James Madison: The Farmer Who Nearly Wasn’t Allowed to Speak

He stood 5’ 4” tall and weighed 100 lbs. His voice was so quiet that delegates in the back of the room often could not hear him. He suffered throughout his life from what he described as “sudden attacks, somewhat resembling epilepsy” which was probably a form of seizure disorder that left him incapacitated at random times. James Madison looked and sounded nothing like a man who would redesign the architecture of human government.

When Madison arrived in Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention in May 1787, he had spent months in preparation that no other delegate could match. He had read every book on political theory, republican governance, and the history of ancient confederacies that Thomas Jefferson could ship him from Paris. He arrived with a fully formed plan, the Virginia Plan, which became the working document around which the entire Convention was organized.

He then proceeded to do something that no one had planned for, he simply took notes. Seated directly in front of the presiding officer at every session, Madison recorded the substance of every speech, argument, and compromise made over four months of closed door meetings. The notes were not published in his lifetime, and he decided they would be withheld until all the Convention participants were dead, which turned out to be 1836, when he himself finally died at age 85.

Without Madison's notes, we would know almost nothing of what actually happened in that room in Philadelphia. The official journal recorded only motions and votes, not debate. Every other delegate who took notes kept them private or incomplete. Madison gave us the history of our own founding.

His personal contribution to the forming of the Constitution was incredible. Working with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, he co-authored The Federalist Papers, 84 essays explaining and defending the new Constitution to a skeptical public. Madison wrote 29 of them, including Federalist No. 51, which contains the most honest assessment of human nature ever written into a governmental document: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

After all that, he turned around and fought for the Bill of Rights against a Congress that did not want to bother. Patrick Henry had defeated him for Senate by cheating him out of his Congressional district, the first gerrymander in American history. Madison ran for the House instead, won, and introduced 12 constitutional amendments in Congress in June 1789. Ten were ratified. The Bill of Rights, which included freedom of speech, religion, the press, the right to bear arms, and protection against unreasonable search all came from that small, quiet, man.

He never raised his voice. He never had to.

Sources

Ketcham, Ralph. James Madison: A Biography. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

Madison, James. Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. New York: Norton, 1987.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. 1788. Reprint, New York: Penguin Classics, 1987.

Labunski, Richard. James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wills, Garry. James Madison. New York: Times Books, 2002.