James Madison

Born March 16, 1751, into a Virginia planter family that held slaves, Madison joined the Patriots in 1774 and served in the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War. Dissatisfied with the weak national government, he organized the Constitutional Convention where his Virginia Plan shaped the debate, then teamed with Hamilton and Jay to write The Federalist Papers urging ratification. He broke with Hamilton in the 1790s over centralization, co-founding the Democratic-Republican Party with Jefferson, whose Secretary of State he became in 1801. Elected president in 1808, he led the country into the War of 1812 after diplomacy failed to stop British seizures of American goods - motivated partly by a hunger for land held by Britain, Spain, and Native tribes. The war ended inconclusively in 1815 but convinced him a stronger federal government was necessary, and he presided over the Second Bank and a protective tariff while the United States took 26 million acres from Native Americans. He retired to his plantation Montpelier in 1817, freed one slave decades earlier to prevent a rebellion, freed none in his will, and died there in 1836.