James Madison

Early in the war Mr. Madison said to a friend, in a letter "altogether _private_ and written in confidence," that the way to make the conflict both "short and successful would b...

The confederate Congress, at its final session in 1788, had fixed the time for the election of President and Vice-President under the Constitution, and the time and place for th...

If any proof were wanting of how completely Madison had gone over to the opposition, he gave it in the memorable attack upon the secretary of the treasury in the spring of 1793,...

Madison was a Federalist until, unfortunately, he drifted into the opposition. He was swept away partly, perhaps, by the influence of personal friends, particularly of Jefferson...

Hamilton's famous report to the First Congress, as secretary of the treasury, was made at the second session in January, 1790. Near the close of the previous session a petition...

In May, 1811, there occurred one of those accidents which happen on purpose, and often serve as a relief when the public temper is in an exasperated and almost dangerous conditi...

Almost at the beginning of his second term, Jefferson found himself in troubled waters, as the United States was drawn slowly but surely into the vortex of European war. The car...

Genet was at last got rid of, but the evil that he did lived after him. His presence had provoked an outbreak, to some degree, of the phenomena of the French Revolution, which,...

Mr. Madison, in retiring for a time from public office, did not lose his interest in public affairs. Of few Americans can it be said with more truth that he had a genius for pol...

Madison had grown steadily in the estimation of his colleagues, as is shown, especially in 1783, by the frequency of his appointment upon important committees. He was a member o...

Mr. Jefferson named his own successor. Of the three Democratic candidates, Madison, Monroe, and George Clinton, he preferred Madison now, and urged Monroe to wait patiently as n...

The question with the North was, how far could it yield; with the South, how far could it encroach. It turned mainly on representation,--on "the unimportant anomaly," as Mr. Geo...

As the election of the same delegate to Congress for consecutive sessions was then forbidden by the law of Virginia, Mr. Madison was not returned to that body in 1784. For a bri...

James Madison was born on March 16, 1751, at Port Conway, Virginia; he died at Montpellier, in that State, on June 28, 1836. Mr. John Quincy Adams, recalling, perhaps, the death...

Madison's place, both from temperament and from want of physical vigor, was in the council, not in the field. One of his early biographers says that he joined a military company...

That the Annapolis Convention ever met to make smooth the way for the more important one which came together eight months afterward and framed a permanent Constitution for the U...

Madison's labors for the Constitution did not cease when the convention adjourned, although he was not at that moment in a hopeful frame of mind in regard to it. Within a week o...

On the morning of March 4, 1801, Mr. Jefferson tied his horse to the fence and walked alone into the Capitol to take the oath of office as President. Mr. Madison was not present...

In February, 1787, Madison again took a seat in Congress. It was an anxious period. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had assumed rather formidable possibilities, and seemed no...

Mr. Madison is called "the Father of the Constitution." A paper written by him was laid before his colleagues of Virginia, before the meeting of the Constitutional Convention at...