The life of our founding fathers is fascinating, not because they were perfect, not because they were exceptional, but because they were real people with conflicts in their own lives, they were occasionally inconsistent and even contradicted themselves. They argued, they developed the same dirty politics we all complain about today and they failed in as many ways as they succeeded.
As we argue about the constitution and the bill of rights today we sometimes think of them in terms of a sacred document, but they came about in ways that were sometimes difficult to learn about. James Madison is the person who authored the bill of rights and - yes, he did think of the number 10 and the ten commandments as he wrote it - thinking 10 would get it a higher recognition (which it did).
Madison was the right hand man to President Washington, but lost favor in the end when he began to plot with Thomas Jefferson. He was in conflict with John Adams, he worked around Aaron Burr and Patrick Henry and he would come in conflict with some of his own statements when he was president.
This complexity does not make him a bad person or a bad president, but one that we can see in a three dimensional view through the authors extensive research and well written narrative. We see the man who wrote of freedom along with Jefferson holding slaves - like Jefferson. For me and others this diminishes many of the founding fathers.
He was a peace candidate like Jefferson and was also the only president to actually be on the battlefield. Since he was in the wrong place and could have been captured by the English in the war of 1812, he also gives us good reason to keep the presidents off the field of war.
Slavery would follow him and frustrate him, just as it did all the presidents up through Lincoln. His compromises would later lead to frustrations rather than solutions and eventually war had to happen, but Madison was much more than a person embroiled in war and slavery. He and Jefferson were the first to create a party - the Republican party (which would eventually become the Democratic party). And who was this leader?
NYT review picks this description from the book = "No one would ever have mistaken James Madison for George Washington. Short, scrawny and sickly, he suffered from a hypochondria that convinced him he would lead neither a long nor a healthy life. He was a miserable public speaker who tended to lapse into inaudible mumbling, and well into his career as a politician, he continued to shrink back in horror at the idea of going out on the stump and putting on “an electioneering appearance.”
NYT reveiw also pulls these facts from the book, "Brookhiser attempts to cover all of the major events of Madison’s public career.
This is no small feat, for Madison was involved in nearly every political controversy and decision of his age: he was Thomas Jefferson’s indispensable ally in the struggle for religious liberty in revolutionary Virginia; he served tirelessly as a delegate to the Continental Congress during the most trying years of the Revolutionary War; he is deservedly remembered as “the Father of the Constitution”; he was the principal, albeit reluctant, author of what would become our federal Bill of Rights; as the prime organizer of the Jeffersonian Republican Party, he was in many ways the inventor of the very idea of a modern party system; he served as President Jefferson’s secretary of state and most trusted adviser; finally, as a wartime president, Madison had to endure not only the burning of Washington, but also conflict and intrigue within his own party and beyond."
This well researched book depends on the continual research of historians and is an excellent example of how we can bring the past to life in a way that is meaningful for today.
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