The Once and Future King. F. H. Buckley
at Windsor chairs arranged by state in semicircles around a raised dais, before tables covered in green baize, in a room small enough that every delegate was visible and every ordinary conversation audible. The delegates looked about, at the room, at each other, with anxious surmise, knowing that everything for which they had struggled, as far back as the Stamp Act, had led to this place and this time, and that all their efforts might be for naught if they failed to reach an agreement.
At ten o’clock, the door was closed behind them by sentries who stood watch to ensure that none but the delegates could enter. Washington had been unanimously elected the president of the Convention, and he ascended the dais to open the session. James Madison took a seat next to him to take notes of the proceedings. Stately, plump Edmund Randolph, Virginia’s governor, stood up, and Washington nodded at him to speak. What Randolph would read came to be known as the Virginia Plan. It proposed scrapping the Articles of Confederation, and the debate over it dominated the Convention for its first six weeks.
Randolph was a member of one of Virginia’s most prominent families, and a second cousin of Thomas Jefferson. He was bluff and well-spoken, but seemed almost apologetic as he began to read off the resolutions the Virginians had prepared. The plan was not from Randolph’s pen, but principally from that of Madison, the man at Washington’s side, and Randolph did not wish to claim the credit for drafting it. But Madison was halting in speech and spoke so lowly that his voice was often lost. At five and a half feet, he was a full head shorter than George Washington. Clearly, he was not the man to present a plan for a wholly new constitution for the country.
Few of the other delegates were prepared for the Virginia Plan. When Congress had joined the call for the Convention, in February 1787, it proposed that the delegates meet “for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such alterations and provisions therein as shall when agreed to in Congress and confirmed by the states render the federal government adequate to the exigencies of Government and the preservation of the Union.”26 This was a call to tinker with the Articles, nothing more. Some delegates argued that, since it exceeded the mandate from Congress, the Virginia Plan was out of order. As the Convention continued, bitter words were exchanged. Several delegates threatened to walk out in protest, and some indeed did so.
Nevertheless, the delegates continued talking. The prestige of the Virginia delegation, and the presence of Washington, made it difficult to ignore the Virginia Plan. It was also that which had sorely been lacking: a plan, a serious attempt to amend the defects of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by the thoughtful James Madison. And it was backed by a core of nationalists from Virginia and Pennsylvania, the two largest states.
Madison had outlined his thoughts about government in an essay entitled Vices of the Political System of the United States, written a month before the Convention began,27 and the imprint of the essay can be seen throughout the Virginia Plan. The problem, he argued, was that government under the Articles was both too decentralized and too democratic. The ultimate authority rested with the states, and the decisions of Congress were little more than recommendations. In addition, state governments were excessively democratic, and the honest delegate too often “the dupe of a favorite leader, veiling his selfish views under the professions of public good, and varnishing his sophistical arguments with the glowing colours of popular eloquence.” Sadly, the voice of (ahem) “individuals of extended views, and of national pride” were silenced by the demagogues.
For an answer to these ills, Madison borrowed two ideas from David Hume, whom he had studied at Princeton.28 Hume had proposed, in a 1754 essay on the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth, a highly artificial scheme of government that began with a division of Great Britain and Ireland into one hundred counties, each with one hundred parishes, and built up from there with parish meetings, county-town assemblies, county magistrates, and senators. It would be difficult to imagine anything more at odds with Hume’s empiricism, with his belief that political arrangements were the product of messy historical quarrels that owed more to contingent conventions and accidental arrangements than to abstract reasoning; and one is permitted to wonder whether the essay was only half-serious, and meant in part as a satire on political theorizing—a possibility that surely would have escaped the humorless Madison.
And yet Hume’s essay was something more than a satire. He believed that some constitutions were better than others,29 and that speculations about the best kind of constitution were “the most worthy curiosity of any the wit of man can possibly devise.” It would be foolish to propose radical changes to existing, benign constitutions, like that of Britain, he thought. But what if the opportunity to start afresh arose elsewhere, “either by a dissolution of some old government, or by the combination of men to form a new one, in some distant part of the world”? When Madison read this, he must have heard Hume speaking to him directly. The time had come to dissolve the old government, and the combination of delegates in distant Philadelphia now had the responsibility to devise a new one.
In his essay, Hume had suggested two principles of constitutional governance, both of which Madison thought admirably suited to America. The first was a theory of refinement, or filtration, of representatives, in which higher levels of representatives would be chosen by those at lower levels, rather than directly elected by the people. Ordinary voters would elect local representatives, who would then elect a higher level of representatives, and so on up the ladder. Madison adopted the filtration theory in his Vices essay, which envisaged “a process of elections” designed to ensure that the most senior places in government would be occupied by “the purest and noblest characters” in society. Such a system would “extract from the mass of the Society” those who “feel most strongly the proper motives to pursue the end of their appointment, and be most capable to devise the proper means of attaining it.” In the Convention he described this as a “policy of refining the popular appointments by successive filtrations.”30
Hume offered a second thought on democracy that Madison seized on as well. The public good is more likely to be promoted in large republics, said Hume; and Madison saw this as an argument to transfer power from the states to the extended republic of a national American state. Hume had turned on its head an argument that Montesquieu had made in The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu believed that republics should be small in size, because he thought that powerful interest groups would promote their private ends in large states.31 Just the opposite, said Hume. Large republics are protected from “tumult and faction,” since the very size of the country would make it harder for factions or interest groups to unite in a common plan. “The parts are so distant and remote, that it is very difficult, either by intrigue, prejudice, or passion, to hurry them into any measures against the public interest.”32
Madison had seen corrupt voters back in Orange County, Virginia, and experienced the turbulence of small-state politicians in the state’s House of Delegates. He expected something better from a national American government, and eagerly adopted Hume’s defense of extended republics. With Hume, he recognized that a well-organized state would seek to prevent a majority from oppressing a minority; and this, he thought, a large state could do more easily than a small one. Madison wrote in his essay that in an extended republic,
the Society becomes broken into a greater variety of interests, of pursuits, of passions, which check each other, whilst those who may feel a common sentiment have less opportunity of communication and concert. It may be inferred that the inconveniences of popular States contrary to the prevailing Theory, are in proportion not to the extent, but to the narrowness of their limits.
Madison had added a wrinkle to Hume’s theory. Hume had thought that a majoritarian faction could never assemble in a large state. Madison agreed with this, but said that it wasn’t the size of the state that prevented this; rather, it was the multiplicity of the factions, and their ability to check each other.33
Madison dropped the extended republic theory into a speech he made to the Convention in answer to Connecticut’s Roger Sherman. As a states’-rights supporter, Sherman had wanted state legislatures, and not the voters, to choose members of the House of Representatives, and as a nationalist Madison opposed this. In a large nation, argued Madison, members of