Two hundred and twenty-five years ago, a Virginia congressional campaign transfixed the nation. Foes of the federal government nearly toppled one of the new nation’s top leaders. He survived, but the experience changed both him and his opponent—and eventually the nation. Both candidates in the 1789 election for Virginia’s Fifth District—James Madison and James Monroe—went on to serve as president. Instead of driving them apart, their time on the campaign trail forged a fast friendship.
Today’s Virginia Seventh District covers much of the same rural ground that the old Fifth covered in 1789. By a bizarre turn of events, two professors at a small college find themselves suddenly pitted against each other in a race for Congress neither ever expected to win. One of them—most likely Republican David Brat—will now go on to serve in the House. No matter who wins, he will be a junior representative and will struggle to even be heard. But if the two of them today agree to emulate Madison and Monroe, they will be heard around the country, and indeed the world.
The story begins in 1788 with the struggle over the new Constitution. Madison, as we know, was the intellectual author of the new charter and one of its strongest proponents. But the ratification victory in Virginia had been close, and many in the Old Dominion remained vehemently opposed. The state’s most powerful legislative leader, Patrick Henry, despised the new Constitution, which he believed violated “states’ rights” and individual liberty and might even open the way to freedom for American slaves.