Transcripts For CSPAN QA Noah Feldman 20180122

Announcer this week on q a, author and Harvard Law School professor noah feldman. Professor feldman discusses his book the three lives of james and madison genius, partisan, president. Brian noah feldman, what are a the three lives of James Madison that you wrote about . Noah the first life is the one that is most famous. In an minute is where he invented the constitution. Not only in our country but also the greatest constitutional genius in the world. In his second life, he discovered the constitution was not perfect. He thought he had fought against political parties, he actually founded the Republican Party to fight the Federalist Party and Alexander Hamilton. He became a partisan very much against his own wishes. In his third life, he got to be secretary of state for eight years and president for eight more. He got to take on all of the decisions when you are running the show, and faithfully taking us into the first war. Very much against the principles of his lifetime. Which was against the Standing Army and the navy. Brian talk about him as a person, size and health problems, and all that. Noah he was very different than the other founders. He was in his head. That is how we would put it today i think. He was deeply committed to reason and logic. He hated public speaking. He hated public disagreement. He was much smaller than the others. He was maybe five foot six inches tall. He may have been shorter according to some accounts. He was very cautious about his health. He did not want to get sick did the sick and as a result, he never took a sea voyage anywhere. He was susceptible to serious attacks of what we would probably called migraines. Intense headaches. They happened at crucial stressful moments, each time he powered through. He would be in bed for a few days, he would force himself back into the saddle and do whatever he was doing. Brian for a guy who was sickly, he lived until he was 85. Noah he was just sick enough to be worried about his health. That was a good strategy and the world where they did not understand anything about infection. They just knew it was out there. Several very important decisions were based on avoiding places he thought there would be yellow fever. He was usually correct, he avoided places where there were mosquitoes. Even though nobody knew at the time it was mosquitoes that gave you yellow fever. Brian if he was sitting right here, what would you ask him . Noah if he was sitting i would want to ask what we should do about our own partisanship, his view was you should only be a partisan to put an end to partisanship. The Republican Party was going to let an end to all republican parties. The federalists more or less shrunk to nothing in response to his onslaught. He did not clearly understand how to sustain a long run in the republic. I would like to hear his thoughts about that. Brian how many languages do you speak . Noah hebrew, arabic, french, there are some dead languages that i would not get to deeply into. Brian when he was at princeton or new jersey, he also studied hebrew, why . Noah i think in the 18th century, if you were at a protestant institution, you had to study the bible. Hebrew was the language of the old testament. Thats why he poked around in it. He did say that he tried very hard to learn hebrew. Brian when did you find out he was a smart person . Noah that was one of the few things i could see up front. He was certainly book smart in the traditional sense. He was the most prepared founder. That was the reason for his success. His response to any deep policy problem was to dig down and much as he could. When he was first elected, the big problem was the shrinking money supply. Instead of just mouthing off, he borrowed books, and buried himself, and tried to write as much as he could about the topic. You can see through his notes a mind in action and at work. The big challenge for him throughout his life was translating the book smart learning into realworld political judgment. There he proceeded like the rest , of us, through trial and error. He would advocate a policy that was created that made sense in light of what he knew. If it did not work he would try to do it differently. Brian how much influence the did James Madison have on the iraq constitution . Noah when we first met, almost 15 years ago, i was briefly a constitutional advisor to the first u. S. Provisional government in iraq. That became the basis for their final constitution. The truth is, madison did have an influence on all constitutions in the world really. One was the idea of federalism. Today, we think of that as a that waspect, but pretty innovative in the u. S. Constitution. That is the idea whether is it Central Government that does have direct Legal Authority over citizens. Then you have state governments that enjoy power over individuals. That is a complex compromise that came out of our philadelphia convention. A compromise also came out of the iraqi process which also involves federalism. In their case, asymmetric federalism. The rest of the country is allowed to organize into regions but typically has not. There is one direct influence. The other is freedom of speech and religious liberty, which is enshrined in the iraqi constitution. I am not saying it is perfectly obeyed there by any stretch of the imagination, but it is on the books. That is an example of a provision that goes right back to the u. S. Constitution. Brian how long did you work with the iraqis and what is your biggest memory from that experience . Noah i was there for several months. Then i continued to work from afar, with their regional sites where i would meet up with the iraqis. I would say my strongest memory of being there are the fact of the strangeness of a scenario where the u. S. Government, this incredibly powerful entity, had knocked out the government, we nor anybody else on the ground were clear on what was going to happen next. I have a very vivid memory of being pulled over on the side of the road in a neighborhood, with just a couple of other americans who were soldiers. We were in a couple of humvees, iraqis came over and asking us in arabic what was going on. They asked when the electricity was coming back on. I had to say, i am sorry, i dont know. They asked when the schools are opening, i said i hope they open soon. Finally, they said who is in charge, who is the government . I would momentarily blocked. I was momentarily blocked. I was not sure what the question meant. Then they asked the question again. I said it is president bushs special envoy. They looked at me and said they had never heard of him but at least somebody is in charge. That really hit home, we had not managed to communicate to the country that we were in charge. And i think that had very important longterm consequences. Brian how important was your arabic in that situation of trying to help them write a constitution . Noah it was centrally important because structure will only get you so far. It is understanding the people who are doing the drafting, their culture, their belief, and their values. In the end it is always their culture that matters the most. Language is a great tool to break through. Contemporary contemporaries not spoken the same language, it would have been very difficult to get together and negotiate an argument. In iraq that was a problem. The younger kurds rarely even speak arabic. So it is difficult to produce Real National unity in the absence of lingual unity. Brian what are you doing fulltime now . Noah i am a professor of law at Harvard Law School. It is a good day job. I love teaching constitutional law to my students, it enables me to keep on writing and doing research. I write a column for Bloomberg View which is a fun way of expressing a view about contemporary events alongside the serious work of trying to do research. Brian you dedicated your madison book to a professor at harvard. What does it mean to be his clerk . Noah they are both about relationships. The first is a living person, the second is a person i never knew. Justice souter, whom i worked for and to whom i dedicated the book was an extraordinary boss. He was just a deeply inspiring figure in the justice system. He was a bipartisanoriented republican. He was a member of the Republican Party for most of his career until he went on the bench and put aside his partisan affiliation. He was deeply committed to the constitution. He was just a profoundly humane, deeply well read, and inspiring person. A person of probity and rectitude, that everybody was struck by his honesty and his straightforwardness. You always knew exactly where he where you stand with him. That has been a great and lifelong relationship for me. Brian how much did James Madison and Justice Souter affect your clerkship . Noah he did very much. Every summer, the justice would give the incoming clerks an assignment to research some problem. There were some cases as it turned out, they did not get argued that term. He gave us a Research Project on early american thoughts about religious liberty and a bunch of specific context. Madison was a core essential source for that. Madisonery deeply into through that research. This was when i understood this is a person who deserves deep scrutiny. Even though that was 20 years ago, he very much informed that going into the world. I think he takes madison very seriously. There are other Founding Fathers he also likes. That is a great skill for the justice. Brian i was looking at some past material when you are getting i think an appointment to a professorship by elana kagan. She was the dean. And you . T her noah i have enormous respect for the justice. When she hired me, she was the dean at the law school there. I was incredibly lucky to have a chance to work under her. To observe her technique and relatively soon thereafter, she went off to washington, to work for the Obama Administration on the Supreme Court. We did not get to work with each other for too many years. I look up to her very much and would like to consider her a friend if it is not too presumptuous. Brian what is her technique . Noah her technique as a justice is some way reminiscent of Justice Souter. Shelooks at text but then, goes beyond that. She does not restrict herself to that analysis. Where she differs is that she is much more colloquial on the court, she is very punchy. She wants the reader to sit up and take notice. She often writes for a nonlegal audience. That is a Remarkable Development in the history of the court. She is one of the clearest and most nontechnical writers that the court has seen in many, many decades. Brian so what does it mean to be the Felix Frankfurter professor . Is somebody iit wrote about in a book about fdr. I found him deeply, personally challenging and somebody who began his career as a liberal. He was a nationally known liberal law professor teaching at Harvard Law School. The key to his liberalism was judicial restraint. That is because the Supreme Court at the time was a conservative libertarian majority Supreme Court. Frankfurter objected to the way that Supreme Court was blocking progressive legislation. He developed the idea of restraint to try to block them. Years, roosevelt managed to appoint a majority of them to the court. Frankfurter believed they should still exercise restraint. They came to see him as a judicial conservative, having come to the bench as a liberal. Ultimately, he ended his career being seen as very conservative and dissenting from some of the great liberal judgments. There were exceptions, he was an active majority in the brown versus the board of education case. He was prepared to be an activist. He is left with academics and people like me who value the fact that he was committed to what i would like to think of as objective as he could be in terms of the values he took. No one is a objective. We are all human. He tried to stick with the philosophy that he believed was true and he was perceived as a liberal. He never gave that up. That is a great model, to hold the professorship of his name to try to challenge the occupier to try and explain the constitution and its values to the world. Also to try and hold onto the principal and try not to be swayed too much by the whims of that political tendency. Brian i want to read a quote from your book about the justice. This is from joseph story. He was 32 when he was appointed. These are his writings. I wish i was somebody perfectly fit for the task would write a full and accurate biography of medicine. I fear that it can hardly be done now, for the men who best appreciated his excellences have nearly all passed away. What shadows we are. Are you perfectly fit for the task of this enormous biography on James Madison . Noah no. That is one reason when i came across that quote, i have a portrait of him on my wall, i wanted to include it. In 1842, joseph story could bemoan the fact that he and his colleagues were shadows compared to the greats. Just imagine how much more shadow like we are 150160 years later. That was myself saying, do your best, it does not have to be perfect, just produce the best biography you can. I care about the constitution, that is my stock in trade. Ultimately, for constitutionalists, James Madison is our einstein. There is nobody more significant to the field. It was a big job, and it would take a while to create. I wanted to sink my teeth into it and i did. Brian there is another famous Supreme Court justice, John Marshall, what was the relationship between madison and marshall back in the days . He was there 34 years as chief justice. The longest serving. Who learned from which one . Noah they had a very complicated ongoing relationship. For one thing, madison succeeded marshall in the division of secretary of state. Marshall was secretary of state under adams before he was chief justice. It was the succession that led to the case of marbury v madison. When marshall was still secretary of state, he was supposed to deliver a commission to marbury, he never managed to deliver. Marbury then sued madison. He refused and that led to the case. Remarkably, John Marshall wrote the opinion even though the case was his failure to deliver. In essence, marshall was an unusual person, he was a virginia federalist. He was from virginia, just like madison was. Most of the virginia gentleman strongly supported the cause of the Republican Party. That is, they were a little bit skeptical of too much central, federal power. They believed to a moderate degree in states rights. That was not the position that on federald acted powers. In that sense, he and madison were political opponents. From the bench, where he was chief justice, he kept up a steady stream of indirect critique of the republican administration, as best as he could. I would say, looking back, it after a couple hundred years, marshall and madison probably agreed on more than they disagreed. They both took a central middle ground on the question of federal and congressional power. In what was probably the most important case, the chief justice stood for the idea that what Powers Congress needed to exercise, what were necessary to fulfilling basic tasks laid down in the articles of the constitution, it had. Those necessary and proper causes have the effect of allowing congress an opinion. That is basically what madison believed, but marshall said there are still some limits to what he can do. Madison also believed there were some limits. Brian when did you decide to do this book . How hard was it to sell to the publisher and when did you start your research . Noah i decided about eight years ago. Then i started doing the research seven years ago. It was tricky to convince the publishers that we needed a madison biography. There hadnt been a full madison biography since 1971. That was a long time ago. I said we need a new madison for a new generation. At the time, i thought maybe there would be some similarities between madison and obama. Both calm, rational, so restrained that their critics complained they did not show enough passion. Each pulled into a war that they did not want to be involved in. The war of 1812 for madison and the war in afghanistan for obama. As i did the research, it became clear the differences between them were much greater than the similarities. In particular, obama had his amazing public capacity to speak and hold audience which was so lacking in madison. And madisons excessive control concerned with constitutional details was not obamas character. Awayesearch took me far from where i had begun. There is an important lesson there, you never know where youre going when you write a book. Fundamentally, the world looks different than when i started writing and the lessons that can be drawn from the book look different. Brian how do you set Something Like this up if it is eight years to get to this book . Where did you operate from . How many places did you have to go to to research . Put that together for us. Noah i was very lucky. Montpelier, where he is from, has a terrific staff of archivists. They were very generous in sharing their materials with me and i drew on that. Brian about an hour and a half south from here in virginia. Noah yes. It is a great place to visit and they have done a great job. That was especially helpful to me, researching slavery at the madison household which was an important theme of the book. That is the reality of madison. He was born in the arms of a slave and a slave closed his eyes when he he died. They were constant in that aspect of his life. Brian how many did he have . Noah his family had more than 100 slaves when he was born. There were fewer than that when he died. Ultimately, Dolley Madison sold those slaves to support herself later in life. That is not because she was free freeing them, she needed the money. I was very lucky in terms of montpelier. Another thing that was fortunate is that scholars have been working for decades and decades, compiling every scrap of paper madison ever wrote on. He himself tried to collect and edit his own papers. He wrote to the families and said can i have a copy of the letter that i sent your father or your grandfather . He did that in part to raise money. Those are now gathered and published as the James Madison papers. It is a long series by the university of chicago and virginia. Increasingly, they have also been digitized. Not 100 but a huge number of them have been digitized. So, i have a lot of Resources Available to me that made my life easier. Madison had good handwriting. The transcribers did a great job. The problem was the sheer mass of material. There are so many volumes of madisons writing. I read them all. Theres no way around it. You have do read every word and then you have to try to weigh them and tell a story. Brian how do you do it . Do you take notes . How do you collect the information after you have read all of this . Noah i usually sat with the books or the papers over here, and the computer over here. When i came across a passage that seemed especially important, i would turn and type it into the computer. I think at some point, you will just be able to cut and paste. I think that was extremely helpful. Youre putting yourself in the mind of madison. You try to talk like he talked. Over time, through the notes that you have taken, a coherent story starts to emerge and you have to make sure youre not doing what henry ford called history. One thing after another. You have to make sure this fits together as a story. You are not writing a novel, you are writing a biography. You want to have a structure that is true to the fact of how things develop. For that you really have to be a little lucky, you have to hope someones life story is coherent. I think his was, partly because he was so analytic he was always trying to make sense of everything around him and put it in a logical format. By following his inner experience, i think i was able to tell the story in a way that i hope at least holds together. Brian the personal relationships, you read your books between madison and jefferson and hamilton at washington, you say there is a point where madison and washington fell out and never saw each other again. What was that . Noah personal relationships are everything to me. Madison was not a guy who liked to be out there on the front lines waving a flag. He liked to be the person making things happen from the back room. The way he did that was through these very intense close , personal relationships. Occasionally, these friendships became enemies. In the case of washington, madison went from being a very close ally of the washingtons helping to convince him to bring the constitutional convention. Eventually madison and randolph got him around. When washington became president , madison was sort of his man in congress. In fact, in the very First Exchange between washington and madison goes through his reply. He goes through washingtons reply to congress. Madison was literally talking to himself and producing these documents. That shows you how close he and washington really were. They eventually fell out over potentially washingtons policy of favoring england over france. It was a time of deep tension between the two countries. Madison believed in a fundamental way that the u. S. Had signed a treaty with france and owed it to france to stay with it and frances war with england. Washington was more probritish. He declared neutrality in the war which given that we had a treaty with france are not and not england was perceived by madison and others as a probritish position. Rather than pure neutrality, this was a concern that favored the british. Madison criticized him, he went further than criticizing his policy, he made the argument that washington was overstepping his constitutional bounds by declaring neutrality. Madison wanted to argue that only congress can declare neutrality. Washington cared a lot about his reputation and was deeply committed to the constitution. He deeply resented the idea that madison was suggesting he may have overstepped constitutional bounds. Hamilton was in the background egging on washington at the same time. And ultimately, what washington could not give what he perceived as a stain on his reputation. They just stopped speaking. After washington died, madison introduced special legislation in honor of washington. He helped put money aside for a monument. In fact, he and jefferson believed that washington had become a partisan federalist. They thought washingtons farewell address was totally and was not something that should be valued for the ages. Brian you come to washington, there is a big statue but there is not a big one for madison. Why is that . Noah the constitution is madisons monument. In that way, the monument for madison is all around you in washington, d. C. The three structures of governments. The way people speak to each other, the exercise of free speech, all of that is his monument. Sort of like the case in st. Pauls where he said look around you. If you are looking for madisons monument in washington, d. C. , it is all around you. Madison did not have a single author document in the way the declaration of independence was written by jefferson. He did not have jeffersons love of the crowd. He did not have his incredible gift for expression. Jefferson was a true genius of expression. Utterly brilliant. He loved a pithy, sharp formulation and the declaration is a monument to that. A lot of times madison was moderating jeffersons enthusiasm. That was his own perception of what his own job was. Madison never wanted to overshadow jefferson. He would have been very happy there was a monument to jefferson. He would not have wanted a monument to himself. That turned out well for both of them. I think jefferson would have loved the idea that there was a monument to himself. Brian a couple of things, why did he send his stepson to the negotiation of the treaty of ghent . You never heard anything good about his son. Madison had a tough relationship with his stepson. Dolley, shen met had, less than a year before lost her husband and infant to , the yellow fever epidemic. She had one surviving son whom they called payne. Madison and dolley never had children of their own. He became a stepfather to payne. He always tried to get him into the best schools. Payne did not have the instincts of a public servant. Madison was trying to get him worldly experience. The u. S. Team was negotiating to try to end the war of 1812. Sent payne over there. Payne was exposed to european aristocratic styles, but didnt have aristocratic style. He borrowed money, spent it, gambled away and came back with huge debt. Madsion did not want dolley to know about this, so he paid the debts. That was a mistake because payne repeated this again and again. He would repeatedly come back with debt and madison would buy him out of debtors prison. He spent so much cash trying to solve paynes economic troubles, he did not have the cash left to give to dolley. Brian we spent a year listening to people talking about Jared Kushner being involved in international relations. What would happen today if madison were here and payne, his stepson, was involved in something as important as the treaty of ghent . Noah as far as i was able to ascertain, he had almost no role in the treaty. He was essentially an intern. Nevertheless, we might raise our eyebrows at the president sending his stepson off and being involved in Something Like a treaty. But it is not like he played an Important Role in those negotiations. They were responsible politicians who were approved by congress. They had to be confirmed by the senate to participate. They did the heavy lifting. Not the only thing in madisons career where you would raise your eyebrows. Madison was obsessively concerned not to take a penny from the public. There were no corruption scandals in his presidency. To ask you about a footnote in the back. It starts off as the africanamerican kiersey family preserves the tradition that they were descended from James Madison and an enslaved woman named coreen. There is a website that you cite. Who is she and what is this about . Noah these days, when you write a biography of the Founding Fathers, you have to think seriously about the question of descendents, including africanamerican descendents. The reason for this, as my wonderful colleague showed in her two books about the hemmings family, that jefferson, almost certainly, was the father of Sally Hemmings children. Family preserved this tradition for centuries and nobody believed them. It took a combination of reeds work and dna testing for them to be acknowledged. I thought, i had better do the same research for madison. It is entirely possible he wasnt biologically able to have children. Y were married for many years. We know that she was able to have children, yet they never had children. One possibility is that madison was unable to have children. Nevertheless i went looking to , see if there were africanamericans who reported a family tradition. I found one family through their website. The woman who maintains it is a physician. She and her family have this tradition. I did what i could to see if i could find further evidence in support of the tradition. I wasnt able to find any. You never know. It would be hard to do the dna testing, because we dont have direct descendents of madison, since there is nobody who is a child of his. In the library of congress, there is a portrait of madison that he presented to a young woman he called kitty. They were not engaged, but they were engaged to be engaged. They exchanged portraits. Behind the portrait there is a lock of his hair. It was a nice chestnut when he was young. My friends who were dna scientists, it would not be easy it is not outside the bound of possibility that you might be able to extract dna from that hair. If that were the case you might , be able to do future dna testing. Maybe somebody will do that. It was beyond the scope of my investigation. Have you asked anybody if they were going to do it . I dont think anybody is planning to do it at the moment. An interesting twist to this is that one of hemmingss children was named James Madison hemmings. They called him madison throughout his life. According to his family tradition, this was because Dolley Madison had requested of Sally Hemmings that this happened. It is kind of remarkable and poetic that jefferson had a son and grandson named James Madison. But as far as we know, madison did not have any offspring of his own. Brian he was one of 12 children, six of them lived to be adults. Where did the other of the children in the family fit . Did they become anything significant . Noah they really did not. We have one angry letter from madison to his brother in a response to a attempt by Patrick Henry to make an approach to his brother willie. Madison was not especially close to his actual brothers and but he was very close with a succession of men his own age. Edmund randolph. James monroe. Those were crucial relationships in his life. They were like sibling relationships. They apparently substituted in some way. He was not that close to his actual, biological siblings. Brian how mean would it have been back then when james monroe challenged James Madison for the seat in the house of representatives . Noah i think it is incredibly shocking. The background is, right after the constitution had been ratified at the convention, where madison had gone headtohead with Patrick Henry, madison won and henry lost. Henry opposed ratification. Although madison controlled the constitutional convention, henry still controlled the Virginia State legislature. Henry gerrymandered the districts in madisons home area of virginia to produce a district full of antifederalists. Then he convinced james monroe, one of madisons best friends in the world, henry seduced monroe, probably by telling him you will defeat madison, this was right after madison had drafted the constitution. Monroe made a run for it. I find it extraordinary he would have done this against his close friend. It was the heart of winter. They went town to town and participated in public and outdoor meetings where they would debate questions of the ratification of the constitution. Madison got frostbite on his nose, he liked to tell the story later and point to the spot on his nose. Madison pulled it off but just barely. And there was an incredible letter that madison wrote to jefferson. Jefferson was in france. He said, you will be sorry to hear that i had the misfortune of running against a close friend of ours, monroe. It is over and our friendship is unaffected on my side. I think jefferson believed him. I think madison actually meant it. He was able to forgive monroe. Had monroe won, madisons whole career would have been over. 30 years later, the whole process was repeated again. Monroe had been convinced by other virginians that he should come back and run for president against madison, when madison was supposed to inherit the presidency from jefferson. Time, monroe did it. He ran against his close friend, lost, and again madison for dave forgave him. In his presidency, madison asked monroe to be his secretary of state. I think he genuinely missed monroe. I think he genuinely forgave him for trying to upstage him. That is a remarkable sign of madisons character. It is a sign of his capacity to be seeking after friendship and forgiving. Brian in 2005, we took our cameras to the constitution center. I want you to solve a problem. The first time i read about James Madison, he was 52. Then he was 54. Then he was 56. Here is video. We are Walking Around with a famous historian, looking at George Washington and James Madison. I want you to tell us how tall you think he was. [video clip] you have George Washington, the father of our country and James Madison the father of the constitution, the shortest delicate and the tallest delegate. Brian i am 57. How tall was he . 63. How tall was madison . 54. Noah i wanted an accurate statement. We know that dolley was 57. We were looking for somebody to have written a description of them standing next to each other. Someone saying, they were the same height or dolley was taller. The concern with height was less pervasive. Today it is unimaginable that we would not know exactly how tall the president is. I pretty sure he was shorter am than dolley. Brian they were 14 years apart . Noah correct. Brian who introduced James Madison to Dolley Madison and under what environment . Noah they were introduced by aaron burr who went down in infamy for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Burr was a sociable guy. He was famous among the young women of the city it was a quaker city. Young women of quaker background were not supposed to learn to draw, learn to read music. Burr liked to help them overcome these strictures. Dolley wrote about it that many young women had burr to thank for learning these accomplishments. What happened was that madison was walking with a congressman, a distant cousin of dolleys saw her on the street and wanted to meet her. He went to aaron burr because he knew everybody. Her that the great madison would like to meet you. They chatted, and within a matter of weeks, madison wrote her letters. Brian what impact did she have on him . Noah she had an enormous impact on him. And a enormous impact on the country. An argument can be made that Dolley Madison was the most important first lady we have ever had. She got 16 years to be first lady. From 18001808, jefferson was president and not married. His wife had died. We know he had a relationship with Sally Hemmings, but she was not in the white house. Most of the time, dolley functioned as the de facto first lady. She sometimes hosted events at the white house. She often hosted at madisons house, which functioned as white house events. This was the time when washington, d. C. Became the capital. The capital was moving from philadelphia and new york, and annapolis. This was the moment when all of washington protocol was being set. When the manners and style of a small r republican president was being set. Jefferson had no interest in socializing. Madison did not like to socialize so dolley ran the show. She did it for 16 years. She also really influenced madison because she was able to express concern, opinion, and emotions that he was not. When i was researching the book i was trying to find what he thought about something and he would be writing letters in calm ways. Then, i would find a letter from dolley where she would say that madison, or mr. Madison, was very concerned about such and such. For example he was very , concerned about the possibility that the british would not make peace in the war of 1812. You see her expressing his opinions. It was the cement of a wonderful relationship. One other thing i would say is, john and Abigail Adams get good press for the hundreds of letters they wrote back and forth. You can see their closeness, but they wrote those letters because they chose almost never to live together. Wherever adams was, abigail was not. Madison and Dolley Madison preferred always to be together. In a halfcentury of marriage, there were apart for only a couple months, only because dolley was sick and needed a doctor in a different town. In that time, they wrote each other three times per day. They were a deeply close and loving couple. It is a shame we dont have the written record to bear that out. We could talk about a lot of different times in his life but you just mentioned the war , of 1812, you have this sentence, madison emerged from the war a hero. Why and what was that war all about . Noah the war of 1812 was almost an incredible disaster. It began because the u. S. Was excluded from trading with european ports. Brian why was that . Noah in this period of time, the british and french empire functioned like the European Union or nafta. They were free trade zones. When the United States seceded from great britain, the United States lost access to british ports. That was a huge challenge for our trade. The u. S. Needed to use leverage to try to pressure britain and france to allow our trade. Not only did they resist, but they used their navy to seize american ships. Saying, if we were trading there, we must be supporting their enemies. If we were, they could seize all of our shipments. The war of 1812 was fought to coerce the british and the french to change their policies and stop seizing u. S. Shipping. The strategy to do this was to invade canada. The idea was by invading canada, the u. S. Would put pressure on britain because it would not be able to support its own colonies in the west indies, especially jamaica. That might have worked had we successfully invaded canada. Unfortunately, madison relied on militia. Our constitution was designed not to have a Standing Army. The militia are very bad at invading. At a crucial moment, 3000 new york troops stood on the river ready to cross into canada and refused to go and said, we are not going. Maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was a constitutional principle but the president could not order them to invade, but for one reason or another, they would not go. The next summer, we failed to invade canada again. Then, britain, which had been occupied fighting napoleon got a lucky break. Napoleon marched into russia, the winter came, they froze, and he marched out with less than 20,000 troops. Now, britain had time and effort to turn to the u. S. They turned with a vengeance. It was in that period that the city of washington, d. C. Was burned to the ground by an invading british force. Suddenly, the u. S. Is very vulnerable. What saved madison and the United States from total destruction and the possibility that we would lose the war outright, was the british were stopped in baltimore. They tried a sea landing and the militia blocked the troops from entering fort mchenry. They bombarded from the air. That is the same bombardment that Francis Scott key captured in his poem that became our national anthem. That battle was a turning point in u. S. History. We know that Francis Scott key watched the bombardment, but we forget that if the flag had been brought down, that could have meant the end of the republic altogether. By withstanding that, the americans convinced the british it was not worth continuing their efforts to conquer the United States. The british pulled back, agreed to a treaty, where each side had whatever it had when they started. That was perceived as a win because things had gotten so bad. Madison was perceived as a hero because he had survived. We fought the second war of independence and had not lost. Not losing was winning in that period. By the time he left office, madison was wildly popular. His era inaugurated the era of good feelings, which was essentially a oneparty government. Point out in your book when the british came to washington, d. C. And burnt the capital and the white house, that the general decided after the first day to do it again the next day. What was that significant hate about . Noah the burning of washington was by a different kind of troops than the americans had seen from the british. The troops who burned washington and the general who did it had been fighting in the war in the Iberian Peninsula against napoleon in one of the most brutal wars in modern history. The famous horrors of war paintings are depictions from that peninsula campaign. These were battlehardened british troops who were used to a different kind of war. Civilians were not spared and the burning of buildings was a tactical approach to strike fear in the enemy. They are the ones who came up the potomac in barges, marched to washington, won the battle in two hours, and marched into washington and selfconsciously burned the city to the ground. Then they got up and they left and they marched back to their boats. It was almost a surgical strike. The reason they did not stay is because washington had no inherent strategic value. It was a tactical point. The idea was, lets show the americans who was boss. That had a powerful effect. It was not enough to defeat the american public, but i think it was terrifying. That was what it was meant to be. Brian we started talking about the Supreme Court, joe torre, elena kagan, marshall. If you were ever appointed to the Supreme Court, where would you fit on the political spectrum . Noah i dont think there are any lawyers who do not fantasize about being on the Supreme Court, but it is a wise lawyer who knows it is just a fantasy. I hope i am one of those. I would like to think that i would be like frankfurter and try to follow constitutional principle wherever it led, regardless of the teams on the other side. That would be my aspiration. We all know that our best aspirations are not always carried through. I dont want to be too confident. That would be my goal. Brian what would you call your own politics . Noah i would call myself a moderate centrist liberal. Im from massachusetts. I am a registered democrat and have been my whole life. But i worked for what was the Bush Administration when i went to iraq. It wasnt a political appointment, but it was the government of bush, and i was proud to do that and represent my country. I worked for Justice Souter who was a republican appointee, but was seen i republicans as having betrayed them. I think that gets it wrong. When a justice is appointed, that justice is not working for a party. The justice has to follow his or her beliefs wherever they go. That is the goal of what a constitutional servant does. They serve the constitution faithfully and that is the best way to think about it. Brian one of the theories about elena kagan and Justice Scalias relationship was that when she was the dean, she would invite conservatives to come to harvard and teach. How tolerant are the professors in the Harvard Law School and the students to the conservative point of view . Noah we are extremely lucky at harvard that we have genuine diversity on our faculty. Our new dean is from a conservative political background and is committed to the idea that we have ideological diversity. The students believe in that and i believe my faculty colleagues do, too. We have a genuine right and left on our faculty. We have lots of moderate liberals in the middle, many of whom have made important contributions to u. S. Constitutional history. I like to think we are tolerant and we try to teach our students that. We try to teach our students you have to know every point of view to represent your clients as best as you can. How many classes do you teach per semester . I always teach a big constitutional law class. I teach a big First Amendment class. And i teach a seminar or smaller class on whatever i am working on at that particular time. Sometimes, i teach that jointly with professors in the arts and sciences, sometimes i teach it on my own. That enables me to develop my research for the books i am working on. Brian if you had to make a decision today to write another book about anybody in our history, who would it be . Noah i think i need to take a break, but i am very interested in Oliver Wendell holmes, junior. He was one of the greatest justices to serve on the Supreme Court, who fought in the civil war and was influenced by that , experience. He went on to craft a lot of our free speech jurisprudence. The other major figure i dont think i would write a full biography, but im interested in abraham lincoln. He had more influence on the constitution than almost any other president. He had suspended habeas corpus during the civil war. In order to save the constitution, he felt he had to violate it. I find that whole history of his relationship to constitutional limits, for example his belief , that he did not have the constitutional power to free the slaves, followed by his feeling that he could use it under wartime conditions. I am interested in exploring how lincoln thought about the constitution. Brian the title of the book is the three lives of James Madison genius, partisan, and president. Thank you. Noah thank you for having me. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2017] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] announcer for free transcripts or to give us your comments ut this program, that is visit us at q and a. Org. Q a. Org. Weeksenjoyed this interview with noah feldman, here are some other programs you might like. We have an author about James Madisons role in the constitutional convention. David and jane high alert talk. Out their book, henry clay whats these anytime or search our Video Library at cspan. Org. Next, your calls and comments onwashington journal continues. Live at noon, the house of representatives gaveled in for possible work on a shortterm government funding extension. This week on the communicators we take you to the Consumer Electronics show in las vegas and talk to leaders about developments in virtual reality, 3d cameras and communications in self driving cars. Watch the communicators at eight eastern tonight on cspan two. Morning, robert wiseman, president of Public Citizen reports on trump business conflicts. Then, lawrence leiser, president of National Association of onistant u. S. Attorneys changes to kernel Justice Policy under jeff sessions