CHAPTER IX. MADISON. FROM Hamilton we naturally turn to his associate in the Federalist, James Madison, afterwards fourth President of the United States, whose faithful and laborious record has preserved to us the debates of the Convention. Mr. Madison was thirty-six years old when he entered that assembly. His previous life had fitted him to play a conspicuous and important part in its proceedings. He was born in 1751, of a good family, in Orange County, Virginia, and was educated at Princeton College in New Jersey, where he took the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1772. He returned to Virginia in the spring of 1773, and commenced the usual studies preparatory to an admission to the bar; but the disputes between the Colonies and the mother country soon drew him into public life. In 1776, he became a member of the State Convention which formed the first Constitution of Virginia. He was afterwards a member of the legislature and of the Council of the State, until he was appointed one of its delegates in Congress, where he took his seat in March, 1780.1 From this time to the assembling of the Federal Convention in 1787, his services to the Union were of the most important character. He entered Congress without a national reputation, but with national views. Indeed, it may be said of him, that he came from his native Commonwealth,-"mother of great men," grown to the full proportions of a continental statesman. At the moment when he appeared upon the larger theatre of the national interests, the Articles of Confederation had not been finally ratified by all the States. Maryland had insisted, as a necessary condition of her accession to the new Confederacy, that the great States should surrender to the Union their immense claims to the unoccupied territories of the West; Virginia had remonstrated against this demand; and the whole scheme of the Confederation had thus been long encountered by an apparently insurmountable obstacle. The generous example of New York, whose Western claims were ceded to the United States in the month preceding Mr. Madison's entry into Congress, had furnished to the advocates of the Union the means for a powerful appeal to both sides of this critical and delicate controversy; but it required great tact, discretion, and address to make that appeal effectual, by inducing Maryland to trust to the 1 Article "Madison" in the Penny Encylopædia, written for that work by Professor George Tucker of the University of Virginia. 2 Ante, pp. 131–141. - influence of this example upon Virginia, and by inducing Virginia to make a cession that would be satisfactory to Maryland. In this high effort of statesmanship-a domestic diplomacy full of diffi culties Mr. Madison took part. He did not prepare the very skilful report which, while it aimed to produce cessions of their territorial claims by the larger States, appealed to Maryland to anticipate the result; but the vast concession by which Virginia yielded the Northwestern Territory to the Union was afterwards brought about mainly by his exertions. In 1782, he united with Hamilton in the celebrated report prepared by the latter upon the refusal of the State of Rhode Island to comply with the recommendations of Congress for a duty on imports.2 In 1783, he was named first upon a committee with Ellsworth and Hamilton, to prepare an Address to the States, urging the adoption of the revenue system which has been described in a previous chapter, and the Address was written by him. The great ability and high tone of this paper gave it a striking effect. The object of this plan of revenue was, as we have seen, to fund the national debts, and to make a sufficient provision for their discharge. I have already assigned to it the merit of having preserved the Union from the premature decay that had begun to destroy its vitality; and it may here be added, that the statesman whose pen could produce 1 It was drawn by James Duane of New York. 2 Ante, pp. 174, 206 - 208. 3 Ante, pp. 177 – 179. the comprehensive and powerful appeal by which it was pressed upon the States, was certain to become one of the chief founders of the Constitution of which the plan itself was the forerunner. It settled the fact, that a national unity in dealing with the debts of the Revolution was "necessary to render its fruits a full reward for the blood, the toils, the cares, and the calamities which had purchased them." Such were Mr. Madison's most important services in the Congress of the Confederation; but they are of course not the whole. A member so able and of such broad and national views must have had a large agency in every important transaction; and accordingly the Journals, during the whole period of his service, bear ample testimony to his activity, his influence, and his zeal. At the close of the war, he retired to Virginia, and during the three following years was a member of the legislature, still occupied, however, with the interests of the Union. His attention was specially directed to the subject of enlarging the powers of Congress over the foreign trade of the country. It is a striking fact, and a proof of the comprehensive character of Mr. Madison's statesmanship, that Virginia, a State not largely commercial, should have taken so prominent a part in the efforts to give the control of commerce to the general government ; — an object which has justly been regarded as the corner-stone of the Constitution. It arose partly from the accident of her geographical position, which made it necessary for her to aim at something like uniformity of regulation with the other States which bordered upon her contiguous waters; but it is also to be attributed to the enlightened liberality and forecast of her great men, who saw in the immediate necessities of their own State the occasion for a measure of general advantage to the country. Mr. Madison's first effort was, to procure a declaration by the legislature of Virginia of the necessity for a uniform regulation of the commerce of the States by the federal authority. For this purpose, he introduced into the legislature a series of propositions, intended to instruct the delegates of the State in Congress to propose a recommendation to the States to confer upon Congress power to regulate their trade and to collect a revenue from such regulation. This measure, as we have seen, encountered the opposition of those who preferred a temporary to a perpetual and irrevocable grant of such power; and the propositions were so much changed in the Committee of the Whole, that they were no longer acceptable to their original friends. The steps which finally led the legislature of Virginia to recommend a general convention of all the States have been detailed in a previous chapter of this work; but it is due to Mr. Madison's connection with this movement, that they should here be recapitulated with reference to his personal agency in the various transactions. A conflict of jurisdiction between the two States of Virginia and Maryland over the waters which |