Father of the constitution: James Madison, more than any other individual, is responsible for the U.S. Constitution. But his legacy extends beyond that priceless document of ordered liberty. (History -- Greatness of the Founders).

James Madison is best known for the most tangible legacy he left America: the U.S. Constitution, and rightfully so. The U.S. Constitution is the oldest national constitution still in force and a model for ordered liberty to the rest of the world.

But Madison's legacy extends beyond being the "Father of the Constitution." He was also the fourth president of the United States. And he was even more than that.

He was the shrewdest politician and political organizer of his generation, More importantly, Madison stands as the greatest political theorist in American history -- and perhaps in world history. Madison left behind a timeless body of political literature unmatched in analytical depth anywhere in American history. From The Federalist Papers to his journal of the 1787 Constitutional Convention to his personal correspondence, Madison created for posterity one of the greatest and most penetrating collections of political thought.

Early Life

Madison grew up in rural Orange County, Virginia, with all the advantages of the landed Virginia aristocracy. His father, James Madison Sr., had amassed a 5,000-acre plantation at Montpelier by the time James Jr. was born. As a result, the young Madison received capable schooling at a local school run by a Scottish-educated teacher and later tutoring at the hands of Presbyterian minister Thomas Martin. The Princeton-educated Martin likely had a hand in Madison's decision to pursue his education at the College of New Jersey at Princeton rather than through the traditional Virginian route at the College of William and Mary. Princeton was founded by fiery Presbyterians but boasted religious toleration of all denominations. Yet it had exacting moral standards as well as a challenging curriculum based on a traditional liberal education. One already had to have knowledge of a substantial portion of the classics to be even accepted by Princeton. The entrance exam of the time required the applicants to be able to "re nder Virgil and Tully's orations into English and to turn English into true and grammatical Latin, and to be so well acquainted with the Greek, as to render any part of the Four Evangelists [Gospels] in that language into Latin or English ... [and master] reading English with propriety, spelling the English language, and writing it without grammatical errors."

Madison not only passed Princeton's entrance exam, but upon arrival he passed the freshman year exams as well and was allowed to skip his freshman year. The brilliant young scholar compressed the remaining three years of study into two. Though Madison managed to win a four-year degree from Princeton in just two years, the concentration on his studies -- limiting himself to a few hours of sleep per night for weeks on end -- took its toll on the already sickly Madison. After graduating in September 1771, Madison stayed on at Princeton through the winter, in part because his health made the 300-mile journey back to Montpelier too difficult. Though Madison was from an Episcopalian family, the influence of his Presbyterian tutor and university schooling gave Madison little interest in denominational squabbles. In fact, he only rarely mentioned his religious faith in public addresses or in personal correspondence. But Madison was hardly indifferent to religion. "The belief in a God, all powerful, wise, and good," M adison wrote in 1825, is "essential to the moral order of the world, and to the happiness of man."

Few would assume Madison was a strong leader based on his physical attributes. He stood approximately 5'4" tall, about average height at the time. This meant that Madison was dwarfed by Virginia's other eminent leaders such as the tall and athletic George Washington and the even taller but lanky Thomas Jefferson. More importantly, Madison had constant health problems and a frail and boyish build well into middle age. He had a weak speaking voice and felt uncomfortable in large social gatherings.

Though appointed a colonel in the Virginia militia, Madison never saw any combat during the War for Independence and spent very little time in military service due to health problems.

Lacking the telegenic qualities that often win elections in the present day, Madison, nonetheless, possessed many assets. If Madison's weak speaking voice forced him to speak at large audiences only reluctantly, he excelled in small gatherings. He made friends easily in small groups with his sense of humor and penetrating intellect. He also had excellent family connections for a political career, and he was far and away the best political organizer and political strategist of his generation.

Entry into Public Service

Madison's skill at the elections process was culled from his study of law in addition to his first painful experience in public office. Elected to the Orange County Committee of Public Safety in 1774, he soon parlayed that office into a seat in the new Virginia state assembly after independence. When he lost re-election in 1777 to a tavern keeper who had reportedly won votes with free drink bribes, Madison learned the valuable lesson that the candidate with the best intellectual and moral argument doesn't always win the election. It was a lesson he never forgot, one that caused him to learn how to organize political movements. The study led to a subsequent string of electoral victories for him and his allies throughout his lifetime.

The experience of corruption at the ballot box also led to Madison's lifelong hostility to a purely democratic style of government. The majority, he learned, does not always make the best choices in its own interests. Instead, government ought to be primarily directed toward protecting individual rights rather than serving the will of a whimsical majority. He gave his most eloquent exposition of this sentiment in The Federalist, No. 10, the most famous of all The Federalist papers:

A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert results from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would at the same time be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

Losing his legislative seat was fortuitous in other ways. The following year Madison was elected to the Virginia Governor's Council. With Thomas Jefferson's ascendancy to the governorship in 1779, the two began a deep friendship and a lifelong political partnership. The partnership helped both Virginians, as well as the new nation, for the next 45 years.

Madison's political influence over Thomas Jefferson was immense. Like Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson's interests ran the gamut of subjects: politics, science, philosophy, literature, and so on. He grasped abstract subjects well and had a writer's gift for expressing a political principle simply and with charismatic flair. But Madison understood political principles better than Jefferson, even if he lacked Jefferson's broad intellectual curiosity. Madison specialized in the study of government, and he was often better acquainted with the details of policy proposals and of constitutional principles than Jefferson. On the rare occasions when the two friends disagreed about a policy measure, they usually ended up reconciling with Madison's s view. Their mutual correspondence contains several examples of Madison correcting Jefferson on policy details and, occasionally, correcting Jefferson on a misplaced principle. One example of this is a 1790 letter from Jefferson proclaiming that longstanding debts should be aban doned because "the Earth belongs to the living, not the dead [and] a living generation can bind itself only." Madison replied that repudiating debts after 19 years would not be just because "debts may be incurred with a direct view to the interests of the unborn, as well as the living. Such are debts for repelling a conquest, the evils of which descend through many generations." Madison noted that this "is the debt incurred by the United States." Furthermore, Madison reasoned, Jefferson's philosophy would lead to the expiration of the Constitution itself. Madison's influence may have been partly responsible for keeping in check Jefferson's occasional tendency to make ill-conceived populist statements. As early as 1784, Jefferson wrote to his nephew studying in Orange County: "Mr. Madison's judgment is so sound and his heart so good that I would wish you to respect every advice he would be so kind as to give you, equally as if it came from me."

By 1785, Madison proved his political skills as a state legislator in Virginia by engineering the defeat of a popular piece of legislation that would have paid the salaries of Episcopal ministers from the state treasury. Though nominally an Episcopalian himself, Madison had been strongly influenced by Presbyterians throughout his life. Accordingly, he always valued highly state protection for freedom of worship. The popular Patrick Henry had pushed the legislation. Henry alone was a formidable opponent. He was a fiery and persuasive orator -- perhaps the best orator of his day -- whom Madison had no hope of besting word for word. Patriotic giants such as George Washington, Edmund Pendleton, and former governor Benjamin Harrison also supported the legislation. And it should hardly be a surprise that such a bill would have attracted so much support; few people in that day had ever lived under or known of a government that did not financially back a particular religious establishment. The bill therefore seemed certain of eventual passage.

Madison and his allies instead backed a substitute, half-measure bill that reestablished the Episcopal Church in Virginia on condition that the bill paying salaries of ministers would be postponed until after the April election the following year.

Once postponement was won, Madison and his liberally-minded colleagues set out to destroy the legislation. Madison drafted a detailed critique called the "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments." His critique was used to support a statewide petition drive. Madison's eloquence in that document continues to echo through the centuries:

It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the no-blest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it. Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish, with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?

Madison won over many by circulating the petitions among non-Anglican religious denominations, such as the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. But he realized that Patrick Henry's presence in the legislature represented the biggest stumbling block to stopping the legislation's passage. Madison cleverly removed Henry as an obstacle by campaigning to get him into the governorship -- and out of the legislature. Madison's political shrewdness paid off: His political opponent became governor, and the legislation died. In addition to killing this particular bill, Madison and his colleagues were able to win disestablishment of the church from the state for good several years later. Madison regarded this as one of his most important political victories throughout his long and fruitful career.

Elected to the Continental Congress in 1780, 29-year-old Madison arrived in Philadelphia as the Congress' youngest member at one of the lowest points in the War for Independence. Madison was among the quietest congressional delegates for the first year of his tenure. But the pressing national crisis called for leadership, and Madison answered the call. Congress was broke. American credit was almost entirely destroyed after four years of war. What credit Congress could get from French and Spanish allies abroad came with increasing costs in the form of political entanglement. Here Madison began to leave his legacy of political analysis. His 1780 essay "Money" took issue with the popular view of money in his day. According to the prevailing wisdom, paper money backed by "specie" lost its value solely because there was too much paper circulating. Madison countered that the ability to exchange the paper money for "specie" determined its value:

If the credit of the issuer, therefore, be perfectly unsuspected, the time of redemption alone will regulate its value. To support what is here advanced, it is sufficient to appeal to the nature of paper money. It consists of bills or notes of obligation payable in specie to the bearer, either on demand or at a future day. Of the first kind is the paper currency of Britain, and hence its equivalence to specie. Of the latter kind is the paper currency of the United States, and hence its inferiority to specie. But if its being redeemable, not on demand, but at a future day, be the cause of its inferiority, the distance of that day, and not its quantity, ought to be the measure of that inferiority. It has been shewn that the value of specie does not fluctuate according to local fluctuations in its quantity. Great Britain, in which there is such an immensity of circulating paper, shews that the value of paper depends as little on its quantity as that of specie, when the paper represents specie payable on demand. Let us suppose that the circulating notes of Great Britain, instead of being payable on demand, were to be redeemed at a future day, at the end of one year for example, and that no interest was due on them. If the same assurance prevailed that at the end of the year they would be equivalent to specie, as now prevails that they are every moment equivalent, would any other effect result from such a change, except that the notes would suffer a depreciation equal to one year's interest?

Madison also strongly supported the alliance with France and defended Benjamin Franklin's mission in Paris, but, after independence was won with the Paris peace treaty, Madison warned about "the labyrinth of European politics from which we ought religiously to keep ourselves as free as possible." That Madison wrote this in 1786--a dozen years before Washington echoed that sentiment in his famous Farewell Address--is a testimony to Madison's foresight (and possibly to his enduring influence on Washington's administration).

Madison figured among the most influential members of Congress by the time he left Philadelphia in 1784, even though he was not yet among the best known. And the defects he saw in the Articles of Confederation forced him to begin organizing for a stronger national government. This organizing resulted in the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

Constitution and Federalism

The best prepared of all the delegates, Madison was the one indispensable man at the Constitutional Convention. Not only did he bring with him the "Virginia plan" used as the model for what eventually became the U.S. Constitution, but he also brought with him a notebook filled with analyses of the virtues and defects of all of history's republics, from the Swiss and the Dutch confederations to the Roman republic and the Greek city-states. Madison used this notebook to great effect in his speeches at the Philadelphia Convention. Madison's journal of debate at the Convention, the only comprehensive record of the Convention, reveals that he participated in the debates more than any other delegate, though Elbridge Gerry, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouvernor Morris participated nearly as much.

Madison's greatest impact was off of the debate floor. More than anyone else present, Madison orchestrated the Convention by lobbying, persuading, and controlling the flow of discussion. Without his day-today vigilance guarding the progress of the convention, a new constitution likely would never have emerged from Philadelphia.

Approval of the Constitution in Philadelphia was one thing, but ratification was another entirely. Once the Constitution was proposed, formidable obstacles to ratification had to be overcome. Many prominent patriotic heroes opposed ratification, including Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, New York Governor George Clinton, and Edmund Randolph. Madison spent the next couple years traveling up and down the Atlantic coast, lobbying and strategizing for the Constitution. He lobbied in person and with his pen, the most famous of the latter being his authorship of 29 of the 35 Federalist Papers. Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay wrote The Federalist Papers under the pen name "Publius" to persuade New York and other states to ratify the Constitution.

More than 200 years later, The Federalist Papers offer invaluable insights into not only the thinking of the federalists but the principles of good government. Consider this jewel of wisdom from Madison's The Federalist, No. 47:

The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, my justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

Madison and his allies succeeded in winning ratification of the Constitution, partly because he and other federalists promised to pass a Bill of Rights upon ratification. And that's what Madison -- elected Speaker of the House in the First Congress -- and the rest of Congress did. Madison served eight years in the House of Representatives, first as a close ally of George Washington and later as a check against the centralist influences of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Madison publicly broke with the Washington administration in 1791, and shortly thereafter formed the Democratic-Republican Party with Jefferson and James Monroe. In 1794, he married Dolly Paine Todd, an attractive widow from a Quaker family. Madison retired from Congress in 1797, but he remained active in opposing unconstitutional federal legislation. In 1798, he authored the Virginia Resolutions in response to passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Alien and Sedition Acts threatened to quash freedom of the press and other rights guara nteed by the Constitution. In several cases, federal agents had actually arrested journalists for criticizing the administration. The Virginia Resolutions, with Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, were a straightforward assertion of states' rights and individual rights under the Constitution and a remonstrance against federal encroachment of powers not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. Together these resolutions served as a rallying point across the nation against the Alien and Sedition Acts, and Madison made full use of them. By persistently persuading in word and pen, along with his organizing efforts, he finalized one of the greatest political comebacks of all time.

Madison returned to office as a state legislator in Virginia in 1799. John Adams and his federalist allies were almost completely defeated in the election of 1800. In May of the following year, Madison rode up to the new capital city of Washington to serve as secretary of state in the new Jefferson administration. Madison served in this capacity for all eight years of Jefferson's Presidency. As secretary of state, Madison was frustrated by his inability to win British guarantees of safety for neutral American shipping. He did, however, oversee a department responsible for making possible the purchase of the Louisiana territory from France. As Jefferson's most trusted advisor, Madison doubtless had a hand in reducing the size and tax burden of the federal government during the Jefferson administration. During Jefferson's administration, federal spending was reduced dramatically, all federal taxes except tariffs on imports were abolished, and a third of the national debt was retired.

Two Terms as President

Madison continued the Jeffersonian revolution of less government when he became president. Madison's Democratic-Republican Party in Congress allowed the national bank's 20 year-old charter to expire and repealed an ill-conceived embargo against trade with Britain.

When British aggression forced Congress' hand to go to war as Madison neared his second term, Madison initially managed the War of 1812 poorly. Not only were national defenses in an appalling state under the Jefferson/Madison budget cuts, but Madison's mediocre military appointees had also failed to account for the possibility of British invasion. The British sailed into Chesapeake Bay and landed a force that burned the Capitol and the White House after defeating a numerically superior American force.

The naval war was one-sided; the British blockaded the entire American coast throughout the war. American naval victories were limited to single engagements and victories on lakes.

American prospects improved slightly as the war progressed, and the rout of the British at the Battle of New Orleans (fought after the war was officially concluded) consolidated the American position in peace.

Madison's handpicked successor, his Secretary of State James Monroe, continued the dominance of Madison's party in Washington by serving his own two terms as president.

Sage of Montpelier

After the end of his second term as president, Madison retired to his plantation at Montpelier. He continued public service as a Virginia state legislator, as a delegate to the Virginia constitutional convention in 1829, and in his frequent correspondence with citizens across the nation until shortly before his death in 1836. The 1830 Virginia Constitution, which emerged from the constitutional convention, gravely disappointed Madison, who had in vain tried to win some protections for slaves. Madison had backed Jefferson's 1785 bill to abolish slavery in Virginia and had resolved early in life "to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves." But he never managed to free himself financially from plantation life.

Madison continued as a pillar of support for the Constitution throughout his lifetime. Writing on a wide variety of constitutional subjects, his retirement-era letters form a body of literature in constitutional exposition unmatched in quality from any other American political leader.

Madison's standing as a political theoretician has suffered in recent history because of a strange phenomenon in modem political science that assumes political theorists can only be considered as such if their theories are impractical and unworkable. Madison may be the only political theorist generally excluded from the fraternity of political theorists because his theories were too practical. Even his Constitution has often been derided as "a bundle of compromises" rather than the masterpiece of checks and balances it was designed to be. Madison's expositions of the principles of American union in his correspondence are discounted as theory because they were actually applied so closely during his lifetime. Should Americans reacquaint themselves with the literature left behind by the Sage of Montpelier, the nation would benefit immensely.