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An Introduction to the Life and Papers of James Madison by J.C.A

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An Introduction to the Life and Papers of James Madison by J.C.A An Introduction to the Life and Papers of James Madison by J.C.A. Stagg A Public Life Late in his life, sometime after 1831, James Madison responded to a request to write his autobiography. The result was a mere sketch, 15 pages long, which contained none of the personal information about a prominent public figure that readers today would expect in an autobiography. Madison recorded that he had been born on 5 March 1751 (Old Style) in King George County, Virginia, to James and Nelly Conway Madison, residents of Orange County, Virginia. He said no more about his parents and nothing of his nine siblings. When he mentioned his wife, Dolley Payne Todd, a Quaker widow from Philadelphia whom he married in 1794, Madison wrote only that she had "added every happiness to his life which female merit could impart." The remainder of the autobiography was a summary overview of the history of the United States between the 1770s and the 1820s, with brief references to the events and developments in which the author had participated. For additional details, Madison referred readers to documents in his personal papers. By summarizing matters so cryptically, Madison told readers of his autobiography--and of all future biographies, for that matter--that they should study his life only to the extent that it was part of the history of the nation. In retirement after 1817, he arranged and edited his papers to reinforce that message, discarding a good deal of material relating to family and private matters. The papers that he bequeathed to his widow upon his death in 1836 thus became, for the most part, the record of a life played out in the public sphere. The limitations that Madison imposed on our ability to understand many aspects of his life and their significance cannot be easily overcome. If we know relatively little of the personal and private affairs of the "Father of the Constitution" and the fourth president, it is because he believed we need not be concerned with them. Concerns for privacy aside, however, Madison did preserve a collection of letters that he had written to his father, James Madison Sr. These letters suggest that the youthful Madison had a respectful, but perhaps somewhat remote, relationship with a parent whom he addressed formally for many years as "Honored Sir." His mother probably taught her oldest son to read, but little can be gleaned from the surviving record about their relationship as adults. After the death of Madison's father in 1801, Nelly Conway Madison maintained separate living quarters and business arrangements in the family house at Montpelier until her death at the age of 98 in 1829. For as long as Madison was away from home on government service, Dolley Payne Madison corresponded with "Mother Madison." The few letters that Nelly Conway Madison received from her son were brief and dealt mainly with business matters. 1 Among his siblings, Madison's favorite was probably his youngest sister, Frances Taylor Madison (Fanny), with whom he enjoyed playing chess. Their relationship was overshadowed later, however, by a dispute between Fanny's husband, Dr. Robert Rose, and other Madison family members over the terms of their father's will. Education of a Statesman James Madison Sr. was a wealthy Virginian planter and slave owner and it was the resources of the Montpelier plantation that provided for his son’s education. Throughout his formative years, Madison was schooled in the classics, natural science, foreign languages, and moral philosophy, often by Scottish-born or Scottish-trained clergymen, of whom the most important was the Reverend John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey in Princeton. Like most advanced students in the eighteenth century, Madison compiled commonplace books--collections of aphorisms and various bodies of organized information to be committed to memory for future use. One such book that probably dates from his time at Princeton, "A Brief System of Logick," is preserved in the Library of Congress. The mental discipline that Madison acquired by these means led him later in life to prepare for public business by researching policy issues as thoroughly as possible. Surviving examples of his research agendas and the notes that they generated are scattered throughout his papers. These papers address such matters as the struggle for religious liberty in Virginia between 1784 and 1786; the history of confederations that figured so prominently in both the debates in the 1787 Federal Convention and the Federalist Papers; the drafting of the Bill of Rights; and the issues of political economy and foreign policy that Madison contested with Alexander Hamilton in the House of Representatives and in newspapers in the 1790s. Revolutionary Legislator After graduating from Princeton in 1771, Madison returned to Montpelier, where he was drawn into politics in both Virginia and the emerging American nation. One issue that engaged his attention was religious freedom for nonconformist sects in Virginia, a concern that led to his first contribution to constitutional law when he persuaded the Virginia Convention of 1776 to include liberty of conscience--as opposed to mere religious toleration--in the Declaration of Rights for the newly independent state. When religious disputes surfaced again in Virginia politics after 1784, Madison circulated throughout the state the clearest exposition of his views on church-state relations, the 1785 "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments." On the basis of public support for that memorial, Madison was able not only to defeat the efforts of Patrick Henry to incorporate the Episcopal church and distribute tax money to religious denominations but also 2 to consolidate religious liberty in Virginia by persuading the General Assembly to pass into law in 1786 Thomas Jefferson's Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom. Madison's membership in the 1776 Virginia Convention was also a step toward involvement in the politics of the War for Independence. After brief interludes in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia Council of State, Madison was elected in 1780 for a three-year term to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. In the nation's first legislature, he established the habits of a conscientious public servant, often taking detailed notes of congressional proceedings as a way of improving his grasp of the affairs of state. In particular, Madison was concerned to ensure that states comply with the requisitions of Congress, and between 1781 and 1783 he joined with other delegates in efforts to secure independent sources of revenue for the Confederation, most notably by granting Congress power to raise an impost. Madison was also instrumental in crafting compromises on the apportionment of taxes, including the formulation of the three-fifths ratio whereby, for purposes of assessing tax burdens, five slaves might be counted as three free persons. That same formulation emerged as a solution for the dispute over slave representation in the Federal Convention of 1787. In 1829, toward the end of his life, Madison again urged his formulation as the best way to deal with similar disputes within his native state as it revised its constitution of 1776. Madison's efforts to strengthen the powers of Congress were unsuccessful. After 1783 he served again in the Virginia General Assembly, where he experienced considerable frustration at the reluctance of its members to comply with congressional policies as well as their willingness to pass laws that he regarded as both unjust and unwise. Eventually, Madison concluded that only a thorough reform of the nation's political system could ensure the survival of the Union and preserve republicanism within the states. Crafting and Defending a Constitution Aided by encyclopedias and historical treatises sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson, Madison began studying the histories of failed confederacies in the past, searching for the weaknesses that caused their downfall. When a convention of the states held at Annapolis, Maryland, in 1786 admitted its inability to solve the problems of the Union by calling for another convention to meet in 1787 to revise the Articles of Confederation, Madison was ready to respond. His response was a memorandum entitled "Vices of the Political System of the United States." In May 1787 this memorandum served as the basis for the Virginia Plan, a series of resolutions that Madison drafted for the Federal Convention in Philadelphia. The resolutions called for the creation of a bicameral national legislature, based on proportional representation in both chambers and accompanied by a national judiciary and a national executive. 3 Madison's main goal was to limit the influence of the states in national politics. To this end, two of his resolutions recommended that both the national legislature and a Council of Revision--a body to be composed of executive and judicial officers--have the power to veto state laws. The delegates in Philadelphia adopted the Virginia Plan, which framed the agenda for the discussions that led to the Federal Constitution in September 1787. Throughout the convention, Madison made detailed notes of its proceedings, partly for his own information and partly to provide a record for posterity of the origins of what he hoped would be the first successful republic in modern times. In the first six weeks of debate over the Virginia Plan, Madison argued vigorously for his preferred reforms of proportional representation and the federal veto. He opposed, equally vigorously, proposals to protect state equality as the basis for representation in national politics. Further, he was unwilling to leave the states with powers that might permit them to thwart congressional priorities. Madison won his point on proportional representation in the House of Representatives, but otherwise experienced defeat. In the so-called "Great Compromise" of July 16, 1787, state equality became the foundation for the new Senate.
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