free c-span radio app. announcer: c-span, where history daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. ♪ announcer: this week on "q&a," author and harvard law school professor noah feldman. professor feldman discusses his book "the three lives of james madison ♪ -- "the three lives of james madison."

brian: noah feldman, what are the three lives of james madison that you wrote about? noah: the first life is the one that is most famous. that is where he created the constitution. not only in our country but also the greatest constitutional genius and the world. in his second life he discovered the constitution was not perfect. he thought he had thought against political parties, he actually founded the republican party to fight the federalist party and alexander hamilton. he became a partisan very much against his own wishes. in his third life he got to be secretary of state for eight years and president for eight more created he got to take on all of the decisions when you are running the show, and faithfully taking us into the first war. very much against the principles of his lifetime. which was against the standing army and the navy. brian: talk about him as a person, size and health problems, and all that. noah: he was very different than

the other founders. he was very much in his head. that is how we would put it today i think. he was deeply committed to reason and logic. he hated public speaking. he hated are you doing had a disagreement. he was much smaller than the others. he was maybe five foot six inches tall. he may have been shorter according to some accounts. he was very cautious about his health. he did not want to get sick did as a custom, he never took a sea voyage anywhere. let's will not least, he was susceptible to serious attacks of what we would probably called migraines. headaches. at crucialed stressful moments, each time he powered through. he would be in bed for a few days, he would force himself back into the saddle and do whatever he was doing.

brian: for a guy who was sickly, he lived until he was 85. noah: he was just a clear enough to be worried about his health. that was a good strategy and the world where they did not understand anything about infection. they just knew it was out there. several very important decisions were based on avoiding places he thought there would be yellow fever. he was usually correct, he avoided places where there were mosquitoes. even know nobody there at the time knew was mosquitoes that gave you yellow fever. brian: if he was sitting right here, what would you ask him? noah: if he was sitting i would want to ask what we should do about our own partisanship, his view was you should only be a partisan to put an end to partisanship. the republican party was going to let an end to all republican parties. the federalists more or less shrunk to nothing in response to his onslaught. he did not clearly understand how to sustain a long run in the republic. i would like to hear his

thoughts about that. brian: how many languages do you speak? noah: hebrew, arabic, french, there are some dead languages that i can get through. i tried to make it with my native tongue. brian: when he was at princeton or new jersey, he also studied hebrew, why? noah: i think in the 18th-century, if you are in princeton you had to study the bible. even though greek was the late would have the adjustment. hebrew was the language of the old testament. around in he poked it. very hard toied learn hebrew. brian: when did you learn he was a smart person?

noah: that was one of the few things i could see up front. he was certainly book smart in the traditional sense. he was the most prepared founder. that was the reason for his success. his response to any deep policy problem was too deep down i learn as much as he could. when he was first elected. the big problem was the shrinking money supply. instead of just mouthing off, he borrowed books, and buried himself, and tried to write as much as he could about the topic. you could see a mind in action and at work. the big challenge for him throughout his life was translating the book smart learning into real-world political judgment. like the rest of us, through trial and error he would advocate a policy that was created that made sense in light of what he knew. if it did not work he would try

to do it differently. sometimes he made mistakes that were never a popular. brian: how much influence the -- did james madison have on the iraq constitution? noah: when we first met, almost 15 years ago, i was briefly a constitutional advisor to the first provisional government in iraq. that became the basis for their final constitution. the truth is, madison did have an influence on all constitutions really. one crucial was the idea of federalism. today, we think of that as a normal aspect, that was pretty innovative in the u.s. constitution.

that is the idea whether is it central government that does have direct legal authority over citizens. then you have state governments that enjoy power over individuals. that is a complex compromise that came out of our philadelphia convention. it cap are mice out of the iraqi convention which also involve federalism. in their case, asymmetric federalism. the rest of the country is allowed to organize into regions. there is one direct influence. the other is freedom of speech and religious liberty. that is enshrined in the iraqi constitution. i am not saying it is perfectly obeyed there by any stretch of the imagination, but it is on the books. that is an example of a provision that goes right back to the u.s. constitution. brian: how long did you work with the iraqis and what is your biggest memory from that experience? noah: i was there for several months. then i continued to work from afar, with their regional sites rather than meet up with the iraqis. i would say my strongest memory of being there are the fact of the strangeness of a scenario where the u.s. government, this incredibly powerful entity, had knocked out the government, we

or nobody else on the ground were clear on what was going to happen next. i have a very vivid memory of being pulled over on the side of the road in a neighborhood, with just a couple of other americans who were soldiers. we were in a couple of humvees, iraqis came over and asking us in arabic of the what was going on. electricityhen the was coming back on. i had to say, i am sorry, i don't know. they asked when the schools are opening, i said i hope they open soon. finally, they said who is in charge, who is the government? i would momentarily blocked. i was not sure what the question meant. then they asked the question again. i said it is president bush's special envoy. they said they had never heard of him but it was somebody is in charge. that really hit home, we had not managed to communicate to the country that we were in charge. and i think that had very

important long-term consequences. brian: how important was your arabic in that situation of trying to help them write a constitution? noah: it was centrally important because you have to understand the people who are doing the drafting, their culture, their belief, and their values. in the end it is always their culture that matters the most. language is a great tool to break through, madison's contemporaries has spoken the same language, it would have been very difficult to get together and negotiate an argument. in iraq that was a problem. the younger kurds rarely even speak arabic. so it is difficult to produce real national unity lingual unity.of brian: what are you doing

full-time now? noah: i am a professor of law at harvard law school. it is a good day job. i love teaching constitutional law to my students, it enables me to keep on writing and doing research. i write a column for bloomberg view which discusses contemporary events alongside the serious work of trying to do research. brian: you dedicated your madison book to a professor at harvard. what does it mean for that and the professorship? noah: they are both about relationships. the first is a living person, the second is a person i never knew. i workedouter, whom for and dedicate the book was an extraordinary boss. just a deeply inspiring figure in the justice system. he was a bipartisan-oriented republican. that is something that used to exist from new hampshire. he was a member of the republican party for most of his career until he went on the bench and put aside his partisan affiliation. he was deeply embedded in the constitution. he was just a profoundly humane, deeply well read, and inspiring

person. a person of probity and rectitude, everybody was struck by his honesty and his straightforwardness. you always knew exactly where he stands. that has been a great and lifelong relationship for me. jamesch did madison and justice souter affect your clerkship? noah: he did very much. every summer, the justice would give the incoming clerks an assignment to research some problem. there were some cases -- as it turned out those cases were not argued that term. he gave us a research project on

early american thoughts about religious liberty and a bunch of specific context. madison was a core essential source of that. i dove very deeply into that. this was when i understood this is a person who understands. even though that was 20 years ago, he very much informed that going into the world. i think he takes madison very seriously. there are other founding fathers he enjoys me that is a great skill for the justice. brian: i was looking at some past material when you are appointmentink an -- professorship by elana kagan. noah: i have enormous respect for the justice. when she had me she was the dean at the law school there. i was incredibly lucky to have a chance to work under her. to observe her technique and

relatively soon thereafter, she went off to washington, to work for the obama administration on the supreme court. we did not get to work with each other for too many years. i looked up to her very much and would like to consider her a friend it it is not too presumptuous. brian: what is her technique? noah: her technique as a justice is some way reminiscent of justice souter. she goes beyond that. she does not restrict herself to that analysis. where she differs is that she is much more colloquial on the court, she is very punchy. she wants the reader to sit up and take notice. she often writes for a nonlegal audience. that is a remarkable development in the history of the court. she is one of the clearest and

most non-technical writers that the court has seen and many, many decades. i think that maybe one of her him or to facets on the bench. mean too what does it be the felix frankfurter professor? noah: he is a connection i wrote about in a book about fdr. i found him deeply, personally challenging and somebody who began his career as a liberal. he was a nationally known liberal law professor. the key to this was judicial restraint. that is because the supreme court at the time was a conservative libertarian majority supreme court. frankfurter objected to the way that supreme court was blocking progressive legislation. he had the idea of restraint to try the block them. he went on the court, within a few years, roosevelt managed to appoint a other court. theyfurter believed

should still exercise restraint. they came to see him as a judicial conservative, having come to the bench as a liberal. ultimately, he ended his career has been seen as very conservative and dissenting from some of the great liberal judgments. there were exceptions, he was an active majority of the minority in the brown versus the board of education case. he was prepared to be an activist. ands left with academics people like me who value the fact that he was committed to what i would like to think of as objective as he could be in terms of the values he took. no one is always objective, he tried to be objective, he tried to stick with the philosophy that he believed was true and he was perceived as a liberal. he never gave that up. that is a great model, to hold the professorship of his name to occupier toenge the

try and explain the constitution and its values to the world. also to try and hold onto the principal and try not to be swayed too much by the whims of that political benefit. brian: i want to read a quote about the quote fromest justice, this is joseph story when he was 32. these are his writings. "i wish i was somebody perfectly fit for the task would write a full and accurate biography of medicine. i fear that it can hardly be done now, for the men who best appreciated his excellences have nearly all passed away. what shadows we are." are you perfectly fit for the task of this enormous biography on james madison? noah: no. that is one reason when i came

across that quote, i have a portrait of him on my wall, i wanted to include that. in 1842 joseph story could bemoan the fact that he and his colleagues were shadows compared to the greats. just imagine how much more shadowlike we are 300 years later. that was myself saying, do your best, it does not have to be perfect, just produce the best biography you can do. i care about the constitution, that is my stock in trade. ultimately, for a constitutionalist james madison is our einstein. there is nobody more significant to the field. it was a big job, and it would take a while to create. i wanted to sink my teeth into it and i did. brian: there is another famous supreme court justice, john marshall, what was the relationship between madison and marshall back in the days? he had been the longest serving. who learned from which one?

noah: they had a very complicated ongoing relationship. for one thing, madison succeeded marshall in the division of secretary of state. it was the succession that led to the case of marbury v madison. when he was still secretary of state he was supposed to deliver a commission to marbury, he never managed to do that. marbury then sued madison. demanding he as secretary of state deliver the commission. he refused and that led to the case. remarkably john marshall held the opinion to not recuse himself even though the case was his failure to deliver. in essence, marshall was an unusual person, he was a virginia federalist. he was from virginia, just like madison was. most of the virginia gentleman strongly supported the cause of the republican party.

that is, they were a little bit skeptical of too much central, federal power. they believed in a moderate degree in states rights. that was not the petition that -- position that marshall enacted on federal powers. in that sense, he and madison were political opponents. from the bench, where he was chief justice, he kept up a steady stream of indirect critique of the republican administration, as best as he could. i would say, looking back, it years,r a couple hundred marshall and madison probably agreed on more than they disagreed. they both took a central middle ground on the question of federal and congressional power. in the was probably the most important case, the chief justice stood for the idea that what powers congress needed to exercise, what was needed to

exercise, what was needed to fulfill basic tasks laid down in article the constitution. those necessary and proper causes have the effect of allowing congress an opinion. that is basically what madison believed, marshall said there are still some limits to what he can do. believed there were some limits. brian: when did you decide to do this book? when did you decided to sell it to the publisher? when did you start your research? noah: i decided about eight years ago. then i started doing the research seven years ago. it was tricky to convince the publishers that we needed a james madison biography. there hadn't been a full madison biography since 1971. that was a long time ago. i said we need a new madison for a new generation. i thought there would be some similarities between madison and obama.

both calm, rational, so restrained that their critics complained they did not show enough passion. each pulled into a war that they did not want to be involved in. as i did the research, it became clear the differences between them were much greater than the similarities. in particular, obama had his amazing public capacity to speak and hold audience which was so lacking in madison. excessive control the constitution was not with obama. his research to me are away from where i had begun. there is an important lesson there, you never know where you're going when you read a book. brian: how do you set something like this up if it is 18 years

to get to this book. where did you operate from? how many places to jump to go to research? put that together for us. noah: i was very lucky. montpelier, where he is from, has a great staff of archivists. they were very generous in sharing their materials with me and i drew on that. brian: about an hour and a half south from that. in virginia. noah: yes. it is a great place to visit and they have done a great job. that was certainly helpful and researching slavery at the madison household which was an important theme of the book. that is the reality of madison. he was born in the arms of slaves and a slave closed his died.hen he he they were constant in that aspect of his life. brian: how many did he have?

noah: his family had more than 100 slaves when he was born. there were fewer than that when he died. ultimately, dolly madison sold those slaves to support herself later in life. that is not because she was free -- freeing them, she needed the money. i was very lucky in terms of montpelier, scholars have been working for decades and decades, compiling every scrap of paper he wrote him. he himself tried to collect and edit his own papers. he wrote to the families and said can i have a copy of the letter that i sent you? he did that impart to raise money, he wanted dolly to have that money. those are now gathered and published as the james madison papers. it is a long series by the university of chicago and virginia. increasingly, they have also been digitized, not 100% white -- but a huge number of them have been digitized.

so, i have a lot of resources available to me that made my life easier. madison had good handwriting. the transcribers did a great job. the problem was the sheer mass of material. there are so many volumes of medicines writing. i read them all. there's no way around it. you have do read every word and then you have to try to weigh them and tell a story. do it?how do you do you take notes? how do you collect the information after you have read all of this? noah: i usually set with the books or the papers over here, and the computer over here. across a passage that seemed especially important, i would turn and type i into the computer will stop

think at some -- into the computer. i think at some point, you will just be able to cut and paste. i think that was extremely helpful. you are putting yourself and the mind of medicine. you try to talk like he talked. over time, through the notes that you have taken, a coherent story starts to emerge and you have to make sure you're not doing what henry ford called history. one thing after another. you have to do things together as a story. you are writing a novel, -- you are not writing a novel, you are writing a troop biography. you wanted to have a structure that is true to the fact of how things develop. for that you really have to be a little lucky, you have to hope the story is coherent. i think his was, partly because he was so analytic he was always trying to make sense of everything around him and put it in a logical format.

by following his inner experience, i think it was able to tell the story in a way that i hope at least holds together. brian: the personal relationships, she read your books between madison and jefferson and hamilton at washington, you say there is a point where madison and washington fell out and never saw each other again. what was that? noah: personal relationships are everything to me. madison was not a guy who liked to be out there on the front lines waving a flag. he liked to make things happen from the back room. the way he did that was through these very intense close personal relationships. these friendships, and occasionally these friendships that became with enemies. in the case of washington, madison went from being a very close ally of the washington's helping to convince him to bring the constitutional convention.

eventually madison and randolph got him around. when washington became president, madison was sort of his man in congress. in fact, in the very first exchange between madison and the congress, washington goes reply. his he senses reply to congress. madison was literally talking to himself and producing these documents. that shows you how close he hand washington really were. they eventually fell out over potentially washington's policy of favoring england over france. it was a time of deep tension between the two countries. madison believed in a fundamental way that they had signed a treaty with france and owned it to france to stay with it and france's war with england. more pro-british hand all he declared neutrality in the war which given that we

had a treaty with france are not england was perceived as madison and others as a pro-british position. rather than pure neutrality, this was a concern that favored the british. madison criticized him, he went further than criticizing his policy, he made the argument that washington was overstepping his constitutional bounds by declaring neutrality. madison wanted to argue that only congress can declare war, only congress can declare neutrality. washington carried a lot of of his reputation, was deeply committed to the constitution. he deeply resented the idea that madison was suggesting he may have overstepped constitutional bounds. hamilton was in the background egging on washington that the same time. and ultimately, what washington could not give what he perceived as a stain on his reputation.

they just stopped speaking. after washington died, madison introduced special legislation in honor of washington. he helped put money aside for a monument. in fact, he and jefferson believed that washington had become part of the federalist. they thought in washington's farewell address, the thing we we all loved so well was a totally partisan performance and was not something that should be valued for the ages. brian: you come to washington, there is a big statue but there is not a big one for medicine. why is that? noah: the constitution is madison's monument. forhat way, the monument medicine is all around you and washington, d.c. the three structures of governments. the way people speak to each other, the exercise of free speech, all of that is his monument.

sort of as the case in st. paul's where he said look around you. if you are looking for madison's monument in washington, d.c., it is all around you. madison did not have a single author document in the way the declaration of independence was written by jefferson. he did not have jefferson's love of the crowd. he did not have his incredible gift for expression. jefferson was a true genius of expression. utterly brilliant. he loved a pithy, short formulation and the declaration is a monument to that. a lot of times madison was moderating jefferson's enthusiasm. that was his perception of what his own job was. he would have been very happy there was a monument to jefferson. he would not have wanted a monument to himself.

host: a couple of things, why did he send his stepson to the negotiation for the treaty. you never heard anything good about his son. noah: madison had a tough relationship with his stepson. it was dolly son from a previous marriage. when madison met dolly, she had in less than a year before, lost her husband and infant to the yellow fever epidemic. she had one surviving son whom they called payne. madison and dolly never had children of their own. he became a stepfather to payne. he always tried to get him into the best schools. payne did not have the instincts of a public servant. madison was trying to get him worldly experience. the u.s. team was negotiating to try to and the world -- the war

of 1812. payne over there. payne was exposed to european aristocratic styles, but didn't have aristocratic styled money. he borrowed money, spent it, gambled away and came back with huge debt. madsion did not want dolley to know about this, so he paid the debts. that was a mistake because payne repeated this again and again. he would borrow money and lose it gambling. he would repeatedly come back with debt and madison would buy him out of debtor's prison. this is one of the reasons madison did not free slaves. he spent so much cash trying to solve payne's economic troubles, he did not have the cash left to give to dolley. host: we spent a year listening to people talking about jared kushner being involved in international relations.

what would happen if madison were here and payne, his stepson, was involved in something as important as the ent?ty of gh noah: i was able to ascertain, he had almost no role in the treaty. nevertheless we might raise our eyebrows at the host -- at his stepson being involved in something like a treaty. we would look at that quite differently today. but in practice it is not like , he played an important role in those negotiations. they were responsible politicians who were approved by congress. they had to be confirmed by the senate to participate. they did the heavy lifting. it's the only thing in madison's career where you would raise your eyebrows at all, madison

was obsessively determined not to take a penny from the public. or do anything that in any way would pre-error -- would appear corrupt. there were no corruption scandals in his presidency. host: i want to ask you about a footnote in the back. it starts off as the african-american kiersey family preserves the tradition that they were descended from james madison and an enslaved woman named coreen. there is a website that you cite here. who is she and what is this about? noah: these days, when you write a biography of the founding fathers, you have to think seriously about the question of descendents, including african-american descendents. the reason for this, as my wonderful colleague showed in her two books about the hemmings family, that jefferson, almost

certainly, was the father of sally hemmings children. the children preserved this tradition for centuries and nobody believed them. it took a combination of reed's work and dna testing for them to be acknowledged. i thought, i had better do the same thing for madison. it is entirely possible he wasn't biologically able to have children. they were married for many years. we know that she was able to have children, yet they never had children. one possibility is that madison was unable to have children. i went looking to see if there were african-americans who reported a family tradition. i found one family through their website. the woman who maintains it is a physician. she and her family have this tradition. i did what i could to see if i

could find further evidence in support of the tradition. i wasn't able to find any. you never know. it would be hard to do the dna testing, because we don't have descendents from madison. i did find that in the library of congress, there is a portrait of madison that he presented to a young woman he called kitty. they were not engaged, but they were engaged to be engaged. behind the portrait there is a lock of his hair. my friends who were dna scientists, it would not be easy it is not outside the bound of possibility that you might be able to extract dna from that hair. you might be able to do future dna testing. brian: have you asked anybody if

they were going to do it? noah: i don't think anybody is planning to do it at the moment. an interesting twist to this is that one of hemmings's children was named james madison hemmings. they called him madison throughout his life. according to his family tradition this was because sally -- dolley madison had requested of sally hemmings that this happened. it is kind of remarkable and poetic that jefferson had a son and grandson named james madison. remarkable and poetic that jefferson had a son and grandson named james allison, but as far as we know, madison did not have any offspring of his own. brian: he was one of 12 children, six of them lived to be adults. where did the other children fit? did any of the rest of them

become anything significant? noah: they didn't really. we have one angry letter from madison to his brother in a response by patrick henry to make an approach to his brother willie. madison was not close to his actual brothers and sisters. but he was very close with a succession of men his own age. edmund randolph. james monroe. these were proteges of jefferson. those were crucial relationships in his life. they were like sibling relationships. they apparently substituted in some way. he was not that close to his actual biological siblings. brian: how mean would it have been back then when james monroe challenged james madison for the seat in the house of representatives? noah: i think it is incredibly shocking. right after the constitution had

been ratified at the virginia ratifying convention where madison had gone head-to-head with patrick henry, madison won and henry lost. although madison controlled the constitutional convention, henry control the virginia state legislature. henry gerrymandered the districts in madison's home area to produce a district full of antifederalists. then he convinced james monroe, one of madison's best friends in the world, henry seduced monroe, probably by telling him you will defeat madison, this was right after madison had drafted the constitution. james monroe made a run for it. i find it extraordinary he would have done this against his close friend. they have is dramatic race against each other. it was the heart of winter. they went town to town and

participated in public and outdoor meetings where they would debate questions of the ratification of the constitution. madison got frostbite on his nose, he liked to tell the story. madison pulled it off but just barely. and there was an incredible letter that madison wrote to jefferson. he said, you will be sorry to hear that i had the misfortune of running against a close friend of ours, monroe. but it is over now. our friendship is unaffected on my side. i think jefferson believed him. i think madison actually meant it. he was able to forgive monroe. -- if monroeone had won, madison's whole career would have been over. 30 years later, the whole

process was repeated again. he had been convinced by other virginians that he should come back and run for president against madison, when madison was supposed to inherit the presidency from jefferson. a second time, he did it. he ran against his close friend, lost, and again madison for dave -- forgave him. his secondnning of term in his presidency, madison asked monroe to be his secretary of state. it was partly because he needed a secretary of state but it was also because he genuinely missed monroe. i think he genuinely forgave him for trying to upstage him. it was a suit -- it was a true sign of his capacity to be forgiving. that is a tremendous sign of

madison's character. brian: in 2005, we took our cameras to the constitution center. the first time i read about james madison, he was 5'2". then he was 5'4". then he was 5'6". here is video. we were walking around with a famous historian, looking at george washington and james madison. i want you to tell us how tall you think he was. >> you have george washington, the father of our country and james madison the father of the constitution, the shortest delegate and the tallest delegate. brian: i am 5'7". how tall was he? >> 6'3". >> how tall was madison? >> 5'4". noah: i wanted an accurate statement. we know that dolley was 5'7". i kept on looking for somebody to have written a description of them standing next to each thinking then -- next to each other.

thinking then we would get someone saying they were the same height or dolley was taller. the concern with height was less pervasive. today it is unimaginable that we would not know exactly how tall the president is. we do not know exactly how tall he was. pretty sure he was shorter than dolley. brian: they were 13 years apart? noah: correct. brian: who introduced james madison to dolley madison and under what environment? noah: they were introduced by aaron burr who went down in infamy for killing alexander hamilton in a dual. -- alexander hamilton in a duel. burr was a sociable guy. he was famous among the young women of the city. it was a quaker city.

background were not supposed to draw, learn to read music. burr liked to help them overcome these strictures. dolley wrote about it that many young women had burr to thank for learning these accomplishments. adison was walking with congressman, a distant cousin of dollies. he was immediately smitten. so he went to aaron burr because he knew everybody. he went to dolley and said the great little madison would like to meet you. they chatted, and within a matter of weeks, madison wrote her letters. and then he asked her to marry him and she said yes. host: what impact did she have on him?

noah: she had an enormous impact on him. and an enormous impact on the country. an argument could be made that dolley madison was the most important first lady we have ever had. she got 16 years to be first lady. from 1800-1808, jefferson was president and not married. madison was secretary of state. jefferson had a relationship with sally hemmings, but she was not in the white house. consequently, most of the time, dolley functioned as the de facto first lady. she hosted events, often at madison's house, which functioned as white house events. this was the time when washington, d.c. became the capital. the capital was moving from philadelphia and new york, and annapolis. this is where the protocol was being set. when the manners and style of a

small r republican president was being set. jefferson had no interest in socializing and was not graceful at it. madison did not like to socialize and dolley ran the show. she did it for 16 years. she had an enormous impact on our national way of expressing ourselves publicly. she also really influenced madison because she was able to express concern, opinion, and emotion that he was not. when i was researching the book and trying to find what he thought about something and he would be writing letters in calm ways. and i would find a letter from dolley where she would say that madison, or mr. madison, was very concerned about such and such. he was very concerned about the possibility that the british would not make peace in the war of 1812. you can see her expressing what he thought.

i think that really mattered for them. it was the cement of a wonderful relationship. what i will say is, john and abigail adams get good press for the hundreds of letters they wrote back and forth. you can see their closeness, but they wrote those letters because they chose almost never to live together. wherever adams was, abigail was not. madison and dolly madison preferred always to be together. in a half-century of marriage, they were only a part for a couple of, only because dolly was sick and needed a doctor in a different town. you can see they wrote three times per day. they were a deeply close and loving couple. it is a shame we don't have the written record to bear that out. host: there are a lot of times in his life, but you just mentioned to the war of 1812, you have this sentence, madison

emerged from the war a hero. why was he a hero and what was the 1812 war all about? noah: the war of 1812 was almost an incredible disaster. it began because the u.s. was excluded from trading with european ports. he was asked -- it was excluded. host: why was that? noah: in this period of time, the british and french empire functioned like the european union or nafta. they were free trade zones. when the united states seceded from great britain, the united states lost access to british ports. that was a huge challenge for our trade. the u.s. needed to use leverage to pressure part in and france -- pressure britain and france to allow our trade. not only did they resist, but they used their navy to seize american ships.

saying, if we were trading there, we were supporting their enemies. if we were, they could seize all of our shipments. the war of 1812 was fought to coerce the british and the french to change their policies and stop seizing u.s. shipping. the strategy to do this was to invade canada. the idea was that by invading canada, the u.s. would put pressure on britain because they could not support their own colonies in the west indies, especially jamaica. that might have worked had we successfully invaded canada. unfortunately, madison relied on militia. our country was designed to not have a standing army. the militia are very bad at invading. in a crucial moment, 3000 new york troops stood on the river ready to cross into canada and said, what are not going.

-- we are not going. maybe it was cowardice, maybe it was a constitutional principle that the president could not order them to invade, but for one reason or another, they would not go. we failed to invade canada. and the next summer we failed to invade canada again. britain which had been occupied fighting napoleon got a lucky break. napoleon marched into russia, the winter came, they froze, and he marched out with less than 20,000 troops. now britain had time and effort to turn to the u.s. and they turned with a vengeance. it was in that period that the city of washington, d.c. was burned to the ground by an invading british force. suddenly the u.s. was vulnerable and americans could feel it. what saved madison and the united states from total destruction and the possibility that we would lose the war outright, was the british were stopped in baltimore. they tried a sea landing and the militia blocked the troops from entering fort mchenry.

they bombarded from the air. that is the famous bombardment at francis scott key captured in a poem that became our national anthem. that battle was a turning point in u.s. history. we know that francis scott key watched the bombardment, but we forget that if the flag had been brought down, that could have meant the end of the republic altogether. by withstanding that, the americans convinced the british it was not worth continuing their efforts to conquer the united states. the british pulled back, agreed to a treaty, where each side had what they had when they started. nobody won or lost. that was conceived of as a win because things have been so bad. madison was perceived as a hero because he had survived. we fought the second war of independence and had not lost. winning inng was

that time. by the time he left office, madison was wildly popular. his party inaugurated the era of good feelings, which was essentially a one-party government. host: you pointed out in your book when the british came to washington, d.c. and burnt the capital and the white house that the general decided after the first day to do it again the next day. what was that significant hate about? noah: the burning of washington was by a different kind of troops than the americans had seen from british. the troops who burned washington and the general who did it had been fighting in the war in the iberian peninsula against napoleon and one of the most brutal wars in modern history. the famous horrors of war paintings are depictions from that peninsula campaign. these were battle-hardened british troops who were used to a different kind of war. civilians were not spared and the burning of buildings was a tactical approach to strike fear

in the enemy. they came up the potomac in barges, marched to washington, won the battle in two hours, and marched into washington and self-consciously burned the city to the ground. then they went back to their boats. it was almost a surgical strike. they did not stay because washington had no inherent strategic value. it was a tactical point. the idea was, let's show the americans who was boss. that had a powerful effect. it was not enough to defeat the american public, but i think it was terrifying. host: we started talking about the supreme court, joe torre, elena kagan, marshall. if you were ever appointed to the supreme court, where would you fit on the political spectrum? noah: i don't think there are

any lawyers who do not fantasize about being on the supreme court, but it is a wise lawyer who knows it is just a fantasy. i would like to think that i would be like frankfurter and try to follow constitutional principle wherever it led, regardless of the teams on the other side. that would be my aspiration. we all know that our best aspirations are not always carried through. i don't want to be too confident. that would be my goal. host: what would you call your own politics? noah: i would call myself a moderate centrist liberal. i'm from massachusetts. i am a registered democrat and have been my whole life. but i worked for what was effectively the bush administration when i went to iraq. it wasn't a political appointment, but it was the government of bush, and i was proud to do that and represent my country. i worked for justice souter who was a republican appointee, but

was seen by republicans of having betrayed them. i think that gets it wrong. when a justice is appointed, that justice is not working for a party. the justice has to follow his or her beliefs wherever they go. that is the goal of what a constitutional servant does. serves the constitution faithfully. host: one of the theories about elena kagan and justice scalia's relationship was that when she was the dean, she would invite conservatives to come to harvard and teach. how tolerant are the professors in the harvard law school and the students to the conservative point of view? noah: we are extremely lucky at harvard that we have genuine ideological diversity on our faculty. our new dean is from a conservative background and is committed to the idea that we have ideological diversity. the students believe in that and i believe my faculty colleagues to too. we have a genuine right and left

on our faculty. we have a lot of moderate liberals in the middle, many of whom have made important contributions to u.s. constitutional history. i like to think we are tolerant and we try to teach our students that. we teach them that you have to know every point of view to represent your client as best as you can. brian: how many classes do you teach per semester? noah: i always teach a big constitutional law class. i teach a big first amendment class around the same number. and i teach a seminar or smaller class on whatever i am working on at that particular time. sometimes i teach that jointly with professors in the arts and sciences, sometimes i teach it on my own. it enables me to develop my research for the books i am working on. host: if you had to make a decision today to write another book about anybody in our history, who would it be? noah: i think i need to take a

break before i dive into another big biography but i am very interested in oliver holmes jr. he was one of the greatest justices to serve on the supreme court, who fought in the civil war and was family influenced by that experience. the other major figure -- i don't think i would write a full biography, but i'm interested in abraham lincoln. he had more influence on the constitution than almost any other president. he had suspended habeas corpus during the civil war. in order to save the constitution, he felt he had to violate it. i find that whole history of lincoln's relationship to constitutional limit. his belief that he did not have the constitutional power to free the slaves, followed by his feeling that he could do so under wartime conditions. i'm interested in understanding how lincoln thought about the constitution. host: the title of the book is "the three lives of james madison: genius, partisan, and president."

thank you for joining us. noah: thank you for having me. ♪ announcer: four free transcripts or to give your comments about this program, visit us at q&a.org. programs are also available at c-span comcast. if you enjoyed this q&a interview, here are some other programs you might like. book,essor on her

madison's hand. and david stewart talks about his book, madison's gift, about medicines role in the founding u.s... -- of the and a book about henry clay, the essential american. watch the news anytime or search our library at c-span.org. c-span's washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. coming up monday morning emma public citizen robert wiseman joins us to talk about the report on the trump organization's conflict of interest. laser will be on to talk about changes to criminal justice policy under jeff sessions. thekim henderson discusses

nutritional assistance program. be sure to watch washington journal live on c-span eastern monday morning. join the discussion. >> congress returns monday heading into day three of a government shutdown. at senate has a vote planned noon eastern for a temporary funding measure through february 8. the house, originally scheduled to be out of session, will gather at noon. follow live coverage of the house on c-span and the senate on c-span2. we are also streaming live online at c-span.org and the free c-span radio app. >> this past week, the british prime minister theresa may and jeremy corbyn talked about the mismanagement and collapse of the construction company that employs over 20,000 people and