by Lynne Cheney
Fall passed into winter with no word coming back from Bradford. After Christmas, slaves spread manure in plant beds, sowed tobacco seed, and covered the beds with branches to protect against frost, while indoors Madison instructed his sisters Nelly and Sarah, twelve and eight, and his brother William, who was ten, in “some of the first rudiments of literature.” He read law and looked into other “miscellaneous subjects,” perhaps exploring further in his father’s small library. Many of the books on James senior’s shelves were medical. Some provided practical information on matters from midwifery to dentistry that a Virginia planter, who oversaw the care of his family and slaves, needed.5 Others must have struck Madison as evidence of how little was really known of the many ailments, including his own, that flesh was heir to.
One of the books in his father’s library took up a most curious medical controversy. It began when Mary Toft of Godalming, England, said that after being startled by a rabbit, she had given birth to seventeen bunnies. Some of the most prominent medical men of the day believed her, were even fooled into thinking they had witnessed the births (she had voluminous skirts), causing the physician James Blondel to launch an assault on the underlying idea that allowed them to be so easily gulled: the notion that a mother’s prenatal influence was so great it could turn her unborn child into a monster. In The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examin’d, a slender book that James senior owned, Blondel called the idea of assigning blame to the mother “mischievous and cruel,” and he ridiculed the old anecdotes used to support the notion, such as the story of a mother startled by a cat who produced a baby with a catlike head and the tale of a pregnant woman who gazed too long at a picture of John the Baptist wearing a hair shirt and produced a hairy child. If Madison found these stories diverting—and how could a former member of the Whig Society have not?—there was another to which he would have paid serious attention, one about “a young and lusty woman” who, frightened at seeing someone suffer an epileptic seizure, bore a child with epilepsy.6
The idea that epilepsy could be caused by a pregnant woman witnessing a seizure was widespread. Even the famed Herman Boerhaave, perhaps the most eminent European physician of the first half of the eighteenth century, wrote that epilepsy could derive “from the imagination of the mother when she was pregnant being shocked at the sight of a person in an epileptic fit.”7 Blondel’s refutation of such a notion would have been of interest to a young man trying to understand his sudden attacks.
While Madison was reading away the winter months in the Piedmont, his friend Bradford was traveling, eventually settling back at Princeton. It was March before he wrote to Madison, apologizing for the delay and taken aback by his friend’s gloomy report: “You alarm me by what you tell me about your health. I believe you hurt your constitution while here by too close an application to study; but I hope ’tis not so bad with you as you seem to imagine. Persons of the weakest constitutions by taking a proper care of themselves often outlive those of the strongest.”8
• • •
BY THE TIME Madison wrote back in April 1773, his health had improved, “owing I believe to more activity and less study recommended by the phy[si]cians.” Perhaps Madison was simply lucky in encountering doctors who subscribed to the idea that patients could be helped by leading measured lives, but he and his family might very well have sought out such physicians, inspired to do so by another of James senior’s books, John Wesley’s widely popular Primitive Physic. Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was unusual in that he left his theology behind when he wrote about health. Prayer was important, he said, but he conveyed no sense of illness being sin. Primitive Physic presented exercise as a “grand preventative of pain and sickness of various kinds.” Its power “to preserve and restore health is greater than can well be conceived, especially in those who add temperance thereto.” Studious persons, Wesley wrote, “ought to have stated times for exercise, at least two or three hours a day.”9
For good health, a person also needed to be in control of his emotions, Wesley said: “All violent and sudden passion disposes to, or actually throws people into, acute diseases.” Blondel, too, wrote about the effects of “violent passions,” saying that they “will cause convulsions, shortness of breath, fevers, epilepsy, apoplexy, and even death itself.” It was common for physicians who recommended exercise also to recommend emotional control, and the doctors who suggested “more activity” for Madison might also have offered advice about being calm and measured.10
Certainly there was a change of mood in his letters to Bradford. The melancholy outpourings ended, and Madison spoke of himself as “sedate and philosophic”—which did not mean being always somber. He joined Bradford in joking about Nassau alumni such as “poor Brian,” who after “long intoxicating his brain with idleness and dissipation” acknowledged his marriage to Miss Amelia Horner, who had already borne his child.11
Madison was, however, deeply serious when Bradford requested career advice. The younger man wrote that he had rejected the idea of becoming a minister and was thinking of law. Madison supported his decision but urged that there was still an important religious role he could play: “I have sometimes thought there could not be a stronger testimony in favor of religion or against temporal enjoyments even the most rational and manly than for men who occupy the most honorable and gainful departments and are rising in reputation and wealth, publically to declare their unsatisfactoriness by becoming fervent advocates in the cause of Christ, and I wish you may give in your evidence in this way. Such instances have seldom occurred; therefore, they would be more striking and would be instead of a ‘cloud of witnesses.[’]”12 The sentiments in this letter are particularly noteworthy because nothing like them would ever come from Madison’s pen again.
During the winter of 1773–1774, Madison’s thinking underwent a sea change. The young man who embraced traditional views at the beginning became a person who no longer affirmed the religious doctrines with which he had grown up. It has sometimes been suggested that he was swayed from his early acceptance of church orthodoxy by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, both critics of revealed religion, but the break in Madison’s thinking happened before he knew either man. The more likely explanation is that having taken his health in hand by walking and riding over the Virginia hills, he decided now to take his soul in hand, casting aside the notion that his sudden attacks were somehow connected with Satan, demons, or sin.
Virginia’s official church, the Church of England, was supported and enforced by the state, and at the same time that Madison was moving away from traditional religious ideas, the government of Virginia was punishing Baptist preachers trying to expand their ministry into the colony. Sheriffs and magistrates, sometimes accompanied by Anglican clergymen, arrested and jailed the Baptists, charging them with disturbing the peace or preaching without a license. When one of the most famous of those jailed, James Ireland, preached to people through the grate in his cell, men on horseback rode through the crowd, driving some of those gathered to the ground, threatening others with clubs, and stripping and lashing the slaves who were listening.13
The jailing of five or six Baptists in neighboring Culpeper County brought Madison to a fury early in 1774. Losing all efforts he had been making to control his passions, he lambasted those responsible, including Anglican clergymen. “That diabolical hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some,” he wrote to his friend Bradford, “and to their eternal infamy the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business.” He had little sympathy for what he later called the Baptists’ “enthusiasm, which contributed to render them obnoxious to sober opinion,” but he took up their cause with a vehemence, suggesting that he saw in their plight a symbol of his own. They were in jail, which was clearly unjust, but so was any constraint that restricted the intellect to narrow and dispiriting dogma. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect,” Madison told Bradford,
writing with the authority of a man who knew firsthand the price of being bound to a received viewpoint—and the liberation of breaking free.
Madison was frustrated in his early efforts to aid the Baptists. He wrote to Bradford, “I have squabbled and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it [to so lit]tle purpose that I am without common patience. So I [leave you] to pity me and pray for liberty of conscience [to revive among us].” But this was hardly the end of it. When a basic principle was involved, Madison could be a man of utterly dogged determination—stubbornness, some would call it. He had already decided to study law, not because he intended to be a lawyer, but because, he told Bradford, “the principles and modes of government are too important to be disregarded by an inquisitive mind and I think are well worthy [of] a critical examination by all students that have health and leisure.” In eerily prescient language, he asked Bradford for information on “the constitution of your country,” meaning Pennsylvania. He wanted to know “its origin and fundamental principles of legislation,” and he made particular inquiry about “the extent of your religious toleration.” If freedom of conscience couldn’t be achieved in Virginia as it was currently organized, then twenty-two-year-old James Madison wanted to think about reorganizing it—and doing away with an official church. “Is an ecclesiastical establishment absolutely necessary to support civil society in a supreme government?” he asked Bradford. “And how far it is hurtful to a dependant state?”14
Madison was also developing another idea: that the absence of clashing ideas and competing interests leads to overreaching and corruption. He wrote to Bradford, “If the Church of England had been the established and general religion in all the northern colonies as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”15 A decade and more hence, when he was contemplating how a republic of vast expanse could succeed, he would call upon the positive side of this idea: that diversity sustains freedom. Upending the conventional wisdom of his time, he would argue that a large republic had a better chance than a small one of succeeding because there are more interests to compete and less chance for any one of them to become tyrannical.
Madison did not make an issue about his departure from the orthodox religious views of his time. To question miracles or the Trinity in one’s study or in private conversation was one thing. To do so publicly was more than unacceptable. Heresy, including the denial of the divinity of the Scriptures, could keep a person from holding office and even, technically at least, lead to imprisonment. With his family, Madison was almost certainly discreet. His father was a vestryman at the Brick Church, and his mother a woman of noted piety who was confirmed in the church as an adult. Her son James chose not to be confirmed, but the loving regard he habitually displayed for his parents almost certainly meant that he did not air his differences with church doctrine at home. Bishop William Meade, a friend of the Madison family, wrote, “Whatever may have been the private sentiments of Mr. Madison on the subject of religion, he was never known to declare any hostility to it. He always treated it with respect, attended public worship in his neighborhood, invited ministers of religion to his house, had family prayers on such occasions—though he did not kneel himself at prayers.” Nevertheless, he gained a reputation as an unbeliever. As the Reverend Dr. Balmaine, who was well acquainted with him, described it, “His political associations with those of infidel principles, of whom there were many in his day, if they did not actually change his creed, yet subjected him to the general suspicion of it. This was confirmed in the minds of some by the active part he took in opposition to everything like the support of churches by the legislature.” Meade reported a private conversation with him that, in Meade’s words, “took such a turn—though not designed on my part—as to call forth some expressions and arguments which left the impression on my mind that his creed was not strictly regulated by the Bible.”16
Madison has often been called a deist, and rejection of supernatural parts of the Bible was common to deist thought, but so, too, was the idea that through reason one could prove the existence of God, and to Madison that smacked of hubris. He posited limits on reason, making him sound very much like David Hume, the Scottish philosopher whom John Witherspoon had classed among “infidel writers,” though that is a description Hume would have rejected. Both Madison and Hume agreed that human understanding can take us only so far and beyond is what Madison described as “mystery,” arising from “the dimness of the human sight.” As Hume put it, “The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery.”17
Hume also argued that a person cannot wrestle with existential problems forever, cannot remain “environed with the deepest darkness.” Life summons, inviting participation: “The blood flows with a new tide; the heart is elevated; and the whole man acquires a vigor which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments.” For Madison, the call came from the events of the day, not only the persecution of Baptists in Virginia, but also the dramatic escalation of the conflict with the king and Parliament. After a few years of relative calm, the British had provoked American ire once more, this time with an effort to save the East India Company. Parliament granted the company exclusive rights to the American tea market, a decision that together with the tax on tea imposed by the Townshend Acts infuriated colonists up and down the seaboard. Once more they saw themselves placed in humiliating subservience, used this time by the ministry in Britain not only to fill up royal coffers but to prop up a failing company. In Philadelphia threats of violence persuaded the captain of the Polly to turn back to London rather than attempt to enter the harbor with his cargo of tea. In Boston anger and crowds grew until on a cold December night in 1773 thousands of Bostonians swarmed Griffin’s Wharf to watch 130 men, many disguised as Indians, board the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver and dump ten thousand pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.18
At first Madison preferred Philadelphia’s more temperate approach. “I congratulate you on your heroic proceedings … with regard to the tea,” he wrote to Bradford, whose father’s print shop had published a handbill warning the captain of the Polly that tar and feathers were in store for him if he landed. “I wish Boston may conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do with boldness.” Madison understood that Boston had been singled out for “frequent assaults” and that the conflict was providing colonists with valuable “exercise and practice … in the art of defending liberty and property.” Still, he admired the judiciousness of Philadelphians and longed to visit their city. Soon he had an excuse. His father wanted to enroll his brother William in a boarding school to the north.19
The Madison brothers, accompanied by James’s Princeton friend George Luckey, started their journey in May and were likely in Philadelphia when they heard the stunning news that in retaliation for the destruction of tea the British Parliament was closing Boston’s port and altering Massachusetts’s charter to bring the colony under greater royal control. Not long after came action and reaction from Virginia. The House of Burgesses called for prayer and fasting on June 1, 1774, the day the port of Boston was to be closed, which led the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to dissolve the assembly. As Madison enrolled his brother in preparatory school—the family decided on one in Princeton—events at home were taking on momentous dimensions. Members of the dismissed House of Burgesses, acting with the aplomb of men well practiced in governance, reconvened in Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern. There, in the long, wainscoted Apollo Room, scene of many a ball and banquet, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and their colleagues reaffirmed their support for Boston, declaring “that an attack made on one of our sister colonies … is an attack made on all British America.” They call
ed for the colonies to meet “in general congress … to deliberate on those general measures which the united interests of America may from time to time require.”20
As the crisis grew, Madison’s attitude, like that of many colonists, hardened. In light of the harsh British measures, Pennsylvania’s cautious ways seemed inadequate, and when its legislature chose delegates for the general congress that Virginia had proposed, Madison told Bradford that the instructions they had been given were much too timid. Instead of waiting to see if the British would make concessions, the colonies ought to undertake immediate military preparations, he maintained: “Delay on our part emboldens our adversaries and improves their schemes whilst it abates the ardor of the Americans inspired with recent injuries.” From his Piedmont home, Madison also wrote to Bradford that he “heartily repent[ed]” having already made his journey to Philadelphia. The years of his young manhood had been marked by repeated British violations of American rights, from the Stamp Act to the Tea Act to the Intolerable Acts, as Americans were calling the measures taken against Boston. The gathering of the Continental Congress offered hope of concerted action by the American colonies in defense of their rights. Madison yearned to observe the great event, but Bradford assured him that even if he were in Philadelphia, he could not witness the proceedings. They were “a profound secret and the doors open to no one.” Bradford had to admit, however, that a city where delegates were convening from such far-flung places as Georgia and Massachusetts provided great spectacle. Philadelphia was “another Cairo,” he wrote, swarming not with merchants but “with politicians and statesmen.”21
Bradford also sent information he knew would fascinate the book-loving Madison: “The Congress sits in the Carpenter’s Hall in one room of which the city library is kept and of which the librarian tells me the gentlemen make great and constant use.” The delegates were especially interested in works of political theory, Bradford wrote, perhaps inspiring Madison to begin a reading project of his own. He sent to England for Joseph Priestley’s Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty, a work advocating natural rights, limited government, and religious freedom. He asked Bradford to send him a copy of Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, which emphasized the need for constitutional checks and balances. Ferguson also asserted liberty to be a right, not a favor granted by the state, a formulation that Madison might have kept in mind as he read pamphlets on religious toleration that he asked another friend to send him.22 Since freedom of conscience was also a right, why should it be regarded as within the power of the state to grant?