Jeff Broadwater, a Barton college history professor and the author of one of the three biographies reviewed in this essay, recently began a public lecture on James Madison's presidency with the following story. A decade ago, Garry Wills, Broadwater notes, wrote the biography of Madison for an American presidency series, edited by the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and published by Times Books.Footnote ¹ The Madison volume in this series contains only two illustrations: a portrait of Madison on the dust jacket and another adjacent to the title page. The portrait pictured next to the title page in the initial run of this book is of, well, James Monroe.

Broadwater tells this story to justify his own sojourn into Madison in face of the avalanche of scholarship already dedicated to every president. “But it occurred to me when I saw that picture,” he quips, “that if a major publisher is publishing a book about James Madison and they are not quite sure what Madison looks like, well then Madison is not as well known as he ought to be and I should go ahead and write my book about James Madison and try to get the Madison story out.”Footnote ² We cannot imagine, Broadwater plausibly implies, that such a mistake and slight could have happened in a biography of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington whose face, character, and contributions to the American Founding are ubiquitous and distinctive.

While Broadwater's use of such a shrewd anecdote to begin a public lecture is understandable, the points that he means to convey now contain only a tincture of truth. Indeed, as the publication of three new Madison biographies in two years indicates, we are now in the midst of an ongoing renaissance in Madisonian scholarship.Footnote ³ Madison may once have been eclipsed by the long shadow cast by his flashier friend and lifelong political partner Thomas Jefferson, but the most recent study of the “great collaboration” between the two Virginians is purposefully entitled Madison and Jefferson, not Jefferson and Madison, to insist upon their “distinct individual contributions.”Footnote ⁴ More broadly, numerous monographs and essays have now been devoted to virtually every aspect of Madison's political thought and career. Because of their historical and contemporary significance and Madison's enduring reputation as chief constitutionalist, Madison's writings and activities in the years surrounding the Philadelphia Convention and the passage of the Bill of Rights have been the most thoroughly combed and contested.Footnote ⁵ During the last decade, however, scholars have also examined, among other topics, Madison's conduct as a slaveholder and his positions on slavery,Footnote ⁶ his contributions to the establishment of religious liberty in America,Footnote ⁷ his understanding of public opinion and his role as an intellectual midwife of that then fledgling political concept,Footnote ⁸ his presidency and conduct during the War of 1812,Footnote ⁹ and Montpelier and the Madisons' life there.Footnote ¹⁰

Kevin Gutzman, Richard Brookhiser, and Jeff Broadwater enter this latest wave of Madisonian scholarship with lively biographies. Each author necessarily tells the same story, even invoking many of the same quotes. Each analyzes Madison's efforts to secure religious liberty in Virginia, his role as constitutional reformer and champion of the Bill of Rights, his writings and conduct as opposition leader and founder of the Jeffersonian party, his leadership as secretary of state and then president, his views on slavery, and his retirement years (xv). Although it is perhaps unfair to judge biographies against the standards of more specialized studies, none of these works provides a markedly original interpretation of any of the major themes in Madison's political thought or a novel account of his life and political career. Madison specialists and political theorists will be particularly frustrated with the lack of close textual analysis and analytical depth in each.

Each study is nevertheless valuable, even to Madison specialists. The hermeneutic horizon in which Founding scholarship is conducted—particularly on the issue of slavery—has shifted dramatically since Ralph Ketcham's still definitive biography was first published in 1971. These shifts have created the need and opportunity for the new emphases, fresh insights, and different judgments provided in these studies. Moreover, each of these scholars has, in good Madisonian fashion, done his homework. Each has immersed himself in Madison's writings and read a great deal of the sprawling scholarly literature on Madison's political thought and career. The result is three substantive and entertaining biographies that, if they do not present a novel reading, are nevertheless sprinkled with provocations. Together, they indicate how scholarship by Madison specialists is being processed and (even more importantly) allow us to take the measure of the man by viewing his political career and political thought as a whole.

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Kevin Gutzman is a history professor at Western Connecticut State University. He has written several historical works on the American Founding as well as a popular jeremiad about usurpations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court.Footnote ¹¹ His is the longest of these Madison biographies and the most provocative for political theorists. Whereas Brookhiser and Broadwater provide roughly equal treatment of each distinct phase in Madison's public life, Gutzman devotes over half of his book to the three-year period from 1786 to 1789 in which Madison championed constitutional reform. Gutzman is hardly to be blamed for this emphasis. These are, after all, the most studied and storied years of Madison's life. Unfortunately, however, these chapters bog down as Gutzman provides a monotonous play-by-play of the speeches at Philadelphia and the Virginia ratifying convention in Richmond and Madison's arguments as Publius with only occasional abrupt interpretive interventions.

If these chapters summarize more than they analyze, they nevertheless set the foundation for Gutzman's contentious account of the arc of Madison's political career and his charge that Madison reversed course several times. Madison, according to Gutzman, made his “greatest accomplishment” early in his career with the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty in 1786 (48). During this same period, he was driven to become a “nationalist” by the vices and failures of the Confederation government (especially its inability to finance or conduct the war), by the threat of disunion and even civil war among the states, and by the fluctuating and unjust laws passed by factious majorities in the state legislatures. At the apex of this nationalistic phase, which overlapped precisely with Madison's efforts to spark, shape, and defend constitutional reform, Madison favored arming the national government with a universal veto of all state laws and, according to Gutzman, hoped to reduce the states to subordinate administrative units (67). He also favored a capacious reading of the implied powers granted to the national government, including the creation of a national bank.

Shortly after the new government was instituted, however, Madison was driven into opposition by Hamilton's economic program. As Hamilton proposed a national bank, assumption of state debts, and the encouragement of public manufacturers, Antifederalist warnings that the national government would exceed its explicit powers, Gutzman speculates, must have flooded into Madison's mind and caused him to second-guess his own assurances against these threats. By 1798, in Gutzman's account, Madison had become the coarchitect with Jefferson of the doctrine of nullification.

As if he had not reversed his course enough already, however, Madison then flip-flopped again, according to Gutzman, during his presidential and retirement years. As president, he signed into law the bill creating a second national bank and reverted to a nationalistic agenda. The notable exception to this nationalistic course was his famous veto of the “Bonus Bill” that authorized the use of one and a half million dollars in “bonus” funds generated by the national bank to pay for extensive internal improvements. In his retirement years, Madison then vehemently opposed John C. Calhoun's efforts to use the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to justify nullification of the national tariff acts of 1828 and 1832 (the former excoriated by Southerners as “the tariff of abominations”) that President Andrew Jackson signed into law.

Aspects of this familiar account are illuminating, others misguided. Gutzman may well be right that, in the long view, Madison's lifelong role as a champion of a secular state that avoided promoting, impeding, or even shaping religious belief may end up being recognized as his most important contribution. Certainly as sectarian violence continues unabated across the world, the neutral state that Madison called for looks more and more necessary and practical. Gutzman, however, is on much shakier ground with his charge of inconsistency. To begin, despite Gutzman's confused and confusing interpretations, Madison was a modified strict constructionalist throughout his political career. In the Confederation Congress, he favored strict construction of Virginia's land claims and initially opposed the chartering of a national bank because Congress had no enumerated powers in these areas. In contrast, Madison recognized implied powers to the Articles of Confederation primarily on issues—such as the power of the national government to coerce states to obtain revenue from them—that rested on the explicit power of Congress to conduct war. Even on the issue of coercing delinquent states, however, he believed that it was best to secure a constitutional amendment.Footnote ¹²

Madison proposed the power to incorporate a national bank at Philadelphia, but when his proposal lost, he accepted that a national bank was unconstitutional. There is certainly nothing inconsistent about proposing to include a power in a constitution because it allows for the creation of a useful institution, but accepting that it is not provided for if that proposal fails. Indeed, the distinction between the utility of an institution and its constitutionality is the essence of constitutionalism itself. This distinction takes us a long way toward understanding Madison's position on the national bank prior to 1816 and numerous other issues, especially his veto in 1817 of the “Bonus Bill” to expand internal improvements. Only in 1816 did Madison reverse course on the constitutionality of the national bank. He did so then with considerable explanation. At this point, he explained that the actual establishment and operation of the national bank and the approval of each branch of the national government, the states, and the people had made it constitutional.

Unfortunately, Gutzman does not engage in the kind of close textual analysis that is required to lead us through a serious discussion of Madison's approach to constitutional construction or the potentially explosive proposition that cumulative precedent clothed an initially unconstitutional institution with constitutional sanction.Footnote ¹³ Had he done so, Gutzman might have discovered Madison's distinctiveness from both Jefferson and Hamilton. Unlike Jefferson and Hamilton, Madison fused a profound respect for written limitations of powers to an earnest and evolving effort to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate implied powers.Footnote ¹⁴ From this perspective, Madison's case for implied powers in The Federalist No. 44 is of a piece with his speeches in the First Congress against the constitutionality of a national bank. The former established the inevitability of implied powers, the later the necessity of preventing the doctrine of implied powers from being abused.

If Gutzman's analysis ignores a principled third way between the straitjacket of Jeffersonian strict construction and the unbounded prospects of Hamiltonian broad construction, it dismisses out of hand the possibility that Madison held a consistent understanding of the proper “middle ground” between comprehensive national supremacy and state sovereignty. To be sure, Madison's support of a universal veto in 1787 suggested a different understanding of the relationship of federal and state sovereignty than he espoused in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and the Virginia Report of 1800. In 1787, Madison favored a universal veto to eliminate what he repeatedly called “the evil of imperia in imperio.”Footnote ¹⁵

Still, Gutzman misunderstands the universal veto. Here the obvious is important. The universal negative was a veto power that would have given the national government the authority to strike down unjust and unwise state laws. Conversely, it did not expand the reach of federal power to make laws for the states. Madison favored the universal veto to prevent the states from absorbing federal functions, not to empower the national government to absorb state functions. He insisted that it had to reach to “all cases whatsoever” because of the plasticity of legislative authority and the uncanny but perverse capabilities of state legislators to find a way to sidestep and disobey federal commands.Footnote ¹⁶ Even more decisively, as Madison concluded that a national bank was unconstitutional because the power to create one had not passed in Philadelphia, so the loss of the universal veto led him to reconceive of the constitutional system that emerged from the compromises at Philadelphia along the lines of the “partly national, partly federal” composition that he defended in Federalist No. 39.

Most important, Madison never said, as Gutzman contends, “that a single state could prevent enforcement of federal policy within its territory” (350). Article three of the Virginia Resolutions of 1798 maintains that the states as parties to the contract that created the union should “have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits, the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them” (274). In this book and a previously published article that sought to establish the “troublesome legacy” of Madison's case for interposition, Gutzman seizes on Madison's opaque language and argues that interposition effectively meant nullification and, if necessary, the use of force to oppose the enforcement of federal laws.Footnote ¹⁷

Nevertheless, at each point that Madison discussed how the states would interpose themselves to stop the exercise of unconstitutional and dangerous powers by the national government, he concluded that the state legislatures would sound the alarm and promote the election of new representatives who would overturn existing unconstitutional laws. The outlines of how the states should respond were set forth in embryonic form in The Federalist Nos. 44 and 46, first published in January 1788. Madison did not wait until 1798 to formulate this plan. Nor were Madison's beliefs about how the states should respond to unconstitutional usurpations of power by the national government contradicted in the 1830s when Madison rebuked Calhoun.

To be sure, Madison changed his specific policy positions on discrimination between the original and subsequent holders of the revolutionary debt and on the assumption of state debts, though these changes can be explained by examining his commitment to deeper principles of proportional fairness. Madison's thinking about the principal threat to liberty also changed from the 1780s to the 1790s. In the 1780s, Madison had feared majority factions and the centrifugal tendencies of the state governments. In the 1790s, his primary fears shifted to usurpations by a minority faction within the executive branch and to the shibboleths of Antifederalism, namely, presidential aggrandizement of power and “consolidation” of the states into a single republic. Finally, we should not discount Gutzman's more limited claim that Madison is guilty of “tergiversation” in the sense that the diffusiveness of the language in which he discussed interposition allowed him to convey a threat in 1798, but then to distance himself from the implications of that threat in 1830s.Footnote ¹⁸ Nevertheless, Gutzman's flat charges that Madison switched back and forth from broad to strict construction and national supremacy to state sovereignty as these positions served the interests of Virginia and his political inclinations are neither fair nor historically accurate.

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If Gutzman slogs through the twists and turns of Madison's political career and finds him wanting as a consistent politician and political thinker, Richard Brookhiser moves through it at breakneck speed and seeks to minimize the importance of consistency in politics in the first place. A William F. Buckley wunderkind, Brookhiser is the senior editor of National Review and the author of eight books on American Founders. Brookhiser structures his biography of Madison around what he judges to be Madison's two central legacies or monuments: American constitutionalism and American politics. The former is composed of the “laws of doing and not doing, and all the debate and revision they have generated” (249). Unlike Gutzman, Brookhiser is thus comfortable calling Madison the “Father of the Constitution.” Although he was perhaps only a “midwife” of the Constitution at its creation, he “earned his paternity of it” over the course of his lifetime as an anxious and devoted parent who linked the Constitution to the protection of liberty and the preservation of union and both to the happiness of the American people (84, 88).

Brookhiser's central point, however, is that more attention should also be given to a second Madisonian legacy—his role as the “Father of American Politics.” Brookhiser seems to be making one specific and one broader claim here. The specific claim is that Madison may have been a man of ideas, but he was no idealist. He was instead a tough, ambitious, relentless, wily, and sometimes “small-bore man who stumped, spoke, counted votes, pulled wires, scratched backs, and stabbed them” (12). Madison's political savvy, according to Brookhiser, was acquired in his large family where one either learns to bicker and brawl or withdraws. Madison chose not to withdraw but became instead a master of the “dark arts” of politics (11).

The broader claim is that Madison contributed to “the behavior that makes constitutionalism work: the ways and means of acquiring, conferring, and rebuking power, the party organizations and partisan media that are the vehicles of interest, ambition, and thought” (249). Madison's legacies here included the formation of one of the first political parties (the Jeffersonian or Republican Party which became the modern Democratic Party) and the first modern partisan media. He also conceived of public opinion as a form of political participation exercised by ordinary Americans between elections and became an astute commentator and analyst of this new political force. Citizens, Madison believed, should act as sentinels of liberty and establish an empire of reason rooted in an informed public opinion. Since public opinion could no longer be ignored as a force, the statesman's task was to gauge, summon, stroke, educate, and even manipulate it.

Like Gutzman's biography, Brookhiser's account of Madison's political career is a mixed bag of insight and error. Brookhiser forcefully reminds us that Madison was a superb, calculating political tactician and that if preparation and reasoned argumentation were his preferred tools, he sometimes relied upon sharper instruments and shrewder tactics. Although he is too critical of Madison, Brookhiser also accurately assesses Madison's political strengths and weaknesses and comes close, in parts, to capturing the complexity of Madison's political personality, especially his unique combination of magnanimity, savvy, toughness, naiveté, and moralism. Brookhiser gives his highest marks to Madison the working parliamentarian: “preparing, persuading, setting agendas, conducting committee work, [and engaged in] legislative maneuvering” (10).

Conversely, he is most critical of Madison's economic policies and his presidential leadership, especially during the War of 1812. As Brookhiser observes, Madison was intensely Anglophobic and never quit fighting to remove the mercantilist tethers that British commercial restrictions placed on American commerce. Madison had immense faith that this goal could be achieved through economic sanctions. He also believed that whatever trade was lost to Great Britain as a result of the adoption of these restrictions could be made up by France. Brookhiser is correct to suggest that Madison's “notions of a potential trade bonanza with France were fantastic” and that his beliefs about the effectiveness of economic sanctions were unrealistic (94).

Madison's economic policies and his condemnation of Hamilton's should not, however, be dismissed, as Brookhiser suggests, as a product of his inexperience with the real world of Wall Street bankers and speculators (90). In these observations and his contentions that Madison was overpowered by realities in the War of 1812 to accept government support of public manufacturing and a standing army, Brookhiser's account is informed by neo-Federalist biases that Jeffersonian scholars have torpedoed. Madison and Jefferson had plenty of real-world evidence of the chicanery and injustices produced by East Coast speculators. The most fundamental differences between Hamilton and Madison were their different constituencies and concerns. Madison was concerned to protect the interests of Southern slaveholding planters and ordinary farmers across the nation. Hamilton's policies, as Madison suggested, favored eastern mercantile elites. Hamilton was interested more in economic growth, Madison in economic justice—at least for everyone but slaves. These differences, in turn, were rooted in fundamentally different conceptions of political economy and visions of American nationhood.Footnote ¹⁹

In assessing Madison's presidential leadership, Brookhiser concludes that Madison was simply not suited for executive achievement. He made patronage appointments in important military positions and as a result later had to replace several ineffectual advisors. “It was his responsibility,” Brookhiser argues, “to spot incompetence and be rid of it, or misdirection and correct it, and he had done neither. He preferred to try to work with people, and he took a long time to make decisions, especially negative ones” (211). Here Brookhiser does not flinch. The charred remains of Washington, DC, resulted from Madison's failures.

Other pithy, but cantankerous and less persuasive, judgments flood Brookhiser's biography. Some of these comments are ultimately sound, but do little work helping us understand the source of Madison's failures. Brookhiser for example blasts Madison's position on slavery without exploring or attempting to explain why Madison believed and acted as he did. “His solutions to the problem of slavery [colonization and diffusion] were worthless, a pathetic case of intellectual and moral failure” (9). Brookhiser's judgments of Madison's National Gazette essays are not simply harsh, but wrong. These essays were published in 1791 and 1792 as a part of Madison and Jefferson's newspaper war against Hamiltonianism. Brookhiser concludes that they were written at a “childish level.” “They are short, but sweet,” Brookhiser opines. “The writing is crude, and so are many of the thoughts” (106).

Contrary to Brookhiser's bald assertions, Madison's National Gazette essays, especially “Property” and “Consolidation,” are essential to understanding his political thought and intellectually on par with his contributions as Publius. Collectively, they amount to a fundamental elaboration of Madisonian republicanism.Footnote ²⁰ In particular, Madison revisits the issue of territorial size and republicanism, presents a Jeffersonian defense of the independent farmer, and analyzes other issues of political economy, including emigration and money, that he had left largely unexplored as Publius. As Brookhiser should be the first to recognize, Madison's National Gazette essays also analyze the many factors that influence the formation, strength, and substance of public opinion and argue that the protean concept of popular sovereignty should be cashed out in the American republic as a politics of this “true sovereign.”Footnote ²¹

A final criticism can be made against the broadest point of Brookhiser's study: his contention that Madison, more than any of the Founders, envisioned and sought to bring into being the modern political world that we inhabit. Madison's actions during the 1790s may have been central to the development of a modern politics of political parties, a partisan press, political bargaining and wrangling, and the politics of personal destruction, but there is little evidence that this is what he intended and even less that modern American politics expresses his normative vision. Even as he helped create the first modern American political party, Madison continued to disdain parties. Party organization and the creation of an opposition press began as efforts to engage in a “defensive concert”—a popular revolution—against the threats of Hamiltonianism.Footnote ²² Madison certainly understood that politicians would often wrangle and compromise. He accepted politics as the art of the possible and sometimes succumbed to its dark side, but he also had a broader vision of disinterested statesmanship that Brookhiser fails to grasp or take seriously.Footnote ²³ Madison always held the “is” and “ought to be” of American politics in a constructive tension.

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Like Gutzman and Brookhiser, Jeff Broadwater is interested in Madison's legacies, vision for America, and consistency. A trained historian sensitive to the distance of Madison's day from our own, Broadwater nevertheless paradoxically examines the aspects of Madison's career and political thought that he judges to be of greatest contemporary interest (xv). Broadwater contrasts this “modest” goal of translating the “essential Madison” into the present with an attempt to improve upon the brilliant analytical and theoretical expositions of Madison's recent commentators. When the final page is turned, however, his account is the most thorough, judicious, and insightful of the three biographies examined here. A particular virtue of this study is Broadwater's ability to succinctly compress accurate and perceptive analyses of Madison's views and policies on major issues.

Specifically, Broadwater's interpretations of Madison's path to constitutional reform, his views on religious liberty and separation of church and state, his beliefs about slavery, and his conduct as president are the most distinctive and illuminating topics. In considering the first of these, whereas Gutzman and Brookhiser rapidly move to Madison's support for fundamental constitutional reform and treat the creation of a new political system as somehow inevitable, Broadwater rightly documents the cautiousness and apprehensiveness with which Madison treated an overhaul of the Confederation well into 1786, primarily because of his sensitivity to the effect that the transfer of substantial powers of commercial regulation to a northern majority might have had on southern navigation rights on the Mississippi. Broadwater also does an excellent job identifying and explaining from Madison's perspective the array of problems—the inability of the Confederation government to finance or manage the war effort, navigation rights on the Mississippi, the paper money crisis, Shays's Rebellion—that eventually led Madison to favor fundamental constitutional reform. This analysis establishes that for Madison “the republic's ills were all related” and thus had to be treated systematically and comprehensively (33).

In his account of Madison's views on religious liberty, Broadwater not only examines Madison's role in the Virginia church-state struggle that began in 1776 and culminated in the passage of Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786, but also succinctly summarizes Madison's lifelong engagement with issues of church and state. The thrust of this analysis is to establish that Madison was a mostly consistent proponent of the strict separation of church and state. Madison made exceptions to this principle such as proclaiming days of fasting and prayer, Broadwater observes, but he increasingly regretted these deviations and other “seemingly innocuous accommodations” to religious groups (26). Late in his life, Madison focused on the threat posed by organized ecclesiastical power, arguing that religious corporations might well become monopolies and endanger public liberty. Issues of church and state, Broadwater convincingly concludes, were not simply intrinsically important to Madison throughout his life, but also served as the paradigmatic case for thinking about how to reconcile the protection of individual rights with majority rule.

Broadwater is hardly gushing about Madison's performance as president. Like Brookhiser, he concludes that Madison made patronage appointments to inept cabinet members and suffered the consequences of their decisions and indecisiveness too long before dismissing them. He also concedes that Madison was no field general. Madison's other flaws, according to Broadwater, included “a preternatural patience with diplomacy; a legalistic, if not doctrinaire, approach to foreign policy; and an inability to mobilize the nation for a long-anticipated war” (153).

But unlike many modern commentators, Broadwater is unwilling to judge Madison a failed president. Madison, Broadwater concludes, was “composed and confident” in the face of intractable factionalism, sectional strife, and opposition from within his own party. He was also a “conscientious administrator” who was “not wholly unsuited to the presidency” and a consistent defender of civil liberties who did not pursue personal vendettas or try to stifle dissent (146). In this judgment and his broader, qualified defense of Madison's presidency and conduct in the War of 1812, Broadwater measures Madison by Madison's own republican values—values that, Broadwater suggests, were shared by Madison's contemporaries. Madison, according to Broadwater, “did not believe that he should dominate Congress or even his Cabinet” (145). Many subsequent presidents have convinced themselves that expanding presidential power—especially in a time of war—was necessary to preserve the nation and innocuous because they would exercise the powers assumed. In contrast, Madison guarded against the expansion of presidential power even in war because he believed that the legislative branch was the first among equal branches in a republic. He also held that dangerous expansions of executive power were most likely to emerge from war or the widespread perception that it was imminent.

Broadwater's sympathies for Madison, however, do not extend to his views on slavery. Madison, Broadwater concludes from testimony by Madison's slaves and reports by visitors at Montpelier, oversaw a “relatively benign regime” for his own slaves. He also never defended slavery as intrinsically good and never voiced anything similar to Jefferson's venomous scientific racism. Instead, he rhetorically condemned slavery throughout his lifetime and favored some policies to curb its growth and promote its gradual abolition. He opposed, for instance, giving slaves as bounty to enlisted men during the American Revolution and fought against the legal recognition of slavery by name in state papers. He also supported measures prohibiting American citizens from taking slaves to foreign ports and requiring humane treatment of slaves in transit, though these did not pass.

Nevertheless, according to Broadwater, Madison mostly ranted and acted fecklessly against slavery. Beholden to the slaveholders who elected him, Madison took few political risks to weaken slavery. Furthermore, the more he thought about slavery—and he never escaped its foreboding presence—the more muddled his thinking became. Like many of the Founders, he hoped that the end of the foreign slave trade would spell the end of slavery. Nevertheless, the prodigious indigenous growth of slavery even after the end of the slave trade doomed this idle hope. Later, he came to believe that diffusion or scattering slaves across western territories would weaken it. This tactic was premised on the observations that slaves were treated best when they were rarest and that slavery had been legally abolished in states where slaves were only a small fraction of the population. Unfortunately, diffusion underestimated the adaptability of slavery to new conditions.

Eventually, Madison turned to the delusion of colonization—“the greatest of the failed panaceas” (191). Colonization, Madison concluded with Jefferson, was necessary because white prejudices against slaves would never abate. Still, slaveholders would only participate if they were compensated. Compensation, Madison understood, would create a hefty bill, some six hundred million dollars by Madison's estimation, which would be paid by selling land from the common domain. This whole project, Broadwater concludes, was a “chimera,” an unrealized and unrealizable dream that acted for Madison, as for many Founders, as a painless solution to a problem that had only painful ones (191).

In addition to these specific interpretations, Broadwater's broader thesis is that Madison is best understood as a Virginia nationalist and that shifts in his political thinking were “constructive accommodations to political reality” (xiv). Broadwater's interpretation of Madison's vision of nationality, aptly summarized in the book's subtitle “A Son of Virginia and a Founder of the Nation,” is that Madison sought to create an American republic that projected Virginia values across the continent. “The American Revolution,” Broadwater observes, “bred in Madison an animosity toward Great Britain that never disappeared” (18). Independence and the failure of the Confederation government gave him the chance to fashion a more perfect union modeled on Virginia—an agrarian republic led by an established aristocracy that was nevertheless responsive to popular opinion. Expansion figured predominantly in this vision because Madison presupposed a natural alliance between the West and the South. As they became part of the United States, western states, Madison believed, would naturally become inhabited by independent, self-governing farmers, stretching Virginia across the continent.

Finally, Broadwater concedes that Madison was inconsistent on a number of issues, but suggests that no politician who lived from the American Revolution to the Age of Jackson could have been otherwise. Throughout his career, Madison, Broadwater observes, sought to maintain a proper division of power between the national government and the states and to maintain a republican system that struck a proper balance between majority rule and the protection of minority rights. Furthermore, Madison came to believe that “consolidation and aristocracy, on the one hand, and states' rights and unfettered democracy, on the other, both undermine republican government” (xv). When political currents shifted too far in one direction, he would tilt the other way. To be sure, Madison was an “unusually erudite politician,” but scholars should focus less on trying to prove that he was a systematic or consistent thinker and more on the transformations that made systematic and consistent thought and behavior so difficult (xii).

Taken collectively, the analyses in Broadwater's study form a valuable overview of Madison's political thought and career. There are no ways in which this study is overtly misguided, but several in which it might have been improved. Broadwater's thesis that Madison saw the American republic as Virginia writ large is solid, but his study would have also benefited from a consideration of the British roots of Madison's constitutional reform program. Fighting the American Revolution led Madison, like Jefferson and many revolutionary statesmen, to consider how the British imperial system would have been best organized, especially how the imperial center should be related to the colonial peripheries. Confronted with the perennial problems of ancient and modern confederacies as they had now manifested themselves in American union, Madison fashioned a republicanized version of the British Empire resting on the universal veto. Within his constitutional reform program, a universal veto would now be exercised by a popular assembly, but the states would be held in check and the rights of minorities protected by the same prerogative that the king had exercised in the colonies.

Broadwater's analysis of Madison's consistency might also have been sharpened if he had explored the historical varieties of nationalism present at the Founding rather than simply assuming that this protean and potentially anachronistic term had one meaning. As Lance Banning has shown, Madison fought to free the national government from dependence on the states in the selection of federal officials and the operation of its powers. Madison was, in Banning's perceptive characterization, a structural nationalist, a nationalist in how the political system would operate, not in its responsibilities.Footnote ²⁴ Unlike Hamilton, he was not a proponent of concentrating responsibilities in the national government, of consolidating the federal union into a single republic, or of unduly freeing the government from control by the people. Most important, Madison's break with Hamilton in the 1790s becomes understandable when we observe that Madison came to favor constitutional reform later, for different reasons, and with a different brand of nationalism than Hamilton.

Finally, though properly critical of Madison's views and positions on slavery, Broadwater underestimates the degree to which Madison sought to institutionalize the protection of slavery in the Constitution—and succeeded. At the Convention, small-state delegates argued that equal representation in at least one branch of the national legislature was necessary to prevent them from being bullied by the large states. Madison balked at this proposition, suggesting that the large states had no common interests on which to create coalitions. More profoundly, as Jack Rakove has shown, he even implied that interests were the attributes of individuals, not states, and that the size of a state could not constitute its “interest.”Footnote ²⁵ But Madison was keenly attuned to the geographic interests of North and South, slaveholding and nonslaveholding. He saw slaveholding as a real interest that needed protection and fought to give it a “defensive power.” His preferred method would have been to have one branch of the national legislature apportioned entirely on the basis of its free inhabitants and the second counting slaves fully with free inhabitants.Footnote ²⁶ He supported, however, the adoption of the three-fifths clause that greatly expanded Southern slaveholding representation in the House of Representatives. He also supported the Electoral College which insured that Southern states got credit for their slave populations in the selection of the president.Footnote ²⁷

Despite these caveats, Broadwater comes closest to taking the measure of Madison. He leads us to appreciate the perceptiveness of the French diplomat Louis Otto's observation that Madison is “a man one must study for a long time in order to make a fair appraisal of him” (xi). With Broadwater's help, we glimpse the fragilities, contributions, and complexities of Madison: the bookish intellectual who dominated deliberative assemblies with his parliamentary skills, the cold public fish who warmed among friends into the private rascal, the “Father of the Constitution” who left Philadelphia despondent, the slaveholding ineffectual critic of slavery dumbfounded by its dilemmas, the Virginia flavored nationalist, the unimperial president, the “Great Little Madison.”