- Sunday, March 1, 2015

MADISON’S GIFT: FIVE PARTNERSHIPS THAT BUILT AMERICA

By David O. Stewart

Simon & Schuster, $28, 419 pages

Washington author David Stewart has rapidly built a local fan base with his award-winning biographies of such diverse historical characters as Andrew Johnson and Aaron Burr.

Now, with “Madison’s Gift,” Mr. Stewart moves into the front ranks of the new generation of American historians who combine rigorous scholarship with the ability to tie the living personalities of his subjects with the broader context of the times in which they moved.

As his title suggests, Madison’s forte lay not in spectacular military or political triumphs but rather in his ability to forge unlikely partnerships that advanced the tortuous path of the American Revolution to become the American Republic. In baseball terms, Madison was often (and wrongly) considered by his contemporaries a “closer” — a pitcher not believed to have the stamina for a full nine innings on the mound, but the one called from the bullpen for that final burst of strike-outs needed for victory. Mr. Stewart’s Madison turns out to be more than that.

It is easy to see why even Madison’s near neighbor and friend Thomas Jefferson would in his last years freely acknowledge the younger man’s contributions, but then add a typically Jeffersonian sneer, “But, ah! He never in his life could stand up against strenuous opposition.” Not the only time the waspish Jefferson would miss the point. At five-feet-six, Madison was dwarfed by the six-footers Washington and Jefferson; even his devoted wife Dolley was taller than he. His constitution was frail and he was prone to periods of collapse and depression. Amid those more flamboyant figures of the Revolution, many mistook his quiet manner in social situations for weakness.

Moreover, Madison was something of an anomaly even in his native Virginia. Born into a comfortable plantation that depended on slave labor, Madison had been sent away to the more liberating atmosphere of Princeton. There in New Jersey, and later in Philadelphia, where people prospered even as they paid wages to their laborers, Madison confronted his life-long antipathy to the conflicts of believing that all men are created equal, while his own prosperity was built on the chattel bondage of fellow human beings. Retiring by nature, he nonetheless made his way in the fierce cockpit of Virginia colonial politics from his early 20s.

Appropriately, Mr. Stewart begins his examination of Madison’s key partnerships with the most unlikely of personalities — the ebullient, self-promoting, war hero and Washington protege Alexander Hamilton. It was Hamilton who was among the earliest to advocate in the early 1780s a new convention to replace the creaky Articles of Confederation. Such a radical idea jarred most of the political leaders of the new nations, especially in the South.

It was Madison who convinced Hamilton to tone down his formal proposal to have a vaguely defined reforming of the Articles and it was under that questionable fiction that delegates arrived in Philadelphia in 1787.

As Mr. Stewart says, “Both wished for a stronger national government and feared the states would never form a workable union under the loose amalgamation achieved by the Articles . In addition, they shared a precocious genius for government. Hamilton was more impetuous, Madison more deliberate but each recognized the other’s talents . they formed a potent force for making permanent the American experiment in self-government.”

That partnership was even more important when the final draft of the Constitution was considered “better than nothing” by Founders like Benjamin Franklin and even Hamilton himself. Then came the daunting task of convincing the new nation to ratify what they had wrought. Along with John Jay, Madison and Hamilton were a triumvirate of essayists who churned out the 85 articles known as the Federalist Papers which swung the tide of public opinion from skepticism to grudging support for the new form of government.

That new government was ill-defined to say the least. The chief executive, it turned out, had been confined by the Constitution to execute the laws enacted by the Congress, but there was no guidance on just how George Washington was to go about that. So by effrontery and stealth, Washington invented much of his office and Madison, who what we now would call the floor leader of the House, adroitly engineered these new powers. He became, as Mr. Stewart says, Washington’s prime minister.

Madison’s next most important partnership came as part of his 40-year friendship with Jefferson. After the fractious one-term presidency of John Adams, Jefferson came to office in 1801 when the nation was poised to fracture over the conflicts between the New England and Southern states, the internal pressures to expand ever westward and perilous threats from both its old adversary Britain and the newly aggressive post-Revolution France. Breaking with his old ally Hamilton, who agitated for a government more responsive to the merchant-banker economic bloc, Madison mustered the counterforce that became our first formal political party.

Madison himself needed a strong right arm when his own presidency became mired in the War of 1812. No soldier himself, Madison adroitly turned to veteran James Monroe, an erstwhile foe who had run against him for his House seat. But Mr. Stewart rightly reserves Madison’s most important partnership for his spirited and supportive wife Dolley. Martha Washington had been uncomfortable amid the pomp and formality of presidential social life. The acerbic and snobbish Abigail Adams too had little truck with public affairs, and Jefferson had been a bachelor. But Dolley Madison can lay claim to have invented the office of first lady. She not only put a positive face on the presidency but she was a bulwark of support during Madison’s bouts of despondency.

In all, this new take on James Madison is a highly accessible read and a perceptive portrait of a catalyst who made the more celebrated contributions of other Founders actually succeed.

James Srodes’ latest book is “On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives who Shaped Our World” (Counterpoint).

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