James Madison

Madison was born in 1751 in Orange County, Virginia, the eldest of a large planting family, and studied at the College of New Jersey, where he absorbed the Scottish philosophy that shaped his politics. Small and bookish, he became the most systematic thinker among the founders.

He came to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 with a plan for a strong national government and kept the fullest record of the debates. His Federalist essays, above all number ten, argued that a large republic could control the mischief of faction better than a small one, and in the first Congress he drafted the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.

With Jefferson he founded the Democratic-Republican party in opposition to Hamilton's program, and he served as Jefferson's secretary of state before becoming president in 1809. His administration led the country into the War of 1812. He died at Montpelier in 1836, the last of the founding generation.

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