Here we are in Philadelphia,
in the summer of 1787.
The states are disunited.
The economy is in depression.
And other nations
walk all over us.
And no one has a solution.
Except this man.
Five-foot four, 36, and
hyper prepared: James Madison.
He’d already helped write the
constitution of Virginia when he
was all of twenty-five.
He had spent his life in
training for this, whether he
knew it or not.
He was small in stature and
lawyerly, legalistic,
not very quotable.
People tended to kind of zone
out when he started to speak.
He preferred to work in the
background, quietly, he didn’t
mind if others took
credit for what he did.
He knew government.
And he knew government probably
better than any Framer and maybe
anyone alive in his generation.
Better even than the lifelong
friend who Madison met in the
Virginia legislature in 1776.
Thomas Jefferson was the
principal draftsman of the
Declaration of Independence:
that stirring call to arms that
started a revolution.
While James Madison was the
principal architect of the
Constitution: a carefully
balanced document that would
create a lasting government.
This contrast between the two
reflects the ways in which they
perfectly complemented
each other.
They brought out the
best in each other.
Jefferson was inspirational
and very impractical.
Madison was kind of
plodding but extremely
practical and very political.
When the British burned
Washington in the War of 1812,
the Library of Congress
lost all its 3,000 volumes.
Jefferson offered his own
library to replace them.
He had more than 6,000 volumes.
The Framers read everything
they could get their hands on.
Montesquieu and Rousseau,
Hume and Locke,
all the great political thinkers.
And the histories of ancient
Rome, of ancient Greece, and
their experience with
monarchy, with republics,
and with democracies.
Long before the Convention,
Madison squirrels
himself away to read.
Jefferson was off in Paris,
representing the United States.
But he and Madison kept up
a frequent correspondence.
Paris was the book
capital of the world.
Madison used to write to
Jefferson, really begging him to
send more books on government.
Bookshops were rare in colonial
America, and books on government
even more rare.
And Jefferson
would ship them back.
Now imagine shipping books
from Paris to the United States.
Thomas Jefferson sent him an
entire chest full of books.
And so, he went up to his
second-floor study and read all
these books and tried to
figure out the causes
of republics failing.
And that learning is what’s
embodied in our Constitution.
What he was doing was creating a
nuanced and really quite novel
mix, something that could
guarantee the fairness of a
democracy while trying
to achieve part of the
stability of a monarchy.
That’s what was unique
about James Madison.
