James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  Word leaked out of the Continental Congress that Virginia’s delegates were the most aggressive in their proposals for dealing with Great Britain. “Your province seems to take the lead at present,” Bradford wrote. Madison proudly reported that in Virginia “a spirit of liberty and patriotism animates all degrees and denominations of men. Many publically declare themselves ready to join the Bostonians as soon as violence is offered them or resistance thought expedient.” During the winter months of 1774–1775, militias began to train. “There will by the spring, I expect, be some thousands of well-trained high spirited men ready to meet danger whenever it appears,” Madison wrote.23

  Madison was a member of the Orange County Committee of Safety, which his father headed, a group responsible for enforcing the Continental Association, a measure passed by the Continental Congress to boycott British goods. Committee members also encouraged local military preparations for what Madison called “extreme events,” efforts that seemed entirely prudent when news arrived that in the dawn hours of April 20, 1775, British marines under the orders of Governor Dunmore had seized gunpowder from the magazine at Williamsburg. Some six hundred armed and mounted men assembled at Fredericksburg “with a view to proceed to Williamsburg [to] recover the powder and revenge the insult,” as Madison described it. They were talked out of their plans by a letter from the portly, fifty-three-year-old Peyton Randolph, who had been in the House of Burgesses for nearly thirty years and presided over the Continental Congress, as well as by advice from three of Randolph’s colleagues: Edmund Pendleton, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington. But Patrick Henry, another Virginia delegate, wasn’t about to let the event pass. Since the time of the Stamp Act, he had been excoriating the British for their actions. Just the month before, he had stirred his fellow Virginians with a call to arms that would become legendary: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me … give me liberty or give me death!”24

  In Hanover County, Henry called for volunteers, and as they assembled, reports from Massachusetts began arriving. Shots had been fired and Americans killed when a British attempt to seize a cache of arms near Concord, Massachusetts, had provoked a confrontation at North Bridge. Henry told the men gathered in Newcastle on the Pamunkey River that it was hardly a coincidence that the British had also seized Virginia munitions. They had a plan to deprive colonists up and down the land of their means of defense, he said, rousing the assembled volunteers with images of comrades fallen, their blood “gloriously shed in the general cause.” He led his motley army toward Williamsburg, and as their march progressed, an alarmed Governor Dunmore sent a message offering reparations. Henry accepted the governor’s bill of exchange, wrote a receipt for 330 pounds, and declared himself satisfied.25

  In Orange County, where indignation was also running high, a group of volunteers, including James Madison, was organizing its own march when its members learned of Henry’s success. A letter from the Committee of Safety, probably drafted by Madison, thanked Henry for his “zeal for the honor and interest of your country,” and Madison was among those who delivered it as Henry passed triumphantly through Port Royal, Virginia, on his way to Philadelphia and the Second Continental Congress. The twenty-four-year-old from Orange County probably tried hard not to stare at the tall, gaunt, thirty-eight-year-old Henry, a man who would be his adversary in the years ahead but for whom he presently had the highest regard, particularly, he told Bradford, when he compared Henry’s upcountry boldness with the “pusillanimity” of the “gentlemen below,” meaning the large plantation owners of the Tidewater, “whose property will be exposed … should [the government] be provoked to make reprisals.”26

  In mid-June, Madison sent sad news to Bradford. Dysentery, widespread in Orange County, had carried off two of his siblings, “a little sister about seven and a brother about four years of age.” Nelly Madison, grieving over the deaths of Elizabeth and Reuben, the fourth and fifth of her children to die, had also fallen ill, but she would later recover.27

  • • •

  AFTER THE KILLINGS at Lexington and Concord, further armed conflict with Britain seemed inevitable, and Boston, under British occupation, was the most likely place for it. When the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in May 1775, delegates quickly created a Continental army, authorizing militia companies from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to march to Boston to reinforce the ragtag assemblage of New Englanders trying to drive the British from the city. Congress then turned to one of its own to lead the army. Colonel George Washington of Virginia, a man of commanding stature, few words, and a reputation for great courage in battling the French and the Indians, accepted the appointment, modestly calling it “a trust too great for my capacity.”28

  Even as Washington was preparing to take up his command, there was further bloodshed. British forces attacked New England militiamen who had taken up fortified positions on Breed’s Hill, which overlooked Boston. After fierce fighting, patriot forces retreated to Cambridge over Bunker Hill, from which the battle would take its name, but they had exacted a terrible price from the British, killing or wounding more than a thousand redcoats.29 As colonists increasingly realized that they were going to have to wage war for their rights, the Battle of Bunker Hill lifted their spirits, encouraging them to think that in a general conflagration their militias would fare quite well.

  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.30

  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.”31 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.32

  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.”33

  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.34 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.”35 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.”36

  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.37

  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.”38

  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.”39

  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.”40

  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.41 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.

  Chapter 3

  GREAT MEN

  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 1774.1 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.2

  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.”3