MADISON HAD HEARD THAT ONE FAMOUS LECTURE OF WITHERSPOON’S focused on the passions. When that day arrived, he sat down in the classroom with anticipation. Witherspoon’s wife would destroy her husband’s own copies of his lectures just before his death,1 but they would live on through his students, who laboriously recorded nearly every word of the lectures in thick books, which were then bound into leather volumes, passed within families, handed down to descendants and libraries like holy texts. Thaddeus Dod (who would later get into trouble with the passions himself, after impregnating a young woman not his wife) meticulously recorded this lecture.
The teacher stood and sternly stared at the boys. The passions, he declared, were “very numerous, and may be greatly diversified.” Every single thing that was the object of desire, he explained, could grow by “accident or indulgence” into a passion. Every one of those passions, he explained, belonged under love or hatred. Passions of love included admiration, desire, and delight, and passions of hatred envy, malice, rage, and revenge. Simple emotions—he gave the examples of hope, fear, joy, and sorrow—were frequently called passions, but this was a mistake. They were instead just states of mind, their object “probable or improbable, possessed or lost.” The passions, in other words, were like Plato’s steeds—physical beings stampeding toward a goal.
Most significantly, Witherspoon explained the other “great and real” distinction between the passions. They were either selfish or benevolent. A selfish passion stemmed from an interest in gratification, whereas a benevolent one came from the happiness of others. And they were either public or private. Public passions included the love of fame, power, and pleasure, while private passions were family affections, friendship, and patriotism. The benevolent, public passions were the noblest ones. And for those, Witherspoon advised his students—Madison listening closely—many brave souls had been willing to sacrifice everything, even their lives.2
MADISON WORKED LATE INTO THE NIGHT IN HIS ROOM, BENDING TO take notes from John Locke’s “Signs of Ideas.” The English philosopher’s argument was that our external behavior is related to our mind, and Madison was fascinated by the difference between exterior and interior. Translating into his own words, he wrote that the external signs or marks of ideas included indications of joy, such as smiling, laughing, and others. Indications of sorrow, on the other hand, were dejection, weeping, wailing, paleness, trembling, and blushing.3 An “Acute Man,” he wrote, should be able to penetrate “far into the most secret sentiments and affections of others.”
He knew he rarely displayed such “natural signs” himself—except for the appalling attacks that came during his most anxious moments. He was, he knew, more sensitive than most of his friends. The full range of passions—from love to hatred, from public to private—seemed to have a tenfold impact on him. He had always assumed that this made him weak, vulnerable. But now he considered a different proposition altogether. Distilling Locke’s thoughts, he scribbled that politicians and “other cunning Men of Business” could, by “great and refin’d dissimulation,” confound, and even stifle, the “natural Indications of their inmost thoughts.”4 He put down his quill. Hiding his feelings, he realized, could be a source of strength, not just weakness.
In the ninth of sixteen lectures Witherspoon delivered on morals, he brought the students to the great center: conscience. Conscience, he told the boys, was real, and “much founded in the moral principle.” Those who neglected their conscience risked great personal harm—leading not only to misery, but to shame. Self-government demanded that men keep their thoughts, desires, and affections in due moderation.5 Madison took notes hungrily, the teacher’s fierce injunction burning into his mind—into his conscience.
THE GREATER ISSUE, AS ALWAYS, WAS ENGLAND. TO EXERT MONETARY pressure on the kingdom, a wide-ranging group of merchants had agreed no longer to import spirits from England. But a smaller group of New York merchants had recently buckled to the economic pressure and decided to break the embargo. They then sent a letter encouraging Philadelphia merchants to break the agreement. Word of the letter had quickly spread, and with it, fury at the New York merchants’ perfidy.
A group of students donned black gowns and began a solemn procession toward the front lawn of Nassau Hall. Other young men pulled on a rope that led up to the bell atop Nassau Hall. The bell’s pealing and the ominous costumes combined to create a haunting effect that hinted at the violence to come.
Once the protesters had gathered in front of Nassau Hall, one student brandished with disgust the merchants’ offending letter. A man dressed as a hangman appeared, whom the students theatrically handed the letter, the crowd jeering. The hangman then loudly read a statement declaring the “Promoters of such a daring Breach of Faith” would be “blasted in the Eyes of every Lover of Liberty” and their “Names handed down to Posterity” as “Betrayers of their Country.”6 He set the letter on fire, riveted the crowd as it burnt to ash.
Afterward, back in his room, Madison excitedly described the incident in a letter to his father. The New York merchants were guilty, he said, of “base conduct.” The scene at Nassau Hall was awesome, with the students “appearing in their black Gowns & the bell Tolling.”7
Madison and all the boys were keenly aware that war with Great Britain was looming. Witherspoon, resentful of abusive British rule, openly stoked the flame, urging his students to view the British as occupiers. He took advantage of a college president’s unique weapons. Honorary degrees were only usually conferred on renowned clergy at Princeton, but in his first full year at the college, Witherspoon instead made them an instrument of dissent, granting degrees to John Dickinson, Joseph Galloway, and John Hancock—all renowned for defying England.8
For the Princeton president, ethics and statecraft had never been separate. In the classroom, his students could not separate the man from his teachings, and young Madison took from Witherspoon not just a set of ideas, but a way of being political in a world where decisions mattered, where a new nation was discovering what it wanted, and did not want, to be. But he was disturbed by one problem: in an uncertain time, how could pernicious ideas be defeated? For that, he paid close attention to his story of history’s most famous gadfly.
IN CLASS, MADISON LEARNED ABOUT SOCRATES’S MURDER BY THE GREEK masses he savagely satirized. The philosopher was charged and convicted of worshipping false idols and corrupting the youth who followed him around like the Pied Piper. Madison began using a single word—“Method” (which he carefully capitalized)—to understand why Socrates failed. The teenager captured the Socratic Method—its strengths and weaknesses—as confidently and economically as a philosophy professor. Socrates would “introduce some Topick suitable to his Design,” he said, but refrain from declaring his own opinion. He would then start “wheeling the Stream of the Discourse Slyly to his Purpose,” only then stunning his opponent “into sudden conviction of an absurdity.”
As impressive as Socrates’s intellectual sleights of hand were, Madison didn’t like them. The problem, he explained, was that the Method was “very captitious and insidious.” Even though Socrates would “surprize” his opponent—having “no suspicion of an attack”—that tactic was infuriating, to the point of violence. To “interrogate others in this manner,” Madison wrote,” is not well taken,” and “probably help’d to kindle & blow up that hatred against Socrates, which put a violent Period to his Life.”9 In other words, the way in which Socrates debated his opponents was so frustrating that they decided they would rather have him dead than so relentlessly expose their faults. When they falsely convicted him of charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and worshipping false gods, they were really venting their fury at his Method.
But young Madison had an alternative in mind. One should “not so much to confute” an opponent’s argument, he wrote. Instead, it was far better to “show the superiour advantage” and the “Honour and Justice of your own opinion.”10 Instead of revealing your opponent as a fool, you should instead concentrate on the intensity of your own convictions, the integrity of your own conscience, and the soundness of your own arguments compared with the flaws in your opponents’. What Madison wanted to avoid was the arrogant authority on which the Socratic Method depended, which so often ended in trickery. Socrates’s Method could not work without elevating the teacher and humiliating the student. A new Method, Madison realized—one that both parties threw on the same field, demanding an open contest between them—could change history.
The brash young scholar was schooling Socrates himself. What he had learned would become, as the boy became a man, the basis of his own very non-Socratic Method.
The great question then was what would inspire his budding young conscience—what Madison would use a new Method for. And for that, Witherspoon had an answer as well.
WITHERSPOON TURNED TO THE TOPIC OF HISTORY. MADISON WATCHED closely as the teacher stood before the students and announced that the study of history was “honorable” and “at present in high repute,” and “useful” and “delightful.” Yet it was also the bloodiest topic imaginable. He wanted them to understand what they were dealing with.
What they must understand, Witherspoon emphasized, was that men had clawed their way into history from the state of nature. In that primal condition, before society and before government, Witherspoon said, men had fought like beasts for everything they wanted: their food, females, a cave, or a spring. They could use no other weapons, he said, but those furnished by nature—their arms, teeth, fists, and feet. Fury, he stated, was their only guide. In the state of nature, he said, men would “endeavor to destroy, torture, exterminate, and even devour one another.”
IMAGE 3.1. JOHN WITHERSPOON, BY CHARLES WILLSON PEALE, AFTER CHARLES WILLSON PEALE, 1783–1784. COURTESY OF INDEPENDENCE NATIONAL PARK.
Devour one another. Without government, Witherspoon believed, men would rip each other apart with their bare hands. They would consume each other’s flesh. His portrait of mankind, which could just as easily have appeared in a ghoulish painting by Brueghel or Goya, was bloodier and more brutal even than Thomas Hobbes’s “poore, nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature. Hobbes had been writing after the massacres of the English Civil War, where he had witnessed men reduced to their bestial selves. But Witherspoon had experienced Doune Castle. All alone, as the solitary target of his torturers, he had evidently concluded that man, without restraint, was even worse.
He was briefly overcome and abruptly interrupted himself. “Let us,” he announced, “leave their horrible state.”* Madison and the others were left to contemplate man himself in a harsh new light. Man could only escape his brutal nature through government. But each form of government had damning weaknesses—and democracy was no exception at all.
WITHERSPOON LED HIS STUDENTS THROUGH THE BRAMBLES OF history. Of the three forms of government, Witherspoon said, he sympathized the most with monarchy, which had plain advantages in “unity, secrecy, and expedition.”11 Monarchy’s weakness lay not in its principle, but in the difficulty of finding men with the ability to command other men as capably and simply as an army: “No man can be found,” he declared, who had “either skill sufficient, or if he had, could give attention to the whole departments of a great empire.”12 And he said that a hereditary monarchy could provide no security whatsoever for either wisdom or goodness.13
More than anything else, every nation needed wisdom in its deliberations, and that, he said, should give aristocracy an advantage over all the other forms. In an aristocracy, the “persons of first rank” would be able to discover the public interest. But aristocracy also had a fatal flaw: the inherent fractiousness of elites, who have “little, or no prospect of fidelity or union.” On the contrary, aristocracies, he said, lead to the “most violent and implacable factions.”14
Witherspoon collected his thoughts; his students waited, quills poised. Democracy, Witherspoon said finally, was superior to both of the others for fidelity, because the multitude were collectively “true in intention to the interest of the public, because it is their own.” But there was a dark side to this collective truth. Democracy, he continued, had “very little advantage for wisdom, or union” and “none at all for secrecy, and expedition.” And there was a broader vulnerability as well: demagogues and other “ambitious persons.” In the ancient Greek, a demagogue was a “leader of the people.” A demagogue, by insinuating himself into the people’s graces, could create a separate power center within democracy, ultimately destroying and overturning the system. Perversely, the demagogue launched that cycle through the people themselves, so “very apt to trust a man who serves them well, with such power as that he is able to make them serve him.”15
However, democracy also could draw brilliance from its leaders. “Democracy is the nurse of eloquence,” Witherspoon went on, because when the multitude had power, “persuasion is the only way to govern them.”16
Witherspoon was building up to his Holy Grail—an alchemical answer to the conflict between the three pure forms. No one of the three, he told them, could exist on its own. Every good government must be “complex,” so that “the one principle may check the other.” Madison took notes furiously. “They must be so balanced,” the professor said, so that when “every one draws to his own interest or inclination,” there would be an “over poise upon the whole.”17
In other words, it was not as simple as planting the three forms separately. They must be interwoven like a rope’s fibers, so that when one element demanded attention, it would pull on the others.
This, Witherspoon declared, was a “nexus imperii.”
Some students frowned at the unfamiliar Latin phrase, but Madison must have understood it immediately. Nexus came from the verb necto, which means “to tie, bind, or weave something together.” In the modern sense, imperio means “power.” The “binding of power” is what Witherspoon meant by his phrase.18 “Something to make one of them necessary to the other,” Witherspoon explained. Otherwise, they would “not only draw different ways,” but would “often separate altogether from each other.”
That would not do. The way to prevent the strands separating—the rope from fraying—was by splitting the “great essential rights of rulers” among the different branches of government. The readiest example, he said, was Great Britain, where one branch had the power of making war and peace, but the British Parliament had the levying and distribution of money. That power over money, he concluded, was a sufficient restraint on all.19
Another harsh secret Witherspoon disclosed to his students about democracy: liberty was not necessary to the virtue a democracy would supposedly produce, because virtue was “perhaps equally possible” in every form of government. Furthermore, he rejected the idea that liberty would produce happiness in democracies, because they actually had more “impatience and discontent” than any other form.
Liberty’s only true advantage, Witherspoon declared, was in what it could do for humanity itself. In the grand sum of things, liberty could “put in motion all the human power” by promoting industry, and thus happiness. In that cool assessment, liberty was desirable not for moral or metaphysical reasons, but because it produces “every latent quality” and because it improves the human mind. Liberty, he told them, was the “nurse of riches, literature and heroism.”20
It was a reasoned assessment of an aspiration that could inflame men to topple governments. And Madison found it profoundly attractive. But liberty itself was not so carefully contained; on the contrary, he watched as the storms of an unsettled time surged through Princeton’s bucolic campus.
During Madison’s last year at Princeton, Witherspoon watched with dismay as a mysterious explosion of religious sentiment took over the school. In 1772, students began chattering excitedly about the power of the Christian faith to transform the nation. What became known as the great Princeton “revival” incensed its president, who deemed the viral event “not true and rational religion, but fanaticism.”21 His own religiosity—like the one Madison would take away from Princeton like a compass—charted a careful course through the shoals of excess, grandiosity, and arrogance. Witherspoon was interested in probity, not popularity. Lecturing divinity students at Princeton about the revival, he said that, whatever one’s calling or profession, “the salvation of our souls is the one thing needful.”22
Madison was growing to appreciate freedom in an entirely new way. Sometime in his final year of college, it is possible that Madison had his own run-in with the passions, with a mysterious “pretty Philadelphian.”* The relationship was serious enough for Madison to commission an ivory locket by the well-regarded artist Charles Willson Peale, into which Madison sealed a lock of his own hair.
But his father would not make things so easy.
IN WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HIS FINAL YEAR AT PRINCETON, MADISON opened a letter from his father to find a disturbing request. James Madison Sr. wanted him to find a friend willing to come down to Orange County to tutor his sisters and brothers. But the letter contained no information about the salary his father would pay or the duration he would expect. With a sinking feeling, Madison realized that the tutor might end up being him.
In the days ahead, he haplessly took his parent’s vague demand to one friend, then another, but they wanted, of course, to know the compensation first. In late July, Madison frantically wrote his father that he had spoken to several members of the senior class about serving as his tutor, but that none would commit unless they “knew what you would allow them.” He complained that they could not “remain in suspense” until after he had returned from his next trip back home to Virginia with the answer. He pleaded with his father, by the middle of September at the latest, to tell him the “most you would be willing to give,” in which case, “I think there would be a greater probability of my engaging one for you.”23
IMAGE 3.2. JAMES MADISON AT PRINCETON, BY CHARLES WILLSON PEALE. COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
But his father never provided the figure, effectively trapping his son in the web of a proposal that was really a requirement. Madison, of course, failed to find a replacement. And so he realized he would have to come home and do the job himself. Agonized, on October 9, Madison wrote for permission to stay the winter. He vainly attempted to manipulate Madison Sr. through his weak spot—money. After telling him of his “past & future expences,” he said he had reached a “bare competency” with his father’s funds, which he would “not ascribe to extravagance.” Yes, he could come home in the spring, but that would require the purchase of a horse and expenses for the journey, which, he said, “I am apprehensive will amount to more than I can reserve out of my present Stock.” He asked his father for “a few Half-Jos” in exchange (a Johannes—“Jo” for short—was a valuable gold Portuguese coin commonly used in America). Otherwise, he reiterated his decision to stay in Princeton for the winter (“I need say nothing more in this place, my sentiments being still the same.”24)
In one version of the autobiography he wrote six decades later (transcribed by an anonymous author who emphasized “These facts are authentic. They are cop[ied] from his own pen.”), Madison rationalized that he stayed because “intense study had left him too weak to make the journey home.”25 But he stayed because he wanted to.
His graduation date was scheduled for the last Wednesday of September 1771. Among the twelve graduating students, he was the only one who was not there. He felt too agitated and nauseated to appear in public. Irving Brant argued that though other historians have speculated Madison was simply ill at the graduation, he was instead likely suffering from “his physical debility due to overstudy” combined with “his diffidence about public speaking.”26 In other words, the problem, as ever, was anxiety.
Having wrestled his respite for the winter and spring from his father, he studied the most advanced liberal arts available—Hebrew, theology, moral philosophy, and history with Witherspoon—effectively becoming Princeton’s first graduate student. He contemplated a future in the clergy, Witherspoon’s great example beckoning yet more urgently.
Through the winter, he clung to the place—the late-night conversations; the private lessons with Witherspoon; the close, woodsmoke-scented warmth of Nassau Hall. But when April came, he sadly reconciled himself to the long return home.
MADISON STEPPED UP ONTO HIS HORSE IN PRINCETON. HE GAZED AT THE cobblestone underfoot, the rocks on a winding road that would inevitably route him back to his father’s house. While his life should have been commencing, he was instead a man without a profession. With the ferment of New York and Philadelphia so tantalizingly close, and with war in the air, he feared the journey back to the parochial countryside of Orange. He began the long trip home with a sense of dread, a familiar anxiety closing in on him.
* Abel Johnson, “Lectures on History” by the Reverend John Witherspoon, president of New Jersey College, 1784, John Witherspoon Collection, Box 1, Folder 40, Princeton Library, 1–43.
* For many years, it was assumed that an ivory miniature of Madison painted by Charles Willson Peale was given to Kitty Floyd, whom he would meet in 1783 and become briefly engaged to. But consider that in his portrait, Madison looks much younger than thirty-two years old. He looks twenty-one—the age he would have been in college. Also, the miniature he received from Kitty—long assumed to be one of a pair the couple exchanged that year—was dramatically different from another made of her that same year. The one of Madison was also made to hold hair, whereas Kitty’s was not. Most important, in a paper discovered with Madison’s miniature, a descendant of Madison’s sister Nelly Hite wrote, “While President Madison was attending Princeton College, aged 20–1, family tradition says, his heart was captured by a pretty Philadelphian, who accepted his offer of heart and hand. . . . Alas! The fair one proved false and returned the locket. It was an unpleasant reminder of his disappointment, so he sent it to his sister Nelly who [later] gave it to her only daughter Nelly.” Virginia Moore, The Madisons (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 36.