James Madison and Montpelier

James and Dolly Madison lived and entertained at Montpelier, their Virginia estate overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Or more accurately, Dolly entertained and James avoided company most days but poked his head in at meals to take part in the conversation.  He was shy and sickly (probably less than 5' 4" and 110 lbs.) and absorbed with the work of fashioning a government for a new country,  reading and writing the documents that would provide the foundations for our federal system.  That's the impression given by Jim Walker, the docent who led a group of us visitors, my wife and I included, through the stately restored home of our fourth president.

I already knew a bit about Madison's home.  I had been to Montpelier in 2005 when the private foundation which runs the estate was in the process of bringing the house and grounds back to their condition at the time Madison was president.  A trailer parked near the main house served as a visitor's center.  The main building was covered in scaffolding and plastic sheets.  Additions on both wings that had been added by the DuPont family, which owned the home for most of the 20th century, were being torn down to bring everything back to earlier dimensions.  Likewise a few walls and doors were being removed or relocated.

Most of those details I gleaned from a brief conversation with one of the volunteers, an elegant perfectly coiffed older lady who walked me through parts of the house that were open to the public.  Most rooms and large sections of the house were closed off for construction.  (An excellent account of the restoration process by Edward A. Chappell is available on the Colonial Williamsburg [website].  That site also contains a gallery of photos highlighting the stages of the renovation.  The opening photo below shows remains of the stucco facade.)

Since at the time I was still involved in remodeling and construction, my interest was about equally divided between the history of the home and its occupants and the restoration project underway.  When my host returned to her trailer refuge and left me alone, I couldn't resist peering into rooms and asking questions of the workmen.

In one of the upstairs bedrooms a mason and his son were eager to explain how the brick they were replacing was being matched in color and composition.  Their suppliers were trying to find what local soil had been used in the manufacture of the original bricks.  But, they pointed out, more than matching soils would be necessary for a solid reconstruction, since whole layers of brick in the building, when cleared of stucco applied by later residents, turned out to be defective.  They were so poorly made that they had essentially disintegrated.  Whole courses of brick would need to be carefully removed and replaced with something that looked the same, but was much stronger and lasting.

That kind of precision and respect for the home and its history is what produced the impressive restoration we saw this past weekend.  Its location, less than an hour and a half from DC and within 30 minutes of both Monticello and Ash Lawn-Highland (President Monroe's home) makes it an easy and worthwhile drive from the Capital.  Entry fees to the grounds are steep -- $19 per person -- but no more than those charged at Mount Vernon, which is across the Potomac from DC and also worth a visit if you want to see how our first presidents lived and understand the roots of pre-industrial American aristocracy.

A modern visitor's center stands about where the trailer was parked on my previous visit.  It contains the omnipresent gift shop, but also a couple of small museum displays.  The room featuring artifacts from the Madison's, some of which were uncovered during the restoration, help provide perspective for an exploration of the house and grounds.  Dolly's engagement ring of yellow gold and diamonds proves her suitor was a man of some means.  A walking stick of gold and rhino horn on display was a gift to Thomas Jefferson from a merchant, which he re-gifted to Madison (long before the Seinfeld cast made that term a part of the popular vocabulary).  These were men of means, who also lived beyond their means, as history reveals -- Jefferson more so than Madison.

A famous short biography -- A Coloured Man's Remembrance of James Madison --  by Paul Jennings, one of Madison's slaves, is also on display.  John Brooks Russell in the US Patent Office came to know and admire Jennings and helped to publish his reminiscences.  From our docent we would learn that five generations of the same slave families served the Madison households both before and through James Madison's lifetime.  Slavery was problematic for Madison and he treated his servants humanely, but like Jefferson and his other slave-holding contemporaries, he did not reject their labor on his own estate nor free them during his lifetime.

Perhaps because his personal life was quiet and his work more behind-the-scenes than the more imposing Founding Fathers, we do not hear or know as much about Madison's contributions to the creation of our democracy.  But, they were many.  For example, he is considered to be the predominant colonial voice in urging separation of church and state.  His "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," addressed to the Virginia legislature in 1785 makes clear this view:

"The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.  This right is in its nature an unalienable right. It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds, cannot follow the dictates of other men. . . . We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance."

The tour of the house allows visitors to look out from the room above the entry portico that Madison employed as a library.  Madison's view from the windows of the Blue Ridge Mountains rising above an open field and hardwood forests must have given him a sense of the vast potential of the country whose government he was intent on designing.  According to Jim Walker, our guide, Madison spent the entire winter of 1786-87 reading and thinking about the shortcomings of confederacies and the potential benefits of a federal system.  He consolidated his thoughts into what he labelled "The Virginia Plan."  When he arrived at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he must have been no more impressive than a mouse upon first sight -- small and quiet as he was.  But, he came prepared, having studied the essential question of the day:  what possibly new form of government offers our new nation the chance to thrive and survive?  Once he began to speak and share his plan, he became the center of attention, the only member to attend every single session.


The ideas framed in the Constitution are largely those of Madison, just as many of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence originated with his Virginia colleague, James Mason, although in both cases others received more credit in history texts.  History books do always mention Madison's role, along with his colleagues John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, in writing The Federalist Papers.  Again, I discovered from my visit,  it was Madison whose influence was greatest, drawing from his prodigious reading on governments to build an argument for our balance of powers among states and the central government.  Madison was a brilliant man, fluent in Greek, Latin, Italian, and French.  His ability to digest sources in their original languages made it possible for him to access information that most of his contemporaries would never have known, had he not shared it in his public life.

I now have Ralph Ketchum's James Madison: A Biography on my reading list and hope to learn more about this influential early American.