James Madison: The Quiet Founder Who Built a Nation

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habeeb and this is our American stories, our fourth President. James Madison is often considered a forgotten founder, and that’s a shame, as his words have echoed through the ages. After all, he was the man who wrote the sentence quote if men were angels, no government would be necessary unquote, and the Bill of Rights. He’s the author of the Bill of Rights too. Chances are he still affects your life today. Here to tell the story of Madison and his partnerships that changed America is David O. Stewart, author of Madison’s Gift. We’d like to thank the National Archives for allowing us access to this audio.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Let’s get into the story.

00:00:53
Speaker 3: He was so central to the nation’s founding, more central to the founding of the nation than anyone else other than George Washington. And if you look at the list of his achievements you get a feel for this. I think, first, of course, is the calling of the Constitutional Convention, the writing of the Constitution at that convention, the Federalist Papers which were written to support the ratification of the Constitution.

00:01:18
Speaker 4: He was the leading member of the First Congress.

00:01:21
Speaker 3: He wrote the Bill of Rights and secured their adoption I’m only halfway through my list yet. He was co founder of the first American political party. In the pivotal election of eighteen hundred, he was the co architect of the transfer of government from the Federalist Party of John Adams to Thomas Jefferson as leader of the Republicans. It’s many times said that the true test of a representative government is if you can have a peaceful transfer of power between contending parties. And we did achieve that in eighteen hundred. That’s when we came of age. He was Secretary of State for the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation. He was our first wartime president through the War of eighteen twelve, not always a glorious chapter in our history, but one that was ended successfully enough.

00:02:07
Speaker 4: I suppose it’s the best way to say it.

00:02:10
Speaker 3: And he was perhaps our only two term president who had a better second term than first term. Madison when he left office was really acclaimed. He ended up being, of all of our presidents, the president for whom the most cities, counties, and municipalities are named, more even than Washington or Franklin. So we have this tremendous list of achievements. But then there is the undeniable fact that Madison is often ignored why he was short, He was skinny, He had a soft voice, and in rooms that were filled with noisy people like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, or with large and charismatic men like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, Madison.

00:03:01
Speaker 4: Was pretty easy to miss.

00:03:04
Speaker 3: He was different from most great leaders. We think of great leaders most often as men who have strong streaks of narcissism. They need to be at the front of the parade. They prefer to be on a white horse. They crave recognition and acclaim. Madison had none of those qualities. He disliked public events. He never became comfortable at them. At his first inaugural ball, this is the pinnacle of his political career. He has become President of the United States, a nation he did so much to found. Madison says, thank you very much, but I would rather be home in bed. He was a man who cared about results, not applause, about making the American experiment in self government to success. His greatest achievements were really the fruit of partnerships. It was almost as though he had taken what today would be called a modern personality assessment, the sort of thing organization like their people to do and turn them into extroverts. Introverts isgjes or whatever, And that Madison was able to conclude that he was in fact short and skinny, and he had a soft voice, and he had zero charisma. But if he was doing an honest self assessment, he would have noticed some real powerful positives. He was smarter than almost anybody he met.

00:04:29
Speaker 5: He had a rare appetite for hard work.

00:04:32
Speaker 3: He had a gift for making contact and connecting with people, an extraordinary political judgment and foresight. So why not take those gifts and marry them to someone else who has the gifts he doesn’t have. Now, we don’t know that Madison actually did that, made such an assessment, stared at the mirror.

00:04:55
Speaker 4: For the requisite period of seconds.

00:04:59
Speaker 3: He was a man, man who understood the power of partnership, and they were formed with very different people. Alexander Hamilton a very different character. Hamilton was flashy, he was charismatic. He was effectively orphaned at age thirteen. He came from nothing, had to make his own way in the world. Madison, by contrast, was a fortunate son, the inheritor of a great estate, the eldest son of a man who owned five thousand acres of land. He never had his own home until he was forty three. He lived with his mom until he was seventy eight. Dolly was very tolerant. But they recognized something in each other when they first met each other as the two youngest men serving in the Confederation Congress. This is in seventeen eighty three, when we’re still operating under the Articles of Confederation. I think they recognized in each other first great intelligence, but also we shared impatience to make the United States a great nation and a true nation, which in seventeen eighty three we really weren’t. There was much talk and serious talk we should simply form three nations, New England and the Middle States, and the South would be separate nations, sort of like Europe, maybe even a fourth nation on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. Hamilton, who took a backseat to nobody for impatience, had first decreed the need to have a national convention to rewrite the Articles of Confederation before the articles had even been adopted.

00:06:34
Speaker 4: But Madison came.

00:06:35
Speaker 3: Along after a couple of years and agreed with him that that was the only practical way to deal with the problems that the country was having. They collaborated in a campaign to call the Constitutional Convention in the summer of seventeen eighty seven, and then they collaborated again, most importantly in the campaign to ratify the Constitution. We often forget what a close struggle that was. They jointly wrote the Federalist Page. Papers wrote them as a propaganda piece, but they’ve endured as really the finest writing about political philosophy that any Americans have ever produced. And then they went out as practical politicians and each won ratification in their conventions Madison in Virginia and Hamilton and New York. The second partner is, of course George Washington. He was the great man of America. He had won the Revolutionary War. There’s a wonderful anecdote that when King George the Third heard that Washington, after winning the war, had resigned his commission and gone back to be a farmer at Mount Vernon, the King.

00:07:39
Speaker 5: Had said, if that’s true, he’s the greatest.

00:07:41
Speaker 4: Man in the world.

00:07:43
Speaker 3: And Washington had won extraordinary trust of every American. He was the trump card of American politics. Madison could see that, and he could see that if he was an ally of George Washington, the things he wanted to get done could get done better. Washington was the indispensable man, so Madison made himself the indispensable man to the indispensable man. When Washington wanted legislation through the Virginia Assembly, Madison would make it happen.

00:08:12
Speaker 4: He would be the leader.

00:08:13
Speaker 3: If he needed legislation through Congress, the Confederation Congress, Madison would make that happen too. And over a period of five years, Madison became Washington’s closest political confidant. He spent days at Mount Vernon just closeted with the General Washington’s diary, and he always kept a diary. His whole life, would simply say, spent today in conversation with mister Madison. Indeed, during the First Congress, Madison is often referred to as having served as Washington’s Prime Minister. Their most important achievement, most durable achievement, I think, was.

00:08:51
Speaker 4: The Bill of Rights.

00:08:52
Speaker 3: There’s a wonderful moment in Washington’s first administration when he’s just coming to office. He needs an inaugural address, asks Madison to write him an inaugural to address which is done, and it asks for only one thing, a Bill of Rights constitutional amendments to protect individual rights. Congress wants to write an answer to Washington as an a gesture of respect, so they asked Madison to write the answer. Well, Washington’s a little flustered, so he wants to write a courteous reply, so he asks Madison to write the reply.

00:09:27
Speaker 4: The early government was in.

00:09:28
Speaker 3: Many ways of conversation among Madison, but the Bill of Rights comes the closest to being Madison’s solo achievement.

00:09:38
Speaker 5: He wrote them, he got.

00:09:39
Speaker 3: Them through Congress, he made it happen. But he also made it happen with Washington’s essential support.

00:09:46
Speaker 1: When we come back more of the life of James Madison, here on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories and the story of James Madison and the partnerships he forged that changed America.

00:10:27
Speaker 2: Let’s return to the story. Here again is David O. Stewart.

00:10:35
Speaker 3: Now the third figure is Thomas Jefferson, his soulmate. They came from the same background. They grew up thirty miles apart. Both from the same background. Jefferson inherited his three thousand acres when he was fourteen, not when he was forty nine.

00:10:51
Speaker 4: That was their biggest difference.

00:10:55
Speaker 3: They were both bookworms, both interested in everything, both knew something about almost everything.

00:11:00
Speaker 4: Their correspondence to each other.

00:11:02
Speaker 3: Is a delight if they write about everything science, philosophy, animals, crops, and politics. Jefferson was more the visionary. He was not good on details. Madison had a very analytical mind and was extremely good at that sort of thing. And Jefferson adopted a practice through his career of when he would have an interesting idea that excited him, he would first run it by Madison. And Madison was not shy about saying, usually in a very polite way, that’s a wonderful idea, but have you thought about these nine problems with it? And Jefferson would take his advice. They both became very disenchanted with Hamilton’s financial system.

00:11:50
Speaker 5: This is the great switch.

00:11:53
Speaker 3: Madison enters Congress as George Washington’s Prime Minister, but after a year and then some.

00:12:01
Speaker 5: He discovers that the Secretary of the Treasury.

00:12:03
Speaker 3: Has a financial program that he can’t support, and so Madison goes into opposition with Jefferson in order to oppose to Hamiltonian policy, which they found unduly centralized the government. They thought it introduced financial instability. We had a number of financial panics under the Hamiltonian system. They had to create a political vehicle for this opposition, and although they both despised partisan politics, they created our first political party. I think they would both be appalled to be remembered for it, but they did it very assiduously and very well dominated American politics for the next six decades. Now, Monroe was a bit of a revelation to me. I had not studied him much. I was really discouraged at first to discover just how many people who were his contemporaries, and felt it necessary to recall he really was a little dim. This was not what I was looking for. He was a military type. He had been a soldier as a very young man in the Revolution. He always had a military bearing. He was a strapping six foot or charismatic, not an intellectual. His letters with Madison are friendly, they’re warm, they’re collegial. He was a very canny politician. But we don’t get a lot of political philosophy. This is not what James Monroe did they were sometimes rivals. Indeed, they ran against each other in the first election for Congress in seventeen eighty nine. They are the only future presidents whoever opposed each other for a lower office. It was a bit of jerrymandering. Patrick Henry had actually set it up so Madison would have to run against Monroe. Henry had a real vendetta against Madison, who was hoping to get him beaten. Madison won fairly handily, but then nearly twenty years later on Madison as a candidate for president, Monroe stands as a candidate against him, and actually is on the ballot in eighteen oh eight. He’s not a serious candidate, but it was a measure that they had had a serious falling out after many years of close relationship. And indeed they didn’t speak for two years or have any contact at all. But Madison reached a point as president in his first administration when he thought it was essential that the United States go to war with Britain. Britain had been seizing our ships at sea for years. They had been taking our sailors and pressing them into the British navy, and Madison simply thought, for our own self, esteem for our own respectability as a nation. We could no longer just take it. But Madison was not a man anybody would think of as a military sort. He needed somebody to put a little steel into his administration, and Monroe was the perfect ca character. He had great experience in Europe as well in credibility as a diplomat. He had negotiated the Louisiana purchase, so he reached out to Monroe. They were able to patch up their differences. He brought Monroe into his administration as Secretary of State, where he was an essential pillar of.

00:15:18
Speaker 4: The government through the war.

00:15:20
Speaker 3: In fact, for periods of the war he served as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War simultaneously, a fairly neat trick. Now his final partner is the one I want to talk about most and in many ways the most interesting one, and that’s.

00:15:39
Speaker 4: Dolly, of course, his wife of forty two years. She was the star.

00:15:44
Speaker 3: Madison would never be the star. It just wasn’t in his skill set. She brought charisma in warmth, great charm well. Madison hated the spotlight. Dolly blew in the spotlight.

00:16:01
Speaker 4: She loved it. She was a natural.

00:16:03
Speaker 5: She started out in life as Dolly.

00:16:05
Speaker 3: Pained and like James, she grew up on a southern plantation, although it was a significant difference.

00:16:13
Speaker 5: She was raised a Quaker on instruction for the Quaker hierarchy.

00:16:17
Speaker 3: When she was a young teenager, her father sold the family slaves and moved to Philadelphia and tried to start a business there. His business failed, but Dolly flourished. She was tall for the time. She had an hourglass figure, a mischievous smile. You could sometimes see it in her images, almost all of them. Black hair, creamy complexion, blue eyes. Men liked her a lot, and I always like to point out that say what she will about James Madison’s small stature is receding hairline, his social reserve and awkwardness. Of all the founders, he had the hottest wife.

00:16:58
Speaker 5: Now. Dolly married a Quake lawyer. She had a first marriage.

00:17:02
Speaker 3: And had two sons with him, but her husband and one son died in a yellow fever epidemic in seventeen ninety three. As a single mother, she was in great demand. She did not want for suitors at all, but one of the most ardent was James Madison, and the story is that he saw her either on the street or at some social event, and essentially said who is that woman, and learned how she was and arranged for his discovered that his good friend from college, Aaron Burr, was renting a room from her mother, so he arranged for Aaron Burr to introduce them, and he was seventeen years older. That was not viewed as a great obstacle in those days. I’m not sure it is today either. And on the occasion of that first meeting, I love the note that Dolly sent to a friend that afternoon, which reveals both her playful nature and her sophistication, because she writes to her friend that she is going to meet the great little Madison.

00:18:03
Speaker 4: She really captures him because.

00:18:06
Speaker 3: Of course he is short, he’s balding, but he also was great, who was wealthy, he was kind, he was intelligent and a Jane Austin era, when the match you made was so important for a woman’s life, you could do a great deal worse than James Madison.

00:18:23
Speaker 2: And you’ve been listening to David O.

00:18:25
Speaker 1: Stewart, author of Madison’s Gift, telling one heck of a story about James Madison, and my goodness, that partnership between Jefferson and Madison. And by the way, they were soulmates. They grew up the same way, very close to one another. I went to the University of Virginia School of Law, and Jefferson’s home there it is up in Monticello on the hill.

00:18:46
Speaker 2: Madison’s home not much farther away.

00:18:50
Speaker 1: And there they were together forming America’s first political party because of their opposition to Hamilton’s financial vision for am Maria and that centralization it required. Thus formed the Republican Party, and thus formed the next chapter in Madison’s life. More of the story of James Madison here on our American stories, and we returned to our American stories and the final portion of our story on James Madison and the partnerships he forged with others that changed this country. When we last left off, David O. Stewart was telling us the story of Madison’s most important partnership, one he had with his vivacious wife Dollar.

00:19:58
Speaker 2: Let’s return to the story.

00:20:00
Speaker 3: You know, the political philosophers have sort of drained the life out of him. To some extent, it could be flirtatious. His few letters to Dolly, they were very rarely apart, but they did write some letters to her.

00:20:12
Speaker 5: They’re warm and loving long after the first.

00:20:15
Speaker 4: Infatuation would have cooled.

00:20:18
Speaker 3: Although the Madisons never had children of their own and are sometimes imagined as this semi.

00:20:23
Speaker 5: Sad, childless couple, they had.

00:20:26
Speaker 3: Dozens of nieces and nephews, upwards of fifty as near as I can tell, and they were often with them for weeks on end, sometimes months. Dolly would always see that the young ladies were introduced to suitable potential matches. It’s also often missed that the Madisons were a lot of fun in small groups. James was quick with a quip and humorous anecdote. Dolly was always vivacious and engaging. A niece called her a foe to dullness. One of the entertaining stories is apparently Dolly and James would run races against each other.

00:21:00
Speaker 5: It was in their retirement, so they weren’t looking for a long.

00:21:02
Speaker 3: Racetrack, but it gives you a feel for the spirit they had with each other. Indeed, there is an account that in retirement Dolly, who was always a bit taller than James and became a good bit wider than James, would load him on her back and carry him around the mansion, but I want to emphasize that their fun had a purpose. Through James’s eight years as Secretary of State and aid as president, Dolly set a bright social tone. She always sought out the most awkward, uncomfortable person in the room to put him or her at their ease. She understood the need to provide glamour and charisma to the government, which again was not something James could do. She was talled at the time sometimes the Lady Presidentess.

00:21:53
Speaker 4: We didn’t use the term first lady. Yet.

00:21:55
Speaker 3: She had a famous exchange with Henry Claig, which may have been apocryphal, and he was a good friend of hers. They played cards together, they took snuff together, and he is reported once to have said, everyone loves missus Madison, and she of course responded, that’s because missus Madison loves everybody. And it wasn’t strictly speaking true. She actually was better at keeping a grudge than James was, but it.

00:22:22
Speaker 5: Seemed to be true.

00:22:24
Speaker 3: And as we know, on politics, that’s far more important than what is true. The Madison’s freely mixed foreigners and federalists and Republicans, producing a social swirl that allowed the sinews of policy and politics to form in an informal setting. Sometimes that’s a terribly valuable opportunity. Office seekers would come to Dolly and ask her to intercede with the president to get jobs, and as near as we can.

00:22:53
Speaker 4: Tell, she was pretty good at it.

00:22:54
Speaker 3: In fact, she really was a political partner, always a loyal and sure footage, one who not only warmed his private life but also helped him forge a new Republican.

00:23:05
Speaker 4: Style for the nation.

00:23:07
Speaker 3: Indeed, the losing Federalist candidate in eighteen o eight claimed that he had lost to mister and missus Madison. I might have had a better chance had I faced mister Madison alone. Now, many of you will recall Dolly’s shining moment during the War of eighteen twelve, which came actually on James’s.

00:23:27
Speaker 5: Worst day, probably of his entire career.

00:23:32
Speaker 3: In late August of eighteen fourteen, the British Army had been disembarked from ships in the Chesapeake Bay marched on Washington. There was a very brief skirmish at Bladensburg, sometimes referred to at the time as the Bladensburg Races because our militia ran so quickly.

00:23:51
Speaker 4: Madison had actually gone to.

00:23:52
Speaker 5: The battlefield to try to rally the troops.

00:23:54
Speaker 3: And inspire them. But it, just as I said, was not something he was going to be able to do. Militia wasn’t really going to ever be inspired anyway. So the British marched into Washington and they burned the public buildings.

00:24:11
Speaker 4: But there was a shining moment.

00:24:14
Speaker 5: Which is right before the British got there.

00:24:16
Speaker 3: Dolly remembered to take down the portrait of George Washington. We were a republic, we were not a monarchy. We didn’t have crown jewels, but we did cherish the memory of George Washington. And this was a presence of mind, a spirit which was much valued through the country. James Madison was reviled by many of his countrymen after the burning of Washington’s public buildings.

00:24:43
Speaker 5: He was called the coward repeatedly, but people kept a.

00:24:47
Speaker 3: Warm spot in their hearts for Dolly. Now their retirement at Montpelier was generally a happy one. James lived for almost twenty years in retirement. He lived to be eighty five. From a fellow who was sick and much of his life, it was a surprise to him. In his final years, James became increasingly decrepit. He spent his days in his dressing gown and nightcap, but his mind remained bright, his intellect sharp. These years were hard on Dolly. She had to take care of them all the time. She wrote once that his hands and fingers are still so swelled and sore as to be nearly useless.

00:25:27
Speaker 4: But I lend him mine. He could always be happy.

00:25:33
Speaker 3: With ideas, or at least occupied with ideas and newspapers and books. She needed people, and it was hard for her to be isolated without them. When he died in eighteen thirty six at the age of eighty five, she moved back to Washington City and re entered the social world, and she lived long enough to have her photograph taken in the Zachary Taylor administration. Her reentry into Washington’s social life was greatly applauded. She had a wonderful time for a few years, but then the money ran out. She had many gifts, but thrift was not among them. Financial management was not among them. She had her own son, Madison’s stepson, who was a bit of a wastrel and burned up a lot of money too. She ended up in a sort of genteel poverty, with only a couple of slaves who were sold.

00:26:23
Speaker 4: Upon her death.

00:26:26
Speaker 3: Now having held forth on two of Madison’s productive partnerships, or just one of them, actually, I want to close with a note about Madison himself. I do think he was able to form these partnerships because of who he was. He was not the dry creature of intellect that we sometimes think of. He was referred to by a contemporary as I’ve never seen so much mind in so little matter. But he had a genuineness and an integrity and open heartedness. These qualities, for me, shine through in the way he received the news of the Treaty of Ghent, which is the agreement that ended the War of eighteen twelve. As I said, he pushed the nation into war, and it didn’t go terribly well much of the time. It’s February thirteen, eighteen fifteen. He’s actually living an Octagon House, which still stands over on Seventeenth Street.

00:27:20
Speaker 5: The rumor arrives that the treaty has.

00:27:22
Speaker 3: Been signed with Britain, and a Pennsylvania senator rushes to Octagon House to ask Madison if it’s true.

00:27:29
Speaker 4: The senator found the house dark.

00:27:31
Speaker 3: The President sitting solitary in his parlor, in perfect tranquility, not even a servant in waiting. The Senator asked if the rumor was true. Madison bade him sit down. I will tell you all I know, he said, then confirmed that he thought there was peace, but he had no official confirmation. The Senator recalled with some wonder, but he called the President’s self command on the occasion and greatness of mind. The war of eighteen twelve truly had been mister Madison’s war. As his opponents called it, it was about principles, not gain. It was fought with a quiet tenacity, sometimes ineptley, and with endless tolerance of those who opposed it.

00:28:18
Speaker 4: As a friend of Madison’s.

00:28:19
Speaker 3: Wrote years later, the war had been conducted in perfect keeping with the character of the President, of whom it may be said that no one had to a greater extent firmness, mildness, and self possession. And when peace came, Madison welcomed it in a darkened house, alone with his thoughts and.

00:28:39
Speaker 2: A special thanks to David O.

00:28:41
Speaker 1: Stewart, author of Madison’s Gift, and to the US National Archives for allowing us.

00:28:47
Speaker 2: Access to this speech. He gave there, and we love doing this.

00:28:52
Speaker 1: We love taking speeches made in the citadels of learning here in America and bringing him to the wider public.

00:29:00
Speaker 2: And my goodness, the story you heard about all of these.

00:29:03
Speaker 1: Partnerships, starting with Hamilton moving to Jefferson, then to Monroe, and then that last partnership, Dolly, And my goodness, what’s storytelling. I could just picture in my mind this playful, beautiful woman hauling her husband on her back because she was bigger than him, and just running around just for some levity, just for some fun. She brought elegance and style and fun to the administration. Things her husband lacked, but things she had. Attributes she had in bounty. And when her husband died, she was lonely and reintroduced herself to greater society and had the foresight to save that magnificent portrait of Washington as the British were sacking and burning.

00:29:52
Speaker 2: Washington, DC.

00:29:53
Speaker 1: The story of James Madison in the end, the story of the nation’s founding.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: Here are now American stories