On today's Founder's Friday on the Glenn Beck Fox News program, Beck spoke at length about founder James Madison. Madison was the 4th president of the United Sates. He was born on March 16, 1751, the eldest son of the wealthiest landholder in Orange County, Virginia. James Madison was destined for a life of privilege and responsibility. The triad of land, slaves, and tobacco supported him financially throughout his life. That helped him to pursue politics and other intellectual pursuits. He was very well educated. He had several years of local schooling and private tutoring. In 1769, he entered the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where he was introduced to the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, to name a few. He was a voracious student who consumed four years of course work in two years and graduated in 1771.
In 1774 he visited Philadelphia, which coincided with news of the passage by Parliament of the Coercive Acts. His contributions to the independence movement was restricted to Orange County, Virgina until his election to the Virginia Convention in 1776. It was in Virginia that he made his first contribution to American constitutional law by his defense of the free exercise of religion as a right and not a privilege. In October, Madison participated in the newly created Virginia House of Delegates, making the acquaintance of his lifelong friend and colleague, Thomas Jefferson. Madison supposedly lost the election for the 1777 session of the House of Delegates for refusing to provide liquor for the voters. His good offices in the legislature was not forgotten. He was elected to a seat on the eight-member Council of State that same year and in 1779 was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia. Madison served in Congress from March 1780, when the Revolutionary War was nearing its end, to 1783, soon after its conclusion. He was known as a conscientious legislator and admired for his committee work. Madison was among those who thought that the Confederation government needed to be invested with more power at the expense of the states. He had engineered compromises in the spring of 1783 on taxation, import duties, and the 3/5th's ration, in which for the purposes of representation, five slaves would be equivalent to three free persons. However, the Articles of Confederation continued to lose power in the wake of the war's end.
Before Madison went to Philadelphia to help draft a new constitution, he left national office to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1784 and for the two subsequent years. He was successful in blocking the establishment of state support for churches. He didn't believe in the state funding of churches. In 1785, Madison was appointed a delegate to a convention on interstate trade to be held in Annapolis in September 1786. The result of this meeting called for the general convention to meet the following summer in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation in such a way to make "the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." He was again elected as a Virginia delegate to Congress, arriving in New York in February 1787. That spring, Madison drafted a comprehensive plan for a more powerful national government. Madison then devoted himself to the task of ratifying the new Constitution. He, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote a series of essays exploring the benefits of the new Constitution and defending some of its more controversial provisions. These essays were collected and published in 1788 as "The Federalist." In March 1788, Madison came home to Virginia to persuade the state legislature to ratify the Constitution. He earned the name "The Father of the Constitution" because of his input in constructing and ratifying the Constitution.
Shortly thereafter, Madison defeated James Monroe for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as a guiding light to his fellows. George Washington relied on Madison for advice on how to conduct a Republican presidency. In addition, Madison had promised his Virginia constituency that in spite of his own reservations, he would pursue a series of amendments to safeguard individual rights. He reduced a multitude of suggested amendments to nineteen. Congress chose twelve to send to the states for consideration, and the states ratified ten of those amendments. They are today known as the Bill of Rights. Madison's time in Congress was shaped by developing discord with America's new treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, over their views concerning the financing of the new Republic. The rift between the two widened to the point that it led to the formation of political parties which were known as the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties. The Federalist party favored a strong central government in governing the nation's affairs, and the Democratic-Republicans favored a more limited role of government. At the time, Madison was also opposed to the national bank of the United States.
In 1974, three years before his term ended in Congress, he married a young Philadelphia widow named Dolley Payne Madison. He had hoped to enjoy the private life but couldn't becuase of America's hostility to France under John Adams. Therefore, Madison drafted the Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in Congress. He was opposed to it because he was opposed to the enlargement of federal power over the last few years in the Adams administration. He felt the Alien and Sedition Acts were an infringement on the rights and liberties of the nation's citizens. He produced the Report of 1800 which was a comprehensive attack on the unconstitutionality of the two acts as well as a ringing statement of the inviolability of the right of free speech.
When Thomas Jefferson was elected president, he appointed James Madison as Secretary of State. As Secretary of State, Madison was charged with a host of duties besides the conduct of American foreign policy, ranging from publishing and distributing the public laws to serving as a liason between the federal government and the governors of the states and territories. In the realm of foreign policy, he handled correspondence from five ministers and over fifty consuls. The greatest achievement of the Jefferson administration was the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France. In 1808, Madison won the presidential election handily and succeeded Thomas Jefferson. Throughout his first term Madison was preoccupied by disputes with France, Great Britain, and Spain. By 1810 France had repealed its commercial restrictions, at least nominally, and in the same year Madison seized the province of West Florida from Spain, thereby consolidating American control of the Gulf Coast. But with respect to Great Britain, his efforts were unavailing, and beginning in November 1811, he urged Congress to mobilize the country's defenses. In 1812, he had asked for and received a declaration of war against Great Britain. Elected president for a second time in 1812, Madison launched a series of invasions at Canada as the most vulnerable British target. The war effort was hampered, however, by poor generalship, by untrained and ill-equipped troops, by quarrels with the state governments, and by logistical difficulties.
With the strategic failure of the Canadian campaigns of 1812 to 1814 and with his own capital burned by British invaders in 1814, Madison was happy to accept a peace on the basis of the prewar relationship with Great Britain. The Treaty of Ghent, ending the war, was negotiated in December 1814, but the news didn't reach Washington until February 1815. In the interim, the nearly miraculous victory at New Orleans on January 1815 put a happy ending on what was for the most part a disastrous experience. Also, the immediate causes of the war--commercial restrictions and impressment--had vanished with the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the European conflict. Madison's final years in office allowed him, for the first time in fifteen years, to focus on domestic affairs. He had proposed several measures that he had ironically earlier opposed such as the recharter of a national bank, a limited protective tariff, and a constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to undertake internal improvements. The Second Bank of the United States was established by Madison's signature in 1816. He was opposed to the national bank during Washington's administration. In one of his last official acts he vetoed as unconstitutional a Bonus Bill that provided for federal support of roads and canals. He retired to Montepelier, his family's plantation, for the second and last time in March 1817.
After Madison retired from serving in government, Madison involved himself in the management of his large plantation, interesting himself in scientific farming as a means to counter the increasing unprofitability of Virginia agriculture. Beginning in 1816, he sat on the Board of Visitors planning the creation of the University of Virginia, and when Jefferson died in 1826, he became the university's second rector. His last public political appearance was in 1829 at the Virginia convention to draw up a new state constitution, where he spoke against the overrepresentation of the Tidewater region in the House of Delegates. He died at his home on June 28, 1836.
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