Happy Birthday to James Madison (b. March 16, 1751, in Port Conway), the fourth president of the United States from 1809 to 1817. A key contributor to both the Constitution and Bill of Rights, he was also an enslaver. He also saw these documents as fundamentally intertwined. As historian Stuart Leibiger writes, “Madison wanted the Constitution to be venerated. Hasty amendments, enacted on sudden popular impulses, would harm it by threatening its stability. The more changes the document underwent, the more likely it would become the plaything of willful majorities. Hence Madison believed that the Constitution must not be tampered with lightly or for merely political reasons. He led the fight for the Bill of Rights only because it protected the rights of those governed by the Constitution.” In the Federalist Papers, Madison described his worries about passionate public overreactions causing harmful constitutional changes. He wrote: “[I]t is the reason of the public alone that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”
Citations: Stuart Leibiger, “James Madison and Amendments to the Constitution, 1787-1789: ‘Parchment Barriers,’” The Journal of Southern History 59, no. 3 (August 1993): 468, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2210003; James Madison, Federalist 49, in *The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers,” ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2003), 245, https://archive.org/details/essentialfederal0000unse; Jacques Reich, “James Madison,” etching on paper (location unknown, 1911), collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), public domain, https://www.si.edu/object/james-madison:npg_S_NPG.67.78.
Comments