A History of the American People

does in great historical events. Virginia and Maryland were rowing over the navigation of the
Potomac, which both claimed the legal right to direct. In this confusion, importers were taking
the opportunity to evade customs-dues. Matters came to a head at the end of 1783 and Madison,
who looked after national affairs for the Virginia government, proposed that negotiating
commissioners be appointed by both states. Washington, a born conciliator, was delighted to
give them hospitality at Mount Vernon, from March 25, 1785. There they ranged well beyond
their mandate, settling not only navigational and naval differences between the two states but
customs, currencies, regulation of credit, and many other topics.
The conference was so successful that Pennsylvania was roped in on the Potomac issue, and
Madison skillfully brought the agreements to the attention of Congress, which ratified them. He
then put through a motion for Virginia to invite commissions from all states to meet and discuss
such commercial regulations as may be necessary to their common interest and their permanent harmony.' The meeting took place at Annapolis on three days in September 1786 and only five states actually sent commissioners. But it did some important preparatory work and lobbying, and it enabled Madison to get to know Hamilton and both to put their heads together to see how to proceed further. Madison was a cautious, deliberative man, Hamilton a plunger, an audacious adventurer. He built onto Madison's tentative scheme of constitutional revision, which dealt only with economic issues, a broader plan, inviting state delegates to Philadelphia in May 1787,to
devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the
Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.' It set no limit on the things the
Convention might discuss.
However, if Hamilton gave the momentum for constitutional reform a decisive push, it was
Madison who provided the Convention's agenda, by presenting the Virginia Plan. The new
element in this, of fundamental importance, was that the national government ought to operate
directly on the people (rather than through the mediating agency of the states) and that it ought to
receive its authority directly from the people (rather than from the states). In other words the
sovereign people-it was Madison who coined the majestic phrase `We, the People'-delegated
authority both to the national government and to the states, thereby giving it the power to act
independently in its own sphere, as well as imposing restrictions on the actions of the states. This
could be described as the most important constitutional innovation since the Declaration of
Independence itself. Madison proposed that the limiting power should be exercised by a federal
power of veto on state laws. This was rejected, as smacking too much of the old royal veto. But
the principle was accepted, and limitations on the power of the states imposed by the federal
Constitution have been accepted as a fundamental mechanism of the federal system. In
Madison's scheme, such power was legitimized by the federal government drawing authority
directly from the votes of the people. The positive point was of comparable importance to the
negative point of limiting state authority because it knocked the bottom out of the subsequent
states' rights argument (of John C. Calhoun and others) that only the states themselves conferred
power on the federal government, and could remove it just as comprehensively. But the people
conferred power too, and it was on that basis that President Lincoln was later able to construct
the moral and legal case for fighting a war to hold the Union together. All this was Madison's
doing.
The Convention met in Philadelphia again and sat for four months, breaking up on September
17, 1787, its work triumphantly done. Its success owed a lot to the fact that all the states had
been writing or improving their own constitutions over the past decades and so many of the men
attending were experts at the game. Of those attending, forty-two had sat in the Continental