SOURCE: Miller, William Lee. “Many Hands.” In The Business of May Next: James Madison and the Founding, pp. 142-52. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992.

In the following essay, Miller discusses Madison's role as the “Father of the Constitution,” suggesting that such a label is inappropriate given the collaborative nature of the founding of the republic.

One

Was Madison the Father of the Constitution? That is the wrong metaphor, for Madison or for anyone else. The singleness of the metaphor of fatherhood is inappropriate to the collaborative complexity of this successful republican state-making. A later president, John F. Kennedy, quoting a “Chinese proverb” that no one has been able to find, would remark that “victory has a hundred fathers. Defeat is an orphan.”

Was Madison the most important of the several parents of the Constitution? Madison failed to carry not only the two big points, very important to him...