The Founding Brother: James Madison

The Founding Brother: James Madison

The American Revolution emerge, and new ideas and changes were made from the Founding Brothers. The Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation...were all made and edit from the Founding Brothers. One of the Founding Brothers, did not experience the American revolution. James Madison, a federalist who was a republican-democratic had many goals he wanted to achieved. He looked back and was able to see what aspects of were done wrong and try to renew them for the future of the United States. James Madison, a Founding Brother was the most influential to establish the United States.

James Madison is considered “Father of the Constitution of the United States”. He became one of the leading theorist of the republican government. Madison attended the college of New Jersey, which is now Princeton. He urged greatly for independence and a stronger nation for the United States. He also became the fourth president of the United States.

Madison, an American Statesmen had great knowledge of understanding government. In 1776, Madison was elected to the Virginia legislature and became a member of the Virginia Constitutional Committee. Madison had bought the idea of the Bill of Rights up in Congress. It took a while to get them to enact with them. Finally in 1789, Madison had presented his plan of the Bill of Rights to the house. At the end of the debate, the House had passed twelve proposed amendments from Madison. Within the Virginia Constitutional Committee, Madison drafted and help established the Bill of Rights through the First Congress (p.53, Ellis). The Bill of Rights later on became amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The Articles of Confederation was in need of a commute, and Madison was the guy for the job. In 1786, Madison had formed the Constitution Convention was held in the Virginia Assembly. The main goal of this convention was to review the Articles of Confederation. Madison had held his arguments for a fortified government and laws (p.52 Ellis). His arguments had been the answer for many of the compromises. Through his great opinions and actions, he was given the title “Father of the Constitution”. He and other people would improve and rewrite the laws so the articles would be able to be passed. Upon the convention, checks and balances was created to keep one branch of government from being powerful than the other. Madison’s ideas of helping to improve the government and laws help establish the United States.

Madison wrote the Virginia Plan, in order to keep the Constitution alive. This Virginia Plan of Madison was consisting for a strong central government. That contain the Supreme Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary. This had provided a bicameral, which was another legislature that contain two houses. One that was elected from the people and a body of nomines from the state legislatures. The bodies of this representation was based on population of the states. In other words, it had enable to the Executive to be elected from the national legislature. This proposal of James Madison was effective and had became preserved in the Articles of Confederation. This also had authority on taxes and trade and protecting the slave trade as well The Virginia Plan of James Madison was indeed a true intelligent with his ideas that the laws were passed in a short period of time.

James Madison help to held the Grand Compromise. There were problems that the Grand Committee had to dealt with. One of the issues was, equal representation for each state due to the fear the Virginia was going to become a dictator over the other states. This had been resolved with a formula that stated the one representative for every 40,000 people in each of the state. The other issue was slavery. Delegates from other states were intending on limiting slavery at the convention. Madison and other delegates had assumed that would be the tool to solving this problem. In one of Madison’s notes he had written, “It seemed now to be pretty well understood that real differences is not lay between the large and small but between the North and Southern States”. That slavery was actually being protected from the constitution. To this result, the slave trade was not bother for another twenty years.

The Virginia Resolutions was also written by James Madison. He was protesting the against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison was declaring that the Sedition Act was guilty. The Alien and Sedition Acts were described as “alarming infractions” from the Virginia Resolution (p.200, Ellis). Madison did not challenged the federal government, but instead help the government. He had suggested that the individual states were in no control of the constitution, but the federal courts were. Madison’s arguments for these acts had guaranteed