2 The Good Doctor

FROM DONALD ROBERTSON, MADISONS FATHER GATHERED THAT HIS SONS preternatural intellect indeed presented extraordinary potential. Madison returned home when he was sixteen. His father invested some of the plantation’s profits in arranging for his son to receive precollege instruction from the Reverend Thomas Martin, a personal friend.

Martin had graduated from the increasingly prestigious College of New Jersey run by free-thinking Presbyterians rather than the stuffy Anglicans who dominated almost every institution in Virginia. He was kind, studious, trustworthy, and earnest—an immediately reassuring presence in Madison’s anxious life, someone Madison could, and would, grow to look up to.

At seventeen, the time to attend college was quickly approaching. The question was where. The standard choice was the College of William and Mary, which had been established by King William III and Queen Mary II in 1693 with a charter envisioning a “perpetual College of Divinity, Philosophy, Languages, and other good Arts and Sciences.” George Washington studied there, as did Thomas Jefferson. The school, located in the established and wealthy Tidewater region, was prestigious and the natural choice for a planting family like the Madisons.

But Madison’s fiercely self-reliant father saw it differently. He didn’t care for the conventional wisdom that James must go to William and Mary, for the school was controlled by Anglicans. Virginia’s Anglicans were intimately bound up with the colonial government and loyalists to the Church of England. Their moralism, theocratic tendency, and addiction to political power had been wearing on him for years.

James Madison Sr. knew a civil war was brewing within the college that mirrored tensions within Virginia as a whole. The majority of the college’s faculty were English-born graduates of Oxford University. Intrinsically conservative, they were wedded to British customs and history and skeptical of trends toward modern literature and modern science, as well as mistrusted modern philosophies centered on individual freedom and justice. They tendentiously argued that the college’s curriculum must follow the rigid classical outlines that had guided generations of British students.1 James Madison wanted none of this for his precious son.

Madison’s parents also considered the nagging issue of their nervous son’s health. Orange County was considered “mountainous,” even though the hills outside were gentle at best. It took days to travel to Williamsburg, through climates so different they felt to the Madisons like different nations. William and Mary, within the reach of the Atlantic Ocean, was low and humid. It teemed with unfamiliar vegetation, mosquitoes—and unseen diseases. His mother feared the thought of sending her frail son there for years.

All the while, Thomas Martin was glowingly describing his alma mater. The College of New Jersey, located in Princeton, had earned a reputation for teaching integrity, moral probity, and intellectual quality to a small segment of the northern states’ leading men. He told Madison’s father exciting tales about John Witherspoon, the college’s renowned new president. Witherspoon was a reformer, a defiant Scottish Presbyterian skeptic, with a famous habit of deliciously skewering the sanctimonious and the tyrannical alike, particularly among the Anglicans. And that appealed even more to James Madison Sr.

Before dogma could poison his promising young son’s mind, the father acted. James Madison Jr. would go to the College of New Jersey.

IN THE SUMMER OF 1769, THE FOUR-MEMBER BAND—MADISON, JONATHAN Martin, his brother Alexander, and Madison’s personal slave, Sawney—loaded their horses with food, light and heavy clothes, water, and books for James’s months-long stay in Princeton, New Jersey. The journey north would take almost two weeks. They traipsed through the Virginia woods, then crossed the Acquia, Quantico, and Occoquan Rivers on ferries. They passed through the quaint town of Alexandria. Throughout, Jonathan Martin told Madison stories from his time as a student in Princeton. Together, they speculated about Witherspoon. They clopped along the banks of the Potomac River for several miles, then boarded another ferry over to George Town. They followed a leafy trail along Rock Creek and proceeded on to Annapolis. After two days, they reached the broad Susquehanna River, which spread around them like the sea itself. Ferrying across, they stepped onto the marshy sands of Delaware. After another day, they reached Pennsylvania, and then made their way to Philadelphia.

Madison had never seen anything like the city. He only knew the small hamlets and homey towns of Virginia. The twenty-five-thousand-strong metropolis was bracing. The group stayed at the London Coffee House, which was operated by the Bradford family, and he learned that their son William had already left for Princeton.2

They covered the forty-mile road from Philadelphia to Princeton in one day, the horses walking steadily on the dirt path along the Delaware River. As the afternoon shadows lengthened, the four entered Trenton. Twelve miles later, with darkness fallen, they finally came to the peaceful town of Princeton in the humid summer night.3 Tired from the long trip, an excited James looked around at the small town where his new life would begin, and beheld the massive building that would provide home, mayhem, and Lyceum—sometimes all at once.

WHEN MADISON ENTERED NASSAU HALL FOR THE FIRST TIME, HE beheld the largest stone structure in the colonies, built to house a student body as large as 150. The building was little over a decade old and settling nicely into its bones. The college’s ambitious founders had aimed for permanence. They chose locally quarried sandstone over brick as building material, giving the walls, which were over two feet thick, a weighty, slablike quality. The hall was three stories tall, with an elegant cupola perched on the center of its roof. Exploring inside, he walked through recitation rooms and a prayer room on the first floor; a library on the second; and a refectory, kitchen, storeroom, and more student rooms in the basement. His feet stepped lightly on hallways paved with brick to protect the building from fire and to retain warmth from the wood-burning fireplaces.4

Madison moved into a room with two other students, hardwood floors underfoot, cool plaster walls around. Everything happened in this building, which was a village unto itself. And the village had a chief.

AFTER HEARING SO MUCH ABOUT WITHERSPOONS WIT, INTELLIGENCE, and fearlessness from his father, Jonathan Martin, and nearly everyone else, Madison was prepared to be intimidated. He wasn’t disappointed. Ashbel Green, a student of Witherspoon’s who went on to become a minister and later the college’s eighth president, later recounted that effect of Witherspoon’s. “He had more of the quality called presence—a quality powerfully felt, but not to be described,” Green wrote, “than any other individual with whom the writer has ever had intercourse, Washington alone excepted.”5

Witherspoon seemed transcendent, somehow, his thoughts sweeping up into a higher plane. In the months and years to come, Madison began to learn more about the man and his extraordinary journey.

Witherspoon was a fighter and a moralist, a man of courage and principle. For him, defiance—in politics and philosophy—was as natural and necessary as oxygen. He was born on a cold Scottish February day in 1723 to a minister’s daughter. His father was also a minister. Like James Madison decades later, Witherspoon would become the eldest brother of six brothers and sisters. His mother, in Witherspoon’s description, was pious, a serious woman passionately driven by faith. His father made the church not only his profession but his life, serving as the minister of his local parish for almost forty years. But he was ambitious as well, with a political bug that expressed itself within the domestic empire of the Presbyterian Church. He preached before and was a commissioner to the Presbytery’s General Assembly, and in 1744, was appointed to the high post of royal chaplain.6

No surprise that when Witherspoon was just four years old, his father handed him a Bible and taught him to read it out loud.7 At thirteen, he arrived at the University of Edinburgh to begin full-time study. At university, Witherspoon’s peers immediately noticed that he lacked social graces. The Reverend Alexander Carlyle, his instructor, described him as having a “disagreeable temper” and an “awkward manner.” But still—he was also “a good scholar, far advanced for his age.” He was “very sensible.” And—he was “shrewd.”8 Witherspoon, in other words, was not well adjusted, but his drive could power him through any awkwardness.

He was impatient to make more of his education than his fellow students would. Although many of them left without doing any independent scholarly work—indeed, some left without graduating at all—when he was seventeen, he requested permission to present a graduation thesis before his professors and fellow students. The bulky young man stood in the university’s common hall and read a twelve-page thesis titled “Philosophical Disputation: Concerning the Immortality of the Mind.”9 Afterward, he bent his large head to receive the hood; he had entered the learned profession, achieving his mother’s and father’s dreams. Edinburgh’s gothic spires surrounded him, reaching for the sky. He stayed on at Edinburgh to study divinity for three more years. In 1743, he passed the examinations that would license him to preach. He worked for his own father for a year and a half more, and then was installed as minister of Beith Parish. He was just twenty-two.10

His friends saw in him a special potential—a forcefulness that seemed to warp the space around him. He was a big man who projected both solidity and acuity, like a sharpened ax. But his wicked sense of humor was another weapon entirely, lashing out quickly and without warning, like a whip.

As a young cleric, he stood tall, with piercing blue eyes and a sardonic, phlegmatic manner. He had a quick temper and did not suffer fools easily. For him, as for Donald Robertson, there was no bigger fool than Bonnie Prince Charlie. That Charlie aspired to a new monarchy was bad enough. But the prince was also undermining an enlightened intellectual and cultural wave spreading across the country like a brightening dawn. Witherspoon felt Charlie would yank Scotland back into the gnarled grip of medievalism. The combative young man gradually narrowed his options. He could see no choice other than to fight the arrogant prince himself. He made the astonishing decision to scrape together his own militia to repel the invasion.

He hectored students, colleagues, and friends. He raised a small company. Surrounded by his band, he strode out from Edinburgh in search of a fight. But after days of looking, they never found a battle. Only reluctantly did the cleric-warrior disband his little force.11

The next year, he learned about a looming battle at Falkirk, where Prince Charlie himself would confront thousands of Scottish troops. Witherspoon again put together a company of his parishioners. Leading the troops, he marched them toward Glasgow, where they heard that the king’s troops would be victorious; they were ordered to turn back. But Witherspoon refused, and marched on to the battle. The battle was bloody, and the king did not win. The prince, glamorously outfitted in a tricorne, drove five thousand of his scruffy Highlander troops toward seven thousand government men. When they clashed, his troops killed or wounded some 350 of the enemy. The prince saw only fifty dead and seventy wounded.12 Witherspoon, along with five of his volunteers, was seized as a prisoner of war.

Doune, a squat, symmetrical castle, had served as a royal second home in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But in 1746 it was requisitioned as a torture chamber. Witherspoon was thrown into a room in the highest part of the castle, along with two men who had been captured as spies. In the neighboring room were another eight prisoners.

Their British captors brutally tortured Witherspoon and the other men.

Witherspoon’s men came up with the idea of escaping their situation by stringing their blankets together into a rope that would drop seventy feet to the ground.13 Witherspoon agreed to join them. The men grabbed their blankets and knotted them together into a long, unsteady rope. They drew lots for the order of descent, with Witherspoon drawing second to last. Four men successfully climbed down to the ground. When a fifth—one of the heaviest of the group—went down the rope, it broke just as he touched the ground. When the next man descended, the rope broke again and he fell a distance to the ground, badly injuring himself. Witherspoon and one other man were left in the castle. They hauled up the rope and attempted to rebuild it. The other man, who had drawn the longer straw, then climbed down. When he reached the part of the rope that had been repaired, it was so thick that he lost his grip and fell a long distance to the earth. He was so badly injured that he soon died.

Witherspoon, looking down, realized he was trapped. He remained in the castle, the only prisoner in the room.14 While there is no record of the torture that followed, his captors must have avenged themselves on the lone man with redoubled fury.

Witherspoon was twenty-four years old when he was released. His experience caused him a severe nervous shock. For three years afterward, even when he was preaching, he would be overcome by a sudden and overwhelming feeling that he would die. Those experiences were understandably terrifying. He credited his father with helping to ease him out of crisis. But for the rest of his life, his nerves were easily disturbed. In the words of a friend, he always had to “keep the strictest check on himself.”15 That was, perhaps, one basis for the sympathy John Witherspoon felt for the young and vulnerable James Madison.

After his release, in friendlier arenas, Witherspoon won election as a commissioner to the Kirk, the Scottish General Assembly. He married the strong-minded Elizabeth Montgomery, who would bear him ten children, but not without considerable heartbreak; only five survived to adulthood.* For the decade from 1758 to 1768, he served as a minister of the Laigh Kirk in Paisley, but he never intended to be just an ordinary clergyman—not with the Enlightenment just sweeping the United Kingdom.

WHAT BECAME KNOWN AS THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT TOOK ROOT in Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, where the law courts met, the General Assembly convened, and the university community thrived.16 The movement’s leaders were impatient with dogmas clotted with centuries of aged ideas. They strove for realism and common sense and reveled in the simple power of experience. They disliked theorists trumpeting about historical trajectories and the gravitational pull of abstract (and often religious) ideals. They aimed instead for ideas grounded in how people lived and what their physical senses told them about the world. Like many other Enlightenment leaders, Witherspoon developed a dislike for metaphysics and, in later years, usually only used the word with distaste.17

As a working cleric, Witherspoon joined the Popular Party of the Church of Scotland, which was in the midst of a clash with the so-called Moderate Party. The conflict was as much cultural as theological.18 The Moderates saw themselves as refined and worldly, the Populars as pious and humble. The Moderates approved of public dancing and the theater. The Populars thought them vulgar and degrading. The Moderates lampooned the Populars as aloof “Highflyers.” The Populars called the Moderates debaucherous equivocators.19

The hostility led to vicious internecine battles on church policy. For instance, under the system known as lay patronage, wealthy landowners appointed ministers, as opposed to the congregation’s democratically choosing its leader. Witherspoon led the Populars in supporting the democratic position.20 A leading Moderate attacked Witherspoon as “close, and suspicious, and jealous, and always aspiring of a superiority that he was not able to maintain.”21 Witherspoon, in turn, began to assail the Moderates in public.

In 1753, he delivered a lecture, titled “Ecclesiastical Characteristics,” with a gibing subtitle: “The Arcana of Church Policy, being an humble attempt to open up the mystery of moderation.” Witherspoon assumed the first-person voice of a buffoonish Moderate. “I believe that the universe is a huge machine,” he announced sardonically, “consisting of an infinite number of links and chains, each in a progressive motion towards the zenith of perfection, and meridian of glory.” He derided the Moderates’ fatuous assumption that the universe was designed around their own concepts of right and wrong. He believed that there was “no ill in the universe,” nor even “virtue absolutely considered.” Worse, “those things vulgarly called sins” were nothing of the sort; there were instead “foils to set off the beauty of Nature, or patches to adorn her face.”22 In this Alice in Wonderland moral universe, he proclaimed that “even the devils themselves” would be happy, while Judas Iscariot would become “a glorified saint.”23

The passions were the villains in Witherspoon’s public morality play. In an essay that was enthusiastically distributed across Scotland, he warned against the sins of excess and intemperance. Scots needed to guard against “idle fancies” and “romantic suppositions of happiness.” He charged them to “set bounds to” and “endeavor to moderate” their passions, instead of voluntarily and unnecessarily exciting them. Persons of “furious and ungoverned tempers,” he said, would not be successful, respected, or even useful.24 He wanted Scots to sublimate their appetites into conviction, in turn translated into purpose—and then power.

That elegantly balanced philosophy became, for Witherspoon, a constant call. A decade later, in 1764, writing from a long stay in London, he introduced a book of his works with a bracing claim. The “immediate and most powerful cause of degeneracy,” he declared, was a corruption of principle. All moral actions, he would write, must arise from principle.25

With that political philosophy firmly in place, Witherspoon openly pursued, like many Enlightenment thinkers (including the economist Adam Smith, the philosopher David Hume, and the Reverend Thomas Reid), the course of a self-made public intellectual. He came to see his clerical job not as a calling, but as a platform. He could lead not only Scotland, but man, to resist darker seductions and to pursue a horizon illuminated by principle.

His growing fame spread across the Atlantic with the ships bound for America. Leaders in the New World were looking for just such a clarion voice. They began to take note of the Scottish cleric growing famous for his sardonic sense of certainty.

IN 1766, THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEYS TRUSTEES ANNOUNCED A SEARCH for a new president who would give the college “breadth and flexibility, virility and permanence.” In November 1766, William Peartree Smith, the board’s acting president, sent a letter to Witherspoon, asking him to become the new president of the school informally known as Princeton. Smith’s letter was only the beginning of a serious campaign. A delegation sailed for Scotland the next year to appeal to Witherspoon in person. Other preeminent citizens, including Richard Stockton and Dr. Benjamin Rush, sent letters pleading Princeton’s case.26

Although he seemed interested—very interested—they were unsure whether Witherspoon would ever say yes. His wife, Elizabeth, clearly opposed the prospect, fearing the effects of the transatlantic journey on their children. But she finally acceded to her husband’s ambition, and he sent word that he would accept Princeton’s offer.

The small Princeton community (consisting of only three professors) had been waiting in limbo for a new leader. One reverend wrote that after the town received the word that Elizabeth “like another Sarah was willing to follow her husband,” Witherspoon’s name “dwelt upon every tongue.” For weeks, Princeton “resounded with nothing but the name of Witherspoon.”27

After a twelve-week-long voyage, Witherspoon, Elizabeth, and their five exhausted children arrived on Sunday, August 7, 1768. Ann was the oldest; James was a college student; John was eleven; Frances was nine; and David, his father’s pet, was eight.28 They entered a pastoral town surrounded by rolling farmland, oriented around the foundational building of Nassau Hall. The family settled in a small house nearby reserved for the president.

Witherspoon set to interviewing his new colleagues. He was dismayed to find the school polluted with metaphysics. Jonathan Edwards, the third president of the college who had a short-lived tenure in 1758 (he died after two months of smallpox), had been a proud idealist. The idealists believed the universe consisted of minds and ideas, refusing to consider that matter could exist independent of the mind. Their approach led them into unsettling dogmatic fervor; Edwards Sr., in particular, was a “New Light” revivalist, stoking contagious religious celebrations. Witherspoon discovered that Edwards’s influence had shaped the entire school. The three tutors—Edwards’s son Jonathan; Samuel Johnson, who had tutored President Edwards at Yale; and Bishop Edward Berkeley—were all metaphysicians.

Witherspoon began a purge. By the end of 1769, his first full year, he fired all three tutors, replacing them with tutors more to his liking.29

WITHERSPOON STROVE TO EDUCATE HIS STUDENTS FOR A LIFE NOT just of scholarship, or business, but of impact on the world around them. In a recruitment letter he later sent to potential students, he claimed higher education was necessary for those who “do not wish to live for themselves alone, but would apply their talents to the service of the Public and the good of mankind.” Education, he declared, was required for “the benefit of society in offices of power or trust.”30

Madison was doubtless aware of the great changes at the college he had just entered. But for the time being, he was more focused on the day-to-day challenges of his brand-new world. He took to heart Princeton’s formal mission, as enlightened as the president the trustees had bravely chosen: to liberate young minds, to “cherish a spirit of liberty, and free enquiry,” and to encourage their right of private judgment, without an “air of infallibility” or demanding an “implicit assent” from their professors.31

In August, just after arriving, young Madison revealed his intense impatience. He told Witherspoon he wanted to finish the three years at Princeton in only two years, and he wanted to begin by bypassing the normal freshman curriculum by taking early exams, enabling him to skip the first year. Witherspoon found the request by his slender, shy student surprising but appealing and granted it. The exams required proficiency in Horace, Cicero’s Orations, the Old Testament in Greek, Lucian’s Dialogues, and Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. The rigor he learned from Robertson and Martin bore fruit, and Madison passed the exams.

Madison then approached another student—the studious, earnest Joseph Ross—with his plan. The young men agreed to work together to cram their three years of college into two. With approval from Witherspoon, they began to spend over ten hours a day together studying. The first signs of Madison’s intensity, his ability to disappear into a plan or campaign, appeared. Sixty years later, Madison recounted the marathon with almost masochistic satisfaction. His “indiscreet experiment of the minimum of sleep & the maximum of application” was a test, he recalled, of “which the constitution would bear.” He slept, he said, for several weeks at a time less than five hours a night. The result was “very infirm health,” which he admitted was caused by his “doubled labour.”32

Why did Madison so urgently need to race through college? He seemed to revel in the bravado of the accomplishment, in the act of bending a rigid curriculum to his will. The damage to his health, he recalled in his old age, came from the “extraordinary exertion made to justify the indulgence granted by the Faculty and to insure the attainment of his object.” The old man—intent, as always, to snuff out the slightest flares of his father’s hated vanity—emphasized that his was not “any extraordinary achievement.” Other students, he asserted, could have done the same with “little more than ordinary exertion.”33

But he was obviously protesting too much. He was deeply proud of his achievement—as was Witherspoon.

Witherspoon took note of the anxious, intense teenager’s tenacity in the classroom. He liked Madison’s perspicacity, which was leavened by a dry and sometimes wicked sense of humor. For Madison’s part, the men in his life had prepared him to see Witherspoon fondly. His father, too, was a contrarian. Robertson had relished fights against monarchy and hypocrisy. But what was most congenial to him was the older man’s impatience with any effort falling short of excellence. With war with Great Britain almost certainly ahead, the desire, the need, for action drew the young man and the cleric even closer.

But life at Princeton was not, thank goodness, all seriousness and revolution.

MADISON DISCOVERED THE JOYS OF MALE CAMARADERIE. THE BOYS quickly fell into an imposed routine. A bell first sounded at five o’clock in the morning, rousing the reluctant students. At six, another bell rang, sending them to morning prayers with Witherspoon, who would explore a single Biblical passage at length. After prayers, they studied for an hour—hungry—before eating breakfast at nine a.m. They then studied for three more hours. They scarfed down dinner at one p.m., then enjoyed two hours reserved for recreation, conversation, sports. From three to five p.m., they studied and practiced rhetoric and recitation. At five o’clock, the bell sounded again for evening prayers. Supper was served at seven, and by nine p.m. they were required to be in their rooms.34

It was a busy day, meant to end quietly, but with three boys to a room, Madison likely found plenty of time for both extra study and mischief. The college allowed students a dish of tea in their apartments, provided it be “done after evening prayer [and] not interfere with hours of study.”35 The caffeine fomented fervent conversations by candlelight. The mayhem that erupted at night caught shy Madison up like a leaf in a storm. The young men invented ribald names and theatrical characters for one another. They took turns aping their roles, hiding in the dark entryways of Nassau Hall to leap out at and shove one another. They knocked on doors in the small town and then ran off, cackling. They soaked feathers with grease from the cook’s heavy supper and strewed them in front of the entryways, pratfalling their friends. Now and then, they stole a plump hen or turkey and let it loose indoors for entertainment. They manufactured packages of gunpowder and exploded them in the rooms of the more timorous boys. In the winter, they poured water into the infernal bell to freeze its constant ringing to their studies.36

It was an adolescent maelstrom, with few women anywhere. Wives and daughters in town found themselves the objects of the students’ constant fascination. Madison and the other students crowded into each other’s already small bedrooms in Nassau Hall late at night, gathering around telescopes to ogle women in town.

His friends liked Madison, and cheerfully called him his childhood nickname, Jemmy. They approved of his sincerity, his enthusiasm for ideas, his loyalty, and his defenseless, contagious hilarity. They also liked how much he plainly cared for them—he listened, empathized, and understood. His small head somehow held an ocean of insight into human nature. And even though they knew he was smarter than most of them, they also liked that his sensitivity checked any tendency toward arrogance (he would shrink at a single harsh word, had no desire for public speaking, and exhibited no ability whatsoever to strut). And they loved to poke him about his discomfort about the most crucial topic for them—females.

Madison began making close friends. He was particularly fond of kind, inquisitive William Bradford, who had an oval face, with large eyes, curved eyebrows, a dimpled chin, and a perpetual slight smile. The pair would spend hours on end talking. He also liked the sardonic, irreverent Philip Freneau, with his a mop of messy hair, unruly demeanor, and passion for poetry—a wonderfully colorful character who always seemed to be performing on stage.

Sometimes, Madison found relief from his own intensity by himself. He would frequently take to the woods outside Nassau Hall, accompanied by a slave, to chop wood. He would set up logs, steady them, and swing down his ax, sweating profusely as chips flew around him.37 The hard exercise stretched his muscles and took him out of his head entirely.

There was an existing social group playfully called the Plain Dealing Society, whose enemy was the Well Meaning Society (later the Clio Society). Out of the first group, Madison, Bradford, and Freneau helped found a debating club they called the Whig Society.38 The two cliques mirrored the students’ home cultures and regions. Southerners and Pennsylvanians dominated among the Whigs, while New Englanders joined the Clios. Madison and the others met in private to brainstorm their strategy for the two societies’ beloved “paper wars.”

In these contests, they would exchange and then read out verses to outwit the other team. The goal was to be as cutting, outrageous, and intelligent as possible, and to win the favor of the crowd.

Madison, charged with penning lyrics, hatched a new persona: the irrepressible joker. His vulgar scenes were explosively funny. One imagined the other team as “Clio,” a seductive and “ever grateful muse.” When Clio “sprinkled my head with healing dews,” Madison crowed, she “then took me to her private room.” We can imagine him or his chosen actor reading out the following lines in an increasingly high falsetto: “And straight an Eunuch out I come,” he cried, “my voice to render more melodious, a recompence for sufferings odious!” Clio, under the guise of a temptress, had castrated Whig, which the boys naturally found hilarious.

But Madison could slash with that rapier wit as well. He gained a fearsome reputation for taking subtle—and not so subtle—jabs at peers who had offended him. When a rascally student named Moses Allen was widely rumored to have visited a prostitute, Madison turned on him with a combination of satire and venom. Calling out Allen as a “lecherous rascal,” Madison predicted, in rhyming couplets, that he would find a place “just suited to his mind,” where he could “whore and pimp and drink and swear,” nor “more the garb of Christians wear.”

While the verses were read in a spirit of hilarity, they had a cutting edge. Thrown out into that libertine wilderness, Madison said, Allen would “free Nassau from such a pest.” He was, cried Madison, “a dunce a fool an ass at best!”39

Poor Allen. For his sexual experience, Madison would cast him out not only from Princeton (Nassau) but from Christendom. Madison’s Puritanical intolerance in matters of the flesh seemed to know no bounds. He was, after all, almost certainly a virgin. Something about Allen’s freedom and recklessness seemed to make the ambitious, driven young man uncomfortable and, perhaps, envious. And so it should come as no surprise that he began taking a special interest in the ancient passions.

*  After Witherspoon and his family moved to America, his oldest son, James, joined the rebel forces and was killed at the Battle of Germantown. Varnum Lansing Collins, Introduction, in Lectures on Moral Philosophy by John Witherspoon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1912), xvii.