President James Madison
(1751-1836)
Although I have not found a direct blood connection to President James Madison, I find it interesting that our Womack's, Woodson's, Mosby's and other lines connect to these families through marriage. Because of these associations and this being such an important part of our nation's history. I thought I would share these with you.
Dorothea (Dolly) Payne, born May 20, 1768 married James Madison, Jr., who became President. Dolly's parents were John Payne, b 1740 and Mary W. Coles. John's parents were Josiah Payne, b 1705 sp Hannah (Ann) Fleming. Josiah's parents were George Payne, b abt 1675 sp Mary Woodson, b. 1678. Mary Woodson's parents were Robert Woodson, born 1634 sp Elizabeth Ferris. Mary Woodson's sister Sarah Woodson, b. 1665, married Edward Mosby, who's son John Mosby, married Martha Womack (daughter of Abraham Womack, b 1644 sp Sarah Worsham?) John Mosby's brother Benjamin Mosby whose descendants include Col., John Singleton Mosby of Civil War fame. Mary Woodson also had a brother Benjamin Woodson, b.1666, who had a descendant Jesse Woodson James ( the famous outlaw, I have this line also if someone is interested).
Youth
Born
March 16, 1751, the eldest son of the wealthiest landholder in Orange County,
Virginia, James Madison was destined for a life of privilege and
responsibility. The triad of land, slaves, and tobacco supported him
throughout his long life, allowing him to concentrate on politics and the
intellectual pursuits he loved. In 1769, after several years of local
schooling and private tutoring, Madison entered the College of New Jersey at
Princeton, where he was introduced to the thinkers of the Scottish
Enlightenment--Frances Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, among others.
Madison proved a voracious student, consuming four years of course work in two
and graduating in 1771. He returned home in 1772 and was soon drawn into a
lifelong career in politics by the deepening imperial crisis.
Madison's Legislative Career
Madison's Whiggish sentiments, born in college debate, strengthened after his
visit to Philadelphia in April 1774, which coincided with news of the passage
by Parliament of the Coercive Acts. His contributions to the independence
movement were restricted to Orange County, however, until his election to the
Virginia Convention of 1776. There he made his first contribution to American
constitutional law by his defense of the free exercise of religion as a right
and not a privilege. In October, Madison participated in the newly created
Virginia House of Delegates, making the acquaintance of his lifelong friend
and colleague, Thomas Jefferson. Madison lost the election for the 1777
session of the House of Delegates, purportedly because he refused to provide
liquor for the voters, a tradition affectionately referred to as
"swilling the planters with bumbo." However, his good offices in the
legislature were not forgotten. He was elected to a seat on the eight-member
Council of State that same year and in 1779 was selected as a delegate to the
Continental Congress sitting in Philadelphia.
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 slaves would
be equivalent to three free persons--the Confederation continue to lose power
and prestige in the wake of the war's end.
Before he took up the task of reformulating the American system of government
in 1787, Madison left national office to serve in the Virginia House of
Delegates in 1784 and for the two subsequent years. His major triumph there
was blocking the establishment of state support for churches. The passage of
the Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1785, in Madison's view,
"extinguished for ever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human
mind."
In
1785, Madison was appointed a delegate to a convention on interstate trade to
be held in Annapolis in September 1786. The report of this meeting called for
a general convention to meet the following summer in Philadelphia to revise
the Articles of Confederation in such a way as to make "the Federal
Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union." Madison was again
elected as a Virginia delegate to 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, the Virginia delegation, of which Madison
was a member, seized the initiative by presenting his 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 and kept notes of the
proceedings that 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 for
the newspapers exploring the benefits of the new Constitution and defending
some of its more controversial provisions. These 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 to became the tenth
state to ratify the Constitution.
Shortly thereafter Madison narrowly defeated James Monroe for election to the
U.S. House of Representatives, where he served as a guiding light to his
fellows. George Washington, in particular, relied on him 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. Congress chose twelve to send to the
states for consideration; ten of these were ratified and have since become
known as the Bill of Rights.
Madison's time in Congress was shaped, in large measure, by developing discord
with the influential secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, over the
latter's financial plans for the new Republic. The rift between the two men
widened over the course of following years, as factions developed around their
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 recreating that
system in the United States, they believed, Hamilton was betraying the ideals
of the American Revolution. Madison further felt that Hamilton was breaching
the limits of power of the federal government as designed in the
Constitutional Convention. The war between France and Great Britain which
began in 1793 further polarized the two groups. As Federalists sided with
Great Britain and Republicans with France, domestic questions became embroiled
with foreign policy issues, introducing into the simplest difference of
opinion a heavy dose of ideological fervor.
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 the young
Philadelphia widow Dolley Payne Madison and a desire to enjoy the pleasures of
private life far from the scenes of factional discord, and part was due to the
death of his brother Ambrose and the increasing responsibilities entailed in
caring for his aging parents. When the time came, he quietly relinquished his
party leadership and returned to Virginia.
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 passage of the
Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. Madison's initial reaction to the draft alien
bill was that it was "a monster that must for ever disgrace its
parents." In December 1798, at Jefferson's urging, he drafted the
Virginia Resolutions, which called on the states to protest the infringement
of their rights and liberties by the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts
and generally criticized the enlargement of federal powers that had taken
place in the previous 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. In
order 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.
Madison and the Executive Branch
The measures of the Adams administration provoked a backlash that allowed
Republicans to capture the presidency in 1801. With Jefferson securely seated
in the presidential chair, Republicans began to dismantle the Federalist
machinery of government in what the president termed "the Revolution of
1800," eliminating internal taxes and judicial positions and reducing the
military to a bare necessity. In this new order, Madison took on the
responsibility of the State Department and remained as Jefferson's right-hand
man and heir-apparent through the eight years of his fellow Virginian's
two-term presidency.
As
secretary of state, Madison was charged with a host of duties besides the
conduct of American foreign policy, ranging from publishing and distributing
the public laws to serving as liaison between the federal government and the
governors of the states and territories. In the realm of foreign policy, he
handled correspondence from five ministers and over fifty consuls.
The greatest achievement of the Jefferson administration was the purchase of
the Louisiana Territory from France. The most difficult problem the
administration faced was the attempt to maintain the rights of a neutral
nation in the face of the provocations and aggressions of France and Great
Britain. No amount of argument about free trade or the injustice of
impressment could stop the depredations enacted on American commerce or the
impressment of American sailors on the high seas. Great Britain's orders in
council in 1807 prohibited the common American practice of trading between
European ports and later required all ships trading with the Continent to
obtain a license in Great Britain. Napoleon's Milan Decree retaliated by
making any ship complying with the British regulation subject to confiscation.
Caught in this intractable bind, Madison and Jefferson turned to economic
coercion as an alternative to war. The embargo that was enacted in 1807 solved
the problem of foreign depredations on American commerce but at the cost of
temporarily destroying that commerce. The weapon that was intended to cripple
the British economy brought instead a wave of popular revulsion and widespread
lawbreaking.
As
Jefferson's successor, Madison won the 1808 presidential election handily,
despite a challenge from his estranged friend, James Monroe. Throughout his
first term Madison was preoccupied by disputes with France, Great Britain, and
Spain. By 1810 France had repealed its commercial restrictions, at least
nominally, and in the same year Madison seized the province of West Florida
from Spain, thereby consolidating American control of the Gulf Coast. But with
respect to Great Britain, his efforts were unavailing, and beginning in
November 1811, he urged Congress to mobilize the country's defenses. In June
1812 he asked for and received a declaration of war against Great Britain.
Elected president for a second time in 1812, Madison launched a series of
invasions at Canada as the most vulnerable British target. The war effort was
hampered, however, by poor generalship, by untrained and ill-equipped troops,
by quarrels with the state governments, and by logistical difficulties. The
collective impact of these administrative and political difficulties on
effective war-making made the War of 1812 hard going indeed.
With
the strategic failure of the Canadian campaigns of 1812 to 1814 and with his
own capital burned by British invaders in 1814, Madison was happy to accept a
peace on the basis of the prewar relationship with Great Britain. The Treaty
of Ghent, ending the war, was negotiated in December 1814, but the news did
not reach Washington until February 1815. In the interim the nearly miraculous
victory at New Orleans in January 1815 put a happy coda on what was for the
most part a disastrous experience. And, just as important, the immediate
causes of the war--commercial restrictions and impressment--had vanished with
the defeat of Napoleon and the end of the European conflict.
Madison's final years in office allowed him, for the first time in fifteen
years, to turn his attention to domestic affairs. Ironically, he proposed
several measures that he had earlier strongly opposed--the recharter of a
national bank, a limited protective tariff, and a constitutional amendment to
allow the federal government to undertake internal improvements. The Second
Bank of the United States was established by Madison's signature in 1816, but
in one of his last official acts he vetoed as unconstitutional a Bonus Bill
that provided for federal support of roads and canals. He retired to
Montpelier for the second, and last, time in March 1817.
Madison in Retirement
It was to be a long and active retirement. Of necessity Madison threw himself
into the management of his large plantation, interesting himself in scientific
farming as a means to counter the increasing unprofitability of Virginia
agriculture. Beginning in 1816 he sat on the Board of Visitors planning the
creation of the University of Virginia, and when Jefferson died in 1826 he
became the university's second rector. His public appearances were few, but in
his correspondence he waged a rear-guard action against the rise of doctrines
of nullification and states' rights. His last public political appearance was
in 1829 at the Virginia convention to draw up a new state constitution, where
he spoke against the overrepresentation of the Tidewater region in the House
of Delegates. He died at his home on June 28, 1836.
Montpelier, Madison's ancestral home. (Photo property of Montpelier, National Trust for Historic Preservation.)
Source: The American Revolution 1775-1783: An Encyclopedia, ed. Richard L. Blanco and Paul J. Sanborn (2 vols.; New York, 1993), 2:1002-8.