He gave more than 40 years of service to his country.

Most people admired and respected Madison, but they never made him a popular hero.

In 1776 Madison was chosen as a member of the Virginia Convention, which carried that colony into independent statehood. He served on the committee which drafted the new state constitution and the famous Bill of Rights, so widely copied elsewhere.

Madison was sent as a member of a distinguished delegation to the 1787 Federal Convention along with George Washington, Edmund Randolph and John Blair.

Madison fought vigorously for strong central government, and sponsored the Virginia or large state plan of union. The plan foreshadowed in its broad outlines the Federal Constitution that was finally adopted.

His profound knowledge of confederacies of the past, his intimate acquaintance of the virtues and defects of the Articles of the Confederation, and his masterly understanding of the problems of federalism made him the most useful member of the Convention and fully justified the title "Father of the Constitution" by which he has since been known.

Madison's presidential years were the unhappiest, as well as the least successful of his public life.

In the summer of 1812 the nation was plunged into a war for which it was woefully unprepared and which brought it neither gain nor glory.

On June 18, 1812 congress voted for war and a few months later Madison was re-elected President over DeWitt Clinton of New York.

The war went badly for the Americans from the beginning. In 1814 the British invaded Maryland, marched on Washington and set it afire.

Only the heroic resistance of Fort McHenry, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner" kept the British from taking Baltimore.

The last of the founders of the American Republic died at his home in Montpelier, Virginia on June 28, 1836.