Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne Read Free Book Online Page B

brilliant tactical move that probably saved the Constitution. Ratification by comfortable margins in Maryland (April 28, 1788) and South Carolina (May 23) brought the number of ratifying states to eight. When New Hampshire reconvened and ratified on June 21, 1788, by a vote of 57–47, the new Constitution officially became law in the nine ratifying states.
    Without Virginia and New York, though, it would’ve been stillborn. After bitterly contested elections in each state, Virginia ratified on June 26, 1788, by a vote of 89–79, and New York followed suit on July 26 with a razor-thin ratification margin of 30–27. The New York vote was something of a surprise, for the Anti-Federalists appeared to control the convention by a wide margin. Once again, the tactical brilliance of the Federalists in delaying New York’s vote until ten other states had ratified probably snatched victory from almost certain defeat. Virginia narrowly rejected a conditional ratification, expressly contingent on the adoption of a bill of rights. New York’s ratification came with twenty-five proposed rights amendments and thirty-one other assorted suggested changes. North Carolina and Rhode Island refused to ratify until a bill of rights was adopted. North Carolina finally ratified on November 21, 1789, ayear after Washington was elected president. Rhode Island held out until May 29, 1790, and ratified by a vote of 34–32, but not until the Rhode Island delegates adamantly demanded a bill of rights, despite the fact one had already been adopted by Congress eight months earlier.
    The first United States Congress elected under the new Constitution was scheduled to convene on March 4, 1789, but didn’t assemble a quorum until April 1. Actually, it was the nation’s fourth Congress. The first Continental Congress met briefly in 1774 to coordinate economic resistance to Great Britain. The second Continental Congress reconvened in 1775 after Lexington and Concord, issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776, appointed George Washington as commander in chief, and remained in session until 1781 to manage (or mismanage) the Revolutionary War. The third congress, the Confederation Congress, was a unicameral legislature established under the Articles of Confederation. The Confederation Congress was in session from 1781 to 1789. It negotiated the Treaty of Paris, ending the Revolutionary War, enacted the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, set in motion the process of drafting a new constitution, and organized the first elections for president and Congress under the new Constitution in November 1788.
    When it finally got to work on April 1, 1789, the first United States Congress had a lot on its plate. The executive and judicial branches had to be created and organized from scratch. Given the press of urgent business, Congress was in no hurry to consider a bill of rights. Only after Virginia and New York had submitted formal demands on May 5 and 6 for a new constitutional convention capable of rewriting the entire document was Madison able to focus his colleagues’ attention on a declaration of rights. On June 8, 1789, Madison, who had won a hard-fought congressional election victory against James Monroe, finally took the floor of the House of Representatives and proposed a draft declaration of rights in the form of a series of freestanding constitutional amendments to be interpolated into the existing text. Madison’s House colleaguescomplained long and loud about being diverted from really important work but reluctantly agreed to hear him out.
    Madison was a political genius but a very reluctant poet. As of June 8, 1789, he had no intention of drafting a bill of rights at all, much less a coherent poem to human freedom. Instead, he proposed that a series of rights-declaring clauses be interpolated into the body of the Constitution at the point where the potentially dangerous government power the clauses were designed to