Americans and scholars will likely always regard Madison as a better convention and congressional leader than president. Those roles played to Madison’s strengths, where deep thought and intimate persuasion are more prized than charisma and magnetism. Indeed, given Madison’s affinity for congressional over presidential power, that legacy would probably suit him fine. His small frame, soft voice, and dislike of attention hardly made him a natural in the office of president. For those reasons, Dolley was an indispensable partner in the White House, recognizing that the nation craved presidential splendor that Madison hesitated to supply. That hesitance stemmed partly from his personality and partly from his deep-rooted desire that the presidential office maintain a republican simplicity, even as the nation grew and developed.

Assessments of Madison’s presidency usually hinge on assessments of the War of 1812. The causes and aims of the war today still seem undefined, and the outcome of the war seems equally murky. Such ambiguity raises doubts about the wisdom of prosecuting the war in the first place. The war was highly popular in most parts of the nation but hardly universally so. A nation whose senate takes two weeks to debate a declaration of war is a nation unsure of its commitment to the cause. The war also invited the only successful invasion and sacking of Washington, DC, hardly a glowing distinction. Many historians still see wartime Madison much like the British and Federalists did at the time, a panicky figure fleeing from the flames set by the British.

Despite the negative perception that persists, some historians have recently rethought Madison’s wartime accomplishments, even drawing comparisons to Abraham Lincoln. Bereft of effective generals, Madison took a direct interest in the prosecution of the war. He refused to relinquish the details to Secretary of War John Armstrong. Though it can be tempting to dismiss the caliber of US fighting, the United States did withstand a British invasion at a time when the British would gladly have at least retaken some territory in North America.

Unlike during the Revolutionary War, the United States fought Britain without the aid of foreign allies. Napoleon distracted the British during the first part of the war, but Napoleon’s defeat in early 1814 freed British forces to concentrate on America. A crucial US naval victory that threatened British supply lines forced the retreat of a formidable British force that could have otherwise inflicted serious damage. In the most sympathetic reading of events, Madison prosecuted a respectable war that vindicated US sovereignty and international rights. The war introduced the nation onto the world stage as a respected power for the first time in its short history.

Like other enslavers among the Founding Fathers, Madison’s legacy will always grapple with slavery because of his enslavement of others and because of the protections the Constitution afforded the institution. Like others of his generation, he considered slavery evil but spent little time or political capital laboring to extricate it from his own life or from the United States. Madison’s complicity with slavery is less visible than Jefferson’s, who made equality a founding ideal in the Declaration of Independence, but it is knottier than Washington’s, who labored to keep his estate solvent so he could free the enslaved people at Mount Vernon in his will (though Washington died at a time when that process was easier legally, politically, and financially).

Madison’s legacy remains intrinsically linked with US constitutionalism. By the time delegates at the Constitutional Convention signed the document on September 17, 1787, it looked rather different from Madison’s original proposals. Those changes have caused some to question whether Americans should remember him as the Father of the Constitution. Some have wondered if that title might even belong to George Washington, given his eminence at the convention and the legitimacy that his presence lent the charter. However Americans choose to remember the Founders with such titles of doubtful historical usefulness, it is difficult to overstate Madison’s contributions to the US Constitution. He tirelessly advocated the convention, helped convince Washington to attend, provided an initial blueprint for the government, spoke frequently and persuasively in debates, kept invaluable notes of the proceedings, fought for ratification, and authored the Bill of Rights. In the process, he produced abiding constitutional theory for generations of political theorists, Supreme Court opinions, and common Americans.

Most people know that James Madison left a legacy of constitutionalism to the United States, but he did more than that. Madison insisted that thirteen sovereign, independent states scrap their diplomatic assembly and unite into a nation. Certainly, he was one among many who advocated such a path, but he combined his advocacy with uniquely laborious thought, planning, and action to bring it to fruition. Madison was instrumental in creating not just a constitution for a nation, but the nation itself. George Washington was the gravitational pull that kept a centrifugal nation together, but Madison may have done more actually to sire that nation out of individual states. At a time when some are wondering if George Washington is the real Father of the Constitution, it is worth wondering if James Madison is the real Father of the Nation.