James Madison: Life Before the Presidency
Childhood
Land was the lifeblood of the Madison family wealth, and James would come to consider it the lifeblood of the nation. In 1722, James Taylor II (1674−1729) patented 13,500 acres in the Piedmont of central Virginia. He was one of twelve men to survey the region with Governor Alexander Spotswood, a group known as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, a mark of Taylor’s affluence. One year later, Taylor’s daughter Frances and her husband, Ambrose Madison, settled on almost 3,000 acres of the land. Like most affluent Virginians, they planted tobacco, a crop that wreaks havoc on the soil’s nutrients and necessitates continual expansion to new, fertile grounds.
In Virginia, owning vast acreage went hand-in-hand with enslaving men, women, and children to work the land and run the plantation. Ambrose and Frances’s son, James Madison Sr., and his wife Eleanor (Nelly) Conway grew the family land holdings, which expanded slavery on their plantation. As slaveholding became a mark of wealth in the colony, the Madisons’ dozens of enslaved laborers, who helped build the fine brick house called Montpelier, marked them among the most prominent families in Virginia and the most prominent of Orange County.
James Madison Jr. was born on March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia, and spent his early years at a farm house in Orange county, Virginia. Montpelier was completed when he was nine years old, one year after he inherited an enslaved infant held in trust by his father. For the young Madison, the social order of master and slave seemed as natural as parent and child.
Around the same time, Madison began to receive his education at a boarding school run by Scottish immigrant Donald Robertson. At the school, he was trained in mathematics, Latin, and Greek, preparing him for higher education in natural philosophy—a precursor to empirical sciences—and moral philosophy. In 1769, at age eighteen, Madison left Montpelier for college.
Until then, his life had followed a standard pattern of the Virginia gentry—become educated in running a plantation, receive an elite education from boarding schools or private tutors, learn to master a household, including the enslaved population. Madison diverged from the pattern, however, when he decided to attend the College of New Jersey, present-day Princeton University, rather than the College of William and Mary, where most of his Virginia peers headed. The decision proved essential to Madison’s later thought and theories.
At the College of New Jersey, Madison studied under its new president, John Witherspoon, the second Scottish immigrant who directed Madison’s education. Under Witherspoon’s direction, Madison became steeped in the European and Scottish Enlightenments, though Witherspoon rejected the philosophies of some of their notable thinkers who held dim views of religion, particularly David Hume. Rather than censor those thinkers, however, Witherspoon assigned their works and taught their philosophies, then sought to rebut them. Madison adopted Witherspoon’s openness to opposing ideas, becoming a resolute defender of religious liberty even for those whose beliefs he disliked, such as Virginia’s Baptists.
Perhaps more important to the trajectory of US history, despite Witherspoon’s opposition to Hume, Madison apparently left New Jersey with some very Humean views of society and politics. Most intellectuals subscribed to Montesquieu’s theory that a republic could only exist in a small, homogenous community, otherwise competing factions would rend it apart. Hume questioned Montesquieu and suggested that an extensive republic would balance competing interests. Those ideas had a major impact on how Madison ordered his constitutional theories. Madison eventually counted Hume among Europe’s “bungling lawgivers,” meant not as an insult but as an observation that his ideas needed to be refined into a practical system of government like the US Constitution.
Early Career
After graduating in 1771, Madison stayed at the college for an additional year of study. In 1772, imbued with an appreciation for viewpoint diversity, he returned to Montpelier and became disillusioned with Virginia society, especially its religious homogeneity. Upon his return to Virginia, he wrote some of the most morose letters of his life. They reveal a young man feeling not just ill but adrift, unsure of his next steps. With failing health and anticipating an early death, Madison planned more for eternity than for earthly accomplishments.
As Madison contemplated religion, he pondered things that he believed corrupted it, and he settled on state-supported churches as the chief culprit. Virginia enforced conformity to the Church of England with uncommon rigor compared to other colonies. Observing the persecution of Baptists in Virginia, Madison could hardly help contrasting their treatment with the religious pluralism and tolerance he had experienced up north. He personally found Baptist practices distasteful, but he detested their official persecution, and he “squabbled and scolded abused and ridiculed” what he called the “diabolical Hell conceived principle of persecution” that he witnessed. Madison combined his own religiosity with Hume’s criticism of religious organization to envision a world in which religion flourished uncorrupted, due not to state support, but to liberty of conscience.
Likely surprised that he was still alive by the mid-1770s, Madison engaged in revolutionary politics and began to ponder the balance between government power and civil liberty. Like many colonists outside of New England, Madison felt threatened by the 1774 Coercive Acts, Britain’s punishment of Massachusetts following the Boston Tea Party. Madison viewed the heavy-handed acts as “Threats of Slavery and Oppression” to all the colonies.
To counter the threat, he believed, colonists needed to implement their own severe methods to protect their liberty. Unable due to health to serve in the militia, Madison joined the Orange County Committee of Safety, where he advocated harsh measures against those who failed to support the revolutionary cause. By 1776, Madison joined the Virginia Convention, the body responsible for governing revolutionary Virginia. He served on a committee responsible for punishing people deemed insufficiently friendly to Virginia’s liberty.
As Madison developed his devotion to civil liberty, he used his position in the convention to translate his advocacy of religious liberty into policy. Anticipating independence from Britain, the Virginia Convention began to draft a new constitution with a Declaration of Rights, written mainly by George Mason. Madison had said little during most of the convention, surrounded by older and more experienced politicians. He spoke up, however, to expand the Declaration of Rights’ protection for religious liberty. He sponsored amendments that broadened the principle from something the government would tolerate to a right of conscience that the government had no power to touch.
With a new government under a new state constitution, Madison took a seat in 1778 on the governor’s council, a small body meant to advise and restrain the governor. During his time on the governor’s council, he served first under a man who became one of his bitterest rivals and then another who became his closest friend—Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, respectively. Madison and Jefferson considered Henry the embodiment of an antiquated ideology in Virginia, especially given Henry’s sympathy for state-sponsored religion.
Madison’s time on the council introduced him to the complexities of fighting a continent-wide war and the exasperation of dealing with an impotent federal congress. He helped oversee the supply of money to Congress and men to the Continental Army. He lamented that Congress’s mismanagement of the resources threatened “the Existence of american Liberty.” The war compelled Madison to contemplate the delicate balance between power and liberty in a republic.
In 1780, Madison became the youngest member of the Continental Congress at age twenty-nine, and he brought to Congress his commitment to strengthening the institution. While there, he advocated amending the Articles of Confederation—the Continental Congress’s governing charter—to give Congress more effective powers to raise revenue and improve public credit. Each time, his support fell short of the steep requirement for unanimity among the states to amend the Articles. In 1783, Madison returned to Virginia unsure whether the union of states would last.
Madison’s focus turned to state politics when he became a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1784. During the mid-1780s, while Jefferson was in Paris as a diplomat, Madison defeated a Henry-backed bill to support Christian teachers with public money, and he ushered the Jefferson-authored Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom through the assembly. At the same time, Madison authored a treatise on religious liberty that evinced early versions of his most penetrating constitutional ideas—pluralism, controlling factions with competing interests, and protecting the civil liberties of minorities.
Failing Articles of Confederation
In 1784, Madison traveled north with the Marquis de Lafayette to observe negotiations with Native Americans at New York’s Fort Stanwix. During the trip, he learned that Spain had closed the Mississippi River to American navigation. Madison had expected the development following the war, but it nonetheless infuriated him. He pleaded with Lafayette and Jefferson to convince France to pressure its ally Spain to reopen the river to Americans.
Madison considered the Mississippi vital to American interests. If Americans in the West could not access the river, they could not export their agricultural goods to the world market. Without a guarantee of access to the river, Americans would stay east, overpopulate, and become an industrial society with major disparities between the monied interest and laboring poor—the very things that had corrupted British society, as Madison saw it. He envisioned a future that he considered more virtuous, where independent farmers moved west, acquired roughly equal parcels of land, grew crops, exported their goods to the world via the Mississippi, and maintained the agricultural character of the United States. If the Continental Congress could not secure access to the Mississippi, people living beyond the Appalachian Mountains might secede and become a client state of Spain or rejoin the British Empire. Madison saw access to the Mississippi River as a vital national security measure.
From a present-day perspective, it would be easy to accuse Madison of overreacting, but most Americans shared his fears, having no guarantees that their republic would survive its first few years after the end of the American Revolution. In the Southwest, Spain allied with Native American nations and armed them against Americans who considered Indian territory their territory with the end of the war. In the Northwest, a Native American−British confederacy kept land and forts that the British had nominally surrendered to the United States as part of the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war.
The states’ sole ally, France, expected to be more of a puppet master than an ally, and the French court cared little about the fate of the United States so long as the territory remained out of British hands. Other foreign nations such as Portugal had rebuffed the efforts of US diplomats to secure advantageous commercial treaties. Americans had good reason to anticipate a bleak future in which foreign nations picked apart their confederacy or adopted different regions as client states.
The confederacy’s financial situation did nothing to invigorate US leverage. The war had left Congress and states deeply in debt, and Congress’s public credit faltered without an effective revenue stream. Congress depended on states to remit funds, but even states willing to bear their share of the burden struggled to collect revenue in a post-war depression that left many people buried in private debt. States levied disparate taxes on foreign imports and often taxed goods from other states, effectively waging trade wars on one another. To confront the economic challenges, some states inflated their currency with paper money, aiding the payment of private debt but further damaging public credit. When the Massachusetts government refused to pass debt relief, a rebellion erupted, lasting months in 1786 and 1787 before state militia quelled it. Like many others, Madison considered the situation unsustainable.
In September 1786, Madison traveled to Annapolis, where a small cohort of influential lawmakers planned to propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation to buttress Congressional power. The convention disbanded without success due to insufficient attendance, but the delegates followed Alexander Hamilton’s lead to call for a national convention at Philadelphia the following May. Madison became a fierce advocate for the proposed Philadelphia meeting, personally imploring George Washington to attend and lend his credibility to the movement.
In the meantime, Madison returned to Congress and met with Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish diplomat in New York. Since 1785, Gardoqui had been negotiating with John Jay, trying to settle land disputes and convince Americans to abandon their demands to navigate the Mississippi River. Gardoqui had promised Northeasterners enticing trade benefits, hoping to sway the region least concerned about the Mississippi River.
Madison believed that he was witnessing a scene that had replayed throughout history—foreign powers were exploiting the internal divisions of weak confederacies to steal their sovereignty. Madison had spent the previous year in a deep study of past confederacies and republics dating back to Greeks and Romans. They all seemed to end the same way, with a foreign kingdom picking apart the divided regions bit by bit until they usurped the whole.
Hoping the United States could avoid the same fate, Madison began to craft a constitution that he hoped would unite the states under a more powerful federal government, yet accommodate internal divisions inherent in a republic. By the time he left New York for Philadelphia, he had created succinct outlines of what he viewed as the major deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, and he proposed remedies.
The Constitutional Convention
The Philadelphia convention, known to history as the Constitutional Convention, was scheduled to begin May 14, 1787. An anxious Madison arrived in the city on May 5 and impatiently awaited delinquent delegates until May 25. In the meantime, he conferred with the Virginia delegates to turn his ideas into a formal proposal for a new government, known as the Virginia Plan, scrapping the Articles of Confederation. Instead of a diplomatic assembly of states, this new system would be a truly national government, with three branches of government—executive, judicial, and legislative. Madison even wanted the federal legislature to enjoy a “negative”—a veto—over all state laws.
On the first day of debate, the Virginia delegation convinced the convention to abandon the Articles in favor of a new framework for a national government. Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia made the speech, but the impetus came from Madison. Throughout the summer of 1787, the convention debated and reconfigured the initial Virginia proposal, but Madison’s ideas shaped the discussion. Madison hardly won every argument. In fact, he lost on two of the questions most important to him—Senate representation proportional to state population and the federal veto of state laws. He considered those points so vital that he was unsure whether the new nation could operate without them.
By mid-September 1787, however, the delegates had crafted a new government that largely reflected his theories. The government would enjoy many powers Congress lacked under the Articles, including independent taxing power, the power to raise an army, and control over interstate and foreign commerce. Madison hoped he had created a federal government with sufficient power to protect the nation’s sovereignty and sufficient safeguards to respect the people’s liberty.
Of course, like most other Americans of the time, Madison had a constricted view of what constituted “the people.” Women had only an indirect claim on the body politic through their husbands or fathers. Native Americans were seen as an odd composite of foreign nations and dependent peoples without the privileges of citizenship. Enslaved people of African descent were excluded from the body of the people, as were most free blacks. The new Constitution did not explicitly delineate those distinctions, but in important ways it protected them, especially the practice of enslavement. For example, the Constitution’s “Three-Fifths Clause” distinguished between “free persons” and “other Persons,” meaning slaves. It allowed slave states to count three-fifths of the enslaved population toward their representation in Congress without including that population in the body politic.
Conscious that he intended the Constitution to balance national security and civil liberty, Madison struggled to make sense of the protections the document afforded slavery. Explaining to convention delegates that the Constitution must protect minority rights, he lamented, “We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.” The reason? A majority favored the institution of slavery.
Hardly an abolitionist, Madison still enslaved others and was actively searching for an escaped slave named Anthony while at the Constitutional Convention. Still, like many Virginians, Madison felt uncomfortable with the institution as part of the new American order of liberty. With others, he agreed that the Constitution should not admit “the idea that there could be property in men.” The delegates drew a delicate balance between offering protections to slavery without condoning, or indeed ever explicitly mentioning, the institution. The result was a decades-long debate until the Civil War over whether the Constitution was fundamentally pro- or anti-slavery.
With the document signed, Madison plunged into the contest over ratification. He teamed with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to publish
In the centuries since, Madison’s essays have become classic pillars of US constitutional theory. Madison’s most penetrating works explained why—contrary to conventional wisdom—a republic could function over a vast territory rather than a small community, how ambition would check ambition to mitigate concentration of power, how to counterpoise majority will with minority rights, and how separation of powers would balance government strength and civil liberty.
In spring of 1788, Madison stopped writing the essays and returned to Virginia to attend the state’s ratifying convention. In Richmond, he faced his adversary Patrick Henry, who opposed ratification. On June 25, Virginia ratified the charter, days after New Hampshire had become the ninth state to do so, making the Constitution operative.
Madison prevailed with promises of amendments to the Constitution. In 1789, he won election to the House of Representatives in the First Congress, reiterating his promises to introduce constitutional amendments. Madison proposed a series of amendments guaranteeing civil liberties and checking the power of the federal government. By 1791, the nation had ratified ten of those amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights.
Within his lifetime, Madison came to be regarded as the Father of the Constitution. He felt uncomfortable with the title, insisting that the charter was “the work of many heads & many hands.” Madison was hardly omnipotent in the creation of the Constitution, losing significant battles in its framing and interpretation. The title is more useful in constructing a national narrative than explaining national history. But if Americans insist on assigning the title to somebody, he remains the obvious choice given his advocacy for the Constitutional Convention, his influence in persuading Washington to attend and lend it legitimacy, his foundational ideas that guided the debates, his writings and speeches that promoted ratification, and his authorship of the Bill of Rights.
House of Representatives
In February 1789, despite Patrick Henry’s best efforts to keep Madison out of the new federal government, Madison was elected to the House and became its most influential member. President Washington leaned on Madison as a key adviser in the legislature, making Madison something akin to a prime minister during Washington’s first term. Washington received Madison’s input on everything from his inaugural speech to foreign relations.
Unfortunately for Madison, Washington received advice from others as well, from people who Madison believed were trying to steer the nation toward a British-backed monarchy. Madison came to consider Alexander Hamilton as Washington’s most dangerous adviser. As treasury secretary, Hamilton proposed a financial plan that Madison feared would ruin his vision for a nation of virtuous, independent, land-holding farmers. Hamilton favored modeling the US economy after Britain’s, committed to industrialization, manufacturing, and commercial exchange, backed by powerful banking institutions such as a national bank. Hamilton also advocated a closer commercial partnership with Britain, convinced that revenue from trade with the former parent country would undergird the financial system. Madison united with Jefferson, by then Washington’s secretary of state, in a battle for the ear of the president.
The political divisions deepened as a republican revolution unfolded in France and war erupted between France and Britain. The tumult pitted Hamilton’s faction, who sympathized with Britain and condemned the violence of the French Revolution, against Madison and Jefferson’s adherents, who favored France and its revolution. The divisions gave rise to an informal, fluid, but increasingly rigid, party system between Hamilton’s Federalists and Madison’s Republicans (different from today’s Republican Party, which originated in the 1850s). In 1795, the party system took deeper root when the Senate approved and Washington ratified the Jay Treaty, a treaty with Britain to resolve outstanding issues from the American Revolution that Madison believed would ruin US economic independence. The political battle over the treaty ended Madison and Washington’s partnership.
During those tumultuous political years, forty-three-year-old Madison made a personal move that surprised many of those closest to him, marrying a vibrant, twenty-six-year-old widow with a toddler son. Aaron Burr introduced Madison to Dolley Payne Todd in 1794. Madison had not had a serious romantic relationship for a decade, since a young Kitty Floyd broke his heart by choosing another man. Combining Quaker roots and an energetic personality, Dolley mixed simplicity, verve, and intellect in a way that appealed to James. They married on September 15, 1794. Dolley’s vitality, social grace, and political instincts made her an important partner to Madison as well as a fixture in US politics and society for the rest of her life.
After backing Jefferson’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1796, Madison retired from Congress as John Adams and his Federalists swept into the presidency and the legislature. With Federalists firmly in control of foreign policy, relations with France began to deteriorate, leading to a limited, undeclared war in 1798. Fearful that Republican attacks on the president and Congress emboldened America’s enemies and undermined the government, Federalists passed the imperious Alien and Sedition Acts.
Among other things, the Sedition Act made it a crime to criticize the president or the government, violating freedom of speech and freedom of the press that were enshrined in the US Constitution. Infuriated by the acts, Madison drafted the Virginia Resolution, attacking the acts as unconstitutional. The Virginia Assembly adopted his resolution in 1798. Jefferson wrote a similar, though fierier, response for Kentucky, which made even Madison flinch with discomfort as it argued that states could nullify laws that they considered unconstitutional. Future generations of Southerners used the resolutions to support their theories that states could nullify laws passed by the federal government. Unwilling to abandon his earlier nationalist leanings, Madison insisted for the rest of his life that his Virginia Resolution meant no such thing.
Secretary of State
In 1800, Madison supported Jefferson in his rematch against John Adams. Having returned to a seat in the Virginia Assembly, he worked to change how the state allotted its electoral votes to ensure that the entirety went to a single candidate. One Virginia elector had given his vote to Adams in 1796, and Madison wanted to ensure that such a thing would not happen again in another election sure to be close.
Due to complexities of the electoral college system—a system even more complicated at the time than it is today—Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied for the electoral college vote. The tie threw the decision to the House of Representatives, where, after thirty-six ballots, Jefferson was voted as president, and Aaron Burr became vice president. With executive power and his party now in control of Congress, Jefferson planned to revolutionize US policy.
Jefferson appointed Madison secretary of state, making him the nation’s chief diplomat. Though Madison had never held an official diplomatic position, having turned down several offers over the years, he had pondered foreign relations for two decades. With Jefferson, Madison imagined a foreign policy marked by republican simplicity. Supported by a free people, the government would not need an army or overbearing state complex to obtain its international objectives.
Secretary of State Madison presided over one of the most significant diplomatic negotiations in US history—the Louisiana Purchase. The French dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, had recently acquired the territory from Spain, and Madison feared that the powerful French would make dangerous neighbors. Soon after the acquisition, however, Napoleon abandoned his hope of recreating a French empire in the Americas. He sold the territory to the United States for $15 million in 1803. Having doubled the size of the United States through diplomacy rather than war, Madison and Jefferson believed that the purchase vindicated their governing philosophy.
The war in Europe made Madison’s position precarious. France and Britain tried to destroy each other’s economy, harming the trade of neutral nations such as the United States. Madison complained about both nations but considered Britain the greater offender due to impressment—the practice of stopping US ships to conscript British sailors into the Royal Navy. Madison considered the practice a violation of US sovereignty, especially because press gangs often conscripted US citizens based on thin evidence that they were British subjects.
To force the European powers to respect US neutrality and sovereignty, Madison championed the Embargo Act of 1807, a blanket prohibition on foreign trade. Madison believed the measure would harm the European economy and compel the belligerents to honor US neutrality. Roundly considered one of the worst policy blunders in US history, the Embargo hurt the US economy far more than economies in Europe and only succeeded in infuriating Madison’s Federalist critics during the election of 1808. Indeed, some British agents hoped the embargo would continue long enough to keep Madison out of the presidency and favor the more British-friendly Federalists. Though such hopes went unfulfilled, the unpopular policy did complicate Madison’s presidential aspirations in 1808.
