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Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
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Woody Holton's article, "Did Democracy Cause the Recession That Led to the Constitution?" in the September 2005 issue of the JAH, asserts that in "Federalist, no. 62," James Madison denounced the weak Articles of Confederation and state governments that "'damp every useful undertaking'" and hindered "ambitious men such as Madison" from obtaining loans to make shrewd investments and stir up a commercial revival (pp. 452–53). However, "Federalist, no. 62" was solely a critique of political factionalism. Nothing there corroborates Holton's assertion that, "Like other Framers, Madison was convinced that cracking down on delinquent debtors would, ironically enough, solve many of the problems the sponsors of debtor relief complained about" (p. 453). "Federalist, no. 62" does not even mention paper money or debtor-creditor conflicts. Madison merely endorses a six-year term for U.S. senators (which radicals thought too long), believing it would engender stable laws. He did not attack state paper money legislation or congressional impotence to levy taxes here. |
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Although Gordon S. Wood and others might think Madison insincere, he touted longer terms for senators as helping the poor. Objecting to the fickle acts and transitory tenure of legislatures, he demands "order and stability" in the national government, through the new Constitution and a responsible upper house. As things were under the Confederation Congress, "no great improvement or laudable enterprise can go forward which requires the auspices of a steady system of national policy" (Edward M. Earle, ed., The Federalist, p. 406). |
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Holton's contention that "Federalist, no. 62" chastised state legislatures for agrarian laws that discouraged rich people from investing overlooks Madison's remarks' radical democratic tendency and his charge that frequent changes in laws helped the rich and government insiders obtain unfair economic advantages. Says Madison:
Another effect of public instability is the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising, and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people. Every new regulation concerning commerce or revenue, or in any manner affecting the value of the different species of property, presents a new harvest to those who watch the change, and can trace the consequences: a harvest, reared not by themselves, but by the toils and cares of the great body of their fellow- citizens. This is a state of things in which [it] may be said with some truth that laws are made for the few, not for the many.
Thus, as in 1790 during Congress's dispute over the public debt, Madison styled himself the ally of the lower classes. |
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Although Holton dubs Madison "the man most closely associated in the historical literature with the notion of republican virtue" (p. 452), John Adams, his cousin Samuel, the Lees of Virginia, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, and even Thomas Jefferson are more closely linked with "classical republican," "civic humanist" ideals. Ever since Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (1948), most scholars have classified Madison, especially during the Constitutional period (1787–1789), as a hard-headed, rationalist liberal, a pragmatist more than a panegyrist of public or private virtue. Historians generally regard John Adams as epitomizing Founders' virtue. Edmund S. Morgan's The Meaning of Independence (1976) depicts virtue as guiding Adams, like George Washington's honor, Jefferson's pursuit of happiness: "What he [Adams] valued most was American independence and the virtue that must sustain it— not least his own" (p. 22). Andrew Trees's The Founding Fathers and the Politics of Character (2004), titles his Adams chapter, "Virtue," Madison's, "Justice." Ironically, Holton's article has signally discovered that Adams and his wife, Abigail, un-virtuously speculated in the public debt. |
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| Arthur Scherr
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City University of New York
New York, New York |
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