James Madison

He came home from Princeton convinced he was dying. Madison had finished the three-year course in two, sitting up most of the night to do it, then stayed on to read Hebrew and returned to Montpelier in 1772 with a nervous complaint he called sudden attacks, something like epilepsy, that he expected would kill him young. He trained for no profession. When the war came he took a militia commission and never used it. He read instead, in a house kept by enslaved labor on land he had not earned, and turned 25 in a colony coming apart. Virginia sent him to its convention in 1776. He lost the seat the next year for refusing to buy voters whiskey.

Eight years, 1809 to 1817, and one war. He asked Congress for a declaration against Britain in June 1812, watched his generals fail on the Canadian border, and rode out to Bladensburg in August 1814 to see the militia break — the only sitting president ever to come under enemy fire in the field. He returned to a burned capital and a country that decided it had won. The war, the peace and the constitutional quarrel underneath them are BriefHistory's subject. What follows is the man the office was built around.

Madison enslaved roughly 100 people at Montpelier and freed none of them in his will. In 1783 he took a young man named Billey north to Philadelphia, decided he had been too exposed to free ideas to be brought back to Virginia, and sold him into a seven-year indenture rather than free him outright. Late in life Madison served as president of the American Colonization Society, which held that free Black Americans should be resettled in Africa, and he could not persuade the people he owned to take freedom on those terms. He was also going broke. To cover the gambling debts of his stepson John Payne Todd he sold land in Kentucky and mortgaged half of Montpelier. Everything he had, the people included, passed to Dolley.

He died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836, leaving a widow and an estate that could not cover its debts. Dolley sold his convention notes to Congress and they were published in 1840, 53 years after he took them down — the record on which nearly every argument about original meaning has been fought since. She sold Montpelier itself in 1844, and the enslaved families who had lived there for six generations were scattered. The du Ponts bought the house in 1901 and gave it to the National Trust in 1983. In 2017 Montpelier opened The Mere Distinction of Colour, built with descendants of the people Madison owned. By 2022 they held 14 of the 25 seats on its board.

James Madison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments article
  The argument that killed Virginia's church tax 1785
• The Virginia Plan other
  Handed to the convention on its first working day 1787
• The Federalist essays book
  He wrote 29 of the 85 1788
• Bill of Rights law
  Drafted and steered through the First Congress 1791
• Virginia Resolutions other
  Written against the Alien and Sedition Acts and quoted for a century afterward by people he disagreed with 1798
• Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 book
  Withheld for 50 years and published four years after his death 1840

• March 16, 1751 aged 0 Born at Belle Grove on the Rappahannock His mother's family home. The date is March 5, 1750 on the old calendar Virginia was still using.
• 1771 aged ~20 Finishes the College of New Jersey in two years and stays on to study Hebrew He came home believing the effort had ruined his health.
• 1777 aged ~26 Loses his seat in the Virginia assembly for refusing to treat voters to whiskey
• September 15, 1794 aged 43 Marries Dolley Payne Todd, a widow of 26 Aaron Burr made the introduction. She was expelled from the Quakers for marrying outside the faith.
• March 4, 1809 aged 57 Takes the oath as the fourth president
• August 24, 1814 aged 63 Rides to Bladensburg and watches the American line collapse British troops burned the Capitol and the President's House that night.
• 1826 aged ~75 Succeeds Jefferson as rector of the University of Virginia He held the post until 1834.
• June 28, 1836 aged 85 Dies at Montpelier at 85 The last of the men who signed the Constitution.

• Dolley Madison 1768–1849
  First Lady who built the political salon of early Washington and saved the Washington portrait in 1814. married to
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. co-author then rival
• John Jay 1745–1829
  Founding Father, diplomat, Federalist Papers co-author, and first chief justice who helped construct the early republic. co-author
• Aaron Burr 1756–1836
  Third vice president who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason. introduced him to his wife
• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. pushed him toward war