The Madison Miracle
This writer’s admiration for James Madison, whose birthday this week (March 16) in 1751 is arguably the most distressingly unobserved birthday in our history, stems from his role in solving the great paradox that America faced after the American Revolution.
The paradox was this: America rebelled against Great Britain because it was fed up with being governed by a powerful central authority located so far away that it was neither familiar with, nor beholden to, the concerns of the people it was supposed to govern. “No taxation without representation,” the revolution’s rallying cry, was really another way of saying, “No government unresponsive to the local interests of the people.”
And yet, not five years after the war was won, America’s leaders realized that only a more powerful central government could prevent their new nation from dissolving into 13 squabbling states, each protecting its own interests at the expense of the national wel- fare. What’s more, given the ever-growing size of this new nation, such a central authority would inevitably lose its local flavor and become, like Britain’s Parliament, out of touch.
Small wonder the conventional wisdom back then was that only small city-states could square this circle, mostly because their smallness helped ensure the people’s political concerns remained local and relatively homogeneous. Thus, Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers faced a daunting task at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. They had to create a government strong enough to effectively govern a large nation, but not so strong or distant that the people rejected it for being too much like the British government.
How did they meet this challenge? By ensuring frequent elections to keep a tight rein on their elected officials; by creating a Bill of Rights that spelled out which rights the people possessed in perpetu- BRUCE G. KAUFFMANN
E-mail author BruceG. Kauffmann atbruce@ history lessons.net ity; and by dividing power among three branches of government – the executive, legislative and judiciary.
But most of all, by creating a “Federalist” system in which power was shared between a national government, and the state (and local) governments. The national government dealt with the people’s allencompassing concerns – foreign policy, national defense, interstate commerce, etc. The state governments, being closer to the people and more in touch, addressed the people’s local concerns – paving roads, building schools, raising or lowering state taxes, raising or lowering the drinking age. “The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect,” Madison wrote. “The great and aggregate interests being referred to the national [government], the local and particular to the State legislatures.”
It was a collective triumph, but one man wrote the plan on which the Constitution is based, and provided the leadership required to get it passed and ratified – this week’s birthday boy, James Madison.