Zachary Brown, “Perpetuate the Union, and Redeem the Honor of the Re-publican Name”: Monarchy, Empire, and James Madison’s Negative on State Laws, 4 J. AM. CONST. HIST. 457 (2026).
In 1787, James Madison proposed that Congress should wield a “negative” over state laws. Historians, legal scholars, and political theorists have long argued that this veto was the linchpin of his plan for constitutional reform: the mechanism through which the federal government would suppress irresponsible state legislation, especially laws that infringed on individual and minority rights. According to the standard account, Madison’s support for the negative as a check on majoritarianism is emblematic of his deepest constitutional commitments. While other leading nationalists focused primarily on creating a strong federal government, Madison was chiefly concerned with rescuing democracy within the states by curbing the vices of local legislatures. My article argues that this conventional story about the negative—and Madison’s constitutional thought more broadly—is incomplete. Throughout the spring and summer of 1787, Madison’s principal interest was reconciling national power and stability with republican government. His research on confederal and imperial models suggested that only the prerogatives of monarchs had protected federations against the centrifugal force of their parts. Madison came to believe that without these prerogatives, even a strong general government would become impotent and the confederation it governed would dissolve. The negative was his attempt to find an equivalent power to harmonize the union without adopting a monarchy. Madison’s celebrated theories on minority rights and faction developed as he worked out why a national republic could exercise both the negative and its other powers responsibly. Yet the Convention ultimately rejected both the veto and the Madisonian vision of federalism it underpinned. As a result, Madison left Philadelphia convinced that the delegates had created a “feudal system of republics” lacking a replacement for the unifying power of kings.
