James Madison. Gay Sydney Howard
widow Jordan, in June, it appears by Hotten's Lists of colonists, taken from the Records in the English State Paper Department, that Captain Isacke Maddeson and Mary Maddeson were living in 1624 at West and Sherlow Hundred Island. The next year, at the same place, he is on the list of dead; and there is given under the same date "The muster of Mrs. Mary Maddison, widow, aged 30 years." Her family consisted of "Katherin Layden, child, aged 7 years," and two servants. Katherine, it may be assumed, was the daughter of the widow Mary and Captain Isaac, and their only child. These "musters," it should be said, appear always to have been made with great care, and there is therefore hardly a possibility that a son, if there were one, was omitted in the numeration of the widow's family, while the name and age of the little girl, and the names and ages of the two servants, the date of their arrival in Virginia, and the name of the ship that each came in, are all carefully given. The conclusion is inevitable: Isaac Maddison left no male descendants, and President Madison's earliest ancestor in Virginia, if it was not his great-grandfather John, must be looked for somewhere else.
Mr. Rives knew nothing of these Records. His first volume was published before either Sainsbury's Calendar or Hotten's Lists; and the researches on which he relied, "conducted by a distinguished member of the Historical Society of Virginia" in the English State Paper Office, were, so far as they related to the Madisons, incomplete and worthless. The family was not, apparently, "coeval with the foundation of the Colony," and did not arrive "among the earliest of the emigrants in the New World." That distinction cannot be claimed for James Madison, nor is there any reason for supposing that he believed it could be. He seemed quite content with the knowledge that so far back as his great-grandfather his ancestors had been respectable people, "in independent and comfortable circumstances."
Of his own generation there were seven children, of whom James was the eldest, and alone became of any note, except that the rest were reputable and contented people in their stations of life. A hundred years ago the Arcadian Virginia, for which Governor Berkeley had thanked God so devoutly, – when there was not a free school nor a press in the province, – had passed away. The elder Madison resolved, so Mr. Rives tells us, that his children should have advantages of education which had not been within his own reach, and that they should all enjoy them equally. James was sent to a school where he could at least begin the studies which should fit him to enter college. Of the master of that school we know nothing except that he was a Scotchman, of the name of Donald Robertson, and that many years afterward, when his son was an applicant for office to Madison, then secretary of state, the pupil gratefully remembered his old master, and indorsed upon the application that "the writer is son of Donald Robertson, the learned Teacher in King and Queen County, Virginia."
The preparatory studies for college were finished at home under the clergyman of the parish, the Rev. Thomas Martin, who was a member of Mr. Madison's family, perhaps as a private tutor, perhaps as a boarder. It is quite likely that it was by the advice of this gentleman – who was from New Jersey – that the lad was sent to Princeton instead of to William and Mary College in Virginia. At Princeton, at any rate, he entered at the age of eighteen, in 1769; or, to borrow Mr. Rives's eloquent statement of the fact, "the young Virginian, invested with the toga virilis of anticipated manhood, we now see launched on that disciplinary career which is to form him for the future struggles of life."
One of his biographers says that he shortened his collegiate term by taking in one year the studies of the junior and senior years, but that he remained another twelve-month at Princeton for the sake of acquiring Hebrew. On his return home he undertook the instruction of his younger brothers and sisters, while pursuing his own studies. Still another biographer asserts that he began immediately to read law, but Rives gives some evidence that he devoted himself to theology. This and his giving himself to Hebrew for a year point to the ministry as his chosen profession. But if we rightly interpret his own words, he had little strength or spirit for a pursuit of any sort. His first "struggle of life" was apparently with ill-health, and the career he looked forward to was a speedy journey to another world. In a letter to a friend (November, 1772) he writes: "I am too dull and infirm now to look out for extraordinary things in this world, for I think my sensations for many months have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life; though it may be better with me after some time; but I hardly dare expect it, and therefore have little spirit or elasticity to set about anything that is difficult in acquiring, and useless in possessing after one has exchanged time for eternity." In the same letter he assures his friend that he approves of his choice of history and morals as the subjects of his winter studies; but, he adds, "I doubt not but you design to season them with a little divinity now and then, which, like the philosopher's stone in the hands of a good man, will turn them and every lawful acquirement into the nature of itself, and make them more precious than fine gold."
The bent of his mind at this time seems to have been decidedly religious. He was a diligent student of the Bible, and, Mr. Rives says, "he explored the whole history and evidences of Christianity on every side, through clouds of witnesses and champions for and against, from the fathers and schoolmen down to the infidel philosophers of the eighteenth century." So wide a range of theological study is remarkable in a youth of only two or three and twenty years of age; but, remembering that he was at this time living at home, it is even more remarkable that in the house of an ordinary planter in Virginia a hundred and twenty years ago could be found a library so rich in theology as to admit of study so exhaustive. But in Virginia history nothing is impossible.
His studies on this subject, however, whether wide or limited, bore good fruit. Religious intolerance was at that time common in his immediate neighborhood, and it aroused him to earnest and open opposition; nor did that opposition cease till years afterward, when freedom of conscience was established by law in Virginia, largely by his labors and influence. Even in 1774, when all the colonies were girding themselves for the coming revolutionary conflict, he turned aside from a discussion of the momentous question of the hour, in a letter to his friend3 in Philadelphia, and exclaimed with unwonted heat: —
"But away with politics!.. That diabolical, hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some; and, to their eternal infamy, the clergy can furnish their quota of imps for such purposes. There are at this time in the adjacent country not less than five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox. I have neither patience to hear, talk, or think of anything relative to this matter; for I have squabbled and scolded, abused and ridiculed so long about it to little purpose that I am without common patience."
These are stronger terms than the mild-tempered Madison often indulged in. But he felt strongly. Probably he, no more than many other wiser and older men, understood what was to be the end of the political struggle which was getting so earnest; but evidently in his mind it was religious rather than civil liberty which was to be guarded. "If the Church of England," he says in the same letter, "had been the established and general religion in all the Northern colonies, as it has been among us here, and uninterrupted harmony had prevailed throughout the continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us."
He congratulated his friend that they had not permitted the tea-ships to break cargo in Philadelphia; and Boston, he hoped, would "conduct matters with as much discretion as they seem to do with boldness." These things were interesting and important; but "away with politics! Let me address you as a student and philosopher, and not as a patriot." Shut off from any contact with the stirring incidents of that year in the towns of the coast, he lost something of the sense of proportion. To a young student, solitary, ill in body, perhaps a trifle morbid in mind, a little discontented that all the learning gained at Princeton could find no better use than to save schooling for the six youngsters at home, – to him it may have seemed that liberty was more seriously threatened by that outrage, under his own eyes, of "five or six well-meaning men in close jail for publishing their religious sentiments," than by any tax which Parliament could contrive. Not that he overestimated the importance of this wrong, but that he underestimated the importance of that. He was not long, however, in getting the true perspective.
CHAPTER II
THE YOUNG STATESMAN
Madison's place, both from temperament and from want of physical vigor, was in the council,
The letters to a friend, from which we have quoted, were written to William Bradford, Jr., of Philadelphia, afterward attorney-general in Washington's administration. They are given in full in