A Biography Of James Madison And His

Impact On The Civil War Essay, Research Paper

Madison Report

James Madison: SO MUCH, SO YOUNG

James Madison was ” the greatest man in the world.” This praise came from a source of great accomplishment, Thomas Jefferson. The time was 1790 when great men inhabited the world, such men as George Washington, Goethe, Lafayette, Mozart, Napoleon, and Jefferson himself. What caused this source of intellectualism to state such a phrase. It was Madison’s great intellectual prowess and his belief that the United States of America as a union of free people was committed to the ideals of the American Revolution. As a framer of the United States Constitution, James Madison changed the role of government in this country’s infancy. Madison thoroughly believed he could make a difference and throughout his life he did, whether it was finishing college in two and half years or taking Presidential office on March 4, 1809.

On March 16, 1751 in Virginia, James Madison Senior and Nelly Conway Madison had changed the course of the world. Born to well-to-do parents, James Madison was the oldest of eleven children. Madison, a great thinker of his time, was born within 150 miles and a couple of years between other great minds as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, John Marshall, George Mason, and James Monroe. After his birth his father, a tobacco plantation owner moved his family westward to an Orange County plantation, a place, where young Madison would live and serve most of his Life. As a child, Madison was sickly, taking after his mother who was said to be constantly in her sickbed. He suffered from an assortment of problems the worst, he explained, as some continual disease similar to epilepsy. As well as epilepsy, he experienced attacks of diarrhea, influenza, and hemorrhoids, a common curse of the horseback riding society.

Despite his endeavors with childhood sickness, Madison became a well-accomplished student. Due to plantation life, education came in the form of private tutors or with boarding at nearby academies. Madison’s education came by way of instruction from a tutor named Donald Robertson. Robertson instilled in Madison a passion for learning, and by the age of twelve had taught Madison Latin. His next tutor, the Rev. Thomas Martin, carried on the Madison’s love for learning and directed him to the campus of Princeton, Martin’s alma mater. This college choice was vastly different from most Virginians who tended to go to William and Mary due to its near location. This action was one the first of Madison’s where he chose not to take the easy way.

At Princeton, Madison was a workhorse who stopped sometimes only to breathe. Princeton followed the idea of Presbyterianism, pedantry, and patriotism. Madison however, took the idea of patriotism to heart as he engaged in his future endeavors. He felt that the patriotism he found there filled is body and soul. He collected a bachelor’s degree in just two and a half years. Later, he described his stressful work habits as,

“An indiscreet experiment of the minimum of sleep and the maximum of application.The former was reduced for some weeks to less than five hours in the twenty four.” His work habits allowed him to create the credentials that at twenty would last a lifetime.

After his time at Princeton, Madison returned home and found no pleasure in plantation life. He also was not interested in very much else; he found the ministry boring, but dabbled in law. He soon became content with reading his books and being the dutiful son on his father’s farm. That was until the first shots were fired at Concord; at the age of twenty-four, James Madison’s life would never be the same.

The Revolutionary War had begun, and Madison’s feelings of patriotism had once again been ignited. As many men of his age were enlisting in local militias, young Madison a great shot, but nearly five feet two inches tall and barely one hundred pounds, was restrained from entering the military. He feared his health might deteriorate in the conditions of war. Madison knew he had to help, however, and he did. As Robert Allen Rutland wrote in his book James Madison: and the Search for Nationhood, “Whatever the cause, the Virginia minutemen lost a volunteer and the Virginia Convention of 1776-one of the great legislative bodies in our history-gained a member.” Madison’s disappointing denial to the militia turned him into a legislator, and he represented Orange County as a representative at the May 1776 gathering of the Virginia Convention held in Williamsburg.

Madison now joined the likes of such influential men as Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, and George Mason as he took his seat in the House of Burgesses. Historic business was to take place and he was a part of it. The last ties of England were about to be surrendered and Madison was ready to take a stance for both separation between the colonies and England and for the assembly of a republic. Madison’s feelings are later stated in a letter to Jared Sparks:

My first entrance on public life was in May, 1776, when I became a member of the

Convention in Virginia, which instructed her delegates in Congress to propose the

Declaration of Independence. . . It has always been my impression that a

re-establishment of the Colonial relations to the parent country previous to the