James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (5 page)

In Mark 9:17–26, the boy is described as possessed by “a dumb spirit” that “teareth him: and he foameth, and gnasheth with his teeth.” Jesus charges the spirit to come out, “and the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him.” In Luke 9:42, as the boy approached Jesus, “The devil threw him down and tare him, and Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, and healed the child, and delivered him again to his father.”

The idea of epilepsy arising from supernatural sources went back to antiquity. Aristotle (or one of his followers) observed that “men who have become outstanding in philosophy, statesmanship, poetry, or the arts are melancholic, and some to such an extent that they are infected by the diseases arising from black bile, as the story of Heracles among the heroes tells.” This, says the writer, had led the ancients to call “the disease of epilepsy the ‘sacred disease’ after him.” One of the Hippocratic writings, on the other hand, disputed the idea, declaring the notion that epilepsy came from the gods absurd and suggesting that it had been started by charlatans.
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In the Christian era the idea of a supernatural origin arose again, almost entirely because of the story of the epileptic boy. An early church father, Origen, after analyzing the passage in Matthew, concluded that epilepsy “is obviously brought about by an unclean dumb and deaf spirit.” The association of epilepsy and possession persisted through the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment, with theologians declaring madmen, demoniacs, and those with epilepsy ineligible for ordination. Even physicians of the Enlightenment who were trying to move away from supernatural explanations found themselves carving out an exception for epilepsy. In a book published in 1729, the respected physician Jonathan Harle wrote, “That there were some actually
possessed by the devil
is a truth as plain as words can make it: ’Tis true in one place a person is said to
have a devil and be mad,
and another to be a
demoniac,
and yet is called a lunatic, or one troubled with the
falling sickness
. If we take in both texts, we have the full meaning, which is, that the madness and epilepsy these people labored under were caused by the devil.”
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For someone experiencing “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling
epilepsy,” such interpretations had to be extraordinarily disheartening. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often ill and seeming to suspect that he had epilepsy, wrote in 1802, “If the Evangelists had . . . merely called the demoniacs diseased men or insane men ‘whose diseases are believed by the people to proceed from demons’ . . . there would have been, I conceive, no physical hypothesis implied, and yet the Gospel . . . confirmed by its authority a belief so wild.”
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It would also have been helpful if eighteenth-century church leaders had admitted such a possibility, but the assault by Enlightenment thinkers seems to have made them wary of giving up any ground.

If, as seems likely, Madison suffered the first of his sudden attacks at Princeton and turned to books, as he did for most of his life, for understanding, he would have found nothing to lift his spirits. In President Witherspoon’s personal collection, there were two books the president specifically recommended to students, Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius’s
De veritate religionis Christianae
and French divine Jacques Abbadie’s
Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne,
both of which firmly asserted the truth of biblical miracles. The president also had the eminent divine Samuel Clarke’s paraphrase of the four evangelists, in which Clarke explicitly labeled the possessed boy’s ailment “the falling sickness,” the popular name for epilepsy. Nor were the misconceptions of classical writers in the Princeton library any more reassuring. Pliny the Elder indicated that epilepsy was contagious. “We spit on epileptics in a fit; that is, we throw back infection,” he wrote in
Natural History,
a book in which he also reported on fantastical cures, including elephant liver, crocodile intestine, and “food taken from the flesh of a wild beast killed by the same iron weapon that has killed a human being.”
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It might have been during the extra time he spent at Princeton that Madison took notes in a commonplace book that survives today. It shows him interested in secrets, which would be natural at a period in his life when he probably wanted as few people as possible to know what had happened to him. Reading the
Memoirs
of Cardinal de Retz, he stopped to copy this passage: “Secrecy is not so rare among persons used
to great affairs as is believed.” He added his own thought, “Secrets that are discovered make a noise, but these that are kept are silent.” De Retz’s Machiavellian insights interested him (“To lessen envy is the greatest of all secrets”), as did de Retz’s description of a rising churchman who did not reveal much of himself, Cardinal Fabio Chigi, who, wrote de Retz, “was not very communicative, but in the little conversation he had he showed himself more reserved and wise (
savio col silentio
) than any man I ever knew.” Reflecting on the sentence, Madison offered his own, more pointed version: “He showed his wisdom by saying nothing.”
⁵⁵

The most striking entry in the commonplace book paraphrases part of a letter sent to John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher, when he was suffering one of his frequent illnesses. Dr. Thomas Molyneux wrote to Locke deploring “the great losses the intellectual world in all ages has suffered by the strongest and soundest minds possessing the most infirm and sickly bodies.” Molyneux went on to speculate that “there must be some very powerful cause for this in nature or else we could not have so many instances where the knife cuts the sheath, as the French materially express it.” Scraping his quill across a page, Madison recorded what seemed to him the essence: “The strongest and soundest minds often possess the weakest and most sickly bodies. The knife cuts the sheath as the French express it.”
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The association of illness and powerful intellect probably brought comfort to a young man recently stricken and impressed Locke’s personal story on his memory. Years later Madison likely had Locke in mind when he gave his Piedmont home and the land around it the name of the town in southern France where the great English philosopher repaired for his health. Madison’s Montpelier, like Locke’s Montpellier (which was actually the spelling Madison preferred), would be a place where one could, when the knife had cut the sheath, breathe deeply, hike green hills, and find
renewal.

MADISON RETURNED HOME
from Princeton in a state of deep despondency. In 1772, as the oaks and maples shed the last of their leaves, he took up his pen to warn his friend William Bradford not to count on too much from the world: “I hope you are sufficiently guarded against the allurements and vanities that beset us on our first entrance on the theater of life. Yet however nice and cautious we may be in detecting the follies of mankind and framing our economy according to the precepts of wisdom and religion, I fancy there will commonly remain with us some latent expectation of obtaining more than ordinary happiness and prosperity till we feel the convincing argument of actual disappointment.” He himself was no longer burdened with optimism, the twenty-one-year-old Madison told his seventeen-year-old friend, because he was convinced that he had no future to be optimistic about. “As to myself I am too dull and infirm now 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.”
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Madison had learned from Bradford of the death of Joe Ross, a classmate from Princeton, who had joined him in crowding two years of
study into one. He had also been to Berkeley Warm Springs, and the mineral waters had done him little good. In addition, he was reading a book from his father’s library that would have contributed to his gloom. William Burkitt’s
Expository Notes with Practical Observations on the New Testament
emphasized the literal truth of the Bible, particularly the miracles. In Burkitt’s commentary on the story of Christ’s curing the boy who “falleth into the fire, and oft into the water,” there was no hedging. Satan was the aggravating force of the boy’s sickness, as Burkitt explained it, and Christ’s casting him out was the cure.
²

Madison took notes on Burkitt’s weighty tome, and from the pages that have survived, we know that he paused over passages about miracles. He noted Burkitt’s observation that the miracles wrought by the apostles in curing diseases and casting out devils were so extraordinary that they exceeded Christ’s miracles. He took notes on Burkitt’s observation that biblical narratives about possession were unique to the New Testament, writing, “Evil spirits none were that we read of in the Old Testament bodily possessed of, and many in the New.” The reason for this, Burkitt explained, was so “that the power of Christ might more signally appear in their ejection and casting out.”
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Madison’s interest in how the world works had not been extinguished. He wrote down Burkitt’s observation on Acts 18 that “rulers and great men are like looking glasses” in the model they provide for others. Proverbs 11:13 caught his attention with its caution about talking too much: “A talebearer revealeth secrets: but he that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter.” And he paused over Proverbs 12:23: “A prudent man concealeth knowledge; but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness.” But he also had a concern about sin and damnation and how easy it was to slide into both. He paraphrased Burkitt on Matthew 3: “Sins of omission as damnable as sins of commission . . . neglects of duty as damnable as acts of sin.”
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Fall passed into winter with no word coming back from Bradford. After Christmas, slaves spread manure in plant beds, sowed tobacco seed, and covered the beds with branches to protect against frost, while indoors Madison instructed his sisters Nelly and Sarah, twelve
and eight, and his brother William, who was ten, in “some of the first rudiments of literature.” He read law and looked into other “miscellaneous subjects,” perhaps exploring further in his father’s small library. Many of the books on James senior’s shelves were medical. Some provided practical information on matters from midwifery to dentistry that a Virginia planter, who oversaw the care of his family and slaves, needed.
⁵
Others must have struck Madison as evidence of how little was really known of the many ailments, including his own, that flesh was heir to.

One of the books in his father’s library took up a most curious medical controversy. It began when Mary Toft of Godalming, England, said that after being startled by a rabbit, she had given birth to seventeen bunnies. Some of the most prominent medical men of the day believed her, were even fooled into thinking they had witnessed the births (she had voluminous skirts), causing the physician James Blondel to launch an assault on the underlying idea that allowed them to be so easily gulled: the notion that a mother’s prenatal influence was so great it could turn her unborn child into a monster. In
The Power of the Mother’s Imagination over the Foetus Examin’d,
a slender book that James senior owned, Blondel called the idea of assigning blame to the mother “mischievous and cruel,” and he ridiculed the old anecdotes used to support the notion, such as the story of a mother startled by a cat who produced a baby with a catlike head and the tale of a pregnant woman who gazed too long at a picture of John the Baptist wearing a hair shirt and produced a hairy child. If Madison found these stories diverting—and how could a former member of the Whig Society have not?—there was another to which he would have paid serious attention, one about “a young and lusty woman” who, frightened at seeing someone suffer an epileptic seizure, bore a child with epilepsy.
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The idea that epilepsy could be caused by a pregnant woman witnessing a seizure was widespread. Even the famed Herman Boerhaave, perhaps the most eminent European physician of the first half of the eighteenth century, wrote that epilepsy could derive “from the imagination of the mother when she was pregnant being shocked at the sight
of a person in an epileptic fit.”
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Blondel’s refutation of such a notion would have been of interest to a young man trying to understand his sudden attacks.

While Madison was reading away the winter months in the Piedmont, his friend Bradford was traveling, eventually settling back at Princeton. It was March before he wrote to Madison, apologizing for the delay and taken aback by his friend’s gloomy report: “You alarm me by what you tell me about your health. I believe you hurt your constitution while here by too close an application to study; but I hope ’tis not so bad with you as you seem to imagine. Persons of the weakest constitutions
by taking a proper care of themselves
often outlive those of the strongest.”
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•   •   •

BY THE TIME
Madison wrote back in April 1773, his health had improved, “owing I believe to more activity and less study recommended by the phy[si]cians.” Perhaps Madison was simply lucky in encountering doctors who subscribed to the idea that patients could be helped by leading measured lives, but he and his family might very well have sought out such physicians, inspired to do so by another of James senior’s books, John Wesley’s widely popular
Primitive Physic
. Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was unusual in that he left his theology behind when he wrote about health. Prayer was important, he said, but he conveyed no sense of illness being sin.
Primitive Physic
presented exercise as a “grand preventative of pain and sickness of various kinds.” Its power “to preserve and restore health is greater than can well be conceived, especially in those who add temperance thereto.” Studious persons, Wesley wrote, “ought to have stated times for exercise, at least two or three hours a day.”
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For good health, a person also needed to be in control of his emotions, Wesley said: “All violent and sudden passion disposes to, or actually throws people into, acute diseases.” Blondel, too, wrote about the effects of “violent passions,” saying that they “will cause convulsions, shortness of breath, fevers, epilepsy, apoplexy, and even death
itself.” It was common for physicians who recommended exercise also to recommend emotional control, and the doctors who suggested “more activity” for Madison might also have offered advice about being calm and measured.
¹⁰

Certainly there was a change of mood in his letters to Bradford. The melancholy outpourings ended, and Madison spoke of himself as “sedate and philosophic”—which did not mean being always somber. He joined Bradford in joking about Nassau alumni such as “poor Brian,” who after “long intoxicating his brain with idleness and dissipation” acknowledged his marriage to Miss Amelia Horner, who had already borne his child.
¹¹

Madison was, however, deeply serious when Bradford requested career advice. The younger man wrote that he had rejected the idea of becoming a minister and was thinking of law. Madison supported his decision but urged that there was still an important religious role he could play: “I have sometimes thought there could not be a stronger testimony in favor of religion or against temporal enjoyments even the most rational and manly than for men who occupy the most honorable and gainful departments and are rising in reputation and wealth, publically to declare their unsatisfactoriness by becoming fervent advocates in the cause of Christ, and I wish you may give in your evidence in this way. Such instances have seldom occurred; therefore, they would be more striking and would be instead of a ‘cloud of witnesses.[’]”
¹²
The sentiments in this letter are particularly noteworthy because nothing like them would ever come from Madison’s pen again.

During the winter of 1773–1774, Madison’s thinking underwent a sea change. The young man who embraced traditional views at the beginning became a person who no longer affirmed the religious doctrines with which he had grown up. It has sometimes been suggested that he was swayed from his early acceptance of church orthodoxy by Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, both critics of revealed religion, but the break in Madison’s thinking happened before he knew either man. The more likely explanation is that having taken his health in hand by walking and riding over the Virginia hills, he decided now to take his soul
in hand, casting aside the notion that his sudden attacks were somehow connected with Satan, demons, or sin.

Virginia’s official church, the Church of England, was supported and enforced by the state, and at the same time that Madison was moving away from traditional religious ideas, the government of Virginia was punishing Baptist preachers trying to expand their ministry into the colony. Sheriffs and magistrates, sometimes accompanied by Anglican clergymen, arrested and jailed the Baptists, charging them with disturbing the peace or preaching without a license. When one of the most famous of those jailed, James Ireland, preached to people through the grate in his cell, men on horseback rode through the crowd, driving some of those gathered to the ground, threatening others with clubs, and stripping and lashing the slaves who were listening.
¹³

The jailing of five or six Baptists in neighboring Culpeper County brought Madison to a fury early in 1774. Losing all efforts he had been making to control his passions, he lambasted those responsible, including Anglican clergymen. “That diabolical hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some,” he wrote to his friend Bradford, “and to their eternal infamy the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such business.” He had little sympathy for what he later called the Baptists’ “enthusiasm, which contributed to render them obnoxious to sober opinion,” but he took up their cause with a vehemence, suggesting that he saw in their plight a symbol of his own. They were in jail, which was clearly unjust, but so was any constraint that restricted the intellect to narrow and dispiriting dogma. “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise, every expanded prospect,” Madison told Bradford, writing with the authority of a man who knew firsthand the price of being bound to a received viewpoint—and the liberation of breaking free.

Madison was frustrated in his early efforts to aid the Baptists. He wrote to Bradford, “I have squabbled and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it [to so lit]tle purpose that I am without common patience. So I [leave you] to pity me and pray for liberty of conscience [to revive
among us].” But this was hardly the end of it. When a basic principle was involved, Madison could be a man of utterly dogged determination—stubbornness, some would call it. He had already decided to study law, not because he intended to be a lawyer, but because, he told Bradford, “the principles and modes of government are too important to be disregarded by an inquisitive mind and I think are well worthy [of] a critical examination by all students that have health and leisure.” In eerily prescient language, he asked Bradford for information on “the constitution of your country,” meaning Pennsylvania. He wanted to know “its origin and fundamental principles of legislation,” and he made particular inquiry about “the extent of your religious toleration.” If freedom of conscience couldn’t be achieved in Virginia as it was currently organized, then twenty-two-year-old James Madison wanted to think about reorganizing it—and doing away with an official church. “Is an ecclesiastical establishment absolutely necessary to support civil society in a supreme government?” he asked Bradford. “And how far it is hurtful to a dependant state?”
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Madison was also developing another idea: that the absence of clashing ideas and competing interests leads to overreaching and corruption. He wrote to Bradford, “If the Church of England had been the established and general religion in all the northern colonies as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us. Union of religious sentiments begets a surprising confidence and ecclesiastical establishments tend to great ignorance and corruption, all of which facilitate the execution of mischievous projects.”
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A decade and more hence, when he was contemplating how a republic of vast expanse could succeed, he would call upon the positive side of this idea: that diversity sustains freedom. Upending the conventional wisdom of his time, he would argue that a large republic had a better chance than a small one of succeeding because there are more interests to compete and less chance for any one of them to become tyrannical.