October 23, 2003, 9:49 a.m.
Madison Memory
Why doesn’t the father of the constitution get an eternal flame...or something?

In the Washington Post Monday, there was an article about the new restoration plans for Montpelier, the historic Virginia home of James Madison. The Post interviewed the president of the Montpelier Foundation, Michael C. Quinn, and reported, "With no monument on the Mall or currency bearing Madison's image, the man Quinn calls 'chief architect of the American Republic' and author of the Bill of Rights is suffering from a lack of celebrity equal to his contribution to the nation."

That sentence brings back to me a poignant memory.

One day, my family and I drove down to see Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello. Now Jefferson is of course on the nickel (and the two-dollar bill), and has a big monument in Washington, D.C., near all the famous cherry blossoms. And Monticello is quite a popular tourist attraction. We had to wait for a while to be given the tour through his house, and after that we walked around the grounds and saw, among other things, Jefferson's famous headstone in his family cemetery, which now has a ten-foot-high iron fence around it to discourage souvenir seekers.

We had lunch and decided, on the way home, to go see Montpelier, too. Madison's home is much farther off the beaten path, and so we drove along a little Virginia back road. We were getting close to the home itself and could see it, but just before we got there I saw one of those little brown-and-white National Park Service signs, and it said, "Madison's Grave." So I quickly slowed down, turned at the sign, and before you knew it I was on a gravel road. We started to go across a bridge, but had to stop quickly and back up, because it was too narrow for two cars and a pickup had already started across it. On the other side of the bridge, we drove for a while along the winding gravel road.

Eventually, we came to the Madison graveyard. There was no one there except for two guys in another pickup. They were just leaving. So there we were: My wife, my son, and I, at James Madison's grave. No ranger from the National Park Service. No doyenne from the Montpelier Foundation. No tourists, clicking away with their cameras. Nobody. We were out in the middle of nowhere. There was a three-foot-high fence around the graveyard, which was the size of a medium-sized room. Heck, if we'd had a pickup, we could have taken James Madison's headstone and driven off with it. Taken Dolley's, too.

I thought: How strange. The father of the Constitution, the author of the Bill of Rights, the coauthor — with Hamilton and Jay — of The Federalist Papers: and this is his monument. Three of the great documents of Western political thought, three of the great texts of liberty, but Madison has no mausoleum like Lenin, no eternal flame like Kennedy, not even a well-visited cemetery like Jefferson. How strange.

As I said, it is a very poignant memory for me, but it is neither entirely sad nor entirely uplifting. On the one hand, one can conclude from this incident that we forget our great men and what we owe them, and that is sad. But, on the other hand, perhaps it is a measure of Madison's success that he helped create a republic in which most people don't have to worry much about politics, and can take freedom for granted, and don't worship the authorities. It certainly gives pause, to those of us who write and think about politics, to visit the final resting place of one of our greatest political writers and thinkers — and to be there all alone.

— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.

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