James Madison by Richard Brookhiser

This is not really a full throated biography.  We learn little of Madison's upbringing, and only the sparest of details about his relationships with his siblings, parents, or even with his famous wife Dolley.  Given the definitive-for-their-time and exhaustive-as-can-be-managed-in-one-volume biographies we've recently received for Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson (as well as several recent books on Franklin) Madison is obviously due for such treatment, and, as it is now his turn, there is no doubt some famous author is busily researching and scribbling away on such a project right now, for inclusion on some publisher's future Father's Day list.

In the meantime, this will do.  And this is a political biography.  Brookhiser argues that Madison is not only the father of our Constitution but the father of our politics as well.  His admiration for his subject rests in his admiration for Madison's political achievements: as a formidable advocate of religious liberty, as the moving force behind the creation of our Constitution and of its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, and as a leading partner, with Jefferson, in establishing the Virginia Dynasty in our presidential politics.  That's where Brookhiser's interests lie, and that's what he focuses on. 

This focus is helpful, and provident, as Madison's ideas obviously still matter a great deal.  By giving us just a brief narrative background of Madison's early years and family life, Brookhiser is able to slow down and start giving more detail when Madison's life gets to what Brookhiser obviously considers "the good parts."  These would be the political battles in which Madison framed and defended and won acceptance for the ideas and ideals which are still being argued about today.  Rather than be bothered by what some have referred to as the "James Madison Problem" of Madison's inconsistency on some political issues (especially States' rights vs. the strength of the National government, which seemed to vary depending on which office Madison was holding at any given time), Brookhiser argues that no life lived as long in the political arena as Madison's, should be expected to live up to some ethereal ideal of clean and virtuous consistency.  Indeed, Brookhiser encourages us not only to admire Madison's genius for winning and accomplishing that which he wished to accomplish politically, but to also admire, rather than hold our noses, at the muck and tumble and sometimes dirty politics that was necessarily involved.

And it must be said, Madison was consistent in many of the areas where it counted most: especially in standing up for religious liberty, and in the fight to preserve the Constitution as creating a limited national government of enumerated powers.  If he sometimes went too far on this latter point, and, through his and Jefferson's "nullification" schemes set the ideological and intellectual precedents for secession and Civil War, he can surely be forgiven by our generation, which has seen our leaders go far too far in the opposite direction, allowing the Federal Government to become a true behemoth with far more reach into our individual lives than any of the founders, likely even Hamilton, would have approved.  We could use a little Madison around here these days.  Essential reading.