Young James Madison wasn’t exactly sociable when his Taylor cousins spent a week at Montpelier in March 1786. Francis Taylor wrote in his diary that “Col Madison Jr while we were here, came to breakfast of which he eat sparingly, and then would go to his room till a little before dinner.” Madison, however, had good reason to be preoccupied. He was about to change the world.

If Taylor had barged in on Madison, he would have found his cousin absorbed in two trunks of books, recently shipped from France by his friend Thomas Jefferson. This “literary cargo” wasn’t just recreational reading. Madison was doing serious research between sessions of the Virginia General Assembly. He was searching for historical examples to solve the most pressing problem of his day: thanks to the weak Articles of Confederation, the United States’ original governing document, America’s great experiment in representative government was on the verge of collapse. 

Madison pored over world history and political theory, studying the few instances when confederations rather than monarchies governed nations. By analyzing the structures of these governments and the pitfalls they encountered, Madison concluded that confederations were fragile unless there was a strong central authority. Madison wrote up his research as “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies.”

Was it audacious to think that a research paper could change the world? Perhaps, but Madison’s first political victory a decade before had hinged on changing a single word. In 1776, when Madison was a twenty-something delegate to the Virginia Convention, he pushed to reword a statement in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted by elder statesman George Mason. Instead of establishing religious “toleration” (which implied that the government could establish a state-supported religion and just “tolerate” the others), Madison’s edit secured “free exercise” of religion, a truly revolutionary concept.

Madison championed religious liberty again in 1784-1785. The Virginia General Assembly, still assuming churches needed government support, proposed a tax to pay “teachers of the Christian religion.” This time, to level the playing field, they would let the taxpayers decide which Christian denominations their taxes would support. Madison not only thought that was wrong, but he thought of fifteen reasons why it was wrong, and – at the urging of George Mason and others – wrote them up in a paper titled “Memorial and Remonstrance.” (Madison would later keep a framed copy of this document on his dining room wall until the day he died.) In the next Assembly session, Madison took advantage of the moment he had created, and reintroduced a bill that Thomas Jefferson had written nearly a decade earlier: the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. 

The statute, which opened with the ringing assertion that “Almighty God hath created the mind free,” ended the establishment of a tax-supported church in Virginia, and confirmed freedom of religion as a natural right of humanity. After shepherding the bill to passage in January 1786, Madison jubilantly informed Jefferson in France, “I flatter myself we have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.” 

This was just the beginning of the most productive and impactful period of Madison’s life. As a Congressman in New York during the spring of 1787, Madison prepared an analysis titled “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” Informed by his research for “Notes” and “Vices,” Madison drafted an outline for a new Constitution. He seized the agenda at the Constitutional Convention by having fellow delegate Edmund Randolph present Madison’s outline as the Virginia Plan. It became the starting point for a long, hot Philadelphia summer of negotiation and concession that was later called the Second American Revolution. Although Madison was not entirely pleased with the final Constitution, he recognized that the choice was to compromise or to fail. Madison compromised.

Madison’s work was not done. He argued tirelessly in favor of the Constitution at Virginia’s Ratifying Convention in June 1788. He wrote 29 of The Federalist essays to sway voters in New York. And, when the Constitution was ratified and Madison was elected to Congress in 1789, he addressed the one critique that had almost derailed the Constitution – he drafted a Bill of Rights from among the multitude of amendments proposed by the states.

In later life Madison shrugged off the title “Father of the Constitution,” writing, “It ought to be regarded as the work of many heads and many hands.” Yet it was Madison’s own analytical head and guiding hand that made the years 1786-1789 so transformative in the cause of liberty and representative government.