MADISON, JAMES 4th president of the United States, was born at Port Conway, in King George county, Virginia, on March 16, 1751. His first ancestor in America may possibly have been Captain Isaac Maddyson, a colonist of 1623 mentioned by John Smith as an excellent Indian fighter. His father, also named James Madison, was the owner of large estates in Orange county, Virginia. In 1769 the son entered the College of New Jersey (now Princeton university). He graduated in 1771, but remained for another year at Princeton studying, apparently for the ministry, under the direction of John Witherspoon (I 722— 94). In 1772 he returned to Virginia, where he pursued his read ing and studies, especially theology and Hebrew, and acted as a tutor to the younger children of the family. In 1775 he became chairman of the committee of public safety for Orange county, and in the spring of 1776 he was chosen a delegate to the new Virginia convention, where he was on the committee which drafted the constitution for the State, and proposed an amend ment (not adopted) which declared that "all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise" of religion. In 1777, largely, it seems, because he refused to treat the electors with rum and punch, after the custom of the time, he was not re-elected, but in November of the same year he was chosen a member of the Privy Council or Council of State, in which capacity he took a promi nent part from Jan. 14, 1778, until the end of 1779, when he was elected a delegate to the Continental Congress.
He was in Congress during the final stages of the Revolution ary War, and in 1780 drafted instructions to Jay, then represent ing the United States at Madrid, that in negotiations with Spain he should insist upon the free navigation of the Mississippi and upon the principle that the United States succeeded to British rights affirmed by the Treaty of Paris of 1763. When the con federation was almost in a state of collapse because of the failure of the States to respond to requisitions of Congress for supplies for the Federal treasury, Madison was among the first to advo cate the granting of additional powers to Congress, and urged that Congress should forbid the States to issue more paper money. In 1781 he favoured an amendment of the Articles of Confedera tion giving Congress power to enforce its requisitions, and in 1783, in spite of the open opposition of the Virginia legislature, which considered the Virginian delegates wholly subject to its instructions, he advocated that the States should grant to Con gress for 25 years authority to levy an import duty, and sug gested a scheme to provide for the interest on the debt not raised by the import duty—apportioning it among the States on the basis of population, counting three-fifths of the slaves, a ratio sug gested by Madison. To accompany this plan he drew up an able address to the States. In the same year he was a member of the committee which reported on the Virginia proposal as to the terms of cession to the Confederation of the unoccupied Western terri tory, held by several of the States ; the report was a skilful compromise made by Madison, which secured the approval of the rather exigent Virginia legislature.
In Nov. 1783 Madison's term in Congress expired, and he returned to Virginia and took up the study of the law. In the following year he was elected to the house of delegates. As a member of its committee on religion, he opposed the giving of special privileges to the Episcopal (or any other) Church, and contended against a general assessment for the support of the churches of the State. His petition of remonstrance against the proposed assessment, drawn up at the suggestion of George Nicholas (c. 1755-99), was widely circulated and procured its
defeat. On Dec. 26, 1785, Jefferson's bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia, which had been introduced by Madison, was passed. In the Virginia house of delegates, as in the Continental Congress, he opposed the further issue of paper money; and he tried to induce the legislature to repeal the law confiscating British debts, but he did not lose sight of the interests of the Confederacy. The boundary between Virginia and Maryland, ac cording to the Baltimore grant, was the south shore of the Potomac, a line to which Virginia had agreed on condition of free navigation of the river and the Chesapeake bay. Virginia now feared that too much had been given up, and desired joint regu lation of the navigation and commerce of the river by Maryland and Virginia. On Madison's proposal commissioners from the two States met at Alexandria (q.v.) and at Mount Vernon in March 1785. The Maryland legislature approved the Mount Vernon agreement and proposed to invite Pennsylvania and Delaware to join in the arrangement. Madison, seeing an oppor tunity for more general concert in regard to commerce and trade (and possibly for the increase of the power of Congress), proposed that all the States should be invited to send commis sioners to consider commercial questions, and a resolution to that effect was adopted (on Jan. 21, 1786) by the Virginia legis lature. This led to the Annapolis convention of 1786, and that in turn led to the Philadelphia convention of 1787. In April 1787 Madison had written a paper, The Vices of the Political System of the United States, and from his study of confederacies, ancient and modern, later summed up in numbers 17, 18 and 19 of The Federalist, he had concluded that no confederacy could long endure if it acted upon States only and not directly upon indi viduals. As the time for the convention of 1787 approached he drew up an outline of a new system of government, the basis of the "Virginia plan" presented in the convention by Edmund Jennings Randolph. Madison's scheme, as expressed in a letter to Washington dated April 16, 1787, was that individual sover eignty of States was irreconcilable with aggregate sovereignty, but that the "consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable." He considered as a practical middle ground changing the basis of representation in Congress from States to population ; giving the national Govern ment "positive and complete authority in all cases which require uniformity"; gibing it a negative on all State laws, a power which might best be vested in the Senate, a comparatively permanent body; electing the lower house, and the more numerous, for a short term ; providing for a national executive, for extending the national supremacy over the judiciary and the militia, for a coun cil to revise all laws, and for an express statement of the right of coercion; and finally, obtaining the ratification of a new consti tutional instrument from the people, and not merely from the legislatures. The "Virginia plan" was the basis of the conven tion's deliberations which resulted in the constitution favourably voted on by the convention on Sept. 17, 1787. Madison, always an opponent of slavery, disapproved of the compromise (in Art. I. sec. 9 and Art. V.) postponing to 1808 (or later) the prohibition of the importation of slaves. He took a leading part in the de bates of the convention, of which he kept careful notes, after wards published by order of Congress (3 vols., Washington, 1843).