by Chris DeRose
The next spring, Lexington and Concord—and the Gunpowder Affair, with the appearance of Patrick Henry and the Hanover County militia in Williamsburg itself—inspired Monroe and the other William and Mary students to train for war. Drilling with muskets, not parsing Latin sentences, was the order of the day. Monroe entered enthusiastically into military preparations.
The situation must have looked grim to Governor Dunmore. He was far from England, and as the city filled with angry mobs, the Governor’s Palace became a splendid prison. Dunmore’s life was in danger, and his wife was living on a ship for her own safety. When he had originally accepted the post as governor of the most populous and prosperous colony in the Americas, Dunmore could not have imagined he would see college students openly training for war in the middle of the city.
Meanwhile, in Orange County, the Committee of Safety adopted a strongly worded resolution on May 9 praising Henry’s response and condemning Governor Dunmore. James Madison accompanied other members of the committee to present their resolution in person to Henry, who was by this time in Port Royal, Virginia, on his way to the Second Continental Congress.
It is likely that the party from Orange found Henry in a tavern surrounded by admirers hanging on his every word. Not yet thirty-nine, Henry had become a celebrity by taking on the British in what became known as the Parson’s Cause.31 His fame had only grown with his electrifying call to arms. Now he had marched at the head of a body of armed men, confronted the symbol of royal authority in Virginia, and forced the governor to back down without firing a shot. Next he would represent Virginia in Philadelphia, among the other great men of the colonies.
Patrick Henry probably barely noticed or acknowledged the diminutive twenty-four-year-old boy standing in front of him. We can imagine Madison sheepishly asking the man of the hour to carry a letter to Bradford in Philadelphia for him, to the merriment of Henry’s hangers-on. Henry, however, graciously agreed to take Madison’s letter to his friend. So went the first meeting between James Madison and Patrick Henry. That this young man would soon become his colleague, Henry would have found improbable. That the delicate, awkward boy would some day become his formidable political adversary, he would have found unthinkable.
The letter Henry carried for Madison was filled with the latest events in Virginia, but Bradford had little to contribute in response. The Second Continental Congress met in absolute secrecy. Everyone was anxious for information. The men in Congress were making life-and-death decisions. Things were tense inside the Pennsylvania State House. Any man in the room could have been arrested and hanged for treason. One attendee was suspected of being a spy—Benjamin Franklin, who had only recently returned from London where he had been serving as the colonial representative.
Boston, meanwhile, was enduring a famine. Milk and meat were scarce, and the British soldiers did not distinguish between what belonged to the people and what was theirs. No one could leave the city except on certain days, and then only with the permission of a military officer. And the hostilities that had begun on the Lexington green were spreading. On May 10 came the fall of Fort Ticonderoga in upstate New York.32 Ethan Allen—later known as the founder of Vermont—and Benedict Arnold, entirely on their own initiative, took over the British fortress and the weaponry inside.
On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress declared the Coercive Acts a violation of Americans’ rights, resolved to withhold all taxes from Great Britain, and voted to raise twenty thousand troops in support of Boston. The next day a general was chosen to command these forces. The unanimous choice of Congress was George Washington of Virginia.33 Washington was an experienced military leader, popular in the Congress, and willing to forego a salary—a definite advantage for a government with no money and no means of procuring any. Washington also hailed from the largest colony, and from the South. His selection telegraphed that the struggles of Boston were a continental concern.
Now that it would have an army, the Continental Congress needed a way to pay the soldiers. Congress resolved to print two million bills of credit, which each of the twelve colonies present (Georgia was not represented) would redeem.34 New York’s request via its delegates in Congress summed up the mood in the colonies: “Send us money, send us arms, send us ammunition!”35 Committees of Safety throughout the colonies, like the one Madison and his father were serving on in Orange County, were preparing for war.
In Philadelphia, late in the evening of Saturday, June 24, rumors of war were confirmed by Congress. A week earlier, in what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, the militia had occupied and fortified the heights around Boston. The British dislodged them at the cost of a thousand men, killing fewer than half that number of American patriots. “I wish we could sell them another hill for that price,” observed one militia leader.36
On July 6, 1775, Congress adopted the “Declaration on the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.”37 It began with an appeal to God and a history of the British belligerence that had set the colonies on their present path. Madison read it and thought it “amazing.”38
As the situation in Williamsburg threatened to boil over, Governor Dunmore joined his wife on the frigate—just in time. On June 24, 1775, Monroe was the youngest of twenty-five armed militiamen who stormed the Governor’s Palace, seizing two hundred muskets and three hundred swords. Monroe later had his musket engraved “JM. W-M 1776.” It was a souvenir he treasured for the rest of his life.
A few months later, on October 2, 1775, Madison was commissioned as a colonel in the Orange County militia in recognition of his “patriotism, fidelity, courage, and good conduct .… And we do hereby require” your men “to obey you as their Colonel.” His appointment was made by the Virginia Convention meeting in Williamsburg and now functioning as the government of the colony since the dissolution of the Burgesses. James Madison’s commission was signed by Edmund Pendleton as Chairman of the Virginia Committee of Safety.
Madison was the number two officer in his county’s militia, second to his father. But at a slight 5’4” and prey to continual bouts of debilitating illness, he was not cut out for a military career. Madison’s organizational strengths meant a well-trained militia for Orange, but his infirmity made him unfit for a wartime command. He never saw action.
In November of 1775, Governor Dunmore offered slaves and indentured servants emancipation if they would enlist in the royal forces for the pacification of the colony. The following month, a group of Virginia militiamen including Monroe’s former schoolmate John Marshall marched on Norfolk to take possession of that chief commercial town. The militia engaged Dunmore’s troops at the Great Bridge, killing sixty-one and losing not a single man.39 On New Year’s Day of the year 1776, Dunmore responded. The British navy shelled Norfolk for three days and three nights, until the town of nine thousand souls was “laid in ashes.”40
And in those fateful first days of 1776, James Monroe—his destiny on the battlefield, not in the classroom—was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Third Virginia Infantry. Throughout the spring and summer, the Third trained with other regiments under General Andrew Lewis, and prepared for war.
On April 25, 1776, James Madison was elected one of two delegates to serve in the upcoming Virginia Convention. This was the fifth such convention since the dissolution of the House of Burgesses by the royal governor; anyone who had previously wanted to serve had likely already done so. Some conventions had dragged on and accomplished little, and the time away from home was a sacrifice for those with active plantations. It was a perfect opportunity for someone like Madison, who had just turned twenty-five. The rudderless, restless four years since he left Princeton were at an end.
And so was the colony of Virginia.
Chapter Two
THE SOLDIER AND THE STATESMAN
“The student is converted to the warrior.”
—THE REVEREND JAMES MADISON (JAMES MADISON’S COUSIN)
America was on the verge of independence, and the spectators an
d delegates in the old House of Burgesses chamber in Williamsburg sensed it.
Edmund Pendleton had been elected chairman of the fifth and final Virginia Convention to meet between the fall of the colonial government and independence. Previously, as head of the Committee of Public Safety, he had overseen Virginia’s military mobilization.
From the chair Pendleton looked out at many new faces. Of the 126 delegates, fifty had not served in any of the previous four conventions.1 Pendleton had given prominent members their preferred committee assignments, but had then taken the unorthodox step of filling the remaining positions alphabetically by county. This opened up a great opportunity for new members and won Pendleton many friends.2 One beneficiary was James Madison. In the Virginia Convention, the future author of the Bill of Rights would get his first opportunity to define and protect fundamental liberties.
If Madison hoped for a consequential entrée into public life, he would not be disappointed. He soon joined a unanimous convention in instructing Virginia’s representatives in Congress “to propose to that respectable body to declare the United Colonies free and independent states absolved from all allegiance to our dependence upon the crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” The resolution declared the colonies free to pursue foreign alliances. It authorized Virginia to confederate with other colonies, but not to cede authority over the internal affairs of Virginia to any new government.
Thus Virginia became the first colony to declare independence, and to instruct its members of Congress to seek the same for the American colonies as a whole. Bells rang out throughout the city of Williamsburg in recognition of independence, artillery was fired, and spontaneous celebrations began in the streets. Did the revelers realize that the next time they heard cannon it would be for a cause other than celebration?
The Virginia Convention prepared for war, while also taking on the responsibility of defining Virginia as a new and independent state. After the resolution on the colonies’ independence, the next action of the Convention was to create two committees—one to prepare a “declaration of rights” and the other, a “plan of government.”
George Mason, a delegate from Fairfax, was chairman of the former committee; he took the lead in authoring the Virginia Declaration of Rights. James Madison was a member of the committee and contributed to the creation of the Declaration. This enormously influential document of sixteen articles inspired the Declaration of Independence, as well as Madison’s own Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution.
The Virginia Declaration of Rights recognized and guaranteed man’s “inherent rights.” It also established and codified other concepts that became important to American government, such as separation of powers, the right to jury trial, the prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishment, the necessity of prior evidence for search-and-seizure warrants, and freedom of the press. The final provision of the Virginia Declaration of Rights guaranteed freedom of religion: “Religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and... it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.”
On June 7, 1776, in Philadelphia, Richard Henry Lee, acting on the instructions that Madison had voted for in the Virginia Convention, made a motion in Congress to declare the colonies “free and independent states.”3 A committee of five including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman was appointed to draft a document setting forth the declaration of independence, should it be approved by Congress. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, on June 29 the Convention adopted “the first written constitution ever framed by an independent political society.”4 That constitution listed the offenses of the Crown against the colonies and declared the bonds between them “TOTALLY DISSOLVED.”5
Only three days later, on July 2, the Second Continental Congress, by a “unanimous” vote (twelve states in favor, New York abstaining), declared the colonies free and independent. Writing to his wife the following day, John Adams pronounced, “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America . . . it ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.”6 Indeed, it is a curiosity of history that America’s birthday is celebrated on any other day.
On July 4, Congress adopted “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” The Declaration of Independence was chiefly the work of Jefferson, with major assistance from Adams and Franklin. (Originally, Jefferson was not even supposed to be a member of Congress, much less compose the Declaration. He was a replacement for Peyton Randolph, who had resigned to return to the Burgesses.) Congress adopted a number of revisions to the committee’s draft, but the passages that have been most remembered through the ages are nearly all those of the principal author.
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The Declaration of Independence presented a long list of complaints against King George III. These included making war upon Americans, “imposing taxes on us without our consent,” denial of trials by jury, and harmful trade regulations. Jefferson’s Declaration ends with an appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world,” and its signers, in support of the same, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence . . . mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.” The official, “engrossed” copy of the Declaration would not be created and signed by members of Congress until August.
During this period the Continental Congress was also considering how to formalize its authority. Up until now, Congress had convened for specific purposes and in response to events. A body formed to file formal complaints would now be charged with a different task entirely. As the former colonies hurtled toward independence and war with England, they would need some manner of organizing a common defense. Congress would have to coordinate the war effort among the thirteen states and attempt to obtain the support of foreign powers.
The idea of a confederation of the colonies was at least as old as the Albany Plan, which had been proposed by Benjamin Franklin in 1754. The Albany Congress, attended by seventeen delegates from seven colonies (and one lobbyist), considered a plan for a continental government to defend America during the French and Indian War. The plan they considered, however, in no way contemplated independence. Franklin had renewed his efforts for unity among the colonies in 1775, this time with independence in mind. Thomas Jefferson had responded favorably to Franklin’s proposed “Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union,” but the reception in Congress had been decidedly cool. At that time reconciliation with Britain was the primary goal of most members; Congress refused even to vote on Franklin’s plan. In fact, he was allowed to present his proposal to Congress only on the condition that no reference would be made to it in any of the journals .7
That was on July 21, 1775. Less than a year later, the mood in Congress was very different. With independence in sight on June 12, 1776, a committee was created, chaired by John Dickenson of Pennsylvania, “to prepare and digest the form of confederation.”8 The Dickenson Committee report, laid before Congress on July 12, 1776, was modeled closely on Franklin’s proposal from the previous year.9 The Articles of Confederation, then—the document establishing the Confederation in which the thirteen newly inde
pendent states would join to fight Great Britain—can be said to have sprung chiefly from the pens of two Pennsylvanians.
The debate over the Articles was characterized by the same divisions that would eventually, after America had finally won the independence Congress had just claimed, doom the Confederation and inspire Madison and the other delegates to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention to draft a different form of federal government, one that would ensure “a more perfect Union.” These were the same issues that would return again and again to bedevil the government under the Articles and that both Madison and Monroe would one day struggle with as members of the Confederation Congress. The Confederation—and the war—would be funded by “requisitions” paid by the individual state governments. But representatives defending the Articles in Congress disagreed over how to set the requisitions for the different states, and how to define the population on which the requisitions would be based. They differed about how many votes each state should have in Congress—whether it should depend on the states’ monetary contributions, or not. They disagreed about how to settle disputes between the states about Western lands. And they differed on how many representatives should make a quorum, and where the capital should be—and even whether there should be one permanent capital, or not.