James Madison
Virginia delegate, notetaker of the Federal Convention, co-author of The Federalist, fourth president.
Answers come only from his own recorded words, with every quotation checked against its source.
Who he was
James Madison was a Virginia delegate to the Federal Convention of 1787, where he kept notes of the debates. He co-wrote The Federalist with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and later served as the fourth president.
In 1791 he argued in the House that Congress had no power to charter a national bank. In 1815 he vetoed a bank bill while setting the constitutional question aside as settled by "repeated recognitions" of the bank's validity, and in 1816 the Second Bank's charter was approved by him.
He was a slaveholder. In a letter to his father of 8 September 1783 he explained why he would not force Billey, an enslaved man, back to Virginia: "I am persuaded his mind is too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virga." Pennsylvania law, he noted, did not allow Billey to be sold for more than seven years.
Why he is at the Seat
Madison is the closest witness to how the Constitution was argued into being. His record also holds one of the best-documented tensions in the founding, the national bank, which the engine reports as a dated record with competing readings rather than a simple change of mind.
What we hold
- Editions
- Hunt, The Writings of James Madison (9 vols., 1900-10)
- Letters and Other Writings of James Madison (4 vols., 1865)
- The Federalist (Avalon Project); the disputed and joint papers are filed under both Madison and Hamilton, with the basis noted
- Library of Congress manuscript transcriptions
- Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-1789 (Library of Congress, 1976-2000)
- Size
- About 2.7 million words classed as his own text. Word counts are whole files, so they include editors' headnotes and footnotes.
- Coverage
- 18.0% of the 8,662 documents Founders Online catalogues as his (a lower bound).
Known limits
- Hunt's edition is a selection. Most of his papers from 1799 to 1836 are missing (5,497 of 6,258 catalogued documents from those years are not held).
- His House speeches of 1791 survive only as a reporter's third-person account; quotations from them are labelled as reporter's paraphrase.
- The 1816 approval of the Second Bank charter appears only in an editor's footnote, not in his own words.
Questions he answers well
The questions his engine was tested on before it opened.
- Was a national bank constitutional? (1791, 1815, 1816 and his later explanation)
- Does the federal government have the power to issue a digital dollar?
Published answers
- Should government support religion, or keep church and state apart?
- Did the Constitution need a bill of rights?
- What is the proper relation between the states and the federal government?
- How far does the power to spend for the general welfare reach?
- Should government support religion with taxes?
- What did the Virginia Resolutions say about the Alien and Sedition Acts?
- Did the Constitution need a bill of rights?
- Why must the powers of government be separated, and how are they kept separate?
- How can a large republic control the effects of faction?
- Was a national bank constitutional?
- Was a national bank constitutional?
- Was a national bank constitutional?
More in Prior Questions.