Abstract This chapter studies the First Inaugural Address of James Madison. After assuring his listeners of the profound sense of duty impressed upon him “by the call of my Country” to the presidency, Madison candidly pronounced “the present situation” of the nation “full of difficulties.” Yet he could not bring himself to blame the country’s political, economic, and diplomatic woes on the preceding administration; that regime had been led by his good friend Thomas Jefferson. Instead, Madison blamed the nation’s misfortunes on the extreme and desperate measures of Great Britain and France. His First Inaugural Address did not offer new policy proposals to deal with the crisis. Perhaps already anticipating a war with Great Britain, Madison assured that his administration would never use events as an excuse to trample personal rights and liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights that he himself had authored.

Reviewed by: The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter by Dennis C. Rasmussen Stuart Leibiger (bio) Keywords Gouverneur Morris, U.S. Constitution, Constitutional Convention, Ratification The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter. By Dennis C. Rasmussen. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2023. Pp. 266. Cloth, $44.95.) Almost every fifth grader knows who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Most college students, in contrast, cannot name the author of the final draft of the U.S. Constitution. Of the few Americans who recognize Gouverneur Morris as one of the Founders, [End Page 120] most do not know the correct pronunciation of name (it was pronounced “Governor”), are unable to separate fact from fiction about his colorful life, and do not understand his critical role at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The Constitution’s Penman: Gouverneur Morris and the Creation of America’s Basic Charter, by Dennis C. Rasmussen, professor of political science at Syracuse University, is the first book-length study of Morris’s immense role in framing the Constitution. Rasmussen persuasively argues that Morris, who gave as many speeches as anyone at the Convention (despite missing a month), contributed much more than the final draft. He shaped the document in significant ways, especially its provision for a strong executive. Morris, an outspoken nationalist and opponent of slavery, also prepared a cover letter to the Confederation Congress explaining that the preservation of the Union required the states to surrender some of their power to the Federal government. Although the book is not a biography, Rasmussen sketches Morris’s amorous life, which if made into a film “would likely require an R rating” (10). A principal draftsman of New York’s 1777 Constitution (featuring an independent executive) and a member of Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779, Morris signed the Articles of Confederation. Becoming a resident of Philadelphia to pursue law and business, he suffered a carriage accident in 1780 that cost him his leg below the knee. He assisted Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris (no relation) during the Revolutionary War, became U.S. Minister to France from 1792 to 1794, and served in the U.S. Senate from 1800 to 1803. Morris died at his home Morrisania in the Bronx in 1816. Morris’s immense role at the Convention is surprising, notes Rasmussen, considering that he was the last member added to the Pennsylvania delegation. During the opening week of the Convention, Morris joined with other nationalists in backing the Virginia Plan, which replaced the Confederation with a national government operating directly on the American people without the states as intermediaries. After attending the first week of the Convention in late May 1787, Morris left Philadelphia for New York on personal business and did not return until July 2. Rasmussen shows that from then on, he was perhaps the most vocal and active member of the gathering. Rasmussen uses topical chapters to analyze Morris’s impact on the Constitution’s provisions on federalism, the congress, the presidency, the judiciary, and slavery. Morris favored an aristocratic senate of propertied [End Page 121] men appointed by the president serving for life without pay that could check the unwise democratic impulses of the lower house. Rasmussen explains that Morris’s objective, however, was not to empower the rich, but to isolate them in a single legislative chamber rather than to have them dominate the entire federal government. Morris similarly backed property requirements for federal voting to ensure that the rich would not buy the votes of the landless poor. Of the federal government’s three branches, maintains Rasmussen, Morris had the greatest impact on the design of the presidency. Morris advocated direct popular election of the executive instead of election by congress to ensure presidential independence from the legislature. Unable to secure direct popular election of the president, Morris engineered the next best thing, indirect popular selection of the executive through an electoral college, and he staved off adoption of a presidential term limit. Rasmussen contends that Morris, the most outspoken critic of slavery at the Convention, at times seemingly prioritized abolition over Union, unlike other delegates...

Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery. By Bruce A. Ragsdale. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021. x + 358 pp. Hardcover, $29.95. ISBN 978-0-674-24638-6. - Volume 97 Issue 2

Reviewed by: Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821 ed. by William S. Belko, and: A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse ed. by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond Stuart Leibiger Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821. Edited by William S. Belko. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. x, 225. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2228-2.) A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200. Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse. Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond. Studies in Constitutional Democracy. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. xxvi, 414. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2231-2.) Two new books in the University of Missouri Press series Studies in Constitutional Democracy mark the recent bicentennial of the Missouri Compromise. Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819–1821, edited by William S. Belko, executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council, closely examines congressional debates over the settlement. A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse, edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, a professor of history at the University of Missouri, and John Craig Hammond, an associate professor of history at Penn State University–New Kensington, explores the Missouri crisis in a context broader than the narrow congressional milieu in which it is usually studied. Between 1819 and 1821, a controversy over Missouri's admission to the Union deadlocked Congress. Antislavery restrictionists in the House of Representatives passed the Tallmadge Amendment, prohibiting Missouri's admission as a slave state, but proslavery antirestrictionists blocked the measure in the Senate. After a one-year deadlock, Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state. The settlement also provided that the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36°30′ would be forever free of slavery. Later in 1820, controversy resurfaced when a clause in Missouri's state constitution banned free people of color from entering the state. A congressional resolution stating that the clause in question could not be used to violate the privileges and immunities clause of the federal Constitution resolved this second dispute, despite Missouri's continued refusal to admit free Black people. Each chapter of Contesting the Constitution perceptively analyzes how a specific clause in the U.S. Constitution was interpreted by restrictionists and antirestrictionists in the congressional debates over Missouri's bid for statehood. Christopher Childers's essay discusses how Missouri's ban on free Black people entering the state sparked a disagreement over the meaning of the privileges and immunities clause. Restrictionists argued that by denying free citizens of color access to the state, Missouri's constitution violated the clause in Article IV, Section 2, that states that "citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens of the several states" (Belko, p. 31). Antirestrictionists countered that Missouri's constitution did not violate the federal Constitution because Black people were not in fact U.S. citizens. A chapter by John Eastman (who supported Donald Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election) examines the debate over the guarantee clause. Restrictionists insisted that Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution, which guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government," required Congress to deny Missouri's admission to the Union as a [End Page 763] slave state, because slavery clearly violated the principles of republicanism (Belko, p. 51). Antirestrictionists answered that the treaty between the United States and France creating the Louisiana Territory ensured that new states carved out of that territory must enter the Union on the same terms as the original states, including the option to have slavery. Chapter 8, one of three chapters by William S. Belko, illustrates how restrictionists refuted this claim by maintaining that the president and the Senate could not use a treaty to usurp the power of Congress to regulate the territories and admit new states. As John R. Van Atta's essay demonstrates, southern states vigorously denied that Congress possessed the power to prohibit slavery in new states (as opposed to in...

Reviewed by: Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution by Jeff Broadwater Stuart Leibiger Jeff Broadwater, Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2019). Pp. 296. $30.00 cloth. About Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, John Quincy Adams wrote, “the mutual influence of these mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet” (xiii). In Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution, Jeff Broadwater, professor emeritus of history at Barton College, traces the evolution of the political thought of these two Founders from the drafting of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence to the adoption of the Madison’s Bill of Rights. As young adults, Jefferson and Madison read law, but only Jefferson became a lawyer, and neither made a career in that profession. Instead, writes Broadwater, both men gravitated to the political realm, where writing legislation and designing governments fascinated them. Jefferson dominates the first quarter of this book. Eight years older than Madison, he was already authoring the Declaration and proposing a constitution for Virginia when Madison entered public life as a delegate to the 1776 Virginia Convention. Jefferson and Madison first met at the 1776 session of the state legislature, but they did not become friends until 1779, when Jefferson became Virginia’s governor and Madison sat on the governor’s council of state. “A friendship was formed,” Madison later wrote, “which was for life, and which was never interrupted . . . for a single moment” (69). Broadwater suggests that a shared commitment to religious liberty and the separation of church and state also brought the men together. Before becoming governor, Jefferson had taken the lead in proposing revisions to the state’s laws. Thanks to Madison’s leadership in the 1780s as a member of the state legislature, most of Jefferson’s bills became law, especially the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which ended established religion in the state. Broadwater shows that as members of the Confederation Congress (Jefferson succeeded Madison as a delegate from Virginia in 1783), both men pursued the same goals: securing Virginia’s cession of its western land claims to the Confederation government, obtaining Mississippi River navigation rights from Spain, and granting to Congress the power to collect revenue and regulate commerce. This work continued when Jefferson became the U.S. Minister to France and Madison took a seat in the Virginia legislature in the mid-1780s. Although Jefferson and Madison concurred on the need to reform the Articles of Confederation, they did not agree on how strong the national government should be. During the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison helped to create a strong and independent executive and argued successfully against including a federal bill of rights but failed to obtain a Congressional veto power over state laws. He came away from the convention convinced that the Constitution would neither sufficiently bolster the national government nor rein in the states. Jefferson preferred a much less muscular central government, commenting that three or four amendments to the Articles would have been sufficient. Fearing Jefferson’s reaction, Madison hesitated to send him a copy of the proposed Constitution. While not opposed to the document’s ratification, Jefferson desired a one-term limit for the president and the addition of a bill of rights. “Jefferson and Madison, for the first time in their careers, had dramatically different views on a great political issue,” writes Broadwater. “The debate over the Constitution tested their friendship as nothing else ever had or ever would” (153). [End Page 246] Despite the embarrassment Madison faced at the Virginia Ratification Convention over Jefferson’s critique of the Constitution, the friendship between these two men helped lead to the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Madison recognized that adding rights-related amendments to the Constitution would quiet lingering Antifederalist opposition to the document. Broadwater traces the process by which an exchange of letters with Jefferson convinced Madison that a bill of rights would also genuinely improve the new framework. Madison had initially opposed a bill of rights, insisting that mere “parchment barriers” could not stop majority tyranny (164). In discussing the issue by mail with...

Reviewed by: The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University ed. by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy Stuart Leibiger (bio) Thomas Jefferson, University of Virginia, Education history, Public education The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University. Edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. 341. Cloth, $29.95.) The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University, edited by John A. Ragosta, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew J. O'Shaughnessy, is a collection of essays that explores Jefferson's hopes and plans—some successful and others not—for the school that he fathered. Ragosta, Onuf, and O'Shaughnessy serve as historian, senior research fellow, and director, respectively, at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. In addition, Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, and O'Shaughnessy is vice president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Chapter authors include professors of history, American studies, and medicine; staff members at The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series; and librarians at the University of Virginia, the Library of Congress, and the Jefferson Foundation. This collection is based on conferences commemorating the bicentennial of the University of Virginia, co-sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the American Philosophical Society, held in Charlottesville and Philadelphia in 2018. Jefferson viewed a knowledgeable citizenry achieved through public education as the key to the survival of the American republic. Ellen Hick-man explains that in 1819, thanks to Jefferson's intensive but veiled lobbying, [End Page 340] the Virginia legislature transformed Central College in Charlottesville into the University of Virginia. In 1825, the school opened its doors to students. Jefferson designed the buildings, hired the faculty, prescribed the curriculum, and oversaw the library's acquisitions. Chapters by Neven Leddy, Alan Taylor, and Joseph Michael Lasala describe how deficiencies in Jefferson's own education, and in education in Virginia and the South, shaped his plans for the University. Fearing the corrupting influence of a European urban education, southern parents typically sent their sons to domestic schools. But most of these institutions, especially ones in the South, like Jefferson's alma mater The College of William & Mary, were known more for student misbehavior and "dissipation" (55) than for academic achievement. Having himself learned much more from informal sessions with his mentors George Wythe and William Small than he did in formal college classes, Jefferson's design eschewed housing students together in a single large dormitory building, an environment he deemed physically, mentally, and morally debilitating. Instead, he sought an "academical village" (a learning community in today's parlance) where students lived as close to their professors as they did to each other. With faculty homes (pavilions) interspersed among rows of dormitory rooms, Jefferson hoped students would spend more time being morally and intellectually uplifted by their professors than being lowered by their peers. Jefferson, a disciple of the Enlightenment, insisted that "this institution will be based in the illimitable freedom of the human mind" (6). Several chapters illustrate, however, that he did not hesitate to restrict the curriculum to ensure that students "arrived at his preferred destination" (226). Hoping to train leaders for Virginia and the South, he banned teachings of Federalist-dominated northern schools, such as abolitionism and the consolidation of political power in the federal government. Jefferson decreed that law students read the Whig-republican Edward Coke rather than the Tory-monarchist William Blackstone. Favoring natural religion over revealed religion and determined to avoid religious dogma, Jefferson insisted that there be neither a professor of religion nor a campus church at his secular public university. Instead of a church, the library, housed in the neo-classical Rotunda with a "Delorme Dome" (115), would be the school's architectural focal point. Douglas Harnsberger shows that Jefferson even hoped that the interior of the of Rotunda's dome would serve as a planetarium, with the astronomy professor being hoisted up with a "boom-lift contraption" (115) to affix stars on the ceiling! [End Page 341] Early national education emphasized rhetoric (classical languages and public speaking) over philosophy (humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences). Chapters by...

This history of the 1787 Constitutional Convention uses a chronological narrative format to capture the complexity, messiness, and unfolding daily drama behind the writing of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the role of contingency in that process.The Framers of the U.S. Constitution designed a novel republican form of government to replace the failing Confederation, one that would divide power between the federal government and the states, launching a new phase of the American "experiment" in representative democracy. Not until the end of the American Civil War, nearly a century later, would it become clear, as Abraham Lincoln put it in his Gettysburg Address, "that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Reference Guide provides an invaluable guide covering the background to the convention, the convention itself, the ratification of the Constitution, and the adoption of the Bill of Rights. In addition to the narrative itself, the story of the convention is supplemented with a detailed chronology, a rich selection of primary source documents, 15 biographical sketches of convention delegates, and a comprehensive bibliographical essay. Based largely on primary sources, the book also weighs in on some of the historiographical debates that have taken place among scholars about the convention.

Why was James Madison the “least likely” Founder? Journalist, political consultant, and attorney Michael Signer answers this question in this study. The author's response is that young Madison not ...

For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789. By Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Pp. 252. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by Stuart LeibigerThe first clash between the House of Representatives and the Senate occurred less than three weeks after the convening of the First Congress in April 1789. In For Fear of an Elective King, Kathleen BartoloniTuazon, a visiting scholar at the First Federal Congress editing project, chronicles the neglected but crucial Title Controversy. In this struggle, the Senate abandoned its quest to give George Washington a regal title when the House insisted on addressing the chief executive simply as "the President of the United States." The outcome, according to BartoloniTuazon, "fledged the presidency's power by not flaunting it," resulting in a strong but democratic chief executive (12).Bartoloni-Tuazon shows how Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Vice President John Adams led the Senate's quest for the designation, "His Highness the President of the United States, and Protector of Their Liberties" (113). The outspoken Adams feared that the Constitution left the president too weak vis-a-vis Congress and the states. He thought that a title would help prevent the executive from becoming a tool of aristocrats in the Senate, or the sport of European powers. "Presidents," Adams sneered, led "Fire Companies" and "a Cricket Club," not "a great and independent Nation" (25, 27). A title would command respect at home and abroad, he insisted. Without one, people would "despise" the executive "to all eternity" (101). Bartoloni-Tuazon explains that Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay, Virginia Congressman James Madison, and the entire House of Representatives responded that a title would violate Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution (prohibiting titles of nobility), needlessly fanning fears of executive tyranny.The congressional debate triggered a national public discussion that lasted over a year. Most Americans did not care that the adulation of Washington resembled the worship of the divinely anointed monarchs of Europe, writes Bartoloni-Tuazon, but they agreed with the House that the president should not have a pretentious title. The outcome in Congress reassured those worried about the new regime's direction.According to Bartoloni-Tuazon, President Washington recognized titles as anathema to the people and that the dispute could damage his reputation. By resisting the Senate's designs, he enhanced his standing as America's most beloved and trusted leader. Bartoloni-Tuazon argues that Adams, in contrast, tone-deaf to popular fears of monarchy, lost influence with the president and dramatically weakened his own political standing. Privately, Maclay described Adams as a "monkey just put into Breeches," while Ralph Izard of South Carolina, speaking behind the closed doors of the Senate, dubbed the vice president, "His Rotundity" (101). More devastating publicly was Edward Church's poem denouncing Adams as "The Dangerous Vice" (132). Despite sustaining severe, lasting political damage, Adams won election as the second president in 1796 thanks to "Washington's coattails" (162). …

Presidential Studies QuarterlyVolume 44, Issue 2 p. 376-377 BOOK REVIEW The Queen of America: Mary Cutts's Life of Dolley Madison. Edited by Catherine Allgor. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. 240 pp. Stuart Leibiger, Stuart Leibiger La Salle UniversitySearch for more papers by this author Stuart Leibiger, Stuart Leibiger La Salle UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 April 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12125Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume44, Issue2Special Issue: Symposium on Screening the PresidencyJune 2014Pages 376-377 RelatedInformation

May 01 2014 The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy. By Jeffrey L. Pasley (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2013) 516 pp. $37.50 Stuart Leibiger Stuart Leibiger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Stuart Leibiger Online Issn: 1530-9169 Print Issn: 0022-1953 © 2014 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2014 The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2014) 45 (1): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_r_00665 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Stuart Leibiger; The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy. By Jeffrey L. Pasley (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2013) 516 pp. $37.50. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2014; 45 (1): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/JINH_r_00665 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc.2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.