James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (13 page)

Seasoned legislator that he was, Madison knew the importance of getting the lay of the political land. No one’s opinion would matter more in the upcoming session than Patrick Henry’s, and so Madison met with him in a Richmond coffeehouse. Fulfilling Madison’s fondest hope, Henry, likely wearing the scarlet cloak and fully dressed wig for which he was noted about this time, pronounced himself in favor of giving greater power to the federal government. He believed that “a bold example set by Virginia would have influence on the other states” and declared that securing this outcome was his only reason for attending the assembly.
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Madison reported Henry’s sentiments to Jefferson and told him that he had also tried to sound out Henry on revising the state’s constitution. Although Henry had made no commitments, Madison wrote, “the general train of his thoughts seemed to suggest favorable expectations.”
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Henry did indeed support resolutions to strengthen the powers of Congress—until they required that Virginia tax its citizens. That prospect brought him out in full oratorical opposition. In the wooden frame building that served as Virginia’s capitol, he thundered away as though he had utterly forgotten his previous commitments. Madison wrote to his father that the members of the legislature would “make a sharp figure,” if after their declarations of support for Congress “we wholly omit the means of fulfilling them.”
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But with Henry leading the way, that is exactly what they did.

When it came to revising the Virginia Constitution, Henry showed “a more violent opposition than we expected,” Madison wrote to Jefferson. A resolution proposing a general convention to take up the Virginia Constitution was defeated, causing Jefferson, in Paris now as minister
to France, to comment sarcastically that it was probably just as well. Using code, he wrote, “While Mr. Henry lives another bad constitution would be formed and saddled forever on us. What we have to do I think is devo[u]tly to pray for his death.” Madison contented himself with a slighting reference to Henry as one of “the forensic members” of the assembly.
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With revising the constitution off the agenda, Madison turned to the revision of Virginia’s laws, a project that Jefferson, his mentor George Wythe, and the revered Edmund Pendleton had begun half a dozen years earlier. Their goal was to update Virginia’s statutes, but few of the bills they proposed had been acted upon, and Madison decided to renew the effort, at first with great success. One of his fellow delegates asked, “Can you suppose it possible that Madison should shine with more than usual splendor this assembly? It is . . . not only possible but a fact. He has astonished mankind and has by means perfectly constitutional become almost a dictator. . . . His influence alone has hitherto overcome the impatience of the House and carried them half through the revised code.”
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But Madison hit a snag with the bill on crime and punishment. Its main intent was to limit the number of crimes punishable by death to murder and treason, but some of the alternative punishments proposed, based on the idea of
lex talionis,
or “an eye for an eye,” met resistance. For rape, for example, the punishment was castration. Jefferson, who had outlined the bill, was embarrassed and agreed the punishment should be changed, offering a weak joke as his reason: that “women would be under [temptation] to make it the instrument of vengeance against an inconstant lover.” But after Madison had seen to the removal of the most onerous provisions from the bill, he ran afoul of what he called “the rage against horse stealers.” With opposition from those who thought three years of hard labor not nearly enough punishment, the bill was defeated by a single vote. “Our old bloody code is by this event fully restored,” Madison wrote to Jefferson.
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Code revision was essentially over. Jefferson would later say that it was a wonder that Madison had accomplished as much as he had, given
that he had faced “the endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays of lawyers and demi-lawyers,” but Madison lamented “that the work may never be systematically perfected.” Time and again he was struck by the way that “important bills prepared at leisure by skillful hands” were treated to “crudeness and tedious discussion,” and he had seen legislative tricks of the most blatant sort. An effort to make Virginians liable for their debts to British creditors, which was required by the peace treaty with Great Britain of 1783, failed when a number of legislators took a boat across the James River to Manchester and claimed to be unable to get back.
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Madison would not soon forget his frustrations in the Virginia legislature, but it was also the scene of one of his proudest accomplishments. Patrick Henry championed an assessment to support teachers of the Christian religion, the rationale being that “the general diffusion of Christian knowledge hath a natural tendency to correct the morals of men, restrain their vices, and preserve the peace of society.” This was a proposition widely agreed to, and since the bill allowed taxpayers to choose the denomination they would support, its sponsors argued that it could be passed “without counteracting the liberal principle heretofore adopted.”
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Madison, who had helped author the “liberal principle” in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, utterly disagreed. The true question, he wrote in notes to himself, was not whether religion was necessary but whether state-supported religious establishments were. His answer was an unequivocal no. Madison’s opposition helped postpone consideration of the assessment bill—as did Patrick Henry’s election as governor. When Henry decided to go on a long leave home before assuming the governorship, it was, Madison noted, “a circumstance very inauspicious to his offspring.”
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Assemblyman Wilson Cary Nicholas and his brother George decided to mount a campaign against the assessment bill and sought out Madison to write a petition. He responded with the “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments,” a document that would become a landmark in the history of religious freedom. He began by
establishing the remonstrance’s origins in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which he quoted: “Because we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth ‘that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence,’ the religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate. This right is in its nature an unalienable right.” Madison went on to marshal arguments against state support of religion. There must be no overleaping of “the great barrier which defends the rights of the people,” he wrote, and while the fact that the bill provided for all Christian religions might make it seem harmless enough, it was “proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties”: “We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one of the noblest characteristics of the late revolution. . . . Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other sects?” He ended the remonstrance as he had begun it, declaring freedom of religion to be a natural right, a “gift of nature,” fully equal to other rights Virginians held dear.
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As he had before, Madison wrote anonymously. The idea of a general assessment for Christian churches had not only the support of officials with whom he generally found himself at loggerheads but also the backing of men he admired, such as Edmund Pendleton. Madison saw no reason to alienate friends and didn’t believe that adding his name would strengthen his argument. But he was proud of his work, noting after he retired that “the number of copies and signatures” on the petition “displayed such an overwhelming opposition of the people that the plan of a general assessment was crushed under it.”
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Madison did not let the advantage gained go to waste, but seized the moment to pass the Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom that Jefferson had authored half a dozen years before. Although Jefferson’s language was changed slightly as the bill went through the House of Delegates and the Senate, the alterations did not deprive his concepts
of their force. “Whereas almighty God hath created the mind free,” the statute begins, and “all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens or by civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, . . . all men shall be free to profess and by argument to maintain their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities.”

The Virginia statute also made clear the connection between religious and intellectual freedom. “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself,” Jefferson had written. “She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error and has nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” It was this theme that Madison chose to take up when he wrote to Jefferson to tell him of the statute’s passage. “I flatter myself [we] have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.”
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The bill was one of three accomplishments that Jefferson would ask to be memorialized on his tombstone, the other two being his authorship of the Declaration of Independence and his founding of the University of Virginia. The high regard that he and Madison had for the statute has been shared by subsequent generations. Theologian Martin Marty noted that passage of the statute marked “an epochal shift in the Western world’s approach to relations between civil and religious spheres of life.” The Virginia act, he observes, can rightly be seen “as a hinge between ages.”
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IN BETWEEN SESSIONS
of the Virginia Assembly, Madison spent time at Montpelier, reading and studying. One of his father’s cousins, Francis Taylor, who spent a few snowy days in March at Montpelier, noted that Madison, although hospitable, did not, in typical Virginia fashion, devote the majority of his day to socializing. Madison “came to breakfast, of which he eat sparingly,” Taylor recorded in his diary, “and
then would go to his room till a little before dinner. After dinner play at whist for half bits till bedtime.”
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Madison also made journeys northward, in part for the exercise and in part to break from the isolation of Montpelier and spend time in Philadelphia and New York. While he was on a “ramble into the eastern states” in 1784, a chance encounter with the marquis de Lafayette led to a wilderness adventure. The two happened to meet in Baltimore, both on their way to Philadelphia, and Lafayette invited Madison to accompany him to Fort Stanwix in New York, where a treaty was to be signed between the United States and the Iroquois Confederacy.
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The wealthy and ambitious Lafayette, who had traveled to America when he was just nineteen to fight in the Revolution, had proven himself both skilled and courageous in battle. Tall, with reddish hair, he was, to use a word with which both Benjamin Franklin and James Madison described him, “amiable.”
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He invited friendship, and his offer to include Madison in his frontier journey would have been hard to resist, not only as a chance to see wondrous sights with a good companion, but as an opportunity to converse on a subject Madison thought of great importance—America’s right to free navigation of the Mississippi. Spain, hoping to stop the westward expansion of the United States, had recently closed the river to all but Spanish ships, and Madison realized that Lafayette could be most helpful in persuading France to take up America’s cause with Spain.

Madison was at Mrs. House’s Philadelphia boardinghouse putting into code a letter to Jefferson explaining the efforts he was making to enlist Lafayette’s assistance when Lafayette walked into his room. Madison was thus obliged, so he explained to Jefferson, “in order to avoid reserve to let him know that I was writing to you. I said nothing of the subject, but he will probably infer from our conversation that the Mississippi is most in my thoughts.” Particularly at Mrs. House’s, it could not have been otherwise. Eliza Trist, Mrs. House’s daughter, who was on her way down the Mississippi River to be with her husband, would soon learn of his death, and then what would she do? “When and how she will be able to get back since the Spaniards have shut all their ports
against the U.S. is uncertain and gives much anxiety to her friends,” Madison wrote to Jefferson.
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Madison and Lafayette traveled to New York, where the marquis received “a continuation of those marks of cordial esteem and affection” that Madison had observed since the two had first joined forces in Baltimore. From the city they set off in a barge up the Hudson to Albany, a journey that took them past lovely country homes and the commanding sites where Forts Washington and Lee and Stony Point had once stood. Their barge wound through highlands that curved and narrowed at West Point, where during the Revolution a great chain had been stretched across the Hudson to prevent British ships from sailing farther north. Slowed for six days by heavy wind and rain, the party finally sailed past family seats of the Rensselaers and Schuylers, over dangerous sandbars, and into Albany on September 22.
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As they were making arrangements for traveling overland to Fort Stanwix, François de Barbé-Marbois, the witty French chargé d’affaires whom Madison knew well from Philadelphia, arrived at the dock, and soon he had joined their party.

After stopping at a Shaker community and observing the sect’s “convulsive dances,” the party rode on to Fort Stanwix, a journey of several days. “Mr. Madison directed the march,” Barbé-Marbois reported, “and I was cook for the troop.” It was often cold and rainy, but Lafayette seemed impervious to the weather, protected as he was by “a cloak of gummed taffeta, which had been sent him from France, wrapped up in newspapers. The papers had stuck to the gum, and there had not been time to get them off, so that the curious could read on his chest or his back the
Journal de Paris,
the
Courier de l’Europe,
or news from other places.”
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