The Founding Fathers are often called “demi-Gods,” mostly because of the document they produced and signed this week (Sept. 17) in 1787, the U.S. Constitution.

But there is a reason for the “demi.”  They were far from perfect, as evidenced by two shameful provisions in this Constitution  — the fugitive slave clause, which forced northern states to return runaway slaves to their owners in southern states, and Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 1, which extended for eight years, until 1808, the time period in which Congress was forbidden to interfere with the slave trade.

I have written before of the embarrassment our Founders must have felt in protecting slavery in this sacred document, even using the euphemism “Persons” to describe slaves so that they could keep the word “slavery” out of the Constitution (while keeping the institution of slavery in it).

But the language protecting the importation of slaves until 1808 — which meant importing an additional 40,000 slaves into America — is an even more astonishing example of euphemism and obfuscation.  Here the Founders’ embarrassment knew no bounds.

The passage reads:  “The Migration or Importation of such Persons [slaves] as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight … ”

Does anyone think that even one of those 40,000 slaves migrated to America?  Were they like certain birds who, not liking the hot weather in Africa, decided to migrate to the milder temperatures in the slave states of America’s South?

Further, is it not curious that the Founders made the claim that, when they thought it “proper,” they were “admitting” these slaves into their country, as if 40,000 Africans would petition to be let into America so that they could be chained, whipped and worked to death?   And which slaves did the Founders think were not “proper to admit” — other than those who were old, infirm or near death thanks to the horrifying conditions they endured in the slave ships that carried them across the ocean to America?

There is not a more shameful passage in the Constitution, but there is one irony — the inclusion of the seemingly innocuous phrase “as any of the States now existing …”   That suggested that the Founders meant to protect slavery only in those states that existed when the Constitution was signed.   Abe Lincoln would point to that language as proof that the Founders never intended for slavery to spread to the new territories — later the new states — that would enter the Union.

Disagreement on that very point was the main cause of the Civil War — a war that finally ended slavery forever and everywhere in America.

My hero, James Madison, died this week (June 28) in 1836.  As a president, our fourth, he was no great shakes, but as a “Founding Father” he was second only to Washington, for he was the creative genius behind two of the three pillars of our nation’s founding. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, but Madison is responsible for the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Imagine almost single handedly drafting the blueprint that would be the basis for the world’s longest-lasting representative government.  For all intents and purposes that is what Madison did in 1786, in his private study, in his beloved home Montpelier, where — in the greatest one man “skull session” in history — he pored over hundreds of books on governments of the past in an effort to discover what had worked, what hadn’t, and why.

There are bookworms and then there are bookworms, and it isn’t every student who can plow through the strengths and weaknesses of the Amphyctionic Confederacy of 16th century Greece, the Helvitic Confederacy of 14th century Switzerland or the Belgic Confederacy of the 1600s.  Madison did, and he made lists of the defining features of those governments, both good and bad.  From those lists Madison began to form his ideas of how human nature affected government, and vice versa.  He concluded that a successful government must not ignore or work against human nature, especially our very human tendency to act in our own self-interest.  Rather, government should minimize its damaging effects and, when possible, turn self-interest “to the support of liberty and republican government.”

That is why Madison formulated a government with shared powers, all of which “would check each other.”  That is why he constructed a “Republican,” or representative government, instead of a pure democracy.  Madison wanted the wishes of the masses — based naturally on self interest — to be filtered through the judgment and wisdom of elected representatives, who would more likely act in the national interest.  And that is why he assembled a Bill of Rights, so that the God-given rights of the minority could never be violated by the numerical power of the majority.

As I have written before, it is dismaying how little respect is paid to Madison’s importance. No national monument stands in his honor, no holiday is set aside for his birth, and even his live-wire wife, Dolley, gets more press.  But as George F. Will once wrote, “If we really believed the pen is mightier than the sword, the nation’s capital would be named not for the soldier who wielded the revolutionary sword, but for the thinker who was ablest with a pen.  It would be Madison, D.C.”  

I, for one, would happily live in that city.