3 - The American Way: Progress, Ethics, & Unity

•Exordium: Which is more important; Progress, Ethics, or Unity?
•As his last official act as President, Madison vetoed a bill that would provide federal funding for building roads and canals throughout the United States. The President finds no expressed congressional power to fund roads and canals in the Constitution, and he believes that the federal government should not encroach upon matters delegated to state governments:
"I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and a reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest." -James Madison, March 3, 1817; Veto Message on the Internal Improvements Bill
•Discuss:
-What kind of bill did Congress pass in 1817?
-What constitutional reason does Madison give for rejecting it?
-What does “enumerated powers” mean?
-How does Madison interpret the “necessary and proper” clause?
-Does Madison oppose roads and canals themselves, or the means of establishing them?
-Why would Madison veto a project he likely supported in principle?
-How does this veto show his belief that ends must be governed by means?
-What is Madison protecting—the economy or the Constitution?
-What danger might Madison have foreseen if Congress stretched the “general welfare” clause too far?
*Madison valued the form of law as much as its spirit. He feared that a government that ignores its limits in doing good will soon ignore them in doing harm.
In classical terms, prudence guards both liberty and order.*
-When is restraint more virtuous than action? Can “good intentions” still endanger justice?
•In 1819, Congress was debating whether Missouri could enter the Union as a slave state, raising deep constitutional and moral questions about slavery’s expansion. James Madison wrote this letter to journalist Robert Walsh to explain that, constitutionally, Congress might not have the power to impose anti-slavery conditions on a new state’s admission. He added that, from a moral and practical standpoint, the issue turned on whether restricting slavery’s spread would actually lessen its numbers, shorten its duration, or improve the condition of enslaved people in the United States.
-What two things does Madison say the issue depends on?
-What does “expediency” mean in political language?
-What does Madison mean by “restrictions”?
-According to Madison, what outcomes must be weighed? (quantity, duration, condition of slaves)
-What does this suggest about his view of government’s role in moral questions?
-Why might Madison think restricting slavery’s spread could make things worse?
-What assumptions about human nature or economics does this reasoning show?
-If the goal is eventual abolition, what hidden risk does Madison see in moral legislation?
-Madison believed moral ideals must be guided by prudence—an ordered sense of when and how to act. But what happens to truth, beauty, and goodness when prudence turns into delay?
-Madison agreed with the Compromise because it safeguarded the unity of the Union (Jefferson was quite fearful this situation would spell the end), but was he putting unity above ethics?