James Madison: A Life Reconsidered

by Lynne Cheney

  Hard as it is for a twenty-first-century mind to contemplate Royal Powder and sal armoniac being administered to a toddler, James Madison—Jemmy, at this point—was the only member of his family for whom there is any indication of epilepsy and thus the most likely patient. Assuming that the seizures he suffered were fever related, as the medicines Frances Madison ordered seem to indicate, doctors today would likely diagnose febrile seizures, convulsions that can occur when a small child has a fever. A grandmother in colonial Virginia might be forgiven, however, for thinking the child had epilepsy. When Thomas Jefferson’s two-year-old grandson, Francis Eppes, suffered “dreadful fits” in 1804, his aunt wrote, “I cannot help fearing them to be epileptic.”21

  Although children with febrile seizures are not considered to have epilepsy today, a history of them in early childhood, especially if they are prolonged, is common in the syndrome of temporal lobe epilepsy. The evidence available suggests that this was the pattern of Madison’s ailment: fever-related episodes when he was a toddler, then “sudden attacks” later in his life.22

  • • •

  MADISON GREW UP to love the outdoors and probably spent much of his boyhood riding and playing in the fields and forests with his brothers and the slave children on the plantation, but he was also bookish, reading the Spectator at an early age. His grandmother Frances likely encouraged him and was surely pleased to have him appreciate the lessons it taught. Early on he would have come across this: “Nothing can atone for the want of modesty, without which beauty is ungraceful and wit detestable.” Later he would have read about Prince Eugene of Savoy, who, said the Spectator (the eponymous author of the series), exemplified “the highest instance of a noble mind,” bearing “great qualities” without displaying “any consciousness that he is superior to the rest of the world.” James also encountered immodesty in the person of Simon Honeycomb, who claimed that women had forced him to abandon his modest ways. Because they liked rogues, he had been forced to become one, wenching, drinking, and keeping “company with those who lived most at large.” Characters such as Honeycomb were comic touches that would have appealed to a boy, and Madison would long remember the Spectator as “peculiarly adapted to inculcate in youthful minds, just sentiments, an appetite for knowledge, and a taste for the improvement of the mind and manners.”23

  In the pages of the Spectator, Madison followed friends who gathered at Will’s Coffee House, attended the theater in Drury Lane, and in general took advantage of urban pleasures. This world must have seemed wonderfully exotic to a boy in colonial Virginia, where there were no cities. The geography of the colony, with the Chesapeake Bay, the great rivers flowing into it, and the multitude of navigable tributaries flowing into the rivers, undermined the commercial need for cities. “Every person … can ship his tobacco at his own door and live independent,” wrote one mid-eighteenth-century visitor.24 Towns developed—Williamsburg, Fredericksburg, Alexandria—but Virginia, the largest and most populous of the colonies, had no Boston or Philadelphia within its borders.

  Living on isolated farms and plantations, Virginians compensated by opening their doors and dining rooms to all respectable passersby. They entertained at oyster suppers and squirrel barbecues, turned court days into occasions for dinners and horse races, and called in dancing masters to teach their children the elaborate steps of the minuet. One popular dancing master, a Mr. Christian, whom James senior paid in 1756 and 1758, started with his pupils after breakfast and kept them dancing until after dark, not hesitating to deliver a sharp rebuke if they failed to show a respectful attitude.25

  Virginians also looked to Sunday, when going to church was a chance to mend souls and socialize. The Madisons attended the Brick Church, a two-or three-hour ride to the east, where James Madison Sr. was a vestryman and Frances Madison had joined with other good women of the parish to purchase a silver Communion set. The family prayed at the Brick Church, heard official notices, and exchanged news of politics and tobacco prices. As young James wandered among the congregation after services, he would have encountered a plethora of relatives, many of them named Taylor. Frances Taylor Madison’s siblings were prolific—her brother George had fourteen sons—and many of Frances’s brothers, sisters, nieces, and great-nephews were within easy distance of the Brick Church. Young James would also have seen Chews, Taliaferros, Beales, and Willises, families related to the Madisons and one another by blood, marriage, and sometimes both, forming what historian Bernard Bailyn called the “great tangled cousinry” of Virginia’s gentry class.26 One can imagine a curious young boy on the ride home inquiring which of the Beale cousins were his aunt Elizabeth’s children and which belonged to his aunt Frances and asking how the Willises and Hites fit in.

  • • •

  ON A SAD DAY in December 1761, the Madison family gathered at the Brick Church for the funeral of Frances Madison, who had died at sixty-one. The minister, the Reverend James Marye Jr., comforted the mourners with words from Revelations: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord … that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.” That one of Frances’s most lasting works was encouraging her grandson’s love of learning seems likely from his father’s making educational arrangements for him within months of her death. About the time the tulip poplars bloomed in 1762, young James began attending a boarding school on the banks of the Mattaponi, where the Madison family had started in America. There Master Jamie, as he was now known, found an instructor to whom he would be grateful throughout his life, Donald Robertson, an immigrant from Scotland, “a man of extensive learning and a distinguished teacher,” in Madison’s words. Along with three dozen other boys, many of whom he knew, young James studied arithmetic, geography, algebra, and geometry. He also learned the languages essential for going to college, Latin and Greek, and studied French as well, though, as he later emphasized, he could only read it. He liked to recount how he had once tried to speak to a Frenchman, only to discover that the Scottish burr he had picked up from Robertson rendered him incomprehensible.27

  At Robertson’s school, Madison found a library containing authors of antiquity, such as Thucydides, Virgil, and Cicero, and more recent thinkers, such as Locke and Montesquieu. In Robertson he found a teacher who knew how to make the connection of learning to life, even when teaching theoretical subjects. Notes that young James Madison made in a copybook show that Robertson began one lecture with the definition of a sign: “a thing that gives notice of something different from itself.” He next gave examples of natural signs, such as smiling, which indicates joy, and blushing, which speaks of shame. Then, after observing that such signs are universal, Robertson noted this exception: “Politicians and other cunning men of business, [who] by great and refined dissimulation, have in great measure confounded and stifled the natural indications of their inmost thoughts.”28

  Madison’s copybook contains drawings that look like assignments in geometry and geography. One, a hexagonal fort surrounded by a twelve-sided moat inside a twenty-four-sided wall, was surely a more interesting exercise for a boy than a rendering of abstract shapes would have been. Another drawing, a standard rendering of planets in circular orbits around the sun, is made personal by the face on the sun, its nose and brows created by a single line and its rays so thickly drawn they appear to be a mane. The result is a solar system that appears to have a mildly friendly lion at its center.29

  Madison spent part of 1762 studying the English curriculum at Robertson’s school, then moved into the Latin curriculum, or the college preparatory course, for four years before departing. He could have stayed longer, but there were now six children in the Madison family, four besides James of school age, and James senior, in whom a strain of frugality ran strong, seems to have decided to economize by hiring a live-in tutor for all of them. He had a candidate for the job, the new minister at the Brick Church, and room for the tutor in the house he had just built, a structure of some twelve rooms, located a third of a mile east of the old family h
ome.30

  Compared with the great plantations of the Tidewater, the new house was modest, but rising two stories and made of brick, it was the finest dwelling in Orange County. Young James, helping carry furniture from tiny Mount Pleasant to the family’s new home, was no doubt impressed by its roominess.31 The house was also splendidly situated, as the older house had not been, commanding a magnificent view, a thirty-mile vista over fields and forests to a long stretch of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  The tutor living with the Madison family, Thomas Martin, had recently graduated from Nassau Hall of the College of New Jersey, known as Princeton University today. Together with his brother Alexander, another Nassau graduate, Thomas made the case that James should attend the New Jersey college. No doubt the brothers mentioned the school’s new president, John Witherspoon, who was, like Donald Robertson, a product of the highly esteemed University of Edinburgh. Perhaps the Martins also talked about students at Princeton opposing British taxes. At the commencement in 1765, the year that Parliament had lit the fires of colonial outrage by imposing the Stamp Act, there had been a rousing oration on liberty, a valedictory address on patriotism, and a determination by the graduating class to wear only clothing made in America.32 James Madison Sr., a decided foe of British taxation, would have been favorably impressed by such an account.

  Nassau Hall was also the least expensive university in the colonies, a fact that would not have escaped James senior’s notice. And while the College of William and Mary was the place where aspiring sons of the Virginia gentry traditionally went, there had been troubling reports from Williamsburg of rioting, drinking, and all-night card games. In later years, Madison mentioned another Williamsburg disadvantage: its Tidewater location. He had been sent to Nassau Hall, he wrote, “in preference to William and Mary, the climate of which was unhealthy for persons going from a mountainous region.”33

  • • •

  IN THE MIDDLE of a parched summer, James, eighteen years old, left the Virginia upcountry for Princeton, accompanied by the Martins and an enslaved man named Sawney, who was also eighteen. The men traveled down dusty tree-lined roads through enervating heat to Fredericksburg, where they crossed the Rappahannock. They next encountered the Potomac, where they used Hooe’s ferry to cross into Maryland. Assuming they followed the route of another traveler from about this time, they traveled a road that took them through Upper Marlboro and to the South River, where yet another ferry took them to Annapolis, a town of fewer than two hundred houses that commanded a splendid view of the Chesapeake. “The bay is twelve miles over,” one visitor noted, “and beyond it you may discern the eastern shore, so that the scene is diversified with fields, wood, and water.”34

  From Annapolis, they sailed across the Chesapeake in a northeasterly direction, landing on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and moving by land northward to New Castle, the colonial capital of Delaware, “a place of very little consideration,” according to one visitor, but it was followed by the “pretty village” of Wilmington.35 Soon the party was on a ferry across the Schuylkill, then a short ride later at Philadelphia, America’s largest city and a place full of wonder for a young man from the Virginia frontier. Mariners shouted to one another along crowded Water Street wharves. Splendid gentlemen on fine horses clattered through paved streets that were lit at night. There were coffeehouses, bookstores, a theater—establishments that made Philadelphia a New World version of the London Madison had read about in the Spectator. The city’s most impressive building, located between Fifth and Sixth streets on Chestnut, was a Georgian structure of red brick surmounted by a bell tower. For now it was known as the Pennsylvania State House, but Americans of a later time would call it Independence Hall.

  A ferry across the Delaware and a day’s ride brought Madison and his party to their destination, the small village of Princeton, which had a single road and fewer than “eighty houses, all tolerably well built,” one observer noted, “but little attention is paid them.” Eyes were drawn instead to an immense stone edifice in the center of town, Nassau Hall, where James Madison would spend most of the next three years. The Martins left him there, and as James settled in to study for his entrance exams, he might have been homesick. In a letter to Thomas Martin, he referred to “the prospect before me of three years confinement,” hastily adding that the time would be well compensated “by the advantages I hope to derive from it.”36

  In fact, the years at Princeton were some of the happiest of his life. He met young men from every part of the country and formed close friendships with a few: William Bradford, a thoughtful and well-read young man whose father was a printer in Philadelphia; Philip Freneau, the brilliant and perpetually discontented son of a Huguenot wine merchant; Hugh Brackenridge, born in Scotland, a farmer’s son, as smart as he was strong. Like the other hundred or so young men of Nassau Hall, Madison and his friends adhered to a rigid schedule. A bell rang at 5:00 a.m., and lest anyone fail to hear it, a servant followed, beating on every door. Students rushed to morning prayers, then returned to their rooms to study until breakfast at 8:00 a.m. Recitation came after breakfast and was followed by a time for study that lasted until a 1:00 p.m. dinner. From 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. was another study period, followed by evening prayer, supper, and another study period. After 9:00 p.m., students could go to bed, but, as one noted, “to go before is reproachful.”37

  Tight as the schedule was, there was time for the discussions with other students that make college memorable. After his graduation Philip Freneau, who would play an important part in Madison’s life, would write to Madison about how he missed “conversation I delight in.” Madison remembered chats of “an hour or two” with Bradford that were “recreation and release from business and books.”38

  Philip Fithian, whose time at Princeton overlapped Madison’s, fondly remembered the student hijinks of his college days: “Meeting and shoving in the dark entries; knocking at doors and going off without entering; strewing the entries in the night with greasy feathers; freezing the bell; ringing it at late hours of the night.” He also recalled “parading bad women, burning Curse-John [the privy], darting sunbeams upon the town-people … , and ogling women with the telescope.” In the case of Madison and his friends, at least some youthful energy was diverted into the American Whig Society, a debating club that John Witherspoon supported as part of his plan to encourage effective public speaking. No doubt there were many elevated orations as the Whigs took on their rivals in the Cliosophic Society, but what remains from their “paper wars” is spirited doggerel. In one bit of rhyme, Madison urges his fellow Whigs to be of good humor while the Clios manage their own doom:

  Come, noble whigs, disdain these sons

  Of screech owls, monkeys, and baboons

  Keep up you[r] minds to humorous themes

  And verdant meads and flowing streams

  Until this tribe of dunces find

  The baseness of their groveling mind

  And skulk within their dens together

  Where each one’s stench will kill his brother.39

  The paper wars captured a side of James Madison that would be often commented upon but too seldom recorded, a fondness for sharing less-than-elevated wit with his male friends.

  • • •

  THE STUDYING, COMRADESHIP, and raillery of college life did not keep students at Nassau Hall from having a sharp interest in the events of the larger world. The British had repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but colonists harbored resentment that Parliament, in which they were not represented, had felt authorized to levy a tax on everything from their newspapers to their playing cards. Great Britain had not only tried to use them as a purse but also violated their fundamental rights as Englishmen, taxing them without their consent. In 1767, when Parliament made another attempt to gather revenue with the Townshend duties, which taxed imports such as lead, paper, and tea, new anger toward Britain began to build on old, particularly in Boston, where opposition to what colonists saw as British tyranny was fierce—and
grew fiercer as the British reinforced the Boston garrison with additional regiments of redcoated soldiers. Emotions were running high on the evening of March 5, 1770, when a rowdy crowd gathered outside the Custom House and began throwing rocks and snowballs at British soldiers standing sentry. Before the night was over, the outnumbered British fired into the crowd, killing five.

  Parliament repealed the Townshend duties (except for the tax on tea) shortly after the bloody confrontation, but the Boston Massacre, as it came to be called, stood as a powerful symbol of British oppression. It also increased the fervor of those determined to pressure Great Britain by refusing to buy British products. In July, when a letter circulated at Nassau Hall that showed New York merchants trying to persuade Philadelphia businessmen to break their boycott of British goods, students donned their black gowns and, as the college bell tolled, marched to the front of the college. There, as one observer described it, they “burnt the letter by the hands of a hangman hired for the purpose, with hearty wishes that the names of all promoters of such a daring breach of faith may be blasted in the eyes of every lover of liberty and their names handed down to posterity as betrayers of their country.” Madison wrote to his father about the demonstration, noting that James senior was likely to hear of it in any case: “A distinct account … I suppose will be in the Virginia Gazette before this arrives.”40 He probably also thought that the letter burning was an extracurricular activity that James senior would approve.