James Madison
The best single-volume biography of Madison’s life, Ketcham’s biography provides readers a sense of the man while also tracing Madison’s career. “All that I have been in life I owe substantially to that man,” Madison said of his early years in Virginia studying under Donald Robertson, who introduced him to thinkers like Montaigne and Montesquieu. Additionally, it depicts a side of Madison that is less frequently seen (including a portrait of the beautiful Dolley Madison).
Among the first four presidents, James Madison may have had the fewest biographies available for me to study, but he offered no less mystery. I still find Madison as intriguing as any of the presidents before him, despite four books and nearly 2,000 pages. Although he is the least well-known of these individuals, he was in no way the least successful.
Madison and Thomas Jefferson had one of the most distinctive, significant, remarkable, and amazingly fascinating friendships and political alliances in American history.
