James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (4 page)

In fact, the years at Princeton were some of the happiest of his life. He met young men from every part of the country and formed close friendships with a few: William Bradford, a thoughtful and well-read young man whose father was a printer in Philadelphia; Philip Freneau, the brilliant and perpetually discontented son of a Huguenot wine merchant; Hugh Brackenridge, born in Scotland, a farmer’s son, as smart as he was strong. Like the other hundred or so young men of Nassau Hall, Madison and his friends adhered to a rigid schedule. A bell rang at 5:00 a.m., and lest anyone fail to hear it, a servant followed, beating on every door. Students rushed to morning prayers, then returned to their rooms to study until breakfast at 8:00 a.m. Recitation came after breakfast and was followed by a time for study that lasted until a 1:00 p.m. dinner. From 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. was another study period, followed by evening prayer, supper, and another study period. After 9:00 p.m., students could go to bed, but, as one noted, “to go before is reproachful.”
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Tight as the schedule was, there was time for the discussions with other students that make college memorable. After his graduation Philip Freneau, who would play an important part in Madison’s life,
would write to Madison about how he missed “conversation I delight in.” Madison remembered chats of “an hour or two” with Bradford that were “recreation and release from business and books.”
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Philip Fithian, whose time at Princeton overlapped Madison’s, fondly remembered the student hijinks of his college days: “Meeting and shoving in the dark entries; knocking at doors and going off without entering; strewing the entries in the night with greasy feathers; freezing the bell; ringing it at late hours of the night.” He also recalled “parading bad women, burning Curse-John [the privy], darting sunbeams upon the town-people . . . , and ogling women with the telescope.” In the case of Madison and his friends, at least some youthful energy was diverted into the American Whig Society, a debating club that John Witherspoon supported as part of his plan to encourage effective public speaking. No doubt there were many elevated orations as the Whigs took on their rivals in the Cliosophic Society, but what remains from their “paper wars” is spirited doggerel. In one bit of rhyme, Madison urges his fellow Whigs to be of good humor while the Clios manage their own doom:

Come, noble whigs, disdain these sons

Of screech owls, monkeys, and baboons

Keep up you[r] minds to humorous themes

And verdant meads and flowing streams

Until this tribe of dunces find

The baseness of their groveling mind

And skulk within their dens together

Where each one’s stench will kill his brother.
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The paper wars captured a side of James Madison that would be often commented upon but too seldom recorded, a fondness for sharing less-than-elevated wit with his male friends.

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THE STUDYING, COMRADESHIP,
and raillery of college life did not keep students at Nassau Hall from having a sharp interest in the events
of the larger world. The British had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but colonists harbored resentment that Parliament, in which they were not represented, had felt authorized to levy a tax on everything from their newspapers to their playing cards. Great Britain had not only tried to use them as a purse but also violated their fundamental rights as Englishmen, taxing them without their consent. In 1767, when Parliament made another attempt to gather revenue with the Townshend duties, which taxed imports such as lead, paper, and tea, new anger toward Britain began to build on old, particularly in Boston, where opposition to what colonists saw as British tyranny was fierce—and grew fiercer as the British reinforced the Boston garrison with additional regiments of red-coated soldiers. Emotions were running high on the evening of March 5, 1770, when a rowdy crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began throwing rocks and snowballs at British soldiers standing sentry. Before the night was over, the outnumbered British fired into the crowd, killing five.

Parliament repealed the Townshend duties (except for the tax on tea) shortly after the bloody confrontation, but the Boston Massacre, as it came to be called, stood as a powerful symbol of British oppression. It also increased the fervor of those determined to pressure Great Britain by refusing to buy British products. In July, when a letter circulated at Nassau Hall that showed New York merchants trying to persuade Philadelphia businessmen to break their boycott of British goods, students donned their black gowns and, as the college bell tolled, marched to the front of the college. There, as one observer described it, they “burnt the letter by the hands of a hangman hired for the purpose, with hearty wishes that the names of all promoters of such a daring breach of faith may be blasted in the eyes of every lover of liberty and their names handed down to posterity as betrayers of their country.” Madison wrote to his father about the demonstration, noting that James senior was likely to hear of it in any case: “A distinct account . . . I suppose will be in the
Virginia Gazette
before this arrives.”
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He probably also thought that the letter burning was an extracurricular activity that James senior would approve.

President Witherspoon surely thought the demonstration justified. A bushy-browed, stocky Presbyterian minister, he’d gained a reputation for standing up to authority in his native Scotland—and not minding if controversy ensued. When the church there took what he perceived to be a liberal drift, he published a satire portraying members of the hierarchy as soft-minded relativists who believed there to be “no ill in the universe, nor any such thing as virtue absolutely considered.” A student of the Scottish Enlightenment, Witherspoon lectured Princeton students on unalienable rights, on society as a “voluntary compact,” and on human beings as creatures “originally and by nature equal and consequently free.” These ideas would be important to the graduates of Nassau Hall in the years ahead. One of Witherspoon’s students would become president; another, vice president; forty-nine would be members of the House of Representatives; twenty-eight, of the Senate; and three, Supreme Court justices.
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Within six years of Witherspoon’s 1768 arrival from Scotland, John Adams would judge him to be “an animated Son of Liberty.” Within eight years Witherspoon would be the only minister and one of the most colorful delegates in the Continental Congress deciding on American independence. When one delegate hesitated to break ties with Britain, declaring that America was not ripe for independence, Witherspoon responded that “in his judgment it was not only ripe for the measure, but in danger of becoming rotten for the want of it.”
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In support of the Princeton ideal “of preparing youth for public service in church and state,” Witherspoon insisted that students practice public speaking and provided them with an oratorical model that his most distinguished pupil seems to have found inspiring: simple, commonsensical, unadorned with flourishes and gestures. A visitor coming across Witherspoon in his garden observed that he grew only vegetables. “Why, Doctor, I see no flowers in your garden,” to which Witherspoon replied, “No, nor in my discourses either.”
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Witherspoon encouraged study of the classics, as his predecessors had done, but he also brought a modern sensibility to the college, updating the library with hundreds of volumes he had shipped from
Scotland and emphasizing “natural philosophy,” as science was called. He worked to bring scientific equipment to the college and brought off an early triumph when he persuaded clockmaker and astronomer David Rittenhouse to let Princeton buy his famed orrery, or planetarium, a device of enameled, silvered, and gilded brass that at the turn of a crank showed planets moving around the sun and moons around planets.
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It was a mechanical demonstration of all the parts of the universe being held in their paths by a delicate gravitational balance. Young James Madison may well have been impressed by how a gain in power in one part, if not countered in another, could throw the planets into disarray. The idea of the stability produced by equipoise would loom large in his thinking in the years to come.

Rittenhouse’s hero, Isaac Newton, had demonstrated the laws underlying the planetary orbits, and to exemplify how far man’s mind had penetrated the secrets of the heavens, Rittenhouse put a dial at the top of the orrery that allowed observers to predict the position of the planets for the next four thousand years.
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That man’s mind could plumb depths never before understood was another idea that Madison took away from Princeton.

One might think that the man who brought the orrery to Nassau Hall had deist sympathies, so perfectly did the device seem to represent God as a clockmaker who set the universe in motion and then stood back as it proceeded on its course. But Witherspoon regarded the deists as his theological adversaries, calling them “pretended friends to revealed religion, who are worse if possible than infidels.” He believed in revelation as well as reason and in the historic truth of the Bible, including the miracles of the Old and New Testaments. And generous of spirit though he was, he did not welcome opposition to these convictions. He made sure that college trustees invested him “with the sole direction as to the methods of education to be pursued” and during his first year as president saw to the removal of a number of tutors who advanced ideas incompatible with his own.
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Witherspoon nonetheless wanted his students to know about man’s progress in understanding material nature, what he called “the noble
and eminent improvements in natural philosophy . . . made since the end of the last century,” and he saw the orrery as a way to advance that goal. An appreciation of the new knowledge of science, in his view, offered a further challenge. “Why should [progress] not be the same with moral philosophy,” Witherspoon asked his students, “which is indeed nothing else but the knowledge of human nature?”
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It was an exhilarating time to be at Nassau Hall, particularly for a young man from the Virginia upcountry who had proved the substantial power of his own mind in a little over a year and a half. Madison had performed well enough in Latin and Greek on his entrance exams to be able to skip his freshman year. Working his way through sophomore studies, he had looked ahead to his junior and senior years and decided he could do both at once, a course that his father, as well as a realization of his own intellectual prowess, might have encouraged. James senior, who had suffered a substantial setback with the drought of 1769, repeatedly warned about the need to cut down on expenses. Student Madison repeatedly explained to his father about how costly things were. “Your caution of frugality on consideration of the dry weather shall be carefully observed; but I am under a necessity of spending much more than I was apprehensive, for the purchasing of every small trifle which I have occasion for consumes a much greater sum than one wou[ld] suppose.”
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In the end, Madison might have decided that not only was he smart enough to shorten his time at Princeton but doing so was a way to save his father money.

After receiving a promise from the faculty that if he did all the work of two years in one, he could graduate early, he began, as he described it, “an indiscreet experiment of the minimum of sleep and the maximum of application which the constitution would bear.” He managed to earn his degree, but with devastating effect on his health. A letter carried to Virginia by Dr. Witherspoon that told James senior of the health crisis is missing, but it is reasonable to suppose that it described the first of Madison’s “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy.” The crisis, which came after sleep deprivation, a classic trigger for seizures, seems to have made young Madison wary of participating in his own
graduation and convinced him, although he was not bound to a sickbed, that he should wait several months before attempting the long trip home.
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During the extra term he stayed at Nassau Hall, Madison did some reading in law and studied Hebrew with Witherspoon. Samuel Stanhope Smith, who was studying under Witherspoon to be a minister, recalled in later years that Madison was drawn to discussions of the topics that occupied philosophers and divines. Prominent among them, thanks to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, were the miracles of the Bible. In
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
Hume had argued powerfully that miracles could not be assented to because they were incompatible with reason. As Witherspoon and other orthodox defenders saw it, this was an assault on a central tenet of Christianity. Hume had joined the deists in attacking “principal and direct evidences for the truth of the Christian religion,” in Witherspoon’s words, and there could be no backing off, no giving an inch in this dispute. If the miraculous events described in the Bible seemed different from what a person judged reasonable, it was only because that person failed to understand, in Witherspoon’s words, “that revelation immediately from [God] is evidently necessary.”
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Every member of the Princeton faculty, particularly after Witherspoon’s purge, would have said the same, and it is hard to imagine twenty-year-old James Madison registering objection, even in the case of the boy with epilepsy. In the King James translation of Matthew 17:14–18, he is called a lunatic:

And when they were come to the multitude, there came to him a certain man, kneeling down to him, and saying, Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is lunatic, and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water. And I brought him to thy disciples, and they could not cure him. Then Jesus answered and said, O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him hither to me. And Jesus rebuked the devil; and he departed out of him; and the child was cured from that very hour.