Legislative Career
Madison's Whiggish sentiments, born in college debate, strengthened after his April 1774 visit to Philadelphia, which coincided with news that Parliament had passed the Coercive Acts. His contributions to the independence movement were restricted to Orange County until his election to the Virginia Convention of 1776. There he made his first contribution to American constitutional law with his defense of the free exercise of religion as a right rather than a privilege.
In October, Madison participated in the newly created Virginia House of Delegates, where he met Thomas Jefferson, who became a lifelong friend and colleague. Madison lost the election for the 1777 session of the House of Delegates, purportedly because he refused to "swill the planters with bumbo" (provide liquor for the voters). Later that year, he was elected to the eight-member Council of State, and in 1779 he was selected as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia.
Continental Congress
Madison served in Congress from March 1780, when the Revolutionary War had reached its nadir, to December 1783, soon after its triumphant conclusion. He was known as a conscientious legislator and admired for his committee work and his forcefully argued and closely reasoned speeches. Madison was among those who thought that the Confederation government needed to be invested with more power at the expense of the states. Though he engineered compromises in the spring of 1783 on taxation and import duties--including the famous three-fifths ratio, in which for purposes of representation five enslaved persons would be equivalent to three free persons--the Confederation continued to lose power and prestige.
Religious Freedom
Madison left national office to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates between 1784 and 1786. His major triumph there was blocking the establishment of state support for churches. In Madison's view, the passage of the 1785 Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom "extinguished for ever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind."
Shaping the Constitution
In 1785 Madison was appointed a delegate to a convention on interstate trade to be held in Annapolis in September 1786. This meeting called for a general convention to meet the following summer in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation to make "the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." Madison was again elected to represent Virginia in Congress, arriving in New York in February 1787. That spring Madison drafted a comprehensive plan for a more powerful national government.
At the Constitutional Convention, Madison and the other members of the Virginia delegation seized the initiative by presenting a plan to scrap the Articles of Confederation and substitute a national government that operated directly on individual citizens rather than the states. Madison took a leading role in shaping the constitution that emerged. In addition, his notes of the proceedings are the most complete record of the debates.
Madison then devoted himself to the task of getting the new constitution ratified. He, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay wrote a series of essays exploring the benefits of the new constitution and defending some of its more controversial provisions. After initially appearing in newspapers, the essays were collected and published in 1788 as The Federalist. In March 1788, Madison returned home for election to the Virginia ratifying convention, where he ably defended the Philadelphia convention's handiwork, helping Virginia become the tenth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
U.S. House of Representatives
Shortly thereafter, Madison narrowly defeated James Monroe for election to the U.S. House of Representatives. The new president, George Washington, relied on Madison for advice on how to conduct a republican presidency. In addition, Madison had promised his Virginia constituency that in spite of his own reservations, he would sponsor a series of amendments to safeguard individual rights. He reduced a multitude of suggested amendments to nineteen, of which Congress sent twelve to the states for consideration. Ten were ratified and have since become known as the Bill of Rights.
Madison's time in Congress was shaped in large measure by a growing rift between him and the influential secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, over financial plans for the new republic. As that gulf widened, factions developed around the two men's views, ultimately leading to the formation of the Federalist and Republican Parties. Madison and other proto-Republicans believed that Hamilton's financial system aped the corrupt policy of Great Britain, with its national bank, sizable public debt, and droves of speculators. In re-creating that system in the United States, Madison and his supporters believed, Hamilton was betraying the ideals of the American Revolution. Madison further felt that Hamilton was breaching the limits of the federal government's power under the Constitution. The 1793 outbreak of war between France and Great Britain further polarized the two groups, with Federalists siding with Great Britain and Republicans backing France. Domestic questions became intertwined with foreign policy issues, introducing into the simplest difference of opinion a heavy dose of ideological fervor.
Marriage and Return to Montpelier
Madison resolved to retire from Congress when his term ended in early 1797. Part of his decision was no doubt prompted by his 1794 marriage to a young Philadelphia widow, Dolley Payne Todd, and a desire to enjoy the pleasures of private life far from the scenes of factional discord. Another factor was the death of his brother Ambrose and the increasing responsibilities of caring for aging parents. Madison quietly relinquished his party leadership and returned to Virginia.
Virginia Resolutions
However, Madison could not disengage from national issues simply by retreating to Montpelier, his family's Virginia plantation. Increasing hostility to France under the presidency of John Adams culminated in the 1798 passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison's initial reaction to the proposed bill was that it was "a monster that must for ever disgrace its parents." In December 1798, at Jefferson's urging, Madison drafted the Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to protest the measure's infringement of their rights and liberties and generally criticized the enlargement of federal powers over the preceding five years. Coupled with Jefferson's more dramatic and extreme Kentucky Resolutions, the statement provided a rallying point for Republicans, but it was not well received by the other state legislatures. To defend his resolutions, Madison was persuaded to stand for election to the Virginia Assembly in 1799. He was elected and undertook their defense by producing the Report of 1800, a comprehensive attack on the unconstitutionality of the two acts as well as a ringing statement of the inviolability of the right of free speech.
David Mattern (edited for use here by Jewel Spangler, Anne Colony, and Ellen Goldlust); source: The American Revolution 1775-1783: An Encyclopedia, ed. Richard L. Blanco and Paul J. Sanborn (2 vols.; New York, 1993), 2:1002-8.