Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and The Election that Saved a Nation
Madison’s 1789 election to Congress embroiders histories of the establishment of the Constitution (James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights, by Richard Lebunski, 2006), but in DeRose’s account, it’s the main event. Perhaps drawn toward this campaign trail by his background as a contemporary political consultant, DeRose depicts what in retrospect was a critical contest, given Madison’s subsequent centrality to creating the Bill of Rights and the principal government departments. His opponent was none other than fellow future president James Monroe, then an opponent of the Constitution. Thrown together in a gerrymandered district whose anti-Federalist tincture favored Monroe, he and Madison campaigned through snowy northern Virginia in January 1789, expounding their views in courthouses and churches. Madison’s promise to codify religious freedom, DeRose suggests, might have gained him the Baptist and Lutheran vote; in any case, he squeaked past Monroe by 336 votes. Building up to this result with the duo’s political and personal relations in the 1780s, DeRose applies a dramatizing hand to a topic scholastically grounded in Ratification, by Pauline Maier (2010). --Gilbert Taylor