Episode 4.3 The Young James Madison

[Transcript]

Hello, and welcome to America’s First Ladies. I’m your host, Risa Weaver-Enion.

Episode 4.3 The Young James Madison

We left off last week in the spring of 1794. Dolley Payne Todd had lost her husband, infant son, and parents-in-law to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, and she had fought tooth and nail to get what was lawfully hers under the terms of her husband’s will. She was on the cusp of meeting James Madison, so now we’re going to rewind all the way back to the 1750s and learn more about young Madison.

James Madison was born on March 5, 1750, but his actual birthday is March 16, 1751. Wait, what? We are once again confronted with the old style dates of the Gregorian calendar versus the new style dates of the Julian calendar. This has come up a couple of times before and I’ve mentioned that dates had to be shifted forward by 11 days to accommodate the switch, which England and all its colonies undertook in 1752.

But what hasn’t come up yet, and what I learned in the process of researching James Madison, is that not only did 11 days have to be adjusted, but the first date of the year had to be adjusted as well. Under the old Gregorian calendar, the year started on March 25. Why the 25th? As usual, blame religion. It aligned better with the Christian holiday of the Annunciation, unlike the traditional first day of the year under the Romans, which was January 1. So from the 12th century until the middle of the 18th century, the year began on March 25.

When everyone switched to the Julian calendar, the first day of the year was moved back to January 1. So anyone born between January 1 and March 25 of any given year suddenly had not only a new birth date, but also a new birth year. Talk about confusing!

Because James Madison was born on March 5, 1750, his birth year became 1751 after the switch. It didn’t make him any older or younger, it just required more careful math to figure out how old someone was. When I first learned about this, I was hoping that maybe it would explain why Thomas Jefferson thought his mother was 57 when she died, when she was actually only 56. But sadly, no, Jefferson was just inexplicably wrong about how old his mom was. The switch of her birth year from 1720 to 1721 (because she had been born in February) doesn’t account for Jefferson’s mathematical error. 

But I do perhaps owe William Hyland Jr. an apology for throwing shade at him for listing Jane Randolph Jefferson’s birth year as 1721 when everyone else lists it as 1720. But if any one of them had bothered to explain this in a footnote, it would have been helpful. Also, if you haven’t listened to episode 3.2 from last season, you have no idea what I’m even talking about.

Oh, and one more (hopefully last) fun fact about the switch to the Julian calendar: for some reason, the powers that be decided to make the 11 day adjustment right in the middle of September 1752. So the calendar went from September 2 right to September 14, skipping over September 3 through the 13. Insanity! Let’s hope we finally have our calendars in order and we never have to do this, because it sounds like an absolute nightmare. Also, I said something in episode 3.1 that’s not correct. I said 11 days had to be added to the calendar, but what I really meant is that the calendar shifted forward by 11 days, which really means 11 days were subtracted. The ones that got skipped in September 1752. I’ll be really happy when I can stop talking about this calendar switcheroo.

So back to James Madison. He was born in Virginia, because of course he was. It figures that three of the first four presidents were from the largest and wealthiest former colony. (Actually, it’s four of the first five, because our next president, James Monroe, was also a Virginian. We’ll learn more about him next season.)

Madison’s grandfather was named Ambrose Madison, and his family had been in Virginia since the mid-1600s. His paternal grandmother was named Frances Taylor, and her family came to Virginia in the 1720s. The Madison and Taylor families were prolific and vast, which is how fourth president James Madison and twelfth president Zachary Taylor are cousins, even though Zachary Taylor was born 33 years after James Madison.

James often referred to his vast extended family as “connections” and Ralph Ketcham explains the significance of this network in his biography of Madison, simply called James Madison: A Biography:

“Such a network of relatives was of special importance to a man in public life. Madison’s family standing assured him of easy access, if he desired it, to the offices where a political career in Virginia nearly always began—those of justices of the peace, sheriffs, county lieutenants, and members of the legislature. Furthermore, when a man from a family such as Madison’s went to Williamsburg (or later to Richmond) as a legislator, he was sure to find a few men who were close relatives and many who felt some kindred tie. … [Madison] was of the substantial gentry, of the three or four hundred families that throughout his lifetime dominated Virginia politics and made such a large contribution to the public life of the new United States.”

James was born in King George County on the Rappahannock River. His father was James Madison, Sr., and his mother was Nelly Conway. James was born while they were visiting Nelly’s mother and step-father, but they soon returned to their home in Orange County, Virginia.

Orange County was in the Piedmont region of Virginia, much like Thomas Jefferson’s beloved Albemarle County. Unlike the low-lying Tidewater region along the rivers (like where Mount Vernon was located), the Piedmont was known for high hills and clean air. James’s grandparents, Ambrose and Frances, had settled in an area of Orange County near a town called Orange Court House. By 1757, the plantation was about 4000 acres in size, which was quite respectable, but not massive. For context, let’s refer back to episode 1.1 where we learned that Martha Washington’s first husband owned about 17,000 acres and was one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.

James’s grandparents and parents both settled on this land, which was about 30 miles from the Blue Ridge Mountains, which dominated the landscape. The plantation home that you probably mentally associate with James Madison, called Montpelier, is on the same land. The house wasn’t technically called Montpelier until the 1780s, but I’m going to refer to it as Montpelier throughout, just to make things easier.

The house that still stands at Montpelier today was originally built throughout the 1750s and ‘60s, and was then enlarged and improved by James in the early 1800s. When James was a young man, the house was a two-story rectangular building, facing northwest, toward the mountains. The lower floor had two large rooms divided by a wide hall. One room was the dining room and the other room was a parlor or sitting room. Both rooms had fireplaces.

Upstairs were bedrooms and attic space where the growing Madison family slept. It’s likely that James eventually had 11 younger siblings, not all of whom survived to adulthood. He was the eldest, followed by a brother named Francis in 1753, a brother named Ambrose in 1755, a sister named Catlett in 1758, who died only a month later; a sister named Nelly in 1760, a brother named William in 1762, a sister named Sarah in 1764, an unnamed brother who died the same day he was born in 1766; a sister named Elizabeth in 1768, who died as a child; an unnamed child who also died the day of birth in 1770; a brother named Reuben in 1771 who died as a toddler; and finally a sister named Frances born in 1774.

As a Virginia plantation, Montpelier was an agricultural property, growing tobacco, and of course, the Madison family were slaveholders. Big surprise.

Young James was given a solid education, first probably by his mother and grandmother, and then at a local county school where children from neighboring plantations learned together. This early schooling was probably limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic, but we know that the Madison household contained books imported from England, and it’s likely that young James read them all. As Ralph Ketcham says, “Since his parents seem always to have admired their son’s intellectual accomplishments, James Madison probably had every opportunity they could furnish him as a youth to develop his mind. We do not need to imagine him struggling against obscurantism or poverty to gain an education. His parents had the means and inclination to provide their children with a sound though simple education, and their eldest son took full advantage of what was available.”

From 1762 until 1767, when James was aged roughly 11-16, he attended a boarding school run by a Scottish teacher named Donald Robertson, where he learned Latin, Greek, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, geography, literature, French, Italian, and perhaps Spanish and logic. In later life, James supposedly said, “all that I have been in life I owe largely to that man.”

James spent 1767 to 1769 back at the family plantation, being tutored by the Reverend Thomas Martin, who lived with the Madison family and taught the gaggle of children James Sr. and Nelly now had. You’ll note that these are the pivotal 1760s when England was exercising more and more control over its American colonies and trying to extract every last penny out of them to pay for the French and Indian War. This all would have been the subject of much conversation around the Madison household.

By 1769, James was ready for college. As a Virginian, it would have made sense for him to go to The College of William and Mary, but it was in Williamsburg, in the Tidewater region, and James always had a (perhaps unhealthy) fear of the Tidewater with its malaria and fevers. He preferred to avoid the Tidewater, especially during the summer months. The family tutor, Thomas Martin, had attended the College of New Jersey in Princeton, New Jersey. We know it today as Princeton University. For a variety of reasons, James decided that was the place for him. He departed for Princeton in the summer of 1769, taking clothes, books, and a young enslaved man named Sawney. It was a journey of 300 miles, and traveling on horseback, they probably made the trip in about 10 days.

Thanks to his solid preparatory education, James entered Princeton as a sophomore, and then he completed the remaining three years of curriculum in two years, graduating in September 1771. But then he ended up staying at Princeton until April 1772, because he had so exhausted himself by cramming three years of study into two that he was too sick to travel. This would become a bit of a hallmark of James Madison, nearly working himself to death.

James was often described as sickly, feeble, and pale. He had mysterious illnesses throughout his life that would strike usually when he was overworked. No one has ever been able to diagnose any particular illness that he might have been suffering from, but he would refer to it as his “bilious complaint” for the rest of his life.

When James returned to Montpelier from Princeton in 1772, he was at loose ends, not quite sure what he was going to do with his life. He wrote to a friend, “I intend myself to read Law occasionally and have procured books for that purpose,” but it seems he never really intended to practice law the way John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did. He was never admitted to the bar and never took on clients. He merely wished to study law to deepen his understanding of public affairs and government.

James and his friends from Princeton exchanged numerous letters discussing the events of the day, like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party, and also expanding discussions of more scholarly ideas that they had begun in college. They were especially interested in discussing the First Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia in September 1774. James wrote to a friend that he hoped the debates would “illuminate the minds of thinking people among us [and] render us more respectable at Home.” By “home” he meant England.

One outcome of the First Continental Congress was that each county, city, and town in the colonies was to create a Committee of Public Safety to enforce the boycott of English goods. James was named to the Orange County committee, along with his father, who was the chairman. It was the first of many, many public roles James Madison would play throughout his life.

In October 1775, James was commissioned as a colonel in the Orange County militia, but he never engaged in battle during the war. The most he did was participate in drills and marches. He felt that his unstable health made battlefield service problematic.

After the Second Continental Congress began meeting in May 1775, the colonies were directed to meet and prepare state constitutions for themselves. It was one of many steps toward declaring independence. In April 1776, 25-year-old James Madison was chosen as one of two men to represent Orange County at the Virginia Convention, scheduled to meet in Williamsburg. This was likely James’s first visit to Virginia’s capital city, and he traveled with one of his uncles who had also been named to the convention. 

On May 15, the Virginia Convention unanimously resolved to send instructions to its delegates in Philadelphia sitting in the Second Continental Congress that they were authorized to propose a resolution for independence. And we know from episode 2.4 that Virginian Richard Henry Lee made that proposal on June 8, which kicked off the writing of the Declaration of Independence, even though it took until July for the rest of Congress to be ready to vote for independence.

The Virginia Convention’s next order of business was to write Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, which was essentially a state constitution. James was named to the drafting committee, but as a junior member of the convention, he didn’t have much input into the writing process. But he had a close-up view of the process, which undoubtedly came in handy 11 years later when the U.S. Constitution was drafted. More on that in episode 4.4.

The Virginia Convention concluded on July 5, and James returned to Montpelier for the summer. But he was back in Williamsburg in October because he, along with the rest of the members of the convention, was to be a member of the first session of the new Virginia legislature that had been established by the convention over the summer. The old House of Burgesses, the colonial legislature, was gone. In its place was the Virginia House of Delegates.

Ralph Ketcham describes how impactful this service at the Virginia Convention was on James’s life and future career:

“When Madison left Williamsburg after the convention adjourned on July 5, he sensed with a clearness unimaginable four years earlier a congenial and challenging task in life. He had taken sure steps along the customary path toward a political career in Virginia. As the scion of a substantial family, he had a firm political base. Moreover, he had sat honorably in a historic convention, whose members, as the years passed, would more and more acquire a hallowed place in Virginia history. His associations with [Edmund] Pendleton, [Patrick] Henry, [Edmund] Randolph, and many others placed him strategically among the men of influence in the new commonwealth. Though diffident and shy, he had supported a rising republicanism in Virginia politics, and he had impressed the foremost republican theoretician of the convention, George Mason. Events conspired, it seemed, to heighten Madison’s zeal to be a nation builder and to increase his opportunities to be a good one.”

James served his term in the legislature from October until about December 1776, and then returned home. He was defeated in the spring 1777 election for another term in the legislature, but he ended up going to Williamsburg anyway, as a member of the governor’s council of advisors. The current governor was Patrick Henry, and he remembered James’s competent service at the Virginia Convention. James would serve on the governor’s council over the next several years, from November 1777 until July 1778, from November 1778 until July 1779, and then again from October to December 1779. 

I won’t get into the details of what James did as a member of the council, except to note one item of interest. In early 1778, when the Continental Army was freezing to death in Valley Forge, George Washington sent a letter to Congress in which he wrote, “this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve—dissolve—or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.” We discussed this in episode 1.7. Well, Virginia did something to help. The governor’s council ordered that 8-10,000 hogs and several thousand cattle be driven in the most expeditious manner to the soldiers in camp.

James’s service on the governor’s council is noteworthy for one other reason: it’s how he and Thomas Jefferson became the closest of friends. You’ll recall from episode 3.2 that Jefferson was selected as governor in 1779 and again in 1780. During his first term, James was on the governor’s council, and they worked closely together. Ralph Ketcham writes, “By the time Madison left Williamsburg in December 1779, the two men had formed the bonds of respect, devotion, and affection which would make their collaboration both a joy to themselves and a boon to the new nation.”

The reason James left Williamsburg and the governor’s council is that he accepted an appointment to the Continental Congress, still sitting in Philadelphia. Thanks to the worst winter anyone alive could remember, his departure for Philadelphia was delayed until March 1780. He used the unexpected free time to do a deep dive into monetary policy and history. We all know how badly provisioned the Continental Army was, and a large part of the problem was the rapid depreciation of continental currency. I’m not a financial expert, and I don’t know how many of you would enjoy a deep dive into fiscal policy, so I’ll just quote a few sentences from Ralph Ketcham here:

“Madison developed a theory of money and credit accounting for economic and political realities… He cast aside the enormous amount of vacuous theorizing and technical gibberish that befogged the study of money and credit in his day. The lessons of the essay on money made Madison sure only loans of hard money from abroad, the determination of Congress and the states to lay and collect taxes, a rise in public confidence that the war would be won, and faith that the United States would fulfill its obligations would provide the needed fiscal strength.”

When James finally arrived in Philadelphia on March 18, 1780, having turned 29 while in transit, he took lodgings at a boardinghouse located at the corner of Fifth and Market streets. This establishment was owned by a woman named Mrs. Mary House. Her daughter, Elizabeth House Trist, was mentioned repeatedly in season 3. James recommended Mrs. House’s boardinghouse to his close friend Thomas Jefferson when he and young Patsy first traveled to Philadelphia in 1782. Elizabeth Trist was Patsy Jefferson’s lifelong friend, and Elizabeth’s grandson Nicholas married Patsy’s daughter Virginia. Sometimes it truly seems that everyone in 18th century America knew everyone else.

At age 29, James was the youngest delegate to Congress. He was not an intimidating presence. He was about 5 feet 6 inches tall and had a small, slight frame. Some colleagues thought he was fresh from college because he looked even younger than he was. Many called him “young Madison.”

His fashion sense was non-existent. For most of his life, he dressed entirely in black. He was shy, quiet, and borderline reclusive among company. The wife of one Congressman described him as “a gloomy, stiff creature; they say he is clever in Congress, but out of it he has nothing engaging or even bearable in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.” But an aide to French minister de la Luzerne pronounced James to be “well-educated, wise, temperate, gentle, [and] studious.”

James very quickly understood the inadequacies of the Continental Congress. After being there for only one week, he wrote a long letter to Jefferson outlining the myriad problems facing the new country:

“Our army, threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or living on free quarter; the public treasury empty; public credit exhausted…; Congress complaining of the extortion of the people, the people of the improvidence of Congress, and the army of both; our affairs requiring the most mature and systematic measures, and the urgency of occasion admitting only of temporizing expedients, and those expedients generating new difficulties. Congress from a defect of adequate Statesmen more likely to fall into wrong measures and of less weight to enforce right ones, recommending plans to the several states for execution and the states separately re-judging the expediency of such plans…. An old system of finance discarded as incompetent to our necessities, an untried and precarious one substituted, and a total stagnation in prospect between the end of the former and the operation of the latter: These are the outlines of the true picture of our public situation. Believe me Sir as things now stand, if the States do not vigorously proceed in collecting the old money and establishing funds for the credit of the new, that we are undone.”

He paints a grim picture, indeed. It didn’t help that the war was going very badly in 1780. Between serious losses in the South and the betrayal of Benedict Arnold at West Point in the North, the British were pressing their advantage. Congress was incompetent at best. Quoting Ralph Ketcham once again:

“Listening to the debates during these perilous months, doing what little a junior member could do on committees and executive boards, Madison learned hard lessons about the conduct of government. He saw how stirring words and high resolves would not win revolutionary wars. He saw how personal jealousies and international disputes undermined even the noblest of causes. He experienced the baffling crosscurrents that swirled in Congress because it was the place where the thirteen states had to reconcile conflicting interests. He saw for the first time the stresses in a free deliberative body when the members, unlike those in the Virginia House of Delegates, did not know each other and when few if any members had firsthand knowledge of the whole country. These strains convinced Madison that only ‘greater authority and vigor [in] our councils’ could prevent chaos and defeat. Effective federal power in the constitution of 1787 grew from the alarm and despair Madison felt in Philadelphia that summer of discontent as the dispatches came in from Charleston, Camden, and West Point.”

James was the most diligent member of Congress, attending nearly every single day for almost four years, a feat not achieved by any other member. He didn’t return to Virginia or take any leave from Congress until after the final peace treaty was signed and the Continental Army was disbanded near the end of 1783.

In March 1781, the Articles of Confederation, which had been drafted by the Continental Congress in 1777, were ratified by the 13th and final state (Maryland), and finally came into effect. Congress had been pretty much operating within the terms of the Articles since they had been approved in 1777, so it wasn’t a dramatic change. But technically, the Continental Congress became the Confederation Congress once the Articles were fully ratified. It’s a distinction that most historians don’t bother making, and the body is often referred to simply as Congress.

Despite the soul-crushing work James was doing in Congress, he did manage to make some time for a personal life. One of his fellow delegates and boarders at Mrs. House’s was New York Congressman William Floyd. Floyd brought his wife and daughters to Philadelphia with him in the winter of 1782-83, and James fell in love with 15-year-old Catherine Floyd, called Kitty. Mind you, James was 31 at the time. 

He and Kitty became engaged that spring, but she suddenly broke off the engagement via letter in the summer of 1783, and subsequently married a young doctor she had also met at Mrs. House’s. James was heartbroken and would spend the next 10 years devoted to his work, until he met a certain widow named Dolley Payne Todd.

James retired from the Confederation Congress at the end of 1783 and returned to Virginia for the first time since he had left for Philadelphia in March 1780. He wasn’t quite sure what his way forward was. His father was still alive and still managing the family plantation, and had purchased more than 16,000 acres of land in far western Virginia, which is now Kentucky, while James was in Congress.

James didn’t want to rely on the family plantation for his income—he told Edmund Randolph that he wanted “to depend as little as possible on the labor of slaves”—but he also didn’t want to practice law. And this is as good a time as any to talk about James Madison’s complicated relationship with slavery. He had obviously grown up in a slaveholding family, and he had taken a slave named Billey with him to Philadelphia during his years in Congress. When he returned to Virginia, he did not bring Billey back with him. This might sound magnanimous, but his reasoning was…complicated. 

On one hand, he decided that after four years in the North, Billey was “too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virginia.” Meaning, Billey might have some ideas now. Ideas that would be bad if passed on to the slaves at Montpelier. So James sold Billey to a resident of Philadelphia, and under Pennsylvania law, Billey would then be free after seven years. You might be wondering why James didn’t just manumit Billey altogether, and I’m wondering the same thing. I don’t know the answer.

On the other hand, the alternative to selling Billey to a Pennsylvania resident was selling him to someone in the West Indies, where slave conditions were far worse than in Virginia. This was apparently the approach taken by many Virginia slaveholders who wanted to teach their “uppity” slaves a lesson. James told his father that he didn’t think it would be right to punish Billey “merely for coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood, and have proclaimed so often to be right, and worthy the pursuit, of every human being.”

So James believed that the institution of slavery was wrong, believed that the enslaved people were right to desire liberty, and yet never freed his slaves. Not even the one he took to Philadelphia for four years. The hypocrisy of these slave-owning Founding Fathers knows no bounds.

James spent the years between 1783 and 1787 serving the state of Virginia. He was a member of the State Assembly for portions of 1784, 1785, and 1786. He also kept up his correspondence with Thomas Jefferson and many others, and continued his studies of the law, government, and public policy. After leaving the legislature in 1786, he began an intense study of nearly every republican government in the history of the world.

He wrote an extensive essay called Of Ancient and Modern Confederacies, covering the structure and history of various Greek confederacies, the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederation, and the United Provinces of the Netherlands. He listed the jealousies and animosities among members as the faults of these confederacies, and domestic turmoil and international humiliation as the results of the faults.

He wrote, “the past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of history is no more than anticipated experience….Where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others.”

In addition to his long essay, James compiled his notes onto 41 pocket-sized pages that he could easily carry with him and refer to during debates. His notes and research would serve him well when the states finally decided that the Articles of Confederation were lacking substance and called a convention to revise them.

Next week, we’ll dive headlong into this grand convention, the one we know today as the Constitutional Convention.

Thanks for listening to this episode. It was produced by me, and the music is by Matt Dull. Don’t forget to leave a rating or review in Apple or Spotify, thanks!