James Madison

James Madison by Richard Brookhiser

Tier 4

When I started this project, I was full of vigor, like we so often are at the beginning of a new endeavor. I was ready to climb metaphorical mountains and conquer the knowledge of US Presidential history. I wouldn’t take any shortcuts, and I’d lean into the hard work ahead of me.

And at first, it went brilliantly. The Washington and Adams biographies were excellent, and the Jefferson one was informative, if not exactly what I wanted. I was still going strong, still prepared to dive head-first into the breach.

Then I looked at my prospective list of biographies and became discouraged. Even listening to these books while I cooked and cleaned and went to the gym, I began to worry about how long this project would take me. Naturally, this was a terrible way to view this. I had no time constraints. If it took a year or ten, it didn’t matter. But I’m human, and I decided, with James Madison, to take the easy road.

There’s a different biography of him by Noh Feldman that’s 34 hours long. It is, by all accounts, excellent. Comprehensive and exhaustive. It breaks Madison’s life into three separate spheres and dissects each with careful consideration.

But a few years ago, when I was undertaking this project, I didn’t choose to listen to that book. Instead, I picked Richard Brookhiser’s biography, which clocks in at a digestible 10 hours and 10 minutes. If you speed that up, it’s a workday. I told myself that I already knew a great deal about Madison. He was featured in all three of my previous biographies and extensively covered in the Jefferson one. I decided I didn’t need to exhaust the subject further.

I genuinely regret this decision.

Sometimes I have found myself knee-deep in a book I didn’t want to finish. I’ve been reading or listening, wondering why I cared about the subject but unwilling to cut bait and give up. This book was much the opposite.

It is short. Much too short. And where Meacham’s book on Jefferson is efficient and novelistic, this one to me was just brief. It seemed to feel either that its subject wasn’t exciting or charismatic enough to carry a longer text, or it just didn’t want to get into the weeds. Either is a failing, in my opinion.

Yes, some biographers are gifted with brilliant subjects. For example, writing a boring biography about Teddy Roosevelt would be nearly impossible. And Madison was far from Roosevelt. But we still have the time and the events he imprinted himself on. I think of how Chernow covers many of these same events (in both his Washington and Hamilton biographies), and I can’t help but feel that Brookhiser left a lot of meat on the proverbial bone.

As for Madison, he was the father of the constitution and, according to Brookhiser, the primary catalyst for the party system that has defined our nation’s political history. These two things could have shaped our young nation as much as any.

The Constitution, for better and worse, is practically a religious text at this point. Its initial intention has been wholly obscured over centuries of mythologizing. And no single person had a more significant part in shaping it than Madison. He was there at every step, wrote vast portions of it, and fought for its adoption.

He and Jefferson formed the Democratic-Republican Party, which inaugurated our nearly inescapable two-party political system. I get the impression that he became the face of this partisan politics largely to obscure the role his mentor and idol, Jefferson, played in it. He became a fierce adversary of his former Federalist Paper collaborate Hamilton and, in the end, emerged the victor from that contentious period.

As he grew in stature, his politics shifted. Where the first three presidents were seen to be immovable in their principles (even though this was never truly the case), Madison was malleable. In the 1790s, while fighting with Hamilton over seemingly everything, Madison opposed the national bank, a strong navy, and direct taxes. But once president, he changed his tune.

Is this a good quality? What do we want in our politicians? Would we rather have Adams’ stubborn intractability? Or Madison’s fluidity?

As with everything, it's situational. Madison was right to support those policies. The utopian ideals Jefferson claimed to hold dear needed to be more practical. A strong union was essential in maintaining the grand experiment of the early United States.

That experiment was most seriously tested during Madison’s presidency with the War of 1812. Many historians argue that this was an entirely preventable war handled poorly by a miscast president. He was obsessed with using trade as a pseudo-military lever, and it wasn’t often an effective strategy.

Madison was the right person at the right time. He was hard-working, affable, and clever. He saw changing political tides and shifted accordingly. He tied himself first to Washington and Hamilton, then later to Jefferson. He wasn’t a man to chart his own path, but a young nation still needs figures like Madison.

Like many presidents, he became obsessed with his legacy in his later years. He rewrote personal documents (even potentially forging Jefferson’s handwriting) to put his accomplishments and decisions in a more favorable light. Yet, despite these efforts, he’s a lesser founding father and a below-average president.

As I alluded to before, this was also a below-average biography. It didn’t quite hit my lowest rating, but it wasn’t far off. Whether someone is a good or bad president doesn’t impact the ability to write a good biography on them. Later in this series, we’ll see that in great clarity. There are presidents I despise who have lovely biographies.

Madison wasn’t a great orator and didn’t inspire the type of love or devotion that Washington or Jefferson did, but his life was certainly interesting. He was a founding father who presided as president over our first national war. He expanded the nation and served alongside Hamilton and Jefferson (two fascinating figures). He wrote much of the Constitution and had complex, contradictory opinions on slavery.

And yet, with all that material to work with, Brookhiser’s book manages to be dull. It was short but felt longer than Chernow’s book on Washington. It dragged, despite being a mere ten hours long. I’m sorry to be harsh, but I need to be honest. Skip this book. After the series, I’ll listen to Feldman’s biography and tell you what I think. I have to imagine it was better than this.

As always, if you know someone who might like this, please tell them about my substack, website, or both. It would be a great help to me. Thanks for reading!