James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (6 page)

Madison did not make an issue about his departure from the
orthodox religious views of his time. To question miracles or the Trinity in one’s study or in private conversation was one thing. To do so publicly was more than unacceptable. Heresy, including the denial of the divinity of the Scriptures, could keep a person from holding office and even, technically at least, lead to imprisonment. With his family, Madison was almost certainly discreet. His father was a vestryman at the Brick Church, and his mother a woman of noted piety who was confirmed in the church as an adult. Her son James chose not to be confirmed, but the loving regard he habitually displayed for his parents almost certainly meant that he did not air his differences with church doctrine at home. Bishop William Meade, a friend of the Madison family, wrote, “Whatever may have been the private sentiments of Mr. Madison on the subject of religion, he was never known to declare any hostility to it. He always treated it with respect, attended public worship in his neighborhood, invited ministers of religion to his house, had family prayers on such occasions—though he did not kneel himself at prayers.” Nevertheless, he gained a reputation as an unbeliever. As the Reverend Dr. Balmaine, who was well acquainted with him, described it, “His political associations with those of infidel principles, of whom there were many in his day, if they did not actually change his creed, yet subjected him to the general suspicion of it. This was confirmed in the minds of some by the active part he took in opposition to everything like the support of churches by the legislature.” Meade reported a private conversation with him that, in Meade’s words, “took such a turn—though not designed on my part—as to call forth some expressions and arguments which left the impression on my mind that his creed was not strictly regulated by the Bible.”
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Madison has often been called a deist, and rejection of supernatural parts of the Bible was common to deist thought, but so, too, was the idea that through reason one could prove the existence of God, and to Madison that smacked of hubris. He posited limits on reason, making him sound very much like David Hume, the Scottish philosopher whom John Witherspoon had classed among “infidel writers,” though that is a
description Hume would have rejected. Both Madison and Hume agreed that human understanding can take us only so far and beyond is what Madison described as “mystery,” arising from “the dimness of the human sight.” As Hume put it, “The whole is a riddle, an enigma, an inexplicable mystery.”
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Hume also argued that a person cannot wrestle with existential problems forever, cannot remain “environed with the deepest darkness.” Life summons, inviting participation: “The blood flows with a new tide; the heart is elevated; and the whole man acquires a vigor which he cannot command in his solitary and calm moments.” For Madison, the call came from the events of the day, not only the persecution of Baptists in Virginia, but also the dramatic escalation of the conflict with the king and Parliament. After a few years of relative calm, the British had provoked American ire once more, this time with an effort to save the East India Company. Parliament granted the company exclusive rights to the American tea market, a decision that together with the tax on tea imposed by the Townshend Acts infuriated colonists up and down the seaboard. Once more they saw themselves placed in humiliating subservience, used this time by the ministry in Britain not only to fill up royal coffers but to prop up a failing company. In Philadelphia threats of violence persuaded the captain of the
Polly
to turn back to London rather than attempt to enter the harbor with his cargo of tea. In Boston anger and crowds grew until on a cold December night in 1773 thousands of Bostonians swarmed Griffin’s Wharf to watch 130 men, many disguised as Indians, board the
Dartmouth,
the
Eleanor,
and the
Beaver
and dump ten thousand pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.
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At first Madison preferred Philadelphia’s more temperate approach. “I congratulate you on your heroic proceedings . . . with regard to the tea,” he wrote to Bradford, whose father’s print shop had published a handbill warning the captain of the
Polly
that tar and feathers were in store for him if he landed. “I wish Boston may conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do with boldness.” Madison understood that Boston had been singled out for “frequent assaults” and that
the conflict was providing colonists with valuable “exercise and practice . . . in the art of defending liberty and property.” Still, he admired the judiciousness of Philadelphians and longed to visit their city. Soon he had an excuse. His father wanted to enroll his brother William in a boarding school to the north.
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The Madison brothers, accompanied by James’s Princeton friend George Luckey, started their journey in May and were likely in Philadelphia when they heard the stunning news that in retaliation for the destruction of tea the British Parliament was closing Boston’s port and altering Massachusetts’s charter to bring the colony under greater royal control. Not long after came action and reaction from Virginia. The House of Burgesses called for prayer and fasting on June 1, 1774, the day the port of Boston was to be closed, which led the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to dissolve the assembly. As Madison enrolled his brother in preparatory school—the family decided on one in Princeton—events at home were taking on momentous dimensions. Members of the dismissed House of Burgesses, acting with the aplomb of men well practiced in governance, reconvened in Williamsburg’s Raleigh Tavern. There, in the long, wainscoted Apollo Room, scene of many a ball and banquet, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and their colleagues reaffirmed their support for Boston, declaring “that an attack made on one of our sister colonies . . . is an attack made on all
British America
.” They called for the colonies to meet “in general congress . . . to deliberate on those general measures which the united interests of
America
may from time to time require.”
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As the crisis grew, Madison’s attitude, like that of many colonists, hardened. In light of the harsh British measures, Pennsylvania’s cautious ways seemed inadequate, and when its legislature chose delegates for the general congress that Virginia had proposed, Madison told Bradford that the instructions they had been given were much too timid. Instead of waiting to see if the British would make concessions, the colonies ought to undertake immediate military preparations, he maintained: “Delay on our part emboldens our adversaries and improves
their schemes whilst it abates the ardor of the Americans inspired with recent injuries.” From his Piedmont home, Madison also wrote to Bradford that he “heartily repent[ed]” having already made his journey to Philadelphia. The years of his young manhood had been marked by repeated British violations of American rights, from the Stamp Act to the Tea Act to the Intolerable Acts, as Americans were calling the measures taken against Boston. The gathering of the Continental Congress offered hope of concerted action by the American colonies in defense of their rights. Madison yearned to observe the great event, but Bradford assured him that even if he were in Philadelphia, he could not witness the proceedings. They were “a profound secret and the doors open to no one.” Bradford had to admit, however, that a city where delegates were convening from such far-flung places as Georgia and Massachusetts provided great spectacle. Philadelphia was “another Cairo,” he wrote, swarming not with merchants but “with politicians and statesmen.”
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Bradford also sent information he knew would fascinate the book-loving Madison: “The Congress sits in the Carpenter’s Hall in one room of which the city library is kept and of which the librarian tells me the gentlemen make great and constant use.” The delegates were especially interested in works of political theory, Bradford wrote, perhaps inspiring Madison to begin a reading project of his own. He sent to England for Joseph Priestley’s
Essay on the First Principles of Government and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty,
a work advocating natural rights, limited government, and religious freedom. He asked Bradford to send him a copy of Adam Ferguson’s
Essay on the History of Civil Society,
which emphasized the need for constitutional checks and balances. Ferguson also asserted liberty to be a right, not a favor granted by the state, a formulation that Madison might have kept in mind as he read pamphlets on religious toleration that he asked another friend to send him.
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Since freedom of conscience was also a right, why should it be regarded as within the power of the state to grant?

Word leaked out of the Continental Congress that Virginia’s delegates
were the most aggressive in their proposals for dealing with Great Britain. “
Your
province seems to take the lead at present,” Bradford wrote. Madison proudly reported that in Virginia “a spirit of liberty and patriotism animates all degrees and denominations of men. Many publically declare themselves ready to join the Bostonians as soon as violence is offered them or resistance thought expedient.” During the winter months of 1774–1775, militias began to train. “There will by the spring, I expect, be some thousands of well-trained high spirited men ready to meet danger whenever it appears,” Madison wrote.
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Madison was a member of the Orange County Committee of Safety, which his father headed, a group responsible for enforcing the Continental Association, a measure passed by the Continental Congress to boycott British goods. Committee members also encouraged local military preparations for what Madison called “extreme events,” efforts that seemed entirely prudent when news arrived that in the dawn hours of April 20, 1775, British marines under the orders of Governor Dunmore had seized gunpowder from the magazine at Williamsburg. Some six hundred armed and mounted men assembled at Fredericksburg “with a view to proceed to Williamsburg [to] recover the powder and revenge the insult,” as Madison described it. They were talked out of their plans by a letter from the portly, fifty-three-year-old Peyton Randolph, who had been in the House of Burgesses for nearly thirty years and presided over the Continental Congress, as well as by advice from three of Randolph’s colleagues: Edmund Pendleton, Richard Henry Lee, and George Washington. But Patrick Henry, another Virginia delegate, wasn’t about to let the event pass. Since the time of the Stamp Act, he had been excoriating the British for their actions. Just the month before, he had stirred his fellow Virginians with a call to arms that would become legendary: “Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me . . . give me liberty or give me death!”
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In Hanover County, Henry called for volunteers, and as they assembled, reports from Massachusetts began arriving. Shots had been fired
and Americans killed when a British attempt to seize a cache of arms near Concord, Massachusetts, had provoked a confrontation at North Bridge. Henry told the men gathered in Newcastle on the Pamunkey River that it was hardly a coincidence that the British had also seized Virginia munitions. They had a plan to deprive colonists up and down the land of their means of defense, he said, rousing the assembled volunteers with images of comrades fallen, their blood “gloriously shed in the general cause.” He led his motley army toward Williamsburg, and as their march progressed, an alarmed Governor Dunmore sent a message offering reparations. Henry accepted the governor’s bill of exchange, wrote a receipt for 330 pounds, and declared himself satisfied.
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In Orange County, where indignation was also running high, a group of volunteers, including James Madison, was organizing its own march when its members learned of Henry’s success. A letter from the Committee of Safety, probably drafted by Madison, thanked Henry for his “zeal for the honor and interest of your country,” and Madison was among those who delivered it as Henry passed triumphantly through Port Royal, Virginia, on his way to Philadelphia and the Second Continental Congress. The twenty-four-year-old from Orange County probably tried hard not to stare at the tall, gaunt, thirty-eight-year-old Henry, a man who would be his adversary in the years ahead but for whom he presently had the highest regard, particularly, he told Bradford, when he compared Henry’s upcountry boldness with the “pusillanimity” of the “gentlemen below,” meaning the large plantation owners of the Tidewater, “whose property will be exposed . . . should [the government] be provoked to make reprisals.”
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In mid-June, Madison sent sad news to Bradford. Dysentery, widespread in Orange County, had carried off two of his siblings, “a little sister about seven and a brother about four years of age.” Nelly Madison, grieving over the deaths of Elizabeth and Reuben, the fourth and fifth of her children to die, had also fallen ill, but she would later recover.
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•   •   •

AFTER THE KILLINGS
at Lexington and Concord, further armed conflict with Britain seemed inevitable, and Boston, under British occupation, was the most likely place for it. When the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in May 1775, delegates quickly created a Continental army, authorizing militia companies from Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania to march to Boston to reinforce the ragtag assemblage of New Englanders trying to drive the British from the city. Congress then turned to one of its own to lead the army. Colonel George Washington of Virginia, a man of commanding stature, few words, and a reputation for great courage in battling the French and the Indians, accepted the appointment, modestly calling it “a trust too great for my capacity.”
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Even as Washington was preparing to take up his command, there was further bloodshed. British forces attacked New England militiamen who had taken up fortified positions on Breed’s Hill, which overlooked Boston. After fierce fighting, patriot forces retreated to Cambridge over Bunker Hill, from which the battle would take its name, but they had exacted a terrible price from the British, killing or wounding more than a thousand redcoats.
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As colonists increasingly realized that they were going to have to wage war for their rights, the Battle of Bunker Hill lifted their spirits, encouraging them to think that in a general conflagration their militias would fare quite well.