“ It is very probable that Jefferson’s influence over Madison, which was greater than Hamilton’s, contributed to this result. Madison now opposed Hamilton’s measures for the funding of the debt, the assumption of state debts, and the establishment of a National Bank, and on other questions he sided more and more with the opposition, gradually assuming its leadership in the House of Representatives and labouring to confine the powers of the national government within the narrowest possible limits ”

“ On the 26th of December 1785 Jefferson’s Bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia, which had been introduced by Madison, was passed. In the Virginia House of Delegates, as in the Continental Congress, he opposed the further issue of paper money; and he tried to induce the legislature to repeal the law confiscating British debts, but he did not lose sight of the interests of the Confederacy. ”

“ Madison took his seat in the House of Representatives in April 1789, and assumed a leading part in the legislation necessary to the organization of the new government. He drafted a Tariff Bill giving certain notable advantages to nations with which the United States had commercial treaties, hoping to force Great Britain into a similar treaty; but his policy of discrimination against England was rejected by Congress. It was his belief that such a system of retaliation would remove the possibility of war arising from commercial quarrels. ”

“ In 1775 he became chairman of the committee of public safety for Orange county, and wrote its response to Patrick Henry’s call for the arming of a colonial militia, and in the spring of 1776 he was chosen a delegate to the new Virginia convention, where he was on the committee which drafted the constitution for the state, and proposed an amendment (not adopted) which declared that “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise” of religion, and was more radical than the similar one offered by George Mason. ”

“ In 1797 Madison retired from Congress, but not to a life of inactivity. In 1798 he joined Jefferson in opposing the Alien and Sedition Laws, and Madison himself wrote the resolutions of the Virginia legislature declaring that it viewed “the powers of the Federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact ”

“ The supreme disgrace of the administration was the capture and partial destruction in August 1814 of the city of Washington—this was due, however, to incompetence of the military and not to any lack of prudence on the cabinet’s part. ”