SOURCE: Howard, A. E. Dick. “James Madison and the Founding of the Republic.” In James Madison on Religious Liberty, edited by Robert S. Alley, pp. 21-34. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985.

[In the following essay, Howard discusses Madison's role in formulating the Constitution and founding the republic.]

James Madison—by common consent, the Father of the nation's Constitution—was in many ways an unlikely candidate for the historic role he played in the founding of our republic. Madison was not what we today would call “charismatic”; indeed, for strong personality, it is Dolley, not James, that history remembers.

Unprepossessing in appearance—he stood only five feet six inches tall—and often in ill health during his early years, Madison lacked the majestic bearing, physical prowess, and martial skills of George Washington. His prose, while copious and competent, missed the bite of Paine or the elegance and lucidity of Jefferson. In an age when public speaking was a highly prized political tool, Madison was plagued by a weak voice and hobbled by self-consciousness. Madison was so unimpressive a public speaker that he felt suited neither for the ministry nor the law as a profession (either of which would have been a natural vocation for a person of Madison's intellectual interests).

Madison more than made up for his shortcomings, however, with his rigorously logical mind, appetite for reading, and indefatigable industry. As he matured, he drew around him a circle of important friends who recognized in him a quiet but keen sense of humor, a potential for iconoclasm, and unshakable integrity and convictions.

History can appreciate how Madison's strengths came to outweigh, by any measure, whatever may have been his limitations. For it is Madison who, more than any other founder, shaped our constitutional system of government. How this came to be—how Madison's ideas of politics and government were formed, and how he put those ideas to work—makes a fascinating story.

Madison was born to James Madison, Senior, and Nelly Conway Madison, both from Virginia's landed gentry, on March 16, 1751, at the home of his maternal grandmother at Port Conway on the Rappahannock River. Shortly after his birth, the family moved west to the Rapidan River, in Orange County. The trip was only fifty miles or so, but it took the Madisons from the Tidewater to the Virginia Piedmont at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Both in Madison's day, and for decades after the revolution, life and politics in Virginia were heavily colored by differences in outlook conditioned by living in the east (where established power lay) and in the more westerly regions.

James Madison thus grew up, as did Thomas Jefferson (who lived only thirty miles away), with that strange blend of rustic life and cultivated social and intellectual discourse that marked plantation life in the Piedmont. At the same time, growing up at the family seat at Montpelier, young James Madison enjoyed the leisure purchased by slavery—a leisure employed in the education of a young Virginia gentleman.

After early education at home and at Donald Robertson's school on the Mattapony, Madison entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1769. Madison's choice of Princeton was distinctly unusual; a young Virginia gentleman was likely to attend the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg. It seems that Madison was swayed by his admiration for Thomas Martin, a tutor recently graduated from Princeton. Moreover, Madison (and his father) may also have been drawn by Princeton's eighteenth-century reputation for religious strictness and staunch patriotism. These qualities were exemplified in John Witherspoon, the Edinburgh-educated President, an active Presbyterian, who had come to Nassau Hall shortly before Madison became a student there.

The decision to go to Princeton was a momentous one for Madison, for it brought him directly under the influence of the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. At the college, Madison encountered an early experiment with what would become a staple of American education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a curriculum heavily influenced by the Scottish school. Edinburgh, which produced many of the intellectual leaders of Madison's younger years, had emerged as the most progressive English-speaking university. While the figures associated with the Scottish Enlightenment varied considerably in their views, the general thrust was an appeal to “common sense,” a belief that all men possess an innate sense that enables them to distinguish between good and bad, truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness. The Scottish philosophers, especially Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson, combined their belief in “common sense” with Whiggish patriotism, a “plain” rhetorical style, a plea for empirical investigation of nature (including human nature and political institutions), and a program for a more practical education.

John Witherspoon's Princeton was not friendly to all Scottish thinkers (certainly not free-thinking skeptics like David Hume), and many vestiges of an earlier educational model remained. But Madison eagerly entered into a remarkable political education. He was active in the newly founded American Whig Society, a political club that included Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the gifted writer and jurist; Phillip Freneau, soon to become America's leading poet; William Bradford, later attorney general under Washington; and John Henry of Maryland, later a senator and governor. Above all, Madison devoted himself to an intense study of “The Law of Nature and of Nations.” With what he recalled as the “minimum of sleep and the maximum of application,” he finished his bachelor studies in less than three years.

Madison was a diligent student, especially in history and government. Following his graduation, he spent several more months studying Hebrew, law, and ethics under Witherspoon. Madison's Princeton years brought him tutelage in such works as those of Locke, Montesquieu, Harrington, Grotius, and Hobbes. Through his grounding in Scottish intellectual attitudes, Madison came to appreciate the notion—a fundamental assumption among Enlightenment writers—that the study of history yielded generalizations about human nature and thus furnished guidelines for the governance of human affairs. Thus the stirrings of empiricism (part political theory, part embryonic sociology) played an important part in shaping Madison's thinking about laws and constitutions.

Some years later, therefore, when Madison argued in The Federalist for the ratification of the new Constitution, he stressed an appeal to “experience … that last best oracle of wisdom.” Madison's appeal was no submission to the fetters of the past. Quite the contrary, Madison looked to experience to illuminate a progressive future. As he said in Federalist “No. 14”: “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?”

When Madison returned to Montpelier in 1772, he continued his studies and tutored his younger siblings while pondering his own future. Plagued with ill health and depressed by the death of a close friend from Princeton, Madison brooded over his prospects. “I am too dull and infirm now,” he wrote, “to look out for any extraordinary things in this world for I think my sensations for many months past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.”

Melancholia soon gave way to a passionate interest in public events, nurtured by his inquiring mind. One of the earliest controversies to engage Madison's attention—emblematic of his overarching concern for the freedom of the human spirit—concerned religious liberty. Local persecutions of Baptists and other dissenters moved Madison to write to a friend that “well meaning men” were in jail for publishing their religious sentiments. He prayed “for Liberty of Conscience to revive among us.” Correspondence about political events led to more active roles for Madison, including a seat on Orange County's committee of safety.

In May 1774 Lord Dunmore dissolved Virginia's assembly. The burgesses simply repaired to a nearby tavern and proceeded to form the first of a series of conventions that functioned as the effective government of the colony. In 1776 Madison was elected to the Virginia Convention, representing Orange County. At twenty-five he was one of the youngest members. In May 1776 the convention took the momentous step of instructing Virginia's delegates to the Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, to introduce a resolution calling for independence from Great Britain.

In moving for independence, the convention also created a committee to draft a declaration of rights and a frame of government for Virginia. The principal draftsman of Virginia's new constitution was George Mason, a well-read and politically active planter from Fairfax County. In the debates over the new charter, Madison's chief contribution came when the delegates took up the question of religious freedom. Mason's draft provided that “all Men should enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience. …” This approach, grounded in John Locke's Letter on Toleration, ensured only a limited form of religious freedom—toleration of dissenters in a state where there was an established church. Madison, however, wanted stronger language. He drafted a substitute declaring that “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise of religion”—language sounding of natural right rather than toleration.

Madison's resolution also declared that “no man or class of men ought, on account of religion to be invested with any peculiar emoluments or privileges. …” In the course of debate, however, Madison was obliged to drop this clause, which would surely have disestablished the Anglican Church in Virginia and probably also have barred state support of religious sects generally. The question of disestablishment remained to be settled in 1786, with the passage of Jefferson's Statute for Religious Freedom.

In 1777 Madison suffered the only defeat of his electoral career. It was customary at that time for candidates for public office to ply the voters at the polls with some rum or hard cider. Madison (perhaps with the shade of Witherspoon looking over his shoulder) thought it “inconsistent with the purity of moral and of republican principles” to sully an election with the “corrupting influence of spirituous liquors.” The voters of Orange County seem to have been offended by this display of virtue. (They may well have decided Madison was being arrogant or perhaps simply being tightfisted with his money.)

Madison was not out of public office long. Remembering the impression he had made at the Virginia convention in Williamsburg, the leadership of the new state government chose Madison as one of the eight members of the Council of State, a body that worked closely with the governor in carrying out the Commonwealth's executive business.

Three years later, he served as a delegate to the Continental Congress. Between 1780 and 1783, when the Peace Treaty was signed with Great Britain, Madison was immersed in national rather than merely regional politics. In 1780 he wrote the instructions to John Jay, American minister to the court of Spain, supplying Jay with arguments supporting free navigation of the Mississippi by the United States. Spain claimed a monopoly on navigation of the lower Mississippi, while the United States claimed the lands between the mountains and the Mississippi, as well as navigation rights, derived from England's 1763 treaty ending the last French and Indian War.

In another “national” matter of great urgency, Madison took the leading role in fashioning the compromise over western lands. Virginia, under its colonial charter, had vast territorial claims, asserting dominion over what are now the states of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Other states likewise claimed western lands, and frequently these claims overlapped one another. Land companies, liberally doling out rum to Indian tribes, speculated with millions of acres of land. It was Madison who, with parliamentary skill, steered through Congress the terms by which the eastern states would cede land for the common benefit of the American nation. The settlement fashioned by Madison and his colleagues formed the basis for national land policy under which state after state would be added to a union that ultimately would stretch from ocean to ocean.

Returning to his home at Montpelier in December 1783, Madison carried on his intellectual pursuits, including the study of law. As if in training for the task ahead of him in Philadelphia four years later, Madison made a particular study of confederations, ancient and modern. He wrote to Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris, asking his friend to buy him books, especially those throwing light on the “general constitution and droit public of the several confederacies which have existed”—leagues such as those of ancient Greece and Switzerland.

Jefferson, with his characteristic energy, saw to it that a stream of books flowed westward to Madison—nearly 200 volumes in all. Madison's reading ranged from Plutarch and Polybius to Mably and Montesquieu. In the historians he found repeated confirmation of what was becoming a favorite Madisonian thesis: a confederacy could not hold together without a strong federal center. One by one, Madison considered the strengths and weaknesses of the confederacies, ancient and modern—the Lycian, the Amphictyonic, the Achaean, the Helvetic, the Belgic, the Germanic. Out of these musings came a manuscript of forty-one pages, describing these confederacies, analyzing their federal nature, and summing up each section with conclusions on “The Vices of the Constitution.” Much of this essay, even to its actual language, Madison later carried forward into “Nos. 18,” “19,” and “20” of The Federalist.

Elected in 1784 to the Virginia House of Delegates, Madison quickly became a leader in the General Assembly. He had a hand in virtually every major project between 1784 and 1786—development of the state's resources, improvement in its commerce, and modernization of its laws. Looking to the western regions, he inaugurated a series of surveys to improve transmontane communications. Less successful—though unquestionably forward-looking—were Madison's efforts on behalf of public education; he was unable to persuade the Assembly to establish a general system of common schools as proposed by Jefferson's Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge. (It took another century for a statewide system of public education to be established, by the Constitution of 1870).

A landmark of this period was Madison's role in helping define the proper boundaries between church and state in a free society. In 1784 Patrick Henry and others proposed a general assessment to support ministers of religion. Madison, in reply, wrote his famous A Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments—a document that furnished the intellectual roots of the First Amendment's ban on an establishment of religion.

Religion, said Madison, “must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man,” religious freedom being an “unalienable right.” Government support of religion, he argued, is not necessary for the health of religion; to the contrary, its legacy has been “superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” Moreover, aiding religion at public expense would “destroy that moderation and harmony which the forebearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced among its several sects.”

Government's role, Madison concluded, is simple: “protecting every Citizen in the enjoyment of his Religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property; by neither invading the equal rights of any Sect, nor suffering any Sect to invade those of another.” Madison's spirited defense of religious freedom and of the separation of church and state helped defeat Henry's bill. In its place the General Assembly enacted Jefferson's Bill for Religious Freedom.

On the national scene, the mid-eighties were a time of discouragement for those who cared about the health of the American nation. The defects of the Articles of Confederation were increasingly apparent. Under the Articles, Congress had neither the power to tax nor to regulate commerce. The Articles declared that “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence,” and the states were ever quick to assert and promote their own interests, at the expense of the national welfare.

Commercial rivalries were especially sharp. Concerned with building its own prosperity, a state was inclined to treat a sister state as it would a foreign nation. States without seaports were especially hard hit. New Jersey, finding itself between the ports of New York and Philadelphia, was, said Madison, like a “cask tapped at both ends.” North Carolina, between Virginia and South Carolina, resembled a “patient bleeding at both arms.” Indeed, Madison believed, most of the new nation's “political evils may be traced to our commercial ones.”

The answer to these problems, Madison concluded, was to give Congress power to regulate commerce. As he told James Monroe, the states could no more exercise this power separately “than they could separately carry on war, or separately form treaties of alliance or commerce.” After the Virginia legislature emasculated a bill calling for an enlargement of Congress's commercial powers, Madison drafted a resolution that called for the states to appoint commissioners to meet and consider “how far a uniform system in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common interest and their permanent harmony. …”

Thinking it prudent to avoid intimations of influence by either Congress or commercial interests, Virginia proposed the meeting take place at Annapolis, in September 1786. Attendance was spotty; only five states were represented. Finding that they could accomplish little, the delegates at Annapolis decided that stronger measures were necessitated. They resolved that the states should appoint commissioners to meet at Philadelphia the following year “to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the federal government adequate to the exigencies of the Union” and to report such proposed changes to Congress.

No one who attended the great gathering at Philadelphia in 1787 was better prepared for the job of constitution-making than Madison, who came as a member of the Virginia delegation. His years of study paid rich dividends. Before arriving at Philadelphia, Madison wrote “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies” and a paper on the “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” In “Vices,” Madison noted that, lacking coercive power, the federal system under the Articles lacked “the great vital principles of a Political Constitution” and was in fact “nothing more than a treaty of amity” between so many independent and sovereign states. Anticipating objections to centralized power—indeed, rehearsing the arguments he later used in Federalist “No. 10”—Madison argued that enlarging the sphere of government should lessen the insecurity of private rights, as society would become “broken into a greater variety of interests, of pursuits, and of passions, which check each other. …”

In letters to Jefferson, Edmund Randolph, and George Washington, Madison set out his thinking about the nation's constitutional needs. The larger states should have fairer representation, and the national government needed adequate authority to act in those areas requiring uniformity. In particular, Madison thought there should be national power, including authority in the federal courts, to override state laws in conflict with national legislation. To Washington, Madison summed up his middle ground: “Conceiving that an individual independence of the States is utterly irreconcilable with their aggregate sovereignty; and that a consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable, I have sought for some middle ground, which may at once support a due supremacy of the national authority, and not exclude the local authorities whenever they can be subordinately useful.”

Although called merely to draft amendments to the Articles of Confederation, the Philadelphia convention soon moved to more ambitious business—the writing of a new constitution. Advocates of reform had a head start. A caucus of Virginians produced the “Virginia Plan,” which Madison played the major role in shaping. Introduced by Randolph four days after the convention opened, the Virginia Plan proposed a national executive, a national judiciary, and a national legislature of two houses, apportioned according to population and empowered to legislate “in all cases to which the separate States are incompetent.” Madison's scheme also included a Council of Revision, drawn from the national executive and judiciary, which could veto laws passed by Congress or by the state legislatures.

All in all, the thirty-six-year-old Madison was the dominating spirit of the Philadelphia convention. Certainly his influence on the convention was such that he has been aptly described as the “master-builder of the Constitution.” His winning ways, persuasive powers, and command of constitutional principles deeply impressed the other delegates. South Carolina's Pierce Butler later wrote that Madison blended “the profound politician, with the Scholar” and that in the “management of every great question he evidently took the lead in the Convention.”

Many of Madison's specific ideas, for example, the revisionary council to veto state and congressional legislation, failed to be adopted. Yet, in addition to furnishing the basis for discussion, his plan laid down the basic features that distinguished the Constitution as finally agreed to by the convention—three branches in the federal government (thus institutionalizing Montesquieu's notions of the separation of powers) and sufficient authority in the central government to provide national solutions for national problems.

As if his intellectual contributions were not enough, Madison was also the convention's main, if unofficial, recorder. Using a self-invented short-hand to speed his note taking, Madison carefully transcribed each speech. As he reported later, “It happened, also, that I was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one.”

His account of the convention was not published until 1840, four years after his death, because Madison scrupulously observed the secrecy imposed on convention delegates. Once published, however, his notes provided a remarkably detailed account of the proceedings, adding, as Madison foresaw, an essential “contribution to the fund of materials for the History of a Constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people great even in its infancy, and possibly the cause of Liberty throughout the world.”

As the country turned to the debate over ratification of the proposed Constitution, Madison once again was a leader. Together with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, Madison wrote essays for New York newspapers. The series of essays was introduced by Alexander Hamilton in the New York Independent Journal on October 27, 1787. Madison's first contribution, Federalist “No. 10,” appeared on November 23. Of the eighty-five essays—published in 1788 as The Federalist—Madison wrote twenty-nine.

The Federalist has few competitors as America's single most important contribution to political theory and to the art of governance. In Federalist “No. 10,” Madison saw a central problem of government—in terms that are uncannily prescient—as being to reconcile rivalries among competing economic groups. Madison looked to the new Constitution to control the excesses of “faction”—factions being those groups which, united by some common interest (such as landed or mercantile interests), pursue ends adverse to the rights of others or to the greater good. “The regulation of these various and interfering interests,” says Madison, “forms the principal task of modern legislation”; left to their own devices the most powerful factions must prevail. The variety of interests likely to be represented in the national legislature would furnish a safeguard: “The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.”

As Federalist “No. 10” reveals, Madison was under no illusions about the nature of man, even within the salubrious environment of a republic. “What is government itself,” he asked in Federalist “No. 51,” “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Heir to Enlightenment notions of natural rights and limited government, Madison realized that a popular government can be as tyrannical as a monarchy. His pragmatic ideas about government, rooted in a Lockean empirical tradition, furnish a striking contrast to French revolutionary thought, which, combining the imperatives of Rousseau's General Will and the politics of popular sovereignty, ultimately propelled France into the Napoleonic era.

Throughout Madison's Federalist essays are found devices for addressing the practical problems of government. In Federalist “No. 39,” Madison emphasizes the dual nature of the new government: “The proposed Constitution therefore is in strictness neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both. In its foundation, it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the Government are drawn, it is partly federal, and partly national: in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal: In the extent of them again, it is federal, not national: And finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal, nor wholly national.”

Turning, in Federalist “No. 48,” to the relations among the several branches of the federal government, Madison pointed to the benefits of having checks and balances among those branches. Mere “parchment barriers”—Madison's reference is obviously to the original state constitutions—are not enough to halt “the encroaching spirit of power.” As a total separation of powers is unworkable, the only way to avoid an undue concentration of powers in one branch of government is to have the several branches “so far connected and blended as to give each a constitutional control over the others. …”

The new Constitution, all in all, was one of balance—of states and the central government protected in their respective interests, of power distributed among the branches of the federal government, of limits upon the opportunities of individuals or factions to work their way in derogation of the common good or of the inalienable rights of the citizen.

As Madison and Hamilton added essay after essay to the New York debate, they did more than help ensure ratification of the new Constitution. They gave American constitutionalism its first coherent base in political theory. The Constitution owed much to the give and take of the Philadelphia convention, but Madison was able to make a virtue of that necessity. At first he had resisted efforts to retain powers in the states; now he became an advocate for blended state and federal power.

So elegantly and thoroughly was Madison's defense of the proposed charter marshalled in The Federalist that the essays quickly became, and have remained, essential glosses on the Constitution. Jefferson prescribed The Federalist as a part of the curriculum at his University of Virginia. Chancellor Kent, in his great Commentaries, praised the treatise, saying: “There is no work on the subject of the constitution, and on republican and federal government generally, that deserved to be more thoroughly studied.” More than simply a tract on American government, The Federalist is the first significant analysis of modern federalism. Hence it has attracted the attention of intellectuals in other countries, for example, in England, Sir Henry Maine, James Bryce, and John Stuart Mill.

In the contest between Federalists and Antifederalists over ratification of the Constitution, no state's vote was more crucial than that of Virginia. In that commonwealth's ratifying convention, Patrick Henry and George Mason led a spirited opposition to approval of the new document. Madison was also a member of the convention, and his quiet cogent reasoning contrasted with Henry's rococco oratory. The final vote was a close one, 89-79 in favor of ratification. Had the vote gone the other way, it is hard to say what might have become of the Constitution, in light of Virginia's crucial place in terms of wealth, population, and influence in the nation.

An implicit condition of ratification in Virginia and in some other states was the Federalists' undertaking to see that a bill of rights was added to the Constitution. Madison was at first apprehensive about such amendments, fearing that they might imply the existence of powers never meant to be delegated to the central government. Moreover, he was concerned that any attempt to list the rights of the citizen would be incomplete.

As he explained to Jefferson, however, Madison saw that a bill of rights could serve two powerful objectives. First, “the political truths declared in that solemn manner acquire by degrees the character of fundamental maxims of free Government, and as they become incorporated with the national sentiment, counteract the impulses of interest and passion.” Second, there might be occasions when a bill of rights “will be a good ground for an appeal to the sense of the community.”

When the first Congress met, Madison put aside any doubts he may have felt and led the battle for the Bill of Rights. On June 8, 1789, he initiated discussion of the issue by moving for a Committee of the Whole to receive the proposed amendments. Facing considerable opposition, he then brilliantly engineered passage of the bill, drafting the propositions, answering objections, and adroitly avoiding efforts by opponents to delay the votes or weaken the proposals.

In the course of the debate, Madison responded to the argument that the Bill of Rights would be ineffectual. If the amendments were incorporated into the Constitution, he submitted, “independent tribunals of justice will consider themselves in a peculiar manner the guardian of those rights; they [the courts] will be an impenetrable bulwark against every assumption of power in the Legislative or Executive. …” This explicit forecast of the courts' power of judicial review bore fruit in 1803, when Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison, declared the Supreme Court's power to refuse to enforce an act of Congress that it found to be unconstitutional.

In framing the amendments, Madison winnowed the lists of proposals submitted by eight of the ratifying conventions. He largely ignored proposals (the work of Henry) that would have restricted federal power. Madison looked instead for inspiration to the twenty libertarian proposals drafted at the Virginia ratifying convention by Mason. As Madison's language wended its way through Congress, some provisions were revised, others dropped altogether (in particular, a proposal that would have forbidden the states to violate rights of conscience or press). But, in the end, Madison's propositions were the basis for nearly all the provisions embodied in the amendments ultimately adopted by Congress. Madison had won perhaps his most successful legislative battle—and all in the service of a cause that he had originally doubted.

In 1797 Madison voluntarily left public life, expecting to devote his time to farming his Montpelier estate. He also expected to devote more time to his new bride. Dolley Payne Todd was a twenty-six-year-old widow of a Philadelphia lawyer when Madison married her in September 1794, just four months after they were introduced. She was a vivacious and charming woman, whose social grace, beauty, and wit made her a political asset as well as a beloved and inseparable companion. Now Madison looked forward to a respite from the political conflict of Philadelphia—and to an opportunity to monopolize his wife's company.

The Federalists were now in full control of the national government. Madison, who had contributed so much to achieving a federal government, by now had become a recognized leader of the opposition, the Jeffersonian party. A dark chapter in Federalist rule was their enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which outlawed “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government, and under which opposition newspaper editors went to jail. The first victim was Congressman Matthew Lyon, of Vermont, who was jailed for publishing in his newspaper a letter charging President John Adams with a grasp for power and a thirst for adulation.

Federalist judges who tried cases under the Sedition Act, especially Justice Samuel Chase, displayed violent partisan bias against the accused. Madison's belief in “independent tribunals of justice” as an “impenetrable bulwark” of the Bill of Rights was gravely undermined. Accordingly, Jefferson and Madison turned to another breastwork—the states. From Jefferson's pen came the Kentucky Resolutions, from Madison's, the Virginia Resolutions. Both denounced the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional.

Jefferson's resolution was the more forceful, declaring the two laws to be “altogether void and of no force.” Madison's language, though more muted, still called upon the states as the ultimate judges of the federal compact: “In case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the States who are parties thereto, have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil. …” The doctrine of “interposition”—appealed to by South Carolinians in 1828—appeared to call for state nullification of federal legislation. But in 1800, as a member of the Virginia legislature, Madison wrote a 20,000-word report on the 1798 resolutions, in which he explained that those declarations were simply “expressions of opinion,” for the purpose of “exciting reflection” on objectionable federal actions. However strongly understood, the Virginia Resolutions strikingly reflect Madison's sense of the need for balance wheels in the federal system. The man who in 1787 saw greater central authority as one of the ways to ensure the common good in 1798 looked to the states to resist federal encroachment on individual rights.

The elections of 1800 brought Jefferson to the presidency, and Madison appeared once again in the national spotlight. In his autobiography, Madison rushed over his eight years of service under Jefferson in a single sentence: “In 1801 he was appointed Secretary of State and remained such until 1809.” These eight years, however, played a profound role in Madison's later political fortunes, for during this period he not only cemented his political and personal ties with Jefferson but also identified himself with policies of the Jefferson administration.

In 1808 Madison was swept to the presidency by an electoral margin of 122 to 47. His years in office were dominated by the country's difficult relations with Great Britain. Angry at the impressment of American sailors, the plunder of American ships on the high seas, and threats by both England and France against neutrals venturing into a port of either nation's enemy, Jefferson's administration had secured enactment of embargo and non-importation measures. Committed to maintaining these economic pressures, Madison found himself dealing with strong opposition from Federalists in the Northeast (where American ships and sailors were idled by the economic warfare) as well as dissidents within the Jeffersonian Republican ranks.

For a short time it appeared as if negotiations might provide a solution. An agreement in 1809 seemed to respond to American grievances, but it collapsed when Britain's foreign secretary, George Canning, repudiated the negotiations of the British minister in Washington. By 1812 the diplomatic impasse seemed hopeless. With deep misgivings, Madison called upon Congress to declare war. The House supported him 79 to 49, the Senate by a more modest margin of 19 to 13.

The War of 1812 was an indecisive tragi-comedy of errors. Ironically, five days after war had been declared, the British cabinet revoked the Orders in Council (the proclamation threatening neutral ships entering French ports). But news traveled slowly in those days, and the message came too late to avert hostilities. The United States proved ill prepared for war. An invasion of Canada proved a fiasco; Detroit fell to the British with hardly a shot being fired. Only some fine seamanship, especially the Constitution's capture of the Guerriere in late summer, brightened the early war news.

By 1813 the Americans were shown some significant military successes by Captain Oliver Perry on Lake Erie and General William Henry Harrison at Detroit. But even though Madison had been reelected president in a race against “peace candidate” De Witt Clinton of New York, Madison's opponents in Congress frustrated the war effort. When in August 1814, the British invaded Washington and burned the Capitol and the White House—with first Dolley, then the president, fleeing before them—a symbolic low point in the war was reached.

Despite the mixed successes of British troops, Great Britain was not anxious to continue with the war. Good news reached Washington on February 14, 1815, that a treaty of peace had been signed at Ghent. Days before, the nation's spirits had been buoyed as word spread of the Americans' greatest military victory of the war, General Andrew Jackson's decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans (a battle that had taken place after the peace treaty had been signed but before report of that event had reached America).

Although neither side conceded much in the treaty, the war had produced new American heroes (and a national anthem) and had demonstrated American resolve against British might in a “Second War of Independence.” The Federalists, who had met in a convention in Hartford amid talk of national disunity, saw their efforts to derail Madison's policies swallowed up in the national surge of patriotic feeling. Peace brought renewed prosperity, and Madison could feel vindicated. Perhaps the most gracious assessment of Madison's presidency came from an old Federalist, John Adams. “Notwithstanding a thousand Faults and blunders,” Adams wrote to Jefferson, Madison's administration “has acquired more glory, and established more union; than all his three predecessors put together”—one of those presidents, of course, being Adams himself.

In 1817 Madison left office, returning to Montpelier. His last public appearance was in 1829, at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-30. For all the dignitaries present—Madison, James Monroe, John Tyler, and John Marshall were among its members—the convention must have struck Madison as a pale shadow of the Philadelphia gathering of 1787. While the convention's debates make compelling reading—they have been called “the last gasp of Jeffersonian America's passion for political disputation”—it accomplished little of the constitutional reform (of the franchise, legislative apportionment, and the self-perpetuating county court system) for which Jefferson and others had been calling for years.

The last two decades of Madison's life, from 1817 to 1836, were devoted largely to private pursuits. An apostle of scientific agriculture, Madison urged his fellow farmers to forego old practices that were exhausting the soil. Concerned about the problem of slavery—an issue he and his fellow delegates at Philadelphia had left as unfinished business—he accepted the presidency of the American Colonization Society, which encouraged the manumission and return of slaves to Africa. For the most part, Madison spent his final years at Montpelier corresponding with friends, entertaining travelers who passed his way, and generally overseeing his plantation. His last public message, dictated to Dolley, showed concern about rising sectional tensions; it called upon his fellow countrymen to ensure that “the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated.”