James and Dolley Madison (8 page)

And on top of all of that, the man who was renting his house in Philadelphia, Stephen Moylan, told him that not only could he not pay his rent for a while, but that the house was in need of substantial, and costly, repairs.
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James Madison had put up with so much trouble from bad weather, irate workers, unhappy slaves, deteriorating homes, and nonpaying boarders that a job as secretary of state, where he had to worry only about wars with nations, must have looked very appealing.

When he was young, James Madison did not want to follow in his father's footsteps and become a planter at Montpelier. Running a large plantation farm, keeping books, and sweating in the heat and shivering in the always surprisingly cold Virginia winters were not for him. Shopping at the dreary, little, local general stores and supervising slaves had no appeal. What did appeal to the teenage James Madison were books, volumes of every size and kind—thick ones and thin ones, old ones and new ones. Madison dove into the pages of every book he could find, following the staid debates on governments throughout history in one book, and, in the next, the heroic exploits of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome. He was just as fond of the warrior Achilles as he was of the writer Aeschylus.

The young Madison did not know exactly what he wanted to do in the world, but it was not farming. His father understood. James Madison Sr. had sent his son to study with a noted tutor, Donald Robertson, an instructor at the Innes plantation in King and Queen County, Virginia, for five years. There, he studied with the children of other wealthy and influential Virginia planters. He learned geography, languages, history, and mathematics. He came back to Montpelier at the age of sixteen to study more advanced work with another tutor, Reverend Thomas Martin. Then he was ready for college. Almost all of the college-aged young men of Virginia whose families had money attended the state's finest school, the College of William and Mary, but Madison resisted because of the oppressively hot climate in Williamsburg, which he was certain would ruin his always-precarious health. Instead, he traveled to Princeton,
New Jersey, to enroll at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). There, the slight, thin Madison, who rarely smiled, plunged into college work amid the tree-lined streets of the pretty campus. He jammed three years of academic study into just two, reading day and night, and then stayed at the college for another year to read more. He studied many of the governments of European countries, their history and structure, as well as those of Russia and Asia. His studies took him all the way back to the Roman Empire and the city-states of ancient Greece. This fascination with government would engage him all of his life.

In 1772, he returned to a Virginia that had been torn apart by political disputes between the British Parliament and the colonies. Virginia had been in crisis since 1765, when the British government imposed the Stamp Act on America, forcing the colonists to pay a tax on any printed material. The tax was imposed because Britain had decided that the enormous cost of the Seven Years' War, concluded in 1763 with British victory over the French and their Indian allies, had to be paid by the Americans. British citizens were already paying heavy taxes and should not be charged even more fees, Parliament leaders believed and, besides, that war had been fought to protect the colonies on the eastern seaboard. So, naturally, they had to pay for it. The colonists disagreed, and loudly. The British fought that war, colonial political leaders and newspaper editors argued, to solidify and expand its empire in North America. Victory had given Britain nearly half the continent. The British would reap the profits from the war, so Americans believed that the British should shoulder the cost of it. Colonial representatives from nine colonies met at a special Stamp Act Congress in New York and drew up a formal statement of protest. Colonial leaders agreed to “nonimportation agreements,” a boycott of British goods. Women made homespun clothing to replace the expensive dresses they had been purchasing from fancy London shops as another protest. Men of all ages who had merely watched politics unfold in their cities now jumped into the political wars, angrily siding against the Crown. The Sons of Liberty and Daughters of Liberty, which would become powerful revolutionary groups a few years later, were formed as protest organizations. Newspaper editors, taxed on their newspapers, railed about it, some even predicting that it would end freedom of the press in America. There were parades and public rallies against it. Raucous protests, which included physical attacks on tax collectors, took place in many villages and cities. British merchants complained bitterly to Parliament that their shipping, half of which went to America, and sales had been crippled by the protests. These much-publicized efforts finally forced that tax to be overturned a year later, but the British Crown came back with more taxes.

Nobody understood more than Madison that the taxes came to a set of colonies that had developed into their own country over the past 150 years. Americans had become one of the world's most important trading partners. American court systems, modeled after the British tribunals but with changes, were efficient; crime was low; and business was good. The colonies had become a country within the British Empire.
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There was one more, deep, wrinkle to that portrait—virtue. During the last half century, Parliament and other British governing agencies had been crippled with very public corruption scandals. The British government, Americans believed, was no longer virtuous. Lobbying for liberty grew everywhere in James Madison's Virginia in the 1760s and 1770s. Nowhere was it better expressed than in a soaring speech by Virginian Patrick Henry. Henry would go on to be a six-time governor of Virginia and ardent political foe of Madison. He told the House of Burgesses, the Virginia state legislature, that the taxes would “destroy American freedom.” In soaring language, hands and arms flying about him, he shouted, “If this be treason, make the most of it.” (Madison's friend Jefferson, in the hall that day, said Henry showed “torrents of eloquence.”)
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Madison felt like Washington, whom he would meet later, that the colonies had suffered much. Later, Washington wrote, “We had borne much; we had long and ardently sought for reconciliation upon honourable terms, that it has been denied us, that all our attempts after peace had proved abortive, and had been grossly misrepresented, that we had done everything which could be expected from the best of subjects, that the spirit of freedom beat too high in us to submit to slavery and that if nothing else could satisfy a tyrant and his diabolical ministry, we are determined to shake off all connections with a state so unjust and unnatural.”
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There in Williamsburg, legislators developed the Committees of Public Safety. These were secretive citizen groups designed to gather information about Crown activities and share it with committees throughout the colony and in other colonies. Each colony had several committees.

Madison, aged twenty-three, joined the Orange County Committee of Public Safety. It was his first official political position. He was then elected as a county delegate to the state convention in Williamsburg and a year later, in 1776, was elected to the state assembly, the House of Burgesses. There, in its somber chambers in an elegant brick building, he met and became a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, one of the most brilliant men in America. Madison had witnessed fierce persecution of Baptist ministers in Virginia and in the legislature worked on measures to guarantee religious freedom. In just the three years that he served as a delegate to the House of Burgesses, Madison had
been deeply immersed in the anti-Crown politics of Virginia and America, befriended the leaders of the various tax disputes, served on anti-Crown committees, and written anti-Parliament letters. The Virginia state legislature sent him to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1780 as a state delegate when he was twenty-nine. He was an easily recognizable figure in Philadelphia because he almost always dressed completely in black and, wherever he went, he carried armfuls of thick books. His small room in Philadelphia was crammed full of books.

In Congress, he visited the army camp, dined with Washington on several occasions, and met with Washington whenever the general visited Congress to deliver reports on the progress of the war. In Philadelphia, Madison debated and befriended just about all of the delegates, who represented colonies he had never even visited. He got bills passed in several areas and even convinced Virginia to give up part of its lands to form a brand-new geographical region, the Northwest Territories, governed by Congress.

Few people in America had been so exposed to American political thought, and action, as the radical Madison. Few had interacted with so many political figures from so many colonies. Few had met and spent time with so many generals and officers of the Continental Army. Few Americans, ever, had been so exposed to every nuance of colonial politics or understood the politics of England, both on the battlefield and in philosophical debates. James Madison was, as Edmund Randolph said, “a child of the Revolution.”
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He was a successful congressman but not, at first, a successful politician. Madison hid behind his books, reading long into the night, and never developed the political skills necessary for dealing with other congressmen. His writings were dry; they did not soar with the lyrical prose of other public figures. He was a low-key public speaker whose speeches were barely audible; his voice did not soar with eloquence like that of other Virginians, such as Henry. He was effective, but not a leader. One Massachusetts congressman wrote that Madison was “a man of sense reading, address and integrity” but “a little too much of a book politician and too timid in his politics.”
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But he was effective.

The great political change in Madison came after the war, in the fall and winter of 1787–88 and in the spring and summer of 1788, when, with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, he lobbied to get all of the thirteen colonies to ratify the brand-new Constitution, the Constitution he wrote. To do that, George Washington warned him, he had to step back from his long-held image as a political theoretician and put on the coat of a political arm twister. He needed to engage in hardscrabble politics to win views and get votes. Madison needed
to make friends and make deals. That was the only way the Constitution, objected to by many, was going to be ratified in each state. Madison listened to Washington, and others who offered him the same advice, and changed his ways. His voice never grew louder or stronger, but the way he delivered speeches improved. His ability to talk others into agreeing with him, and to rebut the arguments against the Constitution and to refute powerful speakers, increased dramatically in just a single year.

Another bit of advice Washington told Madison was that his fellow Virginian had to make better use of the country's newspapers to gain support for the Constitution. He had to court editors and make them a part of his campaign. Later, just like Washington, Madison began the practice of reading every newspaper he could find so that he knew what the media and the people thought of his policies.
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One Georgian congressman, William Pierce, said of him later that “every person seems to acknowledge his greatness. He blends together the profound politician with the scholar…he is a most agreeable, eloquent, and convincing speaker…he always comes forward the best informed man of any point in debate. In the affairs of the United States, he perhaps has the most correct knowledge of any man in the Union. He was always thought one of the ablest members that ever sat in Congress.”
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Massachusetts senator Samuel Otis wrote of him that he had “the endowments of a great statesman and a fine scholar, in the study of men and books, possesses a cool, deliberate, cautious judgment [and] writes his friends in Congress in terms very encouraging.”
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Others said that he combined the skills of the statesman and politician, that he not only had ideas but also could do the difficult work needed to bring those ideas to fruition. Brissot de Warville, a French statesman, wrote that “he distinguished himself particularly well at the time that the conventions met to vote on the new Federal Constitution. For a long time, Virginia hesitated to join the Union, but by his logic and his eloquence Mr. Madison persuaded the convention to favor acceptance…he looked tired, perhaps, as a result of the immense labors to which he had devoted himself recently. His expression was that of a stern censor; his conversation disclosed a man of learning, and his countenance was that of a person conscious of his talents and of his duties.”
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Madison had not only designed the Constitution but implemented the document's ideas into his everyday job as a congressman. He was not rash or flighty; he thought before he spoke; and he always expressed his appreciation of every view on a subject, as well as his own. New Hampshire senator William Plumer said of him that “no man was more tenacious of his opinions than he
was—he would die sooner than give them up, but then no man was more ready to save for the present the applications to existing circumstances…. Something of this disposition is no doubt seen in most men, but was remarkably characteristic of Mr. Madison, and forms the true explanation of his conduct in more than one important transaction.”
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