This engaging and sympathetic biography reveals the prolific founding father who Thomas Jefferson described as "the greatest man in the world." We see Madison the legislator, writer, Secretary of State, president, and elder statesman. Perhaps most importantly, we see a man who believed implicitly in the mutual dependence of democracy and individual freedom and whose life was guided by this philosophy. Accordingly, our constitutional guarantees of civil and religious liberty are in many ways his legacy.
"In this very human portrait of Madison and his role in the early, problem-fraught years of the new republic, [Rutland] not only depicts him as a fervent patriot, combining 'erudition and common sense,' but recounts his goals and frustrations, victories and defeats...."-Publishers Weekly
