President James Madison

3 Key excerpts on "President James Madison"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Executive Branch of the Federal Government

  Purpose, Process, and People

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Brian Duignan(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Jefferson died in his bed at Monticello at about half past noon on July 4, 1826. His last conscious words were “Is it the Fourth?” Remarkably, up in Quincy on that same day his old rival and friend John Adams also died later in the afternoon. His last words—“Thomas Jefferson still lives”—were wrong at the moment but right for the future, since Jefferson’s complex legacy was destined to become the most resonant and controversial touchstone in all of American history.

  JAMES MADISON

  (b. March 16, 1751, Port Conway, Va. —d. June 28, 1836, Montpelier, Va.)

  J ames Madison was the fourth president of the United States (1809–17) and one of the Founding Fathers of his country. At the Constitutional Convention (1787), he influenced the planning and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and collaborated with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in the publication of the Federalist papers. As a member of the new House of Representatives, he sponsored the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, commonly called the Bill of Rights. He was secretary of state under Pres. Thomas Jefferson when the Louisiana Territory was purchased from France. The War of 1812 was fought during his presidency.

  EARLY LIFE AND POLITICAL ACTIVITIES

  Madison was born at the home of his maternal grandmother. The son and namesake of a leading Orange county landowner and squire, he maintained his lifelong home in Virginia at Montpelier, near the Blue Ridge Mountains. In 1769 he rode horseback to the College of New Jersey (Princeton University), where he completed the four-year course in two years. Overwork produced several years of epileptoid hysteria and premonitions of early death but did not prevent home study of public law.

  His health improved, and he was elected to Virginia’s 1776 Revolutionary convention, where he drafted the state’s guarantee of religious freedom. In the convention-turned-legislature he helped Thomas Jefferson disestablish the church but lost reelection by refusing to furnish the electors with free whiskey. After two years on the governor’s council, he was sent to the Continental Congress in March 1780.

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  James Madison

  A Son of Virginia and a Founder of the Nation

  • Jeff Broadwater(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER SIX }A Founder as Commander in Chief

  Thomas Jefferson worried about James Madison as the new president took office. “If peace can be preserved, I hope and trust you will have a smooth administration,” Jefferson told his old friend. But he warned him, “I know no government which would be so embarrassing in war as ours.” Jefferson blamed “the lying and licentious character” of American newspapers and “the wonderful credulity” of Congress for the nation's military incompetence. Unfortunately for Madison, a war with Great Britain would dominate his presidency, and he would struggle in the White House with a host of problems. Some were of his own making; many were not. While Madison is considered one of the most creative and productive of the founders, he has not been ranked, in recent times, among the greatest of American presidents.1

  Madison articulated an orthodox republican agenda in his inaugural address. He pledged to keep the peace, to maintain the Union, to support the Constitution, and to respect the people's liberties. He promised specifically “to avoid the slightest interference with the rights of conscience or the functions of religion.” He endorsed frugality in government. He made a commitment “to keep within the requisite limits a standing military force, always remembering that an armed and trained militia is the firmest bulwark of republics—that without standing armies their liberty can never be in danger, nor with large ones safe.”2 The speech contained nothing new, but Madison took republican principles seriously, and they compromised his ability to function as a dynamic commander in chief. Although he could act decisively, he did not believe he should dominate Congress or even his Cabinet. Although he could take risks, he believed war corrupted republican states. As a result, he pursued diplomatic solutions and experimented with economic sanctions until, in the face of repeated failures and provocations, he acquired a reputation for weakness and vacillation. Once the War of 1812 began, the nation's heavy reliance on the state militia proved ill considered at best. Yet Madison's contemporaries did not consider his presidency a failure. Sharing his values, they showed him more sympathy than have historians.3

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  Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume III

  Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime

  • Paul A. Rahe(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  James Madison and the New Science of Politics

  We may appeal to every page of history we have hitherto turned over, for proofs irrefragable, that the people, when they have been unchecked, have been as unjust, tyrannical, brutal, barbarous, and cruel, as any king or senate possessed of uncontrollable power. The majority has eternally, and without one exception, usurped over the rights of the minority

  .—John Adams

  III. i.1

  Despite its lasting fame, The Federalist is less a treatise in political philosophy composed for the ages than a work of political rhetoric aimed at a particular audience.1 All but the last eight numbers were written in extreme haste and first appeared in the popular press of New York City as a series of brief articles designed to explain and defend the new constitution devised for the United States of America at the federal convention held in Philadelphia from May to September 1787. The various numbers were then collected, corrected, and republished in two volumes in time for the New York Ratifying Convention.2

  Precisely two decades before the delegates from Britain’s former colonies gathered for the federal convention, Adam Ferguson had published in Edinburgh An Essay on the History of Civil Society . The twenty years separating the publication of Ferguson’s book and the framing of the American Constitution mark a watershed in human history. Before we can begin to understand what Hamilton, Madison, and Jay have to say, we must ponder the events of those two decades. We must consider their import as understood by the men of that age, and we must pause to reflect on the character of the audience which the authors of The Federalist addressed.

  Though virtually forgotten today, Ferguson was much esteemed at the time. A Gaelic-speaking Highlander, educated in the Lowlands and closely associated with David Hume and Adam Smith, he held in succession the chairs in natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and mathematics at Edinburgh in a period in which that university was generally regarded as the greatest in all of Europe. In the decades after its publication, his essay was to exercise a profound influence on economists and political theorists alike. Ferguson was no less aware of the unprecedented nature of the emerging new order than his two better-known friends. But unlike them, as we have already remarked, he had grave reservations concerning the consequences, for the experience of living in the Highlands and his years as chaplain to the Black Watch had left him with a deep and abiding appreciation for the virtues of the world soon to be lost.3

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