From the Miller Center: James Madison: Life Before the Presidency

In Federalist 10 James Madison argues that people are driven by personal interests. 

What were his? 

- Here's one way to find out.


Land was the lifeblood of the Madison family wealth, and James would come to consider it the lifeblood of the nation. In 1722, James Taylor II (1674−1729) patented 13,500 acres in the Piedmont of central Virginia. He was one of twelve men to survey the region with Governor Alexander Spotswood, a group known as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, a mark of Taylor’s affluence. One year later, Taylor’s daughter Frances and her husband, Ambrose Madison, settled on almost 3,000 acres of the land. Like most affluent Virginians, they planted tobacco, a crop that wreaks havoc on the soil’s nutrients and necessitates continual expansion to new, fertile grounds.

In Virginia, owning vast acreage went hand-in-hand with enslaving men, women, and children to work the land and run the plantation. Ambrose and Frances’s son, James Madison Sr., and his wife Eleanor (Nelly) Conway grew the family land holdings, which expanded slavery on their plantation. As slaveholding became a mark of wealth in the colony, the Madisons’ dozens of enslaved laborers, who helped build the fine brick house called Montpelier, marked them among the most prominent families in Virginia and the most prominent of Orange County.

James Madison Jr. was born on March 16, 1751, in Port Conway, Virginia, and spent his early years at a farm house in Orange county, Virginia. Montpelier was completed when he was nine years old, one year after he inherited an enslaved infant held in trust by his father. For the young Madison, the social order of master and slave seemed as natural as parent and child.