If George Washington was “the father of his country,” then, according to one of his contemporaries, James Madison was the “father of the Constitution.” Madison drafted the Constitution, set forth its philosophical foundations, maneuvered it through to ratification, and then wrote the Bill of Rights as a series of amendments to the document. Later he helped to set the system into motion as a Congressman, party leader, Secretary of State, and, finally, as President of the United States. No other member of the founding generation could lay claim to such an impressive list of accomplishments.

Strangely enough, Madison’s achievements were little appreciated through much of our history. Through the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries, he was brushed off as a secondary member of the founding generation. He labored for much of his career in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson. He appeared inconsistent, working successfully to strengthen national power in the 1780s but then teaming up with Jefferson in the 1790s to weaken it. He was modest to a fault, a virtue that may have led historians to underestimate his contributions to the early Republic. He refused to take credit for writing the Constitution, insisting always that it was “the work of many heads and many hands.” Madison’s presidency, in addition, was generally judged a failure, and he emerged from it with a reputation as a weak and indecisive leader, “a wizened applejack of a man,” in the words of the arch-Federalist Washington Irving. After the Civil