James Madison

As the fourth former president in American history, Madison did what his predecessors had done—he lived at home and received visitors. Like Washington and Jefferson, he was well suited, by his upbringing and his class, for the role. A Virginia gentleman’s home was a hearth and a stage, open to family, neighbors, friends—and, in the case of presidents’ homes, also the patriotic and the curious. Dolley ran the show at Montpelier with her accustomed panache, and her macaw provided color and excitement (it tended to bite people). But the main attraction was Madison. He was a sight, like the Natural Bridge. One young male visitor to Montpelier expressed the universal view, despite the distractions of the young women who were visiting along with him. “The truth is pretty girls I can find plenty of, I could see but one Mr. Madison.”

Age enhanced his stature. After all the years of bad health, and of worrying about his bad health, Madison nevertheless kept marching on. He outlived Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, his predecessors in office—not surprisingly, since they were older men—but he also outlived his immediate successor, James Monroe, who was younger. As the years passed, the thirty-eight other signers of the Constitution, and the sixteen who had attended the Constitutional Convention without signing, fell away, some from unnatural causes—besides Richard Spaight and Alexander Hamilton, killed in duels, George Wythe of Virginia was poisoned by an impatient heir, and John Lansing of New York disappeared one night after walking out to mail a letter. Madison was the last framer standing. Loneliness increased his eminence, like a hill on a plain.

His retirement years were not cloudless. Like every other Virginia gentleman, he spent a lot of time considering how to get a better return from his land. He was elected president of a local agricultural society, which he lectured about contour plowing and manure. None of it helped, much. Montpelier had done well during his years as secretary of state and president, despite the care of overseers, because American wheat fetched good prices in war-torn Europe. But the return of peace and competition drove prices down; new American farmland wrested from the Indians was more productive. In 1825, Madison’s prospects were so poor he could not get a loan from the second Bank of the United States.

Another drag on him was his stepson, John Payne Todd. Portraits show attractive eyes and hair, set off by a thick nose and an even thicker air of self-satisfaction. The tragedy of Payne’s childhood—father and infant brother killed by yellow fever—and some flaw in his mother’s character meant that Dolley never disciplined him; like many stepfathers, Madison was unwilling to do the job in her place. So young Payne ran wild. In 1813, Madison had made him Albert Gallatin’s secretary when Gallatin went to Europe as a peace negotiator; Payne abandoned his boss in Paris to frolic. In later years he ran up immense gambling debts. Madison bailed him out, sometimes telling his wife, sometimes keeping the bad news from her, to the tune of $40,000.

In his old age, Madison pioneered yet another political role—the former president as sage and counselor. Washington, in his brief retirement, had accepted command of the army, in case the French invaded. Jefferson wrote letters of advice to his protégés, Madison and Monroe, and John Adams wrote to whoever would correspond with him. All three were opinionated men, who continued to follow politics. But the aloof and tender part of Jefferson’s nature made him embrace the role of Cincinnatus, forsaking the arena for his plow; Adams was so peculiar and unpopular—and so proud of his peculiarity and unpopularity—that the only politician who would actually listen to him was his own son, John Quincy Adams. Madison kept his hand in. His collegial habits served him in good stead. Early in his career he had been the ideal junior partner; now, in the evening of his life, he was the ideal senior, often silent partner.

One of Madison’s most important tasks in his new role was to watch over his own legacy as a constitution maker. His triple role as a planner, framer, and advocate gave him special standing to speak, and his career told him that persistence often won the day. So he made his opinions known.

Several of his opinions brought him into conflict with Chief Justice John Marshall. Federalists had disappeared as a national political party, but a Federalist still presided over the Supreme Court. Madison had never liked Marshall (in the early 1790s, he told Jefferson that he was corrupt: “It is said that Marshall . . . has lately obtained pecuniary aids from the Bank or people connected with it . . . which will explain him to every one that reflects”). Washington had persuaded Marshall to run for Congress in 1798; Adams tapped him as secretary of state, after firing Timothy Pickering, then nominated him for the Supreme Court. Jefferson in his first term tried, and failed, to purge the courts of Federalist holdovers. But Marshall stayed on and on, issuing his rulings, and administering the presidential oath of office to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe in turn.

In 1819 Marshall heard a case involving the second Bank of the United States. Maryland had passed a tax on the transactions of out-of-state banks. James McCulloch, clerk of the Bank of the United States’ branch in Baltimore, had conducted business without paying the tax, whereupon Maryland sued him. The appeal rose to the Supreme Court. Marshall ruled for the Bank and its clerk, revisiting the argument over ends and means which had pitted Madison and Hamilton against each other in 1791 when the first Bank of the United States was proposed and taking Hamilton’s side. “If the end be legitimate, and within the scope of the Constitution,” wrote Marshall, “all the means . . . which are plainly adapted to that end, and which are not prohibited, may constitutionally be employed to carry it into effect.” Establishing a Bank of the United States was a legitimate end, branch banks were a means, and neither Maryland nor any other state could hobble them with taxation.

Madison took up the argument in a letter to Spencer Roane, a Virginia judge. He found himself standing on different ground than he had in 1791, because he supported the second Bank, and he seemed to support McCulloch in the present case. Nevertheless, he criticized “the general and abstract doctrine” that Marshall had “interwoven” with his decision. Madison thought the chief justice’s pronouncements about ends and means gave Congress too much leeway. “Everything is related immediately or remotely to every other thing; and consequently a power over any one thing, if not limited by some obvious and precise affinity, may amount to a power over every other. Ends and means may shift their character . . . according to the ingenuity of the Legislative Body.” Gallatin had persuaded him that a Bank of the United States was useful, and the chaos of wartime finance had shown him that its absence could be disastrous, but he resented Marshall’s invitation to Congress to propose other innovations and curtail other states’ rights.

Four years later, Madison engaged the Marshall court in a letter to Jefferson. Madison merely disliked the chief justice; Jefferson, who was his cousin, loathed him. Jefferson had sent Madison an anti-Marshall blast, of which he was justifiably proud, for it showed many of his characteristic touches. Marshall’s decisions, wrote Jefferson, “hang . . . inference on inference, from heaven to earth, like Jacob’s ladder.... The Chief Justice says, ‘there must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere’” when state and federal governments collide. “True, there must; but does that prove it is either party? The ultimate arbiter is the people of the union, assembled by their deputies in convention.... Let them decide to which they mean to give an authority.” Don’t take constitutional issues to court, Jefferson was saying; call conventions, like those to ratify the Constitution.

In reply, Madison slipped on the armor of tact he always wore when correcting his friend. Calling conventions to settle every disagreement would be “troublesome.” On the other hand, letting state and federal governments simply fight it out would produce “a trial of strength between the posse headed by the marshal”—did Madison intend the pun?—“and the posse headed by the sheriff.” The judiciary, Madison concluded, was a legitimate constitutional venue for deciding such disputes. Like Jefferson, he deplored Marshall’s “extrajudicial reasonings and dicta.... But the abuse of a trust does not disprove its existence.”

Madison could be pro- or anti-court, depending on the circumstances. In 1800, in his Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts, when Federalist judges were zealously upholding the latter, he had said that the states might sit in judgment on the courts, and in his retirement he thought Marshall went too far. But he acknowledged that the courts had a place in the federal machine.

Madison never arranged his opinions on the courts into a summa. He had a philosophical turn of mind, but comprehensive philosophical statements were not his style. His last large work would be not philosophy, but reporting-as-history—a finished version of the notes he had taken at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Madison was surprised by the publication, in 1821, of a competing set, by Robert Yates, the New York anti-Federalist who had walked out of the convention after a month and attacked the Constitution under the name of Brutus. Yates had died in 1801; his notes were brought out by the other New York anti-Federalist, John Lansing (whose disappearance was still some years off). Madison probably wished that Yates’s notes had disappeared; in letters he called them “egregious,” “erroneous,” and “mutilated.” They showed that Madison had been much less friendly to state power and popular opinion than anyone would have suspected of a founder of the Republican Party and the author of the Virginia Resolutions. They also quoted him speaking bluntly, without the mollifying phrases so characteristic of his rhetoric, and dear to his temperament. For example, Yates had Madison say, during a discussion of the length of a senator’s term of office, that the Senate would be a check “on the democracy.” In Madison’s own notes, he spoke of the Senate checking “the popular branch” and “the instabilities of the other branches.” Madison did not suspect Yates of lying, but he knew from painful experience how hard it was to take notes, and he wanted the notes of such an important event to be his.

Yet Madison refused to publish his own notes in rebuttal to Yates’s—or to publish them at all while he lived. He sensed that the longer he held them back, the greater impact they would have: “the older such things grow, they more they are relished . . . the distance of time like that of space . . . giving them that attractive character.” He also did not want to be embroiled in quibbles, to be questioned or contradicted; if the notes came out after he was gone, he would truly have the last word. Madison was not by nature a dramatic person; he did not have the fire of Patrick Henry or even of Hamilton, or the masterly economy of Washington. But where his notes were concerned, he showed excellent timing.

His notes also showed, yet again, the importance of collaboration in his life—and how he used it for his own fulfillment. In them he would appear alongside fifty-four other delegates, several of them as intelligent and as voluble, a few of them more eloquent than he was. He would be seen losing arguments, and coming as close as he ever came to losing his cool (as when he lectured Oliver Ellsworth about proportional representation in the Lycian confederacy). What kind of a Father of the Constitution did that make him? His notes would show him to be one of a cohort, of a band of contentious brothers. Yet they would be his notes. His were the ears that heard it all and his the hand that wrote it all up. His role as on-the-spot historian would restore his constitutional paternity. What he lost as an actor in the drama of the convention he would recover as its dramatist.

Jefferson enlisted him in a new project—the University of Virginia. Jefferson dreamed of establishing an institution of national repute on his doorstep. In 1818, the state of Virginia agreed to support a university and to put it in Charlottesville, down the mountain from Monticello. Madison served as one of the visitors, or trustees; Jefferson oversaw everything from laying out the foundations of the buildings to hunting for faculty. Among the few places Madison ever traveled, after he retired to Montpelier, were Monticello and Charlottesville, almost always on university business.

Madison conceived of his role as helping the great man, just as he had once helped Washington plan canals. “As the scheme was originally Mr. Jefferson’s,” he told his fellow visitors, “it was but fair to let him execute it in his own way.” He and Jefferson picked books for the library and the curriculum. Making book lists was an old pastime of theirs; it was a form of vicarious shopping, vicarious reading, almost vicarious thinking.

In their selecting of books, one discipline required their special attention. “There is one branch” of learning, Jefferson wrote, “in which I think we are the best judges . . . it is that of government.” He suggested as required texts for the law school the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist papers, and the Virginia Resolutions (one by Jefferson, one and a third by Madison). Madison added Washington’s first inaugural and his Farewell Address (two more contributions, in whole or in part, by Madison—though in fairness to both Virginians, they admitted Hamilton, via the Federalist papers and the Farewell Address, as a coauthor).

The list suggested a larger problem, which would not become evident in Jefferson’s lifetime: the University of Virginia could not be a great school in the nineteenth century because Virginia was no longer a nursery of intellectual greatness. At its best, certain achievements of the Virginia mind had matched or surpassed those of Athens, Rome, and Elizabethan England. But Virginia’s greatest thinkers were taking that mind with them to the grave, and they were not being replaced. They left texts, which their heirs cherished, like creeds. The Virginia gentleman’s code of behavior lasted longer, but unguided by intelligence, it lost half its goodness.

Planning the University of Virginia was Jefferson’s last job, and both he and Madison knew it. In February 1826, Jefferson sent a valedictory letter to his friend. After a page of university business (trying, but not hopeless) and another of personal business (quite hopeless: the master of Monticello was broke and grasping at financial straws), Jefferson opened his heart. “But why afflict you with these details? Indeed I cannot tell, unless pains are lessened by communication with a friend. The friendship which has subsisted between us, now half a century, and that harmony of our political principles and pursuits, have been sources for constant happiness to me through that long period.... You have been a pillar of support through life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave you my last affections.”

Madison wrote back the following week. “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are a source of pleasure to you, what ought they not to be to me?” Deferential to the last: my pleasure in knowing you was greater than yours in knowing me, because you were the greater man. “Wishing and hoping that you may yet live to increase the debt which our country owes you, and to witness the increasing gratitude which alone can pay it, I offer you the fullest return of affectionate assurances.”

This was their personal farewell, the acknowledgment, decorous yet loving, of all they had had and were about to lose: no more books, no more trips; no more letters about weasels, rights, or sad, starving women. It was also their pact with politics and with history. Jefferson asked Madison to take care of his reputation; Madison would do his best to see that the country showed him its gratitude.

Madison the working politician had tried to keep slavery off the table in part because discussing it would distract from his goals. In the home stretch of the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788, Patrick Henry tried to derail the Constitution by warning that the preamble would allow Congress to free slaves in wartime to fight as soldiers. “Have they not power to provide for the general defense and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery?” Madison scoffed at this red herring. “Such an idea never entered into any American breast, nor do I believe it ever will.”

Two years later, in the thick of the debate on Hamilton’s financial plan, Congress received a petition signed by Benjamin Franklin criticizing the slave trade. When southerners blazed up in wrath, Franklin, in his last journalistic hoax, published a speech by “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim of the Divan of Algiers” in which their arguments reappeared as justifications of Moslems enslaving Christians. Madison wanted everybody to shut up. Southerners should let Franklin and the other petitioners “proceed with as little noise as possible.” Thus Madison the legislative tactician: don’t get bogged down in slavery when we have a constitution to pass, or a Hamilton to fight over.

But Madison the Virginian had particular reasons to keep slavery off the table: it put slave owners like himself in a paradoxical position. How could they be in the vanguard of liberty when they held men and women in bondage? European liberals, otherwise sympathetic to the American cause, taxed Madison with the paradox. In the 1820s, Lafayette, America’s favorite Frenchman, visited Montpelier. The old hero was making his final triumphal tour of the United States, but amid the nostalgia and the plaudits he pressed his host about “the rights that all men without exception have to liberty.”

Northern Federalists made the point more rudely, as in Gouverneur Morris’s crack about Virginia Republicans “whipping negroes” while “bawling about the in-born inalienable rights of man.” Morris had little right to joke, because many Federalists, from both north and south—Jay, Marshall, Pinckney—were also slave owners. But the potential for embarrassing Madison and his peers was there.

Three ways out of the paradox presented themselves to Madison in his retirement years. One was to weaken slavery by spreading it more widely, and more thinly—a strategy known as diffusion. In the new American west, the Louisiana Territory, slavery could be diffused as far as the Rockies. Madison described how diffusion was supposed to work, in an 1819 letter to Robert Walsh, a Philadelphia journalist. It would “better the condition of the slaves, by lessening the number belonging to individual masters, and intermixing both with greater masses of free people.” In a freer environment, owners would find encouragement to manumit, and to lighten the lives of their slaves in the meantime.

Diffusion reflected a reality of slavery: wherever it was denser—tidewater versus the mountains, South Carolina versus Virginia, the West Indies versus the United States—it was harsher. But it ignored another reality—that slavery was a tenacious institution even where it was not dense. The New-York Manumission Society had been founded in 1785, yet there were still slaves in New York (the last would not be freed until 1827).

Madison was more taken with a second plan, colonization, which he outlined in another 1819 letter to Robert Evans, another Philadelphian. This plan also required movement—sending blacks back to Africa. Blacks had to be “permanently removed” from white society, Madison wrote Evans, since the “prejudices” of both races were “probably unalterable.” Whites felt “contempt” for the “peculiar features” of blacks, while blacks had “vindictive recollections” of their slave status. Madison envisioned an immense program to buy and resettle slaves. Assuming 1.5 million slaves, he calculated that $600 million would do the job. That money could be raised by selling several hundred million acres of western land. The whole operation should be a federal project: “It is the nation which is to reap the benefit. The nation therefore ought to bear the burden.” Amendments could supply whatever constitutional power was lacking.

Madison was not alone in such thoughts. An American Colonization Society, whose goal was to resettle ex-slaves in Africa, had been founded in 1816; the destination they picked on the west African coast is now Liberia. British abolitionists had begun a similar settlement in Sierra Leone in the 1780s. What made Madison’s scheme utterly unreal was its scope: he proposed to spend more than five times the cost of the War of 1812 ($109 million, not counting veterans’ benefits). Was a country that had not passed a constitutional amendment to build roads and canals going to take on a project of that magnitude?

Edward Coles was a young cousin of Dolley’s, on her mother’s side. The Coleses were well-connected Albemarle County planters. Edward’s older brother Isaac had been Jefferson’s private secretary during his second term, and Edward filled the same role for Madison during his presidency. Young Coles had become convinced that slavery was wrong, and he was comfortable enough with Madison, whom he revered, to jibe him about it. When the two, in Washington, would see “gangs of negroes, some in irons, on their way to a southern market,” Coles would congratulate “the chief of our great republic, that he was not then accompanied by a foreign minister” who might witness the “revolting sight.”

In 1819, Coles took his slaves to Pittsburgh, put them on rafts in the Ohio River, then told them that when they reached their destination, the new state of Illinois, he would free them. He gave each head of a household 160 acres, and each slave a certificate: “Not believing that man can have of right a property in his fellow man, but on the contrary, that all mankind were endowed by nature with equal rights, I do therefore, by these presents restore to (naming the party) that inalienable liberty of which he has been deprived.” Coles was diffusing freedom, not slavery.

Coles’s solution was not for Madison: Coles was thirty-two years old with two dozen slaves, Madison was sixty-eight with a hundred. Nevertheless, Madison wrote his former secretary a congratulatory letter. Coles was not just flinging his slaves off but helping to set them up. “You are pursuing, I observe, the true course with your negroes, in order to make their freedom a fair experiment for their happiness.” Madison added, however, a sober thought: “I wish your philanthropy could complete its object, by changing their color as well as their legal condition.”

Madison’s worries were justified. Life was tough for free blacks in Illinois. The certificates that Coles gave his former slaves were not just testimonials to his principles: Illinois arrested blacks who could not show proof of their freedom. In 1822, Coles, who had moved to Illinois himself, ran for governor, to thwart an effort to make the new state a slave state; he won narrowly and Illinois remained free, but harsh laws and prejudice remained. He joined the American Colonization Society and encouraged his ex-slaves to move to Liberia, but they refused to go. After all, they were Americans.

The option that is always open to men and society in the face of any problem is to do nothing. This is where Madison and Virginia ended up. The last constitution-making experience of Madison’s life stands as a model of inactivity, as far as slavery was concerned. In 1829, Virginia held a convention to rewrite its Revolutionary War–era constitution, and in October, Madison and Dolley left their Montpelier/Charlottesville neighborhood for the only time in their retirement to go to Richmond. All Virginia’s eminences were there—Monroe, Marshall, John Randolph—but Madison was the most eminent. The years had taken a toll on his frame, but not his mind or his spirits: one dinner-table observer noted his “abundant stock of racy anecdotes.”

He gave one speech, early in December, on the issue of representation. Virginia’s existing constitution used a system of apportionment based on counties and election districts, which favored the planters of the tidewater. (Their counties and districts might be as populous as those in the mountains of western Virginia, but since so many easterners were slaves, eastern masters wielded disproportionate political power.) Western Virginia wanted apportionment based on white population. This was a racial yardstick, but it would diminish the clout of slave owners.

Madison offered a compromise—representation based, at least in part, on population, counting every slave as three-fifths of a person. “It is due,” he said, “to justice; due to humanity; due to truth [and] to the sympathies of our nature” that slaves be considered “a part, though a degraded part, of the families to which they belong.” Madison’s concern for keeping slaves in the family recognized their personhood, but a three-fifths rule in the Virginia constitution—like the three-fifths rule in the U.S. Constitution—would be a political gift to slave owners, smaller perhaps than district-based suffrage but still a structural benefit. Madison’s fellow delegates crowded around to hear the great man speak—then took up their former arguments, unmoved. In the constitution that was finished in January 1830, the eastern planters were able to keep a district-based system. When the faithful Lafayette wrote from France to ask whether his favorite Americans had managed to curtail slavery, Madison had to tell him no. “Any allusion . . . to the subject you have so much at heart would have been a spark to a mass of gunpowder.”

Madison had lived among, and off of, slaves all his long life. What did he think about the institution? About slaves? What were the sympathies of his nature? There is with him little of the emotional grist we find in Jefferson—no acting out, no agony, no craziness. No one ever imagined, much less charged, that Madison had a slave mistress, and his writings are free from visions of divine punishment and crackpot racial theories alike.

Sometime about 1821 he tried his hand at a new genre for him—a parable of north and south, in which the two sections were called Jonathan and Mary Bull, descendants of John Bull (Britain), now married. He never published it, and happily for his reputation it is little known. Mary, it seems, has a black left arm, stained by a “certain African dye” when a ship “enter[ed] a river running through her estate” and unloaded “the noxious cargo.” The stain makes Jonathan, for no good reason, turn against her. The story is a wallow of self-pity and blame-shifting: Mary denies that she “brought the misfortune on myself,” and says she is “as anxious” as Jonathan to get rid of it and has done “everything I could” to lessen the evil. Everything except anything. At story’s end, Jonathan is “touched” by Mary’s protests, and their “bickering . . . ended as the quarrels of lovers always, and of married folks sometimes do, in increased affection.” Madison says nothing more about the black arm or the noxious cargo, for they are not the point of his story; Jonathan and Mary’s little spat is. Freeing slaves is not on his agenda, only keeping the peace between north and south.

But as the years passed, his thoughts could not pass over the subject. In 1835, he was visited by Harriet Martineau, a young English Unitarian making an American tour (a fashionable activity for English writers: Mrs. Trollope had already logged her miles, and Charles Dickens would follow). Martineau found Madison “lively—often playful,” but one subject depressed him. “With regard to slavery he owned himself to be almost in despair.” He talked more about it than anything else, “acknowledging without limit or hesitation all the evils with which it has ever been charged.” He pitied white mistresses, forced to preside over untrustworthy servants; he pitied slave girls, pregnant at age fifteen. “He observed that the whole Bible is against negro slavery; but the clergy do not preach this.”

His only hope was Liberia. Martineau did not share it. In almost twenty years, the American Colonization Society had resettled fewer than 3,000 people; America’s slave population, meanwhile, had increased by 60,000 a year. “How such a mind as his,” Martineau observed, “could derive any alleviation to its anxiety from that source is surprising.”

On the question of slavery, all Madison’s intelligence and political skills amounted to nothing. His statesmanship failed, and in failing he typified the founding generation, instead of leading it. Some founders made local contributions—Jay, George Clinton, Alexander Hamilton, and the other founders of the New-York Manumission Society began a forty-two-year march toward emancipation in their state. A handful made personal contributions—Washington freed his slaves in his will. Even Jefferson left rhetoric. But too many founders, like Madison, ignored slavery, hoped it would go away, or toyed with impossible solutions.

Madison faced another great issue in his retirement years: disunion. When he was young, he had helped to form a more perfect union, but now that he was old, it looked as if the country might fly apart. His thoughts on union were much more focused and forceful than his thoughts on slavery.

Broadly speaking, the younger cohort of founders, to which Madison belonged, valued union as much as liberty; in their minds, union was the necessary condition of American freedom, national and personal. In The Federalist, Madison and Hamilton had unreeled variation after variation on this belief.

Yet the United States was a new, large country in a wild continent with weak communication and strong local cultures. Centrifugal forces were powerful. Timothy Pickering and his die-hard friends chewed at secession from the election of 1804 until the Battle of New Orleans.

In 1819, sectional strife took a new and lurid shape when Missouri applied for statehood. It would be the second state carved out of the Louisiana Territory, after Louisiana itself, and compared to Louisiana, it seemed almost a blank slate, with a thin history of pre-American settlement. What kind of a state it became—slaveholding or free—would be a portent for the development of the west. The House passed a bill for Missouri’s admission with a requirement that it be a free state; the Senate rejected the requirement.

Two years of controversy erupted. Slavery, the issue Madison had tried all his life to keep off the table, now filled the table, and it took a starkly sectional form. Thanks to northern prosperity and fecundity, the House had a free-state majority, but the Senate was evenly balanced, eleven free states versus eleven slave (after Madison’s retirement, Mississippi, Illinois, and Alabama had joined the Union). Even more than politics or the development of the west seemed to be at stake: the nature of the country appeared to be up for grabs.

Two of Madison’s colleagues from the Constitutional Convention were sitting in Congress when the controversy blew up. Charles Pinckney was a representative from South Carolina (not Charles Coatesworth Pinckney, the Federalist also-ran, but his younger Republican cousin who had helped tip the 1800 election to Jefferson and Burr). Some founders liked slavery just fine; Pinckney was a vehement and openly racist supporter. He denied that blacks could ever be citizens anywhere, because they were savages, and he said they were savages because they were stupid. “The African man . . . is as unchanged as the lion or tiger which roams in the same forests with himself.”

The other veteran of Philadelphia in Congress was Rufus King, who still sat in the Senate for New York. Federalism was moribund, but feuding Republicans in King’s state kept him in Washington as a neutral placeholder. He accepted slavery where it already was as a fait accompli but fervently opposed extending it. “All laws and compacts imposing [slavery] upon any human being are absolutely void, because contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God.”

What did the Father of the Constitution think? As a supporter of diffusion, Madison did not want to see slavery ruled out of Missouri. He also thought Congress had no power to make such a condition: they could not place a new state “above or below the equal rank and rights possessed by the others.” What most worried him about Missouri, however, was the politics of the clash, which, as he put it in his letter to Robert Walsh, “fills me with no slight anxiety.” When Jefferson was worried, he pulled out the vox humana. When Madison was worried, he hunkered in understatement. He now wrote Walsh a structural analysis of political parties. “Parties . . . must always be expected in a government as free as ours. When the individuals belonging to them are intermingled in every part of the whole country, they strengthen the union of the whole, while they divide every part.” This was the doctrine of the Virginia Plan—unity through diversity. Now, however, the Missouri question seemed to have generated parties “founded on geographical boundaries.... What is to control those great repulsive masses from awful shocks against each other?”

Compromise buffered the masses for the time being—Congress admitted Missouri as a slave state and the Maine district of Massachusetts as a free state, and forbade slavery in most of the remainder of the Louisiana Territory—and time quickly gave politicians other things to quarrel about. But at decade’s end, the threat of disunion reappeared.

In 1828, Congress passed a tariff designed to protect manufacturing, though one critic called it “a machine for manufacturing presidents.” Andrew Jackson’s supporters in Congress hoped the Tariff of 1828 would gain him the votes of northern manufacturers and workers in that year’s election (they assumed he had the south and west locked up). Jackson won handily, sweeping the south and west, as well as Pennsylvania and more than half of New York’s electoral votes. But John Calhoun, now vice president, had ambitions of his own; the former nationalist, who had once proposed a federal road and canal bill to combat sectionalism, had concluded that his only hopes for advancement lay in carving out a southern base for himself.

The tool Calhoun chose was a report written anonymously by him and issued by the South Carolina legislature, attacking the tariff as a burden on slave-owning agricultural states: since they bought their manufactured goods from the north, or abroad, under a high tariff their costs would rise. That complaint was ordinary interest-group politics, but Calhoun raised the temperature by attacking the tariff as unconstitutional—tariffs, he claimed, could be levied only to raise revenue, not to support manufactures—and asserting South Carolina’s right to “interpose” against enforcing it. For justification he cited Hamilton in The Federalist, and the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of Madison and Jefferson. But since the Federalist paper he cited was #51, one of Madison’s, he was relying entirely on Virginians. Madison was thus drawn into the fight as an oracle.

Madison was sure that tariffs to support manufacturers were constitutional. As he told Joseph Cabell, a Virginia state senator, protective tariffs had been proposed and passed in the First Congress, and many congresses since—an “unbroken current” of “prolonged and universal practice.”

The threat of interposition represented a more personal challenge, since Calhoun presented it as his (and Jefferson’s) brainchild. New England Federalists at Hartford had invoked interposition in 1814. Madison had ignored them then, not because they had no right to invoke it, but because they invoked it in a bad cause (he had a war to win and they wanted to end it). Now Calhoun was claiming the same right.

But was he really? Madison wrote a long letter of reproof to Calhoun’s mouthpiece in the Senate, Robert Hayne of South Carolina. Hayne never answered; evidently he was too flummoxed by Madison’s attack. When Edward Everett, a Massachusetts congressman, learned of the letter and asked if he could print it in the North American Review, a Boston journal, Madison agreed. His letter, addressed now to Everett, appeared in October 1830.

Madison tried to take control of what he had written in the Virginia Resolutions, and in the Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts. The doctrine of interposition he had outlined called on the states, plural, “to concur in declaring . . . acts to be unconstitutional, and to co-operate in . . . necessary and proper measures” to maintain their rights (Madison’s italics). The measures he had in mind were the counterthrusts of politics—rallying the public, winning elections—and “as the event showed,” they were “equal to the occasion” (i.e., Jefferson and Madison threw the bums out in 1800). He never imagined that a state acting alone could void a federal law.

In the worst case—repeated abuses and no possibility of political relief—there remained the right of revolution. But that was “an extra- and ultraconstitutional right.” It could not be smuggled into the Constitution by halves in the form of nullification.

The effect of Madison’s letter was dramatic. His three predecessors as ex-presidents either published nothing in their retirement (Washington, Jefferson) or published too much (John Adams defended his diplomatic career in a series of articles for a Boston newspaper that dragged on for three years and that bores even his admirers). Madison’s appearance in the North American Review was strategic and forceful. It received praise from an unexpected source. “Madison,” wrote Chief Justice Marshall, “is himself again.”

Madison also worked behind the scenes. In 1831, Nicholas Trist, a young man who was both a Charlottesville native and a grandson of Madison’s old Philadelphia landlady, became President Jackson’s private secretary. Jackson was determined to enforce the laws and to keep Calhoun in his place, and through Trist Madison had a pipeline to him. The following year Jackson, running for reelection, paid a courtesy call at Montpelier.

Jackson won, and South Carolina decided to execute its four-year-old threat. At the end of 1832, a state convention voted “to NULLIFY certain Acts of the Congress of the United States, purporting to be laws” that taxed imports. If Washington tried to enforce the tariff, South Carolina would “organize a separate government.” Secession was the logical consequence of nullification; both assumed that state sovereignty was undiminished by the Constitution and that the United States was a league. If a state could veto laws all by itself, it could take itself out of the Union.

South Carolina was not acting in a void; willing to go it alone, it nevertheless invited other southern states to join in endorsing its doctrines. South Carolina’s challenge provoked a debate in the Virginia legislature. Supporters of South Carolina moved to reprint Madison’s Report on the Alien and Sedition Acts, as if it were a pro-nullification document. Opponents of South Carolina moved to reprint Madison’s North American Review letter, which explained that it was not pro-nullification. The nullifiers replied that the North American Review letter was “trash” and that the aged Madison who wrote it was “enfeebled.” They wanted Madison when he agreed with them, or not at all.

Madison could not be split in two, especially when he was still alive to assert his own wholeness. But Jefferson was more easy to kidnap. By 1832, he was dead and so unable to explain himself. Moreover, the Kentucky Resolutions he had written really did fit the nullifiers’ program. South Carolina had quoted a ringing line from the first paragraph: “whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” In his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions, Jefferson had even written that “every state has a natural right . . . to nullify of [its] own authority all assumptions of power by others.” The Kentucky legislature had struck out that language, but Jefferson’s draft had leaked in the years since.

As he had promised, Madison took care of his friend. In two 1832 letters to Trist, he laid out the case for Jefferson (his Jefferson). He urged contemporary Americans to look at the whole record: the collected works of long-lived men “would without a single exception” show “apparent if not real inconsistencies” (Madison’s emphasis). He stressed all the times when Jefferson had called for reining the states in, especially when he was a member of the Continental Congress. “It is remarkable how closely the nullifiers . . . shut their eyes and lips, whenever his authority is ever so clearly and emphatically against them.” He pointed, finally, with the insight of a great biographer, to an aspect of Jefferson’s nature, which had made him so thrilling to live with, and so in need of Madison’s ears and advice: “Allowances also ought to be made for a habit in Mr. Jefferson as in others of great genius of expressing in strong and round terms, impressions of the moment.” Jefferson wrote memorably, like Homer. But before you take Homer for a guide to living, consult a scholar. Like Madison.

The nullifiers had gone too far—for the present. Virginia and other southern states would not follow their lead, and South Carolina backed down in the face of threats and blandishments: Jackson and Congress declared that the law would be enforced, and Congress also agreed to lower the tariff. Madison was glad to have won, but he feared that permanent damage had been done. In April 1833, he wrote Henry Clay, who as a senator had helped defuse the crisis. South Carolina, he said, had bequeathed “the torch of discord” to its country. The phrase was from Pope’s Iliad, where it describes the goddess of strife inspiring the Greeks to fight the Trojans.

Behind the tariff battle crouched another: slavery. Calhoun himself acknowledged the “peculiar labor” on which South Carolina’s agricultural economy rested. The tariff battle was Missouri all over again, somewhat more disguised. When Madison thought of slavery directly, the only solution he could see was Liberia. When he thought of slavery as a sectional issue, he looked to the Union as the bulwark against the conflicts it generated.

It is both foolish and irresistible to ask how a 109-year-old James Madison would have voted in the four-way election of 1860. Not for Abraham Lincoln: Lincoln wanted to keep slavery out of the west, and Madison would have tried to tie his constitutional arguments up in knots. Not for John Breckinridge, rule-or-ruin southerner and heir of Calhoun. Perhaps he would have voted for Stephen Douglas, latter-day Jacksonian; more likely for John Bell, the Tennessee Unionist whose platform was union and Constitution, with slavery off the table, and whose running mate was Edward Everett, publisher of the North American Review letter. Bell and Everett were not persuasive; they finished fourth in the popular vote and carried only three states (Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee). Madison’s doctrines by themselves could not keep the country together. But when the crash came, postelection, it is impossible to imagine Madison deserting the Union.

In 1834, he wrote a short note, “Advice to My Country,” which was his political last will and testament. He wanted it released posthumously, when it would have the seriousness of death. “The advice nearest to my heart” was that the Union “be cherished and perpetuated.” His tale about John and Mary Bull had shown his limitations as a storyteller, so he relied on two stories that were already familiar. “Let the open enemy to it [the union] be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.”

The end of such a long life must be a parade of deaths. Jefferson, as all the world learned, died on July 4, 1826. Two days later, Madison wrote Trist that for fifty years he and Jefferson had not experienced “an interruption or diminution of mutual confidence and cordial friendship, for a single moment in a single instance.” Not one moment? Not one instance? Surely Madison idealized his dead brother and his own fidelity. But in a lifetime of collaborations, this was the most productive as well as the most gratifying.

His mother died in February 1829, a month after her ninety-seventh birthday. Before she passed, she told a visitor, “I have been a blest woman, blest all my life, and blest in this my old age. I have no sickness, no pain.” Her face had fewer wrinkles than that of her famous son, who had been as dutiful to her as he had been devoted to his friend.

James Monroe died on July 4, 1831, in New York City, where he had gone to live with a daughter (his Virginia homes were lost to debt). Madison and Monroe had known several interruptions of confidence—when they ran against each other for Congress, when Madison set Monroe up to negotiate an impossible treaty, when Monroe tried to slip ahead of Madison into the White House. Yet Madison had compensated Monroe for beating him by positioning him for ultimate victory. So friendship and party unity had been restored.

In the fall of 1832, he wrote a sweetly stoical letter thanking an in-law for a winter cap. Dolley had been knitting him socks. “I am thus equipped cap-a-pie [head-to-toe] for the campaign against Boreas and his allies the frosts and the snows. But there is another article of covering which I need most of all and which my best friends cannot supply. My bones have lost a sad portion of the flesh which clothed and protected them, and the digestive and nutritive organs which alone can replace it are too slothful in their functions.” For a hypochondriac, Madison had had a good, long run, but the time comes when reality catches up with the anxieties of even the sturdiest.

One of our sources for his last days is Paul Jennings, the slave who as a teenager had helped Dolley evacuate the White House. He had become Madison’s manservant in 1820, and shaved him every other day for the rest of his life. In 1836, Madison became unable to walk, but Jennings testified that his mind was “bright” and that he still loved to talk.

A morbid question of timing arose. Jefferson and Monroe had died on the nation’s birthday; so had John Adams, who had died on the very same day as Jefferson. So far the only ex-president not to die on July 4 had been Washington, who had succumbed to an illness after being caught in a December snowstorm. As June crept on, doctors offered to keep ex-president Madison going until the Fourth with stimulants. He refused the medication and the melodrama, so that he could die “in the full possession of all his noble faculties,” as a niece of Dolley’s put it.

He died on June 28. Jennings was with him. At breakfast he could not swallow. “What is the matter, Uncle James?” a niece asked. “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear,” he answered. Intellectual to the end, and beyond: he was his mind, and he did not say it was ending but changing. “His head,” wrote Jennings, “instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”