Mr. Madison’s War Versus Mr. Bush’s War [Archive]

Galileo Galilei

10-24-2008, 04:50 PM

Mr. Madison’s War Versus Mr. Bush’s War

A comparison of James Madison and his war to George Bush and his war

Full Names

James Madison, Jr.

George W Bush

Also Known As

Father of the Constitution, Father of the Bill of Rights, Co-Author of the Federalist Papers, Author of the Virginia Resolution, 4th President of the United States, Closest confidant of Thomas Jefferson

W, Bush 43, 43rd President of the United States, Neocon

Other Names For Their War

War of 1812, the Second War of Independence, the Forgotten War

War on Terror, War Against Afghanistan, War Against Iraq, War in the Middle East and/or Central Asia

U.S Combat Deaths

Between 1500 to 2300

Over 4000 and counting

Length of War

Two years and eight months

Seven years and counting

War Declared by Congress, as Required by the Constitution?

Yes

No

War Started by a Deception?

No, James Madison clearly stated the causes for war in his war message, which included impressments of U.S. seamen by the British, British failure to abandon forts in North American as required by treaty, and decades of general meddling by a strong world power (Great Britain) against a weaker nation (United States)

[Madison’s War Message to Congress, June 1, 1812
http://www.constitution.org/jm/18120601_war.htm]

Yes, 9/11 was a false-flag military attack orchestrated by the Bush Administration.

Enemies

The British Empire

Terrorists, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, bin Laden’s driver, Saddam Hussein, KSM, Arabs, Muslims, Liberals, Traitors, Unpatriotic people, Peace Activists, Left-wingers, Democrats, Civil Libertarians, 9/11 Truthers

Enemy’s Navy

The world’s largest

None

Direct Threats to the United States

Atlantic coast blockaded, Detroit captured, Washington DC occupied, trashed and burned, Baltimore laid siege upon, New Orleans attacked

None from terrorists. The Bush Administration orchestrated the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks.

Federal Government Powers

No standing army, no central bank, no income tax, no military draft

Standing army, central bank, income tax, potential military draft

Worst Abuses of Constitution

James Madison declared a national day of prayer. Madison was also upset by some excesses of General Andrew Jackson

Bill of Rights shredded, Habeas Corpus nixed, Constitution ignored, Torture

“War Powers”

James Madison never declared that the Constitution granted him special war powers

George Bush claimed the Constitution granted him special war powers

Negotiations To Prevent War?

Yes, The Jefferson and Madison Administrations struggled for over ten years to work out a peaceful solution with the British

No, The Bush Administration made no attempt to honestly negotiate with either the Taliban or Saddam Hussein

Strategic Value of War

Conquest of Canada would have kicked British Empire out of our backyard, and increased the number of free states, perhaps leading to quicker an end to slavery

None that benefits the American people

Results of the War

The Era of Good Feelings, a decade mostly free of partisan diatribe, 45 years of peace and prosperity, interrupted only by the panic of 1819, the panic of 1837, and the Mexican War. James Madison ended his second term in 1817 as the most popular President in the history of the United States.

Bad economy, high gas prices, worldwide shame upon the United States, and other unforeseen effects in the future

Conclusion

George Santyana said that those who do not learn the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. James Madison proved that you could win a war and preserve the U.S. Constitution at the same time, even when facing a military power stronger than your own. It’s disgraceful that anyone would think that we have to throw out our rights to win the war on terror.

Written by Rolf Lindgren

Galileo Galilei

10-25-2008, 11:03 AM

"The executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war."

James Madison

Is There a “James Madison Problem”?
gordon s. wood

....

If any of the Founders was a modern man, it was not Madison but Hamilton. It was Hamilton who sought to turn the United States into a powerful modern fiscal-military state like those of Great Britain and France. Madison may have wanted a strong national government to act as an umpire over contending expressions of democracy in the states, as his Virginia Plan suggests. But he had no intention of creating the kind of modern war-making state that Hamilton had in mind. Which is why he had no sense of inconsistency in turning against the state that Hamilton was building in the 1790s.

The great development of the early modern period in the Western world was the emergence of modern nation-states with powerful executives—states that had developed the fiscal and military capacity to wage war on unprecedented scales. Over the past several decades scholars have accumulated a rich historical and sociological literature on state formation in early modern Europe.38 From the sixteenth century through the eighteenth century, the European monarchies had been busy consolidating their power and marking out their authority within clearly designated boundaries while at the same time protecting themselves from rival claimants to their power and territories. They erected ever-larger bureaucracies and military forces in order to wage war, which is what they did through most decades of three centuries. This meant the building of ever more centralized governments and the creation of ever more elaborate means for extracting money and men from their subjects.

These efforts in turn led to the growth of armies, the increase in public debts, the raising of taxes, and the strengthening of executive power.39

Such monarchical state-building was bound to provoke opposition, especially among Englishmen who had a long tradition of valuing their liberties and resisting Crown power.

The country Whig–opposition ideology that arose in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was essentially proto-republican. It was resisting just these kinds of monarchical state-building efforts taking place rather belatedly in England. When later eighteenth-century British radicals like James Burgh and Thomas Paine warned that the lamps of liberty were going out all over Europe and were being dimmed in Britain itself, it was these efforts at modern state formation that they were talking about.40 Madison, Jefferson, and many other Americans had fought the Revolution to prevent the extension of these kinds of modern state-building efforts to America. They were not about to allow Hamilton and the Federalists to turn the United States into a modern fiscal-military state burdened by debt and taxes and saddled with an expensive standing army. Such states smacked of monarchy and were designed for the waging of war. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” wrote Madison in 1795, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other [enemy].” As “the parent of armies,” war, he said, not only promoted “debts and taxes,” but it also meant that “the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.”41 These sentiments, which Madison never ceased repeating, were the source of the Republicans’ sometimes hysterical opposition to the Hamiltonian Federalist state-building schemes of the 1790s.

Many American Revolutionaries, including Jefferson and Madison, wanted to end this kind of modern state-building and the kinds of international conflicts that this state-building promoted. Just as enlightened Americans in 1776 sought a new kind of domestic politics that would end tyranny within nations, so too did they seek a new kind of international politics that would promote peace among nations and, indeed, that might even see an end to war itself.

Throughout the eighteenth century, liberal intellectuals had dreamed of a new enlightened world in which corrupt monarchical diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, standing armies, and balances of power would disappear. Monarchy, unresponsive to the will of the people, was the problem. Its bloated bureaucracies, standing armies, perpetual debts, and heavy taxes lay behind its need to wage war. Eliminate monarchy and all its accouterments, and war itself would be eliminated. A world of republican states would encourage a different kind of diplomacy, a peace-loving diplomacy—one based not on the brutal struggle for power of conventional diplomacy but on the natural concert of the commercial interests of the people of the various nations. If the people of the various nations were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republicanized, pacified, and ruled by commerce alone. Old-fashioned diplomats might not even be necessary in this new commercially linked world.42

Suddenly in 1776 with the United States isolated and outside European mercantile empires, the Americans had both an opportunity and a need to put into practice these liberal ideas about international relations and the free exchange of goods. Thus commercial interest and revolutionary idealism blended to form the basis for American thinking about foreign affairs that lasted well into the twentieth century. To some extent this blending is still present in our thinking about the world.

“Our plan is commerce,” Thomas Paine told Americans in 1776, “and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” There was no need for America to form any partial political connections with any part of Europe. Such traditional military alliances were the legacies of monarchical governments, and they only led to war. “It is the true interest of America,” said Paine, “to steer clear of European contentions.” Trade between peoples alone would be enough.43 Indeed, for Paine, Jefferson, Madison, and other idealistic liberals, peaceful trade among the people of the various nations became the counterpart in the international sphere to the sociability of people in the domestic sphere. Just as enlightened thinkers foresaw republican society held together solely by the natural affection of people, so too did they envision a world held together by the natural interests of nations in commerce. In both the national and international spheres, monarchy and its intrusive institutions and monopolistic ways were what prevented a natural harmony of people’s feelings and interests.

These enlightened assumptions are what lie behind the various measures of commercial coercion attempted by Madison, Jefferson, and other Republicans throughout the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century. They knew only too well that if republics like the United States were to avoid the consolidating processes of the swollen monarchical powers—heavy taxes, large permanent debts, and standing armies—they would have to develop peaceful alternatives to the waging of war. Madison was not a completely naive utopian. He feared, as he wrote in 1792, that “a universal and perpetual peace . . . will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts.” Nevertheless, because war was so foolish as well as wicked, he still hoped that the progress of reason might eventually end war, “and if anything is to be hoped,” he said, “every thing ought to be tried.”44

The ideal, of course, was to have the world become republican, that is, composed of states whose governments were identical with the will of the people. Jefferson and Madison believed that, unlike monarchies whose wills were independent of the wills of their subjects, self-governing republics were likely to be peace-loving—a view that Hamilton had only contempt for. Madison did concede that even republics might occasionally have to go to war. But if wars were declared solely by the authority of the people and, more important, if the costs of these wars were borne directly and solely by the generation that declared them, then, wrote Madison, “ample reward would accrue to the state.” All “wars of folly” would be avoided and only brief “wars of necessity and defence” would remain, and even these might disappear. “If all nations were to follow [this] example,” said Madison, “the reward would be doubled to each, and the temple of Janus might be shut, never to be opened again.”45 In other words, Madison believed that a republican world might be able to close the door on war forever.

In a world of monarchies, however, Madison concluded that the best hope for the United States to avoid war was to create some sort of peaceful republican alternative to war. This alternative was the use of commercial discrimination against foreign enemies backed ultimately by the withholding of American commerce; these measures were, he said, “the most likely means of obtaining our objects without war.”46 In other words, Madison proposed the use of what we now call economic sanctions—something that even today we often desperately cling to as an alternative to the direct use of military force. Given the importance Republicans attached to commerce in tying nations together, it made sense to use it as a weapon in international politics.

I suggest that this republican idealism—this fear of the modern fiscal-military state and this desire to find peaceful alternatives to war—is the best context for understanding the thinking of Madison and other Republicans. It helps to explain not only their attitude toward modern state power but also their resort to trade discrimination against Great Britain in the early 1790s. Madison and the other Republicans were so outraged at Jay’s Treaty in 1795 because the treaty took this essential weapon away from the United States. In the same way this context helps to explain Jefferson’s and Madison’s policies in the years following the lapse of Jay’s Treaty in 1806—the several non-importation and nonintercourse acts against the two European belligerents, Britain and France. These efforts came to a climax with what Jefferson called his “candid and liberal” experiment in peaceful coercion—the Republicans’ disastrous embargo of all American trade between 1807 and 1808, surely the most extraordinary example in American history of ideological principles brought directly to bear on a matter of public policy.47 Actually Madison believed in the coercive purpose of the embargo more than did Jefferson. To the end of his life Madison remained convinced that the embargo would have eventually worked if it had not been prematurely repealed.48

But probably the most convincing evidence of Madison’s being an idealistic republican seeking to avoid a strong federal government and the state-building processes characteristic of the modern European monarchies was the way he and the other Republicans prepared for and fought the War of 1812. “Prepared for” is hardly the term to use. The Republicans in the Congress talked about war, but at the same time proposed abolishing the army. They cut back the War Department and defeated efforts to build up the Navy. They abolished the Bank of the United States on the eve of hostilities, and in March 1812 they very reluctantly agreed to raise taxes, which were to go into effect, however, only if an actual war broke out.

Historians often harshly criticize Madison and the Republicans for the inept way they prepared for and conducted the war. But this criticism misses the point of what Madison and the Republicans were most frightened. As Jefferson said in 1806, “Our constitution is a peace establishment—it is not calculated for war.”49 War, the Republicans realized, would lead to a Hamiltonian monarchical-type government—with increased taxes, an overblown bureaucracy, heavy debts, standing armies, and enhanced executive power. Since war was a threat to republican principles, the Republican Party and administration would have to wage the war that began in 1812 in a manner different from the way monarchies waged war.

As Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin pointed out at the outset, the Republicans’ dilemma was to wage a war without promoting “the evils inseparable from it . . . debt, perpetual taxation, military establishments, and other corrupting or anti-republican habits or institutions.”50

Madison remained remarkably sanguine during the disastrous events of the war. Better to allow the country to be invaded and the capital to be burned than to build up state power in a European monarchical manner. Even during the war he continued to call for embargoes as the best means for fighting the war. He knew that a republican leader could not become a Napoleon or even a Hamilton. He knowingly accepted the administrative confusion and inefficiencies and the military failures, calm in the conviction that, in a republic, strong executive leadership could only endanger the principles for which the war was fought.51

So even though the war settled nothing, it actually settled everything. It vindicated the grand revolutionary experiment in limited republican government. As the City of Washington declared in a formal tribute to the president, the sword of war had usually been wielded at the expense of “civil or political liberty.” But this was not the case with President Madison in the war against Britain. Not only had the president restrained the sword “within its proper limits” but he also had directed “an armed force of fifty thousand men aided by an annual disbursement of many millions, without infringing a political, civil, or religious right.” As one admirer noted, Madison had withstood both a powerful foreign enemy and widespread domestic opposition “without one trial for treason, or even one prosecution for libel.”52

Historians living in a world dominated by theories of preemptive war, a vast federal bureaucracy, a sprawling Pentagon, an enormous CIA, huge public debts, taxes beyond any the Founders could have imagined, and well over a million men and women under arms may not appreciate Madison’s achievement, but contemporaries did. “Notwithstand[ing] a thousand Faults and blunders,” John Adams told Jefferson in 1817, Madison’s administration had “acquired more glory, and established more Union than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, put together.”53

We historians have gotten so used to praising Madison the author of the Tenth Federalist and denigrating Madison the president that we assume they must be two different Madisons. But there is no “Madison Problem” except the one that we have concocted.

Maybe we ought to spend less time investigating Madison the author of the Tenth Federalist and more time investigating Madison the president. His conception of war and the world, whether we agree with it or not, might give us a better perspective on the confusing times in which we live.

http://74.125.95.104/search?q=cache:Vohs0mU0OEAJ:oll.libertyfund.org/%3Foption%3Dcom_staticxt%26staticfile%3Dshow.php%2 53Ftitle%3D1727%26chapter%3D81746%26layout%3Dhtml% 26Itemid%3D27+james+madison+gordon+wood+liberty+fu nd&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us

http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1727&chapter=81746&layout=html&Itemid=27

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (Paperback)
by Gordon S. Wood
http://www.amazon.com/Revolutionary-Characters-What-Founders-Different/dp/0143112082

Libertarian primer on the Constitution
by Louise Dotter
http://www.madison.com/wsj/home/column/other/275502

A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison
by Paul Jennings
http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=48

James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights
by Richard Labunski
http://www.amazon.com/Madison-Struggle-Pivotal-Moments-American/dp/0195181050

Pacificus Helvidius Debates of 1793-1794
by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison
http://www.amazon.com/PACIFICUS-HELVIDIUS-DEBATES-1793-179/dp/0865976880

Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787
by James Madison
http://www.amazon.com/Debates-Federal-Convention-Reported-Madison/dp/0393304051/ref=pd_sim_b_title_1

Marbury v. Madison : The Origins and Legacy of Judicial Review
by William Edward Nelson
http://www.amazon.com/Marbury-v-Madison-Origins-Judicial/dp/0700610626/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1210609348&sr=1-3

Science and the Founding Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and Madison
by I. Bernard Cohen
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Founding-Fathers-Political-Jefferson/dp/039331510X

The Presidency of James Madison
by Robert Allen Rutland
http://www.amazon.com/Presidency-James-Madison-American/dp/0700604650

The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776-1826
by James Morton Smith
http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Letters-Correspondence-Jefferson-1776-1826/dp/039303691X

James Madison: A Biography
by Ralph Ketcham
http://www.amazon.com/James-Madison-Biography-Ralph-Ketcham/dp/0813912652

The Last of the Fathers: James Madison & The Republican Legacy
by Drew R. McCoy
http://www.amazon.com/Last-Fathers-Madison-Republican-Legacy/dp/0521407729