astonish him would be the fact that women are being educated at uva, and african-americans are being educated at uva, and students from all around the world are being educated at uva. and yet, there's still a great deal about his original vision that has survived. and i think that is probably as astonishing as anything. >> behind me are statues of the third, fourth and fifth presidents of the united states. thomas jefferson, james madison and james monroe. up next, we speak with author michael signer on the fourth president of the united states, james madison and how his early years shaped him as a president. president. >> a story on irving brandt, the greatest interpreter, the greatest biographer of madison gave a quote of all the

founding fathers, james madison was the one who did the most and known the least. the thing that's frustrating, but fascinating about james madison was he was incredibly impactful individual over our history over the world, but because he was private and because he was introverted and because of some other aspects, he was 5-4, 100 pounds, he had these anxiety attacks, that i chronicled in the book, he has not exerted the same gravitational force field on people that thomas jefferson or alexander hamilton, some of the more charismatic, larger than life figures have had. that's the reason to write the book that plunged really deep into his youth and his coming of age to try and figure out, how do we know this guy and motivate him. and what motivated him to have such an impact on the country and the world. james madison was from right here where we're standing here, which is orange county, which is in the heart of virginia.

it's about half an hour north of charlottesville. he grew up in this house, which is right behind us, which is changed over the years and they've brought it now closer back to what it was. when he was a very young boy, he was raised overthere in another much more primitive kind of development before his father built this brick house, which was a big deal. madison was the son of definitely a privileged family on here. his father was a planter. he grew up kind of in the elite gen tri of families. he had the experience of the oldest brother. he had a demanding and unconventional father who raised him here and a mother who was very warm, maybe a little bit anxious as some of the studies and i write about in the book. and so he was the eldest son of

a premier family in virginia at that time and he was-- he enjoyed all the benefits and also the burdens that came with that. he was sent away to an elite boarding school when he was young, through his early teens. he was sent out of the state to go to college as a college of new jersey, the eldest born and someone the family invested in which later became princeton and that was an unusual choice because it was not william and mary which is where most of the families sent their kids who were in this social class. it was know not an anglican college, it was presbyterian one and that carried a lot with that choice. and his father brought him back after graduating from college, to be a tutor to his youngest siblings here and he didn't want to do that. but it was sort of the cost of being the eldest son, the bearer of all of this privilege

was that he came back and was kind of, you know, forced by his father to apply all of that learning and investment right back here in pontiac county when he thought it would be much more exciting to be in philadelphia, kind of, you know, being in the cities of the country and he ultimately made it back there. but orange county is where we really understand who he was and how it came to be. one of the battles of his life, what was he going to be and do for a living basically. what he was really good at was legislating and understanding problems, researching them, coming up with a solution and an approach to really crucial public policy problems, that everybody else couldn't understand or couldn't figure out how to translate in some kind of solution in politics. that's what he was good at. but he, because of the example of his father, because he inherited a plantation he had to run, he had a very difficult time ever settling on vocation that was outside of government

and public service. he had a terrible time becoming a lawyer. a lot of the book, i chronicled the difficulties i had being a successful plantation operator and farmer. and he was becoming a lawyer which is what he felt like he needed to do and there were these really funny passages he's complaining about just how boring and difficult and intense the study of law is at this time. he never really managed to do it in the right way. he only got an honorary degree in the law and he would sit here in this house in the library just battling it out with the law books and miserable in the process and vocally miserable about it. so, he-- it was a constant struggle how he was going to make a living outside of what his passion was. he had a fit of anxious depression when he came back. he had these psychological challenges, which i think in the-- i argue in the book and i do a lot of research that he had in

the category of anxiety disorder that cause him to have the fits and theseattacks where he would basically collapse and be out of commission for a couple of days. so, he's back here after college, tutoring and he-- a couple of causes kind of took him over. one of them was the harassment that baptists were experiencing at this time in virginia. their were effect kind of, they-- at this time he needed a license to preach and they didn't do that and just north of here, in a county called culpepper, a city called culpepper, they were imprisoned and harassed by the ruling, you know, state religion, and he was very taken with that cause, the religious independence, religious intoleration, what it meant to cast your lot with an underdog and there are some

accounts that he traveled up there and saw what was happening. he took this on as a cause. that's when i think the political itch, they used public policy to express a conviction and a president clinton and to actu-- and to engage in the government and he talked about it that way. pretty soon afterward he became a member from orange county to the constitutional convention that did the first-- this is after the declaration of independence, they needed to come up with a constitution so he was involved in that. he became a counsellor to the governor. governor patrick henry, as a very young man, in his mid 20's. so, he achieved a position in the official post revolutionary government of virginia when he was in his 20's and that's when he started his career. his conviction on issues ran the gamut of basically every

public policy issue the country was dealing with, especially at this young age. when he was a young aide to governor patrick henry, he became absolutely obsessed with the problem of military supplies. so this was a very difficult question at the time because the state was figuring out how to supply a federal, sort of part federal and part state armed forces that was fighting great britain and the revolutionary war which dragged on forever and ever. one of the problems was, how do you equip and supply the troops when the dollars that they're using are-- there were like five different kinds of money at the time and they were all incredibly inflated and it's difficult to find the food and the drink and the supplies needed. and you needed people in go of the actually trying to work that problem and he carried that through to when he went to congress. for instance, when he came back to virginia as a delegate after having been in congress. he got fascinated by the

problem of overhauling virginia's state code, so it didn't have all of these medieval punishments and it's like capital punishments for all kind of random things. the fact there wasn't a lt. governor. he through himself into virginia law, for instance, those are much less sexy and famous examples of what he did that became very famous like religious independence. the freedom of religion, separation of powers and the sign of our government. by camera legislature, the design. presidency. he was instrumental in shaping the federal judiciary. independently appointed very statesman-like federal judiciary. so, there were all of those issues were what he contributed to in the design of the country, but there were dozens of others that he also mastered and led on. one of the grains of the book. the thing that planted the seeds for what became the book was this discovery i made when

i was looking through the minutes of the ratifying convention that happened in richmond in 1788, the year after the constitutional mention in philadelphia. all the state's conventions to ratify the constitution. and madison and his former boss and this major figure in virginia politics, patrick-ry, the governor they faced off against each other for three weeks. madison's leader of the federalists, henry is trying to tear down the constitution. madison during that time. had two anxiety attacks, they were called epilepsy attacks that caused hip to be removed. he had to go out and stay in his boarding house and suffer. he described it as suffering. i think he experienced it as incredibly daunting and difficult, this, the pressure of having the whole country on his shoulders, on his narrow little 5 foot 4 soldiers. i think that most of the time when he engaged in real intense

public battles about something, it was not easy for him because he was an introvert. he was-- it wasn't, it didn't come naturally to become the leader of a nation under people. i think his leadership came from the necessity and the gifts that he had and his understanding that he needed to solve things through department of the and politics and public service and public policies and the way you did that was by having to do this. and so, it was a necessity, and he mastered it by dint of will and unlikely charisma and relationships and warmth and passion and conviction. it was a more tortured, overcoming of obstacles for him than it was for somebody who was, you know, who had a grace and an ease about being in public or, you know, george washington, like a classic example of somebody who was at

ease of being in leader of the nation or the people. there was a charisma in that. that wasn't what madison experienced at all and sometimes it crippled him. he's the least likely person to get involved in politics that you possibly could have thought of. there was a wonderful friend, a warm friend of his named elizabeth who ran the boarding house he was at in philadelphia and one time when thomas jefferson said he should come back and he should run for governor of virginia and he's the guy. she said it's a great idea, but he'd never handle a torrent of abuses in public life. he's too sensitive. the fact that somebody like that, closest friend said politics is the last thing he should do, the fact he did it anyway because of how deeply he felt the need to address these problems and have something live, even it it was him. we said it's got to be somebody, might as well be him. they knew he knew what he was

talking about, he cared about what he was talking about and figured out an ena probably better than the rest had done and he was throwing himself into the ring to figure out the solution for it. the presidency came out of the kind of chain of succession and the relationships that he had and the fact that he had been secretary of state when he shifted into the executive, when he became the president of the united states, deficiencies that he had were more on display. so it was harder for him to give confident to the nation during the war of 1812 and he was criticized for that. and that's one thing he saw with his staffing decisions, cabinet members he had, ones involved in prosecuting the war, the signal and image he presented to the country didn't meet the moment and that's one of the reasons i think his image suffered over the decades. he very much met the moment

when the country needed to design its foundation and what he it needed to craft the compromises and the structure that were going to link the states to a much stronger federal government to create the difference that the whole machine thats with a going to guide the country and that's how he talked about his life. one of the initial pieces of research was looking at the many different drafts and memoirs as he got older and older and refining the short autobiography, it was like 20 pages. he almost focused the retrospective on events that happened until he was 37 and he would pay barely any attention to when he was president or secretary of state. and i think it's because he saw his life's work in the distribution to the world as having been writing and enacting the constitution and not so much, you know, conducting the war, the

country, the chief executive. there's a scene in the constitutional mention, in the 1820's when madison is in his old age when he appears and he's been president, secretary of state, and father of the constitution, and he takes on some unpopular difficult causes then, like giving african-americans the rights of representation and the design of-- in the county of population for districts. and the scene of people kind of quieting and hushing and drawing around him so they can hear what he's saying, it's totally different from, you know, like daniel webster standing up in front of people and being blown away by the powerful oratory. but it was the quietness and the element of being magnetically pulled towards the depths of what he was saying, that conviction, the fact that

he knew what he was talking about, that i think explains why people were so drawn to him. i do not think that history has given the right credit to james madison. i wrote the book basically about statesmanship. you see it in the way they talk about the federal judiciary, about the united states senate and talks about regular citizens. theres supposed to be challenging of public opinion. there's supposed to be research and knowledge, supposed to be alliances and compromises and debate and deliberation, all of which go toward pushing to a higher plain and not just to the lowest common enominator. we would not be here except for his statesmanship at any number of crucial junctures that we had. whether it was freedom of religious or getting the constitution passed. we needed someone doing what he did. the fact that we don't think about it muchtoday i think is