Though the Constitution had been adopted by the States, it was not without objections by some of them. To meet these objections Mr. Madison proposed twelve amendments declaratory of certain fundamental popular rights, which, it was thought by many persons, were not sufficiently guarded by the original articles. This, also, was left to him to do, no doubt because of his thorough knowledge of the Constitution and of the points wherein it was still imperfect, as well as those wherein it had better not be meddled with. The amendments, as finally agreed to after long debate, were essentially those which he proposed, and in due time ten of them were ratified by the States. The two that were not accepted referred only to the number of representatives in the House, and to the pay of members of Congress.
It was hoped that the selection of a place for the permanent seat of government would be made by this Congress. There was much talk of the centres of wealth, of territory, and of population then, and of where such centres might be in the future. But the question was really a sectional one. The Northern members were accused of having made a bargain out of doors with the members of the Middle States. The bargain, however, was only this: that, inasmuch as it was hopeless that the actual centre should be chosen as the site for a capital city, a place as near as possible to it should be insisted upon. The South, on the other hand, determined that the seat of government should be within the boundaries of the Southern States. That was a foregone conclusion with them, that needed no bargain. The nearest navigable river to the centre of population was the Delaware; but the jealousy of New York stood in the way of any selection that favored Philadelphia. The Susquehanna was proposed. It empties into Chesapeake Bay. North of it was, as Mr. Sherman showed, a population of 1,400,000; and south of it, 1,200,000. The South wanted the capital on the Potomac, not because it was the centre of population then, but because it might be at some future time, from the growth of the West. On the other hand, it was insisted that the population south of the Potomac was then only 960,000, while north of it there were 1,680,000 people, and that it was no more accessible from the West than the Susquehanna was. To many members, moreover, this talk of the great future of the West seemed hardly worthy of consideration. It was "an unmeasurable wilderness," and "when it would be settled was past calculation," Fisher Ames said. "It was," he added, "perfectly romantic to make this decision depend upon that circumstance. Probably it will be near a century before these people will be considerable." He was nearer right when he said in the same speech "that trade and manufactures will accumulate people in the Eastern States in proportion of five to three, compared with the Southern. The disproportion will, doubtless, continue to be much greater than I have calculated. It is actually greater at present, for the climate and negro slavery are acknowledged to be unfavorable to population, so that husbandry as well as commerce and manufactures will give more people in the Eastern than in the Southern States." It was, however, finally resolved by the House "that the permanent seat of the government of the United States ought to be at some convenient place on the banks of the river Susquehanna in the State of Pennsylvania;" and a bill accordingly was sent to the Senate.
Had the Senate agreed to this bill, there are some luminous pages of American history that would never have been written; for the progress of events would have taken quite another direction had the influences surrounding the national capital for the first half of this century been Northern instead of Southern. But the Senate did not agree. For "the convenient place on the banks of the Susquehanna" it substituted ten miles square on the river Delaware, beginning one mile from Philadelphia and including the village of Germantown. To this amendment the House agreed, and there, but for Madison, the matter would have ended. He had labored earnestly for the site on the Potomac; but failing in that, he hoped to postpone the question till the next session of Congress, when the representatives from North Carolina would be present. He moved a proviso that the laws of Pennsylvania should remain in force within the district ceded by the State till Congress should otherwise provide by law. It seems to have been accepted without consideration, a single member only saying that he saw no necessity for it. At any rate, whether that was Mr. Madison's motive or not, time was gained, for it compelled the return of the bill to the Senate. This was on September 28, and the next day the session was closed by adjournment till the following January.
When in that next session the bill came back from the Senate to the House, a member from South Carolina said, in the course of debate, that "a Quaker State was a bad neighborhood for the South Carolinians." The Senate had also come to that conclusion, for the bill now proposed that the capital should be at Philadelphia for ten years only, and should then be removed to the banks of the Potomac. It was done, Madison wrote to Monroe, by a single vote, for two Southern senators voted against it. But the two senators from North Carolina were now present, and the majority of one was made sure of somehow.
So much was gained by gaining time, and Madison thought the passage of the bill through the House was possible, "but attended with great difficulties." Did he know how these difficulties were to be overcome? "If the Potomac succeeds," he adds, "it will have resulted from a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances which might never happen again." What the "fortuitous coincidence" was he does not explain; but the term was a felicitous euphuism to cover up what in the blunter political language of our time is called "log-rolling."
The reader of this series of biographies is already familiar with Hamilton's skillful barter of votes for the Potomac site of the capital in exchange for votes in favor of his scheme for the assumption of the state debts. Madison seems not to have been ignorant of the progress of that bargain, with which Jefferson was afterward so anxious to prove that he had nothing to do. Madison earnestly opposed the assumption of the state debts from first to last; but, when he saw that the measure was sure to pass the House, he wrote to Monroe: "I cannot deny that the crisis demands a spirit of accommodation to a certain extent. If the measure should be adopted, I shall wish it to be considered as an unavoidable evil, and possibly not the worst side of the dilemma." In other words, he was willing to assent silently to what he believed to be a great injustice to several of the States, provided that the bargain should be a gain to his own State. If Hamilton and Jefferson were sinners in this business, Madison will hardly pass for a saint.