In December 1779, in response to a plea from George Washington that Virginia send her “ablest men” to the Continental Congress, the state legislature, with Governor Thomas Jefferson’s warm approval, nominated James Madison. It was not quite the tribute that some biographers have tried to make it. As the year 1780 began, Congress’s prestige had fallen so low that it was difficult to find anyone willing to waste his time in Philadelphia. In the year 1779, Virginia had named sixteen men as delegates. Seven resigned, four failed to serve or went home, and four did not show up until the following spring.
The war for independence had become interminable, and Congress had made a colossal mess out of the country’s finances. With $230 million in circulation, Continental currency was turning into waste paper. Military and civilian morale plunged with the dwindling power of the dollar. “Congress” had become a word tinged with contempt. Some people may have thought that the short, thin, morbidly shy new delegate was the best Congress could expect for its mediocre ranks.
One delegate described the twenty-nine-year-old Madison as “just from college”—a graphic indication of the first impression he made. The wife of another Virginia delegate, Martha Bland, described him as a “gloomy stiff creature” with “nothing engaging…in his manners—the most unsociable creature in existence.” But even this nasty critic—her husband, Theodorick Bland was a windbag who became Madison’s political enemy—eventually admitted that Madison was “clever in Congress.”1
James Madison’s brilliant mind, and his readiness to work hard and think even harder, gradually made him a leader in this feckless legislature. For the next four years, Madison grappled with the problems of the faltering war effort, rancorous quarrels between political factions inside Congress, and the struggle to unify thirteen often recalcitrant states. Washington’s triumph at Yorktown in 1781 put independence within America’s grasp, but it seemed to only exacerbate the problem of creating a nation.
At Thomas Jefferson’s suggestion, Madison lived in a boardinghouse on the corner of Fifth and Market streets. The landlady’s daughter, Mrs. Eliza Trist, was a charming woman described by one historian as the house’s “presiding angel.” Jefferson urged Madison to “cultivate her affection.” It soon became apparent that she and Jefferson were partners in trying to help Madison cope with his shyness. Mrs. Trist developed a protective attitude toward him. When there was talk of electing him governor of Virginia, she wrote to Jefferson, strongly advising against it. “He has a soul replete with gentleness, humanity and every social virtue,” she said. But his “amiable” disposition would never be able to tolerate the abuse that went with the governorship. “It will hurt his feelings and injure his health, take my word.”2
Among the congressmen in the boardinghouse was William Floyd of New York, who had brought his wife and three children with him. The youngest of these offspring was thirteen-year-old Kitty, who was extremely pretty, vivacious, and talented at the piano. By 1782, when Madison was thirty-one and Kitty was fifteen, the congressman was in love with her. Jefferson joined forces with Mrs. Trist to encourage the match. In fact, everyone in the boardinghouse seemed to concur in urging Miss Kitty to say yes. The elders did not seem to realize that this was a poor tactic when dealing with someone from a different generation.
In a scene that can readily be imagined as agonizing, Madison finally asked Kitty whether she was willing and her answer was yes. By this time, we are in 1783 and Kitty was sixteen. Although the age gap might sound wide to modern ears, Madison was not robbing the cradle. Marriage at sixteen or seventeen was not unusual for a woman in this era. Martha Jefferson was seventeen when she married Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Madison was elated by Kitty’s response and rushed the news to Jefferson. The wedding would have to wait until the end of the congressional year. Madison expressed his gratitude for Jefferson’s interest in his quest. It confirmed feelings of friendship that Madison “reciprocated.”3
In the spring of 1783, Congressman Floyd took Kitty and the rest of his family home to Long Island. Madison rode with them to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a distance of sixty miles—strong evidence of how deeply his feelings were engaged. Embroiled most of the time in the struggle to rescue the bankrupt United States from chaos, the congressman did not realize he had a rival. Nineteen-year-old William Clarkson, a medical student and son of a prominent Philadelphia doctor, spent a great deal of time in the Trist boardinghouse, much of it leaning on the harpsichord admiring Kitty’s playing.
There is a tradition in the Floyd family that someone around Kitty’s age in the Trist ménage secretly encouraged her to look with favor on the smitten Clarkson. Back on Long Island, beyond the reach of the pro-Madison pressure group, Kitty thought things over and decided her heart was voting for Clarkson. Her embarrassed parents told her to write Madison a letter. She obeyed, displaying very little grace. Soon he was telling Jefferson about the “profession of indifference” he had received from Kitty and the “disappointment” of his plans “by one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable.”4
Fifty years later, when James Madison was editing his papers, the wound was still painful enough to prompt him to scratch out most of the letter. Biographers have been able to decipher only a few phrases, such as having hoped for a “more propitious fate.” Jefferson did his best to console his friend. He confessed that “no event has been more contrary to my expectations.” If Kitty’s decision were final, Jefferson philosophized that “the world presents the same resources for happiness and you possess many within yourself.” To relieve his friend’s pain, he urged “firmness of mind and unremitting occupations.”5
Consoling though it was to have such a sympathetic friend, Madison’s humiliation must have been intense. In Congress he dealt each day with the most momentous imaginable issues—how to raise enough money to prevent the American army from overthrowing the government, how to persuade the various states to cede their conflicting claims to western territory to Congress, and how to improve the unworkable Articles of Confederation under which the nation was supposed to govern itself. The French ambassador considered him a man of weight and decision. But he had been bested in a contest for the affection of a beautiful young woman by a lowly medical student.
II
James Madison was born in 1751—making him nineteen years younger than George Washington and eight years younger than Thomas Jefferson. In 1764, when John Adams married Abigail Smith, Madison was just emerging from boyhood on his father’s four-thousand-acre plantation in the wooded hill country of Orange County, Virginia. Like the Washingtons, the Madisons traced their ancestry back to an Englishman who arrived in Virginia in the middle of the seventeenth century. They had prospered tilling the rich, reddish soil of the Virginia Piedmont.
Madison’s boyhood was uneventful and happy. His mother, Nelly Conway, gave birth to eleven more children after James’s arrival, seven of whom survived to adulthood. He had brothers and sisters to play with, and there were other large families on neighboring plantations. His parents were affectionate and devoted to their brood. James’s only distress was his frail physique. He never grew beyond five feet six or exceeded one hundred pounds, and his health was poor. He suffered from a severe digestive complaint, cholera morbus, which forced him to live on gruel much of the time. This made him something of an anomaly in a society that prized masculinity and physical prowess.
As the oldest son, James Madison Jr. was strongly influenced by his father, who was the largest landowner and leading citizen of Orange County. As his family multiplied, James Madison built a spacious mansion, Montpelier (the Mount of the Pilgrim), to house them. Deprived of his own father at the age of nine, he was a deeply paternal man who instilled in his namesake a strong sense of public responsibility.
James Sr. worried about James’s poor health. He decided to send his son to the College of New Jersey in distant Princeton rather than to William and Mary, where most Virginians went. Both Madisons feared the endemic fevers of the Virginia lowlands. Neither realized the decision would turn out to be one of those transformative moments that would alter the course of James Madison Jr.’s life.
Before he left for Princeton, James had acquired a first-class education from some of the best teachers in Virginia. He read Latin, Greek, and French and was well versed in English literature. Arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1769, he easily passed examinations that enabled him to skip his freshman year. In massive Nassau Hall, the college’s main—and only—building, he plunged into a regimen that called for hard study and serious thought. The president of the college was a recently arrived Scottish minister, the Reverend John Witherspoon, a tall, stern, beak-nosed man of God who was determined to make the school the best in America.
Behind the rigorous facade, however, college boys remained college boys. Dormitory life was full of practical jokes and rampant teasing of newcomers, forbidden midnight feasts smuggled from nearby taverns, and ingenious assaults on tutors and anyone else who suffered from a surfeit of self-importance. Only the imperious Witherspoon was exempted from such high-jinks.
James Madison seems to have participated in these indoor sports with zest. He was a ribald rhymester who penned raucous attacks on members of the Cliosophic Society, a mostly New England group who were the eternal rivals of the Whig Society, to which James belonged:
Great Allen founder of the crew
If right I guess must keep a stew
The lecherous rascal there will find
A place just suited to his mind
May whore and pimp and drink and swear
Nor more the garb of Christians wear
And free Nassau from such a pest
A dunce a fool an ass at best.
Moses Allen, the target of this jape, did not take it seriously, any more than Samuel Spring, the poet laureate of the Clios, resented Madison describing him paying a visit to Clio in her private room and emerging a eunuch, “my voice to render more melodious.” It was all in fun, and Madison’s participation in it reveals a side of him that his public personality long concealed. He made dozens of friends at Princeton, most of them from other colonies, many of them young men of talent, such as poet Philip Freneau and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, America’s first novelist.
III
On the serious side, Madison decided to cram three years into two and save his father money. Virginia was mired in recession during his college years. Part of it was caused by droughts and other varieties of bad weather, part by the boycotts of English commerce that the Americans imposed in their mounting quarrel with Parliament. In several letters to his father, Madison apologized for spending too much money. Apparently, the father, with two other sons to educate and four daughters who would need dowries, expected his oldest son to help him deal with severe financial stress.
Telescoping his college years was a tribute to Madison’s powers of concentration, but it was a serious mistake. James added to his woes by staying at Princeton for another year of intense study. When he returned to Virginia in 1772, he was exhausted. He began suffering epileptic-like seizures that caused him to lose consciousness. No one has ever satisfactorily diagnosed this illness. It might be simplest to describe it as a nervous collapse from overwork. For the next three years, Madison did little but stay home and read and correspond with college friends such as William Bradford, scion of a wealthy Philadelphia printing family.
In one letter, he told Bradford he was “too dull and infirm” to expect anything extraordinary in his future. In fact, he had all but resigned himself to a short, unhappy life. Sounding like a septuagenarian, he envied Bradford’s “health, youth, fire and genius.” Bradford replied by scoffing at his hypochondria and expectations of imminent demise. He remarked that Madison’s worries about his health might have an opposite effect—guarantee him a long life. It was an offhand prophecy that would prove to be uncannily on the mark. Madison would outlive most of his contemporaries, including Bradford.6
Two more years found Madison healthier but still undecided about his future. He made a pass at studying law but found Old Coke’s leaden prose intolerable. The ministry, another obvious choice for a Princeton graduate, was equally unappealing. Early in 1774, Madison was well enough to embark on a trip to Philadelphia to visit Bradford and other college friends. He saw the street demonstrations in support of the Bostonians who had recently defied royal authority by throwing 9,659 pounds of English tea into Boston harbor.
Energy began surging through Madison’s frail frame. At Princeton he had been indoctrinated in a Presbyterian hostility to arbitrary power. Back in Virginia, he begged Bradford to send him the latest political news. When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774, Madison bemoaned taking his trip earlier in the year. He yearned to be with Bradford, watching the delegates grapple with the natural rights of Americans versus the legal rights of Parliament. The art and science of government fascinated Madison. As one historian has put it, he found his vocation in the American Revolution.
IV
When the shooting war began, Madison was elected colonel of the Orange County militia. It was largely a tribute to his father’s local prestige. It may also have been a fatherly attempt to lure James out of the library. His poor health never permitted him to serve a day as a soldier, and he soon resigned the appointment. His younger brother William joined the army to uphold the family honor.
Another paternal power play had a more positive effect. Madison was elected to the Virginia Convention, the extralegal legislature that had replaced the colonial House of Burgesses. In April 1776, at the age of twenty-five, James decided to risk the miasmas of Williamsburg and took his seat among this body of politicians.
In this first venture into public life, Madison said next to nothing throughout the proceedings as Virginia adopted a constitution and a bill of rights. As one of the youngest delegates, his silence was understandable, but it foreshadowed a style that flowed from his diminutive size and unprepossessing appearance. Madison was the polar opposite of the flamboyant leader of Virginia’s revolution, Patrick Henry, whose defiant shout, “Give me Liberty or Give me Death!” had become one of the mottos of the Revolution.
Henry was a man’s man in every sense of the word, ready to flay an opponent with words or a whip and quick to defend his honor with a gentleman’s ultimate recourse, a pistol. Henry must have filled James Madison with a rueful envy—and not a little despair. Behind his rhetorical facade, the great man was an ignoramus. Madison’s brainpower exceeded Henry’s by at least ten to one. But the younger man’s thin, reedy voice, his parchment-like skin, and his diffident manner virtually guaranteed that no one would ever listen to him.
In the fall of 1776, Madison participated in a minor way in a debate over religious freedom in the Virginia legislature. His Princeton education made him strongly sympathetic to the Baptists and Presbyterians in Virginia, who were often persecuted and sometimes jailed by zealots supporting the established Anglican Church. The leader of the assault on the established church was Thomas Jefferson, but not even his prestige as the author of the Declaration of Independence did him much good against the angry majority who sided with the religious status quo. Madison was more a spectator than a participant in the debates, and he later recalled that Jefferson paid little or no attention to him, because of “the disparities between us.”
That phrase reveals a great deal about Madison’s self-image at this time. The tall, lanky Jefferson, with his genial, outgoing manner and gift for the smashing phrase, was another icon that James Madison could never become. The comparison was as painful to Madison as the contrast to Henry. The younger man admired Jefferson’s wide-ranging knowledge of the law, philosophy, and literature. Here was someone Madison would do almost anything to have as a friend. But there seemed to be no hope of such a relationship ever developing.
V
Back home in Orange County, Madison received a rude shock. He ran for reelection to the Virginia Convention and lost. Still a college idealist, he had disdained to offer the voters what they had become accustomed to getting from political candidates in Virginia—unlimited access to a liquor barrel. He had decided booze was “inconsistent with the purity of moral and republican principles.” The voters thought he was a cheapskate or had gotten too big for his breeches.
Once more Madison retreated to his father’s library and continued to read deeply on the art and science of government. He might have stayed there for decades were it not for the good offices of his father’s friends in high places. In 1778, the legislature elected Madison to Governor Patrick Henry’s council, an eight-man body that was supposed to advise the chief executive on matters of politics and policy.
Madison moved to Williamsburg once more and took a room with his second cousin, yet another James Madison, who was president of William & Mary College. He was soon embroiled full time in the problems of taxation and finance, army recruitment, Indian affairs, and the myriad other matters that fighting a war and running a government dumped on Governor Henry’s desk. The Virginia constitution, fearful of creating a tyrant, gave the governor and his councilors virtually equal power, creating what Madison later sarcastically called “eight governors and a councilor.” Ninety percent of the power remained with the legislature, prompting Madison to describe the job as “a grave of useful talents.”
In 1779, Thomas Jefferson was elected governor, and Madison’s attitude toward the councilor’s job changed dramatically. Virginia faced a looming challenge as the British shifted the focus of the war south, and everyone realized that Henry had spent his three years as governor talking big and doing nothing to prepare the state for serious warfare. There were woeful shortages of everything from guns to supplies. We have already watched a dismayed Governor Jefferson discover the weakness of the state’s militia law, which all but made cowardice a virtue.
In this crisis atmosphere, Jefferson found himself listening far more often to the twenty-eight-year-old Madison than to any of his other councilors. The soft-voiced little man had an uncanny ability to cut through details and fasten on the heart of a problem—and suggest a realistic solution. The beginning of a friendship that would powerfully influence the history of the United States took shape during these hectic days in Richmond. It grew in depth and intensity during Madison’s years in Congress. Without Jefferson’s sympathy and support, Madison’s humiliating debacle with Kitty Floyd might have sent him back to Virginia a recluse for the rest of his life.
VI
Somewhere deep in his unconscious or perhaps in his conscious mind, James Madison seems to have resolved not to seek romance again until he was a man of importance. For the next decade, he devoted himself exclusively to the future of the United States of America. He took Jefferson’s advice about unremitting occupations, altering it in only a single respect—he narrowed his occupation to one: his role as a public man.
Americans from 1784 down to our prosperous and powerful present generation have been the beneficiaries of Kitty Floyd’s decision to jilt James Madison. One can only speculate what the ex-congressman might have done if he had carried her off to Virginia and began enjoying the pleasures of married life. Instead, he focused his powerful intellect on solving the fundamental problem confronting the nation—how to persuade the thirteen quarrelsome, semi-independent states to cede sufficient power to a central government to preserve the federal union.
When Thomas Jefferson went off to France to replace Benjamin Franklin as ambassador, Madison turned to the ultimate American hero, George Washington. Instinctively, Madison seemed to reach out to more commanding figures to help him achieve his goals. He had already won Washington’s respect and attention by constantly supporting the army and other national interests in Congress. At the end of the war, Washington had won Madison’s respect by peaceably resigning his commission as commander in chief of the army, even though Congress had sent his soldiers home unpaid and embittered.
The two men began a momentous correspondence, in which the ex-general made his vision of America’s future plain: an “indissoluble” union of states under a single head was vital to the nation’s survival. How to achieve this goal was beyond Washington’s capacity—but not Madison’s. While he began politicking for a convention to overhaul the ramshackle Articles of Confederation, he went to work on the masterly rearrangement of powers that became the United States Constitution.
Even here, when the document that was his brainchild was presented to the historic convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Madison remained in the background. Edmund Randolph, the splendidly handsome, fulsomely oratorical governor of Virginia, introduced the “Virginia Plan” to the convention. But Madison played a leading role in the debates that followed. Delegate William Pierce of Georgia said that thanks to his “spirit of industry and application…he always comes forward as the best informed man of any point in debate.” He was a unique combination of “the profound politician and the scholar.”7
Historically speaking, the convention was Madison’s finest hour, his rendezvous with fame and greatness. But from a personal point of view, the most satisfying moment came the following year, when he took on Patrick Henry at the Virginia ratifying convention and persuaded the delegates to accept the constitution by a whisker-thin majority. Speaking in his low soft voice, with reams of notes concealed in his hat, Madison bested Henry’s anti-federal fireworks with calm, unwavering logic. It did not hurt to have an invisible backer, George Washington, whose enormous prestige reinforced this reasoned persuasion. But the triumph, as far as the political world of Virginia was concerned, belonged to Madison.
VII
Elected a congressman from Virginia—the resentful Henry blocked his appointment to the Senate—Madison won passage of the Bill of Rights and became the most powerful voice in the new House of Representatives. By this time, at least among his fellow politicians, his fame almost equaled the eminence of his two heroes, Jefferson and Washington. Moving in this aura, James Madison felt ready to resume his search for a wife.
While attending Congress in New York, the nation’s first capital, he met an attractive widow, Henrietta Maria Colden, who had married into the family of Cadwallader Colden, a prominent prewar New York politician. Although he had remained neutral, many members of his family chose the king’s side. Mrs. Colden’s husband had become a British officer and died not long after they retreated to London with the rest of the British army. Mrs. Colden had returned to New York with two sons to try to regain some of the family’s property, which had been either confiscated or neglected during the war.
Henrietta Colden was one of the few women who had a membership in her own name in the New York Society Library—one of the first semipublic libraries in the nation. The books she took out, according to the records of this venerable institution, were impressive and undoubtedly explain one reason why Madison pursued her. She read the Roman historians, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Julius Caesar, as well as the historian of Rome, Edward Gibbon, the French savant Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and similar weighty authors. According to one admirer, she combined her brainpower with “feminine graces,” which prompted some to refer to her as “the celebrated Mrs. Colden.”8
Nothing came of Madison’s interest in her. No one knows whether she rebuffed the diminutive congressman or he had second thoughts about marrying into a family that was strongly tinged with Toryism. It is more than a little likely that Mrs. Colden, who was Scottish, shared her late husband’s sympathies. But the progression from sixteen-year-old Kitty Floyd to this elegant cosmopolitan lady was unquestionably a sign of Madison’s new sense of himself as a man who had achieved fame.9
VIII
Politics now transferred Madison to Philadelphia, the next national capital. He had numerous friends there from his years as a confederation congressman and he was soon enjoying the lively social life of the City of Brotherly Love. Politically he sided with his friend and fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, and acquired more fame by opposing Hamilton’s Bank of the United States and President Washington’s policy of neutrality in the mounting conflict between England and revolutionary France. But marriage remained very much on his mind.
At dinners and receptions, he often met Dolley Payne Todd, wife of a young Quaker lawyer and one of the most lively, attractive women in the capital. He probably bowed to her as often in the street; they lived only three blocks apart. In 1793, her husband and one of their sons died in a yellow fever epidemic. The twenty-five-year-old Dolley became one of the most sought-after widows in the city. According to one somewhat legendary story, a veritable corps of would-be husbands used to station themselves at the head of her street and wait for her to appear.
One of her suitors was suave Senator Aaron Burr of New York, whose wife was dying of cancer back home. Burr already had a reputation as an irresistible lady-killer. He lived in the nearby boardinghouse run by Dolley’s mother and in 1794 helped Dolley draw up a will leaving all her property to her surviving son, Payne Todd, and making Burr the executor—and Payne’s guardian. Rumors swirled that Burr was going to propose the moment he heard the hourly expected news of his wife’s death.
Madison decided on a preemptive strike with a neat political twist. He offered to back Burr as the next American ambassador to France, and he persuaded his friend and former ambassador James Monroe to support him. The ambitious Burr was grateful. Paris was a diplomatic post that was virtually guaranteed to get a man’s name in the newspapers. Madison took the proposal to President Washington, who thunderously rejected the idea. For reasons never completely understood, he loathed Aaron Burr.
Having tried to do this large favor for his chief rival, Madison asked Burr if he would introduce him to Dolley Payne Todd. How could the senator say no? Dolley’s reaction makes plain how high Madison had risen on fame’s ladder. She rushed a note to her best friend, Eliza Collins: “Thou must come to me. Aaron Burr says the great little Madison has asked to be brought to see me this evening.” Dolley was not alone in using this phrase to describe Madison—but for her it seems to have had a romantic ring.10
Madison came and was enthralled. Buxom, dark-haired, and bubbling with high spirits, Dolley was used to being the center of attention. Like Madison, she was the oldest child of a large family. Philadelphia friends were struck by her beauty and cheerful disposition from the moment she arrived in their city at the age of fifteen. Her Quaker father had freed his slaves and moved north to launch a business career. One man recalled how her “soft blue eyes” and “engaging smile” had raised the mercury in numerous “thermometers of the heart to fever heat.”
Further cementing Madison’s attraction, Dolley had been born in North Carolina and raised in Virginia, and had numerous relatives there. A fellow Virginian, Congressman Richard Bland Lee, was engaged to Eliza Collins, and Dolley’s younger sister Lucy was about to marry George Steptoe Washington, nephew of the president.
Madison launched a whirlwind courtship. He enlisted Dolley’s cousin Catherine Coles, the wife of Congressman Isaac Coles of Virginia, to write her a teasing letter, telling her how much she had mesmerized the great little man: “To begin, he thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue, at night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep calling on you to relieve his flame for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed and he hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself.”11
For good measure, Catherine Coles added, “He has consented to every thing that I have wrote about him with sparkling eyes.” For even better measure, Madison enlisted none other than Martha Washington, who reportedly wrote Dolley a warm letter, urging her to marry her ardent forty-three-year-old suitor.12
Dolley played the reluctant game for a while. But in the summer of 1794, while visiting her sister Lucy in Virginia, she wrote Madison a letter, saying yes. Madison replied that he had received her “precious favor” and hoped she could “conceive the joy it gave me.” The once jilted suitor anxiously added, “I hope you will never have another deliberation on that subject. If the sentiments of my heart can guarantee those of yours, they assure me they can never be cause for it.”13
The couple were married on September 15, 1794, at Harewood, the Virginia plantation of George Steptoe Washington. Before the afternoon ceremony began, Dolley found time to write a letter to Eliza Collins, who had just married Congressman Lee. The bride’s remarks about James Madison were notably unromantic. She mentioned her “respect” for him and thought their marriage would give her “everything that is soothing and grateful.” What she meant was clear in the next sentence: “My little Payne will have a generous & tender protector.” She was thinking of her two-year-old son, Payne Todd, who needed a father.
The word “love” went unmentioned in this intimate semi-confession. She signed the letter “Dolley Payne Todd.” That evening, after the ceremony and the wedding dinner, she added beneath the previous signature: “Dolley Madison! Alas!”14