Welcome to Our American Stories, where we explore the remarkable lives that shaped our nation. Today, we dive into the life of James Madison, a true architect of American liberty and our fourth President. Born in Port Conway, Virginia, in 1751, Madison wasn’t just a leader; he was a profound thinker who helped author the essential Federalist Papers and tirelessly advocated for our Constitutional Convention. His work laid the bedrock for the United States Constitution itself, a story we’re honored to share with insights from our partners at Hillsdale College, dedicated to bringing American history to life.
This humble Virginian, often described as a short man compared to his peers, harbored an immense intellect and a profound understanding of human nature. He famously observed, “If men were angels, no government would be needed,” a simple truth that justified the very need for our balanced Constitution. From his close bond with Thomas Jefferson to his crucial role in shaping America’s political landscape, Madison’s quiet persistence helped define our nation. Tune in as we learn from Hillsdale College President Dr. Larry Arnn about this essential Founding Father, a brilliant lawgiver whose vision still guides Our American Stories today.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
A 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 Knecht, of the signing of the Constitution.
It’s six feet tall and eight feet wide.
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 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 in…
a member of the Continental Congress.
And the point about him was he’s so… I happened to have a big 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, neither internal nor external controls on the government would be necessary.” 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… 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.
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 Convention is meeting, Jefferson writes a long letter, of many long letter, to Madison. The main thing he did for Madison that time was Madison said, “Send me books about constitutions,” and he sent him 200. Madison already read most of them, but he read them all. He’s a very determined individual. So, Jefferson writes Madison a long letter, 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—deeds and everything—they should sunset every 33 years, and we should 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 it back, and he says, “Yes, yes, those are brilliant points.”
Take them very seriously.
It is the fact that the 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.”
You know, he was like that.
And then with Jefferson, he created a political party that was good for our country for a long time and replaced the Federalist Party while serving its same aims. And that’s the kind of decent 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 1812, and that was, you know, a little embarrassing. And he did send a force up to Canada with the word, you know, “to take Canada.” We’re gonna, we’re gonna go take Canada from the bridge. We won’t 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 floundered around. Right.
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. And he and Hamilton, by the way, would be party opponents after 1796, 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 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 the Constitution, and its 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.
They got 60 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.
You got bigger, right? And it’s a…
different model, because the Northwest Ordinance provides that when you get a certain population, 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 Congress in 1787, the same year as the Constitution. But it also contains a provision that in this Northwest Territory there can…
never be slavery.
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 will 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 1836, if I remember right. But, you know, in 1832, with the Missouri Compromise in 1820, 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. That claim amounts to a complete departure from the dictators 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 human societies evolve, was taken by Calhoun to justify slavery.
And so…
They get in, when Andy Jackson was President in 1832, they get into a fight about the Tariff of 1832. And the tariff was outrageous, and the reason it was outrageous was the Southern delegates who didn’t want the tariff—sye, because that’s a attax 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 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 with the idea from South Carolina that a state by itself can nullify a law. Qualification Crisis. In other words, we just vote that law is no good here. Now, you know, you can read the Constitution, all 4,500 words of it.
You can read it in 30 minutes. You can read it over and over. You not to find that power in there. And darn…
if it wasn’t James Madison, still alive, who raised the main contest against those points, and he explained 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. And a special thanks to Doctor Larry Arnn. James Madison’s story: the lawgiver, the main driver behind our Constitution. Here on Our American Stories.
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