Madison became secretary of State upon Jefferson's accession to the presidency in 1801, and it is said that no secretary of State was ever confronted with larger problems or worked more closely with his president to solve them. For the very reason of their close relationship it is difficult to separate their parts in the diplomacy of 1801-09. The great achievement was the purchase of Louisiana, and following it the success with the Barbary pirates. Their failures were their inability to acquire Florida and the hopelessness of the relationship with England and France. During the eight years that he held the portfolio of State, he had continually to defend the neutral rights of the United States against the en croachments of European belligerents; in i8o6 he published An Examination of the British Doctrine which subjects to Capture a Neutral Trade not open in nme of Peace, a careful argument against the rule of war of 1756 extended by Great Britain in 1793 and 1803.
Jefferson's wish was that Madison should succeed him in the presidency and to this the party acceded. However, a hostile group practically forced the new president to take Robert Smith as his secretary of State. So for two years his foreign policy suffered because the two could not temperamentally co-operate. Jefferson's peace policy—or, more correctly, Madison's peace policy—of commercial restrictions to coerce Great Britain and France he continued to follow until 1812, when he was forced to change these futile commercial weapons for a policy of war, which was very popular with the extreme French wing of his party. After being tricked by France and seemingly unable to gain any concessions from Great Britain he embarked upon war. The country was unprepared for war, and Madison and his cabinet proved unable efficiently to cope with the difficulties. Re-elected in 1812 in spite of formidable opposition, he grew increasingly unpopular as disaster followed the armies; the New England Federalists wished his resignation and even talked secession. In general, Congress was more blamable than either the president or his official family, or the army officers. With the declaration of peace the president again gained a momentary popularity much like that he had won in 1809 by his willingness to fight France.
Retiring from the presidency in 1817, Madison returned to his home, Montpelier, Orange county, Va., which he was to leave in no official capacity save in 1829, when he was a delegate to the State Constitutional Convention and served on several of its committees. Montpelier, like Jefferson's Monticello and Monroe's
Oak-Hill, was an expensive bit of "gentleman farming," which with his generous hospitality nearly ruined its owner financially. Madison took an interest in education, in emancipation, and in agricultural questions, to the last. He died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836. Madison married, in Dorothy Payne Todd a widow of great social charm. Her plump beauty was often remarked—notably by Washington Irving—in contrast to her husband's delicate and feeble figure and wizened face—for even in his prime he was, as Henry Adams says, "a small man, quiet, somewhat precise in manner, pleasant, fond of conver sation, with a certain mixture of ease and dignity in his address." Henry Clay, contrasting him with Jefferson, said that Jeffer son had more genius, Madison more judgment and common sense; that Jefferson was a visionary and a theorist; Madison cool, dispassionate, practical and safe. The broadest and most accurate scholar among the "founders and fathers," he was par ticularly an expert in constitutional history and theory. In the great causes for which Madison fought in his earlier years— religious freedom and separation of Church and State, the free navigation of the Mississippi, and the adoption of the constitu tion—he met with success. His greatest and truest fame is as the "father of the Constitution." BiBuoGRAPHY.—Madison's personality is perplexingly vague ; the biographies of him are little more than histories of the period, and the best history of the later period in which he was before the public, Henry Adams's History of the United States from r8or to 1817 (1889— 90), gives the clearest sketch and best criticism of him. The lives of Madison are: J. Q. Adams's (Boston, 185o) ; W. C. Rives's (Boston, 1859-69, 3 vols.), covering the period previous to 1797; S. H. Gay's (Boston, 1884) in the "American Statesmen Series"; and Gaillard Hunt's (1902). Madison's Writings (19oo–o6) were edited by Hunt, who also edited The Journal of the Debates in the Conven tion which framed the Constitution of the United States, as Recorded by James Madison (1908). See also Mrs. Madison's Memoirs and Letters (Boston, 1887) and M. W. Goodwin, Dolly Madison (1897). The most authoritative account of Madison's diplomatic activities is contained in vol. iii. of the American Secretaries of State (1927).