Giving Madison His Due

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s somewhat sour sonnet comes to mind as a free-roaming commentary on any number of contemporary crises. These include a less-than-sober national media and a poorly grounded civic conversation about politics and the public.

Last month saw the anniversary of the birth of James Madison, fourth president of the United States and a voracious reader of history who was acutely aware of his place in time. His own writing isn’t read in our time as often as it’s quoted in the media. That’s because his body of work revolved around a project that earned him the sobriquet “Father of the Constitution,” and neither American history nor its constitutional debates are much taught in schools anymore. He was as well a premier statesman, which makes him seem too old-fashioned for current commentary—statesmanship no longer being the great ambition of the politician. For these reasons, as much as for the lack of a federal holiday and targeted shopping specials, Madison’s birthday goes by barely noticed.

That’s fine, in and of itself. Not every past president and Founding Father needs his own national holiday. More legitimately concerning is the ever-growing distance between the sophistication of our technological methods of communication and the poverty of our public discourse. We are marvelously up-to-date but hardly well-informed. This is especially true when it comes to our particular constitutional form of government: knowing the branches of government (legislative, executive, judicial), by whom their powers are to be exercised, and, crucially, how they are to be exercised.

Madison, in company with other statesmen of his generation, thought it particularly important—vital, actually—that a self-governing people be conversant in this kind of political talk. He famously summed this up in an 1822 letter to W. T. Barry:

Mere information about government (what now is often reduced to cries for “transparency!”) was only the baseline of what Madison had in mind. His intellectual dance around the issue of a bill of rights displays better how Madison connected popular opinion, political knowledge, and self-government premised on the preservation of rights (the first purpose of government, according to the Declaration of Independence). This is noteworthy, because Madison initially was not in favor of including a bill of rights in the Constitution—he believed that the Constitution was itself a bill of rights. Additionally, he was skeptical that a list of specified rights would have efficacy against actual abuses of those rights. It might only amount to a paper tiger, a “parchment barrier.” In other words (so to speak): They’re just words, words, words.

While Thomas Jefferson was in Paris during the first rumblings of the French Revolution, Madison wrote him, maintaining that when it came to ensuring the protection of rights, public opinion could be as much the offensive as the defensive guard. Madison was particularly concerned with the opinion of the vocal majority. He worried that because “the real power lies in the majority of the Community” in America, “the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended .  .  . from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” This, he pointed out, was different from what Jefferson was noticing about France, where it was “acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents” that appeared problematic.

It was teasing out the role of public opinion over the course of corresponding with Jefferson that convinced Madison a bill of rights added to the Constitution might serve an essential task. It could attract the favor of the sizable minority then cool or opposed to the Constitution, as well as firm up the favorable disposition of the more general opinion. A separate bill of rights could serve as the instrument by which Americans would become attached to the idea of the Constitution, and thus the type of government and society the Constitution meant to stimulate. And this deep and popular attachment would be the real protection against the public abuse of private rights. Madison believed the Constitution needed to be an extraordinary force in its own right in American political life.

How Madison implemented his ideas by shepherding the first 10 amendments to the Constitution—our Bill of Rights—through the first Congress and the state ratification process is a story of statecraft well executed as well as a tale of public opinion both respected and educated. Madison believed that despite the limitations of human nature and popular government, the vocal majority and public opinion were not condemned to wallow in their own prejudices and ignorance. The possibility of climbing out from under them—of a flight lofty and sublime—depends on knowing the proper facts and engaging with the “reflections suggested by them” by politicians and people alike. And it is the sustained reading of history that helps us recognize those facts and enriches our reflections on them.

Rebecca Burgess is program manager of the American Enterprise Institute Program on American Citizenship.