by Drew R. McCoy



Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Even though James Madison disliked and publicly condemned slavery, this
slave-owning president and Virginia planter does not get high marks from
most modern historians for his stance on that issue; indeed, his support
for extending slavery into the Western territories has led some critics to
call him a pro-slavery expansionist. To Harvard historian McCoy, "the Sage
of Montpelier" was a prisoner of his republican idealism, tragically tied
to the conventions of his native soil. This apologetic, revisionist
biographical study will stir up controversy among scholars. For the
general reader, its focus on Madison's years of retirement (from 1817
until his death in 1836) gives us a prescient sage leery of the
"nullifiers" who touted states' inherent right to secede from the union.
The mature Madison was haunted by the specter of an industrializing
society faced with the prospect of mass unemployment and a poor,
propertyless class--problems that plague us today. Illustrations.

Product Description:

James Madison survived longer than any other member of the most remarkable
generation of political leaders in American history. Born in the middle of
the eighteenth century as a subject of King George II, the Father of the
United States Constitution lived until 1836, when he died a citizen of
Andrew Jackson's republic. For over forty years he played a pivotal role
in the creation and defense of a new political order. He lived long enough
to see even that Revolutionary world transformed, and the system of
government he had nurtured threatened by the disruptive forces of a new
era that would ultimately lead to civil war. In recounting the experience
of Madison and several of his legatees who witnessed the violent test of
whether his republic could endure, McCoy dramatizes the actual working out
in human lives of critical cultural and political issues.

Product Details

Paperback: 406 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; Reprint edition (May 23, 1991)
ISBN: 0521407729