by Lynne Cheney
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.41
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.”42
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.”43
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.44 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.45 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.46
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?”47
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.”48 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.49
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.”50
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 di
sciples, 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.
In Mark 9:17–26, the boy is described as possessed by “a dumb spirit” that “teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth.” Jesus charges the spirit to come out, “and the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him.” In Luke 9:42, as the boy approached Jesus, “The devil threw him down and tare him, and Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and healed the child, and delivered him again to his father.”
The idea of epilepsy arising from supernatural sources went back to antiquity. Aristotle (or one of his followers) observed that “men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile, as the story of Heracles among the heroes tells.” This, says the writer, had led the ancients to call “the disease of epilepsy the ‘sacred disease’ after him.” One of the Hippocratic writings, on the other hand, disputed the idea, declaring the notion that epilepsy came from the gods absurd and suggesting that it had been started by charlatans.51
In the Christian era the idea of a supernatural origin arose again, almost entirely because of the story of the epileptic boy. An early church father, Origen, after analyzing the passage in Matthew, concluded that epilepsy “is obviously brought about by an unclean dumb and deaf spirit.” The association of epilepsy and possession persisted through the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment, with theologians declaring madmen, demoniacs, and those with epilepsy ineligible for ordination. Even physicians of the Enlightenment who were trying to move away from supernatural explanations found themselves carving out an exception for epilepsy. In a book published in 1729, the respected physician Jonathan Harle wrote, “That there were some actually possessed by the devil is a truth as plain as words can make it: ’Tis true in one place a person is said to have a devil and be mad, and another to be a demoniac, and yet is called a lunatic, or one troubled with the falling sickness. If we take in both texts, we have the full meaning, which is, that the madness and epilepsy these people labored under were caused by the devil.”52
For someone experiencing “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy,” such interpretations had to be extraordinarily disheartening. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often ill and seeming to suspect that he had epilepsy, wrote in 1802, “If the Evangelists had … merely called the demoniacs diseased men or insane men ‘whose diseases are believed by the people to proceed from demons’ … there would have been, I conceive, no physical hypothesis implied, and yet the Gospel … confirmed by its authority a belief so wild.”53 It would also have been helpful if eighteenth-century church leaders had admitted such a possibility, but the assault by Enlightenment thinkers seems to have made them wary of giving up any ground.
If, as seems likely, Madison suffered the first of his sudden attacks at Princeton and turned to books, as he did for most of his life, for understanding, he would have found nothing to lift his spirits. In President Witherspoon’s personal collection, there were two books the president specifically recommended to students, Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae and French divine Jacques Abbadie’s Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, both of which firmly asserted the truth of biblical miracles. The president also had the eminent divine Samuel Clarke’s paraphrase of the four evangelists, in which Clarke explicitly labeled the possessed boy’s ailment “the falling sickness,” the popular name for epilepsy. Nor were the misconceptions of classical writers in the Princeton library any more reassuring. Pliny the Elder indicated that epilepsy was contagious. “We spit on epileptics in a fit; that is, we throw back infection,” he wrote in Natural History, a book in which he also reported on fantastical cures, including elephant liver, crocodile intestine, and “food taken from the flesh of a wild beast killed by the same iron weapon that has killed a human being.”54
It might have been during the extra time he spent at Princeton that Madison took notes in a commonplace book that survives today. It shows him interested in secrets, which would be natural at a period in his life when he probably wanted as few people as possible to know what had happened to him. Reading the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, he stopped to copy this passage: “Secrecy is not so rare among persons used to great affairs as is believed.” He added his own thought, “Secrets that are discovered make a noise, but these that are kept are silent.” De Retz’s Machiavellian insights interested him (“To lessen envy is the greatest of all secrets”), as did de Retz’s description of a rising churchman who did not reveal much of himself, Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who, wrote de Retz, “was not very communicative, but in the little conversation he had he showed himself more reserved and wise (savio col silentio) than any man I ever knew.” Reflecting on the sentence, Madison offered his own, more pointed version: “He showed his wisdom by saying nothing.”55
The most striking entry in the commonplace book paraphrases part of a letter sent to John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher, when he was suffering one of his frequent illnesses. Dr. Thomas Molyneux wrote to Locke deploring “the great losses the intellectual world in all ages has suffered by the strongest and soundest minds possessing the most infirm and sickly bodies.” Molyneux went on to speculate that “there must be some very powerful cause for this in nature or else we could not have so many instances where the knife cuts the sheath, as the French materially express it.” Scraping his quill across a page, Madison recorded what seemed to him the essence: “The strongest and soundest minds often possess the weakest and most sickly bodies. The knife cuts the sheath as the French express it.”56
The association of illness and powerful intellect probably brought comfort to a young man recently stricken and impressed Locke’s personal story on his memory. Years later Madison likely had Locke in mind when he gave his Piedmont home and the land around it the name of the town in southern France where the great English philosopher repaired for his health. Madison’s Montpelier, like Locke’s Montpellier (which was actually the spelling Madison preferred), would be a place where one could, when the knife had cut the sheath, breathe deeply, hike green hills, and find renewal.
Chapter 2
SEASON OF DISCONTENT
MADISON RETURNED HOME from Princeton in a state of deep despondency. In 1772, as the oaks and maples shed the last of their leaves, he took up his pen to warn his friend William Bradford not to count on too much from the world: “I hope you are sufficiently guarded against the allurements and vanities that beset us on our first entrance on the theater of life. Yet however nice and cautious we may be in detecting the follies of mankind and framing our economy according to the precepts of wisdom and religion, I fancy there will commonly remain with us some latent expectation of obtaining more than ordinary happiness and prosperity till we feel the convincing argument of actual disappointment.” He himself was no longer burdened with optimism, the twenty-one-year-old Madison told his seventeen-year-old friend, because he was convinced that he had no future to be optimistic about. “As to myself I am too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world for I think my sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.”1
Madison had learned from Bradford of the death of Joe Ross, a classmate from Princeton, who had joined him in crowding two years of study into one. He had also been to Berkeley Warm Springs, and the mineral waters had done him little good. In addition, he was reading a book from his father’s library that would have contributed to his gloom. William Burkitt’s Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament emphasized the literal truth of the Bible, particularly the miracles. In Burkitt’s commentary on the story of Christ’s curing the boy who “falleth into the fire, and oft in
to the water,” there was no hedging. Satan was the aggravating force of the boy’s sickness, as Burkitt explained it, and Christ’s casting him out was the cure.2
Madison took notes on Burkitt’s weighty tome, and from the pages that have survived, we know that he paused over passages about miracles. He noted Burkitt’s observation that the miracles wrought by the apostles in curing diseases and casting out devils were so extraordinary that they exceeded Christ’s miracles. He took notes on Burkitt’s observation that biblical narratives about possession were unique to the New Testament, writing, “Evil spirits none were that we read of in the Old Testament bodily possessed of, and many in the New.” The reason for this, Burkitt explained, was so “that the power of Christ might more signally appear in their ejection and casting out.”3
Madison’s interest in how the world works had not been extinguished. He wrote down Burkitt’s observation on Acts 18 that “rulers and great men are like looking glasses” in the model they provide for others. Proverbs 11:13 caught his attention with its caution about talking too much: “A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.” And he paused over Proverbs 12:23: “A prudent man concealeth knowledge; but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness.” But he also had a concern about sin and damnation and how easy it was to slide into both. He paraphrased Burkitt on Matthew 3: “Sins of omission as damnable as sins of commission … neglects of duty as damnable as acts of sin.”4