by Lynne Cheney
As to my daughter Catherine, since she was married to Mr. Clarkson, I have given them considerable sums, money and many things to keep house with, and also a tract of land, which, if they had kept it, would now be worth about seven thousand dollars, but all is spent and gone. I therefore conclude that she is not capable of taking care of property and I think it not prudent to leave any at her disposal, but I do hereby [enjoin] it upon my son Nicoll to give her seventy dollars a year after my decease during her life.
Shortly before he died in 1821, Floyd had a change of heart. In a codicil to his will, he bequeathed to Catherine “a lot of land in Deerfield No. 1” and one thousand dollars.11
Disappointed as Madison was at Catherine Floyd’s breaking off their romance, both he and posterity likely benefited. Madison had ahead of him the most consequential, history-altering years of his life, and if they were lonelier without Floyd, they were almost certainly more productive. And as grave an error as it usually is to read history backward, perhaps in this instance one might be forgiven for also observing that if he had married Catherine Floyd, there would have been no Dolley Madison.
• • •
MADISON LEFT PHILADELPHIA, a former congressman now, but his interest in politics was undiminished. On the way to Montpelier, he stopped at Gunston Hall, George Mason’s elegant home on the Potomac, and as he visited with Mason, probably near the fireplace in the gray-painted parlor, he sounded him out on the looming issues of the day. He found Mason to be less opposed to the impost than he had expected and also surprisingly “sound and ripe” on the matter of revising the Virginia Constitution. But when it came to bolstering the national government, Mason was dragging his feet. “His [he]terodoxy,” Madison wrote to Jefferson, “lay chiefly in being too little impressed with either the necessity or the proper means of preserving the confederacy.”12
Madison had a course of study in mind, but his return to Montpelier, where he had not been for nearly four years, inspired an outpouring of Piedmont hospitality that kept him from settling into it. As January snow deepened and drifted, making neighborly visits impossible, he finally had time to read, but now he didn’t have the books he needed. The volumes he had shipped from Philadelphia were held up at Fredericksburg, and he could not avail himself of the library at Monticello, which Jefferson had given him permission to use, because the caretaker and the keys were in Richmond. Determined to keep busy, he read Sir Edward Coke’s Commentary upon Littleton, one of the few law books on Montpelier’s shelves. It was an enormously influential exposition of common law but dry and difficult. Madison leavened his law study with an excursion into science, making calculations on the heat of the earth’s core. He believed that he was expanding on a theory of the French naturalist the comte de Buffon, but in the absence of books he was depending on what Jefferson had told him about Buffon’s theory—and, as Jefferson later confessed, he hadn’t gotten it quite right.13
Over the next few years, as Madison sought the “unintermitting occupations” that Jefferson had said would provide him solace, he produced detailed descriptions of some of the smaller quadrupeds found at Montpelier, including a woodchuck, a mole, and a weasel, and sent them to Jefferson to help his friend disprove one of Buffon’s most irritating theories—that American animals had degenerated so that there were fewer species and smaller specimens than in Europe. He kept records of when rain fell, cherry trees blossomed, and wild geese flew northward. He also had “a little itch to gain a smattering in chemistry,” he told Jefferson, asking him to send him two chemistry boxes, as well as a pedometer, a pocket compass that could be carried like a watch, and a telescope that fit into a walking cane.14
During these years, Madison would also serve with great distinction in the Virginia Assembly; travel extensively, though never outside the United States; and try to figure out a way to earn a living rather than being dependent on his father. But through all these activities, he would remain intensely focused on the question that his service in Congress had raised time and again: How can a union of states function effectively? A letter to Jefferson, in which he asked his friend to keep an eye out for “rare and valuable books,” makes clear that one place he intended to look for answers was in the failures and successes of the past. “You know tolerably well the objects of my curiosity,” he wrote. “I will only particularize my wish of whatever may throw light on the general constitution and droit public of the several confederacies which have existed… . The operations of our own must render all such lights of consequence.”15
• • •
IN APRIL 1784, with the poplar trees leafing out, Madison left Montpelier in a chaise driven by his brother William and headed for Richmond, where the Virginia Assembly met. As a result of the peace treaty that the United States had concluded with Britain in September 1783, states were more reluctant than ever to provide financial support to the central government. Thus even though Madison knew that participating in the legislature would be “noxious” to his historical study of constitutions, he had agreed to serve, hoping to convince his fellow delegates of the peril the country was in and persuade them to lead the way in rescuing “the Union and the blessings of liberty staked on it.”16
Montpelier was also short on the intellectual companionship he had grown used to, and he looked forward to seeing old friends such as Edmund Randolph. He must have been gratified upon his arrival in Richmond by the way he was looked to for leadership. “The assembly … have formed great hopes of Mr. Madison,” wrote Jefferson’s protégé William Short. “He is already resorted to as a general of whom much has been preconceived to his advantage,” Edmund Randolph observed.17
Richmond, the capital of the commonwealth for four years, had foul and muddy streets and fewer than two hundred houses. Many who came to the capital for the assembly stayed in inns such as the one run by Serafino Formicola, who rented beds packed together in two rooms on his tavern’s second story. While some legislators, lobbyists, and various hangers-on tried to catch a few hours of sleep in the crowded rooms, others wandered through eating and drinking. There was no possibility of “withdrawing apart … from the noisy, disturbing, or curious crowd,” a German traveler reported, unless one rented “a private apartment”—which Madison almost surely did, if not at Formicola’s, perhaps at City Tavern on Main Street.18 He had letters to write, legislation to draft, plans to formulate—tasks nearly impossible to accomplish in a dormitory.
Seasoned legislator that he was, Madison knew the importance of getting the lay of the political land. No one’s opinion would matter more in the upcoming session than Patrick Henry’s, and so Madison met with him in a Richmond coffeehouse. Fulfilling Madison’s fondest hope, Henry, likely wearing the scarlet cloak and fully dressed wig for which he was noted about this time, pronounced himself in favor of giving greater power to the federal government. He believed that “a bold example set by Virginia would have influence on the other states” and declared that securing this outcome was his only reason for attending the assembly.19
Madison reported Henry’s sentiments to Jefferson and told him that he had also tried to sound out Henry on revising the state’s constitution. Although Henry had made no commitments, Madison wrote, “the general train of his thoughts seemed to suggest favorable expectations.”20
Henry did indeed support resolutions to strengthen the powers of Congress—until they required that Virginia tax its citizens. That prospect brought him out in full oratorical opposition. In the wooden frame building that served as Virginia’s capitol, he thundered away as though he had utterly forgotten his previous commitments. Madison wrote to his father that the members of the legislature would “make a sharp figure,” if after their declarations of support for Congress “we wholly omit the means of fulfilling them.”21 But with Henry leading the way, that is exactly what they did.
When it came to revising the Virginia Constitution, Henry showed “a more violent opposition than we expected,” Madison wrote to Jefferson. A resolution proposing a
general convention to take up the Virginia Constitution was defeated, causing Jefferson, in Paris now as minister to France, to comment sarcastically that it was probably just as well. Using code, he wrote, “While Mr. Henry lives another bad constitution would be formed and saddled forever on us. What we have to do I think is devo[u]tly to pray for his death.” Madison contented himself with a slighting reference to Henry as one of “the forensic members” of the assembly.22
With revising the constitution off the agenda, Madison turned to the revision of Virginia’s laws, a project that Jefferson, his mentor George Wythe, and the revered Edmund Pendleton had begun half a dozen years earlier. Their goal was to update Virginia’s statutes, but few of the bills they proposed had been acted upon, and Madison decided to renew the effort, at first with great success. One of his fellow delegates asked, “Can you suppose it possible that Madison should shine with more than usual splendor this assembly? It is … not only possible but a fact. He has astonished mankind and has by means perfectly constitutional become almost a dictator… . His influence alone has hitherto overcome the impatience of the House and carried them half through the revised code.”23
But Madison hit a snag with the bill on crime and punishment. Its main intent was to limit the number of crimes punishable by death to murder and treason, but some of the alternative punishments proposed, based on the idea of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye,” met resistance. For rape, for example, the punishment was castration. Jefferson, who had outlined the bill, was embarrassed and agreed the punishment should be changed, offering a weak joke as his reason: that “women would be under [temptation] to make it the instrument of vengeance against an inconstant lover.” But after Madison had seen to the removal of the most onerous provisions from the bill, he ran afoul of what he called “the rage against horse stealers.” With opposition from those who thought three years of hard labor not nearly enough punishment, the bill was defeated by a single vote. “Our old bloody code is by this event fully restored,” Madison wrote to Jefferson.24
Code revision was essentially over. Jefferson would later say that it was a wonder that Madison had accomplished as much as he had, given that he had faced “the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers,” but Madison lamented “that the work may never be systematically perfected.” Time and again he was struck by the way that “important bills prepared at leisure by skillful hands” were treated to “crudeness and tedious discussion,” and he had seen legislative tricks of the most blatant sort. An effort to make Virginians liable for their debts to British creditors, which was required by the peace treaty with Great Britain of 1783, failed when a number of legislators took a boat across the James River to Manchester and claimed to be unable to get back.25
Madison would not soon forget his frustrations in the Virginia legislature, but it was also the scene of one of his proudest accomplishments. Patrick Henry championed an assessment to support teachers of the Christian religion, the rationale being that “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.” This was a proposition widely agreed to, and since the bill allowed taxpayers to choose the denomination they would support, its sponsors argued that it could be passed “without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted.”26
Madison, who had helped author the “liberal principle” in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, utterly disagreed. The true question, he wrote in notes to himself, was not whether religion was necessary but whether state-supported religious establishments were. His answer was an unequivocal no. Madison’s opposition helped postpone consideration of the assessment bill—as did Patrick Henry’s election as governor. When Henry decided to go on a long leave home before assuming the governorship, it was, Madison noted, “a circumstance very inauspicious to his offspring.”27
Assemblyman Wilson Cary Nicholas and his brother George decided to mount a campaign against the assessment bill and sought out Madison to write a petition. He responded with the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” a document that would become a landmark in the history of religious freedom. He began by establishing the remonstrance’s origins in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which he quoted: “Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth ‘that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence,’ the religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” Madison went on to marshal arguments against state support of religion. There must be no overleaping of “the great barrier which defends the rights of the people,” he wrote, and while the fact that the bill provided for all Christian religions might make it seem harmless enough, it was “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 noblest characteristics of the late revolution… . 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?” He ended the remonstrance as he had begun it, declaring freedom of religion to be a natural right, a “gift of nature,” fully equal to other rights Virginians held dear.28
As he had before, Madison wrote anonymously. The idea of a general assessment for Christian churches had not only the support of officials with whom he generally found himself at loggerheads but also the backing of men he admired, such as Edmund Pendleton. Madison saw no reason to alienate friends and didn’t believe that adding his name would strengthen his argument. But he was proud of his work, noting after he retired that “the number of copies and signatures” on the petition “displayed such an overwhelming opposition of the people that the plan of a general assessment was crushed under it.”29
Madison did not let the advantage gained go to waste, but seized the moment to pass the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom that Jefferson had authored half a dozen years before. Although Jefferson’s language was changed slightly as the bill went through the House of Delegates and the Senate, the alterations did not deprive his concepts of their force. “Whereas almighty God hath created the mind free,” the statute begins, and “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, … all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”
The Virginia statute also made clear the connection between religious and intellectual freedom. “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself,” Jefferson had written. “She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” It was this theme that Madison chose to take up when he wrote to Jefferson to tell him of the statute’s passage. “I flatter myself [we] have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”30
The bill was one of three accomplishments that Jefferson would ask to be memorialized on his tombstone, the other two being his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his founding of the University of Virginia. The high regard that he and Madison had for the statute has been shared by subsequent generations. Theologian Martin Marty noted that passage of the statute marked “an epochal shift in the Western world’s approach to relations between civil and religious spheres of life.” The Virginia act, he observes, can rightly be seen “as a hinge between ages.”31
• • •
IN BETWEEN SESSIONS of the Virgin
ia Assembly, Madison spent time at Montpelier, reading and studying. One of his father’s cousins, Francis Taylor, who spent a few snowy days in March at Montpelier, noted that Madison, although hospitable, did not, in typical Virginia fashion, devote the majority of his day to socializing. Madison “came to breakfast, of which he eat sparingly,” Taylor recorded in his diary, “and then would go to his room till a little before dinner. After dinner play at whist for half bits till bedtime.”32
Madison also made journeys northward, in part for the exercise and in part to break from the isolation of Montpelier and spend time in Philadelphia and New York. While he was on a “ramble into the eastern states” in 1784, a chance encounter with the marquis de Lafayette led to a wilderness adventure. The two happened to meet in Baltimore, both on their way to Philadelphia, and Lafayette invited Madison to accompany him to Fort Stanwix in New York, where a treaty was to be signed between the United States and the Iroquois Confederacy.33
The wealthy and ambitious Lafayette, who had traveled to America when he was just nineteen to fight in the Revolution, had proven himself both skilled and courageous in battle. Tall, with reddish hair, he was, to use a word with which both Benjamin Franklin and James Madison described him, “amiable.”34 He invited friendship, and his offer to include Madison in his frontier journey would have been hard to resist, not only as a chance to see wondrous sights with a good companion, but as an opportunity to converse on a subject Madison thought of great importance—America’s right to free navigation of the Mississippi. Spain, hoping to stop the westward expansion of the United States, had recently closed the river to all but Spanish ships, and Madison realized that Lafayette could be most helpful in persuading France to take up America’s cause with Spain.