James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (2 page)

At the convention, he would be one of the chief participants in debate
while at the same time keeping notes that would create a historical record of immeasurable worth. The Constitution that the delegates finally agreed upon would not be everything he had wanted, but he quickly concluded it was more than anyone could have hoped, and with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton he defended it in
The Federalist,
a series of essays that has become a classic of political thought. Madison would be crucial to securing the ratification of the Constitution in Virginia, the biggest and most powerful state, and he would face down Patrick Henry, the most famed orator of the day, in order to do so.

Madison would have a greater hand than anyone at setting the government based on the Constitution in motion, including drafting a bill of rights and getting the necessary amendments through Congress. He would lead in the founding of the first political party, once again upending conventional wisdom. So frowned upon was the idea of partisanship that Jefferson once declared, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” But Madison defended parties as “natural to most political societies.”
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They were a legitimate vehicle for free people to use to advance their views and interests.

Madison’s genius would ripen into a wisdom that served him well for the eight years he was Jefferson’s secretary of state and for his two terms as president. Through the perilous losses and thrilling victories of the War of 1812, he was as steady a commander in chief as the United States has known. Even after the British burned the nation’s capital, he remained calm, resolute, and devoted to founding principles, refusing to heed calls to silence Americans opposed to the war. His contemporaries, while acknowledging that the course of the war with Great Britain was not always smooth, praised his success. “Notwithstand[ing] a thousand faults and blunders,” John Adams wrote, Madison’s administration had “acquired more glory and established more union than all his three predecessors, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, put together.”
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Without precedent to guide him, James Madison would demonstrate that a republic could defend its honor and independence—and remain a republic still.

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PRAISE WOULD FOLLOW MADISON
to the grave and beyond. Nine years after his death, Charles Jared Ingersoll would say that “no mind has stamped more of its impressions on American institutions than Madison’s.” But eventually his fine reputation would suffer, and he is popularly regarded today—when remembered at all—less as a bold thinker and superb politician than as a shy and sickly scholar, someone hardly suited for the demands of daily life, much less the rough-and-tumble world of politicking.
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The reasons for this transformed image are many, including Henry Adams’s late-nineteenth-century history of Madison’s administration, in which the fourth president is presented much as his worst enemies liked to describe him. Misunderstandings about Madison’s health enter in—as does our twenty-first-century inability to conceive of modesty and reserve as having any compatibility with politics.

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IT IS A PROMISING TIME
to clear away misconceptions about Madison, brush off cobwebs that have accumulated around his achievements, and seek a deeper understanding of the man who did more than any other to conceive and establish the nation we know. His home at Montpelier, long burdened with massive twentieth-century additions, has now been beautifully restored. One can visit the dramatic red drawing room where the Madisons relaxed with guests; the dining room where they entertained, its walls decorated with historic prints; the library, the center of Madison’s intellectual life, where he kept some of his four thousand pamphlets and books.

Pathfinding authors, particularly biographers Irving Brant and Ralph Ketcham, have charted the way for researchers into Madison’s life, as Catherine Allgor has done for Mrs. Madison’s. J. C. A. Stagg and his team at the University of Virginia—particularly senior associate editor David B. Mattern, as well as Mary Hackett and Angela Kreider—have drawn together thirty-five volumes of Madison’s papers in beautifully edited and annotated form and made them available online, providing an ease of access that past researchers could only have dreamed of.
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Holly C. Shulman, also at the University of Virginia, has led the project to get Dolley Madison’s papers edited and online, together with groundbreaking essays that provide invaluable context.

The thirty-five volumes of James Madison’s papers alone run to more than twenty thousand pages, and writing about him requires exploring much more, including the voluminous papers of the leaders with whom his life intersected, figures such as George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. Reconsidering James Madison’s life has been for me a project of many years, but what amazing company I have kept. I particularly treasure the time spent with that determined man in the high-crowned hat, rushing through the rain. He was on his way to creating a nation—and changing the world.

JAMES MADISON,
one of the great lawgivers of the world, descended from generations of people who drew their living from the land. His great-great-grandfather John Madison had departed England in the middle of the seventeenth century with the rich soil of Virginia in mind. He sailed between Cape Charles and Cape Henry, entering the Chesapeake Bay with eleven men whose passages he had paid so that he might get “headrights”—grants of fifty acres—for each of them, as well as one for himself. The six hundred acres that the royal governor of Virginia granted him were in Gloucester County along the Mattaponi River, a tributary of the York, which is one of four great rivers flowing into the Chesapeake Bay.
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The men whose passages Madison paid had agreed to indenture themselves for four or more years, hoping when they finished their terms to buy land and become tobacco planters themselves. Meanwhile, they labored in Madison’s fields, and in decades to come, he would import scores more servants, claiming headrights for each one. By the time of his death, he held grants to several thousand acres, most of them along the north side of the Mattaponi.
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John Madison’s son, also named John, followed a similar course, first acquiring land near his father’s, then moving farther inland, expanding his holdings as tobacco planters had to do if they wanted to survive. Tobacco quickly exhausted the soil, so every three years or so fields had to be abandoned and new land put under cultivation. This second John Madison is listed in a deed book as a “ship carpenter,” an occupation he might have taken up to supplement his income. Being a tobacco planter allowed one to live independently, but crops and prices were at the mercy of the weather, the inclinations of Parliament, and the outbreak of foreign wars. Having a sideline, such as building the sloops, shallops, and flatboats that plied the rivers flowing into the Chesapeake, was insurance against contingencies. In 1707, John the ship carpenter also began to assume the responsibilities expected of Virginia’s gentry planters, becoming first a justice of the peace, charged with everything from recording cattle brands to deciding criminal cases, then a sheriff, responsible not only for enforcing the law but also for collecting quitrents and levies.
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The ship carpenter’s son Ambrose Madison married well. His wife, Frances, was the daughter of James Taylor, one of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, a group that Governor Alexander Spotswood had led on an expedition into the Shenandoah Valley. Before they crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, the knights had explored the rolling hills of the Virginia Piedmont, land that glistened green from rain and sun. Spotswood gave each of his fellow explorers a small golden horseshoe to commemorate their trip, but the enduring gift was the knowledge they gathered of uncultivated lands that promised abundant tobacco crops. James Taylor patented vast stretches of the Piedmont, paying a little over a penny an acre, and in 1723, two years after Ambrose Madison had married his daughter, Taylor arranged a transfer of 4,675 acres to him and Thomas Chew, another of his sons-in-law.
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Ambrose Madison shipped tobacco to London, ordered goods from there, and supplemented his family’s income as a merchant. Like his father, he served as a county official and expanded his landholdings. He and Chew worked on improving their jointly held acreage, but they did
not rely on indentured servants to fell the trees or put up buildings. Economic conditions had improved in England, while at the same time Virginia tobacco land had grown so scarce that a man who bound himself into servitude had little hope of becoming a planter. With fewer and fewer willing to indenture themselves, planters turned to another source of labor, the men and women whom they could buy from the slave ships that were an increasingly familiar sight in Chesapeake waters. Ambrose’s first known purchase was in July 1721, when he paid the captain of the
Ann and Sarah
fifty pounds for “two Negro women.”
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In the spring of 1732, Ambrose, in his thirties, took his wife and three young children to the plantation cut from the wilderness by people he had purchased, and not long after the family arrived, Ambrose Madison became very ill. When he died in late summer, three slaves, arrested for “suspicion of poisoning,” were put on trial for conspiring to kill him. Pompey, the property of another landowner, was found guilty and hanged. Turk and Dido, Madison slaves, were judged to have been “concerned” in the crime “but not in such a degree as to be punished by death.” They were sentenced to twenty-nine lashes each.
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Although Ambrose’s was the first known instance, it was hardly the last in which slaves in the area were tried for poisoning masters. Another concerned Eve, accused of poisoning Peter Montague. In 1746 she was convicted and condemned to burn at the stake. Her sentence was carried out under the authority of the sheriff of Orange County—Thomas Chew, Ambrose Madison’s brother-in-law.
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Ambrose’s descendants, who almost certainly knew that a slave had been hanged for murdering him, left no record of how he died. A family history told of relatives who had been killed by Indians but mentioned not a word about Ambrose’s untimely demise. The silence no doubt reflected a belief that to talk about slave resistance was to encourage it. Any hint that Ambrose was murdered also gave the lie to a benign version of slavery in which his descendants, like many slave owners, tried to believe. In this version, the slave was referred to as a servant or even part of the family. In 1777, James Madison, the future president, would advise his father, “The family have been pretty well since you left us
except Anthony,” who was an enslaved man with a high fever and a swollen arm.
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Frances Madison, widowed with three small children on the Virginia frontier, buried her husband next to their small house and turned to the enormous challenges facing her, not least of which was her husband’s will. In his final agony, Ambrose had overlooked a crucial detail—dividing the patent he held jointly with Chew.
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Thus, upon Ambrose’s death, the land on which his wife and children were living passed into Chew’s hands and would descend to his heirs.

Unwilling to accept the fate that she had been handed, Frances reached an agreement with Chew. On May 26, 1737, in return for 2,850 acres of the patent, she paid him two hundred pounds, a significant amount, as much as a small planter might accumulate in a lifetime. It was a price per acre above the average of other properties sold in Orange County that month, but Chew doubtless pointed out that the land had been improved, with “houses, buildings, barns, dove houses, yards, orchards, gardens,” as the deed specified. He seems to have given little ground to his widowed sister-in-law, but it might well have been that in that time and place neither she nor any of her family expected him to, and in the end the bargain was hers. She gained the acreage and its improvements for her “use and behoof . . . for and during the term of her natural life” and preserved the family estate not only for her son but also for the grandson who would become America’s fourth president.
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As the person running the plantation, Frances Madison would have been familiar with every step in the growing, harvesting, and marketing of tobacco, a plant that, as one contemporary observed, required “a great deal of skill and trouble in the right management of it.” The seeds, so small that ten thousand would fit in a teaspoon, had to be started not long after Christmas, preferably in a wooded site rich with mold. The seedlings were replanted in fields in the spring—but only after a rain shower, or “season,” when the ground was wet. Within about a month, the plants had to be “topped” to encourage the growth of large leaves, then repeatedly “suckered,” which involved cutting shoots, and “wormed,” which meant removing grubs and hornworms. When the
leaves began to spot and thicken, the tobacco was cut, and after wilting in the field, it was taken to tobacco houses and hung to cure. About the time that the tobacco was ready to be packed in hogsheads and transported to market, slaves were sowing seed for the next crop.
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Frances put her mark (“FM”) on hogsheads leaving the Madison plantation and ordered goods from the London merchants to whom the tobacco was shipped, including ten narrow axes, a hydrometer, a quilted coat, and a pair of boots. Frances was a planter, a fact that made her an exception among her sex, but as she did the work of a man on the Virginia frontier, she also upheld the era’s standards of womanhood, ordering fabric for dresses and, from John Maynard & Son in London, two “good stays,” or corsets, size small. She also added to the modest collection of books that Ambrose had owned at his death. She ordered a Bible commentary, two volumes of the British newspaper the
Guardian,
and, her biggest extravagance, eight volumes of the
Spectator,
a periodical
known for its wit and commonsense humanity.
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THE MADISONS OWNED
thousands of acres and dozens of slaves and worked their land year-round, but income from farming remained unreliable. Frances’s son, known to history as James senior, to distinguish him from his famous son, found a multitude of ways to enhance the plantation’s earnings. He sold his neighbors everything from gunpowder and silk purses to brandy from his still. He sawed planks, built hogsheads, and rented out his enslaved carpenters, Peter and George, usually for long-term projects, but once to fight a fire. He oversaw the construction of buildings, including a tobacco house for John Norton and a privy for Erasmus Taylor. Eventually, he established an ironworks where he gained a reputation for quality goods and shrewd dealing.
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But he also became knowledgeable about the plantation’s mainstay and early on would have accompanied his family’s hogsheads down rolling roads to the Rappahannock. The few days’ journey was a price the Madisons paid for growing tobacco in the Piedmont, which was above navigable waters, but taking the yearly crop to Fredericksburg, a port
village where British ships arrived, was also a chance to socialize. After leaving the Madison hogsheads at Royston’s warehouse, James senior could ferry across the Rappahannock and ride another day downriver to where one of his best friends, Francis Conway, lived. Their families had long been close. Francis’s father had been one of the executors of Ambrose’s will and died himself only a year later. Francis had a younger sister named Nelly, and in 1749, when she was seventeen, she and twenty-six-year-old James Madison Sr. were married.
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Nelly “was not a beautiful woman,” according to Gaillard Hunt, an early Madison biographer, but Hunt was probably relying on a portrait painted by Charles Peale Polk in 1799, when Nelly was sixty-eight. Something in her youth attracted James senior, perhaps her piety, since that was her reputation in old age, but James senior’s cousin and close friend, the genial Joseph Chew, suggested the attraction was more than spiritual. Two weeks prior to James and Nelly’s wedding, Chew wrote to James, “I hope before this Miss Nelly has made you happy.” After their wedding, Chew complained of not hearing from Madison. “Never since I left Virginia have I had one scrape of a pen,” he wrote. “I make every allowance in your favor I can. The marrying a young agre[eable] wife will certainly make moments slide away pleasantly, and that you should be happy no one desires or wishes more truly than myself but in that a few hours is due to your friend.”
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Two years later, while James senior and Nelly were visiting her mother at Port Conway, their first child, a son, was born. The date of his birth according to the Gregorian calendar, adopted the year after his birth, was March 16, 1751. Named James after his father, the baby was called Jemmy by his parents, and they prepared for his homecoming by having a woodworker, William Crittenden, make a cradle. Later the plantation overseer, Robert Martin, made Jemmy two small banyans, or tiny robes open in the front.
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When the baby was taken to the Madison family seat in the Piedmont, it was not to the house that dominates the site today but to Mount Pleasant, the simple frame home with a footprint of 416 square feet that Frances, Ambrose, and their three children had moved into nearly
twenty years before.
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Now the house had four occupants: Frances, James senior, Nelly, and the baby. In 1753, when Nelly gave birth to a second son, Francis, there were five in the house, as there had been in Ambrose’s time. After a third son, Ambrose, named for his grandfather, arrived in 1755, Mount Pleasant might have seemed crowded, but when Catlett, a fourth son, was born in 1758 and died soon thereafter, the house, like Nelly’s heart, must have seemed to have a great and empty space in it.

Life was precarious in colonial Virginia. Newcomers had to survive the “seasoning,” the first year of sickness that killed many, and everyone faced a mortality rate much higher than in New England.
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Although the Piedmont was healthier than the Tidewater, which provided a near-perfect breeding ground for malarial mosquitoes, sickness still abounded, and the death of children was heartbreakingly common. Of the twelve children Nelly would eventually bear, only seven would survive to adulthood.

Learned physicians under the influence of the Enlightenment were struggling to find scientific explanations of illness, but in everyday life the theories of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen still prevailed. They regarded illness as an imbalance among the four humors—air (blood), earth (black bile), fire (yellow bile), and water (phlegm)—and associated the excess of a humor with certain diseases. Black bile, for example, was associated with epilepsy.
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Bleeding and purging could rid the body, so the theory went, of an excess of one humor or another and bring back a healthful balance. Herbs were prescribed for purging and healing, but the ideas of the medieval physician Paracelsus were also influential. On the theory that sickness was the result of poisons attacking the body from outside, he had recommended counteracting them with internal doses of metals and medicines from the laboratory, such as arsenic, antimony, and mercury.