Madison Capital Funding


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Madison Capital Funding

Madison Capital Funding

James Madison’s Legacy

James Madison was eighty-five years old when he died, frail and nearly blind, but mentally alert. He realized that Montpelier, his once thriving Virginia plantation was failing, partly due to the vagaries of farming itself, partly due to his deteriorating health which curtailed his personal management, and mostly due to Payne Todd, his stepson. His wife Dolley had been a twenty-five year old widow when he married her more than forty years before; a widow with a two-year-old son. James and Dolley Madison would have no children together.

Payne Todd, good looking and personable like his mother, was given every advantage and opportunity, but it was clear, even from early childhood, that he was doomed to be a wastrel. By the time he was twenty, he was well entrenched on the road of wine, wenching and wagering. As he fell into debt, he would turn to his gentle stepfather, who would shield the wife he dearly loved from the hard truth about her dissipated son – and sell off another hundred or so acres to pay Payne’s debts.

As his life drew to a close, Madison's overwhelming thought was to provide for his wife. Dolley was nearly seventy, a considerable age in 1836. She would not be able to run Montpelier alone, let alone profitably. For some years, he had been reworking and annotating his papers, including the comprehensive diaries he had kept fifty years earlier, during the Constitutional Convention, which, in essence turned an amalgam of not-very-united ex-colonies into a cohesive country. The diaries would go to Dolley, with his explicit instructions: sell them for publication.