I started reading Noah Feldman’s biography of one of the U.S.A.’s founders, James Madison a few days ago. It’s part of my project to read as much as I can about the people who laid the foundations of our nation. Thus far, I’ve read biographies of Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and watched Ken Burns’s video biography of Ben Franklin. The winner—as best person, person most worth emulating—is George Washington, although none of our heroes lacks feet of clay.
Feldman’s book is entitled The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.
This morning, I read a section of the book that finds Madison in Philadelphia, in 1787, for the convention that led to the writing of the Constitution. The convention was called because it was becoming clear that the Articles of Confederation that had become the “law of the land” in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the eventual success of the Revolutionary War was far from what the young nation needed: states were refusing to support Congress with taxes; there was no executive officer (president); no coherent foreign policy (individual states were sometimes making agreements with foreign nations); and so on.
The immediate context is the convention’s discussion of what stance, if any, the Constitution should take on the matter of slavery: yes or no? or something of a compromise? Here’s the section that struck me forcefully:
Madison’s position [that “a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation (of slaves) not exceeding $10 for each person”] reflected the contorted moral logic of slaveholders enacting a slavery-protecting constitution while opposing that very institution.1 [George] Mason, with his three hundred slaves, had argued that slavery was harmful. Madison, who owned slaves throughout his life, thought that the constitution should not “admit” the very “idea that there could be property in them.”
This contradiction can be explained in part by the very notion that Mason and Madison aspired to a world in which slavery would be abolished. They knew that, in various more civilized corners of the world, the journey to abolition had already begun, and they felt ashamed of their association with slavery. It was, as Madison had said of the twenty-year protection of the slave trade,2 “dishonorable,” not simply to the national character, but to the character of men such as Mason and Madison. They just did not feel sufficiently ashamed to do anything about it, at least not while their livelihoods and those of their families depended on the labor of enslaved persons. They could compromise on slavery in the constitution—because they had always compromised on slavery in their own lives.3 [emphasis is mine—JEE]
Does personal character matter to governance of a community or a nation? Very clearly, it does. How one chooses to conduct one’s own life will also be reflected in the way that a position of governance will be handled. Immoral people will choose immoral means and even immoral goals in their governance of a nation.
It’s rather easy to look back 230 years and see the failures, moral and otherwise, of the Founders. But it’s also plain that the present moment provides many of the same sorts of issues and problems. This is true nationally, where we face choices between deeply immoral people and somewhat more moral persons. Even if the choice is sometimes minor gradations of gray, in the present moment, the difference in the shade of gray is major: a gray that is almost completely black is challenging a gray that’s of a much lighter shade.
But the principle is far more wide-ranging than community or nation. What about me? What am I doing that I oppose in principle but feel insufficiently ashamed about doing to change my actions? Am I willing to adjust my personal “pursuit of happiness” (one of the least well-formed phrases in the Declaration of Independence) to address the wrongs I know about and participate in at cost to myself and my family and friends?
Madison and George Mason, among others, had stated that they believed slavery to be wrong—that treating a human being as property did not conform to the statements of the Declaration of Independence and was something they found distasteful.
The convention had already agreed to a motion that permitted the slave trade to continue for 20 years beyond the ratification of the Constitution. Of course, slave-trade and slavery itself went on quite a bit longer.
Feldman, The Three Lives of James Madison, p. 164.