Word: madison
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Washington, Franklin, Madison -- when Thomas Jefferson, then serving as Minister to Paris, read the names of all those worthies reported gathering in Philadelphia, he called them "an assembly of demigods." They were something less than that, of course, but they were nonetheless an unusually admirable lot, experienced, educated, patriotic, dedicated. And though they displayed powerful individual differences in both philosophy and temperament, they showed important similarities too. Of the 55 delegates from twelve states (Rhode Island refused to participate), more than half were lawyers and eight were judges; another quarter were large landowners. All of them had held public office...
Many of the delegates expected Washington's fellow Virginians to provide direction. In the absence of Jefferson, the state's intellectual leadership inevitably came from "Jemmy" Madison, who was to become "the Father of the Constitution." He was shy and soft-spoken, a slender bachelor about 5 ft. 6 in. tall, and, according to one account, "no bigger than a half a piece of soap." His father was a wealthy landowner (and slaveholder), and Madison never had to work for a living. He studied philosophy at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), became an early supporter of the Revolution...
...typical of Madison that he had come to Philadelphia eleven days early, the first outsider there. As the opening was delayed, Madison met daily with the other Virginia delegates to work out what came to be known as the Virginia plan, a blueprint for the Constitution and thus the basic agenda for the convention. His ideas were fairly representative of liberal opinion in his time. He was deeply suspicious of executive authority, of anything that smacked of monarchism. He believed profoundly in the sovereignty of the people and in their civil rights. But he was worried that political groups tended...
After the convention's ceremonial opening on May 25, the Rules Committee spent the weekend organizing its procedures, which were formal and parliamentary -- and included an important provision that no vote could prevent the delegates "from revising the subject matter of it when they see cause." Then, although Madison had probably drafted the Virginia plan, Governor Edmund Randolph was given the honor of introducing it. It took him more than three hours...
Connecticut offered Sherman's compromise a second time and a third. The Madison forces refused to budge. Madison gibed at Connecticut for tax evasion: "Has she paid, for the last two years, any money into the Continental Treasury?" Oliver Ellsworth angrily retorted, "Connecticut had more troops in the field than even the state of Virginia . . . We feel the effects of it even to this day." Pennsylvania's Wilson fretfully asked why the small states persisted in their suspicions of the large ones. Gunning Bedford of Delaware provided a sharp answer: "I do not, gentlemen, trust...