James Madison

James Madison was the intellectual power behind the Constitution and its ratification and one of the true geniuses of the early Republic. Now given his due in a majestic biography that encompasses the whole man, his mind, his words, and his character, Madison takes his proper place as one of the giants among the Founding Fathers.

As a young thinker imagining the future of the nascent country during the early years of the Revolution, Madison envisioned a vast republic, where the people were sovereign and their fundamental rights respected as nowhere else on earth. Such a republic had been judged impossible by influential thinkers of the age. Without monarchical power at the center, they believed, a country of great size would come apart, riven by different interests and ambitions. Only in a small republic, where citizens held views and virtue in common, could there be stability. Madison understood that no society, not even the smallest, was truly homogenous. The challenge was insuring that majority rule, which was at the heart of republican government, did not become an instrument for suppressing minority views. The way to do this was to make the republic large enough so that no single interest dominated. This insight-brilliant and prophetic-not only provided a rationale for the union of states that would be created by the Constitution, it would transform political thought, taking self-government from an impossible realm, in which all citizens virtuously suppressed their self-interest in the name of the common good, and moved it into reality, where interests competed with and checked one another. Bringing the idea of the extended republic to bear at a time when a great nation was to be built was Madison's first great act of creative genius-but by no means his last. Over the next five years, he, more than any other individual, would be responsible for creating the United States of America in the form we know it today.

At the constitutional convention, Madison was one of the chief participants in debate, while at the same time keeping notes that would create an historical record of immeasurable worth. The Constitution that the delegates finally agreed upon would not be everything he had wanted, but he quickly concluded it was more than anyone could have hoped, and with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, he defended it in The Federalist, a series of essays that historian Clinton Rossiter called "the most important work in political science that has ever been written, or is likely ever to be written, in the United States." Madison was crucial to ratification in Virginia, the biggest and most powerful state, and he would face down Patrick Henry, the most famed orator of the day, in order to succeed.

As a congressman, he dominated the House of Representatives, and as George Washington's chief advisor, he had enormous power in the executive branch, as well. Eventually Madison and Washington would split, and with Thomas Jefferson, Madison would found an opposition party-the first political party in the country's history. When the Democratic Republicans, as members of that party were called, took control of the government, Madison became President Jefferson's Secretary of State, a position from which he managed the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States. As president himself, Madison worked to defend America's interests peaceably, but when that failed, he led the country in its first war under the Constitution, the War of 1812. It was a conflict famously marked by the burning of Washington. America suffered ignominious defeats, but also won glorious victories, and at the end of the war, John Adams wrote that "notwithstanding a thousand faults and blunders," Madison's "administration has acquired more glory and established more union than all three predecessors, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, put together."

Madison accomplished all that he did despite his reserved nature and the fact that throughout his life he suffered from epileptic seizures. Though he was a quiet man, often shy around strangers, he married one of the most glamorous figures of the age, the warm and outgoing Dolley Madison. Lynne Cheney herself a close eyewitness to the exercise of power in Washington-returns to us the understanding that citizens of Madison's own time had of his leadership of the nation during the first war under the Constitution. Without precedent to guide him, he would demonstrate that a republic could defend its honor and independence-and remain a republic still.