Volume 53, Number 19 · November 30, 2006
Without Him, No Bill of Rights
By Gordon S. Wood
James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights
by Richard Labunski
Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $28.00
James Madison is being subjected to some very hard knocks at the hands of historians these days. Not only has he been pictured as a lifelong apologist for slavery, but he has even been replaced as 'the Father of the Constitution' by none other than John Rutledge of South Carolina.[1] Much of the general public might not notice these criticisms, especially since most Americans over the past two centuries have not celebrated Madison as much as they ought to have. He has no temple erected to him on the Mall, and only recently did he have a building that is part of the Library of Congress named after him. While Monticello, the home of his friend and older colleague Thomas Jefferson, has been restored to Jeffersonian perfection and for decades has been a shrine visited by tens of thousands of people every year, Madison's home, Montpelier, is only now being restored to the condition it was in when Madison lived there. To the public he has always seemed smaller than Jefferson in every way. Not only was he merely five feet six or so to Jefferson's six two or six three, but he never seems to have escaped from Jefferson's shadow. In their great collaboration throughout their lives he was at all times the subordinate sidekick, ready 'always,' as he told Jefferson in 1794, to 'receive your commands with pleasure.'
Review, 4168 words
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