The Genius of America by Eric Lane

They had already fought too hard and sacrificed too much. They refused to accept that Americans could not govern themselves. “It is evident,” wrote James Madison, “that no other form” of government other than a republic “would be reconcilable with the genius of the people of America; with the fundamental principles of the Revolution; or with that honorable determination, which animates every votary of freedom.” James Wilson of Pennsylvania said, “The citizens of the United States, however different in some other respects, are well known to agree in one strongly-marked feature of their character—a warm and keen sense of freedom and independence.”
    But if they were to go forward, if they were to preserve the liberty they had fought for, they had to invent a new kind of government. “The American war is over,” Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania wrote in January of 1787 in his address to the people of the United States. “But this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is disclosed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens, for these forms of government, after they are established and brought to perfection.”
    They needed a new government based not on the romantic ideal of public virtue but on recognizing people as they really are. They needed a government that guaranteed liberty, while protecting people from the excesses of liberty. They needed a government that would channel self-interests, rather than counting on people to set them aside. They needed, Madison said, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.”
    And so they gathered in Philadelphia and invented one.

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    APPROACHING SO NEAR TO
PERFECTION AS IT DOES
    Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?
    â€”A LEXANDER H AMILTON , 1787
    A NESSAY ON Thomas Jefferson once defined genius as the capacity to see ten things where the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to then apply those perceptions to the material of his art. Rarely has there been a man who better illustrates this definition of genius than Jefferson’s friend James Madison. Madison’s grasp of the political world of 1787 was unsurpassed. He then applied those perceptions to a work that was to the art of government as brilliant and inventive in its age as Einstein’s rethinking of time and space, and Picasso’s reshaping of form and image, were in theirs. Madison wrote the blueprint for American democracy. Then he did even more. He carefully guided his plan through the convention in Philadelphia. To succeed, the delegates, Madison included, had to compromise on many specific points. By modifying his own proposals, even if sometimes grudgingly, Madison became both the father of the Constitution and the midwife of the most important principle underlying the nation’s success: His new political structure only worked if its participants were willing to compromise. The spirit of America, as drafted by James Madison and revised by the delegates at Philadelphia, was a spirit of compromise.
    The story of the convention at Philadelphia has been told many times. Each generation finds its own meaning. The framers meant to give the states great power, or no power at all, went the arguments before the Civil War. The framers were heavily motivated by mercantile interests, or barely motivated by them at all, raged the debate as the frontier closed and the nation’s industrial might rolled.
    We touch on the story again to recall what we think is valuable and relevant to our age: this spirit