Aimee Dennett
Madison Campaign Ad
This ad turned out to be much more difficult for me to create than I had originally anticipated for a few reasons. The first being that it seems Madison did not have any drawings or portraits made of him before 1808 other than one while he was serving in the Virginia legislature. The second being his strong association with Jefferson at the time of the election, who had just suffered significant domestic political opposition because of his two recent policies. The embargo placed on Europe was quite obviously unpopular but, luckily for Madison’s political career, repealed a few days before the end of Jefferson’s presidency. Though the Louisiana Purchase in retrospect was a great success, many thought it was a hypocritical move by Jefferson–a president who claimed to be in favor of little-to-no strong national intervention had just purchased land through arguably unconstitutional means. If I were a campaign advisor in 1808, I would try to do my best to distinguish Madison from these unpopular policies. It is for this reason I placed the anti-Jefferson political cartoons in the video.
The music playing is a portion from Yo Yo Ma’s “Song Without Words, Op. 109”. I did my best to time the music to various cross-fading effects, and played the anti-Jefferson clips where the music reaches its climax. The first two quotes were taken from Williams Pierce’s “Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention,” where he describes Madison in a very favorable light. The highlighted quote is taken from what I’m assuming is a toast from the periodical “Claypoole’s Daily Adverstiser.” Since I only had one usable image of Madison, I wanted to save it until the very end of the video, which is why I chose to emphasize Madison as a “defender of the rights” and then cross-fade to a political cartoon of two men boxing at a Constitutional convention. I used this image for two reasons: one, Madison constructed the Bill of Rights making him not only the defender of rights but the founder. Two, Madison was largely responsible for convincing Virginia to ratify the Constitution. If it had not been for Virginia, New York most likely would have also avoided ratifying. This made Madison again a crucial defender of the People, which is why I thought the cartoon would be relevant.
The next portion of the video was tricky—I didn’t want to sacrifice subtlety but still needed to disassociate Madison from Jefferson even though the first 20 seconds of my video was devoted to Madison. I decided to use a Bible passage, which may be ironic considering Madison’s crucial role in defending religious freedoms, but nonetheless I thought it could speak to the religious population in America at the time. I also needed to make the pacing in this part of the video different from the rest, so I could again set Jefferson’s content apart from Madison’s. I chose images of Jefferson enacting his then unpopular policies, and used my words to imply Madison’s innocence. I would have liked to use a quote from a newspaper to do this more subtly, but unfortunately most newspapers at the time still associated Madison very directly with Jefferson (for good reason). As the music comes to an end, a slow fade of a young Madison felt like a sufficient way to wrap up the video. All images were found using the Library of Congress online database.
Young Madison:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html
Embargo pic:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3g00000/3g06000/3g06200/3g06235v.jpg
Louisiana purchase:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3g00000/3g04000/3g04500/3g04544v.jpg
William Pierce-Character Sketches of Delegates to the Federal Convention:
http://history.wisc.edu/csac/founders/madison.htm
Boxing image:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/cph/3c30000/3c32000/3c32900/3c32988v.jpg
Jefferson pic:
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/19100/19161v.jpg