◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE: From the Tomb I am James Madison. Of Montpelier, in Virginia. Born 1751, died 1836, the last of them. I outlived every other man who signed that document, and I knew what that meant. It meant the last living memory of the room was mine, and when I went, the room would become a story, and stories can be told any way you like. You should know that I have done this before. In 1830 I wrote out a paper, sealed it, and left instructions that it not be opened until I was dead. I began it by saying that advice issuing from the tomb may be trusted, because a man in the tomb has nothing left to gain by lying. Six years later they opened it. It was short. It said the advice nearest my heart is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated, and it named two enemies of it. The open one, and the disguised one, creeping like the serpent into the garden. I wrote that from the tomb once already. I am simply going to finish it. Now let me tell you how the thing works, because you use it every day and I do not think you know. I did not believe in good men. That was the whole of my method. I assumed the officeholder would be vain, grasping, and jealous, and I built a machine that ran on those very qualities rather than one that required their absence. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. Men are not angels. So set ambition against ambition. Give each branch the means and the motive to resist encroachment by the others. The Congress will guard its powers because they are its powers. The court will guard its own. No one will need to be virtuous. Each will merely need to be possessive. That is the engine. That is the entire design. And I will tell you plainly what I am watching, because it is the joint where my machine has failed. Your Congress does not want its power. I did not foresee that. I built the whole apparatus on the assumption that a man given authority would clutch it, that a legislature would no more surrender its prerogative to a President than a farmer would hand over his fields. But your legislators have found something they prize more than their own institution. They prize the favor of the man at the head of their party, because his favor is what returns them to the seat. And so they hand him the fields and thank him for taking them. Ambition counteracting ambition requires that the ambition attach to the office. Yours has attached to a person. My machine has no part that can fix that. It was never in the design. The correction has to come from you, at the ballot, or it does not come. In the second of these I will tell you the thing a man says only from the tomb, where there is nothing left to gain by lying. PART TWO: The One Thing I Never Revised I am James Madison again. In the first of these I gave you the machine: ambition set against ambition, and the joint where it has failed, because your Congress no longer wants its own power. That was the diagnosis. This is the confession, and I will not evade it, because a man speaking from the tomb who evades has wasted his one advantage. Begin with what I want you to weigh in my favor, because it is the whole reason the rest of this is damning. I was wrong about many things, and I corrected them. I opposed a Bill of Rights. I thought it unnecessary. I thought it dangerous, even — that naming some rights would imply the surrender of the ones you forgot to name. And then I was argued out of it, and I sat down and drafted those amendments myself. The man they call the father of the Constitution was talked out of his own position and wrote the correction with his own hand. Notice that. I could revise. I did revise. I was not a man imprisoned by his certainties. I revised everything except the one thing that needed it most. When they buried me at Montpelier, roughly a hundred human beings stood at that grave whom I owned. I freed none of them. Not one. Not Paul Jennings, who had dressed and shaved and attended me for sixteen years, and was in the room when I died. He was sold afterward for two hundred dollars. He earned his freedom from another man, and in his old age he gave money out of his own pocket to my widow, who by then was poor. I wrote that all men are created equal in their rights. I revised myself on nearly every question a man can face. And I never revised that one. Do not tell yourselves it was the age. That is the comfort I most want to take from you. Men in that same room told me plainly it was a sin. I heard them. I understood the argument. I was capable, as I have just shown you, of changing my mind against my own interest. And I kept my hundred people anyway, because changing it there would have cost me everything I owned, and I found I could revise everything except that. So take my machine, which is good, from a man who was not. Do not wait for good men. I told you at the start I never believed in them, and I was the proof. Watch the disguised enemy, the one who says he loves the country while he takes it apart, who is cheered while he does it. My paper named him from the tomb two hundred years ago. And find officeholders who love their office more than they love him. That is the missing part, the piece I could not build into the machine. The ambition has to attach to the chair, not to the man in it. I could not build that. You have to elect it.