after trump" with publisher steve kaplan. on sunday at 9 p.m. on "after words," the american enterprise institute's john fortier with his book, "after the people vote." he's interviewed by author and former editor-in-chief of the texas relief of law and politics, tara ross. then at 10:55 p.m. eastern, author janice devoar with "the are doctors blackwell." watch booktv this weekend on c-span2. ♪ ♪ enter james madison overcame several obstacles to become one of america's founding fathers and its fourth president. michael signer shares the story in his book, "becoming madison: the extraordinary origins of the least likely founding father."

>> historian the irving grant who was kind of the greatest interpreter, greatest biographer of madison, he gave this quote that out of all the founding fathers, james madison was the one who did the most but is known the least. the thing that is frustrating but fascinating about james madison was he was this incredibly impactful individual over our history, over world history. but because he was private and because he was introverted and because of some other aspects -- he was 5-4, he was 100 pounds, he was having anxiety attacks that i chronicle in the book -- he has not exerted the same gravitational force field on people that thomas jefferson and alexander hamilton, some of these more charismatic, larger than life figures have. that, to me, was the reason to write a book that plunged really deep into his youth and his coming of age to try and figure out how do we know this guy, how

do we understand what motivated him and also 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 has changed over the years. they've brought it, now, closer to what it was. when he was a very young guy, he was raised over there 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. his father was a planter. he grew up kind of in the elite gentry of virginia families. he was the oldest of several siblings, so he had the experience of being an oldest brother. he had a very demanding and up

conventional father who raised him here and a mother who was very warm, maybe a little bit anxious as some of the studies 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 but also all the burdens that came with that. is so he was sent away to an elite boarding school when he was, when he was young, his early teens. he was sent out of the state to go to college at the college of new jersey. as kind of the eldest born and somebody that his family really invested in which later became princeton, and that was an unusual choice because it was not william and mary which is where most parents at that time sent their kids who were in the social class. it was not an angry can college -- anglican college, it was a 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

sibling ares here. siblings here. and he didn't want to do that. but it was sort of the cost of being the eldest son, the bear of all this 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 to be in philadelphia, kind of, you know, being in the cities of the country. he ultimately made it back there. but orange county is where you really understand who he was and how he came to be. in one of the battles of his life, what was he going to be and what was he going to do for a loving, 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 into some kind of solution in politics.

that was what he was good at. but he, because of the example of his father, because he inherited a plantation he had had had the run, he had a very difficult time ever settling on a vocation that was outside of government and public service. he had a terrible time becoming a lawyer. a lot of the book i chronicle the difficulties he had being a successful plantation operator and farmer. he had an equally harder time becoming a lawyer which is 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 that 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 these law books and miserable, in the process very vocally miserable about it. so 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. he had these psychological challenges which i think, you know, i argue in the book and i do a lot of research that he had a category of anxiety disorder that caused him to have these fits and these attacks where he would basically collapse and be out of commission for a couple 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 -- [inaudible] were experiencing at the time in virginia. baptists kind of, you know, they 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 state rebigs. and he was very taken with that cause, religious independence, religious toleration, what it meant to cast your lot with an underdog. and he, there's some accounts that he traveled up there and saw what was happening, but he took this on as a cause. that was when i think the political itch to use public policy to express a conviction and a principle and to actually engage in questions of governance and public service really hit him. and he talked about a it that way. pretty soon afterwards 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 involvedded in that. he became a counselor to the governor, above patrick henry, as -- governor patrick henry, as a very young man. he was in his mid 20s. so he achieved a position,

official post in the revolutionary government of virginia when he was in his 20s. and service 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 very young age. when he was a young aide to governor patrick henry, he was, he became absolutely obsessed with the problem of military supplies. so this was a very difficult question at the time because the fate was figuring out how to supply a federal, a sort of part federal, part state armed forces that was fighting great britain in the revolutionary war which dragged on forever and ever. and 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 this time, and they were all incredibly inflated, so it was difficult to find the food and drink and supplies the troops needed.

and you needed people in government actually trying to work that problem. and he carried that through for when he went to congress. for instance, when he came back to virginia as a delegate after having been in congress, he got fascinate by the problem of overhauling virginia's state codes that didn't have all these medieval punishments in it like capital punishment for all kinds of random things or the fact there wasn't a lieutenant governor. so he kind of threw himself into overhauling the virginia law, for instance. those are much less sexy and famous examples of what he did. he became very famous with religious independence, separation of powers and the design of our government, bicameral legislature, the design of the presidency. he was instrumental i shaping the federal judiciary, an independently-appointed, you know, states and federal judiciary. so, you know, there -- all of 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, 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, so it was the year after the constitutional cop venn in philadelphia -- convention in philadelphia. all the states held conventions to ratify the constitution, and madison and his former boss and this major figure or in virginia politics, patrick henry, who'd been the governor, they faced off against each other for three weeks. madison was the leader of the anti-federalists, henry was trying to tear down the constitution. madison during that time had two anxiety attacks. they were called epilepsy attacks. it caused him to be removed. he had to take himself out and stay in his boarding house for days at a time suffering. and he described the suffering. and i think it was because he experienced an incredibly

daunting and difficult, this, the pressure of having the whole country on his shoulders, on his narrow little 5-4 shoulders. i think that most of the time when he engaged in real intelligence public battles -- intense public ballots on something, it was not easy for him because he was an introvert, he was -- it wasn't, it didn't come naturally to be the leader of a nation. i think his leadership came from the necessity of the gifts that he had and his understanding that he needed to solve things, government and politics and public policy, and the way you did that was by having to deal with this. so it was a necessity, and he mastered it by dent of will and charisma he had and the relationships and his warmth and passion and conviction. but it was always, it was a more tortured overcoming of obstacles for him than it was for somebody

who, you know, who had a grace and an ease about being in public or, you know, george washington, the classic example of somebody who's very at ease being a leader of a nation or of a people. and there was a charisma in that. that wasn't what madison's experience was like at all, and sometimes it got -- you know, crippled him. he was like the least likely person to get in politics that you could possibly have thought of. there was a wonderful friend if, warm friend of his named elizabeth who ran the boarding house he was at in the philadelphia, and there was this one time when thomas jefferson said he should come back and run for governor of virginia. he's the guy. and she said it's a great idea, but he said she could -- she said he could never handle, she called it the torrent of abuses he would experience in public life. he was too sensitive. so the fact that somebody like that, his closest friend said politics is the last thing he should to -- [laughter] the fact he did it any because

of how deeply he melt to address -- he felt to address these problems. i might as well do it. it was the conviction that powered him through and that, i think, drew so many other people to him because they knew what he was talking about, that he cared what he was talking about and that he had figured out an answer that was probably better than what a lot of the rest of them 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, the deficiencies that he had were more on display. so it was harder for him to give confidence to the nation during the war of 1812. and he was criticized for that. and that was one of the things you saw even with his staffing decisions, with the cabinet members heed had, the ones involved with prosecuting the war. the signals and the image that he presented to the country

didn't really meet the moment, and that's one of the reasons that he, i think that his image suffered over the decades. finish -- he very much met the moment when the country needed to design its foundation and what it needed to craft the compromises and the structure that were going to link the statements all together into a much stronger federal government, that were going to create the whole machine that was going to guyed 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. he kept on refining this very short autobiography. it was, like, 20 pagings. and 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 pay barely any attention to when he was president or secretary of state. and i think it was because he saw his life's work, his

contribution to the world as having been writing and enacting the constitution and not so much, you know, conducting the wars, you know, the country as chief executive. there's a scene in the constitutional convention in the 1820s 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 very unpopular, difficult causes then like giving african-americans the right -- representation and 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'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. it was that quietness and the element of being, of being magnetically pulled toward the depths of what he was saying and 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 jamessed madison. i wrote the -- james madison. i wrote the book basically about statesmanship. you see it in the way he talks about the judiciary, in the way that he talks about the united states senate, in the way he talks about regular citizens. they're suppose to be challenging public opinions, there's supposed to be research and knowledge, there's supposed to be alliances and compromises and debate and deliberation, all of which go toward pushing to a higher plane and not just going to the lowest common denominator and not just playing to what makes people feel for. we would not be here but for his statesmanship at any number of

crucial junctures that we had whether it was freedom of religion or getting the constitution itself passed. we needed somebody doing what he did, and the fact that we don't think about it much today, i think, is the problem. >> booktv on c-span2 starts now, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. television for serious readers. .. profiles the blackwell sisters. the first to receive medical in the united states. also this we can enter program "after words", of the american enterprise institute pvi