James Madison: A Biography by Ralph Louis Ketcham
Paperback, 753 pages. Published March 22nd 1990 by University of Virginia Press (first published 1970). ISBN 0813912652
Ketcham’s Madison biography provides a thorough and engaging survey of Madison’s life, the philosophical underpinnings of the U.S. Constitution, and the political maneuvering of the founders and the early republic. Although a single volume, it delves deeply into Madison’s letters and other primary documents to paint a detailed portrait of the foremost political theorist among the founders.
A child of the Virginia planter class, Madison’s early years help illuminate how a group of rural colonies on the edge of the known world produced such an extraordinary collection of political theorists and statesmen. Madison’s family had lived in Virginia for generations–long enough to leave the more settled tidewater region and move to what was then the ragged frontier at the feet of the Shenandoah mountains. Although provincial farmers, the Madisons, Jeffersons, and others devoted extensive resources to classical education for their sons, including tutors, boarding schools, and universities. The role of slavery in this equation poses a troubling question. The Virginia planters did not teach their sons Greek to make them better tobacco farmers. The Virginia aristocrats were building not only an economic system, but also a social system in which they assumed the role of lords of the manor and embodied the noblesse oblige of a Walter Scott novel. In an undeveloped wilderness with essentially unlimited free land, there was no way to create subservient captive farmers without chattel slavery. The early history of America is a never-ending tale of disaffected men pulling up stakes and fleeing farther west, abandoning debts, families, reputations, and taxes. Only chains, whips, and sheriff’s posses could sustain the feudal relationship that southern planters sought to imitate. Their obsession with classical education revealed a social need that superseded the purely economic requirements of farming and necessitated enslaved laborers to realize.
Madison’s and Jefferson’s educations, regardless of their questionable provenance, paid undeniable benefits for the future of the European colonists. Jefferson’s flamboyant personality and writing style have placed him in the brightly lit foreground of history, but Madison was far more instrumental in the formation of the republic and demonstrated a much greater grasp of the challenges of representative democracy. In the Declaration of Independence and later documents, Jefferson showed himself to be the master of the memorable and dramatic phrase, and his facility with propaganda has made him the most quotable of the founders. It is no accident that Jefferson’s words have caused consternation and dispute over the ensuing centuries as they frequently failed to represent the laws actually enacted by cooler heads. Jefferson wrote to inspire revolution and to energize what today we would call his political base. Madison drafted a constitutional scheme to build a functioning government that provided the maximum possible liberty to [white, male, propertied] individuals within the bounds of human frailty and selfishness. Madison’s grasp of the contradictions of self-rule and his vision for mitigating those contradictions remain as inspiring and extraordinary today as it was more than two centuries ago. Ketcham repeatedly details Madison’s corrections to Jefferson’s radicalism. We have received the Jefferson-Madison partnership as one of mentor and protege, but Ketcham shows us that the picture is not only incomplete, but probably downright erroneous. Madison felt no apparent restraint in contradicting and deflating his senior partner whenever Jefferson’s pronouncements on liberty strayed into the unrealistic or dangerous.
Over his career, Madison’s opponents challenged his apparent reversals, and his early partnership with Hamilton to produce The Federalist contrasted with their later political conflict presents one of the apparent mysteries of the founding. Ketcham shows in great detail how Madison’s overriding concerns led naturally to the positions he took both early and late. While Jefferson was dogmatic on the subject of individual liberty and tended to espouse absolutist positions without regards for their logical sequelae, Madison saw every political question in context. He viewed government as an instrument for balancing liberty with order and recognized, perhaps better than any other founder, that liberty could not long exist without order and limitation. At the time of the Constitutional Convention, Madison viewed a weak government, interstate rivalry, and selfish opportunism as the greatest threats to the newly established republic and the personal liberty that it promised. Once the federal government was established firmly, government overreach and centralized power replaced chaos as the greatest threat. Madison saw a need to limit the growing power of the federal government and establish precedents that would serve to contain it through the ages. His particular positions on the issues of the day reflected those concerns, and unlike his more dogmatic contemporaries, he was perfectly comfortable espousing opposing positions at different times to deal with different circumstances.
We must also remember that Madison was a practicing politician throughout most of his life, and that he could not simply ignore the requirement to win elections in order to effect his plans and policies. Having lost an early election to a neighbor with a larger electioneering budget, Madison accepted the grubby realities of partisan politics. Never as underhanded or sleazy as Jefferson in his tactics, he nevertheless served as an effective party leader in the House of Representatives with all of the attendant log-rolling, compromises, and parliamentary maneuvers. Jefferson presents a more appealing picture to the dogmatic purist who can focus on his lofty pronouncements while ignoring his Nixonian political operations and his transparent hypocrisy. Madison, more cautious, dour, and circumspect, offered fewer bon mots, more complexity, and better government. Still, even more than his political maneuvering, his glaring failure on the most pressing issue of the era leaves the hagiographic portrait with a giant stain at its center. Madison, more clearly than any other southern founder, foresaw the destructive power of slavery and the inevitability of conflict over the issue, and yet he failed not only to take effective steps toward abolition nationally, but also to make any provision for freeing his own slaves. Doing so was certainly within his capability, but not without enormous cost. The great irony is that his plantation collapsed after his death, and Dolley was left in penury despite the retention of the Madison slaves. She eventually had to sell the slaves and the plantation, and nevertheless ended her days in poverty. Had Madison freed his slaves during his lifetime, his family would have ended no worse off, and he would have set a powerful example for his fellow planters. Such speculation does not represent retrospective application of modern values to an earlier era. Madison wrote extensively about the evils of slavery, and his close confidant Edward Coles freed his own slaves and repeatedly urged Madison to do the same.
The institution of slavery combined with the cavalier myth to create one of the stranger paradoxes of early American politics, and provides a useful lens for viewing its modern descendants. Fearing for the security of their largest capital investment, southern planters developed a philosophical framework in which they–the “owners” of millions of chattel slaves–represented the defenders of individual liberties, while the merchants, bankers, and manufacturers of the north represented “aristocracy” and “monarchy.” Madison participated in the partisan warfare of the 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s that portrayed Alexander Hamilton and other early capitalists as monarchists seeking to create a hereditary nobility of the wealthy while the southern “farmers,” living on vast estates and maintaining discipline with the whip represented the common man. As racial politics heated up through the first half of the nineteenth century, later planter-class defenders explicitly articulated the logic in which the maintenance of a sub-human class of enslaved black laborers elevated all whites to a single plane, despite the vast difference in wealth and influence between the richest and the poorest. Madison himself would never have been so crude, but he must bear the weight of those who followed him and took his political system and compromises to their logical conclusions. By creating a permanent racial underclass, white planters could simultaneously claim solidarity with poor whites while demanding subservience and defense of the “peculiar institution.” Poor whites were left with the Hobson’s choice of sustaining their subservient position to wealthy planters in exchange for a permanent guarantee that they would never sink to society’s bottom rung, or throwing in their lot with millions of black slaves against those who controlled the wealth and political power. The latter course offered no guarantee of success and presented the enormous risk that poor whites would find themselves not just picking cotton in the fields alongside blacks, which many of them were doing anyway, but doing so without any sense of social superiority.
Ketcham’s biography of James Madison is a valuable guide to the intersection of political philosophy and practical politics in the early republic. Ketcham falls prey to a common pitfall in biographies of those with poorly documented childhoods–he repeatedly employs the construction, “Madison may have” or “Madison most likely” to attribute the most mundane actions to a particular person based on our general knowledge of the times. He and other biographers of our early citizens would do better to draw a general picture of the times and place their subjects in context, attributing to them only those thoughts and actions, if any, that are documented. The constant, and largely pointless, speculation about Madison’s early life quickly proves tiresome, and the reader is relieved when young Jemmy reaches an age to begin his famously voluminous correspondence.
James W. Vizzard 