“The difficulty of uniting the minds of men accustomed to think and act differently can only be conceived
by those who have witnessed it.”
- James Madison to Edmund Pendleton, September 14, 1789
James Madison and the Natural History of the Democratic Party
David Brian Robertson, University of Missouri - St. Louis
To what problem did James Madison think the embryonic Democratic-Republican Party
was a solution? As a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Madison supported broad,
strong national powers and disparaged political factions. Within five years, he seemed undergo
a complete reversal. By 1792, he took strong stands against broad, strong national powers and
personally was laying the foundations the Democratic-Republican Party.
I argue that Madison’s reversal marked a tactical shift in pursuit of a consistent policy
strategy, and that the Democratic-Republican Party was a natural result of that tactical shift.
Madison was an outcome-driven policy strategist committed to republicanism, Virginia, and
market-driven economic development. For Madison, comparative advantage fused these
interests and principles into a coherent policy strategy: American national government should
advance the nation’s comparative advantage in agricultural commodities. Madison’s broad
policy strategy remained consistent through the 1780s and 1790s: he wanted to strengthen
national powers to achieve the policy outcomes he preferred, and to weaken those national
powers to pursue policies he opposed. He adjusted his political tactics, not his basic strategy,
to changes in political structure and in the nature of the resistance he met. In the 1780s, the
pursuit of these interests required a central government with strong revenue and commercial
powers. When the Convention produced a government with less authority and less influence for
Virginia than Madison intended, he used these same limitations tactically to build support for
ratification. He and Alexander Hamilton could cooperate on the creation of a national
government, but they soon found that they could not cooperate on that government’s use.
Convention