What had shaped his mind? At Princeton, Madison was exposed to a wide variety of subjects, and though he never had any intention of becoming an attorney, he began the study of law in late 1773. His real intellectual passion lay with arguments in favor of religious and civil liberty. Here Reverend John Witherspoon, the president of Princeton, was his guide. A stout man with a Scottish accent as pronounced as his satirical bent, Witherspoon exposed Madison to the Scottish philosophes as well as the powerful Presbyterian critique of religious oppression. The Scots’ contribution to the Enlightenment was their particular emphasis on sympathy and sociability—how to nourish manners on a national scale and improve the human condition.
Revolutionary ideas were already in the air at Princeton during Witherspoon’s presidency, and he was subsequently elected to the Continental Congress. He would, in fact, be the only ordained minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. The great majority of those who took his classes became avid supporters of the patriot cause.
Passionate about liberty, Witherspoon believed that every human being had a natural inclination to behave morally in pursuit of temporal and eternal happiness alike. But he also believed in sin and human depravity: the moral sense was blunted whenever selfishness—an unjust authority, within or without—took over. Resistance to that authority through acts of virtue preserved liberty of conscience. In Witherspoon’s words, conscience set bounds to authority by saying: “Hitherto shalt thou go, but no further.”
Believing that liberty of conscience was uniquely a Protestant endowment, he reviled the Catholic Church. “Unjust authority is the very essence of popery,” he wrote. The Church of Rome was distant, hierarchical, and oppressive, “making laws to bind the conscience” and punishing those who called its authority into question. Yet he held Protestants responsible for similar abuses, because all human institutions, religious and political, were prone to corruption, bias, and human error. The Church of England itself had an embarrassing history of persecuting Quakers, Presbyterians, and other dissenting sects on English soil.
As tensions built between America and England, Witherspoon saw in the British ministry a replication of these abuses. If the pope was fallible, then so were the British king, his council, and the members of Parliament. In short, London had become another Rome. Its distance from America had generated error, persecution, and the faulty claim that it could make laws “to bind us in all cases whatsoever.” In 1776, in one of his best-known published sermons (dedicated to John Hancock, who was then president of the Continental Congress), Witherspoon said that the central aim of American independence was to protect civil and religious liberties. His logic was formidable, and his robust language a strong stimulus for Madison.14
Writing to his friend Bradford early in 1774, Madison noted that while the recently engineered Boston Tea Party may have involved too much “boldness,” it was ultimately right because of the “ministerialism” of the royal governor. His choice of words was not accidental. Madison saw a direct connection between Britain’s ministers—the king’s chief political advisers—and the established church. Referring to the primacy of the Congregational Church in New England, he wrote: “If the Church of England had been the established and general Religion in all the Northern Colonies as it has been among us here [in Virginia], 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.”
A state of “tranquility” was nothing desirable—it meant surrender of the will. Madison was saying that the Bostonians’ love of liberty flourished in a dissenting religious environment, for Anglicans were without power there. If the Anglican Church had held sway in Massachusetts as it did in Virginia, a general passivity—“slavery and subjection”—would have sunk the colonies into a political grave. Virginia could learn from Boston’s example.
Madison possessed the fire of a young activist. Thinking of the contest between freedom and servitude, he was livid that religious persecution should continue in Virginia. In a county near Orange, a half dozen Baptists had been thrown into jail for publishing their beliefs. Madison expressed his disgust with “knavery among the Priesthood,” and the “Hell conceived principle of persecution” that raged among the Anglican clergy. Though the House of Burgesses was then considering petitions on behalf of dissenters, he doubted much would change. The self-interested clergy were “numerous and powerful” due to their connection to the “Bishops and the Crown”; they would do all they could to retain control.
Just as he admired the Boston patriots, Madison told Bradford that he wished Virginia could be more like Pennsylvania, where the “air is free” and free people evinced a “liberal and equitable way of thinking as to the rights of conscience.” Pennsylvania had long been a haven for religious dissenters; its original charter protected liberty of conscience from state interference. Madison said that Pennsylvania “bore the good effects” of its history. If only, he mused, liberty of conscience might be revived among Virginians.15
His 1774 visit to Philadelphia further convinced Madison of the need for change in Virginia. After he returned south, he became a member of the local committee of safety in Orange, where he took part in the confiscation of Tory pamphlets being distributed by an Anglican minister, recommending that the offensive literature be reduced to ashes. Nor did he have qualms about applying tar and feathers to another minister who denied the authority of the Virginia Convention. By January 1775 Madison was reporting to Bradford that Virginians were “procuring the necessaries for defending ourselves.” Within a short time, he predicted, there would be “some thousands of well trained High Spirited men ready to meet danger whenever it appears.” Between then and early May 1776, when he presented himself to Pendleton, Madison had become a passionate proponent of revolutionary change. The interior counties of Virginia, where he had grown up, were in general more radical than the vulnerable coastal, or Tidewater, region, where the threat to life and property felt more immediate and made men more tentative in their questioning of royal authority.16
It is especially interesting that Madison in his early twenties should have sounded so combative and should have so eagerly assumed a leading role in Virginia politics. He had a preoccupation with his physical infirmities, a history of convulsive outbursts attributed to a combination of “feebleness” in constitution and “epileptoid hysteria,” or hypochondria. These were believed to be diseases of the learned (those who sap their own strength with too much study). Now generally used to refer to an imaginary medical complaint, hypochondria was defined in Madison’s day as a weakness in the nervous system producing low spiritedness, fearfulness, and distrust. “I am too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world,” he wrote to Bradford at one point. “My sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.” It may be that he suffered from a form of depression.17
“Dull and infirm,” Madison, who also had gastrointestinal complaints, was an unlikely candidate for the army. So was the unmartial Jefferson, who though a competent hunter in his youth was too mild and bookish now to partake in acts of physical aggression, even at the moment of revolution. Yet in the expectant autumn months of 1775, Madison was named a colonel and Jefferson a lieutenant (and commander in chief) in their respective county militias. The lead signature on both commissions was that of Edmund Pendleton. Neither would ever put on a uniform. But they were, on paper at least, officers.18
“Most of Them Glowing Patriots”
Of those Virginians who preceded Jefferson and Madison in attaining political eminence, Edmund Pendleton was one of the few who did not need to justify his position within the governing elite. Having risen gradually over several decades, he was respected in all corners of the Old Dominion. After Pendleton came the militant Patrick Henry. Forty years old in 1776, Henry was still not content with where he stood among the powerful, though his reputation for soaring oratory
held steady and his rustic appeal to ordinary men was making him appear more and more heroic.
Pendleton warmed to the younger patriots Madison and Jefferson, partly because of the quality of their minds and partly because of who their parents were. But he was decidedly unimpressed with Henry, for reasons that had nothing to do with his pedigree—his father, born in Scotland, had achieved respectability in Virginia—and everything to do with his pose.
Patrick Henry was Virginia’s darling who became, as time passed, leader of the knee-jerk opposition to every reform that the Madison-Jefferson partnership stood for. Jefferson’s account of Henry’s career, written in later years to William Wirt, Henry’s first biographer, tells how Jefferson disparaged (and no doubt also envied) the talents of the sensation-causing oracle, who was seven years his elder. Jefferson’s prejudices may also help to explain Pendleton’s discomfort with Henry’s ambition.
Jefferson told Wirt that he first met Patrick Henry at the end of 1759, when, just shy of seventeen, he left Albemarle County and rode off to college. At a holiday party, he witnessed the vaunted sociability of Henry, then twenty-four, and came to know of his passion for deer hunting. Should his reference to rusticity be read as neutral in tone, Jefferson added for Wirt that Henry lived for weeks in the wilderness without changing his dirty shirt. In Jefferson’s eyes, Henry was a man of hunger and passion and little else, one who resisted gentrification and was a lazy thinker.
A few months after their first meeting, Henry was in Williamsburg to be licensed as an attorney. According to Jefferson, “he told me he had been reading law only 6. weeks.” Two of Henry’s examiners, brothers Peyton and John Randolph, “signed his license with as much reluctance as their dispositions would permit them to shew.” But Jefferson’s own law tutor, the virtuous George Wythe, “absolutely refused.” The Randolph brothers subsequently acknowledged to Jefferson that they considered Henry “very ignorant of law.”
As far as Jefferson was concerned, the facts proved Henry’s intellectual weakness. Yet he saw Henry as an ally in the years leading up to the Revolution. “The exact conformity of our political opinions strengthened our friendship,” he wrote. What that friendship consisted in, Jefferson did not say. But he did say that as his reputation built, Henry capitalized on every opportunity: “His powers over a jury were so irresistible that he received great fees for his services, & had the reputation of being insatiable in money.” Jefferson repeatedly damned Henry with faint praise.
Henry specialized in criminal law, where his obvious passion swayed juries. If we take Jefferson at his word, Henry only preferred jury trials because he sensed that well-educated judges would be able to see through him and expose his limited knowledge of the law. Jefferson dated his break with Henry to 1780, but his extant notes of 1773 (when he observed Henry argue for one side in a marital dispute) already suggest friction: “Henry for the plaintiff avoided, as was his custom, entering the lists of the law … running wild in the field of fact.” Jefferson’s phrasing was colorful but dismissive. A gifted student never celebrated for his public performances, Jefferson disliked Henry’s unorthodox manner and was frustrated by the success of style over substance. In this case Henry bested the opposing attorney—none other than Edmund Pendleton, whom Jefferson lavishly praised for his legal erudition.
To the vast majority of Virginians, Henry was a champion. Even an old and begrudging Jefferson was to admit that it was Henry “who gave the first impulse to the ball of revolution.” His strength lay in his prophetic power. He sensed what the royal court was up to and made certain that America understood the inevitability of war. He prepared his countrymen for it, risking treason in justifying rebellion.19
All recollect Jefferson’s role in the Second Continental Congress, in 1776, but he was also among fourteen notables considered in 1774 for inclusion in the seven-member Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress. In the balloting, Henry tied for third with George Washington. Jefferson came in a distant ninth. He was, at this point, a leader of the second tier only. Whether he expected something more, or felt the slightest bit hurt by the vote that excluded him from the First Continental Congress, is pure conjecture.20
Nor can we know precisely who James Madison was referring to when he wrote to his friend Bradford: “This Colony has appointed seven delegates to represent it on this grand occasion, most of them glowing patriots & men of Learning & penetration. It is however the opinion of some good Judges that one or two might be exchanged for the better.” The unanimous first-place finisher, Peyton Randolph, and the graceful, classically trained Richard Henry Lee (whom Jefferson later described as “frothy”) are unlikely to have struck Madison as lesser lights; nor Pendleton, of course. Richard Bland was advanced in years, and suggestions in Madison’s later correspondence point to him as one he considered expendable. The relatively conservative Benjamin Harrison, a man of known veracity noted more for his wide girth and his dark humor than for his scholarly credentials, may have been the other.
Then there was George Washington, who possessed an intellect no better than average. He did not protest the Tea Act at the time it passed Parliament, and he focused his frustration with London on an issue where he stood to lose personally: the military’s refusal to award five thousand acres to American officers of the French and Indian War. (He had already paid another Virginia officer for his share and anticipated receiving ten thousand acres.) Beyond this evidence of self-interested behavior, Washington expressed his open concern over Britain’s divide-and-conquer approach, its punishing Massachusetts first while hoping to minimize dissent in other, unaffected colonies. It is hard to imagine that Madison meant for Washington to be exchanged.
So how was it that Patrick Henry was able to endear himself to so many of his fellow Virginians? Jefferson again: “I think he was the best humoured man in society I almost ever knew, and the greatest orator that ever lived. He had a consummate knoledge [sic] of the human heart.” The original editor of the Madison papers has speculated that Patrick Henry might have been too “fiery” for Madison’s tastes. But Henry, at this juncture, seems rather to have embodied Madison’s Revolutionary spirit.
The personalities of Henry and Washington were rather different: the one gregarious, the other grave. But they received the same number of votes and held similar views while members of the Virginia delegation to the First Continental Congress. Perhaps the most formidable combination of mind and voice in that delegation belonged to Richard Henry Lee, who was born the same year as Washington. Lee had grown up nearby on the estate of Stratford (whose best known occupant, yet unborn, would be his grandnephew, Confederate general Robert E. Lee). The Lees were already an influential Virginia clan, and Richard Henry was English-educated. The Virginia delegation may not have been quite as intimidating as Madison wished it were, but in their secret proceedings the Virginians were animated and decisive. The southern group worked closely with a Massachusetts delegation that included cousins John and Samuel Adams; combined, they challenged the conservative elements in other colonies point by point.21
“We Shall Fall Like Achilles”
Virginia was not fully committed to independence until it tasted British tyranny directly in the form of the royal governor, John Murray, the fourth Lord Dunmore. Appointed in 1770, Dunmore was a passionate Scotsman trained in the military and prone to explosive outbursts. At least one newspaper described him as a “devil more damned in evil.” He was berated for his sexual indulgences with “black ladies” and mocked for convening a “promiscuous ball.” In 1775–76, Lord Dunmore was the most hated man in the colony. Madison to Bradford: “We defy his power as much as we detest his villainy.”22
On April 21, 1775, following instructions from the British ministry, Dunmore had removed gunpowder from the public magazine in Williamsburg. He did so clandestinely, ordering a few of his men to slip into town before dawn and carry off fifteen barrels. They loaded them onto a war vessel docked nearby. An alarm was sounded, which drew a c
rowd, angry and armed, to the town green. A group of the colony’s leading men addressed the royal governor at the palace, with reasoned arguments to counteract the energy of the masses. The gunpowder belonged to the colony and not to the king, they claimed. It should be returned because of rumors that a slave revolt was imminent.
Pleased with their mild response, Dunmore offered assurances that the powder would be returned if needed for defense. But the next day the governor abruptly changed his mind. Finding himself accosted by one angry alderman, he lashed out at the entire colony, threatening to free all slaves and reduce the colonial capital to ashes. Dunmore is alleged to have snarled: “I have once fought for the Virginians, and by God I will let them see that I can fight against them.”23
Within a week, six hundred men had mustered in Fredericksburg, ready to march on Williamsburg. Urged by Pendleton and others to disband, the majority took their leaders’ advice. But a few volatile companies thought otherwise. One was an independent company from Jefferson’s Albemarle County, and another was from Madison’s Orange County. They joined forces with Patrick Henry’s Hanover County band and marched east. When news of Henry’s troop movement reached the governor, Dunmore fumed that if the marchers did not stop, he would free untold numbers of slaves and spread “devastation where I can reach.” He reminded the colonists that they were vulnerable to Indian uprisings too.
Madison and Jefferson Page 4