JAMES MADISON, most cerebral of the Founding Fathers, would have been hopeless on Twitter. As a rising political star, seeking to understand why the infant American republic was so fragile, he took to the library of his Virginia plantation, Montpelier, for several months. He emerged having written a 39-page study of previous attempts at political union, from the Achaean League to the Belgic Confederacy, as well as a memorandum on “Vices of the Political System of the United States”. Amid all that scholarship lurked ideas about government that he would champion throughout his career, as drafter of the constitution, a leader in Congress, his country’s chief diplomat and its fourth president.Sound-bites were few and far between, reducing his modern-day fame. He was small in stature, soft-spoken and reserved to the point of rudeness, at least among strangers; so his influence often lay in things that did not happen (he was a good dealmaker) or remained unsaid (he repeatedly reined in the fieriest impulses of his friend Thomas Jefferson). Montpelier, at the foot of the Blue Ridge mountains, works hard to explain the importance of its former owner. One stately room...
from The Economist: United States http://ift.tt/1mDKjZT
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