Word: madison
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From 1789 to 1797, Madison served in the House of Representatives that he had helped set up, found time to marry a buxom widow named Dolley Todd, and, with honors enough for any bookish man, retired to Virginia to lead the life of a gentleman farmer. But when Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801, he summoned his good friend Madison to become his Secretary of State. And before Jefferson left the presidency in 1809, he successfully named Madison as his successor...
Whisper & Torch. The sixth and final volume of Irving Brant's massive biography begins as Madison is leading the U.S. into the War of 1812. In the five previous volumes, Brant argued energetically and effectively that Madison was the forgotten Founding Father, a man dehumanized by historians because of his "intellectual powers, his Addisonian style of political writing and his concentration on public affairs." As proof that he had a more human side, Brant even dug up some mildly salacious poems that Madison had written at Princeton. In his present volume, Brant claims that Madison was also a strong...
...Madison fought the war mainly to stop British harassing of U.S. shipping. British men-of-war were keeping U.S. ships out of European ports and halting them on the high seas to impress U.S. sailors into the British navy. Madison never did succeed in rallying the nation behind the war. Merchants traded with the enemy throughout the war. Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were so opposed to "Mr. Madison's War" that there was open talk of secession. Madison had no control over Congress, tolerated incompetent subordinates in his Cabinet. A whispering campaign was launched suggesting that...
Brant concedes all this. In rebuttal, he argues that Madison deserved credit for the victory because he pushed through the construction of the heavily armored ships that won the battles on the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, and backed the rise of young generals such as Winfield Scott, who finally stopped the British armies. Brant blames historians' low opinion of Madison as President on a failure to appreciate his "quiet methods" and "an underestimate of the titanic difficulties heaped on him by the refusal of New England to take part...
Where's Jemmy? Brant began his spirited defense of Madison in 1938 while he was working as an editorial writer for the now defunct St. Louis Star-Times. The biography soon came to take so much of his time that Brant gave up his journalistic career. "If anyone had told me in 1938 that I would be working on Madison for 23 years, I would have been appalled," says Brant, now a spry, white-thatched 76. "I should never have started...