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Hello and welcome to the Jefferson Madison Letters. I'm Charlie Jett coming to you from our studio in beautiful downtown Chicago. With one letter at a time, we're following the fifty year friendship that helped build a republic. Well it is october twenty fourth, seventeen eighty seven, and Madison is writing from New York. The Constitutional Convention adjourned five weeks ago on september seventeenth. James Madison is thirty six years old and exhausted. He has been the intellectual engine of that convention all summer in Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson is in Paris, having missed the whole thing. He learns what is happening in his country largely through letters like this one. And what a letter it is. This is the famous one. Madison's complete account of how the Constitution was built, a letter so long that halfway through he begs Jefferson's pardon for what he calls an immoderate digression. He walks Jefferson through the great debates, how to construct the presidency, how to form the Senate, how to divide power between the nation and the states. Most of the letter is a dense, brilliant argument for an idea Madison fought for and lost, a federal power to veto state laws. We'll come back to that thread in this series because it reveals something surprising. The father of the Constitution was at this moment deeply disappointed in the Constitution. But for our purposes, the heart of this letter is near its end. A few sentences of news that will change American history, though no one writing or reading them has any idea of it yet. Tucked into Madison's report is the first sign of organized opposition and the specific opposition that will launch the entire Bill of Rights. So let us read it as Jefferson First Will, not knowing which sentence in it matters the most. A note before I read, this is one of the longest letters in the whole correspondence, and most of it is Madison's theory of the Federal Veto and the extended republic, ideas he'd soon make famous in the Federalist Papers. Those I'll summarize. The passages I read in full are the ones that open the Bill of Rights story. Every word is Madison's from the manuscript now in the Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. Madison opens with the traffic of friendship. Boxes of books just arrived from Paris. He writes, and I quote, a valuable addition to former literary remittances. The bookseller of our first episode is still on the job three years on. Then, in closing the Constitution itself, Madison introduces what will become the most famous account of the Convention ever written with the driest modesty in the whole correspondence. He offers, and I quote, some observations on the subject which will help to make up a letter, if they should answer no other purpose. Filler, he calls it, and he frames the Convention's purpose simply by writing It appeared to be the sincere and unanimous wish of the Convention to cherish and preserve the Union of the States. Then he gives Jefferson the four great problems the Convention had to solve. The great objects which presented themselves were number one, to unite a proper energy in the executive and a proper stability in the legislative departments with the essential characteristics of Republican government. two to draw a line of demarcation which would give to the general government every power requisite for general purposes and leave to the states every power which might be beneficially administered by them. three to provide for the different interests of different parts of the Union and four to adjust the clashing pretensions of the large and small states. Each of these, he says, was pregnant with difficulties, and the degree of agreement that they reached less than a miracle. Then comes the long, masterful digression of the federal negative, the veto on state laws that Madison fought for and lost, finally rejected, he reports, by a bare majority. I'll set that aside for now. It's at the close, reporting on the men who would not support the plan that the letter turns historic. He describes the objections of Virginia's governor, Edmund Randolph, who declined to sign. And then he comes to George Mason, author of Virginia's own Declaration of Rights, one of the most respected men in the state. He writes Colonel Mason left Philadelphia in an exceedingly ill humor indeed. A number of little circumstances arising in part from the importance which prevailed toward the close of the business conspired to whet his acrimony. He returned to Virginia with a fixed disposition to prevent the adoption of the plan if possible. And then the single sentence that launches everything to come. Madison writes He considers the want of a Bill of Rights as a fatal objection. A fatal objection, the want, the lack of a bill of rights. Madison reports it in almost passing, as one man's grievance. He has no idea that his friend in Paris is about to seize on that exact objection and refuse to let it go. The letter runs on, ratification forecasts from every state, crop reports from a drought stricken Virginia, even news that John Adams is coming home from London. And one stretch goes into Cypher, the inside business of Congress, including the vote on Jefferson's own reappointment as minister to France. Even the vote on his own job reached Jefferson in code. Then, on november first, the courier still in port, Madison adds a last page of news, and the whole thing finally goes to sea. So what does Madison assume? He assumes that structure is what protects liberty, not a list of rights. Read the whole letter and you see a mind obsessed with architecture, how to balance the branches, how to check the states, how to engineer a republic so that no faction can dominate. To Madison in 1787, that is how you secure freedom, through the careful machinery of government. Mason's demand for a written bill of rights strikes him as almost beside the point. He reports it the way you report a colleague's old complaint. This assumption, structure over enumeration, is exactly the one Jefferson is about to challenge, and it is the engine of the next three episodes. So what does Madison fear? Instability and the injustice of the states. This is the surprising thing that the long letter reveals. Madison's deepest fear in 1787 isn't a tyrannical central government, it is the opposite. He fears the chaos and unfairness coming out of the state legislatures, the mutability and injustice of their laws. He wanted the federal veto precisely to restrain the states. So when Mason worried that the national government needs to be chained down by a bill of rights, Madison's instinct runs the other way. He thinks the real danger is below, not above. That tension, where does the threat to liberty actually come from? Is one the whole founding generation argued over, and these two friends land on different answers. So what do they take for granted that we no longer do? That the Constitution might simply fail. We read this document as scripture, settled and sacred. Madison wrote this letter genuinely unsure the whole thing would work. Without a federal check on the states, he tells Jefferson, any reform and I quote, must be materially defective. And the Convention had just rejected that very check by a bare majority. By his own argument, the plan he is enclosing falls short. The man we remember as the Constitution's champion was, in private, to his closest friends, full of doubt. It is worth remembering that the founders didn't know they were founders. They thought they were taking a risk that might not pay off. So what's missing? Well, a bill of rights, which is the whole point. The most consequential thing about this letter is an absence. The absence Mason pointed at. And notice the irony the series is built on. Madison, who shrugs at Mason's objection here, will within two years become the man who writes the Bill of Rights and shepherds it through Congress. What changes his mind? A letter. The one Jefferson is about to send. And that's where we will go next. History often turns on a sentence written in passing. Madison meant to tell Jefferson about a difficult colleague. What he actually did was hand his friend the thread that would become the first ten amendments to the Constitution. He didn't know it yet, but Jefferson, reading this in Paris, was about to pull that thread hard. Well that's our third letter. It reached Paris on december nineteenth. Jefferson logged it in his journal of letters, and he answered it the very next day. Eight weeks at sea, answered in twenty four hours. Next time, that reply, and one of the ringing lines of the founding, a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth. Now today's letter is verified against Founders Online, the National Archives edition of the Founders' Papers. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24th, 1787, in the Papers of James Madison, volume 10. You can read every word for yourself. Well, thank you for joining us. I'm Charlie Jett. Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and stay curious.