About James Madison

James Madison: The Man Who Loved Books
By Lynne Cheney

Mrs. Cheney talks to students at Montpelier, James Madison's home. White House Photo by Tina Hager

By the time James Madison, our fourth president, moved into the White House in 1809, he had already changed the course of history. Rightly known as the father of our Constitution, he was the prime mover behind that magnificent document as well as the primary author of the Bill of Rights.

The knowledge that enabled these achievements came in large part from reading, an occupation to which Madison dedicated himself from his youngest years. Even as a boy, he knew the power of the printed word to enlarge experience. He saw how books could teach about times and places that one could otherwise never know.

During his college years, spent at Princeton, Madison encountered more books that he had ever seen before and well-trained minds to test himself against. He took a double class load and completed the required course of study in two years. He managed to find an excuse to stay an extra six months, but finally, in 1772, at age twenty-one, he returned home.

Back in Virginia, he fell into deep depression. Some scholars speculate that it was brought on by a seizure, one that Madison thought was epileptic. Others suggest he was troubled by the death of a college friend. It may also have happened that he had trouble decompressing after Princeton. What use were his studies in history and philosophy, he may have asked himself as he considered his family’s well-managed farm. What spur was there to probe deeper and learn more?

The American Revolution delivered him by involving him in an all-absorbing cause. He became a politician, though a more unlikely one is hard to imagine. He was small, no more than five and a half feet tall. He was shy and guarded around strangers. He was not a brilliant orator. But what he lacked in charisma, he made up for in brainpower--and in his willingness to study and prepare.

Once independence was won and the young country began to take stock of itself, many thoughtful people concluded that the Articles of Confederation did not provide a strong enough national government. As early as 1783, Madison began an intensive course of reading to assess the alternatives. He implored his friend Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, to send him books. Jefferson responded by sending more than two hundred volumes across the Atlantic.

Madison read Plutarch, Polybius, and Montesquieu. He studied ancient governments and modern ones, and he pondered the lessons they taught: a republic was usually small, highly constricted in the area it covered. A republic was usually fragile, easy to tip over into despotism.

By the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Madison had arrived at a plan for a republic that might both extend and endure. His theories took form in the Virginia Resolves, the plan that would become the basis for the convention’s deliberations. Madison thus shaped the agenda for the delegates and then went on to steer their debates, speaking more than 160 times, “always...the best informed man at any point,” one of this fellow delegates wrote.

Madison’s learning showed itself again after the Constitution had been signed and sent to the states for ratification. Working with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay and writing at breakneck speed, Madison authored more than two dozen of The Federalist essays. Arguing for the Constitution, he helped to produce the most superb political commentary ever written on this continent--and to insure the Constitution’s ratification. He then went on to propose amendments to the Constitution enumerating freedoms that government should not abridge. And thus we have the Bill of Rights.

Douglass Adair, a scholar of the founding period, once called the course of study that Madison undertook before the Constitutional Convention “probably the most fruitful piece of scholarly research ever carried out by an American.” It is a fair assessment, a modest one even. The Constitution, bearing Madison’s mark more than any other, was crucial not just to this country, but to the history of the world. Nation after nation would use our Constitution as a model. Nation after nation would look to the freedom that our Constitution makes possible for inspiration in their own struggles for liberty.

The astonishing thing about Madison’s influence is that he exercised it without ever traveling very far from where he was born. He never saw Europe. He never saw most of this continent. If one were to draw a rectangle six or seven hundred miles long and four or five hundred miles wide, it would encompass entirely the area of which Madison had first-hand knowledge.

Within that rectangle, he was born, lived, and died. And from within it, using books as his lever, he managed to move the world.