In the early months of 1774, the British Parliament deliberated
on how the Americans ought to be punished for the infractious behavior
displayed at the Boston Tea Party in December the previous year. A
series of bills known by incensed Americans as the Intolerable Acts
were passed in the House of Commons, among them an order that the
port of Boston should be shut down. This action infuriated not
only American colonists in the northeast, but also southerners such
as the young James Madison.
Politics increasingly became Madison's main preoccupation. The
issues that concerned him most were the religious establishment
in Virginia and the more general issues of trade policies between
Crown and colonies. Having developed a strong affinity for dissenting
religious communities while at Princeton, Madison came to look
very critically upon the established Anglican Church in Virginia.
He was particularly upset by the various punishments meted out
by the government against Protestant dissenters who resisted the
rule of the Anglican episcopacy.
On December 22, 1774, when he was twenty-three years of
age, Madison formally entered politics in Virginia when he was
elected as a member of the Orange County Committee of Safety. This
Committee was part of a movement to boycott British manufacturers. Early
in the same year, the Virginia House of Burgesses defied Governor
Dunmore's dissolution of the assembly. Madison and his Committee
and many other public men in Virginia were standing in open defiance
of the British.
The situation came to a head on April 19, 1775, when gunshots were
fired against uniformed British troops at Lexington and Concord,
Massachusetts. Revolutionary war was imminent, and along with Massachusetts,
Virginia came to play a leading role in the struggle. One of her
leading citizens, George Washington, soon took to the field as
the commanding general of the Continental Army. Madison himself
was unfit to don the uniform. His health was still unstable, and
the closest he came to the military fight was his receiving an
honorary commission as a colonel in the Orange County militia.
Madison played an important role in the political developments during
the Revolution. In April 1776, he was elected to the Virginia Constitutional
Convention–a revolutionary assembly which gathered in opposition
to the British rule of the colony. Critical decisions were made
at this Virginia Convention that affected the course of events
throughout the American colonies. On May 15, the body unanimously
told its delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia
to call for a declaration of independence from the British Crown.
Among these delegates were Thomas Jefferson, who soon became a
close friend of Madison's, as well as Richard Henry Lee, who read
the proposal to the Congress on June 15, 1776. The American Declaration
of Independence was proclaimed shortly thereafter
on July 4, marking the creation of the United States of America.
Near this time, the Virginia Constitutional Convention
adopted a Declaration of Rights, primarily the work of the prominent
supporter of independence, George Mason. Significantly, it was
the young James Madison who was responsible for that Declaration's strong-worded
commitment to the idea of religious freedom. His was the hand behind
its revolutionary provision that "all men are equally entitled
to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of
conscience."
The Virginia Constitutional Convention succeeded in establishing
a legislative assembly for the new revolutionary government of the
state, the Virginia House of Delegates. Madison was elected as a
member to this House in October 1776. Also elected was Jefferson,
who quickly moved to disestablish the Anglican Church from its
privileged position in Virginia. Madison supported Jefferson's efforts.
In the 1777 elections, however, he failed to win back his seat in
the House, allegedly because he refused to lure voters to the polls with
free liquor.
Madison was not completely deprived of political office
in 1777. The House itself voted to put him in the Virginia Council
of State, whose members worked under the governor of the state,
who was then the great revolutionary orator, Patrick Henry. Madison
continued to serve on the Council after Thomas Jefferson became
Virginia's governor in June 1779. At this time, Virginia was reeling from
the aftermath of the first of several British invasions. Madison
was a witness only to this first invasion of his home state, as
he was elected in December 1779 as a delegate to the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia.
At the time that America's military fortunes seemed to
be at their darkest hour, young James Madison's rise as a political
leader of national stature had commenced. He arrived in Philadelphia
in March 1780, the same time that General Washington's Army was encamped
at Morristown, New Jersey, experiencing a harsher, hungrier winter
than the one they had spent at Valley Forge the winter before.
It would be a major concern of the Continental Congress, in which
Madison was the youngest member at age twenty- nine, to support
the struggling army with money and supplies, a task made very difficult
by the depreciation of the paper money upon which the Americans
had been floating the economic cost of the war.
