The professional lives of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson first intersected in 1779, when 28-year-old Madison sat on the Council of the State of Virginia and Jefferson served as governor. For the next 47 years they enjoyed what Madison biographer Irving Bryant once called a “perfectly balanced friendship.”
Yet the contemporary legacies of Madison and Jefferson could not be more divergent. Jefferson the polymath is widely remembered for achievements before, during and after his presidency, to include the following: principal author of the Declaration of Independence; visionary expansionist who purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803; founder of the University of Virginia; champion of classical architecture; guiding light of republicanism, and so on. Located high atop a hill in the Virginia Piedmont, Jefferson’s majestic, neoclassical-inspired plantation, Monticello, continues to remind tourists of its owner’s imposing brilliance.
Thirty miles down the road in Orange County, a sign at the entrance gate to Montpelier informs visitors that James Madison was the “Father of the Constitution.” America’s fourth president was much more. Historian Lynne Cheney’s 2014 biography, James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (Viking, 2014), offers a layered re-evaluation of the man too often remembered as shy, sickly and “hardly suited for the demands of daily life, much less the rough-and-tumble world of politicking.”
Yes, Madison was a two-term president, and he was indispensable in the 1787 drafting of the Constitution. He was also an influential member of the House of Representatives and Secretary of State during Jefferson’s presidency. Even more so than his good friend Jefferson, Madison is credited with founding the Democratic-Republican Party. Mrs. Cheney’s biography successfully conveys the full depth of her subject’s character and his many accomplishments. Historian Gordon S. Wood, writing in the New York Times, called the book “lucidly written” and among the best Madison biographies. Below is a transcript of RealClearBooks’ recent conversation with Lynne Cheney.
Q: You write in the book’s prologue, “It is a promising time to clear away misconceptions about Madison.” What are these misconceptions, and why do you think they have seeped into the collective consciousness of a nation still governed by ideals James Madison helped formalize?
LC: I think he has faded in national memory in part because he was reserved. His contemporaries came to understand that although he wasn’t the kind to push toward the front of the room, they had better pay attention to him—and so should we. An early historian wrote, “No mind has stamped more of its impressions on American institutions than Madison’s.”
Q: You remark that as James Madison entered the Philadelphia convention in 1787 (also known as the Constitutional Convention), he was the “political equivalent of Mozart in the late 1770s” or “Einstein [when] he would establish the basis of the theory of relativity and quantum physics.” What led you to place Madison’s political genius in the same category as two men whose creative brilliance is so universally celebrated?
LC: A genius is someone who breaks through conventional thinking and takes whatever field he or she is in to a new level. Mozart did this in music, Einstein in physics, and Madison in politics. It was widely believed that a large republic was impossible, that it would break into pieces, or factions. Madison saw that the tendency of free people to have many different interests could be the underlying strength of a great republic. No one faction would come to dominate and turn the republic into a tyranny.
The extended republic established at the Constitutional Convention was the result of breakthrough thinking. It was new under the sun, which for Anti-federalists became a point of criticism. Madison responded in The Federalist, no. 14, asking, “Is it not the glory of the people of America that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?”
Q: Historians have long believed that Madison suffered an illness resembling epilepsy. Do you believe he was epileptic, and how did his infirmity affect him as a writer, statesman and leader?
LC: When I began to study Madison, I was struck by the way that truly distinguished biographers dismissed what he called “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions” as hypochondria. I made charts of when these attacks might have occurred and immersed myself in eighteenth-century medical books as well as more modern ones. I consulted with experts, in particular Dr. Orin Devinsky, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center of New York University’s Langone Medical Center, and concluded there was a pattern suggesting that Madison suffered from complex partial seizures, a form of temporal lobe epilepsy.
These seizures leave the person conscious, but with comprehension and ability to communicate impaired—the “intellectual functions” suspended, as Madison wrote. He may have described his attacks as “resembling epilepsy” because in his time epilepsy was known as the “falling disease.” The term was reserved for convulsive seizures. That he saw a relationship between what happened to him and attacks in which people fell to the ground and convulsed is, I think, one more indication of how remarkably perceptive he was.
Q: A niece of the Madison family once wrote that Dolley was James’s “solace and comfort […] He could not bear her to leave his presence, and she gratified him by being absent only when duty required.” What more can you tell us about the relationship between James and Dolley Madison?
LC: Dolley and James loved one another and complemented one another. While he was reserved, she was outgoing. While he didn’t stand out in a crowd, she certainly did. Descriptions of her clothes are wonderful. One of my favorites of her outfits is a pink gown with a lot of gold chains around the waist. Her hat was a white velvet turban with feathers on top.
Dolley knew how to entertain and make people comfortable. This was a great help to James when he was running for president. She welcomed members of Congress to their house on F Street in Washington, where they could get to know James and come to like him personally as well as respect his intellect. Since congressional caucuses chose nominees for president in those days, Dolley, as contemporaries acknowledged, really made a difference.
Q: Madison once commented that “the belief in a God all powerful […] is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources.” Yet Madison’s religious beliefs are unclear. How do you characterize his faith life?
LC: The important thing to Madison wasn’t to discuss his religious beliefs, but to be certain that everyone was free to believe as he or she chose. In my book, I speculate that his “sudden attacks” may have been part of the reason he was so fervent in his defense of religious freedom. In the eighteenth century, epilepsy was regarded as a sign that the sufferer was possessed by the devil. Madison had personal reason to know that wasn’t the case and to realize there was no cause for imposing such a notion or any other religious belief on another person.
There are many aspects to Madison’s thought and character—which is how I justify having spent five years writing "James Madison: A Life Reconsidered."
