ON OCTOBER 7, MADISON TRAVELED BACK TO WILLIAMSBURG TO BEGIN working in the new government. His early biographer William Rives believed this was when Madison and Jefferson first met. Jefferson had been in Philadelphia that summer serving in Congress and had resigned his seat to join Virginia’s House of Delegates where, Rives wrote, he became “naturally and properly the leader.”1 Jefferson was immediately struck by his impatient and anxious young colleague. He later described Madison as “a new member and young” and recalled that “his extreme modesty . . . prevented his venturing himself in debate.”2
Madison may have been quiet, but he did not shrink from the challenges ahead. On the contrary, he dove further into the apparatus of the new government. He was appointed to the Committee of Privileges and Elections, the Committee for Religion, and three special committees dealing with unsettled claims against the state related to Dunmore’s war, Virginia’s disputed boundary with Pennsylvania, and abolishing special privileges for the Anglican Church.3 The six-month term flew by. The delegates could only return if they were actually elected by their constituents, and so Madison traveled the long road home to stand for election.
The wind seemed to be at his back. His experience in Williamsburg had been extraordinarily heady for the twenty-six-year-old. He had single-handedly changed the course of freedom of religion in Virginia. He felt he might tackle the integrity of democracy in Orange County as well. But that indulgence in idealism was about to deliver Madison a crushing defeat.
THE CUSTOM IN ORANGE COUNTRY WAS FOR CANDIDATES TO BRING LARGE quantities of cider and liquor to voters at polling places. Whoever kept the voters drunkest in this extramural political competition would win. Voters, who often had to travel long distances to vote, loved the tradition, which created a kind of competitive drunken party between candidates’ supporters at the court house where voting was taking place. It was a messy, happily vulgar tradition, with voters growing more raucous as the day progressed.
Madison had always found the practice beneath Virginia’s dignity and his own concept of public service. The Commonwealth, he thought, was aspiring to become a land of achievement and nobility. How could an aspiring office-holder win through such a quid pro quo? Why should he have to trade liquor for votes? He should, he felt, be able to lead public opinion, to change how people thought about such a retrograde practice. And so Madison decided to buck the long tradition.
He not only let it be known that there would be no free booze for Madison supporters at the courthouses. He went on to publicly attack the “corrupting influence of spiritous liquors” in his campaign. He felt positive about his decision, but he noticed quickly less applause than he had hoped, particularly because one of his opponents, Charles Porter, also happened to run a tavern. The vote was held on April 24, 1777. Voters filed into courthouses to cast their ballots, cheerfully accepting free cups of punch and cider from Porter’s supporters. They jawboned about the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, drinking more, trading stories about their upcoming planting season and the progress of the assembly in Williamsburg, drinking even more. And they collectively decided to throw the young Madison out of office.
He lost not only to Porter but to another candidate as well. He was stunned. One day, he was an elected official, mirror of his father’s long-earned prestige, and his home county’s designate to the colony’s precious new government. Now, he was a private citizen with no power.
Later, Madison’s supporters would allege that Porter had used bribery and corruption in the election.4 But whether it was a fair fight or not, Madison soon realized he had lost his grasp on the public’s favor. Later in life, he described the experience with uncompromising candor, castigating himself rather than the voters for obtuseness. He had regarded the liquor custom, he remembered, as “equally inconsistent with the purity of moral and of republican principles.” He was “anxious to promote, by his example, the proper reform.” But he made, he said, the mistake of trusting that his “new views of the subject” would “prevail with the people; whilst his competitors adhered to the old practice.”5
At some point, Madison wrote a mysterious “paper containing some reflections on the importance of maintaining the purity of popular elections.” The paper, nowhere to be found today, was cited verbatim by Rives in his nineteenth-century biography of Madison. In it, Madison provided a richer and angrier account of the episode, revealing his raison d’être in politics: to elevate the government rather than flatter the people. In Virginia at the time, Madison explained, the people “not only tolerated, but expected and even required to be courted and treated. No candidate, who neglected those attentions, could be elected.” Madison’s decision was therefore “ascribed to a mean parsimony” and to a “proud disrespect for the voters.”
He had, he recalled, erroneously believed that the “spirit of the revolution” would support a “more chaste mode” for elections. But he had collided with “old habits” that were “too deeply rooted to be suddenly reformed.” He took a swipe at the candidates who had stooped to conquer. He was outvoted by candidates, “neither of them having superior pretensions, and one particularly deficient in them,” but both men, he said, were willing to use “all the means of influence familiar to the people.” After he lost, the hypersensitive Madison added insult to his own injury by appearing highfalutin and aloof when asked about his defeat. The elderly Madison explained that the “reserve” he expressed to others after his loss was mistakenly “imputed to want of respect for them.”6 But his protective measure was simply self-defense.
Madison decided he would never again allow a fickle public to determine his destiny. He would control public opinion, lest it control him. And he learned another, more personal, lesson. He must always connect with others. They must like him. And nobody could ever think he saw himself as above them—ever again.
MADISON BELIEVED EACH YEAR CONTAINED A “SICKLY SEASON” THAT ran from mid-July to early November, so the odds of an enjoyable year after his loss were already low. He likely spent the following months holed up at Montpelier, away from the disease and the public and the world in general.7 But in November, with the humid sickly season passed, a new political opportunity opened up. Madison, restless as always, seized it.
ARTICLE 9 OF VIRGINIA’S NEW CONSTITUTION REQUIRED THAT THE governor exercise his executive powers “with the advice of a Council of State” (as well as that he not, “under any pretence, exercise any power or prerogative by virtue of any law, statute, or custom, of England”). The Council of State was elected not by regular propertied voters, but by elected officials. For the colonial Virginians by now deeply suspicious of centralized power, the council was intended as a profound check on a governor—even one as popular as Patrick Henry.*
The election was held in the House of Delegates. When Madison’s name was announced, sixty-one men voted for James Madison, and only forty-two for Meriwether Smith, his opponent.
Madison was back in power.
IN JANUARY, HE TRAVELED TO WILLIAMSBURG TO BEGIN HIS SERVICE. ON THE unseasonably warm day of January 14, 1778, he stood before Patrick Henry, placed his small hand on a Bible, and followed as Henry read these words out to him: “I, James Madison Jr.,” he said, “do solemnly promise and swear, that I will, to the best of my skill and judgment, execute the said office diligently and faithfully according to law.”
Dudley Digges, John Blair, Nathaniel Harrison, and David Jameson, the four other members of the council, looked on. Three were older and far more august than Madison. Digges, sixty, was a member of a storied Tidewater political family. Blair, forty-six, was a prominent lawyer. Harrison, almost seventy, was a state senator.8 The only one near Madison’s age was Jameson, a twenty-one-year-old prodigy who had already built a successful merchant business in nearby Yorktown.9
Madison liked Jameson, and bonded as easily with him as Bradford. The young men shared a contagious enthusiasm for ideas that easily spilled over into conversation. Their marked lack of pretense allowed them to surmount the barriers usually separating the politically ambitious. They even shared the same melodramatic hypochondria. Years later, after Madison had moved to Philadelphia as a congressman, Jameson would mourn the “thin putrid state of the Air” of Richmond, looking back to their time in Williamsburg for comfort: “I have been long used to the Salt Air,” he wrote Madison, “and think I cannot enjoy health without it.”10
Digges, Blair, Harrison, and Jameson would be Madison’s partners in a new venture. Madison completed his oath: “[I] will be faithful to the commonwealth of Virginia, and will support and defend the same, according to the constitution thereof, to the utmost of my power.”11 They politely applauded—and got to work. They quickly had to deal with matters of life and death.
IN VALLEY FORGE IN PENNSYLVANIA, WASHINGTON’S SOLDIERS WOKE UP HUNGRY and spent their days that way, with precious supplies of pork, beef, and bacon achingly slow to arrive, and limited when they came. Night after night, they ate only fire cake—water and dough cooked over a campfire.12 Their feet cracked and bled as the cold and snow ate them alive. A brigadier general described their condition: “near one half of them destitute of any kind of shoes or stockings to their feet, and I may add many without either Breeches shirts or blankets exposed.” He observed many living in log huts without doors or floors.13
On December 31, Governor Henry received a letter from Congress with “alarming Accounts of the Distresses of the American Army for the Want of provisions.” Washington warned Congress that unless supplies were sent immediately, the troops would “Starve Disolve or Disperse.” Madison and the others urged Henry to instruct the Continental commissary to send an “active intelligent & proper person” to Virginia’s northwestern counties to buy up all the available pork, beef, and bacon, along with wagons for sending salt and other necessities—and quickly. Henry agreed, immediately putting the order in place.14
Madison was hooked on the problem that has long tormented military strategists—supplying troops in an extended war. But he was infuriated to find the council’s efforts disappearing into Virginia’s bottomless bureaucracy. The deputy commissary refused Henry’s request for a mission northwest for provisions, advising the governor that he should ask his deputy instead. Henry, learning that eight or ten thousand hogs and several thousand cows were available to be driven to the camping soldiers, employed three “Gentlemen of Character” to instantly purchase the livestock and drive them up to Washington’s camp.15
But, for Madison, the broader problem remained: the governor did not control, or even fund, the commissary. Congress did, and Congress was dysfunctional. On December 31, 1777, Congress allocated Virginia’s delegates a paltry $50,000 to buy goods for the army.16 That still left Henry in the constant position of begging for more money whenever it was needed, which it always was. Henry was livid. The commissary’s refusals to act with alacrity, he told Virginia’s congressional delegates (in a letter Madison probably drafted), “filled me with Concern & astonishment.”17 “The Genius of this Country,” he angrily wrote, “is not of that Cast.”18
Meanwhile, George Washington bitterly complained about the suffering of his troops. Early the next spring, Madison joined the other councilors in advising Henry that the “great fatigues to which he is constantly exposed” were placing Washington’s own health at risk. Because necessary items were unavailable in the “exhausted part of America” where the troops were stationed, the five men asked the governor to direct the commissary to send Washington good rum, wine, and sugar.19 Henry gladly complied.
EVEN THOUGH HE WAS MAKING WAR POLICY, MADISON WAS INSULATED from the dangers and violence of the battlefield in the quiet college town. The pillar of his comfortable world was his cousin, the Reverend James Madison, who had recently become president of the College of William and Mary. Madison moved into a room at his cousin’s house, which was a “much better accommodation,” he told his father, “than I could have promised myself.”
His cousin taught natural and moral philosophy at the college and was an Anglican minister, which put him at good-natured odds with James’s father. The reverend had always had a warm spot for his scholarly young cousin, and he was gentle and uncritical toward his houseguest. He admired James’s fortitude and intellect, his humor and conviction, and his plain commitment to the common good. Madison, in turn, was moved by his cousin’s steady moral compass; as an old man, he remembered the reverend as a man of “intellectual power and diversified learning” and recalled his “benevolence,” “courtesy,” and commitment to “our Revolution, and to the purest principles of a Government founded on the rights of man.”20
However, as much as he enjoyed his cousin’s companionship, he found himself longing for the everyday comforts, even the foods, of Montpelier. He wrote his father to ask for some of the local dried fruit he loved, explaining, “It would be very agreeable to me if I were enabled by such rarities as our part of the Country furnishes.” He missed his family; he reminded his father, with some urgency, “I hope you will not forget my parting request that I might hear frequently from home.”
And the eldest brother worried, too, about his younger brother Ambrose, who had left to fight the British. After hearing nothing about Ambrose’s safety for too long, he became deeply anxious. “Whenever my brother returns from the Army,” he pleaded with his father, “I desire he may be informed I shall expect he will make up by letter the loss of intelligence I sustain by my removal out of his way.”21
Although Madison’s bruising electoral loss still haunted him, his family and friends back home were plotting his restoration. On April 23, 1778—exactly a year after his loss—his neighbors reelected him, in absentia, to the House of Delegates. Virginia law prevented one man from simultaneously serving in the council and the legislature, and so the House of Delegates, by resolution, voided the election.22 But Madison took satisfaction in the victory all the same.
HENRY’S TERM AS GOVERNOR WAS SPEEDING TO AN END. IN JUNE 1779, Thomas Jefferson was elected Virginia’s new governor. Madison stayed on as councilor to the new governor.
These were increasingly precarious times for the country, and especially for Virginia. As the most populous and prosperous of the states, Virginia had previously enjoyed unparalleled national prestige. But constant British attacks and a rapacious inflation crisis were sapping her strength. Even worse was the growing fatigue among Virginia’s leadership class for tackling the problems themselves, through public service. Virginia had previously sent her very best people to Congress, including Jefferson himself; Edmund Pendleton, a lawyer and judge who had been president of the Virginia Convention and then the first judge of the Supreme Court; and George Wythe, the so-called first law professor, who taught Jefferson, James Monroe, and John Marshall at William and Mary, even designing the “Sic semper tyrannis” state flag with George Mason.23
Yet they all had departed Philadelphia, disgusted with the ineffectiveness of the Continental Congress. They left behind a cavernous emptiness. George Washington watched their replacements in Congress fritter away their power. He described with distaste to Benjamin Harrison, the speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates, their “idleness dissipation & extravagance.” Most of the men, he spat, were infected by an “insatiable thirst for riches.” He watched in disgust as they poured worthless money into Philadelphia’s taverns and fleshpots. The delegates routinely spent three or four hundred pounds on a concert, dinner, or a supper; such decadence, he wrote, would “not only take Men off from acting in but even from thinking of this business.” As a consequence, “party disputes and personal quarrels” had become the “great business of the day.”24
Washington implored Harrison to present his letter to the best men in Richmond as a tool for recruiting them to travel to Philadelphia. As “ever the Sun did in its meridian brightness,” he declared, the country had never been in such “eminent need of the wise patriotic and spirited exertions of her Sons than at this period.” His “pious wish” for the county was, he told Harrison, that each state would “not only choose but absolutely compel their ablest men” to come to Congress, and that they would then launch an investigation of the causes that had produced “so many disagreeable effects in the army and Country.”25 That was precisely what Madison began planning to do.*
With Madison’s prestige continuing to rise, his older colleagues looked to the compelling young man to fill the void. When the General Assembly met on December 14, 1779, they elected James Madison one of four new representatives to serve in Philadelphia.
Madison was electrified. He wrote an ecstatic, unctuous letter to Speaker Harrison, assuring him that “as far as fidelity and zeal can supply the place of abilities the interests of my country shall be punctually promoted.” The eager young man inadvertently dated the letter “November” instead of “December.”26 But as much as he wanted to leave for Philadelphia, he was restrained by that old friend—his conscience.
Throughout the thirteen states, new congressmen were saddling their horses and taking to chilly roads, in an attempt to outrace winter to the capital. They were excited for the fervor, chaos, and intrigue of Philadelphia. An unusual chill had begun to appear in the air. From New Jersey, Washington said the frost exceeded anything “that had ever been experienced in this climate before.”27 By January, heavy snows began to fall. A great winter descended on Virginia, locking Madison in a snowy prison. He had stayed behind on purpose.
The congressman-elect was already hard at work in his parents’ home, refusing the seductive capital as he tried to save it.
* By the Virginia Convention of 1829, the Council’s power had become so controversial that one delegate said, “I am not going to say any thing more about the Executive Council. God help me, I sometimes think I am labouring under a partial insanity and that this must be one of the subjects in which it runs.” David Robertson, Debates and Other Proceedings of the Convention of Virginia (Richmond: Enquirer-Press, 1805), 181.
* Washington was not alone in bemoaning Virginia’s men in Philadelphia. Richard Henry Lee, who seconded the motion in the Continental Congress calling for independence, had fled Congress along with Jefferson. In 1778, he wrote a letter mocking the no-names who were replacing Virginia’s statesmen in declamatory sarcasm. “The Virginia delegates in Congress are James Mercer! William Fitzhugh of Chatham! Flemming! Cyrus Griffen! Mery Smith!” By the next year, even those embarrassing men were gone. Fleming and Smith resigned in disgrace. Randolph retired under a cloud of financial impropriety. Fitzhugh dug in his heels in Virginia, effectively resigning. Patrick Henry refused to serve. Cyrus Griffin was the only one left in Philadelphia, but he could not even technically represent Virginia under Virginia’s own law, which required three members as a quorum. Irving Brant, James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751–1780, vol. 1 (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), 362.