James Madison (1751–1836) was a small man—at 5 feet 4 inches our shortest president—frail, often sickly, shy, and modest about his abilities and achievements. He never commanded troops in battle like George Washington or waged a war of wits in the courtroom as John Adams had.
Yet his predecessor in the White House, Thomas Jefferson, dubbed Madison “the greatest man in the world.” John Adams wrote to Jefferson regarding Madison that “his Administration has acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three Predecessors Washington Adams and Jefferson put together.” Given that Adams was one of these predecessors, that was indeed high praise.
A portrait of James Madison, by James Sharples, as a student at Princeton. Public Domain
These men and others were lavish in their praise because they witnessed what we cannot see: Madison in action. We possess his correspondence, the works he produced, like “The Federalist Papers,” the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and the recorded contemporary observations of his character, but the Founders knew the man in the flesh. In “James Madison, the Clearest Thinker,” historian Alvin Felzenberg gave us this brief explanation for the respect rendered to Madison by his colleagues:
“Like Washington, Madison’s greatness lay as much in his character as in his achievements. Colleagues found him appealing and persuasive because of the diminutive manner through which he conveyed his brilliance. Ronald Reagan had to have been thinking of someone like Madison when he observed, ‘There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.’”
Madison’s humility was a part of his personality. His brilliance was, in part, a result of his reading.
The Spectator
Madison climbed the ladder of learning typical of the well-to-do of his time. Educated at home for a few years, he then entered a local school and was later privately tutored before setting off to the College of New Jersey, now Princeton University. In his pre-college days, his home studies with his grandmother included a thorough exploration of scripture plus reading, writing, and basic math.
In his more formal pre-collegiate schooling, Madison worked under schoolmaster Donald Robertson in such subjects as geometry, Latin, French, and history. According to author-historian Mary-Elaine Swanson in her article “The Education of James Madison,” the texts Madison read, while under Robertson’s tutelage, included works like Montesquieu’s “The Spirit of Laws” and John Locke’s “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.”
Interestingly, a popular literary periodical had a profound impact on the adolescent Madison. Around the age of 11, he began reading from The Spectator, a publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele advocating for “truth, innocence, honor and virtue, as the chief ornaments of life.” Though The Spectator had ceased publication years before Madison’s birth, the back copies remained popular, and Madison’s grandmother, who had charge of his home education, had ordered an eight-volume bound set from London. Among its array of articles were samples of the best writing of the time. Years later, Madison sent a copy of The Spectator to his nephew, encouraging the young man to read it and noting its enormous effect on his own writing style.
Title pages of the circa 1788 edition of the collected edition of Addison and Steele's The Spectator. Public Domain
Cramming for the Constitution
Before departing for France in 1784 as the American ambassador, Jefferson arranged for Madison to have charge of the education of his nephews, Peter and Dabney Carr, in exchange for which Jefferson would send books and pamphlets back from Paris to Madison. With a shipment of two trunks of books in September 1785, Jefferson included an inventory, on which we find listed several books about ancient forms of government.
Though Madison could not know it at the time he began reading these books, they proved invaluable in his work on the Constitution just a short time later. Even as he and others began shaping that document, Madison gleaned information on law and government from these histories and from the works he’d read since boyhood. It was this erudition and the ability to use it that so impressed his colleagues.
In Ralph Ketchum’s “James Madison: A Biography,” we find, as we do with so many of the Founders, a discussion of the influence of John Locke. Ketchum held that the ideas of Locke found in “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” his “Letters on Toleration,” and “Second Treatise on Civil Government” all attracted Madison and found a place in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As this biographer wrote, “Locke’s thought influenced Madison early and remained always the foundation of his personal and public philosophy.”
"An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding" in four books (1690) by John Locke. Public Domain
For more than 230 years, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, though a bit battered by time and circumstance, and often under fire, have served along with the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of our nation’s law and government. The concepts promoted by these documents, ranging from a checks-and-balances system to our freedoms of religion, the press, and speech, are precisely what has made America exceptional among the world’s nations.
For these immeasurable gifts, we can thank James Madison, his reading, and his books.
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Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
