Part 1 (1/2)

James Madison

by Sydney Howard Gay

CHAPTER I

THE VIRGINIA MADISONS

Jainia; he died at Montpellier, in that State, on June 28, 1836 Mr John Quincy Ada, perhaps, the death of his own father and of Jefferson on the same Fourth of July, and that of Monroe on a subsequent anniversary of that day,some equally appropriate coinian President For it was quite possible that Virginia ht think him capable of an attempt to conceal, what to her mind would seem to be an obvious intention of Providence: that all the children of the ”Mother of Presidents” should be no less distinguished in their deaths than in their lives--that the ”other dynasty,” which John Randolph ont to talk about, should no longer pretend to an equality with the out of it At any rate, he notes the date of Madison's death, the twenty-eighth day of June, as ”the anniversary of the day on which the ratification of the Convention of Virginia in 1788 had affixed the seal of James Madison as the father of the Constitution of the United States, when his earthly part sank without a struggle into the grave, and a spirit, bright as the seraphim that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom of his God” There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this tribute, whatever question there rah the date is erroneous The ratification of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was on June 25, not on June 28 It is the reaton common days like coo, however, the propriety of such providential arrangenized alossip of that tiuished physician”

declared that he would have kept a fourth ex-President alive to die on a Fourth of July, had the illustrious sick man been under his treatht, in that case, possibly have declined to have a fatal illness prolonged a week to gratify the public fondness for patriotic coincidence But Mr Adams's appropriation of another anniversary answered all the purpose, for that he made a mistake as to the date does not seem to have been discovered

It was accidental that Port Conas the birthplace of Madison His randfather, whose na Mrs Madison happened to be there on a visit to her mother when her first child, Jaraphy of hiiven as Eleanor Mr Rives nity that the uished a son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely a name as Nelly But we are afraid it is true that Nelly was her narapher than Mr Rives, that we know of, calls her Eleanor Even Madison himself permits ”Nelly” to pass under his eyes and from his hands as his mother's name

In 1833-34 there was some correspondence between him and Lyman C

Draper, the historian, which includes soy These, the ex-President writes, were ”made out by a member of the fa his sanction The first record is, that ”James Madison was the son of James Madison and Nelly Conway” On such authority Nelly, and not Eleanor, must be accepted as the retted from the Rives point of view; but perhaps the nao; and no doubt it was chosen by her parents without a thought that their daughter o into history as the her fortune could befall her than to be the respectable head of a tobacco planter's faical record further says that ”his [Madison's] ancestors, on both sides, were not a the most wealthy of the country, but in independent and comfortable circumstances” If this comment was added at the ex-President's own dictation, it was quite in accordance with his unpretentious character[1] One ht venture to say as much of a Northern or a Western farinia; they planted Mr Rives says that the elder Jae landed estate in Virginiawas a n and doular adn relations” were the shi+pping, once a year, a few hogsheads of tobacco to a London factor; the ”ro huts; and the ”administrative hierarchy” was the priest, as more at hoe of his clerical duties

As Mr Madison had only to say of his immediate ancestors--which seems to be all he knew about them--that they were in ”independent and comfortable circumstances,” so he was, apparently, as little inclined to talk about hie when it is supposed that men who have enjoyed celebrity find their own lives the reeable of subjects In answer to Dr Draper's inquiries he wrote this modest letter, now for the first tiust 9, 1833_

DEAR SIR,--Since your letter of the 3d of June cae and continued maladies, with the ing it, for which these circuy, in your case, as I have been obliged to make them in others

You wish me to refer you to sources of printed information on my career in life, and it would afford me pleasure to do so; but my recollection on the subject is very defective It occurs [to ed edition coers of Pennsylvania, and whichothers When or where it was published I cannot say To this reference I can only add generally the newspapers at the seat of govern periods, when I was one of the objects under review I need scarcely remark that a life, which has been so much a public life, must of course be traced in the public transactions in which it was involved, and that the most important of them are to be found in documents already in print, or soon to be so

With friendly respects, JAMES MADISON

LYMAN C DRAPER, Lockport, N Y

The genealogical stateo farther back than Mr Madison's great-grandfather, John Mr Rives supposes that this John was the son of another John who, as ”the pious researches of kindred have ascertained,” took out a patent for land about 1653 between the North and York rivers on the shores of Chesapeake Bay The same writer further assumes that this John was descended from Captain Isaac Madison, whose name appears ”in a docu a list of the Colonists in 1623” Fro more of this Captain Isaac than this mere mention Under date of January 24, 1623, there is this record: ”Captain Powell, gunner, of James City, is dead; Capt Nuce (?), Capt Maddison, Lieut Craddock's brother, and divers more of the chief ether true or there was another Isaac Maddison, for the nanatures to a letter dated about a overnor, council, and asse It is of record, also, that four months later still, on June 4, ”Capt Isaac and Mary Maddison”

were before the governor and council as witnesses in the case of Greville Pooley and Cicely Jordan, bethoe,” made ”three or four days after her husband's death” But the lively , it seeovernor and council, and disavowed the former contract,” and the case therefore became so complicated that the court was ”not able to decide so nice a difference” What Captain Isaac and Mary Maddison knew about the matter the record does not tell us; but the evidence is conclusive that if there was but one Isaac Maddison in Virginia in 1623 he did not die in January of that year Probably there was but one, and he, as Rives assumes, was the Captain Madyson of whose ”achievement,” as Rives calls it, there is a brief narrative in John Sinia”

Besides the record in Sainsbury's Calendar of the ruinia, in January, 1623, his signature to a letter to the king in February, and his appearance as a witness before the council in the case of theJordan, in June, it appears by Hotten's Lists of colonists, taken frolish 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 saiven under the saed 30 years” Her faed 7 years,” and two servants

Katherine, it hter of theMary and Captain Isaac, and their only child These ”musters,” it should be said, appear always to have been reat care, and there is therefore hardly a possibility that a son, if there were one, was omitted in the nue of the little girl, and the naes of the two servants, the date of their arrival in Virginia, and the naiven 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 so 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 lish 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 ”arants in the New World” That distinction cannot be clai that he believed it could be He seereat-grandfather his ancestors had been respectable people, ”in independent and coeneration 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 Jain the studies which should fit hie Of theexcept 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 hoyman of the parish, the Rev Thomas Martin, as 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--as from New Jersey--that the lad was sent to Princeton instead of to Williainia At Princeton, at any rate, he entered at the age of eighteen, in 1769; or, to borrow Mr Rives's eloquent statea virilis_ of anticipated manhood,see launched on that disciplinary career which is to forraphers says that he shortened his collegiate ter in one year the studies of the junior and senior years, but that he remained another twelve- Hebrew On his return hoer brothers and sisters, while pursuing his own studies Still another biographer asserts that he began iives soy This and his giving himself to Hebrew for a year point to the htly interpret his oords, 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 as in this world, for I think my sensations foror 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 old”