An imagined gathering
1788 · Richmond, Virginia
Henry argues the anti-federalist case against Jefferson and Madison, and warns that the new Constitution needs a bill of rights.
The Virginia ratifying convention is meeting in Richmond, and Henry has been speaking against the Constitution for days. He has invited Jefferson and Madison to his rooms, not to convert them but to make his case once more in private.
Henry objects that the document begins with the people rather than the states, that it creates a consolidated government, and that it contains no bill of rights. Madison, who wrote much of it, answers with the theory of the extended republic; Jefferson, sympathetic to Henry's fears, notes that he has himself argued for a bill of rights. The evening is cordial under the disagreement. They eat Brunswick stew and sweet potato pone, finish with chess pie and raspberry shrub, and part knowing that Virginia will ratify by a narrow margin.
Host: Patrick Henry
Thomas Jefferson — Sympathetic to the demand for a bill of rights, though absent from the convention.
James Madison — The Constitution's chief architect, defending it against Henry's attack.
a period dish
Drink
a period dish
Side
a period dish
Patrick Henry
Henry's speech to the Virginia Convention of 1775 and the oratory that made him the voice of the coming revolution.
Patrick Henry
The opposition to ratifying the Constitution, which feared a distant government would swallow the states and the liberties won in the Revolution.
James Madison
The first ten amendments, which Madison drafted reluctantly and which became the republic's written guarantee of individual liberties.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom, which disestablished the church and made belief a matter of private conscience.
This gathering is an editorial recreation grounded in the biographies of those present; it did not necessarily take place as described.