Read James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780

James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780

Irving Brant

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Description:No biography of the great fourth President of the United States has hitherto been written in the modern scientific method. Irving Brant was moved to undertake it as a result of his studies for Storm Over the Constitution. After three years of wide and intensive research, the results are now seen in the first volume of a projected three-volume work.Madison is carried in this volume from his birth in 1751 to his entrance into the federal Congress in 1780. These were his formative years, and also the formative years of the nation. They were his years of youth and zeal in a period when young men were shaping American destiny. So they possess a peculiar interest and importance.After tracing Madison's ancestry with little sympathy for those who try to build American "peerages," Mr. Brant describes his boyhood on the Montpelier estate in the Virginia Piedmont. A tie to the soil, a sense of responsibility for the family slaves, a fear of Indian uprisings, were bred in him during these plantation days. With all this was the frontier touch that intensified his revolutionary spirit and gave him a vision of a growing nation.In this book Madison's education comes to light and to life. That profound Scotch scholar, Donald Robertson, takes his rightful place in Madison's schooling. Princeton, which Madison chose over William and Mary because of its opposition to a state church, is here revealed as a source from which came patriotic ardor, devotion to religious freedom which Madison was to establish as a fundamental tenet of the new republic, and his deep grounding in public law. Here under President Witherspoon he drove relentlessly forward in scholarship; and in the recently organized American Whig Society, vied with Philip Freneau in writing satires, pointed by pornographic wit, against members of the rival Cliosophic Society. Earlier biographers' ignorance or suppression of these off-color verses helps to account for the false picture of Madison as one who "never said or did an indiscreet thing."In a postgraduate half-year at Princeton and three years at home studying political economy and divinity and tutoring younger brothers and sisters, Madison was afflicted by a mysterious illness. By a process of deduction as ingenious and conclusive as Sherlock Holmes's, Mr. Brant for the first time diagnoses that sickness.The beginnings of Revolutionary activity were showing themselves in Virginia. There were calls for a general congress. Madison, in sympathy with the radical group, favored an embargo against England and strong measures to enforce it. With a great majority of his fellow countrymen in a period when Congress was "the idol of America," he thought in terms of American unity and placed the sovereignty of a united continent above that of individual states.Mr. Brant does a thorough job of demolishing Van Tyne and other notable historians who have contended that the idea of Continental sovereignty arose only with the Constitutional Convention. This emerges as the central theme of his first volume, not as an opinion but documented with overwhelming proof in the words and works of Madison and his associates.Following his activities as a country committeeman enforcing the Continental Association, Madison was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776. Still young, shy, modest but of firm opinions cogently expressed in private conversations, he watched the launching of the independence movement and took active part in drawing a Declaration of Rights. From him came the distinctive provisions of the article on religious freedom, later to be embodied in the Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution. Here he came to know Patrick Henry and George Mason, who bulked large in his career; and in the first Virginia legislature he was to make friends with Thomas Jefferson, the great abiding influence, with whom he worked for laws that would broaden religious liberty and break the grip of aristocracy.Defeated for the legislature in 1777 because he would not furnish whisky to the voters, he was chosen only a few months later a member of the Council of State, the cumbrous eight-headed executive designed to curb the Governor (Patrick Henry). To it was entrusted the critical task of carrying on the war, and Madison found work made to his hand⁠—providing food for the army, coping with depreciation of the currency, aiding Henry with the conquest of the Mississippi Valley.In December 1779 Madison, not yet thirty, was elected to Congress. The book leaves him departing for the national scene, where he was to become so great an architect of its institutions and its fortunes, It leaves the reader with an understanding of that scene and a sure foreknowledge of Madison's place in it.Everywhere the author shows complete grasp of subject and background. Letters, documents, newspapers, books⁠—all primary sources⁠—have been directly drawn on. Mr. Brant with gusto goes into the controvers...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780. To get started finding James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 471

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Release: 1941

ISBN

Description: No biography of the great fourth President of the United States has hitherto been written in the modern scientific method. Irving Brant was moved to undertake it as a result of his studies for Storm Over the Constitution. After three years of wide and intensive research, the results are now seen in the first volume of a projected three-volume work.Madison is carried in this volume from his birth in 1751 to his entrance into the federal Congress in 1780. These were his formative years, and also the formative years of the nation. They were his years of youth and zeal in a period when young men were shaping American destiny. So they possess a peculiar interest and importance.After tracing Madison's ancestry with little sympathy for those who try to build American "peerages," Mr. Brant describes his boyhood on the Montpelier estate in the Virginia Piedmont. A tie to the soil, a sense of responsibility for the family slaves, a fear of Indian uprisings, were bred in him during these plantation days. With all this was the frontier touch that intensified his revolutionary spirit and gave him a vision of a growing nation.In this book Madison's education comes to light and to life. That profound Scotch scholar, Donald Robertson, takes his rightful place in Madison's schooling. Princeton, which Madison chose over William and Mary because of its opposition to a state church, is here revealed as a source from which came patriotic ardor, devotion to religious freedom which Madison was to establish as a fundamental tenet of the new republic, and his deep grounding in public law. Here under President Witherspoon he drove relentlessly forward in scholarship; and in the recently organized American Whig Society, vied with Philip Freneau in writing satires, pointed by pornographic wit, against members of the rival Cliosophic Society. Earlier biographers' ignorance or suppression of these off-color verses helps to account for the false picture of Madison as one who "never said or did an indiscreet thing."In a postgraduate half-year at Princeton and three years at home studying political economy and divinity and tutoring younger brothers and sisters, Madison was afflicted by a mysterious illness. By a process of deduction as ingenious and conclusive as Sherlock Holmes's, Mr. Brant for the first time diagnoses that sickness.The beginnings of Revolutionary activity were showing themselves in Virginia. There were calls for a general congress. Madison, in sympathy with the radical group, favored an embargo against England and strong measures to enforce it. With a great majority of his fellow countrymen in a period when Congress was "the idol of America," he thought in terms of American unity and placed the sovereignty of a united continent above that of individual states.Mr. Brant does a thorough job of demolishing Van Tyne and other notable historians who have contended that the idea of Continental sovereignty arose only with the Constitutional Convention. This emerges as the central theme of his first volume, not as an opinion but documented with overwhelming proof in the words and works of Madison and his associates.Following his activities as a country committeeman enforcing the Continental Association, Madison was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1776. Still young, shy, modest but of firm opinions cogently expressed in private conversations, he watched the launching of the independence movement and took active part in drawing a Declaration of Rights. From him came the distinctive provisions of the article on religious freedom, later to be embodied in the Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution. Here he came to know Patrick Henry and George Mason, who bulked large in his career; and in the first Virginia legislature he was to make friends with Thomas Jefferson, the great abiding influence, with whom he worked for laws that would broaden religious liberty and break the grip of aristocracy.Defeated for the legislature in 1777 because he would not furnish whisky to the voters, he was chosen only a few months later a member of the Council of State, the cumbrous eight-headed executive designed to curb the Governor (Patrick Henry). To it was entrusted the critical task of carrying on the war, and Madison found work made to his hand⁠—providing food for the army, coping with depreciation of the currency, aiding Henry with the conquest of the Mississippi Valley.In December 1779 Madison, not yet thirty, was elected to Congress. The book leaves him departing for the national scene, where he was to become so great an architect of its institutions and its fortunes, It leaves the reader with an understanding of that scene and a sure foreknowledge of Madison's place in it.Everywhere the author shows complete grasp of subject and background. Letters, documents, newspapers, books⁠—all primary sources⁠—have been directly drawn on. Mr. Brant with gusto goes into the controvers...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780. To get started finding James Madison: The Virginia Revolutionist, 1751-1780, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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