James Madison

A Son of Virginia and a Founder of the Nation

Jeff Broadwater

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807869918
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

James Madison is remembered primarily as a systematic political theorist, but this bookish and unassuming man was also a practical politician who strove for balance in an age of revolution. In this biography, Jeff Broadwater focuses on Madison's role in the battle for religious freedom in Virginia, his contributions to the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, his place in the evolution of the party system, his relationship with Dolley Madison, his performance as a wartime commander in chief, and his views on slavery. From Broadwater's perspective, no single figure can tell us more about the origins of the American republic than our fourth president.
In these pages, Madison emerges as a remarkably resilient politician, an unlikely wartime leader who survived repeated setbacks in the War of 1812 with his popularity intact. Yet Broadwater shows that despite his keen intelligence, the more Madison thought about one issue, race, the more muddled his thinking became, and his conviction that white prejudices were intractable prevented him from fully grappling with the dilemma of American slavery.

{ CHAPTER ONE }
Religion and Revolution

James Madison was born on 16 March 1751, while his parents, James Madison Sr. and Nelly Conway Madison, were visiting his maternal grandmother on her plantation in King George County, Virginia. The young family soon returned to their own plantation, which would eventually be known as Montpelier, in orange County. Little is known of Madison's early life, and the house where he first lived has long since disappeared. Madison's great-great-grandfather, John Maddison, had come to Virginia as a ship's carpenter in the middle of the 1600s. Maddison and his descendants prospered in America, the second d was dropped along the way, and by 1751 James Madison Sr. owned 2,850 acres, making him the wealthiest landowner in the county. The great house at Montpelier that would be his son's home for the rest of his life was finished when James Madison Jr. was a young boy. As an adult, Madison remembered helping move furniture into the new mansion.¹

The house stood among wooded, rolling hills near the Rapidan River, within sight of the Blue ridge Mountains on a clear day. The Madisons were rural people, but they were not isolated. They owned dozens of slaves, and they enjoyed the company of a handful of white neighbors; Orange County sheriff Thomas Chew and his family were the closest. Worship at the Brick Church, a nearby Anglican congregation where James Madison Sr. served as a vestryman, brought the Madisons into contact with a community beyond the plantation.²

The first of twelve children, James Madison saw three siblings die in infancy. Two others died young from dysentery. He probably began his education at home under the supervision of his grandmother Frances Taylor Madison, a pious Anglican. He may have gone later to a local school. The future president's reading included books from his father's modest library and articles from Joseph Addison's The Spectator, a popular magazine known for its elegant essays. From 1762 to 1767, Madison attended a boarding school run by Donald Robertson in King and Queen County. Robertson was a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and the curriculum, which included Latin, Greek, logic, astronomy, and mathematics, was demanding. Madison recalled years later, “All that I have been in life I owe largely to that man.” From 1767 to 1769, Madison studied with the Reverend Thomas Martin, the new rector of the Brick Church.³

Sketch of Montpelier by J. F. E. Prud'homme after a painting by John G. Chapman. Montpelier is known as James Madison's house, but his father, James Madison Sr., was the owner until his death in 1801, well into his son's middle age. After his father's death, Madison shared the house with his mother, Nelly, who died in 1829 at the age of ninety-eight. (Library of Virginia)

After two years with Martin, Madison faced the first important decision of his life. The sons of Virginia's gentry often went to the College of William and Mary to complete their education. A few traveled to england to study law at the Inns of Court. Madison chose the College of New Jersey, soon to be better known as Princeton. By eighteen, Madison was showing signs of hypochondria, and New Jersey's cooler climate seemed healthier than the coastal lowlands near Williamsburg. William and Mary suffered under a questionable academic reputation, and Martin, a Princeton alumnus himself, may have influenced Madison's decision. An Anglican's choice of a Presbyterian college raised some eyebrows, but Madison seems never to have been wholly committed to the established church.⁴

In fact, Princeton's biases, both religious and political, may have been part of the institution's appeal. A Scottish divine, John Witherspoon, had become president of Princeton in 1768 and quickly established a reputation as a champion of evangelical Christianity and religious toleration. Contemporary critics accused Witherspoon of turning the college into “a seminary of sedition.”⁵ A modern historian has called it “a kind of West Point for dissenting Presbyterianism.”⁶ Madison must have known what he was getting into, and presumably it was what he wanted. In the summer of 1769, Madison set out on horseback for New Jersey with Thomas Martin, Martin's brother Alexander, and a slave named Sawney.⁷

Madison immediately warmed to Princeton, writing Thomas Martin shortly after they parted company, “I am perfectly pleased with my present situation.” Madison thrived in college, completing his coursework in two years. Princeton combined the classics with then innovative courses in history, mathematics, and science, making Madison one of the best-educated of the American founders. New Light Presbyterianism and liberal political ideas permeated the campus, but then as now college life was not interminably serious. Madison joined the Whig Society and wrote bad and slightly risqué poetry satirizing the Cliosophians, a rival social club. His fellow Whigs included William Bradford, a future attorney general of the United States, as well as Hugh Henry Brackenridge and Philip Freneau, both of whom would enjoy distinguished literary careers.⁸ As college students typically do, Madison worried about money and about his appearance. “Every small trifle which I have occasion for,” he wrote James Sr., “consumes a much greater sum than one wou[ld] suppose.” In another letter, he sent his mother neck and wrist sizes for three or four shirts, but he implored her not to add the ruffles until he could come home and supervise the project.⁹

Madison received his undergraduate degree in the fall of 1771, but he remained at Princeton until April 1772, studying Hebrew under Witherspoon and reading law, among what he called his “miscellaneous studies.” Of the twelve members of his graduating class, only Madison failed to speak at the graduation service. Although he never relished public speaking, he may have been excused for health reasons. He contracted a mysterious ailment about the time he graduated—the timing is uncertain—and the ill effects persisted for two or three years. Overwork may have been partially to blame. Madison reportedly slept only four or five hours a night while he was at Princeton. After Madison returned to Montpelier, William Bradford wrote expressing concern about his former classmate's health: “I believe you hurt your constitution while here, by too close an application to study.” Another fellow student, Joseph Ross of Pennsylvania, completed his degree on the same accelerated schedule as Madison did, and Ross died a year after leaving Princeton. Madison complained of symptoms similar to epilepsy, but modern biographers have concluded he was not an epileptic. The episode may have been triggered by having to leave Princeton, which he loved, without any definite career plans. It may have been aggravated by an inordinate concern about his health. Slight, with boyish features, Madison seemed delicate. In reality, he demonstrated a remarkable resistance to diseases like malaria and smallpox, which were common in his day, and he lived to a venerable old age. He was also taller than commonly believed; one creditable estimate put him at five feet, six inches tall, short, but not unusually so.¹⁰

Besides his epileptic symptoms, Madison returned to Montpelier with at least an academic interest in religion. According to one report, he had been caught up in a religious revival that had swept Princeton. He led family devotionals for a time after coming home. His surviving papers from his school days include a copybook with a Socratic dialogue between an atheist and a theist in which the theist argues for the existence of God from the “Fabric of the Universe.” He also took extensive notes from a popular biblical commentary.¹¹

The young graduate could sound downright sanctimonious. As he wrote William Bradford in November 1772, “a watchful eye must be kept on ourselves lest while we are building ideal Monuments of Renown and Bliss here we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.” He complained in another letter of the difficulty of finding printed copies of John Witherspoon's sermons in Virginia. When Bradford asked Madison's advice on the choice of a vocation, the Virginian advised him to consider the ministry, perhaps as a second career. “I have sometimes thought there could not be a stronger testimony in favor of Religion,” he wrote Bradford, than for successful professionals to renounce worldly pursuits “by becoming fervent advocates in the cause of Christ.” He opined to Bradford in a later letter that “the specious Arguments of Infidels have established the faith of enquiring Christians.”¹²

Madison avoided such professions of faith in later years. Seeds of skepticism were planted alongside his adolescent orthodoxy. The first entry in his commonplace book is from the memoirs of the French cleric and politician Cardinal de Retz: “Nothing is more subject to Delusion than Piety. All Manner of Errors creep and hide themselves under that veil.” The second is from the essayist Michel de Montaigne and includes the observation, “People who pretend to religion cannot help confessing in general that they are Sinners; but they conceal or disown all Particulars.”¹³

Madison had been baptized as an infant, but he was never confirmed in the Anglican Church. In 1790, an unfounded rumor circulated in Virginia that he had converted to Methodism. A year later, while he and Thomas Jefferson were touring New York and New England, they attended a Congregational Church in Bennington, Vermont; when asked how they liked the music, they responded that it had been so long since they had been to church that they could make no comparisons. In middle age, Madison brought ministers to Montpelier to give the sacraments to his mother, but he did not kneel at prayer. As president, he and Dolley Madison occupied the President's Pew at St. John's Episcopal Church near the White House, and at Montpelier they worshipped at St. Thomas's Church; how often is uncertain. After dinner at the white House in 1815, the Boston Unitarian George Ticknor reported that Madison seemed sympathetic to liberal Christianity. He was more likely to refer in public to “Nature's God” than to Jehovah or Jesus.¹⁴

At Princeton, Madison had been impressed by the Reverend Samuel Clarke's The Being and Attributes of God, which argued that conclusive evidence for the existence of God could be drawn from the physical world. Clarke's brand of rationalism fell from intellectual grace over the course of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, when Thomas Jefferson asked Madison in 1825 to suggest theological works for the University of Virginia library, Madison recommended Clarke's book. He may have failed to stay abreast of the latest thinking because of a waning interest in religion. In February 1836, a Presbyterian minister from Danville, Virginia, wrote Madison to warn him that he could not be “expected to remain much longer on this earth” and to urge upon him “the necessity of . . . Divine influence to qualify you for heaven.” Madison responded with a terse reference to his “general rule of declining correspondences on the subject [of] my religion.” Reluctant to discuss his own views, Madison remained throughout his life respectful of the opinions of others.¹⁵

The mature Madison may have been inclined toward deism, as were many of the leading figures of his day, including Jefferson, who would become his closest political confidant. Eighteenth-century liberals sometimes shared more in common with orthodox Christians than is commonly acknowledged. Abigail Adams rejected the idea of the Trinity, but she believed that Jesus had been sent by God, crucified, and resurrected. Benjamin Franklin expressed “some doubts” about the divinity of Christ, but he believed in a divine creation, the immortality of the soul, and the vengeance of the Almighty “either here or hereafter.” Madison and Jefferson subscribed to a practical faith. They had more confidence in reason than in biblical revelations, but they thought religion could help promote the public virtue they believed was essential to the success of republican governments.¹⁶

Hand in hand with a skepticism about orthodox Christianity—cause and effect here is hard to trace—went a hostility to the established church. Late in life Madison wrote of his “very early and strong impressions in favor of liberty both civil and religious.” Prerevolutionary Virginia imprisoned almost fifty Baptist ministers for preaching without licenses or for over-stepping the geographic boundaries they imposed. The persecution of religious dissenters, Madison wrote Bradford in January 1774, “vexes me the most of anything whatever.” the establishment of religion had corrupted both the clergy and the people and retarded Virginia's economic development. “Poverty and luxury prevail among all sorts: pride, ignorance and knavery among the Priesthood and vice and wickedness among the Laity.” Madison attributed Pennsylvania's prosperity, by contrast, to its embrace of religious freedom. “I can not help attributing those continual exertions of genius which appear among you to the inspiration of liberty and that love of fame and knowledge which always accompany it.”¹⁷

As relations worsened between the colonies and Parliament on the eve of the American Revolution, the establishment appeared to Madison to threaten political freedom as well as liberty of conscience. The state church in Virginia was, after all, the Church of England. If the Anglican Church had been the established church “in all the northern colonies,” as it had been in the South, and if religious beliefs had been uniform, he believed “that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence and Ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”¹⁸

Opposition to the idea of an established church and fear that British authorities would appoint an Anglican bishop for the American colonies, which would threaten the vestries’ control of their local congregations, made it easier for patriots like Madison to resist imperial taxes and trade regulations. Madison enthusiastically supported the resistance movement. He visited Philadelphia in 1774 and saw two royal officials, Alexander Wedder-burn and Thomas Hutchinson, burned in effigy. while he was in Philadelphia, patriot leaders met at the City tavern and called for a continental congress to coordinate the American response to the infamous Coercive Acts. Congress eventually proposed that local committees of safety be created to enforce a boycott of British goods, and Madison was elected to the Orange County committee in December 1774.¹⁹ His family's prominence and his college degree, a rarity in eighteenth-century America, made a position of leadership, at least at the local level, almost inescapable.

After the fighting began, Madison received a commission as a colonel, under the command of his father, in the orange County militia. He drilled enough to boast of the Virginians’ marksmanship: “The most inexpert hands rec[k]en it an indifferent shot to miss the bigness of a man's face at the distance of 100 yards. I am far from being among the best and should not often miss it on a fair trial at that distance.” Poor health kept him from active duty, and he never saw combat. As he explained in his autobiography, he was disabled by “his feeble health, and a constitutional liability to sudden attacks, somewhat resembling Epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions.”²⁰

In reality, Madison's intellectual functions rarely stopped after 1775, although the outbreak of the Revolutionary War did occasionally test his patience and common sense. He initially gave credence to rumors that Benjamin Franklin was a British spy and that Richard Bland, the veteran Virginia lawmaker, was a traitor. He fumed against “selfish Quakers” who had refused to sign non-importation agreements foreswearing the purchase of British goods. His ire cooled when some of Virginia's Quakers began to join militia companies. He felt no sympathy for Anglican ministers with Loyalist leanings. Madison heartily approved when the Culpeper County committee of safety closed the church of James Herdman, stopped paying his salary, and expelled him from the parish. In Orange County, patriots burned allegedly “seditious pamphlets” belonging to the Reverend John Wingate. Shortly thereafter, he left his church.²¹

Madison had floundered professionally since leaving Princeton. He may have toyed with the idea of a career in law or the ministry, but he seems to have had no genuine interest in either. James Madison Sr., a sensible and well-respected planter, remained active and vigorous far into his son's adulthood, living until 1801. As a result, Madison was not forced to assume the patriarchal role thrust on Jefferson and so many of their contemporaries who had lost fathers early in life. The Revolution, however, created new opportunities for ambitious Americans. In April 1776, Orange County elected Madison one of its two delegates to a convention scheduled to meet in Williamsburg in May. The May gathering was the last in a series of conventions that provided Virginia with a provisional administration between the collapse of royal authority and the creation of a new state government. Madison found his calling in Williamsburg: politics. Intelligent and studious, able to grasp abstract principles without neglecting more mundane details, he was ideal...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• James Madison
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• { CHAPTER ONE } Religion and Revolution
• { CHAPTER TWO } A Republican Constitution
• { CHAPTER THREE } From Ratification to the Bill of Rights
• { CHAPTER FOUR } The Origins of the Party System
• { CHAPTER FIVE } The Politics of Charm and the Limits of Diplomacy
• { CHAPTER SIX } A Founder as Commander in Chief
• { CHAPTER SEVEN } Slavery, Sectionalism, and the Decline of the Old Dominion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index