Free Madison's Music by Burt Neuborne Page A

for Western lands, which he acknowledged was much more important than the Bill of Rights. Theodore Sedgwick, who would later play an important editorial role on the Committee on Style, grumbled that the House had “much other and more important business requiring attention.” Elbridge Gerry, who had refused to sign the Constitution because it lacked a bill of rights and who had demanded that every amendment proposed by a state ratifying convention be discussed on the floor of Congress, continued to play his complex game by urging Madison to withdraw his proposals entirely. Gerry hoped that failure to adopt a bill of rights would require the calling of a new constitutional convention with power to rewrite the 1787 document. Madison didn’t take offense. In fact, Gerry eventually served as Madison’s vice president from 1813 until Gerry’s death in 1814.
    Debate began on August 13. Roger Sherman, who had lost the argument in the Committee of Eleven, urged once again that the seventeen pending clauses be consolidated in a single coherent bill of rights. Once again, Madison, the reluctant poet, disagreed, insisting on interpolating the clauses into the body of the Constitution at five different places. Elbridge Gerry then piped up, ridiculing the idea of a single coherent bill of rights. Sherman’s motion for a single bill of rights was once again roundly defeated.
    On August 14, the House finally began considering Madison’s handiwork. His stripped-down addition to the preamble was adopted by a vote of 27–23, although it was eventually rejected by the Senate. His apportionment fix, linking House representationto thirty thousand constituents and fixing the maximum size of the House at 275, carried 27–22. His structural limit on Congress raising its own salary carried easily. None of it made its way into the final Bill of Rights. On August 15, a Saturday, the House finally began debating the committee’s edited version of Madison’s effort to protect religious freedom. The committee’s version read:
    No religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.
    Roger Sherman moved to strike the amendment entirely, arguing that it was unnecessary because Article I, section 8 did not give Congress the power to establish a religion in the first place, so no need existed for an antidote. After Madison reminded his colleagues that some feared that the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause would expand Congress’s power beyond the literal text of the Constitution, Sherman’s motion was overwhelmingly defeated. Attention then turned to the text. Madison explained that the clause was intended to prevent Congress from establishing a national religion and requiring people to observe it by law. Samuel Livermore (N.H.), an opponent of strong national government who had opposed the creation of lower federal courts, moved to amend the text to read:
    Congress shall make no laws touching religion, or infringing the rights of conscience.
    While the House adopted the Livermore version by a vote of 31–20, subsequent editing would veer back toward Madison’s “establishment” language. Theodore Sedgwick then ridiculed Madison’s insistence on protecting the right of assembly as well as speech. His effort to excise “assembly” was roundly defeated. A sustained effort to augment Madison’s protection of the freedom to apply to the government for redress of grievances by adding a right of the people “to instruct their representatives” was defeated by a vote of 41–10,but not before it triggered a discussion of Edmund Burke and the nature of representative democracy. The day ended with Fisher Ames unsuccessfully seeking to derail all further discussion of the committee’s work.
    Madison had a good day on Monday, August 17. The House voted to approve Madison’s “right to keep and