coffers. That, of course, was at the root of the collapse of credit and the runaway inflation. All
agreed: things could not go on this way.
At this point, yet another Founding Father emerged from the shadows into the bright lights of
national prominence. James Madison (1751-1836) was born in 1751 in Virginia, the son of a
fairly prosperous planter, who had him educated by private tutors before dispatching him to
Princeton in 1771. There he was a classmate of Aaron Burr (1756-1836) and with two budding
authors, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) and Philip Freneau (1752-1832), produced a
remarkable Poem of the Rising Glory of America,' reflecting the view of their generation of educated elitists that leadership in culture was inevitably passing westward from Europe to America, which would be the theater ofthe final stage ... of high invention and wond'rous art,
which not the ravages of time shall waste.' Freneau indeed has often been called, with justice,
the poet of the American Revolution.’ Madison, however, can be called, with equal justice, the constitutionalist of the Revolution, for he did more than Jefferson or even Hamilton to ensure that the United States got a workable system of government. He had read Francis Bacon's famous essay,Of Honor and Reputation,' which discussed the hierarchy of categories of fame and honor,' placing at the top of itfounders of states and commonwealths, such as Romulus,
Cyrus and Caesar.' It was his good fortune, as John Quincy Adams was to write a few years later,
to join this select company, being sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government-more than of air, soil or climate-for themselves and their children? When, before the present epoch, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?' It was, Madison congratulated himself,a period glorious for our country and, more
than any preceding one, likely to improve the condition of man'-hence to be privileged to write
the constitution was as fair a chance of immortality as Lycurgus gave to that of Sparta.' Madison was a frail man, whose physique prevented him from serving in the army. In 1776 he was elected to the Virginia state convention where, in the drafting of the new state constitution, he made his first gift to the vernacular of American constitutional law by suggesting that the phrasetoleration of religion' be given a positive twist by being changed to `the free exercise of
religion'-an important improvement, with many consequences. That year, as a member of the
state executive council, he first met Jefferson, formed a friendship with him which lasted for the
rest of Jefferson's life, and produced an exchange of letters of which over 1,250 survive, one of
the great correspondences of history and by a long way the most important series of political
letters, between two leading statesmen, ever to have been written. There is no more agreeable
way of learning about how history was made during this half-century than by browsing in the
three grand volumes in which these letters are printed. It is important to remember, in judging the
contributions made by each of these two great men, the extent to which one influenced the other,
at all times.
The stages by which the United States Constitution was created were as follows. The efforts by
Morris and Hamilton to reform the existing Confederation, especially in finance, had produced
no fundamental response. In 1783 Madison turned his hand to the problem, producing a three-
point plan of reform, less radical in some ways than the Morrison-Alexander scheme, but
introducing the concept of popular elections for the first time (with the slave element in the
population of states counting as three-fifths of whites, per capita-the formula eventually
adopted). Nothing much came of this either, at the time. Then accident intervened, as it often