4 The High Tract of Public Life

IT TOOK THE MEN ABOUT TWO DAYS TO REACH WILLIAM BRADFORD’S HOUSE in Philadelphia. The friends welcomed and embraced each other, Madison’s spirits immediately lifting. Over meals at the Bradfords’ London Coffee Shop, they regaled Bradford’s family with stories about Princeton, gossiping about their classmates—the ones getting married, the ones indecently occupied, the ones who would be famous, who were dying or already dead.

After the visit ended, Madison took back to the road. Plock plock plock went the horses’ hoofs, syncopating a depressing journey back in time. The journey took another week before he arrived back on the plantation. Approaching the mansion’s porch, his parents welcomed him, his siblings scrambled around him. The eldest brother, returned! In the days to come, aunts, uncles, cousins stopped by for cider, for dinner, to talk and inquire, to hear what he’d learned, to ask him, over and over, what he was going to do. Would he be a lawyer? A planter?

But for Madison, the arc of his young life was flattening, the momentum disappearing. He was going to stay there, at home, in the dead-end occupation of a tutor—a tutor!

“I HAVE UNDERTAKEN TO INSTRUCT MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS IN SOME OF the first rudiments of literature,” Madison informed Bradford in a tone of frustration, “but it does not take up so much of my time.” Why was he so bothered that he wasn’t busy? He was burning up with excess energy. It was like running full speed into a stone fence. “[I] shall always have leisure to recieve and answer your letters which are very grateful to me I assure you,” he told Bradford, “and for reading any performances you may be kind enough to send me whether of Mr. Freneau or any body else.”¹

IMAGE 4.1. PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM BRADFORD, BY WILLIAM E. WINNER. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART.

He did have extra time, but he spent it on the stifling role of full-time eldest brother. Madison was twenty-one when he returned home. His brothers Francis, Ambrose, Willey, and Reuben were nineteen, seventeen, ten, and one. His sisters Nelly, Sarah, and Elizabeth were twelve, eight, and four. He began tutoring Nelly, Willey, and Sarah in literature, grammar, mathematics, Latin, Greek, and French. Every morning, he sat down in the house with the trio and worked through lesson plans, dividing each day and each week carefully into segments.

His mother, almost always in sight, was fiercely glad to have her eldest back in the home. Throughout her long life, Nelly was both doting and overwrought. She was, first of all, kind; in an interview with a longtime docent from Montpelier, I heard a long-repeated story that Nelly always kept a candy jar nearby for the children who would visit and that she darned socks for children with their names.2 William Cabell Rives, who knew Madison personally and wrote the first authoritative biography of him in 1859, described his devoted tenderness toward his mother and how Madison “ever recurring with anxious thoughtfulness, in the midst of his most important preoccupations” attended to her “delicate health.”3 When she was a young bride, Madison Sr.’s envious cousin Joseph Chew complained that his cousin James was so completely absorbed by his “young, agreeable wife.” A “few hours,” he complained, “is due to your friend,” but, he admitted, a wife like Nelly could “certainly make moments slide away pleasantly.”⁴

IMAGE 4.2. NELLY MADISON, BY CHARLES PEALE POLK. COURTESY OF BELLE GROVE.

While sweet-natured, Nelly was also high-strung and hypersensitive. To have her first baby, she traveled to be with her mother in Port Royal, a town that still sits, quiet and small, about sixty miles from Montpelier; Madison was born in Port Royal. In one of many draft autobiographies he took up and then discarded as an adult, Madison recalled that in his “earliest years” he was taught the “ordinary elements” in a school in Port Royal, while “living at his house with his grandmother.”⁵

Why did his parents send their first child away? Perhaps it had something to do with the wildness of life on the frontier at Mount Pleasant. And what were the effects on a young boy of living away from his mother and father, with his maternal grandmother, for long stretches of time? Even as a teenager, Madison had become strikingly independent. But he also exhibited painful sensitivity to slights and threats to his health. Perhaps he took away a sense of specialness and vulnerability—and reserve—through his removal from the family seat.

He also saw a powerful hypochondria in his mother. Like her son, she seemed almost constantly to be ill. The specter of her sickness cast a pall over the house and was echoed in Madison’s later continuing melodrama about his health.

Yet a Frenchman visiting Montpelier in 1816 revealed what might be an (if not the) origin of Nelly’s constant illnesses. The visitor recorded that Nelly, then eighty-six, was a “very active women” who “enjoys perfect health” and “busies herself with the different occupations of her sex, as in the flower of her youth.” He had learned, he said, that Nelly had been “delicate and a semi-invalid” until she turned seventy, where her health had suddenly improved.6 Madison’s father also died when Nelly was about seventy. It seems unlikely that Nelly’s bursting into life exactly when her husband passed from life was a coincidence.

But she always stayed close to her first son. When Madison retired to Montpelier with his wife, Dolley, after serving two terms as president in 1817, long after his father had died in 1801, Nelly was still there. In his retirement, Rives wrote, Madison was “personally watching over and nursing her old age with such pious care that her life was protracted to within a few years of the term of his own.”⁷ James and Dolley would take care of Nelly until she died in 1829, at the age of ninety-eight.

IN THE HOUSE, SURROUNDED BY HIS MOTHER, HIS FATHER, AND HIS SIBLINGS, the hours plodded by. Madison mournfully looked outside at the placid landscape. It did not change. It never changed. His father checked in now and then on the school for siblings, before heading out to survey the slaves and measure the crops; his mother oversaw the preparation of meals, asking her children gentle but probing questions to assess their progress.

As bogged down as he felt, Madison always took good care of his brothers and sisters. As chief of a band of siblings, he displayed warmth and authority among them. But his relations with his siblings also featured a ruminative and insecure side. That doubling—of confidence and sensitivity, warmth and neediness—is common to eldest brothers.8 Madison was particularly anxious about his wandering, wayward, but loveable younger brother Willey. When he had returned home from college and Willey began college at William and Mary, their cousin, the Reverend James Madison, was the president of the college. William and Mary was in the midst of a radical restructuring; the Board of Visitors had just decided to remove the grammar school and two schools of divinity, in the process of deemphasizing religion and the humanities at the expense of a new, more technocratic focus on the hard sciences.

Madison felt keenly the risks for Willey and believed his brother’s malleable nature required the deep sort of humanistic learning he himself had received to shore up his wandering tendency. Madison wrote his father in exasperation that he was “much at a loss how to dispose of Willey.” “I can not think it would be expedient in the present state of things to send him out of the State,” he fretted, but at William and Mary, there was “nothing new to be taught but the higher & rarer branches of Science.” Madison urged his father to install Willey instead in private schools or academies, but he said he must be very particular; Willey’s sensitive character required it. Madison recommended to his father that Willey be sent home, where he would study English, geography, and arithmetic until he was mature enough to return to William and Mary.⁹

In April 1781, when Madison had entered his second year as a congressman in Philadelphia, he again chose to advise his father on Willey. He was “well pleased,” he wrote, that Willey had turned to thinking seriously about studying the law, but he worried that his preparatory studies had not been “sufficiently ripened for the purpose.” He went on to suggest that Willey “place himself in a situation for alternately persuing both” his studies and the law, as well as move near a respectable court where he could learn the rules of law practice. Madison fixedly concluded, “It is of great importance that no time be lost.” Madison, a failed student of law, probably had no business advising anyone on success as a practicing lawyer. But he shouldered Willey’s burdens as if they were his own.

That pattern continued in later years. In 1787, after the Constitutional Convention, Willey ventured a plan to enter politics. Madison was in New York at the time, trying to push the document through Congress, yet still found time to write his brother Ambrose, about Willey’s plan, “I am at a loss what to say.” Politics did not, Madison said impatiently, “call for much personal sacrifice” (which was what the indulgent Willey needed above all). Nor did he think Willey would earn “the honor, the profit or the pleasure of the undertaking.” Further, Willey should “not make an attempt without a tolerable certainty of success.” What he really wanted his brother to do was to take more time for the “only durable as well as honorable plan”: to “establish a character that merits” winning office.

The most succor the eldest brother would grudgingly offer his impetuous younger brother for his political ambition was this: “I would not be understood to discountenance the measure.”10

MERE MONTHS AFTER HE HAD RETURNED HOME, MADISON OPENED A letter from William Bradford to find a terrible shock. Bradford began with the tender address, “My dear Jemmy” and regaled Madison with the story of his recent graduation from Princeton. Bradford was suffering the bittersweet sensation of leaving a warm and beloved place for an uncertain future. “I leave Nassau Hall with the same regret,” he told Madison, “that a fond son would feel who parts with an indulgent mother to tempt the dangers of the sea.” He informed Madison he was disappointed that the latter hadn’t traveled north for the commencement. “I had some expectations of seeing you & Ross there,” he wrote, referring to Joe Ross, who also had left Princeton.

“But alas!” Bradford wrote. “You have doubtless heard of Poor Joe’s death.”

Madison’s stomach must have dropped. Bradford closed with kindness, as if he knew the news of his study partner’s early death would wound Madison. “When you write be particular,” he urged, for nothing that “concerns my dear Jemmy” could be “indifferent to one who esteems it his happiness.”¹¹

Madison painfully realized that life was short, indeed.