JOE ROSS’S DEATH INTENSIFIED MADISON’S DISQUIET ABOUT HIS PRESENT AND future. Notwithstanding, he quickly adopted the role of mentor to Bradford, who was struggling with his own future. “Strong desires and great Hopes instigate us to arduous enterprises, fortitude, and perseverance,” he responded to his friend. “Nevertheless a watchful eye must be kept on ourselves, lest while we are building ideal monuments of Renown and Bliss here, we neglect to have our names enrolled in the Annals of Heaven.” Bradford took Madison’s advice and studied law. He would later become attorney general of Pennsylvania.
As for Madison, at twenty-two, the itch for immortal achievements had taken root in his character. The more he struggled against that desire, the more he was entangled in it. The aches returned to his stomach. He felt trapped and suffocated in the house and could not fathom what he would do with his life, how he would make his mark.
There was a strong belief at the time in the curative, almost baptismal effect of mineral spring waters. Years later, Madison’s mother, experiencing what her husband called a “most troublesome and weakening disorder,” would consult with eminent physicians and take a wide variety of medicine for four long years—to no effect. Then, after she bathed in and drank the water of a sulfurous mineral spring for several weeks, Madison’s father breathlessly described his “inexpressible satisfaction and pleasure” that she had overcome her “deplorable state.” Through the “salutary virtue of the water,” he proudly exclaimed, his wife had been restored—and was even “fatter than she ever was before.”1
Now, Madison decided to escape Montpelier for the hot springs of the Alleghany Highlands.2 James and Nelly agreed to fund a restorative trip west for their complaining, nervous son. Loaded with several weeks of supplies and his parents’ blessings, Madison and Sawney took to the road.
The two men followed the trail away from Montpelier. The horses jounced and jostled on the red-orange clay road as the house receded in the background, shimmering slightly in the humid July air. Horseflies buzzed around Madison’s ears, magenta sprays of redbud decorating the dark walls of forest.
At once, he must have felt lighter, less encumbered. The 120-mile trip took about four days. Finally, the pair arrived. The pool rested like a small blue-green jewel in the vast Shenandoah Valley. A few thousand feet away, the gentle hills soared up and away, blanketed with deciduous trees and pines. There was almost no sound, save for the falling waters. A sulfurous odor—at once grating and strangely pleasant—suffused the air. A broad circular pool, some twenty feet in diameter, sat placidly, while an overflow channel steadily splashed into a stream.
The pool was about six feet deep, and so Madison, upon slipping into the water, was either quickly underwater or clinging to the stony side. The water, heated by natural springs, always stayed slightly warm, like breath itself. Madison, looking into the glassy surface, saw himself—his thin nose, his small eyes, his shock of thinning hair, his pale skin. He looked through his face to the pool’s depths, to the bottom, filled with thousands of pebbles and smooth rocks, painted with a blue-green surface of algae.
With the combination of the water’s warmth, the devilish scent, the blue-green depths, and the gentle lapping as his fellows entered and left the pool, Madison quieted, the unease in his stomach and nerves settling. No surprise that he would go often to the pools and encourage his friends to do the same. In late October 1779, when Bradford was ailing, Madison would write to encourage him to travel to Virginia to enjoy the “beneficial affects” for his health that “I flatter myself” had helped Madison so much.3
The waters were balm for Madison’s choked ambitions, the physical effects of his anxiety. They become another instance of his personal system of checks and balances.
WHEN HE RETURNED, ORANGE COUNTY SEEMED EVEN MORE STAID, especially in contrast to the ferment of Princeton and the bonhomie of Philadelphia. Day by day in that autumn of 1772, Madison began to feel trapped. As autumn descended coolly on the Blue Ridge, he told Bradford to prevent the “impertinent fops that abound in every City” from diverting him from “your business and philosophical amusements.” Those “fops,” Madison believed, would pursue Bradford because of his “indignation at their follies” and because he—with his habitual discretion and good taste—would keep them at a “becoming distance.”4 As for his part, Madison told his friend, he was “luckily out of the way at such troubles,” but he imagined they were virtually swarming Bradford, “for they breed in Towns and populous places, as naturally as flies do in the Shambles.”5
He would not admit, even to himself, his plain envy of the sirens Bradford had to avoid. Although Madison protested that he was above such degraded seductions, he would have traded his father’s pristine home for such “shambles” in an instant. He hated his remove from the flow of ideas and the clash of events. “You are the only valuable friend I have settled in so public a place,” he told Bradford, and so “must rely on you for an account of all literary transactions in your part of the world.”6
He badly missed the friendship of school, the ease of conversation and the bonding around ideas in the close quarters of Nassau Hall. For the rest of his life, he would seek to re-create that intensity of friendship around ideas wherever he could, whether with Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, or James Monroe.
After a long winter, the air began to warm, bringing along Madison’s nostalgia for a life of ideas. In April 1773, he yearningly asked Bradford to write to him “when you feel as you used to do when we were under the same Roof and you found it a recreation and release from Business and Books to come and chat an hour or two with me.” In the country, he complained, he was “too remote from the Post” even to have the luxury of immediately expressing himself through a letter.7
He felt stuck and frantic. But he spent another three seasons at home—summer, fall, winter—until, finally, he had had enough.
In the freezing month of January 1774, he sent an agonized letter from his effective prison to his friend.
“I WANT AGAIN TO BREATHE YOUR FREE AIR,” HE CRIED TO BRADFORD. HIS anxiety, intensified at Montpelier, gave free rein to his hypochondria. He conflated Philadelphia’s cosmopolitan culture with health-giving properties. “I expect it will mend my Constitution,” he declared, and “confirm my principles.” Immersion in a fresh city—brimming with new ideas and new people—would, like the pools, make him well. He had, he complained, “nothing to brag of as to the State and Liberty of my Country.”8
He told Bradford he was lucky to be “dwelling in a Land where those inestimable privileges are fully enjoyed” and where people had “long felt the good effects of their religious as well as Civil Liberty.” The difference was cultural; outsiders, as well as new ideas, were welcomed in Philadelphia: “Foreigners have been encouraged to settle amg. you.” Diversity, pluralism, and progressivism followed. “Industry and Virtue” stoked by “mutual emulation and mutual Inspection,” the “Commerce and Arts” flourishing. The cause was the “continual exertions of Genius,” which were always accompanied by Philadelphians’ “love of Fame and Knowledge.”
Virginia’s closed thinking was dramatically different. In his Commonwealth, he lamented, “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind” for every “noble enterprize” and every “expanded prospect.”9
He asked his friend for a reprieve. Bradford happily agreed to host Madison on a visit to Philadelphia. Madison excitedly packed his bags for the trip. In the beginning of May, he traveled to stay with Bradford for a few days, before and after a trip to Albany whose purpose is unknown.10
Stirring Philadelphia lit a lamp in Madison’s mind. When he returned to Orange County, he was afire for a life of true principle. It seemed a perfect time for his awakening, coinciding with the pitiless harassment in Virginia of a defenseless religious minority. The question was what Madison would do about it.
IN THE SPRING OF 1774, CELL DOORS SHUT ON FIVE MEN IN CULPEPER, A deeply conservative county about twenty miles north of Montpelier. The prisoners were Baptists who had been traveling throughout central Virginia, distributing tracts proclaiming their faith. They were proclaiming their direct connection to God (circumventing clergy) and their skepticism about the Anglican Church’s sweeping power in government. After they arrived in Culpeper, the sheriff jailed them for the crime of preaching without a required license. But their real offense was challenging the Anglicans.
Through heavy recruitment and a dizzying service style marked by their ministers’ “holy whine” and wild gesticulations, Baptists had been spreading through Virginia like wildfire; in 1771, there had been fourteen churches throughout the Piedmont; in 1772, thirty-four; and by 1774, fifty-four. By 1776, the year of the Revolution, there would be seventy-four Baptist churches in Virginia.11 In almost every respect, this contagious growth undermined both the Anglicans’ theology and their practice. The Baptists regularly elevated unlearned leaders to ministers, finding a natural congregant base among the poor and the illiterate, which the Anglicans saw instead as the blasphemous seduction of the ignorant.12 Like Witherspoon’s Moderates in Scotland, they infuriated their established opponents. They seemed ungovernable, a tribe of passionate separatists who refused to ask permission to pray in public, to assemble, to protest.
In the General Assembly, “incredible and extravagant stories” were circulated about the Baptists, describing the “monstrous effects” of their “Enthusiasm.” The outrage of the paranoid attacks lay in their very baseness—their appeal to the lowest common denominator. The audacity was precisely what made the Baptists so weak. The Baptists were “so greedily swallowed by their Enemies,” Madison darkly observed, that they “lost footing by it.” Their oppressors were “too much devoted” to the Anglican establishment even to “hear of the Toleration of Dissentients.”13
Madison saw in the Baptists conscience that deserved protection from the state rather than oppression. The Baptists, after all, weren’t pursuing state power or tax revenue. They were promoting their faith in baptism, their practice of plunging adherents into the cool waters of Virginia’s rivers and lakes to cleanse their sins. But they were now crying out for food through the cold bars of their jail. Their captors threw them only dry crusts of rye bread to eat. One tormentor even stood on a stool and urinated through the bars into their cell.14
The inhumane treatment became notorious throughout Virginia. In Orange, young Madison was enraged. As an older man, Madison recollected that he was under “very early and strong impressions in favour of Liberty both Civil and Religious.” His conscience, he said, led him to spare “no exertion to save” the Baptists from imprisonment.15 At the time, he proudly told Bradford that he “squabbled and scolded abused and ridiculed” the shameful action with everyone he could.16 He later recalled that the “interposition” was “a mere duty prescribed by conscience.”17 He had absorbed Witherspoon’s teachings entirely; he simply had no choice in the matter.
Everywhere he went and with anyone he thought could make a difference, he remonstrated on behalf of the imprisoned men. Their crime, he wrote Bradford, was simply publishing “religious sentiments” that were actually “very orthodox.”18 Bradford sympathetically responded, “I am sorry to hear that Persecution has got so much footing among you.” But he couldn’t resist a jab at his friend’s bumpkin land. “The description you give of your Country,” he informed Madison, “makes me more in love with mine.”19 Persecution, he declared, was a “weed that grows not in our happy soil.” He could not even recall a single person being imprisoned for his religious beliefs, “however heritical or unepiscopal they might be.”20
In late March, Madison proudly reported to Bradford that a contingent of Virginians was attempting to rescue the Baptists. With the General Assembly scheduled to meet on May 1, defenders of the imprisoned men began circulating petitions in central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley. Meanwhile, a clutch of Presbyterians were planning a direct intervention with the Culpeper authorities. Madison was at once enthusiastic and skeptical, admitting to Bradford that he was “very doubtful of their succeeding in the Attempt.”21
Frighteningly, with the arrival of hot Virginia months, he watched the persecution begin to spread beyond the Baptists. When James Herdman, a Scottish parson, refused to observe the Sunday fast required by the Anglicans, more Culpeper politicians sent a delegation to demand he comply. “When called on,” Madison wrote admiringly, he “pleaded Conscience.” Inspired, Madison wrote that Herdman was “alledging that it was his duty to pay no regard to any such appointments made by unconstitutional authority.” Drily, he observed that the politicians seemed to “have their Consciences too.” They ordered the sheriff to seal the doors of Herdman’s church and stop his salary.
For young Madison, the affair echoed Witherspoon’s battles between conscience and power, minority and majority. He described for Bradford the notorious case of John Wingate, a reverend who had angered the local Anglicans so intensely that they publicly considered tarring and feathering him. At the last minute, Wingate recanted. Madison was not impressed. Once Wingate noticed that he would be protected “not so much in the law as the favor of the people,” he satirically observed, he became “very supple & obsequious.”22
He was disgusted by the fact that, all around him, conscience always seemed to play David to power’s Goliath. He blamed culture. The Virginia gentry’s sentiments were “vastly different,” he told Bradford, from “what you have been used to.” Virginia, with its profound cultural connections to the English landed class and Anglican religion, differed radically from Pennsylvania’s immigrant culture. Philadelphians had a “liberal catholic and equitable way of thinking as to the rights of Conscience” that was “little known,” he remarked angrily, among the “Zealous adherents of our Hierarchy.”23
For Madison, diversity led to challenge, challenge to truth—and truth to wisdom. Witherspoon’s beacon was shining above the storm. The twenty-three-year-old, fresh off his birthday, began formulating his vision of a future free of tyranny.
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1773, AS MADISON SETTLED INTO HIS SECOND LONG winter at home, tutoring, Bradford clipped a story from a Philadelphia newspaper about the stunning “tea party” in Boston. He folded the article and inserted it in an envelope he addressed to Madison, along with a letter relishing the “Destruction of the Tea at Boston.”24 Madison read Bradford’s words with a combination of jealousy and atavistic pride. He was thrilled the British were being repulsed in the north, but he badly wanted his more desultory Commonwealth to do the same.
As he pondered whether such a revolution could happen in Virginia, he gradually came to a crucial insight. He picked up his quill. If the Church of England remained the established religion in the colonies, Madison argued, then “slavery and Subjection” would be “gradually insinuated among us.” Such “Ecclesiastical Establishments,” he excitedly explained, “tend to great ignorance and Corruption,” which only lead to “mischievous Projects.” The destruction of a state monopoly on religion could leave behind not spiritual anarchy or nihilism, but instead an archipelago of principled beliefs. “I verily believe,” he wrote, that the “frequent Assaults” on America would “in the end prove of real advantage.”25
This picture, in turn, led Madison to a fresh new thought about the power of federalism—of a nation comprised of vigorous and competing states. Two centuries later, Justice Louis Brandeis would enthusiastically describe the states as “laboratories of democracy.”26 Witherspoon had lectured at Princeton that “every good form of government” must be “complex, so that the one principle may check the other.” Madison realized now that if a single religion were allowed to entrench itself through state government, it would colonize the minds of all the citizens. The differences between Virginia and Pennsylvania, as seen in the tea party, were the country’s strength. Through its own squabbling elements—its own Bradfords and Madisons—the young nation would learn to embrace the checks and balances inherent in human belief itself.27
In the coming months, Madison continued to devour the news. As he stewed on the oppression of the British, he became not only a war hawk, but a distinctly impatient one. “Would it not be advisable as soon as possible to begin our defence & to let its continuance or cessation depend on the success of a petition presented to his majesty,” he wrote Bradford. Delay only “emboldens our adversaries and improves their schemes,” he wrote. Meanwhile, waiting would degrade the “ardor of the Americans inspired with recent Injuries” while giving an opportunity to “our secret enemies to disseminate discord & disunion.”28
Public opinion, he felt, needed to be galvanized—and quickly.
MEANWHILE, BRADFORD CONSCIENTIOUSLY APPRISED MADISON OF THE strange tensions building at Princeton, where people were suddenly having apocalyptic visions. In August 1774, he wrote Madison, “Indeed my friend the world wears a strange aspect at the present day; to use Shakespeare’s expression ‘the times seem to be out of joint.’” It was not just the Indians, or the British, or the turmoil in Europe—it was everything together, a combination that created the disorienting sensation that the end of the days were afoot. “Something at hand,” Bradford believed, would “greatly augment the history of the world.” People everywhere were calculating the “commencement of the Millenium in the present Century.”
It seemed, Bradford wrote, as if they were all heading toward the “consummation of all things.” Indeed, when the “plot thickens,” everyone expected the “conclusion of the drama.”29
But Bradford wasn’t waiting for the apocalypse. He wanted Congress to begin “effectually warding off the attacks of Slavery and fixing the boundaries of Liberties.” He believed the nation most needed the confirmation and the grant of “certain rights” necessary to liberty. But he was pessimistic; the delegates in Philadelphia, he thought, lacked unanimity. Several of them, he observed, were even “inimical to the Liberties of America.”30
Madison responded with a rare admonishment. While he greatly admired the “wisdom of the advice & the elegance and cogency” of instructions that had been given to Philadelphia’s delegates, mere words would not be enough against the British. He questioned Bradford’s proposal of “deferring all endeavors” until America received concessions from England. Instead, he declared, Americans should take the offensive—immediately. The impatient young man told Bradford it would be “advisable as soon as possible to begin our defence.” Only then should a petition be delivered to the king.31
Madison was agitating to attack now. Pennsylvania had recently elected two well-known doves to Congress; that, he told Bradford, augured only “difficulties and divisions” ahead. But even worse, he said, were the “selfish Quakers in your House,” who, in their maddening denial of any right of government to use violence, would “frustrate the generous designs & manly efforts of the real friends to American Freedom.”32
James Rivington—the publisher of the influential Gazetteer—especially enraged Madison. Rivington was a dignified, gentlemanly figure who had emigrated from London in 1760. He had initially stayed neutral in the brewing conflict. But as revolutionary sentiment grew, Rivington began advocating for the British, and the front page of his paper proudly announced his title as “Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty.” In 1774, with tensions growing, Rivington said the Whig New-York Journal was “abhorrent to all good men” and a “pest to society.”33
Madison saw a rat. “I wish most heartily we had Rivington & his ministerial Gazetteers for 24 hours in this place,” he railed to Bradford. “Execrable as their designs are, they would meet with adequate punishment.” While he usually described his home state as a sort of backwater, in this respect—Virginia’s harshness to the disloyal—he was proud. “How different is the Spirit of Virginia from that of N York?,” he asked Bradford, rhetorically. “A fellow was lately tarred & feathered for treating one [of] our county committees with disrespect; in NY. they insult the whole Colony and Continent with impunity!”34
But then death came to Madison’s own door.
PEOPLE AT MONTPELIER BEGAN FALLING ILL. THEIR BODIES WERE RACKED by waves of diarrhea and bloody stools. They were constantly vomiting. Dysentery is transmitted through dirty water infected with fecal matter, but nobody knew that. What they knew was that it often killed, slowly and relentlessly.
Everyone walked around with palpable dread. Madison’s sister Elizabeth and brother Reuben were under eight years old. In May 1775, both children fell ill. Their little bodies heaved with diarrhea and burned with fever. On May 17, Elizabeth died. Reuben followed three weeks later, on June 5.
Madison’s mother, Nelly, had already endured both a miscarriage and an infant death. Now, she was in agony; his father, more stoic, was still clearly shaken. Madison suffered quietly and intensely. He was also terrified that he himself might die. Two weeks later, he wrote Bradford a clipped letter, employing formal, ancient English as a wall against fear. “Since I wrote last a Dysentry hath made an Irruption in my father’s family,” he wrote. “It has carried off a little sister about seven & a brother about four years of age.” Madison briskly composed himself and moved onto the secondary victims—“It is still among us but principally among the blacks,” adding, “I have escaped hitherto” and “it is now out of the house I live in, I hope the danger is over.” But reassurance was difficult for the disease was “pretty incident to this Country” and he feared that it would “range more generally this year than common.”35
Bradford was less equable in his response, responding with warmth and empathy. “I am grieved to hear the dysentery prevails so much with you,” he wrote, “& for the loss you have sustained.” And he suggested a solution for his friend: escape. “If the disorder should not abate,” he urged, “I would recommend a Journey this way to you: & if you can find nothing to amuse you here you may prosecute your journey to Cambridge.”36
Madison could at least save himself. But he did not move in time. The dreaded disease returned. Two weeks later, he wrote Bradford that the dysentery was “again in our family & is now among the slaves.” He felt he was living on borrowed time. “I have hitherto Escaped,” he said, “and hope it has no commission to attack me.” There was a small hope, however, in that the new wave seemed “less severe than it was at first.”37
Madison was amazed he had escaped death’s grasp. He agonized even more intensively about what he should do with his life. He decided to try his hand at the law. It would be a descent into hell for his restless, passionate mind.
HE DIFFIDENTLY INFORMED BRADFORD, “I INTEND MYSELF TO READ LAW occasionally and have procured books for that purpose so that you need not fear offending me by Allusions to that science.”38 He was taking his own medicine. When Bradford had pressed him for advice on his career, Madison had advised that the law was the “most eligeble” for Bradford’s “endowments” and had confidently explained that the law was “a sort of General Lover that wooes all the Muses and Graces,” unlike commerce or physics, which required “less Learning & smaller understanding.” He had expansively praised Bradford’s “adherence to probity and Truth in the Character of a Lawyer,” but had advised that dissimulating clients would often “occasion doubt and ignorance.”39
It was one thing to give such smooth advice; it was another altogether to take it. One became a lawyer by learning case after case, principle after principle, usually studying in solitude. Madison sat down with a new commonplace book of forty sewn pages to study the Reports, a book of cases and rules by a noted lawyer named William Salkeld that covered English common law from 1689 to 1712.40 The common law Salkeld covered was a disordered mess. Over centuries, English judges had decided countless disputes by examining other judges’ previous decisions, all the while trying to guess what other judges might follow in the future.
He closed the door in the library upstairs and set Salkeld’s tome before him. The low blue mountains spread out enticingly, miles away, like all the horizons he would never reach. In the library, Madison picked his way through dozens of cases, but he found his interest dwindling, his pen wandering into doodles. For a disinterested mind, gathering wisdom from the common law was like picking vegetables in an overgrown summer garden, stalked by buzzing mosquitoes. He yawned. He tried to fit in his studies before and after the tutoring sessions with Willey, Nelly, and Sarah but easily became distracted, and it showed in his notes.
His commonplace book cruelly tracked his declining progress. When beginning the book, he diligently employed wide-ruled margins, carefully including significant blank space under each case name. He wrote carefully, in neat and unrushed script. But as the weeks and months wore on, his well-laid plans slipped. His handwriting became small and hurried. He began carelessly squishing in notes to fit on a single page.
He half-heartedly designed a system to copy Salkeld’s cases and topics in alphabetical order, but the notes revealed his diminishing focus. Section A took up twelve pages, for instance. Sections B, C, D, and E each used four or five pages. But when he reached F, Madison’s boredom swamped him, and he could only manage a single page. When he got to G, on page 32, the game was up; he accidentally wrote everything upside-down.
He also skipped certain important areas of the law entirely—Law, Common and Civil, for instance, as well as most of the W’s: Wager of Law, Warranty, Weights and Measures, Wills and Testaments, Witnesses, and Words. The only W he included was a case under Writ.41
His boredom emerged in his summary of one property case called Ashby v. White, where the court rejected a voter’s complaint that his vote for Parliament had not been counted. Salkeld included a dissent by a judge eloquently standing up for a property-owner’s right to a remedy through law. The state, the judge argued, should respond to what was a moral injury. Such a ringing case about voter participation should have captured Madison’s imagination. But instead he wrote, “Case by voter for refusing to receive his vote in election for members of parliament. [Judges] adjudged the action not maintainable.” Stultified as he was, he totally ignored the dissenting judge’s reasoning and, by extension, the principle in the case.42
Sometimes he even lost his temper, such as in his caustic response to learning that Bradford was readily progressing in his studies. He was happy, he said, that his friend would “converse with the Edwards and Henry’s & Charles &c&c who have swayed the British Scepter.” But he sardonically warned that they would be “dirty and unprofitable Companions,” unless Bradford would “fall more in love with Liberty” by beholding such “detestable pictures of Tyranny and Cruelty.” Jealousy lurked in his words like a cancer.
He did laugh at himself, from time to time, grimly mocking his inability to master the law: “I was afraid you would not easily have loosened your Affections from the Belles Lettres,” he wrote Bradford. He paid his friend a sideways compliment. A “Delicate Taste and warm imagination like yours,” he said, “must find it hard to give up such refined & exquisite enjoyments for the coarse and dry study of the Law.” All his sentiment repressed by Salkeld’s oppressive logic came rushing out. Madison groped for language that could wing him away from his problem: “It is like leaving a pleasant flourishing field for a barren desert,” he waxed. “Perhaps I should not say barren either because the Law does bear fruit but it is a sour fruit that must be gathered and pressed and distilled before it can bring pleasure or profit.”43
He bemusedly read over what he had written. He admitted that he had made a “very awkward Comparison.” He was right; who would distill a “sour fruit” for pleasure? But he had “gone too far to quit,” he wrote wryly, “before I perceived that it was too much entangled in my brain to run it through.” In closing, he told Bradford, “You must forgive it.”44
In September 1774, his father tried to resolve his unemployed son’s clear professional predicament by giving him two hundred acres of land near Montpelier.45 But it must have been clear to all that if Madison had little interest in being a lawyer, he had even less in being a farmer or lord of a plantation.
So what would he do?
THE YOUNG MAN FELT HE WAS ATROPHYING. NOT ONLY HAD BEING PULLED in as his siblings’ tutor enmired him as thoroughly as quicksand, it seemed increasingly likely he would be a lifelong bachelor. Stuck in his father’s house, he doubted he would ever meet a wife in Orange County, and tried to deflect that worry through harsh asides about the excesses of others. When John Witherspoon visited Philadelphia, Bradford learned from him that Thaddeus Dod—who had transcribed Witherspoon’s lectures on the passions and, after graduation, entered theological studies—had gotten a young woman pregnant. He friends, Bradford reported, had forced the “Old fellow’s head in the noose” and made Dod marry her. Bradford laughed that this was putting the “Cart before the horse.”46
Madison responded acidly that the “World needs to be peopled”—but not with “bastards as my old friend Dod.” Sarcastically (but with a hint of envy), he wrote, “Who could have thought the old monk had been so letcherous,” and further observed that Dod’s mistake might have stemmed from his own religious repression. “I hope his Religion,” Madison snapped, “like that of some enthusiasts, was not of such a nature as to fan the amorous fire.”47 Dod had clearly failed to channel his own passions; as for Madison, he was about to realize his own best bet would be a “political career,” with the example, again, coming from Witherspoon.
THE CONGREGATION, RUSTLING AND BUZZING, LOOKED UP AT THE BEARISH form in the pulpit. It was May 17, 1775, in Princeton, a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, and Witherspoon was about to deliver his first public sermon on revolutionary politics. “You are all my witnesses,” he proclaimed to the crowd, “that this is the first time of my introducing any political subject into the pulpit.” He was, he said, “declaring my opinion, without any hesitation.”
Witherspoon began with deceptive simplicity. His purpose, he said, was to explore the meaning of Psalm 76.10: “Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee, and the remainder of wrath shalt thou restrain.” He explained that all the “disorderly passions of men” were, in the end, to the “praise of God.”48 He regarded his listeners. Even the infuriating circumstances of the colonies—the “plague of war,” the “ambition of mistaken princes,” the “cunning and cruelty of oppressive and corrupt ministers,” the “inhumanity of brutal soldiers”—all of these, he proclaimed, “however dreadful,” would “finally promote the glory of God.”
God would therefore aid the coming revolution, and “while the storm continues, his mercy and kindness shall appear in prescribing bounds to their rage and fury.”49
As they sharpened their bayonets, he instructed those assembled, they must keep one item paramount: humility. “Ostentation and confidence,” he said sternly, were an “outrage upon providence.” Arrogance was contagious, and when it “infuses itself into the spirit of a people,” became a “sure forerunner of destruction.” Witherspoon recounted for his flock the story of David and the Philistine. The Philistine taunted David, threatening that he would tear off his flesh and feed it to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field. But David, unruffled, offered a “just and modest” reply: “Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come unto thee in the name of the Lord of Hosts, the God of the Armies of Israel whom thou hast defied.”50
It was through that purity of his purpose, Witherspoon explained, that David prevailed. All forms of self-aggrandizement, bloviation, and puffery were not only bad spiritual practice—they undermined war and statesmanship. Such “profane ostentation” appeared in the braggart names given to ships of war—he cited with derision the “Thunderer,” the “Dread-nought,” the “Terrible,” the “Fire-brand,” the “Infernal.” When navies gave their ships such names, he declared, it was “not likely to obtain the blessing of the God of Heaven.”51
At last, he openly proclaimed himself a revolutionary. Rebellion, he declared, was the “cause of justice, of liberty, and of human nature.”52 The confederacy of the colonies had “not been the effect of pride, resentment, or sedition”; rather, of a “deep and general conviction” in civil and religious liberty. All of this was driven by faith, by the “knowledge of God and his truths” which naturally surface with “some degree of liberty and political justice.” “There is not a single instance in history,” he declared, “in which civil liberty was lost and religious liberty preserved entire.” If his congregation loved God, in other words, they must expel the British.
He pled for his adoptive countrymen to abandon the chauvinism that had divided rich from poor and north from south. Merchants and landholders must not separate into parties. Everyone must guard against “local provincial pride and jealousy.” By the “contempt of the courage, character, manners, or even language, of particular places,” he declared, they would do a “greater injury to the common cause.” The common good, above all else, should drive them.53
He closed with a ringing injunction about the dangers of incivility. “Every good man,” he announced, must take a deep concern in “national character and manners” and the cause of “promoting public virtue, and bearing down impiety and vice.” Why the urgency of that seemingly minor concern about vanity, when the country was fast approaching war? “Nothing is more certain,” he said, than that a “general profligacy and corruption of manners” would make America “ripe for destruction.” Even though government could “hold the rotten materials together for some time,” after a certain point, he darkly predicted, even the “best constitution” would be ineffectual, and “slavery must ensue.”54
He thus imparted an almost physical sense of urgency to this fusion of humility, principle, passion, and military might.
But he had one more thing to say.
“Certain classes of men,” Witherspoon added, were “under peculiar obligations, to the discharge of this duty.” These classes, he explained, were the magistrates, ministers, parents, heads of families, commanding military officers, and “those whom age has rendered venerable.” These natural leaders within society all had a special duty to elevate the country—to stand for not only political independence, but independence of conscience.55
Over the next three years, this sermon would be printed and sent not only around the thirteen states, but across the Atlantic to England and Scotland. In the late summer of 1775, copies begin circulating around Virginia. Madison read a copy and recognized a bracing new political philosophy that married faith, rebellion, and statesmanship—and supplied him with a cause.
BACK IN VIRGINIA, YOUNG MADISON REALIZED THAT WITHERSPOON’S closing injunction to America’s “certain classes” described the role he was envisioning for himself. The profession he ultimately chose—the statesman—was a new role for a new country. Decades later, scribbling away in his autobiography, Madison summarized his movement into government—a radical departure from the law, planting, or the merchant’s life—in a simple, new phrase. He would soon be, he recalled, “initiated into the political career.”56 Politics—with its intrigues and designs, its ambitions and pitfalls, and, above all, its capacity to help the young country become what she was meant to be—that is what began, at long last, to call to him.
Meanwhile, he learned of a stunning event eastward—and a new political hero. For while young Madison and Bradford were cogitating about British oppression, Patrick Henry was taking arms against it.