James Madison

James Madison (1751 – 1836) was born into a prominent Virginia planting family. Notoriously quiet and reserved to match his mere height of five-foot-four-inches, Madison studied at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) and became immersed in the philosophy, values and modes of thinking of the Age of Enlightenment. Madison was also an enslaver. The wealth generated by the enslaved people on his family’s plantation afforded him the opportunity to develop into one of the United States’ greatest political theorists.

Madison attended the Fifth Virginia Convention in Williamsburg, where delegates wrote and adopted the Virginia Constitution of 1776 and the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Due to his stature and frequent poor health, Madison never saw battle. Instead, he grew to prominence as a political leader of the American Revolution, who thought and worked hard to determine how the ideas that Patriots fought for could be wrapped into legislation.

Madison played a decisive role in the drafting and promoting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He advocated religious freedom, helping to assure passage of his friend Thomas Jefferson’s bill known as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. As one of the three authors of The Federalist, Madison also became a prominent leader in the Democratic-Republican Party, as the two-party system emerged in the 1790s.

Through and beyond the Revolution, Madison served on the Virginia House of Delegates, on the Council of State, on the Second Continental Congress, as a congressman, as Secretary of State and finally two terms as president.

Madison was survived by his wife Dolly when he died at Montpelier, his home in Orange County, Virginia in 1836.