Category: James Madison

James Madison Jr. (March 16 [O.S. March 5], 1751 – June 28, 1836) was an American statesman and Founding Father who served as the fourth President of the United States from 1809 to 1817. He is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for his pivotal role in drafting and promoting the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Born into a prominent Virginia planting family, Madison served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates and the Continental Congress during and after the American Revolutionary War. In the late 1780s, he helped organize the Constitutional Convention, which produced a new constitution to supplant the ineffective Articles of Confederation.

After the Convention, Madison became one of the leaders in the movement to ratify the Constitution, and his collaboration with Alexander Hamilton produced The Federalist Papers, among the most important treatises in support of the Constitution. After the ratification of the Constitution in 1788, Madison won election to the United States House of Representatives. While simultaneously serving as a close adviser to President George Washington, Madison emerged as one of the most prominent members of the 1st Congress, helping to pass several bills establishing the new government. For his role in drafting the first ten amendments to the Constitution during the 1st Congress, Madison is known as the “Father of the Bill of Rights.” Though he had played a major role in the enactment of a new constitution that created a stronger federal government, Madison opposed the centralization of power sought by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during Washington’s presidency. To oppose Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Madison organized the DemocraticRepublican Party, which became one of the nation’s two first major political parties alongside Hamilton’s Federalist Party. After Jefferson won the 1800 presidential election, Madison served as Jefferson’s Secretary of State from 1801 to 1809. In this role, Madison supervised the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the nation’s size.

Madison succeeded Jefferson with a victory in the 1808 presidential election, and he won re-election in 1812. After the failure of diplomatic protests and a trade embargo against the United Kingdom, he led the U.S. into the War of 1812. The war was an administrative morass, as the United States had neither a strong army nor financial system. As a result, Madison came to support a stronger national government and military, as well as the national bank, which he had long opposed. Historians have generally ranked Madison as an above-average president.

In his book, Inventing the People, Edmund Morgan answers a question posed by philosopher David Hume, who noted “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.” Morgan agreed with Hume that governments operate under tacit consent, and adds that the consent implies acceptance of fictions meticulously cultivated by those who govern. One of those fictions is a central tenet of democracies all over the world: “the people” and their sovereignty. Today, the more direct implementations of democratic principles may come across as an actualization of those fabrications, but their fictitiousness still holds — the idea of “the people” lacks an explicit description and the concept of popular sovereignty cannot be practiced in legitimate accordance to its definition.

By the end of the Glorious Revolution in England, governmental powers had been passed on from the king to the Parliament, as it invented the idea of “the people”. The narrative repeated itself across the pond, as the founding fathers gathered in 1787 with an objective to strengthen congress. As the meeting unexpectedly became a constitutional convention, James Madison recognized that if “the people of the United States as a whole…could be thought to stand superior to the people of any single state,” the disease of factionalism could be rid of. As Parliamentarians had trumped divine right with popular sovereignty, Federalists had trumped state sovereignty with popular sovereignty.

As a result of the new constitution, federalists were pleased that a small number of the “natural aristocracy” would be elected as representatives. Similar to the federalists, Socrates had been a huge pessimist about democracy by birthright and favored an intellectual democracy instead. This was because, on a journey to sea, deciding who would be in charge of the vessel would best be conducted by people knowledgeable about the rules and demands of seafaring, not just anyone. On the same vein, Voting in an election and deciding the future of a country are skills, not a random intuition, and thus needs to be taught systematically. Since the American independence, the quality of “the mere people” has changed. Nowadays, a lot of the common people are arguably as well educated as the natural aristocrats. It is commonly known that before a citizen’s political decision-making, they should be well informed on details and be sufficiently exposed to the various arguments. Learning what’s best for the country is not so much harder than turning on the radio, 9 o’clock news, or the cell phone. Also, everyone has the opportunity to voice their opinion, with methods ranging from wearing a pin to disobeying the law as a demonstration, voting, signing petitions, campaigning, participating in protests, and many more.

Therefore, arguably, the issues that federalists aired in allowing an ignorant population decide its future have been solved. People consider issues rationally and deeply before deciding on a stance, and thus have become credible, noteworthy sources through which representatives can base their decisions. Consequently, it could easily be mistaken that the fictional idea of “the people” has become an actuality. Nevertheless, a perceptive examination reveals that the concept of “the people” still remains, and may forever remain, a fictional concept that we choose to believe in to legitimize democratic governance. First of all, it is an abstract idea whose definition isn’t even agreed upon. An entity that has multiple understandings and constantly shifting identity can’t possibly exist in a single, concrete form. Moreover, as long as the mass can’t govern the mass, it can’t be factually that “the people” are sovereign; rather, a subgroup of “the people” is.

To start off, there is no real definition of who “the people” even are. For Edmund Burke, “the people” are a historical, continuous entity that encompasses all past and future generations. For federalists like James Madison, “the people” are an invented entity that, whether intentional or accidental, ended up serving manipulative, elitist purposes. Ordinary men thought they were voting representatives of themselves, but because of the bicameral structure of the legislature, only the higher society would probably ever win elections. For anti-federalists like Thomas Paine, “the people” would be persons living in a state at the particular point in time. Hence there is no unified understanding of “the people” — it is a most nebulous concept, vague enough to not append particular rights and responsibilities. But then to ascribe a will to a body so amorphous, as if it were a single entity with a single outlook and a single interest, and to try to capture such nonexistent will would be to uphold a fiction.

Secondly, the idea that “the people” are sovereign in democracies would only be true in a literal sense if there were no representatives at all and “the giddy multitude” really did rule themselves in whatever form. This, for practical reasons, obviously cannot be materialized in actuality, and thus the universally believed version of popular sovereignty must be a fiction. Even though, in theory, people maintain their superiority over the government, once power is infused in the few representatives, presidents, and judges, they lose the upper hand. Still, because people are involved in their governments, popular sovereignty is a fiction closer to fact. Furthermore, “if subjects and rulers were the same, if government was by the people,” there would be no need for a constitution in the first place. Morgan quotes a Federalist’s question regarding the constitution: “‘Why then should the people…convey or grant to themselves what was their own inherent and natural right?’” The answer would be that they shouldn’t have to; a disguised purpose of the constitution had been to introduce and start planting the idea of a sovereign people.

All things considered, however, fictions are convenient and necessary. The very basis of political systems is composed of fictions that cannot be true. Citizens must still have faith in them because they stand for something greater than words can describe. They must be honored to legitimate democracies, to quell dissent, to nurture deference, but most importantly to preserve the passion for collective strength.

In the federalist papers, the main thesis that guides Madison’s argument is “How shall the separation of power be maintained in practice.” In the federalist paper numbers 47 and 51, Madison discussed the institutional makeup that was included in the draft constitution that had been proposed then. In the federalist paper number 47, Madison discusses the constitution of government and show that power should be distributed among the three branches of government that include the judiciary, executive and legislative branches (Straw 325-326). The main reason was to deal with the criticism that the power of the three factions of government were conflicting, and the branches were not entirely independent. The main argument Madison made was that no colonies at the time or the government of England had a political system with a strict separation of power in the three arms of government (Straw 325-326).

In federalist paper number 51, Madison argues that the constitutors of government must come up with proper system of check of balances that will ensure that there are checks and balances in different department of government, and he argues that it is the key to understanding the American democracy (Straw 325-326). Madison’s argument is based on the premise that each government department should have the freedom to come up with a will of its own (Straw 325-326).

Concerning factions, Madison held the belief that factions that seek to fulfill personal agenda are the main challenge democratic governments are facing. Madison’s understanding of the representative government emanated from experimenting with the concept of self-rule before and after the American Revolution. Before the revolution, there were complaints that the parliament dominated the political scene and the people in the colonies were not represented in the system (Straw 325-326). After the war ended, most colonies were cautious and they did not want to live under another monarch. The factions in the colonies engaged in abuse of powers with the majority undermining the freedoms and rights of the minority, and hence, they substituted the “tyranny of the executive” with the “the tyranny of the legislature (Straw 325-326).

Madison was aware of the fact that factions cannot be eliminated, and his solution was to prevent one faction from growing to become the majority. The aim of Madison was not to prevent the formation of political parties, but ensure that any act passed by the Congress reflects the views of the different factions in society (Straw 325-326). Madison supported the views of Hamilton when he stated that political theorist like Montesquieu were wrong when they stated that democracy could only succeed in tiny geographic area (Straw 325-326).

Most scholars agree that the ruling in the Brown v. Board Education of Topeka case in 1954 was one of the most important political events in the history of the civil rights movement that progressed in the 1960s. In 1995, civil rights activists in Montgomery, Alabama started a movement that sought to boycott businesses and buses owned by white people (Patterson 10-13). The boycott was led by Rosa Park and Nixon E.D, and it started after a bus driver call the cops because Rosa Parks had refused to adhere to the rule that required black people to seat at the back of the bus, whenever white people had no places to seat. This event also made Martin Luther King Jr. to assume the leadership of the civil rights movements. Moreover, King established the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) to assist in the struggle (Patterson 10-13).

Two other significant developments that took place in 1957 also motivated the advocates of the civil rights movements. One of these major events was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, and it was the first Congress had ever passed from the time of reconstruction (Patterson 10-13). The Civil Rights Act enabled the establishment of the Civil Rights Commission at the federal level, and it was given the mandate of researching racial problems and coming up with appropriate solutions. A third significant event in the civil rights movement is was the decision of President Eisenhower to translocate federal troops to Little Rock town in Arkansas to enable the implementation of a partial segregation plan that saw nine Black student being admitted in the Central High School that a had a white majority (Patterson 10-13).

Nevertheless, the above move did not end social segregation. By 1964, black children only constituted one percent of all students in the Southern public schools. The white violence that had been increasing in the south discouraged the proponents of the civil rights movement in the 1950s (Patterson 10-13). In addition, most black people especially the younger ones were impatient because the movement was progressing rather slowly due to several legal hurdles. Based on the Madison’s conceptualization of democracy, it can be said that different factions with different interests characterized the civil rights movement. The factions included blacks fighting for their civil rights, the judiciary, the legislature and the Congress (Patterson 10-13).

The change in the tactics used by civil rights activists such as the CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) led to the revival of old civil rights movement groups and the establishment of new ones, for example, SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating). In May 1961, the pioneering bus carrying mixed-raced passengers was dispatched, and the aim of the trip was to make authority in the South to adhere to the decision that demanded the ending of racial segregation in the bus terminal (Patterson 10-13).

Based on the analysis of the civil rights movement, it can be said that the quality of the American Democracy is the best in the world because it considers the interest of the minorities and all other conflicting factions in society. For instance, there was disagreement between the Congress and the courts on civil rights issues. The Congress wanted a speedy resolution of the matter, while the courts preferred a slow approach based on the argument that many legal issues existed. Young black people wanted a speedy resolution of the matter just like the Congress. However, the leaders of the civil rights movement decided to move with the progress of the courts. In the end, all the parties agreed and a reached a decision that was acceptable to all the parties involved.