sign in sign up
<<
Home , Burning of Washington, I Mean, The Federalist (website), Wilson (House episode)

James Madison Burning down the

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Listen to Presidential at http://wapo.st/presidential

This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.

SCOTT WILSON: He's very pragmatic. He's shifted positions on some really fundamental issues. In many ways, he's very technocratic.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was the Post's national editor and former correspondent, Scott Wilson. He was talking about President Obama, but he could've been talking about . And we'll find out why in this fourth episode of Presidential.

PRESIDENTIAL THEME MUSIC

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: I'm Lillian Cunningham, and we're talking today about our fourth president, James Madison. I have a co-host of sorts for this episode. My colleague Swati Sharma, who is 's digital editor for foreign and national security news.

SWATI SHARMA: Hi, guys. Happy to be here.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Hi, Swati.

Why is Swati here? Well, she is here because James Madison is our country's first wartime president. The happens while Madison is in office. That's the war where America ends up fighting the British again. And that, of course, ends up being the defining event of Madison's presidency.

So, a central question we'll be exploring today is whether Madison has left any lasting imprint on how future American presidents would come to use executive power during a national security crisis. Here's the catch. Madison is usually not really remembered best for his presidency, right?

SWATI SHARMA: His legacy was made almost before his presidency. I mean, if you ask the average American, they'll remember that he was a founding father and that he was the father of the Constitution.

But, beyond that, it kind of stops there.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Maybe the story about , his wife, who rescues the portrait of from the burning White House.

SWATI SHARMA: Right, and the fact that the White House burned under his presidency. That's another thing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that he's short.

SWATI SHARMA: And that he's -- he's really short. He's 5'4.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And that actually is what a lot of people you ask know about Madison -- they remember he was so short.

SWATI SHARMA: Exactly.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, before Madison, we've had Washington, Adams and Jefferson -- three very different men, but all with pretty strong, charismatic personalities. Well, Madison gets to the presidency, and he is not really charismatic. He is very cerebral, very intellectual.

He has a legal and analytical mind, where he wants to just logically reason through everything. This, of course, is what made him such a powerful author of the Constitution. But on the flip side, those traits made him a less magnetic and compelling leader as president.

Our main guest in this episode is Jack Rakove, who's a professor at Stanford University and the preeminent scholar on James Madison. Swati did the interview with him.

SWATI SHARMA: Yep. One of the first things he told me was when he goes swimming at the Stanford pool every morning and he does his laps, the person he thinks about is James Madison, which is amazing.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That is amazing.

SWATI SHARMA: But yes, I started by just asking him to give me some background about his road to the presidency.

JACK RAKOVE: To me, the most interesting thing about Madison is that he really found who he was and what he wanted to be only when the revolution broke out. As a young man back in in the early 1770s, he was kind of aimless. I mean, he wasn't just sitting around moping, but he didn't really have a clear direction to life.

He was unmarried. His father was still running Montpelier, the family plantation. He was the eldest of 10 children, you know, his father's namesake: James, Jr. He must have been bookish as a kid. Of course, if you're stuck in Orange, Virginia…Every time I go to Montpelier, [I think] ‘God, what an isolated place this is.’ I mean, even now. It’s 100 miles from Washington, so it's not that isolated, but then it was really pretty close to the Virginia frontier. I mean, it was kind of the boonies in 18th century culture.

The same thing is true at . So, I think a lot about, 'What is the nature of intellectual life if

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 2 you're someone super smart -- like Madison, Jefferson – and you have to spend long periods on your own in the Virginia countryside?’ You do a lot of reading and you did a lot of thinking. He couldn't go to graduate school because graduate school didn't really yet exist -- although Princeton University used to call Madison their first graduate student, because he stuck around a bit after he finished his Bachelor of Arts.

And then the Revolution came along, and it gave him a career. He really found out who he was -- really comes alive as an adult, once he starts serving in first the Virginia Provincial Convention, then the Virginia Assembly, then the Virginia Council, then the Continental Congress, then the Virginia legislature again, and so on, and so on.

The interesting thing about Madison is, I think, he had an unusual set of strengths in that he was a deeply empirical thinker. He tried to reason analytically, but he also tried to theorize it. He tried to think abstractly, or somewhat abstractly, about the nature of republican government.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Madison has this set of intellectual strengths that cements his status among the founding fathers. His passion, and his strong suit, is really that he's constantly studying and thinking through political theory.

SWATI SHARMA: He was a part of a group who wrote the Constitution, but he did two very, very crucial things. One is that he wrote the Bill of Rights, and those are the first 10 amendments in the beginning of the Constitution…

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That are focused on -- particularly focused on -- individual liberties.

SWATI SHARMA: Right, exactly. And two, he co-wrote a series of arguments that we now know as .

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: These were pamphlets in which he explained the Constitution to the average person and advocated for why the Constitution should be passed.

So, throughout all this time at the country's beginning, Madison is very close with . The two of them are both from Virginia. Their homes at Montpelier and Monticello are not too far from each other. And they first meet back in 1776, when they're both in the Virginia House of Delegates, and they're serving together on the committee of religion. Jefferson and Madison end up being friends and political allies throughout their lives. Madison eventually becomes Jefferson's secretary of state, and that's the position he holds right up until he becomes president himself.

JACK RAKOVE: You know, I think they agreed most on the issues. Their politics, I think, was very close. They were the joint leaders of the Republican Party in the 1790s.

A colleague of mine, Jim Hudson, who was the chief of management at the , once said -- and I think this is a wonderful remark -- that it must have been wonderful to have a friendship where, you know, you really agree with the other person, but you reason about things in very different ways. And I think that's true.

I mean, I think that's kind of a really interesting part of their friendship -- is that, in terms of political principles, they're not very far apart at all. Although, occasionally Jefferson, I think, was a

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 3 bit of a streak hitter. Jefferson will make bolder statements. Jefferson would form very quick opinions that sometimes went too far, and Madison would have to reason back to a more tempered position. So, there is a sense in which, I think, Jefferson was someone more enthusiastic and Madison was someone more prudent, in terms of judgments. But, in the end, they agreed on most things.

SWATI SHARMA: They're similar in a lot of ways, but their physical appearance -- they're completely, completely different.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, Jefferson is 6'2. He's actually a little taller than George Washington. But Jefferson slouched, so he didn't look as tall.

SWATI SHARMA: A foot taller than Madison. Can you just imagine them standing, walking, talking next to each other?

JACK RAKOVE: Well, he was -- you know, he was short and he was slight. And so, I like to tell my students: If he played basketball, he would he wouldn't post up inside. He'd have to stop and pop from some distance away.

You know, some commentators say he was not the greatest public speaker. I think sometimes his speaking voice didn't – he may not have had the most robust voice, but you also had the sense that when Madison spoke, people paid a lot of attention to what he was saying. He was a very analytical speaker, and I think as a legislator politician, I think Madison understood the advantages of mastering the agenda -- mastering the issues in advance.

Madison was very disciplined, you know. He may not have had the loudest voice and certainly didn't have the kind of commanding political stature -- he could never run for president now. You probably have to be 6'0. We know that from studies. Physical presence actually has some significant impact on how politicians are perceived. So he probably would not have made the best campaigner today. But in those days, you didn't really campaign. There were other ways to be nominated and to stand for office.

SWATI SHARMA: Well, OK, so today, if Madison was running for president, what party do you think his beliefs would align with?

JACK RAKOVE: Well, that's a great question. For starters, he and Jefferson are the founders of the modern Democratic Party. I mean, in their time, it was known really as the Republican Party. But, of course, the parties have evolved in massive ways. So, one way to illustrate this is the -- which is this very active group of conservative lawyers -- they have a profile of Madison as their logo. He's kind of like their mascot.

Whereas I think there really ought to be up there, myself; because I think if there's one other institution which should have Madison as their logo or whatever, it would actually be the American Civil Liberties Union. I mean, the ACLU are in certain respects very strong Madisonians -- partly because Madison's the principal author of the original amendments of the Constitution, which eventually came to be the Bill of Rights. But also because Madison's whole analysis of how you should go about protecting rights in American politics -- particularly his analysis in the 1780s at the time when he's becoming the putative father of the Constitution -- it all rests on the conviction that the real danger to rights is going to arise not at the national level. It’s not going to

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 4 happen because J. Edgar Hoover is going to run amok with the FBI. You know, the most systematic basis for violating the rights of individuals and minorities -- that's going to take place within the individual states. So, on that basis, I would say Madison really belongs on the left more than the right.

The more controversial aspect of this involves thinking about: How do we think about the relationship between the Constitution, which Madison did so much to write, and the current impasse of national politics, which is really a complete mess?

I mean nobody who looks at the American political scene today would argue that our system is functioning as well as it should function. And so, that's a big part of his legacy. I mean this is a terrible moment in American politics. I mean, it really is. If you try to be a fair-minded observer, the system is functioning disastrously. Is that primarily a product of just the character of our political parties at this moment? Or does it reflect on the nature of our constitutional system more broadly defined?

A lot of academics think it's really the constitutional system that's the problem, that's the deeper source -- because we have too many check points, too many opportunities to kind of sabotage what government's trying to do, too many obstacles to successful decisionmaking and so on and so on.

SWATI SHARMA: And that was meant -- I mean, Madison loved the checks and balances, right?

JACK RAKOVE: Well, right. Madison did love checks and balances. And you know, it's an interesting phrase -- it's now increasingly common that when academics talk about the Constitution, they call it the Madisonian Constitution. The phrase has become kind of popular, and that is a system of checks and balances. No doubt about it. And, you know, multiple veto points. The president has a veto. You need to have both Houses sent to legislation. So maybe having too many checkpoints…We'd like to think it's great for liberty, but maybe it actually does sabotage effective governing.

I think a big part of this story is -- you know, I'm not a libertarian, but I think we make a lot of claims about what the founders, the framers of the Constitution were doing. The most important thing to remember is they actually thought they were creating a more effective government. I mean, they did believe that you need to have some checks and restraints. But I think Americans ought to remember they wrote the Constitution so would have a more effective, powerful national government. It wasn't written as a libertarian document. It wasn't written primarily to secure the authority of the states. It was written to create an effective national government. That was the whole point.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Madison becomes president in 1809, and he finally has his chance to see how all this plays out when he's the one in charge. This puts our country's main constitutional thinker in the driver's seat of the government system that he really helped to create.

JACK RAKOVE: The one area of government with which Madison was least familiar was the executive branch. And the one area of government that he found most difficult to conceive and to think about critically, analytically was executive power. His principle experience -- his principal concern, really -- lay with legislative power. It lay, I think, with the nature of collective deliberation: How it is that you get groups of people together to try to decide what had to be

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 5 done?

So, the nature of executive power? He didn't have a great grasp with it. Hamilton had a much more sophisticated sense of the potentialities of executive power. In the 1790s, Madison and Jefferson find themselves spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to catch up to Hamilton politically. So, it's only really, I think, after Madison went into executive office that he really started to kind of come to grips with what the actual exercise of executive power meant.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Once he's in the White House, his wife Dolley Madison is kind of the star. She's the much more charismatic of the two of them. And since Jefferson was a widower, Dolley Madison is really the first First Lady to live in the White House. I talked to Julie Miller at the Library of Congress about their marriage and their dynamic.

JULIE MILLER: Well, you wouldn't find him very appealing, but Dolley Madison agreed to marry him. So why? He must have had some appeal. And apparently, they had a very warm and successful marriage.

So, if you went on a blind date with him -- before he met Dolley Madison, of course -- maybe you would have liked him. I don't know. But he was a scrawny little guy, and he was really smart. So, you'd have to like that.

So, OK. So, you're going on a blind date with James Madison. It's the spring of 1787. You want to go out dancing. No! Because he is writing an essay about ancient republics. I mean, he wasn't, like, utterly lacking in social graces. But Dolley Madison, by virtue of holding these really very successful parties, created a forum in which people met and discussed politics. People who went to these parties and wrote descriptions of them would say things like, 'James Madison was huddled in a corner with his cabinet ministers or something.' But Dolley is, in a very queenly way, in her low cut dress, is walking through the room greeting everybody and introducing people to each other, for example, and having little chats with various senators about various issues that concerned her and kind of making things happen.

I mean, she was a political figure. Even though women at the time couldn't have any official political role, she was, in fact, rather powerful. She assisted him enormously, her husband. Really enormously. It's hard to imagine him without her. She's a very important figure in this presidency.

What I have here are some things about the burning of Washington that I can talk about, because that's really the most dramatic event of his presidency. So, for example, when -- and I should say, for a scrawny little guy, he was actually very brave, you know.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Brave -- in which way?

JULIE MILLER: Well, for example, the British had landed right in Baltimore and they're marching up and they're heading towards Bladensburg. And Madison, with a couple of his cabinet members, rode out on their horses to see what was going on. And he kept his cool, which not everyone did.

But ultimately the White House, as you know, was torched -- was burned by the British. And he and Dolley Madison separately left, and we have very interesting descriptions of what happened, written by Dolley Madison among other people.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 She writes how, first, she didn't want to go. James Madison had gone, and she didn't want to leave. But ultimately, she was told that she really had to leave -- that the British were marching into Washington, and she couldn't stay.

So, she wrote: “I am accordingly ready. I have pressed as many Cabinet papers into trunks as to fill one carriage. Our private property must be sacrificed, as it is impossible to procure wagons for transportation. I am determined not to go myself until I see Mr. Madison safe and he can accompany me as I hear of much hostility towards him.” In other words, people were angry at the Madisons at the time because the British were invading. But, eventually, she does leave, and she writes to her sister -- it's 3:00, August 24, 1814 -- and she writes:

“Will you believe it, my sister? We have had a battle or skirmish near Bladensburg.” In other words, imagine that there is a battle taking place very close to where you are and you have to leave. And she writes: “And I am still here within sound of cannon. Mr. Madison comes not. May God protect him. Two messengers covered with dust came to bid me fly, but I wait for him.” Then, finally, she describes this famous event where she took the portrait of Washington, and she says: “Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure.”

In other words, she's refusing to go and people are coming to the House and saying, 'You've got to go. You've got to go.' So, finally, she packs up and she goes. “Mr. Carroll,” she writes, “is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments. I have ordered the frame to be and the canvas taken out. It is done and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of for safekeeping. And now, to you, sister, I must leave this house, where a retreating army will make me a prisoner in it by filling up the road I am directed to take. When I shall again write to you or where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell.”

And there's a couple of descriptions of this. It was a very, very discouraging and dramatic moment when the White House is being destroyed. His terms as president were overwhelmed by the War of 1812, which is a very inconclusive war with a very bad event at the center of it, which is the burning of Washington. So, you know, was it his fault? I don't know. But, I mean, he had a burden. He really had a burden, I think.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, the standard narrative is that Madison's presidency is a bit of a bust, even though they do eventually win the war. But that is not the take that Jack Rakove has on it.

JACK RAKOVE: The question of how Madison acted as president is, in some ways, the most difficult aspect of studying his career. Most scholars don't think very well of Madison's presidency. He's best remembered as being -- I won't say incompetent or inept, but as being kind of a less than sterling head of the executive branch. He spends his first term -- 1809 into the summer of 1812 -- he's preoccupied with all the diplomatic maneuvers that eventually lead him to ask Congress for a declaration of war against Britain.

Of course, the first two years of his second term, we're preoccupied with waging the War of 1812, which is not regarded as a great history of American military successes. So, any attempt to make sense of Madison's presidency kind of has to struggle against that pretty commonly accepted view that he was not a great wartime president.

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 7 Maybe one of the best expressions of this comes from Karl Rove, George Bush's famous adviser, who is a self-styled Madisonian. His son's middle name is Madison, which is more than I've done with my two sons. But, you know, putting that aside, Rove said, in an interview with , Rove said: ‘Madison was a great constitutionalist, a halfway decent secretary of state and a lousy president.’ And I think Rove captures the conventional wisdom, but I think that analysis is wrong for one basic reason.

I think when Madison became president, he was anxious to demonstrate that you could conduct a wartime presidency consistent with this notion that, even in wartime, executive power had to be consistent with Republican principles. It did not make him into an effective leader; but it did lead him to try to demonstrate – and in many ways, successfully -- that one did not have to become a mini- in the to deal with the kind of situation that Americans faced.

I think that has a lot of value in the experiences the United States has had over the last 15 years -- let's say the post-9/11 experiences. It should be reminders to us that there is a kind of enduring legacy that Madison was struggling to pursue of trying [to answer]: How do you remain a lower- case “r” republican in times of national security crises?

That's a serious issue, and I think Madison thought about it actively. And Madison -- under the presidency -- he's a very popular figure. He may not have been the best wartime president. He maybe he went too far in terms of trying to conduct the war in consistency with republican principles. But it didn't seem to cost him very much in terms of public estimation. And I think there may be a big lesson in American history to be learned there.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The lesson being that perhaps Madison shows us you can get through war, and keep a nation intact and secure, without having to use excessive executive power and bulldoze personal freedoms or the legislative process.

JACK RAKOVE: Maybe it's not a simple story about weak executive leadership. Maybe there is a more complicated set of issues that one ought to think about. And that comes back to a kind of perennial question: If you want to have a republican government, lower-case “r” -- which we do -- you have to recognize that we're always going to have to combine two principles that are not wholly compatible. We are going to be committed to principles of liberty, because that's who we are and that's our heritage and that's what we believe in; but we also believe in security. And it'd be nice to say that there’s some constant calculus to figure out what the optimal outcome is in any given situation. But, of course, there isn't.

The way in which the ACLU thinks about civil liberties is not quite the same as, you know, people on the right do. But the key thing to understand is that we share both commitments. -- I mean, collectively as a polity, we share both commitments. We support them both. And they're not wholly consistent. They come into tension.

So it would be a hard case to make that Madison's presidency left a permanent imprint on how the institution actually operated. But that's not the same thing as saying, perhaps, a study of Madison's presidency might illuminate points that are still worth thinking about.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Some of those points worth thinking about are, well, one: How do methodical analytical thinkers fare in the Oval Office today? And two: How hard is it to do today what Madison did in wartime? That is, to uphold the Constitution and preserve individual liberties,

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 while still ultimately keeping this country safe.

For that, I thought it would be interesting to talk to Scott Wilson, whose voice you heard at the very beginning of the episode. He's The Washington Post's national editor, and he was also our former chief White House correspondent.

I started by asking him how hard it is today to be a strong presidential leader if you have a legal mind like Madison's, where you're constantly analyzing all sides of an issue and recalibrating your position.

SCOTT WILSON: With Obama, it was apparent that he even drove some of his own supporters crazy with this quality of sort of being able to argue both sides of a point, which he would do publicly from time to time.

Even with the most ideological points, he would show a certain understanding and even empathy for the opposition’s side. And some of his hardest core supporters really found it kind of off- putting and confusing about where he actually stood on things, even though he usually came down about where they wanted him to.

And so it did have this sense of putting people off in the manner in which he was talking -- the very intellectualized way that he would look at things and think about things. And he would say, 'Look, this is the way democracy is supposed to be. A leader's supposed to be able to see both sides, to see all the arguments available out there, regardless of what party you're from.’ But I think some want -- a follower, in particular, wants -- a much more forceful ideological argument from the leader.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think it's possible, then, for Americans to see someone as a strong presidential leader whose stance adapts over time?

SCOTT WILSON: I think it's most likely difficult for the country to see a strong leader as someone who is ambivalent. You know, Obama often says: 'The easy decisions never make it to my desk. It's only the hard ones. And the hard ones are hard for a reason: They are complicated.’

You know, a lot of the other ‘gut’ presidents -- George W. Bush, obviously -- Obama has used to sort of clarify his own presidency. [He describes it as] something that is un-Bush, that is methodical and intellectual; where Bush was impulsive or instinctive.

It's a reason why you're watching the Republican campaign unfold in a way that says Obama is weak, he's indecisive. I think it's a characteristic that really easily lends itself to most people as someone who doesn't quite know their mind.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It's too soon obviously to say with Obama, but it has kind of lead me to wonder how that plays out over time.

SCOTT WILSON: You know, it's hard to say. Ronald Reagan is seen as a very ideological president. And yet, he compromised in many ways. Does he look back as a weak president, as someone who didn't know his mind? Not at all. And yet he raised taxes, reached out to the Soviets and did a number of things with Tip O'Neill that would now be seen by many in the Republican Party as an absolute appeasement. So, it's hard to know how history's going to judge, and whether ideological

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 presidents come out as more important ones than the more pragmatic.

Maybe the most fascinating aspect of his leadership has been how he's understood the role of commander-in-chief and what his primary responsibility is as a commander-in-chief. The wartime presidents of the past expressed very little doubt -- expressed basically nothing but certainty -- that what they were doing and where we were overseas and what we were trying to accomplish was right.

And Obama, he's always felt a certain pull toward the soldiers themselves, the troops themselves, in a way that, I think, to many, is very moving; and to others can feel a bit crippling when you are trying to win wars and you're trying to talk about them in a way that warriors like to be talked to -- about glory and accomplishment and sacrifice and achievement -- not about suffering and returning home as different people.

And so, again, it really depends on your taste, what you want to hear from the president; and who you are; and do you really want soul searching from a wartime president or do you want certainty.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And what about that challenge of balancing personal liberties and national security? How does that play out today?

SCOTT WILSON: You know, in so many ways, the question is precisely the same. Obama, in one of his early speeches at the National Archives, talked about the of torture in interrogation detention in Guantanamo Bay and the surveillance state of the NSA, and he pledged that the country would be different by the time he left office. In some ways, it is. In some ways, it isn't. Not being able to close Guantanamo is one issue, but not being able to do much about -- not wanting to do much about -- the surveillance state, and very reluctantly being pulled into that after the Edward Snowden revelations? You begin to see that this is a president who does not like to send troops into war but has other ways -- ways that are legally ambiguous and morally ambiguous, if you talk about drone strikes and the attendant civilian casualties -- that is his way of fighting. So it's a balance he's talked about a bit, too.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Back to Madison. Madison's presidency ends in 1817.

The war is over. There's a surge in nationalism across America, and not because Madison is any real hero but because the government America put in place was tested by the crisis of war and it actually held together as a republic. He returns to his home at Montpelier in Virginia, and he continues reading, writing and thinking about politics throughout his retirement. In fact, just recently a legal historian at Boston College -- her name is Mary Sarah Bilder -- she used forensic techniques and found that Madison continued to significantly revise his notes about what happened at the Constitutional Convention all the way up until his death.

She says Madison was probably making revisions in order to paint his legacy in a better light, especially as his views on issues like slavery are evolving toward the end of his life. It's another example of how Madison is adapting, rethinking, revising his thoughts. That actually fits with Jack Rakove's favorite story about Madison, which is what happens at the very moment of his death.

JACK RAKOVE: Madison died on June 28, 1836. He was attended by his slave and by his niece, who was feeding him breakfast. Madison was very infirm in the final years of his life, and the last time he left home Montpelier I think was 1829. He's there the seven years. But his niece

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 10 was feeding him breakfast, and she noticed a kind of look that is sweeping across his face and she said, 'Uncle, is anything the matter?'

He said, 'Only a change of mind my dear.'

Then, his head dropped, and Madison died.

And to me, because I've spent so much time thinking about Madison the Thinker, I'd love to know: What was the last thing he was thinking about? Maybe it was just his breakfast, but I like the idea that here you have this very powerful creative mind, which was mentally active to the very, very end.

You know, when Madison dies, he's deeply concerned about where the American republic is going. So, I kind of like that story. You know, ‘only a change of my mind, my dear’ – I’m wondering, 'Oh God, what was he thinking about?' Of course, we don't know. But maybe in the next world I'll find out.

LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This brings us to the end of the James Madison episode. But just one last footnote…

Dolley Madison lives on for some years after his death and she falls into near destitute poverty. She has to sell off Montpelier, and she also eventually sells Madison's papers to the Library of Congress. One of their slaves, Paul Jennings -- who's actually one of the men who helped save that portrait of George Washington from the burning White House and who was also with James Madison when he died -- he ends up writing a memoir. And in it, he writes that toward the end of Dolley's life, 'She was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life.’ Paul Jennings then goes on to say that he, 'occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her.'

Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 11