March 2001
The sixteenth of March 2001 marks the sesquicentennial of the birthday of our fourth President, James Madison. Within the past month we have celebrated the births of two of our most prominent Presidents: George Washington, whose singular strength and resolve preserved the Continental Army, sine qua non; and Abraham Lincoln, whose entire presidency was dedicated to the preservation of the Union and the abolition of the entrenched slavery that threatened its continuance. Thomas Jefferson, born April 13th, is often included in the triumvirate of our greatest presidents because of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, which embodied the ideals of the new republic. These men who helped to found, to define, and to preserve the nation well deserve the honors, celebrated this month, bestowed upon them by a grateful people.
James Madison, however, to whom the Nation owes an equal measure of reverence, is rarely mentioned. He, by common consent, was the Father of the Nation's Constitution. Historian Page Smith reminds us that 'The Revolution created the possibility, not the reality of a new nation' The Federal Constitution made the reality.
Our Constitution--more than any other common bond or fortuity of circumstance in American life, be it mixed blood or natural treasure, or tradition, or genius, or glorious past--has forged the United States and preserved it thus far against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The Constitution, whether or not we perceive its presence in our daily lives, is constantly before us: guiding, cajoling, admonishing, consoling. We argue and debate incessantly over its ramifications; as our state and national legislatures conduct their business, they are ever mindful of its overarching authority. To this sacred document, we owe the very orderliness of our lives as Americans, our calm expectations for each new tomorrow, and our hopes and aspirations for ourselves and our children. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that the Constitution is synonymous with our nationhood.
Page Smith expresses his view of the importance of the Constitution in these terms: 'Two thousand years of political theorizing and practical experience crystallized in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 in the most brilliantly sustained intellectual and oratorical achievement of history.' This remarkable instrument was the product of a small collection of men converging at a moment in time to do a task they recognized even then to be unique in history. Thus we should pay particular honor to the hand that guided this convention in its labors; supplied the genius and the knowledge of political theory, tinctured with the sense of history, that laid the ground work for an enduring democracy; and introduced an idea that was novel even to the Age of Enlightenment: the concept of the separation of church from state.
In every sense, James Madison furnished the main motivating force that finally propelled the Constitution into life. He spearheaded that force with an unrelenting attack upon the religious bigotry and intolerance that had characterized and blighted centuries of European history. At age 25, he was a member of the Virginia Convention that instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, to introduce a resolution calling for independence from Great Britain. Almost concurrently, Virginia adopted a new constitution that included Madison's own words on religious freedom: 'all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion'. This gigantic step forced the disestablishment of state religion and the end of public funding for churches in Virginia and, eventually, throughout the region. Madison's landmark opinion, 'A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,' was to become the font for the First Amendment's establishment clause. Ten years later, largely through Madison's efforts, the Virginia Legislature passed Jefferson's 'Bill for Religious Freedom' while the author was serving in France as the U.S. Minister.
These two seminal treatises on church-state separation and religious freedom
were stunning in their novelty and daring in the late 18th Century. Historian
Daniel Boorstein suggests that 'religious liberty is probably the most
distinctive and certainly one of the greatest contributions of the American
experience to all human progress'.
Following the cessation of conflict with Great Britain the United States was a
loosely connected group of states that were governed by the Articles of
Confederation, whose laissez-faire attitude threatened to turn the commercial
rivalries between the states into the unfriendly competition that often exists
between foreign countries. Although Madison was no longer a member of the
Continental Congress in 1786, he drafted a resolution calling for the states to
appoint delegates to meet and consider new laws to regulate their commerce and
advance their other common interests. The meeting was set for September 1786 at
Annapolis; only five states were represented. Finding that little could be
accomplished, the representatives resolved to meet the following year in
Philadelphia, 'to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them
necessary to render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the
exigencies of the Union'.
Historian Catherine Drinker Bowen has suggested that the majority of the delegates who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had no plan to rescind the Articles of Confederation in toto and devise a completely new instrument of government. But under the persistence and guidance of James Madison and under the watchful eye of George Washington, the Convention's president, the framework of a new form of government, unlike anything that had gone before, was drafted in four months.
By all accounts Madison dominated the Convention in management, strategy, and spirit. His ideas, formulated in the Virginia Plan, provided the basis for the core of the Constitution as it was finally adopted. Versed in Locke, Montesquieu, Hobbes, Hume, Burke and the philosophers of the Enlightenment, and acutely aware of the abuses heaped on society by centuries of monarchical rule in Europe and elsewhere, Madison defined the structuring of the new government. The central theme was balance: balance was to be inherent in the distribution of power between the three principal branches of the central government and shared with the individual states. Madison's intellectual vigor contributed theory and substance to the deliberations, and his pragmatism provided room and reason for compromise in a very contentious atmosphere. His unofficial notes are the most complete record of the proceedings.
Once written, the Constitution had to be ratified by the states. The effort was protracted and grueling, and a positive final outcome was by no means foreordained. Again Madison lead the struggle for ratification. Alexander Hamilton and John Jay joined him in collaboration to apprise the nation of the meaning of the Constitution. The three published a series of essays in New York newspapers. Madison and Hamilton shouldered the major effort, writing separately and jointly. According to Professor Edward Gaylord Bourne, Hamilton assumed the task of explaining the needs of the country and Madison took the responsibility of interpreting the new Constitution. The aggregate product of these essays, known as the Federalist Papers, is widely accepted as one of the foremost defining treatises on federal democracy and its political theory.
While the original Constitution provided for the basic structure of government, it lacked provisions for the protection of individual rights of citizens. This omission impeded and even imperiled the ratification process. From France, Jefferson wrote, 'I like the organization of the government into Legislative, Judicial and Executive. I will now add what I do not like. First, the omission of a bill of rights..'
At first opposed to the idea of a bill of rights (ironically, because it might leave undefined rights at the mercy of the government), Madison was finally persuaded and became its most vigorous champion; he later authored the First Amendment. Propositions concerning amendments were solicited from the Congress in 1789; Madison assumed the leading role in the final framing of the Bill, whose surviving form and language bore his unmistakable imprimatur.
It is important to appreciate fully the significance of the First Amendment. From it we derive our freedoms of speech and assembly and our guarantees of religious liberty. Religious liberty, however, means far more than freedom to believe in a God or a multiplicity of Gods in whatever form. It also means freedom from religion, such that no man need fear government abuse, calumny, prohibitions, or punishments because he does not belong to this or that faith or any faith at all.
In the First and the Fourteenth Amendments (the latter was enacted to extend the same establishment and free exercise clauses to the individual states), government, at all levels, is prohibited from aiding any religion. Indeed, government is to have no official relationship with any religion. This does not mean that the United States is hostile to religion; it means only that the government is to be absolutely neutral with respect to religion.
The author of the First Amendment was not irreligious in any sense. Madison, Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin were deists all: they held 'to natural religion based on human reason rather than revelation, emphasizing morality and denying interference of the Creator with the laws of the Universe' (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). Their individual writings will attest that each of these men believed in a Supreme Being.
We can be most thankful that our nation was formed at a time when the Age of Enlightenment illuminated certain parts of Europe and North America, and a certain collection of men of extraordinary wisdom and purpose gathered together to seek and win independence and to write our Constitution.
Howard Garcia