Alan Pell Crawford Book Review: ‘James Madison: A Life Reconsidered’ by Lynne Cheney
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Cheney calls Madison and Jefferson ‘the two greatest minds’ of the 18th century—one that also produced Hume, Kant and Burke.
In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was debating the powers of the respective branches of government, the slight and scholarly delegate from Orange County, Va., achieved a success “that would have profound consequences down the years,” Lynne Cheney writes in ” James Madison : A Life Reconsidered.” In the Constitution’s passage on congressional war powers, Madison moved to substitute “declare” war for “make” it, thereby reserving the day-to-day decisions about the use of the military to the executive branch.
The substitution soon enough had profound consequences for Madison himself. During the War of 1812, he had to act as the commander in chief, and the demands of the job did not bring out his finest qualities. Diffident, bookish and afflicted with an ailment that Ms. Cheney concludes was a form of epilepsy, Madison was a theoretician and legislator par excellence; he was considerably less effective as the ex officio head of an army.
Against weighty opposition, Madison appointed John Armstrong as his secretary of war, a shifty character with a reputation, as Henry Adams later wrote, for “indolence and intrigue.” Certain that the British were heading for Annapolis, Md., rather than Washington, Armstrong left the capital defenseless, and Madison, looking “shattered and woe-begone,” turned to a fellow Virginian, James Monroe, for help. Monroe promptly restored order to the smoldering capital, throwing up defenses against further attacks and redeploying 7,000 militiamen around the town.
The debacle of 1812 could have been an unfortunate stain on a distinguished career of public service. It was Madison’s good fortune to come out of the war with his reputation not just intact but strengthened, and there may be some justice in that, since his career was otherwise exemplary.
“No man weighs more maturely than Mr. Madison before he takes a side on any question,” Thomas Jefferson said. The public recognized Madison’s conscientiousness and respected him for it. In Ms. Cheney he has a suitably conscientious biographer whose effort to take the full measure of the man is commendable. Hers is an ambitious undertaking, and her enthusiasm for her subject is everywhere apparent, though at times it leads her to move from topic to topic at the expense of steady thematic development. She goes so far as to call Madison and Jefferson “the two greatest minds” of the 18th century, though the century also produced Hume, Kant and Burke, and, in this country alone, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. Given Madison’s accomplishments, such exaggeration isn’t necessary.
A scion of the Old Dominion’s Piedmont gentry, Madison spent almost his entire adult life in public office, first as a member of the Virginia legislature, where he introduced Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom, and then as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was an early advocate of scrapping the Articles of Confederation and is still regarded as the father of the Constitution that replaced them. It was Madison who proposed a bicameral Congress, an independent executive and an independent judiciary—and then argued eloquently for the new Constitution in some 30 essays of “The Federalist Papers.” While supporting a stronger central government, Madison also pushed for the Bill of Rights, ensuring the new Constitution’s ratification.
As a practical politician, Madison, even more than Jefferson, established the Democratic-Republican Party. This feat was more difficult than it might seem, since statesmen at that time considered themselves nonpartisan and viewed “self-created societies,” as George Washington once called political pressure groups, as at best unnecessary and at worst subversive. Methodical reasoning, not oratorical flourish, accounted for Madison’s effectiveness.
Given the ambiguous outcome of the War of 1812—the fighting ended in a kind of stalemate—it is remarkable that Madison’s popularity soared at its conclusion. But the American public loved the war, and Madison benefited from an economic expansion during the last years of his two-term presidency (1809-17). The war was necessary, in John Adams’s words, to remind England and France “and above all to convince ourselves that we are not nothing.” After the victory at New Orleans in January 1815, Ms. Cheney writes, “Americans knew they were something.” Madison did not express himself in such grandiose generalities, of course, nor was the Sage of Montpelier cavalier about the high price paid in lives and treasure for national self-knowledge.
Every generation should “brush off the cobwebs that have accumulated around [Madison’s] achievements,” as Ms. Cheney writes, “and seek a deeper understanding of the man who did more than any other to conceive and establish the nation we know.” She fears that Madison today is “popularly regarded—when remembered at all—less as a bold thinker and superb politician than as a shy and sickly scholar, someone hardly suited for the demands of daily life, much less the rough-and-tumble world of politicking.” Such a judgment says less about Madison, she notes, than about our “inability to conceive of modesty and reserve as having any compatibility with politics.” It is to Ms. Cheney’s credit that this is her only reference to current sensibilities in a book blessedly free of presentism.
But are Madison’s contributions really in danger of being forgotten? It would be a shame if so, but Lance Banning, Ralph Ketchum and Garry Wills, among others, have made significant contributions in recent years to keeping Madison before the public. Future biographers may fill in gaps where Ms. Cheney speculates. Her frequent use of “likely,” “possibly,” “might have,” “no doubt” and their variations inevitably takes a toll on the reader. Yet any time in Madison’s company is time well spent, and the facts of his extraordinary life, in the hands of as fair-minded as biographer as Ms. Cheney, speak for themselves.
Mr. Crawford is the author of “Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.”
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