Professor Root,
Forgive me for sloppy language that erroneously included Madison with those who thought the Constitution dead by the 1820s.
You’re right concerning Madison. But he did dislike many of the constitutional interpretations that abounded during the early 1800s and believed the Hamiltonian camp was trying to turn the United States into a modern-nation state burdened by debt and taxes.
Back to my point in the previous post addressing Michael’s post: Madison seems to be politically inconsistent. But he’s not. I think in many ways we have concocted a Madison problem. Throughout his political career, Madison’s nationalistic and states’ rights views were always filtered through a federal view of government. The Virginian emphasized states’ rights once he saw the nation that some of the Federalists were creating.
Madisonian thought, I think, reveals that the roots of government encroachment on liberty, which in many ways has always been intertwined with states’ rights in our federal system of government, to be almost immediately after the US was created.
Americans should heed Madison’s 1825 words to Jefferson and understand our federal government; too bad some of the Federalists had ignored them by then.
