I’ve been learning more about America’s founders who opposed slavery, their personal actions on slavery, and their resulting views. Lately I’ve been learning more about James Madison so saved some comments on him by a biographer, Drew McCoy.

I haven’t finished a full biography of him, so I’m just starting learning about him in more depth, but I’m coming to see his views on slavery versus liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy as relevant today, in particular to pollution and depletion, which undermine liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy.

Like Jefferson, he considered slavery wrong but didn’t act against it—that is, he valued freedom but didn’t fight for it in all cases. It looks like he valued it more for himself and his peers than for slaves.

Expect to read about Madison in my next book. And now for some quotes about and (below) by him:

From Remembering James Madison: Character, Vision & Experience

Madison was intimately involved with slavery for all of his 85 years as the eldest son of a well-to-do planner. We might say he literally inherited the dilemma. He had grown up in an environment substantially shaped by the presence of slaves. He still owned close to one hundred at the time of his death in 1836.

We rightly honor Madison as a principled opponent of slavery for all of his adult life, which is to say we can never forget that he categorically condemned the institution as intrinsically unjust, indeed as a contradiction of the fundamental principles of a republican revolution rooted in the logic of natural rights. That belief in turn generated Madison’s commitment to abolishing slavery in the United States.

For him, in other words, the question was never “if” but only “when” and “how,” but the when and how of abolishing slavery became the rub because Madison also understood its deep roots in a society in which racial differences had powerful psychological and cultural resonance.

Above all, Madison believed that a general emancipation of the slaves in the United States would be practical only under circumstances made necessary by the slaves raised even as the explosive development of the southwest cotton frontier in the early nineteenth century might have suggested. Otherwise he stubbornly insisted that the only major impediment to emancipation was this larger looming dilemma of racial adjustment rather then the continuing profitability of the institution.

Now, unlike his friend Thomas Jefferson, Madison never expressed his own suspicions that blacks were intrinsically inferior to whites, nor did he to the best of my knowledge ever express alarm about the danger of racial amalgamation, but he did clearly accept as a permanent prejudice against blacks held by virtually all of his countrymen a prejudice that he assumed would make impossible the integration of free blacks as equal citizens of a biracial republic.

If principle demanded an end to slavery, prudence dictated that slavery be abolished only when the former slaves could be colonized outside the United States.

Madison never stopped believing that colonization offered African-Americans their best, perhaps their only chance of escaping slavery.

[Amid two extremes of “uncompromising demand for immediate abolition without colonization” and “a principled defense of slavery as in John Calhoun’s words from the year after Madison’s death ‘a positive good’] Madison saw little choice, it seems to me, but to cling to and promote his faith in colonization.

[Otherwise he saw] a “torpid acquiescence in perpetual slavery.” In the permanence of slavery an acquiescence that would insidiously threaten to undermine the republic’s fundamental principles.

From Lincoln and the Founding Fathers: A Reconsideration by Drew McCoy:

As Madison scrutinized the younger generation of Virginians who surrounded him in the 1830s, he caught clear glimpses of what was the most likely alternative to keeping faith in colonization as the necessary adjunct to gradual emancipation. And that alternative, as he suggested in a letter to Thomas R. Dew in 1833, would hardly be the acceptance of blacks as full and equal citizens of a biracial American republic, but rather a “torpid acquiescence” in perpetual slavery that would insidiously demand an adjustment of principle. Madison knew that Americans who accepted the permanence of slavery would inevitably be lulled into accepting either the absurd proposition that blacks were not human or the equally repugnant proposition that republican principles had never been meant to apply to all human beings after all.

It was precisely that abandonment—indeed, betrayal—of the Revolutionary legacy of natural right that Lincoln saw occurring, even escalating, during the 1850s. That is why he insisted ultimately on condemning not only southern apologists for slavery (whose interest in the new way of thinking was obvious) but also, even more, such northern Democrats as Douglas who, whether from personal indifference or a desire to appease southern members of their party, refused to acknowledge, as a matter of principle, that slavery was wrong. As Lincoln said of Douglas, such professed indifference to the moral dimension of slavery “debauch[ed] public sentiment” into seeing the Negro not as a man, entitled to at least the natural right to liberty, but as a brute with no rights that the white man was bound to respect. And that fundamental crisis would pass, Lincoln believed, only when Americans clearly, emphatically, and unequivocally reaffirmed their inherited commitment to the Revolutionary propositions that made slavery wrong.

… both Madison and Lincoln accepted the fact that the American Union always had been, and must continue to be, the product of mutual forbearance and concession, of compromise; but they also agreed that some things, by their nature, could not be compromised without altering the character of the regime that the Union defined. The octogenarian Madison embraced colonization as the most practical expression of both a commitment to end slavery and a commitment to the principles that made slavery wrong.

Drew R. McCoy was educated at Cornell University (A.B. 1971) and the University of Virginia (M.A. 1973, Ph.D. 1976). He has taught American history at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University and, most recently, Clark University, where he is the Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of History. He is the author of two books, including The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (1989), which was awarded the John H. Dunning Prize by the American Historical Association and the New England Historical Association Book Award.

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Also: James Madison in Property:

This term in its particular application means “that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.” In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage…

That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest…

If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence [inference?] will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States. If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.

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