THE GREAT SCHISM

For all of the strength of Madison's nationalism in 1787, Madison later joined with Jefferson in the opposition to Alexander Hamilton and ultimately in forming a stable political party aligned against the Federalists, and in favor of constraining the federal government. Washington invited both Hamilton and Jefferson into his cabinet, assuming that the country could be run like the Army by candid discussions and advice from his staff. Washington was apparently dumbfounded to learn in February 1792, that Thomas Jefferson strongly disliked Alexander Hamilton and his programs and that the government by consensus that Washington wanted to run was splitting apart into irreconcilable factions.

Madison turned against the national government only after the Constitution was ratified. It had been “a primary article of [Madison's] creed” in the period leading up to the Constitution, as Hamilton “knew for a certainty,” that the real danger to our system was the subversion of the national authority by a preponderance of the state governments. Madison had been primarily responsible for the core steps in the Virginia Plan, ending the confederate system and creating a national government able to raise funds and operate on its own. Madison had been responsible more than any other person for flipping the system from a supremacy of the states over the Congress to supremacy of the Congress over the states. Madison before the turn had comfortably advocated reducing the states to the status of counties, where they might be “subordinately useful.”