MB Civic

The Federalist

Review by GARY ROSEN

Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, Franklin — they’ve all had their turn on the best-seller list in recent years. And why not? Their lives are the stuff biographers dream of: world-historical ambition, military derring-do, political intrigue, private scandal, theatrical deaths. Even now, their vivid, conflicted personalities fascinate, bringing the feat of the American founding down from its Olympian heights.

Then there is James Madison. What to do with the “great little Madison,” with his books and theories, his quiet voice and imperturbable reserve, his delicate health and aversion to travel? Madison is the nerdy founder, the note-taker and committee man. Scholars may swoon for him, but his career doesn’t exactly cry out for the grand-narrative treatment. The “father of the Constitution” was, alas, a rather dull, proper Virginia squire whose ideas sparkled far more than his domestic life or public persona. His wife, Dolley, had all the star power.

In trying to bring so uncooperative a subject to life, Richard Labunski has wisely focused on the two years, from 1787 to 1789, during which Madison played a crucial role in shepherding the United States Constitution into existence. As “James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights” reminds us, what we now call the Bill of Rights was not part of the proposal that emerged from the federal convention in Philadelphia. Madison and most of the other framers thought it unnecessary to spell out the various rights — of religion, speech, assembly and so on — that the new government was obliged to respect. These protections had no place, they reasoned, in a Constitution that set firm limits on what Congress and the president could do; enumerated powers were themselves a guarantee of safety.

But many Americans were upset by the omission of a declaration of rights, and the Anti-Federalists (as opponents of the Constitution were known) eagerly exploited their concern, hoping to persuade the states to vote down the new charter. As Labunski shows, Madison gradually underwent a conversion. At Virginia’s ratifying convention, he bested the fiery Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry by declaring his own openness to later amendments. As a candidate for Congress under the new Constitution, he promised to press for the essential “guards in favor of liberty.” And once in office, he did just that, almost single-handedly persuading the House and Senate to winnow through dozens of suggested amendments.

A virtue of Labunski’s account is the generous attention he gives to Anti-Federalist luminaries like Henry, George Mason and Richard Henry Lee — figures too often overlooked in our reverential regard for the founding. For those used to thinking of the Bill of Rights as carved in stone, it is also instructive to see just how large a role accident played in its creation. The 10 amendments familiar to us started off as 17 in the House and were reduced to 12 by the Senate. The first two of these — on the size of the House and Congressional pay — didn’t pass muster in the states, and so the third recommended amendment became, as if by fate, our famous First. Still more jarring, the whole lot of them, if Madison had had his way, would have been inserted here and there throughout the Constitution, not attached at the end as a seeming monument to liberty.

Labunski’s presentation of these events is solid and well-researched — to a fault. A journalism professor at the University of Kentucky, he gives us a newsmagazine-style chronology of conventions, elections and debates, one after another. It’s dry going, especially since Madison — true to form — was so tight-lipped about his thoughts on these matters, even in private correspondence. Labunski resorts repeatedly to some version of the formulation, “Madison must have felt . . . .” Well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.

The book is part of a series on “pivotal moments in American history,” and none would deny that winning ratification of the Constitution was a big deal. But was passage of the Bill of Rights equally “pivotal”? Labunski plainly thinks so, but Madison did not. For him, amendments were largely a means to an end, a way to secure popular support for the new government, whose powers he was determined to preserve. Of Madison’s view that “parchment barriers” were unlikely to stop an oppressive government or majority, Labunski is dismissive. It is those amendments, he writes, “on which so much of our freedom depends.”

This may be true, but it is too facile a conclusion for an author who never comes to grips with Madison’s deeper reasoning on these questions, especially as set out in “The Federalist,” the classic defense of the Constitution. The details on which Labunski does dwell — county-by-county voting results, weather reports, news of Madison’s chronically unhappy bowels — only emphasize the thinness of his story line. With Madison, the real action is always in the ideas.

Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary and the author of “American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding.”