AS 1783 DREW TO A CLOSE, MADISON DEVISED A PLAN TO STAY IN PHILADELPHIA all winter for “close reading.” Just as at Princeton a decade earlier, he clung to an ambiguous present rather than return to Montpelier. But it seemed Congress might stay in Princeton, which left him tenuously situated—he would be all alone in the city, with no job and no role. His father had also let him know that his mother—a “tender & infirm parent”—wanted him back in Virginia. Deeply torn, Madison confessed to Jefferson his “anxiety on the subject” of whether to return to Orange.1
In the end, the eldest son again buckled under his family’s pressure. He remained with Jefferson in Philadelphia through the expiration of his term in Congress. Three weeks later, the pair left for Annapolis, where Congress was scheduled to meet. A quorum did not show up, however, and so Madison was all too quickly back on the long road home.
He arrived at Montpelier on December 5. Three and a half years had passed since he had left the homestead. His father and his brothers Ambrose and Willey had been busy acquiring land, some sixteen thousand acres in what is now Kentucky. Looking around him, he saw a bustling plantation that felt like the headquarters of a family empire.2 There was a busy, edgy feel in the ironworks and farm and cellars. A brutal winter was just beginning, with cold gray skies threatening to dump the greatest quantity of snow in anyone’s memory.3 He noted the dread on his family’s faces as they contemplated the weather’s impact on their revenue in the coming year.4
But all was not gloomy. The coming weeks were also filled with the merriment and chaos and fire-lit stories of a large, extended family shut indoors for a long winter. With the exception of Madison, the family was growing, his nieces and nephews scrambling around their grandparents’ house at will. They all noticed the changes in Madison. The tender young man was tougher and more seasoned. He had survived the battles of a flailing nation and suffered the wounds of love. Most markedly, he was alone, and plainly not sure what he would do with himself. Yet they all knew he would need to do something. He would have to live up to his potential.
DURING THE ICED-OVER WINTER, MADISON RETURNED TO READING THE law, hating it more than ever. He could not return to subjects he loved more, because all his books from Philadelphia, which he had sent home by a separate carriage, had been delayed by the freezing slush. Madison desperately wanted to visit Jefferson’s library at Monticello, but the weather turned so severe that he couldn’t even leave Montpelier. It took until late March for the books to arrive, exasperating him.5 He procrastinated on his legal study with long, looping letters to Jefferson. Perhaps trying to keep his forlorn friend busy, Jefferson, who was leaving soon for Paris to start his term as ambassador to France, asked Madison to start a meteorological diary, instructing him to record twelve pieces of data every day, including the direction of the wind at sunrise and the appearance and disappearance of birds. “It will be an amusement to you,” Jefferson promised, “and may become useful.”6
The spring thaw eventually came to Montpelier, along with morning birdsong, tender green buds on the dogwood trees, damp reddish patches of thawing clay, and a surprising letter in the mail. That great avatar of the people, Patrick Henry, enemy of the forced contribution and, seemingly, of all things federal, was writing his former aide about constitutional reform. Henry told Madison he wanted him to commit “further Services to our Country.” Although Madison deserved “some Respite,” Henry wrote, “Is not the federal Government on a bad Footing?” The situation required, he said, “Correction & Improvement.” “How mortifying is it,” Henry asked rhetorically, “to see a rich Harvest of Happiness, & Labourers wanting to gather it in?”7
Madison, flattered and restless to return to politics, put his name forward as a delegate from Orange. He won easily. He arrived in Richmond in mid-May. One of his first orders of business was to sit down for coffee at Formicola’s in Shockoe Hill with Patrick Henry and Joseph Jones, as well as a friend named William Short.8 He had a particular plan in mind. He wanted the former governor to support an effort he would lead to revise Virginia’s outdated constitution, as a paragon for a similar federal project.
In dreaming up this project, Madison’s self-confidence bordered on arrogance. Henry was so renowned for his singular passion for Virginia that it was almost delusional to imagine he would join Madison’s federal cause. But Madison had been totally immersed in realpolitik in Philadelphia. Yes, he held Henry at least partly responsible for the death of the forced contribution in Virginia, and, by extension, for the country’s catastrophic war policies. Yet Madison also saw Henry for who he was—Virginia’s most powerful public figure and a vital artery to the people who would be crucial to any long-term solution.
Over coffee, the men discussed the dysfunction of Congress and the need for reform. To Madison, it seemed their minds had actually met, and he took a rare leap of faith afterward, enthusiastically informing Jefferson that Henry seemed “strenuous for invigorating the federal Govt.” As for a new state constitution, he said of Henry that the “general train of his thoughts seemed to suggest favorable expectations.”9 A friend of Henry’s wrote Jefferson the next day that Henry had declared that he “saw ruin inevitable” unless Congress was given a “compulsory process on delinquent States.”10
For Madison, things were looking up. Henry seemed to be warming to the idea of a new federal government. Perhaps he had seen reason. Perhaps he could lead the nation after all. But the revolutionary hero was bound to disappoint Madison. The two men, driven as much by their personalities as their political philosophies, were destined to clash.
IN AUGUST, MADISON’S PROFESSIONAL ANXIETIES WERE ALLEVIATED SOMEWHAT when his father again gave him land, 560 acres this time, attempting to bequeath to his son, at long last, a profession: planter. But the vocation felt like an ill-fitting costume. Madison made passing attempts at addressing an infestation of his wheat and corn crops by chinch bugs. But he yearned for intellectual stimulation and cosmopolitan company. He quickly sold off some land, which gave him capital and, for a time, the means for independent subsistence.11 He left for Philadelphia, explaining to Jefferson his “need of exercise after a very sedentary period” and his desire of “extending my ramble into the eastern states which I have long had a curiosity to see.”12
When he met his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in Baltimore, Madison found the adventure he was seeking. He was swept up in a three-week journey with Lafayette to witness a treaty with the Six Indian Nations in Fort Schuyler, New York, at the elbow of a man of action he deeply admired. Wherever Lafayette went, Madison wrote, he was cheered with the “most flattering tokens of sincere affection from all ranks.” From New York, the men took barges through punishing winds and choppy waters to Albany. They stayed afterward in a Shaker village, where they watched a hundred worshippers convulse and commune with the spirit. Lafayette practiced hypnotism on a willing man to sensational effect. They camped in the forest and welcomed Indians bearing meat and chickens.
Arriving at Fort Schuyler, they stayed overnight at a judge’s house. The next day, they rode on horseback on a footpath through tall forest and marshland in gloomy, rainy weather, then arrived at the Oneida’s main village. Madison met a white man and woman who by choice lived among the Indians, dressing and behaving as Indians. His party stayed for eight days, witnessing the signing of the treaty.
He then headed back home, his head spinning with all he had seen.13
BY NOVEMBER, MADISON WAS BACK IN RICHMOND. ALL CHANCES OF collaboration with Henry disappeared when he introduced his assessment to support Christian churches, and Madison launched his year-long plot to destroy the tax and build on its ruins a brilliant beacon of freedom. Jefferson anticipated the collision. In December, he wrote to Madison in cipher that “while Mr. Henry lives,” the only likely outcome would be another flawed constitution” that would be forever saddled on Virginia. With bemused desperation, he declared, “What we have to do I think is devoutly to pray for his death.”14 He was only half-joking.
As for Madison, he could find no joy in Virginia’s capital city. The cold earth was shellacked with snow, the weather cloudy and foggy.15 He bemoaned the barrenness of his life, the fact that in the legislature, “few occurrences happen which can be interesting, and in my retired situation, few even of these fall within my knowledge.”16 He complained to Monroe that the session was simply tedious.17 A window opened when he was nominated to serve in the court of Spain.18 But he again refused an exotic position in a foreign land. His insightful friend Lafayette not unkindly chided his home-bound friend for “Your obstinate plans of life,”19 but something more serious was probably at work—Madison’s anxiety about exposure abroad to foreign threats—both known and unknown.
Madison descended into a deeper funk. Jefferson urged him to visit France, promising to provide room, board, and shelter, with the only requirement that Madison “do me the favor to become of the family.” For two hundred guineas, Jefferson promised, his friend would purchase the “knowledge of another world.” Not only that, but Monroe was coming as well. Jefferson promised that, if Madison stayed from May through September of the following year, he would be back in Virginia for the beginning of any important business in the legislature.20
But Madison never seriously considered the offer. Again, his hypochondria and stubbornness combined to make such an open-ended trip, across the ocean and to a foreign country, unthinkable. Answering his friend, he provided an endless, mounting sequence of objections. “Crossing the Sea,” he said, would be “unfriendly to a singular disease of my constitution.” And if he ever visited Europe, he would need to be “less stinted in time than your plan proposes.” And he had “a course of reading which if I neglect now I shall probably never resume.” And as if those three excuses weren’t enough, Madison unburdened himself of an omnibus complaint—his situation, he said, was “as yet too dependent on circumstances to permit my embracing” Jefferson’s offer “absolutely.”21
While this systematic approach would prove devastating against many public policies Madison opposed, in the context of a friendship, it was just rude. No wonder that Madison often gave the impression of being cold and aloof. Those habits were part of the protective shell the vulnerable young man devised to defend himself against a threatening world.
IN MIDSPRING, THE LEGISLATIVE SESSION CONCLUDED, AND MADISON trudged back to Orange County. He was now thirty-four years old, still a bachelor, still unemployed, and still pessimistic about his prospects in general. While he was energized by the coming fight with Henry on the assessment, that didn’t answer the more existential question of what he should do while not a part-time legislator. Once again, he began wrestling with his old nemesis: the law. On a dreary March day, with an unseasonable mixture of rain and snow descending from a vault of thin clouds,22 he complained to Lafayette that he was spending the “chief of my reading on Law.” He moaned to the Frenchman, “I shall hear with the greatest pleasure of your being far better employed.”23 The spring months brought only more professional stress. He confessed to Randolph his growing desire to achieve a “decent & independent subsistence.” He was reading the law with as much discipline as he could muster, he said, but he was still “far from being determined ever to make a professional use of it.”24
But he was ironically receiving recognition in the law through politics. In February, George Wythe—Virginia’s most prestigious teacher of law—had written Madison that William and Mary was giving him the honorary degree of LLD—doctor of laws. The other recipients included Benjamin Franklin and Edmund Randolph. Madison, flustered, responded to Wythe that the distinction was “so flattering” that he would “feel greater satisfaction in expressing” his acknowledgement “if I had less reason to distrust my title to it.” He did not, he said, count himself among the “illustrious Votaries” of those “who so worthily minister in the Temple of Science,” but was instead merely someone with “a zeal for her service.” But he would accept the degree, he said, “in the most respectful manner.”25
But the longer he battled the law books, the more determined he became on the essential point: He could not accept the compromises he thought were inherent to the legal profession. He would refuse to take unsavory cases and clients. He would not waste his precious time on the mind-numbing research and drafting.
But if not law, what profession could he take? In Orange County, he watched the enslaved men and women toil in his father’s fields, bend and scrape and curtsy inside the mansion itself, and do their masters’ bidding in town. He wanted no part of it. Despite the land he now owned, he decided he could not be a planter—at least not a successful planter with an ironworks and an active tobacco plantation. He had decided, he informed Randolph, “to depend as little as possible on the labour of slaves.” But where did that leave him? He brainstormed on the problem constantly. He told Randolph that these issues had “brought into my thoughts several projects from which advantage seemed attainable.”26
Peach, gooseberry, and plum trees were blooming, clouds of cherry blossoms floating to the ground.27 He felt a new urgency arrive with the spring breeze. He wrote Jefferson to send “treatises on the antient or modern foederal republics—on the law of Nations—and the history natural & political of the New World; to which I will add such of the Greek & Roman authors where they can be got very cheap.”28 Jefferson might as well have mailed boxes of dynamite to his young friend so impatient to change the country.
FOR ONCE, MADISON SEEMED TO WANT TO STAY IN ORANGE. HIS FRIENDS kept trying to convince him to travel out of Virginia. Monroe missed Madison’s company and asked him to take a trip to Indian country on the Ohio River sometime in August or September, pleading that he would be “happy in your company.”29 But Madison adamantly refused the invitation with a series of pointlessly emphatic factual and logical rebuttals. He did not have enough money, he complained. The time of the treaty was “extremely uncertain.” “Great delays” would occur on the trip. Their return would be hampered by “the lowness of the waters” and by the “want of boats at our command” and by the “necessity of travelling back thro’ the Wilderness via Kentucky.” As for other trips Monroe had suggested, a journey to Montreal and Quebec was “objectionable” because of the “time it would require.” And an “Eastern ramble” would require “carrying horses from Virginia.”30
But one objection was the most telling. He could not leave, he told Monroe, because he might be called to public service. He had caught wind of a possible appointment to an interstate commission to negotiate with Maryland on the navigation of the Potomac.31 He was unwilling to risk a lucky break for the nation’s service for a traveling lark. His time might still come.
Another issue was also keeping him in Orange. Madison had a mysterious romantic relationship that summer—and perhaps even became engaged again. The clues lie in letters about his long-standing bachelordom. He had grown accustomed to his friends ribbing him about his solitary state. Caleb Wallace, a colleague who lived in the Kentucky territory, wrote Madison to catch up. Nine years older than Madison, Wallace had three children. “As you are yet a Stranger to the parental Tyes,” he teased his bachelor friend, “I hardly know how to tell you” of both the “great amusements” and “serious Cares” of the children. Therefore, he wrote, “I shall only remind you at present of the Taunts to which old Bachelors are justly exposed.”
But more seriously, he told Madison, “But I shall not say more, as I have had an intimation that you are like to be in a more honourable State e’er long.”32 For this “intimation” to have traveled from Orange County to Kentucky, Madison had become involved with a local Orange County woman at least long enough to spread rumors of an engagement.
Madison wryly responded that although he was a “stranger to parental ties,” he could “sufficiently conceive the happiness of which they are a source to congratulate you on Your possession of two fine sons & a Daughter.” He completely ignored Wallace’s nudge about his engagement, except for his oblique concession that he had “no local partialities” that could “keep me from any place which promises the greatest real advantages.”33 Self-controlled as always, he had already cabined the affair, his love interest became just a “local partiality.”
Over the coming months, he settled into a posture of irony. After Monroe married, Madison wrote him on a cloudy day to wryly congratulate his friend on his “inauguration into the mysteries of Wedlock.”34 Soon after, Madison opened a note from William Grayson, in Philadelphia, listing no less than four congressmen who had recently married. The situation, Grayson laughingly wrote, seemed “to portend a conjunction copulative. In short, I think we have got into Calypso’s Island.” Turning serious, Grayson said, “I heartily wish you were here,” as “I have a great desire to see you figure in the character of a married man.”35
By now, Madison’s romantic failures must have filled him with a sense of futility. But he was working on his grand project, contained in those two trunks Jefferson sent him from Paris. He continued forging ahead—alone.