Forgotten Founder

George Washington, our first president, is probably our greatest and most decent statesman. We celebrate Washington’s Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison.

Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison’s enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. There were 55 delegates to the convention. Like Madison, some had a formal college education, while others did not. From Madison’s notes about the quality of the debates and discourse, one could not tell who was college-educated and who was not. Their ages ranged from 26 (Jonathan Dayton) to 81 (Benjamin Franklin), with the average age being 42.under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression.” Rhode Island’s and New York’s ratification documents made similar statements. By the way, Rhode Island anti-federalist resistance against the Constitution was so strong that civil war almost broke out July 4, 1788.

Madison’s political genius is mostly seen in his contribution to The Federalist Papers, which were co-authored with Hamilton and John Jay. The papers were written to persuade the citizens of New York — and secondarily other states — to ratify the Constitution. Ratification was no easy task. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended our war with Great Britain, held that each state was a sovereign nation. As such, each feared giving up its rights to a powerful central government. Anti-federalists wanted some sort of guarantee that states would remain sovereign and that the power of the federal government would be limited and it would be recognized as a creation of, an agent of and a servant of the states. They said their votes to ratify could only be obtained if the Constitution contained a bill of rights guaranteeing the rights of the people and their states. The most notable and influential anti-federalists were Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, George Mason and Richard Henry Lee.

These few words here do little justice to James Madison’s greatness as one of our Founding Fathers, but a day honoring his birth would help us learn more about his contribution and, as well, learn how much we have betrayed his vision of what constitutes a free people.

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