Over the weekend, the committee elected to draft the rules of the convention is meeting in order to have a proposal for Monday’s session. New delegates are arriving, settling in at their various lodgings and getting briefed about events to date. George Washington recorded in his diary, “I returned all my visits this forenoon. Dined with a club at the City Tavern and spent the evening at my quarters writing letters.”
Like Washington, James Madison is an inveterate letter writer and diarist. Already he is writing to Virginia leaders, including Edmund Pendleton, apprising him of what has transpired thus far and sharing his sense of the mood of the delegates. “In general,” he wrote, “the members seem to accord in viewing our situation as peculiarly critical and in being averse to temporizing expedients. I wish they may as readily agree when particulars are brought forward.” A general consensus that the national government must be strengthened is a far different proposition than determining the actual structure of such a government and its relationship to the States. Theory is one thing: practice another.
Madison was more candid in a letter to his father the same day, alluding to what he has observed in the past as “the unwise and wicked proceedings of the governments of some States and the unruly temper of the people of other States.” Nevertheless, he concluded, there is hope, for “every reflecting man becomes daily more alarmed of our situation.”
No one has invested more time, study and effort preparing for this convention than James Madison. Just thirty-four years old, bookish, and standing five foot four, he tends to slightly mumble in speech, but he has laid out a comprehensive plan for reform which he has shared with Washington, Edmund Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, and others. His ideas, based on years of studying ancient and modern governments, as well as the behavior of the States under the Articles of Confederation, greatly influenced the thinking of the men from whom he is soliciting support.
Yesterday, as the delegates took their seats in the East Room, Madison “chose a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members on my right and left hands. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed, I noted what was read from the chair or spoken by the members.” From this vantage point, Madison began recording what was said,
“losing not a moment unnecessarily.” He wrote out his notes last night and plans to maintain a constant diary of the convention’s work. Posterity will demand it.
The Madison family settled in Virginia in the mid-1600s. James Madison, Sr. was a tobacco planter managing Mt. Pleasant, the largest plantation in the Piedmont, consisting of five thousand acres and worked by approximately a hundred slaves. In the early 1760s, James and his bride moved into a new home they named Montpelier. There they started a family. Their first of twelve children was James Madison, Jr.
Three of James’s siblings died in infancy; two died at the ages of three and seven from a dysentery epidemic in 1775. By that time, Madison was emerging as an active and learned advocate of freedom and independence. He was well-prepared to enter the College of New Jersey in 1769 and completed a three-year academic course in two years, sleeping only five hours a night. He chose to stay in New Jersey under the tutelage of John Witherspoon, the president of the College, and fully embraced Witherspoon’s Scottish Enlightenment ethic.
Returning home in 1772, he tutored his siblings and studied law, but found politics far more conducive to his interests. In 1775, he was a member of the Committee of Safety and commissioned as a colonel in the Virginia militia. The following year, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected to the convention charged with preparing a declaration of independence for Virginia. His important contribution to that event began several years earlier, in response to the incarceration of a small group of Baptist preachers.
In a series of letters to his close college friend, William Bradford, throughout 1774 and 1775, Madison lamented that, “there are at this time in the adjacent county not less than 5 or 6 well-meaning men in close Goal [jail] for publishing their religious sentiments, which in the main are very orthodox.” As in England, the Anglican Church was the official Church of Virginia. It did not tolerate dissent. “That diabolical hell-conceived principle of persecution rages among some” and “vexes me the most of any thing whatever,” Madison railed. “I have nothing to brag of as to the State and Liberty of my Country.”
Bradford lived in Pennsylvania where religious toleration had been a fundamental principle of its founding, a fact that Madison very much envied. To Bradford, “You are happy dwelling in a land where those inestimable privileges are fully enjoyed and [the] public has long felt the good effects of their religious as well as Civil Liberty.” Dictating religious thought and practice, to Madison, is an assault on freedom of conscience, the bedrock of all freedoms.
The Virginia convention of 1776 which adopted a new constitution, also drafted a Declaration of Rights. Young Madison objected to a provision declaring that “all men shou’d enjoy the fullest Toleration in the Exercise of Religion, according to the Dictates of Conscience.” Toleration, Madison asserted, implies that government holds the power to grant or withhold toleration. Freedom of thought is not granted by government. It is “a natural and absolute right.” In the end, the convention adopted Madison’s words: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.” Adopted. June 12, 1776.