Excerpt: James Madison, A Life Reconsidered
In this excerpt from her new book, Lynne Cheney looks at James Madison as he arrived at the constitutional convention in 1787 and how he made history.
PHILADELPHIA, MAY 5, 1787
He hurried along Market Street, his high-crowned hat offering scant protection against the rain. Had he passed this way earlier in the day, shoppers would have slowed his pace, drawn by the covered market that stretched for blocks down the center of the street. Now, with the after noon wearing on and a thunderstorm over the city, only a few bargain hunters remained. Farmers who had brought produce in from the Pennsylvania countryside were scrambling into their wagons for what promised to be a muddy trek home.
Visitors to Philadelphia found the market a wonder, but the residents of Market Street were not fond of it. They repeatedly-and futilely tried to halt its expansion, arguing that the crowds did real estate values no good. Better to have the more peaceful setting enjoyed by residents farther west, the direction that the hurrying figure was headed. He crossed Fifth Street, its wet cobblestones glistening underfoot, then with springing step went up the stairs and entered the door of the ample brick building on the corner. It was the comfortable residence of Mary House, an elderly widow who lived there with her son, Samuel, her daughter, Eliza Trist, and Mrs. Trist’s son, Hore Browse. It was also one of Philadelphia’s most highly regarded boardinghouses, a home away from home for many of America’s political notables.
Thirty-six-year-old James Madison, shaking off rain inside the front door, was one of Mrs. House’s regulars. He had begun staying with her in 1780, when he first became a member of the Continental Congress, and now, after a day-and-a-half ride by stagecoach from New York, he was at her lodgings again, this time to attend a convention scheduled for the second Monday in May. Over the past seven years, Madison had spent more time at Mrs. House’s than at his Virginia home, and he had come to regard her family as his family. He was particularly fond of Mrs. Trist, a woman of spirit and wit. In 1784 she had traveled by flatboat down the Mississippi to Louisiana to be with her husband, Nicholas, a former British officer. She recorded flora and fauna along the way for Thomas Jefferson, another Virginian who stayed at the Market Street lodgings, unaware as she was taking notes that she had become a widow. Between the last letter she received from Nicholas and the beginning of her trip downriver, he had died. Jefferson and Madison, learning of Nicholas’s fate, wrote to each other of their concern for Mrs. Trist. With the Spanish having closed the Mississippi to American navigation, how would she get back to Philadelphia? But she found a way, sailing first to Jamaica and from there back home.
At no more than five feet six inches tall, Madison was not physically imposing in the way Jefferson was, or the great Washington, whom Mrs. Trist and her mother were expecting to arrive in little over a week. But he was fit and well proportioned, and as he gazed out at the world from deep-set light blue eyes, he had a presence about him, “a habit of self-possession,” Jefferson called it, “which placed at ready command the rich resources of his luminous and discriminating mind.
Madison did not leap forward to meet strangers or try to dominate in conversation. He was naturally reserved and perhaps also influenced by a lesson of his youth. From the Spectator, a London periodical that he favored in his early years, he had learned that modesty becomes a man. Famed Spectator author Joseph Addison described it as “a guard to virtue” and noted that it “sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.”
By now Madison also understood that reticence had its political uses. It was wise to avoid strong statements while circumstances were still unfolding. It was often advantageous to put forth proposals anonymously and thus avoid alienating allies who might not agree. If in avoid ing center stage Madison missed some of the praise, he also avoided some of the criticism, thus saving his reputation for a future day.
Madison dressed plainly, as befitted a man who did not want to be conspicuous. Eventually, he would wear only black. His public speaking was as unadorned as his dress. His words and ideas came forth with coolness and clarity, unobscured by drama. Although no one thought of him as an orator for the ages, those who paid attention understood that when he spoke he was enormously effective. “If [eloquence] includes persuasion by convincing,” his fellow Virginian John Marshall wrote, “Mr. Madison was the most eloquent man I ever heard.”
Thomas Jefferson believed that Madison’s reserve had held him back when he first began his public career, and another friend, Samuel Stanhope Smith, told him that his early achievements had come “in spite of all your modesty.” But the reputation that Madison had acquired by the time he arrived in Philadelphia in May 1787 suggests that his manner had been little hindrance. “Every person seems to acknowledge his greatness,” commented William Pierce, who, like Madison, was a dele gate to the Philadelphia convention. Indeed, now that Madison’s intellect and political skill were so widely recognized, his demeanor seemed to burnish his reputation. Despite all his renown, he remained, in Pierce’s words, “a gentleman of great modesty, with a remarkable sweet temper.”
Although she was the same age as Congressman Madison, Eliza Trist sometimes assumed a motherly attitude toward him. She knew from Jefferson that much as he had accomplished, he was likely to achieve still more, and she worried about the “torrent of abuse” he would have to bear as he rose higher. “He has a soul replete with gentleness, humanity, and every social virtue,” she wrote to Jefferson, “and yet I am certain that some wretch or other will write against him. . . . It will hurt his feelings and injure his health, take my word.” Mrs. Trist almost certainly knew that in addition to the common ailments of the day— dysentery, fevers, influenza—Madison suffered from “sudden attacks” that he described as “somewhat resembling epilepsy, and suspending the intellectual functions.” Historians of a later time would dismiss these attacks. “Epileptoid hysteria,” his most influential biographer would call them.
But Madison’s description fits today’s understanding of epilepsy. His sudden attacks might well have been complex partial seizures, which leave the affected person conscious but with his or her comprehension and ability to communicate impaired—the “intellectual functions” suspended, one might reasonably say. In Madison’s day such attacks were not generally regarded as epileptic, which may account for the qualifiers in his description. “Epilepsy” was a term reserved for convulsive seizures. But Madison saw a relationship between his attacks and those in which people fell to the ground and convulsed, an understanding that put him in advance of his time.
From “JAMES MADISON: A Life Reconsidered,” by Lynne Cheney. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Lynne Cheney, 2014.
Programing note: Cheney will be at the National Constitution Center on Tuesday, May 13, discussing her new book. For more information: http://constitutioncenter.org/calendar/james-madison-rediscovered-with-lynne-cheney
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