Madison's 1822 Letter on Why a Republic Needs Informed Citizens

A letter nobody asked you to read, written by a retired president to a lieutenant governor about education in Kentucky, contains the sharpest sentence ever written about the relationship between a free people and what they know. If it were printed on a coffee mug it would be quoted at every civic banquet in the country, and most of the people quoting it would have no idea where it came from, what it was answering, or how much more it says.

I would like to fix that. The letter is dated August 4, 1822. The writer is James Madison, then seventy-one, living at Montpelier, five years out of the presidency and still, as he had been in 1787, the best-prepared mind in the American republic on how self-government is built. The recipient is William Taylor Barry of Kentucky. And the sentence, which you have probably seen, goes like this:

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.

Who Barry was and why he wrote

William Taylor Barry was a Kentuckian, a lawyer and legislator who was lieutenant governor in 1822 and later served as Postmaster General under Andrew Jackson. He headed a Kentucky commission charged with exploring a public school system for the state, and on June 30, 1822 he wrote to Madison for advice, enclosing a printed circular. Madison answered on August 4.

Madison's reply is a gracious letter, and he praises the appropriations Kentucky's legislature had made for education in warm terms. He writes as a man who had spent his career thinking about how a republic is built and kept, and who sees in a frontier state's decision to fund schools a hopeful sign. This is not a dry policy memo. It is a statesman writing a young state's leader in the afternoon of a long life, and every line reflects the habit of mind that produced the Constitution.

Reading the letter, passage by passage

Let me take the central passage in pieces, as I would with a clause of the Constitution.

A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.

"A popular Government." In Madison's usage, a government resting on the people. He is describing the kind of government Americans had just built, and he is warning about it, not praising it.

"Without popular information, or the means of acquiring it." Two conditions. The people should have information, and they should have the means of getting it. The second condition matters. Madison did not say every citizen must already be learned. He said the means must exist: schools, books, a press, the habit of inquiry. A government that hopes to survive must build the machinery of learning.

"A Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy." A prologue is the opening of a play. The farce or the tragedy is what follows. Madison is saying that self-government without an informed people is only the first act of a drama whose ending will be either ridiculous or disastrous. Either citizens who are manipulated by demagogues, or a government that collapses into something worse. He adds, with a dry touch I enjoy, "or, perhaps both."

The passage continues:

Knowledge will for ever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

That is the moral of the whole letter, and it is a principle and not a slogan. Knowledge will govern ignorance. If the people do not hold knowledge, someone else will, and that someone else will govern them. A people who wish to rule themselves cannot leave knowledge to a class of experts. They must arm themselves with it. The metaphor of arms is Madison's, a man who understood perfectly well what it meant to be armed.

A second passage in the same letter is about institutions:

Learned Institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people. They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty.

Here the argument turns from the individual to the institutions. Schools and colleges are the lamps. They light the public mind, and a lit mind is harder to deceive, and "crafty and dangerous encroachments" are the means by which liberty is actually lost: crafty, meaning clever, and gradual, meaning unnoticed. Madison is describing the exact problem he had spent the Convention trying to solve. The enemy of liberty is rarely a man with an army. It is a measure with an innocent name, passed in an inattentive moment.

The Kentucky effort: a state, not a nation

Look at what Madison praised. It was a state's effort. Kentucky had decided, through its own legislature, to put its own money into schools. It was not a federal program, and Madison, the man who wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government are few and defined, did not suggest it should have been. The model he admired was the one the Founders had written into the Northwest Ordinance, covered in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause: encouragement, local endowment and local operation.

This should be the first point a conservative notes about the letter. Madison's passion for popular information did not become a case for national control of schooling. He knew perfectly well that the Constitution grants Congress no power over education. The Tenth Amendment says that powers not delegated to the United States are reserved to the states or to the people. His admiration for Kentucky's appropriations is an admiration for a state exercising its own reserved power.

I would add that Madison himself, throughout his career, took a restrained view of federal power in areas the Constitution did not list. In 1817, near the end of his presidency, he vetoed a bill for federal funding of roads and canals on the ground that it exceeded Congress's enumerated powers, even though he thought the goal was good. A man who would veto a road bill for lack of authority was not about to propose a federal school system. The letter to Barry should be read in that light.

The argument, in numbered premises

I want to set out the logic of the letter as an argument a modern reader can test.

1. In a republic, the people are the government. Madison's own phrase, in the Federalist, is that the government derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people. If the people rule, then what they know determines how they rule.
2. A ruling people who lack information are ruled in fact by someone else. Knowledge governs ignorance. The ignorant do not escape being governed. They merely lose the ability to choose who governs them.
3. Therefore a republic must secure the means of popular information. Schools, a free press, libraries and the habits of civic life are not luxuries. They are the structure that holds the government up.
4. The primary responsibility lies close to the people. Madison praised a state's appropriations, not a national program, and the Constitution gave the states and the people the power over schooling.
5. Therefore the proper response is local action, supported by an informed public. Not a distant authority but a community that builds and watches its own schools.

I find that argument persuasive, and I think it has a harder edge than most people give it. Premise two is the one I would underline. The danger Madison named is not that people will be forced to believe what they do not wish to believe. It is that they will not know enough to resist the one who does the telling. An ignorant citizen does not feel ignorant. He feels certain.

The objection from the other side

The opposing view, stated fairly, is that the letter is a case for more public education, funded more generously and organized more systematically, which has been the progressive position since the nineteenth century. If knowledge is the necessary armor of a free people, then a nation should spend on it without stint and make it universal. Madison himself favored funding. Why should conservatives resist the argument for more?

My answer comes in three parts.

First, Madison's letter is about the ends, which are information and the means of acquiring it. It says nothing in favor of any particular means, and the same Madison who wrote it would have asked of any proposal whether it was in the hands of those who could be held accountable.

Second, spending is not the same as information. The long record of American school finance shows that per-pupil funding rose steeply while the performance of students on national tests stayed roughly flat over decades. A fair reader can argue about why, but no honest reader can say that dollars alone produce the "popular information" Madison cared about. I have set out the figures in Real Spending Per Pupil More Than Doubled Since 1970, So Where Are the Gains.

Third, the content of what is taught matters as much as the amount. A population can be intensively schooled in a way that does not equip it to judge those in power. Madison's concern was information that enables self-government: how the government works, how its powers are divided, what the rights of citizens are, what history says about the dangers of concentrated power. That is civics, and it is the thing modern schooling often neglects.

From Madison's argument to civics and local control

Here is where the letter touches the present, and I will keep it to what I can stand behind.

Every state requires some form of civics instruction. But the question the letter raises is whether the instruction produces citizens who know what their government may and may not do. The test that new citizens take to become Americans includes questions about the Constitution, the branches of government and the rights of citizens. That standard is not an unreasonable one for graduates, a point I make in If New Citizens Must Pass the Civics Test, Graduates Should Pass It Too. You can try the test yourself at the civics test, and read the founding text at the Constitution.

And I would add a distinction that Madison would recognize: civics is not the same as activism. A student who learns how a bill becomes law, what the separation of powers is, and why the Founders feared a concentration of authority has been given information. A student who is assigned to join a protest and given a grade for it has been given something else. I take up that difference in Action Civics Gives Credit for Protest, and That Is Not Civics.

On local control, the letter's implication is straightforward. If the people are to arm themselves with knowledge, the people closest to the schools must have the power to shape them. That means elected school boards, open meetings, public records and parents who show up. A republic cannot outsource the formation of its citizens to a distant bureaucracy and then act surprised when the citizens know little about how they are governed.

What the letter does not say

A good reader marks the limits of a text. Madison does not say that government schools alone can produce an informed people. He does not say that all learning must be public. He does not say that the amount of spending is the measure of seriousness. And he does not endorse any particular curriculum. The letter is a statement of principle, and the principle leaves a great deal of room for argument about means. That room is where the work of a citizen lies.

I will also be fair about Madison's own limits. He was a Virginia planter, and he held enslaved people to the end of his life. A letter praising the education of a free people, written by a man who lived on the labor of the unfree, deserves to be read with that fact in view. It does not make the principle false. A principle can be true when its author fails to live up to it. But honesty requires that we say so, and that we notice that the principle he articulated is the same one that eventually condemned the practice he failed to abandon.

The case in brief

1. Madison's August 4, 1822 letter to W. T. Barry argued that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.
2. He wrote in praise of Kentucky's appropriations for education, a state's own act, which fits the constitutional design in which education belongs to the states and the people.
3. His premise is that knowledge governs ignorance, so a people who mean to govern themselves must arm themselves with it.
4. The letter supports civics instruction that teaches how government works, and local control that keeps the schools near those who must live with them.
5. It does not support the claim that more spending or more centralization is the answer, because Madison's concern was the quality of information and the accountability of those who supply it.

What you can do: take the civics test at 4conservative.com's civics test page with someone in your family, then ask your local school what it teaches about the Constitution.