University of Virginia Library

JAMES MADISON.

James Madison's family traditions were wholly
colonial and extended back to the first settlement of
Virginia. With the mother country he had no living
connection, and only one member of the family, his
second cousin, Rev. James Madison, received any part
of his education there. England was not, therefore,
home to the Madisons as it was to many other
Virginia families, and there were no divisions of the
house and consequent heartburnings when the separation
came, but all of them embraced the patriot cause
in the beginning and without hesitation. From the
shores of Chesapeake Bay, where James Madison's
direct ancestor, John Madison, received a patent for
lands in 1653, the family pushed its way inland
towards the Blue Ridge mountains, and his grandfather,
Ambrose, occupied the tract in Orange County
where his father, James, and himself spent their entire
lives. He was thus completely a Virginian, and his
life was well rooted, as George Eliot has expressed
it, in a spot of his native land, where it received "the
love of tender kinship for the face of earth." During
the eighty-four years of his life he was never continuously
absent from Montpelier for a twelvemonth.

The Virginia convention of 1776 was composed
chiefly of men past the middle period of life; but there

was a small circle of young members who afterwards
rose to eminence, among whom was Madison, then
but twenty-three years old. He was known personally
to few of his colleagues and was mastered by a
shrinking modesty, which kept him in the background;
but he had the reputation of being a scholar and
was put on the committee to draw up the Declaration
of Rights. He made one motion in the convention,
offering a substitute to the clause relating to religious
freedom.[1] It was not accepted as he presented it,
but a modification, eliminating a chief objection to the
clause as originally presented by the committee, was
adopted. If Madison's clause had been taken as he
wrote it, there would have been no occasion for the
subsequent struggle for complete religious freedom in
Virginia, for it was so sweeping that any further progressive
action would have been redundant. The
offering of this amendment was Madison's first important
public act, and his belief that it was right
was the strongest belief he had at that time.

He was then a profoundly religious man, and his
family surroundings were Episcopalian. When he
returned home after his graduation from Princeton in
1772, he plunged into religious studies, wrote commentaries
on the gospels, and acquired an extensive
knowledge of theological literature. His education
at a Presbyterian college, the love of liberty which
was a passion with the young Americans of his school,
the ill-repute surrounding the clergy of the English
church in Virginia, the persecution which he saw

visited upon the Baptists in his section of the State—
all combined to make him champion the cause of absolute
religious freedom and separation of church
from state. Beginning with the convention of 1776
he fought for this step by step, until it was finally secured
by Jefferson's bill, which Madison introduced in
the legislature, but which need never have been written
had Madison's amendment to the Bill of Rights
been accepted. Madison was a strong man who
walked through life alone and did not disclose his
inner thoughts on vital personal questions. What his
religion was has thus always been a matter of dispute.
To Episcopal clergymen his course did not render him
popular, and, although he attended their church, he
was not a communicant. Agnostics often claim him
as having been one of them, chiefly because he was a
friend of Jefferson's and is supposed to have been influenced
by him; but he made his religious studies,
took his first radical stand for disestablishment, and
had probably formed his religious views before he
knew Jefferson. Non-Episcopal clergymen, although
not claiming him as a member of any of their sects,
have written of him gratefully. Undoubtedly, he
sympathized with them, and he had warm friends
among them. He believed in the existence of sects
and used to quote Voltaire's aphorism, "If one religion
only were allowed in England, the government would
possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the
people would cut each other's throats; but as there are
such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."[2]

As Madison was an advanced thinker on religious
subjects, so was he beyond his time as an economic
reasoner. In his correspondence with Jefferson he
always met the daring speculations of that philosopher
with views and conclusions carefully matured.
Twenty years before Malthus published his Essay
on the Principles of Population Madison reached
substantially the same conclusions, as his writings
show. He welcomed Malthus's work when it appeared,
as he had done Adam Smith's.

On the subject of slavery he and his friends stood
together in a frank admission that it was a crushing
public and private evil, and he earnestly desired to
find a means by which his State and himself might
escape from it. On his return to Montpelier from
Congress in December, 1783, he took up the study of
law, having for one object, as he wrote, to gain a subsistence,
depending "as little as possible upon the
labor of slaves." September 8, 1783, he wrote to his
father that he was unwilling to punish a runaway negro
simply "for coveting that liberty for which we have
paid the price of so much blood and have proclaimed
so often to be the right and worthy the pursuit of every
human being." In the convention that framed the
Constitution Madison and George Mason worked
together in opposition to the pro-slavery labors of
South Carolina and other Southern States. In the
first Congress under the Constitution "The Humane,
or Abolitionary Society" of Virginia, composed chiefly,
if not wholly, of Quakers, requested him, as "a friend
to general liberty," to introduce their memorial against

the slave trade and asked his judgment on a proposition
to petition the Virginia Legislature for a law
declaring all slave children born after the passage of
the act free at the age of eighteen for the women
and twenty-one for the men.[3] This was similar to
the scheme of emancipation which Jefferson entertained,
but which he did not bring forward, because
"the public mind would not yet bear the proposition."
It never became able to bear an emancipation
proposition, and Madison lived and died a humane
slaveholder opposed to the institution of slavery.

When Madison went into the Continental Congress,
March 20, 1780, he was probably the youngest
member, and he looked younger than he was; but he
had conquered his modesty and was able to speak his
views when occasion required. The most important
subject before the Congress was that of meeting the
public expenses. Paper money was piled upon paper
money; commerce had fled; there was hardly any
specie to be had; the States found it difficult and
were often disinclined to raise respectable revenue by
taxation. Madison led the fighting for a funding of
the debt, the prohibition of further paper emissions,
and an adequate continental revenue by a five per
cent. tax on all imports. The day that the made one
of his strongest speeches in favor of the last-named
proposition news was received that the Virginia Legislature,
which had previously agreed to it, had withdrawn
its assent. Nevertheless, he did not lessen his
labors, but took the extraordinary course of disregarding

the Legislature's instructions. In this matter he
acted from a national standpoint, for Virginia's interest
was the same as that of the other States.

In advocating an insistence upon the right of
America to the free navigation of the Mississippi
River from the source to the sea, he stood for a measure
more vital to Virginia than it was to any other
State. The first elaborate state paper to come from
his pen was the instruction to Jay at Madrid on this
subject, and it is not too much to say that no member
of the Congress could have prepared the instruction
so well.

Madison's service in Congress at this time and later
laid bare before him all the insufficiencies of the Articles
of Confederation, and it was his fortune to
participate in each successive step that led to the
formation of the Constitution. When he went into
the convention he was better equipped for the work
that lay before it than any other delegate. After his
election he arranged the notes which he had gathered
laboriously in the course of years of experience and
study. These notes covered the governments of the
world, ancient and modern, as they furnished illustrations
likely to affect the forming of a new government
for America, and they also contained a carefully
arranged description of the weakness and vices of
the existing government. He had one primal object
before him—to evolve a scheme for a stronger
government which would remedy the defects of
the Articles of Confederation and which the people
would accept. He was without pride of personal

opinion and was always willing to compromise when
by doing so his main object would not be lost. As
the Constitution was not written by any one member
of the convention, so was it not wholly satisfactory
to any one member. Madison had no cut-and-dried
constitution in his pocket when he went to
Philadelphia; but, keeping the general principles of
the Virginia plan before him, he set himself to the
task of accomplishing a result. He was more continuously
in his place than any other member and
spoke frequently and always temperately and to the
point. When a division of sentiment among the
members was so pronounced as to make any conclusion
seem improbable, he was patient and hopeful,
and returned to the subject when all were in better
humor. As the days wore on he came to be recognized
as the leading man in the convention, and when
the Constitution was finally sent to the people for
their judgment, it was generally known that Madison,
more than any one else, had wrought it into shape.

Eight States had ratified the Constitution when the
Virginia convention met to consider it, and the ratification
of nine States was necessary to put it into
effect. It was confidently believed, therefore, that
its fate would be decided by Virginia's action. When
it first reached the State, it was generally approved;
but as each man began to study it many found objections
to it, and the preponderance of influential men
was on the side of its rejection. When the convention
met, George Mason and Patrick Henry led the opposition,
and Madison, George Nicholas, and Edmund

Randolph led the forces in favor of ratification.
Madison was fresh from the convention that framed
the Constitution; he had recently written his numbers
in the Federalist; he could speak readily, and there
was hardly an argument against the Constitution for
which he did not have the best answer ready prepared.
The chief fighting was waged between him
and Henry. Madison was constantly on his feet,
and during four days he spoke thirty-five times.
Henry was supposed to be invincible before a Virginia
assemblage and was unquestionably the most
powerful man before the people in the State. Madison
beat him, and his victory was the greatest triumph
of his life. Quick upon the heels of each
other had followed his success in the convention
that framed the Constitution, his success in conjunction
with Hamilton and Jay in turning the growing
sentiment against the Constitution by the publication
of the Federalist, and the crowning success
of carrying the ratification in Virginia. This may be
said to have marked the culmination of that part
of his career which was unquestionably the greatest.
The rest was made up of earnest work and high honors,
but the achievements winning for him a great place
in history were those of the period before the government
under the Constitution went into operation.

In the first House of Representatives he was a
leader, but he soon became the leader of a party. He
and Hamilton had frequently co-operated before the
Constitution was formed, and they stood together as
the two most effective champions of ratification the

Constitution had; but they naturally fell apart after
the government was established and parties, as exponents
of different habits of thought, were formed.
Their surroundings and training had been dissimilar,
and they did not agree in disposition. If Hamilton's
theory of government was the more scientific, Madison's
had a broader basis of popular desire; at any
rate, they were different. The two men could not be
coadjutors without one or the other changing his
views. It is therefore as unjust to accuse Madison
of having deserted Hamilton as it would be to accuse
Hamilton of having deserted Madison. They
were active opponents in their views as to how the
Constitution should be interpreted in the conduct of
the government, and, being earnest and positive, they
drifted into distrust and injustice toward each other,
as political opponents nearly always do.

The parties were divided to a great extent on
sectional lines, and Madison was a Southerner and a
Virginian. The narrow sectionalism that then prevailed
needs no explanation. There was no national
feeling overspreading the continent, nor could it be
forced into being. The States were jealous of each
other, and the Articles of Confederation had really
been as strong a scheme of national government as
the people would stand at the time. So cultured a
man as Edmund Randolph wrote some years after the
Constitution had been in operation, "you see I am not
yet really an American," Madison was biased in his
political actions by a preference for the welfare of
Virginia over that of any other State. Washington

alone of the active statesmen of that day manifested
a wholly unprejudiced national spirit. The interests
of the North and the South were opposed, and
Madison bent his energies to keep in control the interests
of the South. He never liked New England
men, and all of his intimate friends were Virginians.
He was as much of a Southerner as John Adams was
a New Englander, and more need not be said.

Few sympathizers with the Federalist party of a
hundred years ago can now be found to defend the
Alien and Sedition Laws which wrecked that party.
They were conceived in a spirit of intolerance and
had all the ingredients in them of tyranny and oppression.
In opposing them many Republicans went to
the opposite extreme and uttered sentiments which
they lived to regret. Madison wrote the Virginia resolutions
of 1798, and, while they are not necessarily
Calhounism, he lived long enough to be obliged to defend
them against the charge that they contained the
germs of nullification.[4]

When Madison became Secretary of State he and
his chief determined upon the inauguration of what
they hoped to make a new American policy in international
intercourse. "If a treaty is proposed,"
wrote Robert R. Livingston to him July 1, 1801,
"that is not to be supported by arms, but by commercial
exclusions, that shall not refer to the present war,

and shall be open to all nations that choose to adopt
it, I think it cannot fail to meet with sufficient support
to establish a new law of nations, and that our administration
will have the glory of saying, in the words
of the prophet, 'a new Law I give unto you, that
you love one another.'"[5] Madison was not an enthusiast
and did not share Livingston's extravagant hopes;
but he had been an advocate of commercial retaliation
as the most effective weapon to employ against Great
Britain from the time of the first Congress, when he
introduced his tonnage bill. He saw his policy carried
to the extreme of an absolute refusal to trade at all with
a country with which we were not yet at war, and he
saw it fail miserably of its purpose. When he stepped
from the office of Secretary of State up to that of
the Presidency, he was warned in the beginning
that a continuance of the embargo would wreck the
administration that continued it. Furthermore, he
was told that perseverance in it would produce in New
England "open and effectual resistance to the laws of
the Union."[6] At no time after the adoption of
the Constitution were the dangers from without and
within so menacing. With fluctuations of false hopes
the inevitable came; the cherished "American Policy"
was thrown to the winds, and Madison found
himself at the head of a nation at war. He was a
rounded-out stateman of wide experience and ripe
knowledge, but of martial spirit he had none. He
was a man of peace and of books. His physique
was weak, and he cared nothing for manly sports.
Nowhere in the record of his life is there a hint that
he ever had a quarrel which approached culmination
in a personal encounter. His blood flowed temperately,
and he hated war, and his incapacity as a war
President was painfully manifest.

The country was not united, and he had not force
enough to unite it. A treasonable faction was breeding
in New England, and he knew not how to crush
it. A vigorous leader of men and of popular forces
was what the occasion demanded, and Madison did
not meet the requirements. Such success as the war
achieved owed nothing to him. An honorable peace
and a reaction of prosperity and calm gave him an
opportunity to conclude his administration creditably,
and he retired from public life with a great reputation;
but he had really won it before he became
President.[7]

In private life he set an example of beautiful simplicity
and purity. No breath of scandal was ever
raised against him. No man ever accused him of untruth
or meanness. He was gentle and sympathetic
towards all who approached him. He was generous
in giving and dispensed a free hospitality. While he
never introduced a jest into a public speech and

rarely into a letter, he had a rich fund of humor, and
his good stories went from mouth to mouth among
his friends. His household was one of rare happiness
and innocence, and perhaps the highest tribute to his
private worth was paid by the hundred slaves who
stood around the grave at his funeral and gave an
extraordinary exhibition of the genuineness of their
grief.[8]

*   *   *

During the closing years of his life Madison occupied
himself in arranging his papers and especially
those relating to the framing of the Constitution.
He bequeathed them to his wife,[9] intending that she
should immediately publish the debates in the Congress
of 1782, 1783, and 1787, the debates in the
constitutional convention, the proceedings of the
Congresses of 1776, and a limited number of letters,
as he had arranged them. Through St. George
Tucker she offered the work to the Harpers and
through her son to other publishers,[10] but was unable
to come to a satisfactory agreement with any of them.
Francis Preston Blair, the publisher of the Congressional
Globe, offered to publish the work, but doubted
whether much profit would accrue and suggested
that her best plan would be to fix a sum to cover
the profit she expected and offer the manuscript to
Congress at that price. He promised to assist her

in securing the appropriation.[11] She had, however, already
offered the papers to the government in her letter
of November 15, 1836, to President Jackson. A copy
of this letter was laid before Congress in a special
message dated December 6, 1836. Madison's neighbor
and friend, James Barbour, acted as her agent
and told her that $100,000, the sum she at first said
she expected, was out of the question,[12] but that she
could get $30,000 for the papers. This amount was
appropriated by Act of March 3, 1837.[13] July 9, 1838,
Congress authorized the publication of the papers.[14]
Henry D. Gilpin, of Pennsylvania, then Solicitor of
the Treasury, was selected as the editor, and the work
was published in three volumes in Washington in
1840 under the title of The Madison Papers. May
31, 1848, Mrs. Madison being then, through domestic
misfortunes, in distressed circumstances, Congress appropriated
$25,000 to purchase all the remaining
manuscripts of Madison's in her hands.[15] This, with
the first purchase, forms the magnificent collection of
Madison's writings now deposited in the Department
of State. August 18, 1856,[16] Congress authorized the
printing of the papers of the second purchase, and a
part of them appeared as The Works of James
Madison, published in four volumes in Washington
in 1865.

Mr. J. C. McGuire, of Washington, a family connection

of the Madisons, who amassed in the course
of his life an extraordinary collection of Madisoniana,
printed in 1859 (Washington) "exclusively for
private distribution" a limited edition in one volume
of Madison's letters under the title Selections from
the Private Correspondence of James Madison from
1812 to 1836. It contained about one hundred
letters.

The originals of a few of the letters printed in The
Madison Papers have been withheld from the editor,
and he has been obliged to reproduce them as they
were printed, in the first volume of this edition, indicating
their source as he has that of every other paper
appearing in these volumes. These sources are
widely scattered and embrace various public, private,
and official depositories, which have been generously
opened to the editor.

But two lives of Madison have been published: one
a large fragment in three volumes, entitled History
of the Life and Times of James Madison, by William
C. Rives, the first volume of which was published in
1859 (Boston, Little, Brown & Co.), and the third in
1868; the other by S. H. Gay, in the American
Statesman Series (Boston, 1884). Of Rives's work it
must be said that it is a misfortune it was never
finished. It embraces only that part of Madison's
career preceding the administration of John Adams.
It is redundant and heavy, and the stilted style betrays
the diplomatic rather than literary training of
the author. But it is a painstaking work, executed conscientiously
and after an exhaustive and able study of

the sources of material, printed and unprinted. The
standpoint is uncritical, and Mr. Rives shows an extreme
partiality for the subject of his work.

None of these remarks is applicable to Mr. Gay's
short Life. With ample unused material available, his
study does not seem to have gone beyond the printed
resources of any good public library, and his attitude
towards Madison and all public men of his school is
extremely unsympathetic. It is enough to say of his
work that it is wholly inadequate to its subject.