Walter Williams writes at Human Events that Americans would do well to commemorate a special birthday each March 16.

We celebrate Washington’s Birthday each February. But March 16th marks the birthday of probably the second-most important and decent American, James Madison.

Madison became our fourth president, but his presidency is not the chief source of his greatness. There would have been an entirely different America without Madison’s enormous input and foresight at the contentious 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. …

… Madison’s political genius is mostly seen in his contribution to The Federalist Papers, which were co-authored with Hamilton and John Jay. The papers were written to persuade the citizens of New York — and secondarily other states — to ratify the Constitution. Ratification was no easy task. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended our war with Great Britain, held that each state was a sovereign nation. As such, each feared giving up its rights to a powerful central government. Anti-federalists wanted some sort of guarantee that states would remain sovereign and that the power of the federal government would be limited and it would be recognized as a creation of, an agent of and a servant of the states. They said their votes to ratify could only be obtained if the Constitution contained a bill of rights guaranteeing the rights of the people and their states.