ||
| So was Thomas Jefferson corresponding with them at the exact same time? | ||
| We don't know that he was, and I think if he had been Either he or they would have saved letters. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| But the thing is, Jefferson insisting on this follows on Mason and Randolph insisting on this and refusing to sign it. | ||
| You have to kind of imagine Madison thinking, okay, I don't think this is that important. | ||
| I don't really think it would have that much impact. | ||
| But if it's going to mean that Mason, Randolph and Jefferson are opposed, This could mean that we don't get the thing ratified. | ||
| So finally, he's going to say, I agree to this. | ||
| Now, one thing you can rightly call Madison is the author of the Bill of Rights. | ||
| But it's interesting to look at the way he introduced this in Congress. | ||
| So they go to Congress after he's been elected to Congress on the ground that he promised he would seek amendments in the first Congress. | ||
| And then when he finally introduces these amendments, here's how he introduces them. | ||
| He says, you know, some men who would otherwise be well disposed toward our new government are opposed to it because it doesn't have a Bill of Rights. | ||
| And he says this in his speech in Congress. | ||
| And I don't think he can hurt anything. | ||
| So why don't we add these amendments? | ||
| So he's not persuaded, but he thinks it's a good political idea. | ||
| So nowadays we think, oh, James Madison gave us the basis of every lawsuit in America. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| He grudgingly did this because his friends wanted him to, and he was afraid they would never agree to support the Constitution if he didn't say, OK, we'll have these. | ||
| And he says, I don't think they're going to hurt anything. | ||
| Please, let's agree to them. | ||
| We'll get people like Randolph and Mason and Jefferson to be enthusiastic. | ||
| Yeah, so basically he was a realist at that point. | ||
| He was, all the time a realist. | ||
| He and Jefferson are kind of yin and yang, right? | ||
| One's kind of impractical, theoretical, philosophical. | ||
| They're both very bookish. | ||
| You can name, you know, 50 books on political science in Greek and Latin and the English classics and a couple of Frenchmen. | ||
| They both know every page, right? | ||
| But they come out of this Entirely different. | ||
| And yet they're just very affectionate friends. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Because they have these common interests and they both think, well, we have kind of the same goal. | ||
| We want Americans to be free. | ||
| We want a republic. | ||
| We want stability. | ||
| We want prosperity. | ||
| We don't want wars. | ||
| They have a lot in common, but I hope you've already gotten that they're very different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's fascinating and it's like You know, 241 odd some odd years later, the idea that Jefferson was pushing there of we need people to be able to point to something and say, I mean, that's one thing that actually does seem to stand the test of time. | ||
| Because as everyone watching this knows, I mean, I'm constantly yammering about free speech and the First Amendment. | ||
| We know what the First Amendment is. | ||
| We know the Second Amendment is the right to bear arms. | ||
| We know the Fourth Amendment is the right to privacy. | ||
| I mean, so that point really does seem like it's something that truly translated over time. | ||
| Yeah, and Madison kind of had to be dragged into it. | ||
| He completely had to be dragged into it, in fact. | ||
| He also was defeated for election to the first U.S. | ||
| Senate, partly because of his having resisted having a Bill of Rights in the Constitution. | ||
| That's why he ends up in the House of Representatives. | ||
| So not only, there were people in Virginia who didn't want a new Constitution, they didn't like Madison for having this Philadelphia Convention and the rest of it, but they also were very skeptical about his willingness to amend the Constitution. | ||
| So they kept him out of the Senate, and he ends up being narrowly elected to the House of Representatives. | ||
| How much fighting was there once he conceded the point on the Bill of Rights? | ||
| How much fighting was there as to what actually was going to be in the Bill of Rights? | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| People weren't really interested because the first Congress was completely dominated by Federalists. | ||
| So you have most historians now who've spent a lot of attention on The process of creating the Constitution and ratifying it, think probably most voters didn't want it. | ||
| So if we had time to go through it state by state and kind of talk about how it came to be ratified, I think I could persuade you that it seems like most American voters did not want the Constitution. | ||
| It had to do with better tactics on the side of the Federalists that it ended up being agreed to. | ||
| So, but was there anything that once the Bill of Rights was actually being written that Jefferson and Madison or any of them had, like this has to be in here, but we're not, you know, were they really fighting over any of that? | ||
| Well, several of the states that had close ratification contests with their announcements, we've ratified, sent proposed amendments. | ||
| So at an early point, after five states, okay, Philadelphia Convention in September 17, 1787, five states immediately ratified within weeks. | ||
| Four of them were small states, you know, like Rhode Island that knew this is the sweetest deal we'll ever get. | ||
| We're equal to Virginia and Massachusetts in the Senate. | ||
| That means we're going to be heavier than we ought to be in the Electoral College. | ||
| That means we're going to be having more of a voice in choosing presidents and judges. | ||
| We better hurry up and agree to this. | ||
| The same thing happened in Georgia and a couple of other small states besides Pennsylvania, which was an odd case. | ||
| But then the next state up, the first big state that considered this question was Massachusetts, and there it wasn't clear who had more votes in the convention, the Federalists or Anti-Federalists. | ||
| So finally the Federalists decided, all right, well, we don't really know that we're gonna win here, so maybe we could say, if you will vote for this thing, we will promise in the first Congress we'll propose amendments. | ||
| So this became the kind of the Massachusetts strategy. | ||
| So the later states that had close Contests did the same thing, and that's what Virginia did. | ||
| Madison's saying, I don't really know whether we're going to get this thing ratified in Virginia. | ||
| We'll promise in the first Congress, we'll propose amendments. | ||
| So that's why he's doing this, right? | ||
| It's not because we like the idea. | ||
| But anyway, several of the states that had these close convention contests with their announcements, we've officially ratified the thing per Article 7, also sent along, here are our proposed amendments. | ||
| So what Madison basically did was he took the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which we said earlier he helped write, and he took the English Bill of Rights from 1689, which was a kind of a pattern for some of the other American declarations of rights, and he took these proposals from various ratification conventions and found most of what's now in the Bill of Rights in those sources, right? | ||
| It's not as if he kind of made them up. | ||
| In fact, the Eighth Amendment comes directly out of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which got it directly from the English Bill of Rights of 1689. | ||
| It's word for word. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| Really? | ||
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Literally? | |
| Yeah, the Eighth Amendment is directly from the Virginia Declaration, directly from the English Bill of Rights. | ||
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Huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| All right, so we've done obviously a ton here, lead it, you know, his whole life and all the work of founding the nation and the laws that we're governed by. | ||
| He's not done yet, though. | ||
| Yeah, no, I know. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about his presidency, actually, since we're doing Presidents Week here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the most important thing we need to know about? | ||
| Well, this is the worst part of his career. | ||
| His foreign policy is a debacle. | ||
| In fact, he had the idea in the early 1780s that America could to some extent substitute economic coercion for traditional military calculations in international relations. | ||
| So he persuaded Jefferson that, for example, in 1807 they could adopt an embargo instead of building up the military, raising taxes, buying warships, defending American merchant ships off the coast of the United States. | ||
| No, we'll just tell foreigners, okay, if you won't treat us right at sea, we won't trade with you. | ||
| This will make them do what we want. | ||
| And the reason he had this idea was because it had worked before the Revolution in 1765, 1767, 1770. | ||
| The British passed tax laws and the colonies boycotted and they repealed the laws. | ||
| So Madison thinks, well, okay, now we're better able to organize. | ||
| It can be a national boycott. | ||
| We'll use the government to keep any Americans from trading with foreigners. | ||
| They'll do what we want. | ||
| But the problem he had in 1812 was there was a world war going on. | ||
| Napoleon has armies of three million men in the field, which today doesn't sound like much. | ||
| We have 325 million Americans. | ||
| Three million is more than we have, but we could have them if we wanted. | ||
| But on the other hand, in 1812 France's population was like 25 million. | ||
| It was the biggest country in Europe. | ||
| Britain had like 15 million people, 3 million men in the army, it was unbelievable, and Britain had over 500 warships, right? | ||
| Mainline warships, like the dreadnoughts in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, right? | ||
| So America's not going to compete. | ||
| Madison thought, well then we shouldn't even try. | ||
| We should just say we're not going to trade with you. | ||
| And so they tried when he was Secretary of State under Jefferson. | ||
| They tried this boycott idea. | ||
| It had no effect at all on the French, on the British. | ||
| France had complete military control of Europe. | ||
| And Britain had complete naval control of all the oceans, and it was a battle to the death. | ||
| If Napoleon were able to cross the Channel, he would conquer England. | ||
| But if the British wanted to defend themselves, they had to maintain their navy. | ||
| How were they going to do that? | ||
| Well, one way was they were going to They were going to continue to force people into their Navy if they thought that there were Britons in American ships. | ||
| They were going to force them into the Royal Navy. | ||
| And the other thing was they weren't going to let the United States trade with France. | ||
| They weren't going to let Americans carry products from British, I'm sorry, from French colonies in the Caribbean to France or anywhere else in Europe. | ||
| And on the other hand, the French policy was, we're not going to let the Americans trade with Europe because they're trading with the British. | ||
| Wow, so this is... | ||
| Neither France nor Britain could possibly be persuaded to give up its strategy in this world war with the other because it was to the death. | ||
| But what the U.S. | ||
| government could do was it could wreck America. | ||
| Which is what it did. | ||
| This was terrible. | ||
| The War of 1812, following this boycott, the boycott was an economic disaster in the United States. | ||
| And then comes, okay, we're going to declare war. | ||
| Well, one of the leading spokesmen for republicanism, old Jeffersonian thinking, was a congressman from Virginia named John Randolph of Roanoke. | ||
| And when this idea of war with Britain came up, he said, you're going to go to war with Britain? | ||
| We don't have any warships! | ||
| Well, we have no money! | ||
| What are you talking? | ||
| Are you kidding? | ||
| This is impossible! | ||
| And, of course, the result was they burned down the Capitol, they burned down the White House, they burned the Library of Congress, they burned the War Department, they burned the State Department, they burned the Treasury Department. | ||
| It's just... Madison has to hop on a horse and ride out of D.C. | ||
| This is totally predictable. | ||
| It was not only predictable, it was predicted. | ||
| So this is a disaster. | ||
| And the only reason it didn't lead to the end of the United States is because the British decided it's not really worth the effort. | ||
| So, at one point, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom went to the greatest British general ever, the Duke of Wellington. | ||
| This was before Waterloo, but he was already the greatest general in British history. | ||
| And he said to him, OK, so I give you an army and I send you to North America. | ||
| And Wellington says, well, then I conquer the United States, and then what? | ||
| We're going to stay there? | ||
| We're going to occupy the country? | ||
| How good is that? | ||
| Yeah, we've been around this process. | ||
| And so then the Prime Minister says, "Well, okay, then we'll negotiate a peace." | ||
| So it was just a complete debacle. | ||
| You could not exaggerate the extent to which this is a mess. | ||
| Wow, I really didn't know this. | ||
| Many people who write about Madison, though, they want, and again this is a pitfall that | ||
| biographers tend to fall into, you know, "I'm writing about this guy, so he's my hero." | ||
| What can I say that's good about him? | ||
| Well, the one thing you can say that's good about Madison as a war president, I mean, his strategy was terrible, he picked totally inept, incompetent unqualified people to be his war secretary and his navy | ||
| secretary. He just did a terrible job as a military leader. But the one thing | ||
| you can say about him is he didn't repress dissent. He didn't jail people. He | ||
| didn't have the army attack militia units in states that were by this time | ||
| openly trading with the British. He didn't put down domestic dissension the way | ||
| that Lincoln did or Wilson did or you know other... That's interesting though | ||
| so I didn't know that so states were actually just bucking what the feds were | ||
| doing. | ||
| New England people were trading with Canada, which was part of the British Empire. | ||
| New England was talking about independence, so we should declare independence. | ||
| There were leading people, including a fellow named Pickering, who was a senator by this time. | ||
| He had been Secretary of State under Washington. | ||
| He says New England should be an independent country. | ||
| We're rightly, we should be aligned with the British, not with this pro-French Republican policy that Jefferson and Madison have wrecked our economy with. | ||
| There's no reason for this. | ||
| The argument that the sycophants of Madison make is, well, you know, Lincoln would have jailed these people. | ||
| He would have wrecked their presses. | ||
| This is what he did. | ||
| Or Wilson, he would have jailed all these people. | ||
| You know, he would have sent the army and shot militia units that were resisting American policy. | ||
| So, yeah, okay, you can say that, right? | ||
| They burned down the Capitol, the White House, Treasury, the state, but at least he didn't hang dissenters. | ||
| There's so much there. | ||
| It was terrible, though. | ||
| Again, the only reason that the United States continued to exist was because Britain decided, eh, it's not worth the effort. | ||
| Wellington said, yeah, conquer them. | ||
| Then what? | ||
| Yeah, it's just a great line. | ||
| It's like, I mean, that's the truth nobody thinks of. | ||
| The then what? | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Nobody thinks about it. | ||
| All right, my final question for you. | ||
| I mean, this has been really chock full of info here. | ||
| Because we're doing President's Week and I'm doing five different presidents in five different days, in the 2018 lens, what do you think James Madison's political outlook would be? | ||
| Because it's interesting, they all sort of, in the lens of now, they all sort of look like libertarians and small government people, but you have said several things here where he wanted a stronger federal government. | ||
| I know it's a kind of tricky question because our parties are so crazy right now and everything else, but if you can give me some sense of where he might fall now or what he might think these days. | ||
| Well, I don't think they're all libertarians. | ||
| I don't think Washington or Hamilton is a libertarian today. | ||
| But I do think people like Jefferson and Madison, to the extent that you can kind of extrapolate from what they thought then, which They're foreboding about the result of a foreign policy like the one we've had has proven justified. | ||
| Of course we have huge economic distortions because of our foreign policy we have uh... gigantic uh... remaking of the nature of our government and we have huge diminution of the role of the average citizen in making his own life for it shaping his own community here and so it's turned out kind of the way they thought it might in that sense on the other hand the fact that the union has proven stable the | ||
| Main freedoms have been enduring. | ||
| This is somewhat surprising. | ||
| People thought that, and this had been true, Republicanism was short-lived. | ||
| There had never been a long-lasting, significant republic, and so we still have a republic. | ||
| Even if it has a lot of the elements that people like Jefferson and Madison wanted to forestall or prevent, it's still Republican. | ||
| We have freedom of speech. | ||
| We have freedom of religion. | ||
| We have input into what the policies are of the government, even if it's somewhat attenuated. | ||
| I think Jefferson would be more disappointed, but Jefferson was disappointed by the time he died. | ||
| But I think he'd be more disappointed than Madison, surely, yeah. | ||
| Wow, that's a really interesting takeaway, and I think a perfect point. | ||
| I thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I mean, what a richness of knowledge you just gave me. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff I'm gonna have to go back in and think about, so thank you so much. | ||
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You're welcome. |
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