James Madison: Founding Father and Lawgiver

On this episode of Our American Stories, President of Hillsdale College, Dr. Larry Arnn, tells the story of our fourth president, James Madison.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we return to all American stories. And one of
our favorite things to tell stories about is American history,
as always brought to us by the great folks at
Hillsdale College, where you can go to learn all the
things that are beautiful in life and all the things
that matter in life. And if you can't get to Hillsdale,
Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific
online courses. Go to Hillsdale dot edu. That's Hillsdale dot edu.

(00:34):
In seventeen fifty one, our fourth President of the United States,
James Madison, was born in Port Conway, Virginia. Besides being President,
Madison was one of the three writers of the Federalist
Papers and a strong supporter of the Constitutional Convention. Here
to tell the story is Hillsdale College's president, doctor Larryon.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
Thing to know about James Madison is he was a
little short guy. You know, he's probably five foot four.
You know, Washington was a foot taller than he was.
We have a great painting done by the longtime chairman
of our art department, Sam Connect of the signing of
the Constitution. It's six feet tall and eight feet wide.

(01:22):
It's very beautiful and it's got Madison in Washington standing
side by side, and Sam is very artful, so he
doesn't make it look ridiculous. But Madison is much shorter.
Madison is you know, he's a Virginia legislator. He becomes

(01:43):
close to Thomas Jefferson. Doing that, he gets his mind
around revolution pretty early. He didn't do much war service
in the Colonial Army for Virginia. He was a state
legislator through most of the war, and then he was
a member of the Continental Congress. And the point about
him was he's so I happened to have a big

(02:06):
soft spot for him because I just you know, he
wrote this passage what is government but the profoundest of
all commentaries on human nature? If men were angels, no
government would be needed. If angels were to govern men,
either internal or external controls on the government would be necessary.

(02:27):
Now that's a piece of beautiful logic that is, by
the way, undeniable, and it justifies the Constitution of the
United States in two sentences. It's more than one could
say to say that he was more important than Alexander Hamilton.

(02:48):
It's hard to think anybody was, but he probably was
because he and Jefferson invented the party that you know,
ruled the country, you know, until Lincoln. Pretty much the
Whigs opposed them, but they were really like them for
the most part. And you know, here's the service he performed.

(03:08):
He was Thomas Jefferson's best friend in every sense of
that word. He was very good for Thomas Jefferson. Thomas
Jefferson was a theoretic politician a little bit. You know,
he's principles. You know, he was big on principles, and
he could state them flowingly. And so when the Constitutional

(03:29):
Convention is meeting, Jefferson writes a long letter, of many
long letter to Madison. The main thing he did for
Madison at that time was Madison said, send me books
about constitutions, and he sent him two hundred. Madison had
already read most of them, but he read them all.
He's very determined individual. So Jefferson writes Madison a long letter,

(03:50):
and the letter is the famous the earth belongs to
the living letter. And what he says is that every law,
including a constitution, and every private contract needs and everything,
they should sunset every thirty three years and we should

(04:11):
start over. This is his advice about how to write
the Constitution of the United states to James Madison, and
it's a perfect microcosm of their relationship because once in
a while Jefferson would be a little wild and Madison
writes them back, and he says, yes, those are brilliant points.
Take them very seriously. It is the fact that the

(04:32):
particular purpose of a constitution is to prejudice the next
generation so they don't have to start up. And Jefferson
writes back, yeah, yeah, I get it. He was like that.
And then with Jefferson, he created a political party that
was good for our country for a long time and

(04:53):
replaced the Federalist Party while serving its same aims. And
that's the kind of decent and see in moderation. And
you know, first of all, he wasn't a wildly successful president.
They burned the White House while he was its occupant.
The British did in the War of eighteen twelve, and
that was, you know, a little embarrassing. And he did

(05:15):
send a force up to Canada with the word, you know,
to take Canada. We're gonna we're going to go take
Canada from the bridge. We want to do it for
a long time. And he said it's only a matter
of marching up there so it's you know, well it
may have been, but it was proved that they couldn't
get there. They never found their way there. They just

(05:36):
floundered around.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
Right.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
So he wasn't the greatest president. That would probably be
Lincoln and Washington. But he was a lawgiver, that's what
he was. He was like the great classical lawgiver. He
and you know, he wasn't alone in doing this, by
the way. He and Hamilton had a whole scheme, you know.

(06:01):
And he and Hamilton, by the way, would be party
opponents after seventeen ninety six when Washington retired, and they
were already picking each other a lot. When he was
Secretary of State under Washington, Thomas Jefferson paid a scurless
man named James Callender, who was a journalist, to write

(06:23):
dirty articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Alexander Hamilton, and
he used public money to do it. You know, America
has its partisan episodes like today, but you have to
think of Madison as possessed of the deepest understanding that
I know of the reasons for and the workings of

(06:45):
the Constitution, and it's most intelligent preserver through his careers.
Oh one more thing, Madison, like the rest of the Founders,
feared the institution of slavery and thought that a way
had to be found to get rid of it. And
that's just almost all of them thought that right, and
they did get rid of it very far, and they

(07:07):
got sixty percent of the Union. And the most dramatic
example is that the Northwest Territory, where I live, five
states of the Upper Midwest. That's our first expansion, and
it's actually the first time a free government ever grew.
Who got bigger, right, And it's a different model because
the Northwest Ordinance provides that when you get a certain population,

(07:31):
you can elect the state government. When you get a
certain larger population, you can petition the Congress to be
an equal state with the rest. That law was passed
by the Confederation of Congress in seventeen eighty seven, the
same year as the Constitution. But it also contains a
provision that in this Northwest Territory there can never be slavery.

(07:53):
And that land came to the Union as a gift
from the state of Virginia. And it was Thomas Jefferson,
more than anybody else who organized that gift and organized
that stipulation that to never be any slavery there. So Madison,
it turns out, lives a long time. He lives till
eighteen thirty six, if I remember right. But you know

(08:13):
in eighteen thirty two, with the Missouri Compromise in eighteen twenty,
that's a sign that slavery is becoming a serious issue.
And what made it a serious issue is the opinion
led by John C. Calhoun that slavery was a positive good.

(08:34):
That claim amounts to a complete departure from the dictates
of the Decoraries of Independence. And that's deliberate because Calhoun
at Yale was connected to students of a man named
Francis Lieber, who was a Hegelian and known to hegel
And this new doctrine of history that human beings and

(08:55):
human societies evolve was taken by Calhoun to justify slavery.
And so they get in when Andy Jackson was president
in eighteen thirty two, they get into a fight about
the tariff of eighteen thirty two, and the tariff was outrageous,
and the reason it was outrageous was the Southern delegates

(09:16):
who didn't want the tariff sy because that's an attacks
on imports of manufactured goods to support American industry. But
that would but you know, that's what they were importing.
They were selling their raw materials, their conton and stuff abroad.
So they didn't want it. And so what they did
was they conspired in the Congress to inflate the tariff

(09:40):
to a huge rate, and they thought that would be
sufficient to defeat it. But darn if it didn't pass.
And so now Calhoun comes up to the idea from
South Carolina that a state by itself can nullify a
law qualification crisis. In other words, we just vote that

(10:00):
law is no good here. Now, you know, you can
read the Constitution, all forty five hundred words of it.
You can read it in thirty minutes. You can read
it over and over. You not find that power in there.
And darned if it wasn't James Madison, still alive, who
raised the main contest against those points, and he explained

(10:21):
the nature the federal nature of the Union in the
most elaborate terms in his life when he was a
very old man, during and immediately after the nullification crisis.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Any special thanks to doctor Larry Arne. James Madison's story
the lawgiver, the main driver behind our constitution. Here on
our American stories.