Of seven books. Madison transformed the field more than anyone else. Its all constitutions everywhere. I thought, i was about to turn 40 and i thought i want something to really sink my teeth into federal spend my middle 40s on and win lose or draw, ive written something fat, and thats edited down considerably. The bottom line is, i wanted to do something i thought would be hard and long and maybe good and it was deathly hard and definitely long and now its up to you whether you think its good. I wanted to really dive in to the essential question of where did it all come from. Who were the key people behind it. Who made the world that we now live in. One of the fascinating things is that it turns out that although writing the constitution is the thing is most famous for, it was not the only thing of huge fundamental importance that he did and thats why called it the three lives of James Madison. The first life is the creation of the constitution and the other half to do with playing out the constitution. Tell us a little bit more about the three lives. What led you to choosing to divide his life up that way. When you write a biography, you struggle with the fact that the person actually lived a life and said stuff and wrote letters and had friendship and made enemies is not always the case that it will divide itself into acts or stories but in his case it did. In his first life, during which he was single, he was a very shy guy and had only one failed romance in his early 30s until he met dolly, and in that first life, he produced this incredible constitution and it was really a remarkable act of genius, creativity on par with einstein great moments of creativity, and he knew it. And he wanted other people to know it too. But then, having created this amazing constitution that among other things was designed to solve the problem of Political Parties forever so we would not have any more Political Parties, he discovered when he entered congress that that part of the constitution had worked and handed up founding the Republican Party alongside Thomas Jefferson to fight Alexander Hamiltons federalist party, and that became a completely different world for him. Having imagine that the constitution would let reasonable people sit around and debate at a high level, he discovered he needed a partisan newspaper. He needed to accuse the other side of vagueness. He needed to create a National Political organization of the kind he had claimed would preclude from ever coming into existence. He believed he was doing this in his second wife because the threat that his federalist meant to the United States was nothing less than the death of the republic and the death of the constitution. That was how serious the threat had to be for him to justify breaking from his deep belief that Political Parties were terrible and create a vertical party that would end all Political Parties. It sort of did. We can come back to that. And then, in his last life, he spent 16 years running u. S. Foreign policy. He was secretary of state under jefferson for eight years and he was president for eight years, and in not extraordinary 16 year period, he tried to do for foreignpolicy what he had done for the constitution, that is create a unique republican version of form policy based around the question, how do you make other countries do the stuff your country wants whether you believe as an absolute principle they cannot have a Standing Army and you cannot have a substantial navy. He thought he had solved that problem, originally because he thought economic sanctions were the magic answer, but he discovered in the runup of the war the 1812 that wasnt quite enough. You also needed some military threat to military force. That made him a wartime president. It was the war of 1812 and he found himself in a world he was completely unprepared for, fighting a war of the kind he believed the United States should never fight and that turned out to be a fascinating story in which we barely got out with our independence intact and he barely got out with his popularity intact and yet he ended his career as the most popular president of any of the first four or five. I dont think many of us think of him as a president. We think of him as a founding father and his role but that was definitely a significant aspect. Lets dive a little bit more deeply into his first life. You start off the book explaining a little bit about him as a College Student and tell us a little bit more about how his experience at princeton and some of his Early Experiences shaped his religious liberty views and whether or not they found their way into the constitution at all. Its a fascinating fact that the topic that brought him into public life and that he care the most about throughout the entire lung trajectory of his career was religious liberty. The rigid engine reason its so fascinating is that madison was not particularly pious in the ordinary sense of the word. He was a christian who almost never attended church, he wasnt a radical freethinker of the Franklin Jefferson type , but he wasnt very interested in substantial the theology or religion. Yet his very first act in public that made him a figure in virginia was a tweet to the virginia bill of rights, a guarantee of religious liberty that shifted liberty from toleration of minorities to equality for everybody regardless of religion. A major change and he was a only 25 and made him very well known. So why . Why was this young guy so interested in religious liberty. I think the answer lies in his experience at princeton. He was from virginia, from the piedmont and that young man did not go at the time to princeton. Later princeton became. [inaudible] there are several reasons but the main reason he went there was for the weather. I use that as the opening line of my book pretty came to new jersey for the weather. I think anyone has ever written that sentence before. It was because he believed, as many people believe that the time that william and mary, which was in williamsburg in virginia was a place where you could get malaria or yellow fever, especially if you are not from a lowend place already, and he was from the piedmont. He thought it would be safer. He would get sick if you went to new jersey, but he discovered in new jersey this extraordinary institution of the time, the only really impressive university in north america in the 1760s and 1770s, and i say that with all due respect to harvard and yale but those were backwaters in that period. Princeton was a kind of wormhole into the european republic. While he was there, madison was also on some strange dimension kind of a minority for the only time in his life. He was a rich kid from virginia, most of the people there who were called middling sorts, they were the children of shopkeepers, artisans who were trying to turn themselves into gentlemen, and of course it was all men at the time, they were going to university. Thats why you went to university, to become a gentleman. They were also heavily presbyterian and he was just plain old ordinary church of england. The presbyterians were very focused on religious liberty because of the history in britain. He therefore was, at the center within this dissenting community and that seems to have spurred this way long concerns for religious freedom. While. So lets talk a little bit more about his specific role. Lets start with the National Vision for the United States. Where did that come from. How did that conflict with some of the other founders were more concerned with state sovereignty and compared to hamilton who even suggest we abolish the states altogether. Madison came to the idea of the need for National Constitution in 1784, 85, 86 which was a time of extraordinary crisis in the new United States. Its no exaggeration to say that the country, such as it was, was falling apart. The reason was, when independence was the great from britain, all the states became traders and rebels and they had to stick together to survive war. The wine, we should all hang together or we will hang separately, but as it ended, that created a tremendous danger and the danger was that the states which had never thought of themselves as a single country, in fact the word country met your state, it was very important thing to realize when you start to read h century documents, hes always talking about his state, never about the United States. So, danger was that these individual little republics, these 13 republics in a federation were going to have so little in common, so few overlapping interests and no central need to cooperate that they would fly off into Different Directions in each become their own little state. Now, that mightve been fine in theory but it was good to be a disaster practice. The main reason i was going to be a disaster practice was trade. The other thing i figured out while working on the book that i never thought of before, the way you have to think of the British Empire and the french empire is sort of like the eu. It was in large measure of free trade. If youre part of the British Empire you could trade free with any other part of the British Empire was global. But when the United States declared independence, it left that trade union for a version of brexit and suddenly the economy of the u. S. Which depended heavily on trade with British Ports was in serious jeopardy because you could no longer trade freely with all of the places where you had been doing all of your business. What the country needed was a trade policy to pressure britain to open its port to u. S. Shipping. You could create a unified trade policy if the people from rhode island, just use one example, which they used a lot, would always wait for the other states to declare they were going to act in concert, and then cheat. Rhode island cheated. People in the 18th century and every other colony, they really hated rhode island. It wasnt just rhode island didnt ratify, the reason they didnt ratify the constitution was that they were waiting to see if there would be some benefits from cheating. This was the kind of logical shipping maneuver. Everyone else is when i can do it then okay, will do it. Madisons first idea about why we needed a National Constitution was the Central Government had to be able to coerce the state, force them to all be on the same page for trade, and that is what began to make him a national. The fear of it falling apart menu needed to pull it to the center and became a gravitational metaphor. If you wanted something in the middle like the sun they would exert tremendous gravitational pull so they didnt fly off in Different Directions. Thats what he was thinking when he went into the Constitutional Convention. That was fundamentally defining his vision. He was a very strong nationalist. He may not have said like hamilton, but you know he was a guy who deserved a hiphop musical about him. He was enthusiastic, he left no good thought on said or unwritten again and again and again and if those on his mind he said it. He will plainly say we dont need the state spread he would say the british monarchy is the only form of government that will work not what we should do. Everyone looked at him. Madison would not have gone off our publicly that he was fully prepared to accept a National Government when he was in philadelphia that would have minimized the role of the states where they didnt matter all that much. Madison also have the idea of the national veto. How did that play into his vision. For him, that was the single most important aspect of the constitution that he lost. The virginia plan that madison prepared, it ultimately became the basic blue print for the constitution and thats why we think of him as the most important draftsman. There were two major tweets. One was equal representation in the senate. Madison thought that was ridiculous. He didnt think delaware and rhode island should have the same number of delegates as virginia and he went to mention thinking that small states would be forced to accept the representation but he didnt think that they voted based on equal representation of all the states so when new jersey staged a walkout of the convention and said okay, were walking, madison realized we had to compromise. He didnt like it, but he did it. The other change was the loss of a central component of the blueprint and that was that congress would be able to veto any law passed by any state that it didnt like. Now watch, one reason is madison had also, in 1785, 86, begun to distrust state legislatures. He did not think you could trust the people who were running the states to do good job and he was very worried about what he came to call the maturity of the majority, and to be precise, the majority were ordinary people who were mostly debtors and the minority who is being tyrannized against the Property Holders who were mostly creditors so the idea that the majority which we like to think of in our modern purse host World War Two context as a phenomenon where were concerned about racial or religious or other minorities was originally about that poor unprotected minority of rich people. In order to protect those people from state legislature, they could issue paper money, devalue the currency, and then make people thats easily paid. Thats the reason you really like inflation only one time in your life, and thats when you have a mortgage. Thats when its good to have inflation. Under those same in the exact circumstances, he feared what state legislators would do and so he wanted congress to stop the states from doing that. That was crucial to a picture of why a National Government was better than the state government. He believed the National Government would be less likely to take the side of the creditors against the debtors. He had a whole theory of why and that theory goes under the heading of the bigger the country, the less likely he believed it would be that factions are parties or small groups of selfinterested people could capture the government. That was the grand theory. If i was going to work, it had to matter. For congress to be much preferable to the state legislator was a nice idea in theory but when he went to the convention he thought lets use this to solve the problem by letting congress veto whatever the state legislators are going to do. In philadelphia, at the convention, he raised it again and again and again. Seven times. I once again seven times but he was defeated every time pretty tried to water it down by saying maybe theyll only be able to veto unconstitutional actions taken by the state. Nope, no buyin. Thats because the other people in the room were not on board with the exception of maybe hamilton and one or two others. James wilson was not on board with the National Government that could dictate to the states and even ultimately control their actions. That is to say he was at the extreme nationalist wing of the convention, and, he never, he never fully gave up on this idea. When the bill of rights was being drafted, hes through in, most of the rights, most of them were built on ideas that the states had submitted to congress in the wake of ratification. A lot of the states during ratification said wed rather not ratify it and other side love you dont ratify now it will never get done so the compromise was listed some rights that you like and put them in a letter to congress. Madison used most of them but he made up one that no one proposed and that was the idea that in the bill of rights it should say that no state could violate certain very basic rights like the right to religious liberty and the right to freedom of the press. That had no relationship to what anyone else wanted. It was a reiteration of his idea from the convention, namely some way for the National Government to block the state legislators from doing nasty stuff. He really, really did not want to give up on that. Just add one last twist, he had a further reason for thinking congress should be in charge, and that is by the time the convention was over, it was clear they had treated a new hybrid form of government that had never existed before in which the states retain some sovereignty but congress and the federal government exercise over those same citizens. This is what Justice Kennedy who has a good ear for a phrase that will last, he said the framers split the atom of sovereignty. Im not sure all of the implications of that metaphor, but thats what Justice Kennedy said. So, when you break something that everyone believed was ungrateful because sovereignty is posterior root mean one guiding charge for one entity is in charge so how can you break it up, thats highrisk. Madison felt there had to be a last word and he wanted to the last word to be with congress, and that was to some degree oppression us because by the time the civil war came along there was dispute about where the last word lay. It took the 14th amendment and the civil war to lead us into a constitutional world where we all believe that somebody, we usually think its the Supreme Court actually does have the last word about what the constitution means. When wymore says well alabama doesnt have to follow what the federal constitution says according to the Supreme Court , we have a legal answer based on the 14th amendment that says no, Supreme Court gets to decide. That is a fundamental structure issue that he identified himself as a and his veto plan was supposed to