online at c-span .org or listen on the c-span radio app. >> james madison overcame several obstacles to become one of america's founding fathers and its fourth president. michael shares the story in his book becoming madison, the extraordinary origins of the least likely founding father. >> historian irving grant who is the greatest interpreter, greatest biographer of madison gave this quote that out of all the founding fathers james madison was the one who did the most but is known the least. this thing that is frustrating but fascinating about james madison was he was this incredibly impactful individual over our world history but because he was private and because he was introverted and because of other aspects he was 54, five had anxiety attacks

that a chronicle in the book and he has not exerted the same gravitational force shield on people that thomas jefferson and alexander hamilton and his more charismatic larger-than-life figures have. that to me was one of the reasons to write a book that plunged really deep into his youth and his coming of age to try to figure out how do we know this guy and how do we understand what motivated him and also what motivated him to have such an impact on the country in the world. james madison was from right here where we're standing here which is orange county which has been the heart of virginia in about half an hour north of charlottesville and he grew up in this house which is right behind us which is changed over the years and they brought no closer back to what it was. when he was a very young boy he was raised over there in another more primitive kind of

development before his father built this house which was a big deal. madison was the son of definitely privileged family. here his father was a planter and grew up kind of in the elite gentry of virginia families and was the oldest of several siblings so he brought into the world the experience of being an oldest brother and had a very demanding and unconventional father who raised him here and a mother who was very warm and may be a little anxious as some of the studies and i write about it in the book and so he was the eldest son of a premier family in virginia at that time and he enjoyed all the benefits and all the burdens that came with that so he was sent away to an elite boarding school when he was young through his early teens and was sent out of the state to go to college at the college of new jersey and was the eldest born and someone that his family

invested in which later became princeton and that was an unusual choice because it was not william and mary which was where most parents at that time sent their kids who are in the social class. it was not an anglican college so it was a presbyterian one and that carried carried a lot with it, that choice. his father brought him back after graduating college to be a tutor to his youngest siblings here and he did not want to do that. it was sort of the cost of being the eldest son, bearer of all the privilege was that he came back and was kind of, you know, forced by his father to apply all that learning and investment right back here in orange county when he thought it would be much more exciting in philadelphia being in the cities of the country and ultimately made it back there but orange county is where he really understand who he was and how he came to be. one of the battles of his life

was what was he going to be and what was he going to do for a living basically. what he was really good at was legislating and understand problems and researching them and coming up with a solution and an approach to really, crucial, public policy problems that everyone else cannot understand or cannot figure out how to translate into some solution in politics. that is what he was good at but because of the example of his father because he inherited a plantation that he had to run he had a very difficult time ever settling on a vocation that was outside of vermont public service. he had a terrible time becoming a lawyer and a lot of the book i chronicle the difficulties he had been a successful plantation operator and farmer and it equally harder times becoming a lawyer which was what he felt like he needed to do and there are these really funny passages where he's complaining about

just how boring and difficult and intense the study of law is at the time and never really managed to do it in the right way we only got an honorary degree and he would sit here in the house in a library battling it out with these law clerks and miserable in the process and very vocal and miserable. 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 depression of anxious depression when he came back and had the psychological challenges which i think or argue in the book and i do research that he had category of anxiety disorder that caused him to have these fits in these attacks with his basically collapse out of commission for a couple of days. he's back here after college tutoring and a couple causes to come over and one of them was

the harassment of the baptists that they were experiencing at this time in virginia and baptists were a sect of kind of they this time you needed a license to preach and they did not do that. just north of here in a county called culpeper or a city called culpeper they were imprisoned and harassed by the ruling state religion and he would very taken with that because, religious independence, religious toleration and what it meant to capture the underdog in there are some accounts he traveled up there and saw what was happening but he took this on as a cause and that was one, i think the political itch to use public policy to express a conviction and a possible and to actually engage in the questions of governance and public service. i think that's when it hit him and he talked about it that way.

pretty soon "after words" he became a member from orange county to the constitutional convention that did the first and this was after the declaration of independence and they needed to come up with the constitution so he was involved in that became a counselor to the governor, governor patrick henry as a young man in his mid- 20s so he achieved a position in the official post revolutionary government of virginia when he was in his mid- 20s and that was when he started his career. his conviction on issues ran the gamut of to basically every public policy issue that the country was dealing with, especially at a young age. when he was a young aide to governor patrick henry he was or became absolutely obsessed with the problem of military supplies so this was a very difficult question at the time because the state was figured out how to supply a federal, sort of part federal, part state armed forces

that was fighting great britain in the revolutionary war which drag on forever and ever am of the problems was how do you equip and supply the troops when the dollars they are using our they were like five different kinds of money at the time and they were all in credibly inflated so it was difficult to find food and drink and supplies that the troops needed and you needed people in government trying to work that problem and he carried that through two when he went to congress but for instance, when he came back to virginia as a delegate after having been in congress he got assassinated by the problem of overhauling virginia state code that did not have all these medieval punishments and it was capital punishment for all kinds of random things or the fact that there wasn't a lieutenant governor so he threw himself into overhauling the virginia law, for instance. those are much less sexy and famous examples than what he did

and he became very famous with religious independence and freedom of religion. or the separation of powers in the design of our government. bicameral legislator, the design of the presidency. he was instrumental in shaping the federal judiciary and independently appointed, you know, statesman federal judiciary so there were all those issues were what he really contributed to 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 and the thing that planted the seed 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 convention in philadelphia and all the states held conventions to ratify the constitution and madison in his former boss in this major figure in virginia politics, patrick henry, would be the governor they faced off

against each other for three weeks and madison was leader of the anti- federalist and henry was trying to tear down the constitution and madison during that time had to anxiety talks called epilepsy attacks that caused him to be removed and had to take himself out and go stay at his boardinghouse for days at a time suffering and described it as suffering. i think it was because he experienced incredibly daunting and difficult this pressure of having the whole country on his shoulders, his narrow little 5'4" shoulders. most of the time when he engaged in real intense public battle about something it was not easy for him because he was an introvert and was, it did not come naturally to be the leader of a nation and i think his leadership came from the necessity and the gifts he had and his understanding that he

needed to solve things through government politics and public service and public policies in the way you did that was by having to do what he did so it was a necessity and he mastered it by dint of will and this unlikely charisma he had and the relationships with warmth and his passion and conviction but it was always more tortured overcoming of obstacles for him that was for somebody who was, you know, who had a grace and ease about being in public or, you know, george washington would be the classic example of someone who was at ease being a leader of a nation or of a people and there was a charisma and that but that was not what madison's experience was like at all and sometimes it got or crippled him. he's the least likely person to get involved in politics. there was a wonderful friend, warm front of his named elizabeth trish to ran a boardinghouse in philadelphia

and there's this one time when thomas jefferson said he should come back and run for governor of virginia and he is the guy and she said that's a great idea but he could never handle, she said she called it the torrent of abuses he would experience in public life but he was too sensitive. so the fact that somebody like that, his closest friend, said politics was the last thing that he should do and the fact that he did it anyway because of how deeply he felt the need to address these problems and have someone even if it was him he was like it's got to be somebody and i might as well do it. it was this conviction that powered them through and i think through other people to him because they knew he was talking about and they cared what he was talking about and that he had figured out unanswered that it was better what the rest of them had done and throwing himself into the ring. the presidency came out of the kind of chain of succession and the relationships he had and the fact that he had been secretary

of state and when he shifted into the executive and when he became the president of the united states the deficiencies he had were more on this place it was him to give confidence to the nation during the war of 1812 and was criticized for that and that was one of the things you saw even with his staffing decisions with the cabinet members and when he was prosecuting the war and the signals and the image that he presented to the country did not meet the moment and that is one of the reasons that he, i think, his images suffered over the decades and very much meant the moment when the country needed the design its foundation and when it needed to craft the compromises and the structure that we will link the states altogether to do a much stronger federal government and create the new whole machine that would 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 of memoirs that he did as he got older and older. kept on refining this very short autobiography that was like 20 pages. he always focused almost all of his retrospective of his whole life on the events that happened up until he was 37 and he would barely pay attention to when he was president or secretary of state. i think it was because he saw his life's work in his contribution to the world as having been writing the constitution and not so much conducting the wars of the country as the chief executive. there is the scene in the constitutional 1820s when madison is in his old age when he appears and has been president and secretary of state and father of the constitution and he takes on some very unpopular difficult causes then. like giving african-americans the right to representation in

the design and the counting of population for districts and the scene of people kind of quieting and hushing and drawing around him so they can hear what he is saying, it's totally different from, you know, daniel webster standing up in front of people and being blown away by this powerful oratory but it was that quietness in the element of being magnetically pulled towards the depth of what he was saying and that conviction and 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. see it in the way he talks about the federal judiciary and about the senate and in the way he talks about regular citizens and there is supposed to be

challenging public opinion and research and knowledge and there is supposed to be alliances and compromises and debate and deliberation and all of which go towards pushing to a higher plane and not going to the lowest common denominator and not just applying what makes people feel good paired we would not be here but for his statesmanship at any number of crucial junctures that we had whether freedom of religion or getting the constitution itself past. we needed somebody doing what he did and the fact that we don't think about it much today i think is the problem. >> visit c-span's new online store at c-span shop .org to check out the new c-span products and with the 1117th congress in session which we are taking preorders for the congressional directory. every purchase help support c-span's nonprofit operation. shop today at