Epilogue

AFTER HE HAD SERVED ONE TERM AS SECRETARY OF STATE, THEN TWO terms as president, and then retired to Montpelier, the top of Madison’s head was almost completely bald. But instead of growing his hair long and combing it forward, as he had in his youth, he now allowed his hair to grow long in the back, to his collar. The effect, while startling at first, was not unpleasant. During a visit by Lafayette to Montpelier, one of the French general’s entourage described Madison in old age as having a “well preserved frame” and a “youthful soul full of sensibility.” Although decades of “reflection and application” had etched his spare face with a certain “aspect of severity,” he now seemed much less high-strung than in his youth. The “impressions of his heart” were now “rapidly depicted in his features,” the visitor recalled, and his conversation lightly leaped, animated by a “gentle gaiety.”¹ Another visitor to Montpelier in those years described Madison as “very hale and hearty,” and remarked that his face was “full of good humour.”²

All this probably had much to do with his wife. In a joke of history, when Madison at long last married, it was to a woman who had spent her childhood living in Patrick Henry’s former home; Dolley Payne’s father, John Payne, bought the large clapboard house, called Scotchtown, in the 1760s. Payne, a Quaker, emancipated his slaves in 1783, after the end of the Revolutionary War. He moved his family to Philadelphia, where he opened up a starch business. When his daughter Dolley turned twenty-one, she married a kind, promising young man named John Todd, soon became pregnant, and had a son. The infant quickly and tragically died. Recovering, Dolley and John had two more children. Yellow fever then attacked the city. John spent two months caring for the ill in a plague center, hundreds perishing each day. John’s father died; ten days later, his mother. And then, three days later, it was him, but only after he cried about Dolley, “I must see her once more.” Dolley herself came close to death. One of her infant sons then died, leaving her with just her son, Payne.

IMAGE E.1. DOLLEY MADISON. COURTESY OF THE MONTPELIER FOUNDATION, JAMES MADISON’S MONTPELIER.

She overcame all this grief through the natural buoyancy of her spirit. By the time James Madison met her, she was a congenitally cheerful, bustling Southern belle, with natural wit and the gravity of the bereaved. She was twenty-six years old and a widow, a single mother in the capital city.

Madison, serving in Congress, lived one block north of the State House, she two blocks east of it, and he frequently saw her on the street and at social functions—and she him. At forty-three, he was ready for real love, for a true partner.

His friend Aaron Burr knew Dolley well. In a feat of directness he could not have mustered in his youth, Madison asked Burr to make an introduction. Burr—who would later go on to kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel—told Dolley about the request. She quickly accepted and excitedly wrote a friend that “the great little Madison has asked to be brought to see me this evening.”3

Madison was enchanted by her. He resolved to pursue her. That summer, they both returned to Virginia. He proposed to her by letter. She wrote back to accept. He responded, rejoicing in her “precious favor,” admitting, “I cannot express, but hope you will conceive the joy it gave me.” Madison married Dolley on September 15, 1794. He did not tell his parents until three weeks had passed—a remarkable and long-delayed act of independence.4

His years with Dolley were generally deeply contented. The couple never had children. Madison, of course, never expressed his feelings about this matter. We can only speculate about whether impotence or deeper intimate problems might have been to blame. They also had great difficulty managing Dolley’s wayward, temperamental son, Payne. But, as life partners, they achieved a wonderful balance. Her warmth played off his restraint, her gaiety meshed with his discipline, well into old age. And they seemed, quite simply, to get a kick out of each other.

Dolley never grew to love Orange County, however. She adored, as her husband had in his youth, the cosmopolitan energy of the cities. When Madison was appointed secretary of state by Jefferson, the couple moved to Washington, and Dolley effervescently transformed the town into a city of light and drama. After Madison was elected president in 1808, Dolley invented the role of First Lady, cheerfully convening weekly parties. She dressed in colorful fabrics and exotic accessories, such as turbans, serving delicacies and generally spicing up a dry town, just as she did her husband.

During the War of 1812, as the brutal British soldiers methodically approached the White House, Dolley instructed her servants to salvage valuable documents and silver. She rolled up herself Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington to save it from their torches. She then fled with it—a quick-minded decision that endeared her to generations of Americans.

The couple spent the years after his presidency living in Orange County. The sitting room where they received guests was draped in red silk, with lush curtains framing the windows in the French style. A portrait of Thomas Jefferson—sternly facing left—hung on the wall. That portrait was to the left of another painting of Mary Magdalene, the Bible’s iconic prostitute. The orientation permanently put the famously carnal Jefferson in the inauthentic position of turning away from lust, probably amusing Madison and Dolley daily. Near the fireplace hung a large painting, Pan, Youths, and Nymphs, featuring a grinning satyr, a bare-breasted woman, and flirting young people. Brought back by Payne Todd after attending the Treaty of Ghent, it dominated the room.5

Contrasted with the tightly wound, emotionally brittle character of Madison’s youth, the room reflected the arc of his personal life. He had softened and warmed, with Dolley at his side. Yet the aging man never forgot the heartbreak of Kitty Floyd. When Jefferson passed away in 1826, the letters Madison wrote to him were returned to Madison. When the long-married man read the letters about Kitty from almost five decades before, he took out a quill and scratched through the ciphered sections with heavy dark lines. He then wrote, along the side of the page, one word: “undecipherable.”

This was a lie to himself, and to history. It was as if he was trying to obliterate the painful memories just as he had vanquished obnoxious ideas with his Method. But he of course could not vanquish his own passions by pretending they did not exist.

IN RETIREMENT AT MONTPELIER, MADISON DELIGHTED IN SITTING WITH DOLLEY and regaling visitors with stories about the men now known as America’s “Founding Fathers,” whether Washington, Jefferson, or Patrick Henry. Especially with visitors he and Dolley trusted, his droll sense of humor could break up a room, his guests laughing “very heartily.” In the words of another visitor, he was “an entertaining, interesting, and communicative personage.” But when strangers entered the room, Madison’s shyness and reserve returned, and he would become “mute, cold, and repulsive.” Dolley, on the other hand, would remain as outgoing as ever.⁶

In 1821, when he was seventy, Madison had the luxury of overseeing a political system that seemed to have fulfilled his designs as a much younger man. He wrote his old friend Lafayette that the United States was, “on the whole, doing well, and giving an example of a free system.” He proudly described the “safety-valves” that gave “vent to overheated passions,” as part of the broader scheme that “carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.”⁷

But his contented enjoyment about his accomplishments would not last.

IMAGE E.2. MONTPELIER, BY PRUD’HOMME AFTER J. G. CHAPMAN. COURTESY OF THE MONTPELIER FOUNDATION, JAMES MADISON’S MONTPELIER.

THE COUNTRY WAS HEAVING AROUND MADISON, AS IF THROUGH PLATE tectonic shifts. When Andrew Jackson was elected president, the event sent tremors all the way to Richmond. The masses loved him for his wild-haired, Indian-fighting persona. But Jackson—a practicing lawyer, student of history, and accomplished military tactician—was not the plebeian his gruff demeanor suggested. On March 4, 1829, after his inauguration, Jackson looked out with amazement on the crowd entering the White House. Drunken commoners were flooding in, carousing inside the building. Rough-looking men broke windows and stamped their boots on the polished wood tabletops. Jackson escaped by a side window.

A hundred miles south in Richmond, the election unleashed more unpredictable events. The prior year, Virginians had voted for a constitutional convention to decide whether citizens other than property-holders should be able to vote—a new Jackson-era notion that was catching on in states around the country. One hundred delegates planned to traveled to Richmond to develop a new constitution for the Old Dominion. At the time, Madison was suffering from yet another bout of likely anxiety-driven illness. But after much pleading from the organizers, the fourth president of the United States, seventy-eight years old, agreed to serve as the 101st delegate from Orange County.

In October, he took to the jostling road from Orange County to Richmond. He must have watched the dusty red Virginia clay pass under the carriage’s wheels with a mixture of anticipation and dread. Nobody knew what would happen next in the age of Andrew Jackson: whether the country would rampage into chaos (as at the now-infamous inauguration), or whether it would settle into a gentler groove, tamed by its own constitutional culture. For his part, Madison was holding fast to the principle that had guided him for a half-century: Democracy should constantly expand, events and public opinion left to arrange themselves around that unbending pillar. But he was powerfully aware that many not only did not share his opinion, but they violently opposed it.

As Madison pulled into Richmond, few suspected that the convention’s principal agitator in favor of progressive notions of national justice would be, yet again, the little old man from Orange County.

THE FORMER PRESIDENT ENTERED THE CHAMBER IN SMALL STEPS, HOLDING his body carefully. He was dressed in a formal and refined black, with silk dress socks pulled up over his thin legs. His skin had a dried yet warm appearance, and he looked younger than his age. He warmly greeted his friends, with a quiet smile and a direct glance from his gray eyes.

As the convention began, the delegates witnessed a touching scene as Madison helped walk the ailing James Monroe to his seat. After introducing Monroe, Madison suggested to the assembled men that they select Monroe president of the convention. They of course instantly agreed.

The convention proceeded for several weeks, with Madison generally listening quietly and speaking only on procedural matters. The cold descended on Richmond, his aged joints registering the familiar chill of winter. On December 1, when discussion turned to the question of how to count populations for the House of Delegates and the State Senate, Madison suddenly made it be known that he wanted to speak.

The delegates knew they were in the presence of history, and they responded accordingly.

The members “rushed from their seats,” according to the stenographer, and “crowded around him.” Madison spoke softly and precisely. Dozens of other members nearby strained to hear him, craning over the shoulders and heads of others.

He was about to try to convince Virginia to transcend, again, the lowest common denominator, to persuade the men around him to become a new generation of Zachariah Johnsons.

“Having been, for a very long period, withdrawn from any participation in proceedings of deliberative bodies,” Madison began, he would only offer a few observations on the topic of property. He instantly had their attention, for the vast majority of the men in the room, like Madison, enjoyed the life of Virginia’s elite. The “essence of Government is power,” he said, and “power, lodged as it must be in human hands,” would always “be liable to abuse.” He said that he knew many of them were well intentioned. In their voting and their legislation on matters of social policy, they would consult the “purity and generosity” of their own mind and recur to the “dictates of the monitor within”—their own consciences.

But Madison told them that this faith was nonsense. Their own good intentions would offer only the flimsiest restraints against their own self-interest. The ugly fact, he declared, was that man was a “selfish, as well as a social being.” The “favorable attributes of the human character” were valuable as “auxiliaries,” but could not substitute for the “coercive provisions belonging to Government and Law.” In other words, the hundred men in the auditorium could not trust themselves to avoid oppressing their lesser. Like Ulysses, they must lash themselves to the mast to avoid the sirens of injustice.

Madison’s evolution on the fundamental question of whether to trust humanity or not to self-improve the human condition was striking. The optimism of his youth had become the pessimism of his old age; what was once a butterfly was now a moth. In this, he was naturally responding to the country itself, which was preparing to tear apart on precisely the issues surfacing in Richmond—race, class, and the rights of states vis-à-vis the federal government.

He had worked up to the great topic of slavery and the question of whether Virginia should count slaves when determining the population basis for legislative districts. The question mattered most for western and eastern Virginia, the state’s harshly divided regions. They already had profound cultural differences. The east, home to the College of William and Mary, was frequented by visitors from the north and considered itself sophisticated. The west was proudly conservative, stubbornly fastened to its cultural and religious traditions. They differed in population, as well. The east included the cities of Tidewater Virginia, which, due to their greater concentration of merchants and shipping interests, had more dense populations and greater concentrations of slaves. The west, on the other hand, was agrarian, dominated by planters and their plantations, and much more sparsely populated—and would receive fewer delegates under a population scheme that counted African Americans.

The question of whether to include blacks in the districting scheme could tip the balance of power between the two regions. The west would have fifty-three delegates if the “white basis”—which ignored slaves—was used, but it would lose thirteen of its representatives—a quarter of its political power—if slaves were counted. It was expected that the west would use its existing dominance to maintain its political control.

And so Madison urged the western delegates, who were his own people, to include blacks at least in their count for the House of Delegates. He pressed them to take this path because conscience dictated it. In his fine voice, he employed again his Method. “It is due to justice; due to humanity; due to truth; to the sympathies of our nature,” he declared, and “to our character as a people, that they should be considered, as much as possible, in the light of human beings, and not as mere property.” Virginia’s enslaved people, he argued, must be recognized as at least partly human. For that reason, he said, they were “acted upon by our laws,” and therefore “have an interest in our laws.”

The men from the west looked at each other with open skepticism, some flashing with anger, but the old man was undaunted. He accused the advocates of the white basis of plain racism. If the slaves were white, he argued—like the serfs of Europe or the Vikings in England—his brethren would have no problem counting them. He marshaled every possible argument. The slaves were not “equally diffused through the state,” and for that reason, the difference around the state “resembles that between the slave-holding and non-slave-holding States.” In that way, he said, the east and the west of Virginia resembled the North and the South of the nation itself, which had overcome their differences in Philadelphia in 1787. If Virginia could not similarly rise above self-interest, how could the nation? Even Georgia was counting slaves. Virginia, he pleaded, must rise to the moment; Virginia must lead.

He ventured a final argument. When Virginians had ratified the Constitution in 1788, it was “in the eyes of the world, a wonder,” the “harmonious establishment of a common Government,” and a “miracle.” “I have now,” he proclaimed emotionally, “more than a hope—a consoling confidence” that the men around him could “at last find, that our labours have not been in vain.”8

TO HIS ALLIES, MADISON’S CONFIDENT, URGENT SPEECH SOUNDED LIKE scripture. One ally told the crowd that his speech “must and will carry conviction to the mind of every cool-reflecting man.”⁹ But there was still the plainly political fact that his supporters comprised only a minority of the assembly. And instead of a happy coalescence of opinion, the old man’s stubborn challenge sparked a conflagration.

Temperatures quickly rose to an almost violent level as the abject political reality of his proposal—the loss of political power by the west—sank in. One western delegate rose to attack an easterner. Pointing at his foe, the westerner declared that “if he brings us to Bannockburn,” alluding to the famously bloody Scottish battle for independence, he would find that “Old Virginia” was “as little disposed to submit to injustice as New Virginia.” The battle between east and west Virginia had somehow transformed into one between “Old” and “New” Virginia. Could the “gentleman suppose,” the westerner taunted, that they were “prepared to submit to any yoke, that they propose to fasten upon us?”¹⁰

Delegates lobbed more bombs at Madison’s proposal. One westerner attacked his compromise—to apply the federal basis only in the House of Delegates—for hypocrisy, even though the principle of equality “applied equally to both” houses of the legislature.¹¹

His proposal was ultimately defeated. While that may not have been a surprise to anyone taking the temperature of the assembly, the outcome bitterly disappointed the old man. But he could take grim satisfaction from the obvious fact that his turn to pessimism had been justified. In the months to come, as he reckoned with his great state’s unwillingness—or inability—to rise above its self-interest for the sake of the common good, he grew only more upset. After he returned home, he took to bed. He remained there for almost a year, racked by wave upon wave of his old fits of anxiety.12 Not only Richmond was to blame; he despaired about the nation itself.

NOT ONLY VIRGINIA WAS IN UPHEAVAL. AMERICA HERSELF WAS UNDERGOING its greatest test yet of the federalist compromise he had helped to design. That would, in turn, throw open the breach for secession, the Civil War, and the nation’s violent reconsolidation.

It had begun the prior year, with the “nullification” creed Vice President John Calhoun had introduced in 1828 to enable South Carolina to challenge new federal tariff legislation. Calhoun argued that each state, though part of a voluntary compact, had always retained its fundamental sovereignty. South Carolina could therefore void, at will, any federal law she decided violated that compact.

Although Madison had supported Virginia’s right to repudiate the Alien and Sedition Acts, he saw Calhoun’s action in a far different light and with real alarm. The Virginia Resolution was about John Adams’s unconstitutional abrogation of the freedom of speech; nullification laid bare the fundamentally unresolved tension in the Constitution about coercion itself regarding the whole range of self-interested pursuits and passions of the states.¹³

The nullification crisis became a crisis for Madison himself. As debate on nullification raged in Congress, he remonstrated with friends that the Constitution was not just a compact between separately acting states. In 1833—four years after the Virginia constitutional convention—he argued that the Constitution was a “mixed form” that forged together “one people, nation, or sovereignty for certain purposes.”¹⁴ Anyone who thought the sovereign federal power should be divided—that the nexus imperii should be unraveled—did not grasp the divine magic of what had happened at the Constitutional Convention.

Madison was sending a blizzard of letters to friends, trying to repudiate the nullification doctrine while rationalizing the Virginia Resolution. In 1834, he wrote Edward Coles that there was nothing “more dangerous” to the country than nullification, “either in its original shape, or in the disguises it assumes.” Nullification, he declared, would put “powder under the Constitution and Union, and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Nullification was a shape-shifting beast, a “figure which the anarchical principle now makes.” The southern states were particularly susceptible to the “contagion.”15

He raged, striving to employ his Method in a final gasp for country. In a 9,500-word essay he wrote in December 1834—he was then eighty-three years old—Madison grappled with the question of whether there was any valid constitutional basis at all for states to nullify federal acts. When could a state defy the very qualified coercion young Madison had fought so strenuously to build into the Constitution? His support of nullification, he said, had been valid because the Alien and Sedition Acts were plainly unconstitutional, and because Virginia, in opposing them, had explained precisely that basis, in good faith and with specifics. In attempting to nullify federal tariffs, South Carolina, on the other hand, was just as plainly arguing from self-interest.

What had been clear to him from the beginning was even more crucial now. There was such a thing as statesmanship. It was possible to decide and differentiate between the general and the special interest. Both “de jure & de facto,” he explained, the nation’s “true character” would be sustained by an “appeal to the Law & the testimony of the fundamental charter.” The nation must again choose between a “government purely consolidated” and an “association of governments purely federal.”¹⁶ He railed against South Carolina for the consequences of its rash position. In some states, there would be war with a foreign power, while in others, there would be “peace and commerce.”

Chaos would result. He pleaded for faith in his original design. A single state’s “remedial right” to protect the Constitution might be “deficient,” he conceded, but there would always be an “ultimate and adequate remedy” in the “rights of the parties to the Constitution.” That is, any complaining state could always gather together others for a new compact, forging a new majority faction. In the hands of such a powerful group, he declared, the Constitution would be “at all times but clay in the hands of the potter.” The Constitution could always—and must always—seek to remedy itself, rather than fall prey to dissenting factions.

Through all this turmoil, the elderly man returned to his own private lodestar—the conscience that had guided him, and the country, during his youth.

IN THE SPRING OF 1831, WHEN HE WAS EIGHTY YEARS OLD AND AILING, MADISON discovered a letter in his mail from James Kirke Paulding. Paulding was an author and popular satirist who had earned a loyal following. He later served as secretary of the navy under President Martin Van Buren. He informed Madison that he was writing a series of biographies of America’s Founding Fathers.17 He asked the former president whether he would consider writing a “sketch of the principal incidents of [his] life.”

Madison thought it over. As a younger man, he would never have entertained Paulding’s request. But Madison respected Paulding. And for years, he had been taking sporadic autobiographical notes, picking them up and putting them down again, never confident of his project. Now that he was eighty, perhaps the time had come for a final stab at the project.

He picked up a quill to write back to Paulding. He admitted that he was “flattered” by the proposal. Yet, he confided, he felt some “awkwardness” from the enterprise. He admitted that years ago he had begun an “abortive biography,” but said “whether I shall be able to give it any amplification, is too uncertain to admit of a promise.”¹⁸

NINE MONTHS LATER, PAULDING OPENED HIS MAIL TO FIND A FIFTEEN-PAGE manuscript from the former president, accompanied by a letter from Madison apologizing that while his intention was to have “enlarged some parts” of the essay, and to have “revised and probably blotted out others,” he simply had been too ill to do so. Indeed, Madison complained, the “crippled state of my health” had made him “shun the task.” Madison had feared he would die too soon even to send the essay off to Paulding; the “uncertainty of the future,” he wrote, had led him to “commit the paper, crude as it is, to your friendly discretion.”¹⁹

When Paulding read the document, he must have found it surpassingly strange. Madison wrote the “autobiography” in the third person. He took obvious pains to remove any emotional drama from the events he recorded, as if an anonymous writer were dispassionately describing a minor historical figure. He also systematically avoided the natural highlights of his public life to concentrate on personal minutiae instead. Whenever the narrative got most interesting—when he approached, for instance, the as ever controversial War of 1812—Madison just referred the reader to his letters.

There was one major exception.

When he described his life as a young man—especially the years and events leading up to 1788, when, at thirty-seven years old, he had confronted and defeated the mighty Patrick Henry in Richmond—the old man’s writing came alive, as he narrated his passions, pains, hopes, failures, and fears with disarming candor.

He recalled studying with Donald Robertson (“a man of extensive learning, and a distinguished Teacher”), and causing himself “infirm health” by compressing two years of study into one, with his long-dead friend Joseph Ross by his side.

He fondly remembered his mentor and ally John Witherspoon, including an anecdote about being summoned to speak French to a visitor to Princeton in Witherspoon’s absence (a scene “as awkward as possible”).

He proudly evoked his early fights for the liberties, whether for the Baptists in Culpeper (“being under very early and strong impressions in favour of Liberty both Civil and Religious”) and about the Virginia Convention of 1776, where he proudly described successfully arguing that the freedom of conscience should be a “natural and absolute right.”

He remembered collapsing on the battlefield during the Orange County militia exercises, blaming “the unsettled state of his health” and the “discourageing feebleness of his constitution.”

He told the story of losing his only election by challenging the custom of providing liquor to voters and being blamed for “pride or parsimony.”

He recalled his struggle of studying the law in the forenoon after returning home from Congress.

He recollected his “attention and researches to the sources ancient & modern” before the Constitutional Convention—but he almost totally ignored the convention itself.

He explained the story of the Federalist Papers, which he said were “meant for the important and doubtful state of new York.”

He remembered the ratifying convention in Richmond, which he said he attended when he was not “absent from confinement from bilious fever.”

He barely mentioned passing the Bill of Rights into law, or serving for eight years in the new Congress between 1789 and 1797.

Even more strangely, out of the document’s fifteen pages, Madison gave only two sentences to his presidency. After passing quickly through the highlights of his time as secretary of state, he raced through his “career in the Executive Magistracy”—not even mentioning the word president—largely referring his reader to his letters and speeches.

But he did describe returning to Montpelier, because he “had become wearied with public life, and longed for a return to a state in which he could indulge his relish for the intellectual pleasures of the closet, and the pursuits of rural life.”

He described having “entered the married state, with a partner who favoured these views, and added every happiness to his life which female merit could impart.”

He recounted how, after “the close of his public life,” he had “devoted himself to his farm & his books.”

Reading through all of this, Paulding must have found it even more odd that, toward the end, Madison decided to spend about 10 percent of his autobiography’s total words on the Richmond Convention of 1829. He told the story of how he was “prevailed upon, notwithstanding his age & very feeble health, being but convalescent from a spell of sickness,” to serve there. He recalled with evident pain his failure to win his battles against using the white basis for the House of Delegates, as well as a separate effort to allow the people rather than the legislature to elect the governor. Ever cautious about giving free rein to the passions, he confessed that he was concerned about universal suffrage, but said he favored extending political rights nevertheless “so far as to secure” the “majority of people on the side of people: a “Government resting on a minority is an aristocracy not a Republic.”20

That political philosophy began in his youth. In the twilight of his life, he still saw his sunrise as his signal era—as, indeed, it was.

ON JUNE 28, 1836, THE EIGHTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD WAS HAVING BREAKFAST with his favorite niece, Nelly, who was named after his mother. He seemed at ease and comfortable, but pain suddenly twisted his face. Nelly asked him whether anything was wrong. Seeming to recover quickly, he responded with a customary joke: “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.” But his head fell to his chest, he stopped breathing, and he died.21

IMAGE E.3. JAMES MADISON BEFORE HIS DEATH IN 1836. COURTESY OF THE MONTPELIER FOUNDATION, JAMES MADISON’S MONTPELIER.

Just the day before, he had composed a letter to an old friend authoring a book on Jefferson dedicated to Madison. Madison said that his “ardent zeal” had always been in “promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.” He recalled the “efforts and anxieties” his effort had demanded, but thought they had been “well rewarded” by their “many good fruits”—and that “no one has been a more rejoicing witness than myself.”²² Even though he was still fighting and wrestling with the nation’s current trauma and tensions, Madison was at peace with his own role within it.

Madison died on the sixtieth anniversary of the adoption of the Virginia Constitution. The news of his death raced across the country, triggering a collective exhalation of grief, of affection, of national memory of the country’s earliest days. He had been the last of the Founding Fathers still alive. Around the country, bells tolled, artilleries fired, and funeral processions marched. In the words of a contemporary biographer, it was at once a celebration and a mourning “such as in the Old World only commemorate the obsequies of kings.”²³