Let's Talk About the Presidents- James Madison

James Madison

Personal opinion based ranking (1 meaning burn the man, 5 being complete indifference, 10 being still awful but could be a lot worse): 

5. I don’t particularly like Madison, and I honestly couldn’t be bothered with him. He was historically uninteresting and the things that are somewhat interesting aren’t generally good. He viewed other races as lesser and therefore was one of the reasons white people were the only ones given rights in the original constitution. I don’t know about you, but that’s a deal breaker for me, . He was close friends with Thomas Jefferson too, so that doesn’t help his case.

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Background, context, and commentary:
Madison was born to a wealthy planter in Port Conway, Virginia. He was the oldest of twelve and ensured the best education by his wealthy and politically active parents. He got sick a lot as a child but still was one of seven of his siblings that survived to adulthood. He went to what is known today as Princeton and later became an influential political leader of the time. 

While politically active, he became close friends with Thomas Jefferson and was the Secretary of State while Jefferson was president. He was well known for helping with many of Jefferson’s political projects as well. He is known now as the “Father of the Constitution” and was one of the writers for the Federalist Papers and the Bill of Rights. 
Five interesting facts about James Madison

1.His wife was more interesting than he was
He married a widow by the name of Dolley Payne Todd who was seventeen years younger than him. She was well known in politics at the time as she was very involved with politics. This was before the idea of the first lady being an important figure, so she was considered extraordinary for her time. 

2. Like Washington, he didn’t have any biological children
Madison never had any biological children, but he was the stepfather to his wife’s son from her previous marriage and was known to have raised him like it was his own kid.

3.Both his vice presidents died while in office
The first, George Clinton, died three years into the presidential term. The second one was Elbridge Gerry who died only two years later in 1814. 
4.His face was on the the $5,000 bill 
Even though it was discontinued in 1945, he did appear on the $5,000 bill for a while. It might be nice if someone wanted to slip me a James Madison or two to help me pay off my student loans.

5.He didn’t do much
I’m not referring to his career; I think we all know that isn’t true. However, as far as his personal life is concerned, he didn’t do much at all. His hobbies were limited to things like chess and learning languages. This may seem normal, but when you look to the hobbies of former presidents he had quite a boring, short list. 

Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading about how screwed up our history was and please join me next week to do the same with our next president: James Monroe. If I made any errors or there is something I missed please let me know. I have far too much presidential knowledge in my head so everything that you read were things that I already had floating around.

Author

Madelyn Rogers. Madelyn is the opinions director of the Weekly Cad.