A devoted American nationalist, James Madison often knowingly worked backstage to make the United States more national—less federal—than his fellow Virginians were willing to endure. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Kevin Gutzman as he examines the complex role James Madison played in the American Founding. —W. Winston Elliott [...]
In the days when the Constitution lay under active consideration by the state conventions, The Federalist gained only a limited circulation. The speeches, newspaper articles, and pamphlets of several other Federalists played larger roles in securing the constitution’s final ratification. Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the “Other” Federalists, 1787-1788, eds. Colleen A. Sheehan and [...]
Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic, by Mark David Hall This is the best life of Connecticut’s foremost Founding Father ever written. More than that, it demonstrates once and for all that Calvinism played a very significant role in shaping the American Revolution and U.S. Constitution. Henceforth, historians will have to take [...]
Driven by an imperative to remind Americans of what they once knew, and to do so before the opportunity passed, M.E. Bradford possessed a reactionary vision; he yearned for a return to America’s birthright, the Constitution of 1787. Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution, by M. E. Bradford; foreword [...]
It is “dearest to my heart and dearest in my convictions,” the dying James Madison said, “that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.” It was this Union, conceived, framed, ratified, explained, implemented, defended, and cherished by Madison, that Kevin Gutzman cogently and rightly sees as the essential “making of America.” James Madison [...]
The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World, by J. C. D. Clark The historiography of the American Revolution and Founding period has been dominated for more than two decades by works that follow the examples of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood. In their books, particularly Bailyn’s The Ideological [...]
The American Revolution proceeded simultaneously on two levels: the state and the federal. While federal reform was essential, and while Virginians took the lead in achieving it, the state-level activity of those years struck contemporaries as more important. Virginia’s revolutionary May Convention adopted its three resolutions of May 15, 1776. In doing so, it decided [...]
James Madison, Jr. entered the world at midnight of the night of March 16-17, 1751.[1] By chance, he was an American prince. James Madison, Sr., the master of Montpellier in Piedmont Virginia’s semi-frontier Orange County, was the wealthiest man in the county. His lands were extensive, his slaveholdings were notable, and his family connections were [...]
Kevin Gutzman’s James Madison and the Making of America takes what we thought was a familiar story and gives it a fresh and important interpretation that challenges old orthodoxies and helps us better understand important episodes in American history. For instance, proper credit for the world-historic Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom is at last granted [...]
James Madison is widely known as the “Father of the Constitution,” author of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In his old age, the prevailing account goes, he stood up to a heretical off-shoot of Southern constitutionalism, and it was fortunate that he, the “last of the Fathers,” was still around to gainsay those [...]