James Madison; Defender of Religious Liberty

While James Madison’s role as the father of the United States Constitution is widely understood, his passion for securing religious freedom is not. Yet there is no principle in all of Madison’s long public career that he held with greater tenacity than a belief in religious liberty. His defense of religious freedom began when he stood with his father outside a jail in the village of Orange and heard Baptists preach from their cell windows. Madison wrote of a similar incident to William Bradford on this day - January 24 – in 1774, saying “There are at this time in the adjacent Culpepper County not less than five or six well-meaning men in jail for publishing their religious sentiments which in the main are very orthodox.”