Fourth President of the United States, was born in King George county, Virginia, educated at Princeton College, and was afterwards admitted a lawyer. After some experience in the local legislature, he became a member of the first Congress under the Constitution in 1789, when he gained the friendship of Washington, and took a leading part in the organisation of the United States Constitution. He next became Secretary of State (1801–8), under President Jefferson, and distinguished himself by upholding the rights of the United States as a neutral Power in the great European war. His “Examination of the Doctrines of National Law” has the reputation of being one of the ablest of existing treatises on the relative rights of neutral and belligerent Powers. In 1809 he was elected to the Presidency, which he held for two terms…. Madison was not a great war administrator, and the period of his Presidency is less to his credit than the period of his Secretaryship of State. In 1817 Madison retired from the Presidency with a name for eminent ability and spotless integrity. He spent the remainder of his days in discharging the academic duties in connection with Virginia University. His speeches, letters, papers, and essays were purchased by Congress for 30,000 dollars, and published in 1840 under the editorial superintendence of H. D. Gilpin.

Personal

  I made two speeches, the latter in reply to Madison, who is a man of sense, reading, address, and integrity, as ’tis allowed. Very much Frenchified in his politics. He speaks low, his person is little, and ordinary. He speaks decently, as to manner, and no more. His language is very pure, perspicuous, and to the point. Pardon me, if I add, that I think him a little too much of a book politician, and too timid in his politics, for prudence and caution are opposites of timidity. He is not a little of a Virginian, and thinks that state the land of promise, but is afraid of their State politics, and of his popularity there, more than I think he should be. His manner is something like John Choate’s. He is our first man.

  Mrs. Madison is a large, dignified lady, with excellent manners, obviously well practised in the ways of the world. Her conversation was somewhat formal, but on the whole appropriate to her position, and now and then amusing. I found the President more free and open than I expected, starting subjects of conversation and making remarks that sometimes savored of humor and levity. He sometimes laughed, and I was glad to hear it; but his face was always grave. He talked of religious sects and parties, and was curious to know how the cause of liberal Christianity stood with us, and if the Athanasian creed was well received by our Episcopalians. He pretty distinctly intimated to me his own regard for the Unitarian doctrines.

  James Madison succeeded Jefferson in the Presidency, serving for eight years, from March 4, 1809. He almost broke down his health by severe studies, and, although undoubtedly a horseman, as proved by his military services when the British attacked Washington during his Administration, in 1814, he was so devoted to books that during his novitiate at Princeton College, in New Jersey, he allowed himself but three hours’ sleep and devoted the day to study.

  The sentiment of veneration for Madison, entertained by all in the vicinity of my birth place, was deeply imbedded in their minds. His praises were so frequently sounded in my hearing that among my earliest recollections of public men and events are those with which his name is associated. The purity of his life was such and the prominence of his virtues so conspicuous, that this sentiment was imparted to my own mind, and became so indelibly fixed that, in my early estimate of founders of the republic, I was accustomed to place him next to Washington, esteeming him as the Father of the Constitution and Washington as the Father of the Nation. His country residence was known as Montpelier. It was situated in Orange county, Virginia, within less than thirty miles from the place of my nativity. As all travel at that time was on horse back and I was too young to visit him alone, my opportunities for seeing him were “like angels’ visits, few and far between.” There having been, however, several occasions when I could do so, I was enabled, much to my gratification, to realize for myself that his personal appearance indicated the possession of the high qualities universally assigned to him. After I had seen Jefferson, I could not avoid observing the contrast between them—Madison being below the average height, while Jefferson was tall. I was more attracted by the expression of his countenance than by that of Jefferson. It seemed to me, each time I observed him, that I had rarely seen a face in which more benignity and quiet composure was expressed. It was a complete personification of gentleness and benevolence. This, however, was altogether consistent with the prominent characteristics assigned to him by the whole community—characteristics which made him as influential in the limited circle around his home as he had been in the broader field of national affairs.

Statesman

  Mr. Madison is a character who has long been in public life; and what is very remarkable every Person seems to acknowledge his greatness. He blends together the profound politician with the Scholar. In the management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention, and tho’ he cannot be called an Orator, he is a most agreable, eloquent, and convincing Speaker. From a spirit of industry and application which he possesses in a most eminent degree, he always comes forward the best informed Man on any point in debate. The affairs of the United States, he perhaps, has the most correct knowledge of, of any Man in the Union. He has been twice a Member of Congress, and was always thought one of the ablest Members that ever sat in that Council. Mr. Madison is about 37 years of age, a Gentleman of great modesty,—with a remarkable sweet temper. He is easy and unreserved among his acquaintance, and has a most agreable style of conversation.

  Trained in these successive schools, he acquired a habit of self-possession which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind, and of his extensive information, and rendered him first of every assembly afterwards of which he became a member…. With these consummate powers, were united a pure and spotless virtue, which no calumny has ever attempted to sully. Of the powers and polish of his pen, and of the wisdom of his administration in the highest office of the nation, I need say nothing; they have spoken, and will forever speak for themselves.

  Of the public life of James Madison what could I say that is not deeply impressed upon the memory and upon the heart of every one within the sound of my voice? Of his private life, what but must meet an echoing shout of applause from every voice within this hall? Is it not, in a pre-eminent degree, by emanations from his mind that we are assembled here as the representatives of the people and States of this Union? Is it not transcendently by his exertions that we address each other here by the endearing appellation of countrymen and fellow-citizens?

  I entirely concur with you in your estimate of Mr. Madison,—his private virtues, his extraordinary talents, his comprehensive and statesmanlike views. To him and Hamilton, I think, we are mainly indebted for the Constitution of the United States, and in wisdom I have long been accustomed to place him before Jefferson. You and I know something more of each of them in trying times, than the common politicians of our day can possibly arrive at. I wish some one who was perfectly fitted for the task, would write a full and accurate biography of Madison. I fear that it can hardly be done now; for the men who best appreciated his excellences have nearly all passed away. What shadows we are!

  From the leading agency of Mr. Madison in the initiation, conduct, and consummation of this great organic change, the history of his public life becomes necessarily a history of the Constitution of the United States, and under a form, which, combining a concrete narrative of individual exertions and individual opinions with the more abstract process of national deliberations, may impart to the latter a livelier and more attractive interest.

  His was not a character so thoroughly and harmoniously constituted and developed as Washington’s. He, too, concealed the depth of his ambition under a plain and modest exterior. When it or his over-sensitiveness was wounded, he, too, could be unjust to his opponents. The violence with which the party struggle was conducted by degrees carried him, also, so far away that he played a more covert game than can be entirely justified by the excuse of political necessity. And when it was a question of opposing a measure in too great conflict with his own party programme, he could descend to the letter, and to petty quibbling, if he could not give his attack the necessary energy from the higher standpoint of the statesman. Spite of this, however, there was nothing of the demagogue about him. He is a purely constituted character, spite of the fact that his moral principles did not so unconditionally govern him as to leave his judgment entirely uninfluenced by his desires. It cannot be charged that he ever consciously approached the constitution with the intention of discovering in it a word which he might make to serve his purposes by dialectical legerdemain.

  He is usually and most justly regarded as a man of great amiability of character; of unquestionable integrity in all the purely personal relations of life; of more than ordinary intellectual ability of a solid, though not brilliant, quality; and a diligent student of the science of government, the practice of which he made a profession. But he was better fitted by nature for a legislator than for executive office, and his fame would have been more spotless, though his position would have been less exalted, had his life been exclusively devoted to that branch of government for which he was best fitted. It was not merely that for the sake of the Presidency he plunged the country into an unnecessary war; but when it was on his hands he neither knew what to do with it himself or how to choose the right men who did know.

  Madison’s political career is, in some ways, a very curious one, and can be summed up in very few words. By nature and reason he was a Federalist and a nationalist. By circumstances he became a Democrat, and at one time a separatist. He was entirely faithful to the party which he espoused, but he was not in full and entire sympathy with it. The result was, that he founded no school and had no personal following. The party which he led honored and trusted him, and it is to their honor and credit that they did so. But they neither loved him nor were in sympathy with him. The party with which he really sympathized opposed him throughout his life. Politically speaking, he was a lonely man, and that loneliness has continued until to-day. No party has placed him among its heroes for stated or occasional worship. He seems to stand aloof in history as he did in life, respected and honored by all, loved and followed by none. With such a nature as Madison’s it could not well be otherwise, and his career was possible only to a man as cold, as conscientious, and as liberal as he was. He was a poor partisan, but a great and useful statesman. He did some unworthy things, he made mistakes, like the rest of humanity, but his abilities and his character are an honor to his country and to his State. Statues may not rise to him in the marketplace, political parties may not enshrine him as a patron saint, but by his labors in the establishment of the government and the Constitution of the United States, and by a pure and dignified character and career, he has built himself a monument more enduring than any of brass or marble.

  By American writers he is invested with the highest mental gifts. Yet the impression which he makes on the ordinary reader is rather that of a cultivated and somewhat prim mediocrity, though combined with a clear understanding, a scientific knowledge of politics, statesmanlike training, and a surefooted ambition.

General

  Although we attach very great value to the Madison papers, we are by no means disposed to go the length of Mr. Robbins, the Senator from Rhode Island, who in his place described them as “the most valuable work that has appeared since the days when Bacon gave to the world his Novum Organum.” This is a fair specimen of the magniloquence for which this country is so remarkable, and which has its focus in the Congress of the United States. It is altogether too long a period of time to look back upon, and too many profound men and brilliant geniuses have lived and written in the interval, for us to like to venture upon such a comparison. Besides, it appears to us to be doing great injustice to the work and its author, to take it up in this tone. It is neither a work of genius, nor does it treat very profoundly of any department of human knowledge. Its value, so far as we can understand, is of a peculiar and somewhat unique character. It is the record of an extraordinary coincidence, in the same assembly, of men of practical skill, legislative talent, and disinterested purposes, such as the world had not often seen before, and such as it may never see again…. The Madison Papers will scarcely teach the inquirer after truth any new and marvellous axioms in the science of government, so much as the application of old and established ones to the peculiar condition of a people already organized into separate communities, and seeking no more than for certain definite objects, expected to be gained thereby, to engraft upon their established system a few features of consolidation.

  Madison lacked neither ability nor inclination for speculative inquiries, and had a mind capable of enforcing the application of whatever principles he espoused. Yet his calm good sense, and the tact with which he could adapt theory to practice, were no less among his prominent characteristics.

  The name of Madison is identified with the political literature of the country, beyond the share which his official state papers must claim, by his defence of the Constitution in the Federalist, and his faithful history of the Debates in the great Assembly which gave bounds and authority to our national government. In these he will be remembered by the political student in the library, when the eye is withdrawn from the public acts of his administration.

  Madison’s claims to literary distinction are neither transcendent nor contemptible. He is entitled to be remembered as having had a share in the form, as well as the matter, of the Declaration of Independence, of the Constitution, and of Washington’s retiring address.

  “The Federalist,” their joint production, is probably the greatest treatise of political science that has ever appeared in the world, at once the most practical and the most profound. The evenness with which the merits of this work are shared between Madison and Hamilton, is well illustrated by the fact that it is not always easy to distinguish between the two, so that there has been considerable controversy as to the number of papers contributed by each. According to Madison’s own memorandum, he was the author of twenty-nine of the papers, while fifty-one were written by Hamilton, and five by Jay. The question is not of great importance. Very probably Mr. Madison would have had a larger share in the work had he not been obliged, in March, 1788, to return to Virginia, in order to take part in the state convention for deciding upon the ratification of the constitution.

  Judge Story once said that to James Madison and Alexander Hamilton we were mainly indebted for the Constitution of the United States. It is curious that to Madison we are also mainly indebted for those Virginia “Resolutions of ’98,” which have been used to justify nullification and secession. With all his mental ability, Madison had not much original force of nature. He leaned now to Hamilton, now to Jefferson, and at last fell permanently under the influence of the genius of the latter. He was lacking in that grand moral and intellectual impulse, underlying mere knowledge and logic, which distinguishes the man who reasons from the mere reasoner. His character was not on a level with his talents and acquirements; his much-vaunted moderation came from the absence rather than from the control of passion: and his understanding, though broad, was somewhat mechanical in its operations, and had no foundation in a corresponding breath of nature. The “Resolutions of ’98,” which Southern Democrats came gradually to consider as of equal authority with the Constitution, were originally devised for transient party purpose…. The “Resolutions of ’98” must be considered an important portion of our national literature, for they were exultingly adduced as the logical justification of the gigantic rebellion of 1861. It is rare, even in the history of political factions, that a string of cunningly written resolves, designed to meet a mere party emergency, should thus cost a nation thousands of millions of treasure and hundred of thousands of lives.

  The time and purpose hardly favored the production of a calm and dispassionate treatise on government, which “The Federalist” certainly is not; but it contains, despite its lack of system, able discussions of many questions of national life and political science. The closing words of Number XIV., printed in the New York Packet, November 30, 1787, and known to be one of Madison’s contributions, illustrate the rhetorical and literary characteristics of the work at their best. This is Johnsonian English, already feeling the breath of a fresher day, and stirring with the intense purpose which pushed the Americans forward.

  His style lacks imaginative charm; it is high-sounding and mechanical and sometimes lacking in clearness. But there is a grave and well-considered purpose apparent in many of his papers; and upon the audience he addressed they produced a weighty effect.

  Madison’s notes on the debates of the Congress of the Confederation and of the Federal Convention are invaluable and almost unique records of these critical episodes.