By Tony Williams
This
essay offers the very simple argument that James Madison was a staunch advocate
of limited government and individual liberty during the creation of the
American constitutional republic. He,
like the other Founders, believed that as government assumed more authority, it
endangered the rights and liberties of the people.
In
his early public career in Virginia, Madison became a leading figure in the
struggle for religious liberty. A
government that violated individual consciences with civil penalties was acting
tyrannically and violating the sacred rights of man. In the creation of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which
helped create a limited, republican government with the purpose of protecting
liberty in the Virginia Constitution of 1776, Madison altered George Mason’s
clause on religious tolerance to one of liberty of conscience:
That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and
the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction,
not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the
free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience
A decade
later, Madison again supported limited government with the disestablishment of
the Anglican Church in Virginia to protect this liberty of conscience, writing
his Memorial and Remonstrance, in
which he stated, “This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” He led the legislative fight for the Virginia Statute of
Religious Freedom, which achieved the goal of disestablishment, while Thomas
Jefferson was in Paris. Almost
another decade later, he made the following argument in his essay, On Property:
Government is instituted to protect property of every sort;
as well that which lies in various rights of individuals . . . .
More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a
government, where a man’s religious rights are violated by penalties, or
fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. Conscience is the most sacred of all property . . . the
exercise of that, being a natural and unalienable right.
That is not a just government, nor is property secure under
it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal
liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the
service of the rest.
During
the 1780s, Madison wanted to give the national government more power because he
believed the Articles of Confederation failed to achieve its ends, and, most
critically, failed to protect liberties in the states. When he helped frame the new
Constitution at the Philadelphia Convention, defended it in his Federalist essays, and fought for its
ratification in Virginia, he constantly sought a stronger, but limited
government (of enumerated powers), that protected individual liberties. Federalist
#51 demonstrates Madison’s argument for limited republican
self-government. He states, “A
dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government;
but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Those precautions included a separation
of powers, checks and balances, bicameralism, and federalism to divide and
limit government power in order to protect individual liberty.
In
the First Congress, James Madison was the guiding force behind the Bill of
Rights, which had been promised by the Federalists during the ratification
debate. Although Madison did not
earlier believe that a Bill of Rights was necessary because as he told the
Congress on June 8, 1789, “because the powers are enumerated, and it follows
that all that are not granted by the constitution are retained: that the
constitution is a bill of powers, the great residuum being the rights of the
people.” Nevertheless, he became
the main proponent of the Bill of Rights because, “so far as a declaration of rights can tend to prevent the
exercise of undue power, it cannot be doubted but such declaration is proper.”
In the 1790s, Madison generally joined with his friend, Thomas
Jefferson, to resist what they believed were the unconstitutional centralizing
tendencies of the Federalists. Whether
the Federalists supported monarchical policies as much as the
Democratic-Republicans believed, and regardless of whether Madison reversed
himself from his nationalist outlook in the 1780s (as some historians have
accused), he continued his enduring commitment to limited government and
protecting the liberties of the American people. His Virginia Resolution, adopted by the Virginia Assembly in
opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts, claimed the government was
exercising:
A power which more than any other ought to produce universal
alarm, because it is levelled against that right of freely examining public
characters and measures, and of free communication among the people thereon,
which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other
right.
James
Madison shared the vision of a constitutional republic with a limited
government to protect the natural rights of mankind with the other Founding
Fathers. They believed that every
person inherently possesses civil and religious liberties given to them by
“Nature and Nature’s God,” which cannot be alienated by any earthly
power.
Tony Williams is the Program Director of the WJMI, and the
author of five books, including Washington
and Hamilton: The Alliance that Created America (forthcoming, 2015)
