James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (7 page)

As happens in great crises, rumors started to fly. In Virginia, Madison heard that Benjamin Franklin, who had been in London for more than ten years, had sold out to the British and that a Virginia delegate had turned traitor and fled from Philadelphia. Neither claim was accurate, but Madison, showing his youth, gave quick credit to both reports. He was also an eager participant in efforts to expose and humiliate those who did not support the American cause. The Committee of Safety on which Madison and his father served required county inhabitants to sign a pledge upholding the Continental Association and demanded that the rector of the Brick Church hand over certain pamphlets in his possession printed by James Rivington of New York, a publisher notorious for his Loyalist sympathies. Declaring the pamphlets full of
“the most impudent falsehoods and malicious artifices,” the committee ordered them burned. Not long after, mobs in New York destroyed Rivington’s press, making the publisher’s subsequent career—as a paid spy for George Washington—all the more amazing.
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In a letter to Bradford, Madison approvingly described the firing of a parson in Culpeper County who had refused to observe a day of fasting and prayer for the patriot cause: “When called on he pleaded conscience, alleging that it was his duty to pay no regard to any such appointments made by unconstitutional authority. The committee it seems have their consciences, too. They have ordered his church doors to be shut and his salary to be stopped. . . . I question should his insolence not abate if he does not get ducked in a coat of tar and surplice of feathers and then he may go in his new canonicals and act under the lawful authority of General Gage.”
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Full of zeal—and youthful braggadocio—Madison saw no contradiction between championing freedom of thought and endorsing tar and feathers, rationalizing, perhaps, that to create a society in which people could express themselves freely, it was necessary first to make sure British oppression failed. And however humiliating—and painful—a tarring and feathering, Madison probably judged it mild in the context of British actions. General Gage, to whom Madison wanted to send the Culpeper parson, had ordered the fateful raid on the arsenal at Concord and authorized the bloody assault on Breed’s Hill.

No British figure ranked lower in Madison’s estimation than Governor Dunmore. The fury following his seizure of gunpowder from the Williamsburg magazine had only begun to abate when Dunmore set a shotgun trap on the magazine’s doors that subsequently wounded two men. With outrage mounting, Williamsburg began to fill with upcountry riflemen, known as “shirtmen” from the hunting clothes they wore, and, fearing for his safety, Dunmore fled the capital with his family in the early morning hours of June 8, 1775. The last royal governor of Virginia, his pregnant wife, and his eight children took refuge aboard HMS
Fowey,
a British frigate off Yorktown. “We defy his power as much as we detest his villainy,” Madison wrote in his report of these events to Bradford.
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Madison had worried for months that if a rupture occurred, the British would encourage a slave insurrection as part of their effort to defeat rebellious colonists, and when enslaved people hoping for freedom began making their way to where Dunmore’s ship was anchored, he suspected the governor was at work—and cleverly so. “To say the truth,” Madison wrote to Bradford, “that is the only part in which this colony is vulnerable; and if we should be subdued, we shall fall like Achilles by the hand of one that knows that secret.” A slaveholder himself, Dunmore understood the potential weakness of a colony in which 40 percent of the population was enslaved, and on November 14, 1775, he declared “all
indented servants, Negroes,
or others (appertaining to rebels)
free,
that are able and willing to bear arms, they
joining his majesty’s troops
as soon as may be.” The emancipation did not encompass the fifty-seven human beings Dunmore owned, or slaves owned by Loyalists, or any women and children, but it sent fear and dread through white Virginia, as did evidence turned up by patriot forces of Dunmore’s intent to enlist Indians from the Ohio country in the British cause. In December 1775, George Washington wrote of Dunmore: “[If] that man is not crushed before spring, he will become the most formidable enemy America has; his strength will increase as a snowball, by rolling.”
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Dunmore was crushed by summer, his strategy of freeing and arming slaves driving even the most cautious Virginia leaders into the patriot cause. He commanded an attack across a causeway at Great Bridge, south of Norfolk, that led to the decimation of British regulars under his command. He bombarded American troops parading in Norfolk and sent landing parties to destroy buildings along the dock area, thereby giving patriot troops, who regarded Norfolk as a Tory stronghold, all the excuse they needed to begin pillaging and burning. Although the destruction of Norfolk had been helped along by the Americans, it became one more item in the litany of British depredations.

Dunmore’s troops subsequently sickened with smallpox and hundreds died, including many of the former slaves who had sought freedom with him, but when he abandoned Virginia, others who had seen him as the leader who could bring them liberty sailed aboard his
fleet, including a man who had formerly been enslaved by George Washington and another who had been the property of Patrick Henry.
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There had been no idealism in Dunmore’s freeing of slaves owned by patriots, but he nonetheless made it possible for some of them to know freedom.

•   •   •

AMONG THOSE TRAINING
to be a Piedmont rifleman was twenty-four-year-old James Madison, likely quite a fit young man by now. It had been two years since he had begun following doctors’ recommendations to leave off constant study in order to exercise regularly. He had made at least one long journey and was eager to take more. Judging by his confidence in his marksmanship, he might also have spent time hunting. Although emphasizing that he was “far from being among the best,” he reported to Bradford that he counted on hitting “the bigness of a man’s face at the distance of 100 yards.”
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That is the rough
equivalent of hitting an eight-inch target at one end of a football field when firing from the other—a respectable shot with an eighteenth-century weapon.

But exercise, though seeming to help, turned out not to be a cure, and his military career came to an abrupt end when he was struck by one of his sudden attacks. If he experienced a complex partial seizure, he might have entered a “dreamy state” and engaged in automatic movements, such as plucking at clothes. He might have walked without awareness of where he was going or heard people speak without understanding what they said. Complex partial seizures typically last a minute or two, and the aftermath is brief. “After the seizure,” writes Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a foremost expert on epilepsy, “lethargy and confusion are common, but usually last less than fifteen minutes.”
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But Madison was occasionally affected for days by his sudden attacks. At times they were described as “slight” and at others “severe,” suggesting that partial seizures might have sometimes generalized (as they do in more than 30 percent of patients with partial epilepsy). The excessive electrical activity that causes a partial seizure when localized
in one area of the brain can spread to both sides, causing the affected person to lose consciousness, fall to the ground, and convulse. If partial seizures did sometimes generalize in Madison’s case, it would help explain why he, in advance of his time, understood a connection between attacks “suspending the intellectual functions” and epilepsy. If an experience that sometimes passed quickly also on occasion led to convulsive seizures, a logical mind would posit a relationship.
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In the end Madison would decide to avoid the freighted word “epilepsy” altogether, revising his autobiography to refer instead to an “experience” during military training that brought his constitutional weakness home to him. But a congressman whom he knew well would use the term, writing not long after Madison’s death that “he was subject to sudden attacks, a mitigated form of epilepsy. And though they attended him through life, this fortunately did not as usual become worse with years and never in the smallest degree dimmed the brightness of his intellect.”
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It’s impossible to know exactly what happened during Madison’s sudden attacks, but we can conclude that he was most fortunate, particularly in a time when there was no effective treatment, that they were not more severe. Although the attacks sometimes stopped him in his course, he was able by the time of his military training to cease dwelling upon them and instead focus on the compelling news of the day: the king’s troops had fired upon and killed Americans, occupied Boston, and razed Norfolk; the British ministry was intent on spreading further death and destruction by inciting Indians and slaves, an action that even so ardent a foe of slavery as Thomas Paine condemned as “cruelty” with “a double guilt; it is dealing brutally by us and treacherously by them.”
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Back at his Piedmont home, Madison watched a new year unfold, a fateful year that would be forwarded in its course by Paine, an immigrant from England, who boldly declared what had until recently been unthinkable: that America must not merely resist Britain but break with it. “Everything that is right or natural pleads for separation,” he wrote in
Common Sense,
a pamphlet that electrified the colonies in the early months of 1776. “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, ’tis
time to part
.”
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Paine pictured what could follow—a freedom unknown on earth, with consequences that would roll down the generations. “’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age, posterity are virtually involved in the contest and will be more or less affected until the end of time,” he wrote.
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Twenty-four-year-old James Madison must have thrilled at these words. It was a time of great change and possibility, and he was a gifted and well-prepared young
man.

ALTHOUGH BY FAR THE YOUNGEST
member of the Orange County Committee of Safety, Madison, along with his uncle William Moore, another committee member, was elected in 1776 to attend the Virginia Convention, the provisional government of the commonwealth since 1774.
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That Madison’s father was head of the Committee of Safety and a well-regarded planter might have entered into the freeholders’ choosing young Madison for what was sure to be a momentous gathering, but in the small, albeit spread-out, community of Orange County they would also have known that he, like most of them, was no longer inclined to temporize with the British. The record of abuse, long and now bloody, seemed proof that if Virginians were to be free men, reconciliation was impossible. The time had come to seek independence.

It had been a wet spring in Virginia, and on the way to Williamsburg, Madison and Moore had to contend with muddy roads, swollen rivers, and creeks overrunning their beds. By the time they arrived, the convention was under way, and they entered the crowded capitol at the end of Duke of Gloucester Street to find that fifty-four-year-old Edmund Pendleton had been elected to preside. He was an impressive figure, six
feet tall, “the handsomest man in the colony,” some said, with a serene and elegant manner that belied a modest background. His father had died the year he was born, leaving the family impoverished and young Edmund with few choices. Apprenticed at age fourteen to the clerk of the Caroline County Court, he educated himself and succeeded in becoming licensed as a lawyer and earning a handsome income, though never entering the ranks of the wealthy because of substantial sums he spent raising up other members of his family. His long and successful career in politics had begun in 1752, when, at age thirty, he had been elected to the House of Burgesses, and he had served either in that body or in every Virginia Convention since.
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Madison was acquainted with Pendleton, whose mother was his grandmother Frances Madison’s sister, but aside from him and William Moore he knew few of the delegates. Most were older, and many had been powerful in Virginia while Madison was still a child. He soon fell into conversation, probably on a back bench, with a delegate about his age, Edmund Randolph. Tall and outgoing, with dark eyes and soft features, Edmund carried the highest hopes of the Randolph dynasty. He would become Virginia’s first attorney general and its governor, and he would hold high national office, but his life was not without its troubles, and for now his problem was his father. John Randolph, known to history as Randolph the Tory, had chosen to sail to England with Governor Dunmore rather than stay in rebellious Virginia. In part to remove the shadow that his Loyalist father had cast on his reputation, Edmund had successfully sought a position as an aide-de-camp to General George Washington, and after serving with the general for two and a half months in Massachusetts, Randolph no doubt had much to relate about the challenges Washington faced, including scarce supplies, short-term enlistees, and the confounding strangeness of New Englanders. As Randolph remembered it, he also learned much from the delegate from Orange, whose broad knowledge and good judgment were apparent almost as soon as one spoke with him. Wrote Randolph, “He who had once partaken of the rich banquet of [Madison’s] remarks did not fail to wish daily to sit within the reach of his conversation.”
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Madison and Randolph took note as Patrick Henry rose to speak. Henry was neither handsome nor graceful and from his childhood had lacked discipline, preferring to run wild in the Virginia forests and play his fiddle rather than attend to schoolwork. But he had passion, and after failing at farming and shopkeeping, he discovered a gift for inspiring others that had made him, next to George Washington, the most popular man in Virginia. He had enemies, to be sure, people who thought he was lazy and crude, but he won over the crowds with his oratory. “Compared with any of his more refined contemporaries and rivals, he by his imagination . . . painted to the soul [and] eclipsed the sparklings of art,” observed Randolph. Madison, too, “thrilled with the ecstasies of Henry’s eloquence and extolled his skill in commanding the audience,” but he also observed privately that Henry’s reasoning was sometimes faulty.
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Henry had earlier been among the most forward leaning on the matter of separating from Great Britain, and Pendleton one of the most cautious, but as the moment of decision neared, their positions reversed. Henry, for all his passion, thought independence a decision to be delayed until it could be taken by all the colonies at once in the Continental Congress, while Pendleton proposed that the Virginia Convention immediately declare union with Great Britain at an end. Pendleton crafted a compromise that fulfilled Henry’s wish with a resolution “that the delegates appointed to represent this colony in the general congress be instructed to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to or dependence upon the crown or parliament of Great Britain.” An accompanying resolution accomplished what Pendleton wanted by setting Virginia on a new course immediately. A committee would “be appointed to prepare a declaration of rights and such a plan of government as will be most likely to maintain peace and order in this colony and secure substantial and equal liberty to the people.”
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Now Henry became “a pillar of fire,” Randolph reported. He threw the full force of his oratory behind the resolutions, and the delegates voted unanimously in favor of both. Remembering the eloquent case
that
Common Sense
had made for American independence, Randolph concluded that “the principles of Paine’s pamphlet now stalked in triumph under the sanction of the most extensive, richest, and most commanding colony in America.”
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The crowd outside the convention thrilled to the new era by pulling down the British flag from atop the capitol and hoisting the red-striped Grand Union flag that George Washington’s army was using. As Thomas Nelson, a delegate to both the Virginia Convention and the Continental Congress, set out for Philadelphia with the resolution recommending independence, Williamsburg prepared for celebration. The next day in Waller’s Grove, the resolutions passed by the convention were read to the army. Troops paraded and partook of refreshment. Toasts were offered, each followed by cannon salute and the cheers of the crowd. That night, as the
Virginia
Gazette
described it, there were “illuminations and other demonstrations of joy.”
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Several days after the vote, another of Virginia’s great men arrived at the convention, George Mason of Gunston Hall, one of the wealthiest planters in the colony. Swarthy, with eyes so dark they looked black, he had been delayed by “a smart fit of the gout,” as he put it. This painful ailment plagued him much of his life and might have contributed to his sometimes acerbic tongue, but he was also a man who carried a heavy weight of grief. His beloved wife, Ann, mother of his many offspring, had died in 1773 after bearing twins, who also died. Mason was left with nine children, to whom he was devoted. Pressed to serve in the Continental Congress in 1775, he had refused on account of his children, explaining with great emotion that such service would not be compatible with their needs.
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Although Mason had little formal schooling, he was a voracious reader and had acquired a vast knowledge of the letter and philosophy of the law. He was a natural appointment to the committee charged with creating a declaration of rights and a constitution for Virginia. Named its thirty-first member, Mason had no illusions about how it would work. He wrote to Richard Henry Lee, one of Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress and a man whom Mason desperately wanted to
have join him in Williamsburg: “The committee appointed to prepare a plan is, according to custom, overcharged with useless members. . . . We shall in all probability have a thousand ridiculous and impracticable proposals and, of course, a plan formed of heterogeneous, jarring, and unintelligible ingredients. This can be prevented only by a few men of integrity and abilities . . . undertaking this business and defending it ably through every stage of opposition.”
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Mason, who immediately took charge of the committee, might well have regarded James Madison as part of its deadwood. It would have been hard to expect much from one so young and inexperienced, but when Mason’s draft of a declaration of rights emerged, Madison had a key suggestion. The section on religious freedom declared that “religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore . . . all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience, unpunished and unrestrained by the magistrate.” These sentiments represented Enlightenment thought, particularly as drawn from John Locke’s
A Letter Concerning Toleration.
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After centuries in which magistrates had seen it as their duty to burn, behead, drown, and hang people of other religions, Locke’s thinking had been a breakthrough, but eighty years and more had passed since his letter, and James Madison thought it was time to push further. Why should religious freedom be regarded as something that the state should tolerate? He had spent much of his young life thinking about the consequences of forcing a person to profess belief he knows is in error and had concluded that to imply that the state had any authority in such a matter was wrong.

Madison, well aware of his junior status, worked through others, including Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton, to bring his amendment before the delegates, and he managed to do so with tact sufficient to leave George Mason unperturbed. In the end Madison succeeded in replacing the words “all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion” with “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion.”
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It was a simple alteration that accomplished a mighty
change: legal recognition that freedom of conscience, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is a natural right. It was also the first example of the double nature of Madison’s genius. He was capable not only of deeply creative thinking but of turning his thoughts into reality.

Madison had studied constitutions, but he took little active part when the convention moved on to create one for governing Virginia, as the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, had called on states to do, but he learned much as an observer, including a great deal about the temperament of a man he had not yet met and who was not even at the convention. Thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson was the most junior member of the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Although not much of an orator, he had already proved himself a gifted writer with a pamphlet,
A Summary View of the Rights of British America,
in which he declared that Parliament had no authority over the American colonies and that King George III had acted illegally when he “sent among us large bodies of armed forces.”
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Jefferson had written
A Summary View
for the Virginia Convention of 1774, which he had been unable to attend, and might have learned from this experience how comfortable it was to give instruction from a distance. He did not like personal confrontation and could avoid it by opining without being present.

From Philadelphia, Jefferson sent word to convention delegates in Williamsburg that they had no authority to write a constitution for Virginia. Such a task was not within the purview of an ordinary legislative body and should be put off, he wrote to Edmund Randolph, “until the people should elect deputies for that special purpose.” Randolph carried Jefferson’s message to other members of the convention, Madison no doubt among them, and probably encountered many a dismayed reaction. As Randolph put it, asking delegates “to postpone formation of a constitution until a commission of greater latitude and one more specific should be given by the people was a task too hardy.”
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But Jefferson wasn’t through. As the convention neared the end of its work on a Virginia constitution, he sent its members another missive—a draft of a Virginia constitution that he had composed, one full
of ideas sure to lead to heated debate, such as ending the importation of slaves and allowing women to inherit equally with their brothers. One imagines Edmund Pendleton privately throwing up his hands, but, ever the gentleman in public, he wrote to Jefferson explaining that because the constitution just agreed to in the committee of the whole “had been so long in hand, so disputed inch by inch, and the subject of so much altercation and debate,” delegates were reluctant to invite more contention. Moreover, they were worn out “and could not, from mere lassitude,” be “induced to open the instrument again.” The delegates did, however, adopt the preamble that Jefferson had written for his draft constitution. Since he was dissatisfied with the document that the delegates produced, Jefferson was less than grateful for their adoption of his words. He described the final result as having his preamble “tacked to the work of George Mason.”
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Meanwhile, he found his own use for the preamble, folding it into a writing assignment he had acquired in Philadelphia. With a few alterations, the preamble became part of the Declaration of Independence.

Even before he met him, Madison was learning how maddening Jefferson could be—and how brilliant. In trying to establish popular self-government, Americans were attempting something new under the sun, which required thinking anew, and even though Madison voted in favor of the Virginia constitution that Jefferson thought flawed, within a decade he was arguing Jefferson’s point: that the convention wasn’t the proper body for creating fundamental law. Elected to run the war and govern the colony, it lacked the status needed to establish a framework for governing. Without what Madison called “due power from people,” its actions were legislative, not fundamental, and therefore alterable by the next governing authority.
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