James Madison

American · 1751 to 1836

Born on March 16, 1751, at Belle Grove plantation near Port Conway in the colony of Virginia, the oldest of twelve children of James Madison senior, a tobacco planter who owned some five thousand acres and around a hundred enslaved people, and Eleanor Madison, James Madison junior was schooled from eleven to sixteen by the Scottish tutor Donald Robertson and grew exceptionally proficient in Latin. To avoid the lowland malaria of Williamsburg he was sent in 1769 to the College of New Jersey at Princeton, where he completed the three-year degree in two and stayed on to read Hebrew and political philosophy under John Witherspoon. He served in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Continental Congress, drafted the Virginia Plan that framed the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, and earned the title father of the Constitution by his daily shorthand record of the debates, eventually published as Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention in 1840 after his death. With Alexander Hamilton and John Jay he wrote The Federalist Papers under the name Publius, contributing twenty-nine of the eighty-five. He drafted the Bill of Rights as a freshman congressman in 1789. Co-founder with Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party, he served as Jefferson's Secretary of State from 1801 to 1809 and as fourth President of the United States from 1809 to 1817, leading the country through the War of 1812 and watching British troops burn the White House while his wife Dolley rescued the Stuart portrait of Washington. He retired to his Montpelier plantation in Orange County, where he died on June 28, 1836, at eighty-five, the last of the framers, leaving most of his enslaved people unmanumitted in his will.