MADELEY, a market town in the municipal borough of Wenlock, and the Wellington (Mid) parliamentary division of Shropshire, England, 159 m. N.W. from London, with stations on the London & North Western (Madeley Market) and Great Western railways (Madeley Court). Pop. of civil parish (1901), 8442. There are large ironworks, ironstone and coal are mined, and potter’s clay is raised. The church of St Michael (1796) replaced a Norman building. The living was held from 1760 to 1783 by John William Fletcher or de la Flechêre, a close friend of the Wesleys. The parish includes a portion of Coalbrookdale (q.v.), and the towns of Ironbridge and Coalport. Ironbridge, a town picturesquely situated on the steep left bank of the Severn, adjoins Madeley on the south-west. It takes its name from the iron bridge of one span crossing the river, erected in 1779. This bridge is a remarkable work considering its date; it was probably the first erected, at any rate on so large a scale, and attracted great attention. It is the work of Abraham Darby, the third of the name, one of the famous family of iron-workers in Coalbrookdale. Here are brick and tile works and lime-kilns. There is a station (Ironbridge and Broseley) on the Great Western railway, across the river. Coalport lies also on the Severn, S. of Madeley and 2 m. S.E. of Ironbridge, with a station on the Great Western railway. It has large china works, founded at the close of the 18th century, which subsequently incorporated those of Caughley, across the Severn, and of Nantgarw in Glamorganshire.
MĀDHAVA ĀCHĀRYA (fl. c. 1380), Hindu statesman and philosopher, lived at the court of Vijayanagar (the modern Humpi in the district of Bellary), the vigorous Southern Hindu kingdom that so long withstood Mahommedan influence and aggression. His younger brother Sāyaṇa (d. 1387) was associated with him in the administration and was a famous commentator on the Rigveda. Sāyaṇa’s commentaries were influenced by and dedicated to Mādhava, who is best known as the author of the Sarvadarsana Samgraha (Compendium of Speculations). With remarkable mental detachment he places himself in the position of an adherent of sixteen distinct systems. Mādhava also wrote a commentary on the Mīmāṃsā Sūtras. He died as abbot of the monastery of Sringeri.
MADI (A-Madi), a negro race of the Nile valley, occupying both banks of the Bahr-el-Jebel immediately north of Albert Nyanza. Tradition makes them immigrants from the north-west. They are remarkable for the consideration shown to their women, who choose their own husbands, are never ill-treated or hard-worked, and take part in tribal deliberations. The Madi build sepulchral monuments of an elaborate type, two huge narrow stones sloping towards each other with two smaller slabs covering the opening between them. They have been much harried by the Azandeh and Abarambo. They were visited by W. Junker in 1882-1883, and described by him in Petermann’s Mittheilungen for May 1883.
MADISON, JAMES (1751-1836), fourth president of the United States, was born at Port Conway, in King George county, Virginia, on the 16th of March 1751. His first ancestor in America may possibly have been Captain Isaac Maddyson, a colonist of 1623 mentioned by John Smith as an excellent Indian fighter. His father, also named James Madison, was the owner of large estates in Orange county, Virginia. In 1769 the son entered the college of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where, in the same year, he founded the well-known literary club, “The American Whig Society.” He graduated in 1771, but remained for another year at Princeton studying, apparently for the ministry, under the direction of John Witherspoon (1722-1794). In 1772 he returned to Virginia, where he pursued his reading and studies, especially theology and Hebrew, and acted as a tutor to the younger children of the family. In 1775 he became chairman of the committee of public safety for Orange county, and wrote its response to Patrick Henry’s call for the arming of a colonial militia, and in the spring of 1776 he was chosen a delegate to the new Virginia convention, where he was on the committee which drafted the constitution for the state, and proposed an amendment (not adopted) which declared that “all men are equally entitled to the full and free exercise” of religion, and was more radical than the similar one offered by George Mason. In 1777, largely, it seems, because he refused to treat the electors with rum and punch, after the custom of the time, he was not re-elected, but in November of the same year he was chosen a member of the privy council or council of state, in which he acted as interpreter for a few months, as secretary prepared papers for the governor, and in general took a prominent part from the 14th of January 1778 until the end of 1779, when he was elected a delegate to the Continental Congress.
He was in Congress during the final stages of the War of Independence, and in 1780 drafted instructions to Jay, then representing the United States at Madrid, that in negotiations with Spain he should insist upon the free navigation of the Mississippi and upon the principle that the United States succeeded to British rights affirmed by the treaty of Paris of 1763. When the confederation was almost in a state of collapse because of the failure of the states to respond to requisitions of Congress for supplies for the federal treasury, Madison was among the first to advocate the granting of additional powers to Congress, and urged that congress should forbid the states to issue more paper money. In 1781 he favoured an amendment of the Articles of Confederation giving Congress power to enforce its requisitions, and in 1783, in spite of the open opposition of the Virginia legislature, which considered the Virginian delegates wholly subject to its instructions, he advocated that the states should grant to Congress for twenty-five years authority to levy an import duty, and suggested a scheme to provide for the interest on the debt not raised by the import duty—apportioning it among the states on the basis of population, counting three-fifths of the slaves, a ratio suggested by Madison himself. Accompanying this plan was an address to the states drawn up by Madison, and one of the ablest of his state papers. In the same year, with Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts. Gunning Bedford of Delaware, and John Rutledge of South Carolina, he was a member of the committee which reported on the Virginia proposal as to the terms of cession to the Confederation of the “back lands,” or unoccupied Western territory, held by several of the states; the report was a skilful compromise made by Madison, which secured the approval of the rather exigent Virginia legislature.
In November 1783 Madison’s term in Congress expired, and he returned to Virginia and took up the study of the law. In the following year he was elected to the House of Delegates. As a member of its committee on religion, he opposed the giving of special privileges to the Episcopal (or any other) church, and contended against a general assessment for the support of the churches of the state. His petition of remonstrance against the proposed assessment, drawn up at the suggestion of George Nicholas (c. 1755-1799), was widely circulated and procured its defeat. On the 26th of December 1785 Jefferson’s Bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia, which had been introduced by Madison, was passed. In the Virginia House of Delegates, as in the Continental Congress, he opposed the further issue of paper money; and he tried to induce the legislature to repeal the law confiscating British debts, but he did not lose sight of the interests of the Confederacy. The boundary between Virginia and Maryland, according to the Baltimore grant, was the south shore of the Potomac, a line to which Virginia had agreed on condition of free navigation of the river and the Chesapeake Bay. Virginia now feared that too much had been given up, and desired joint regulation of the navigation and commerce of the river by Maryland and Virginia. On Madison’s proposal commissioners from the two states met at Alexandria (q.v.) and at Mount Vernon in March 1785. The Maryland legislature approved the Mount Vernon agreement and proposed to invite Pennsylvania and Delaware to join in the arrangement. Madison, seeing an opportunity for more general concert in regard to commerce and trade (and possibly for the increase of the power of Congress), proposed that all the states should be invited to send commissioners to consider commercial questions, and a resolution to that effect was adopted (on Jan. 21, 1786) by the Virginia legislature. This led to the Annapolis convention of 1786, and that in turn led to the Philadelphia convention of 1787. In April 1787 Madison had written a paper, The Vices of the Political System of the United States, and from his study of confederacies, ancient and modern, later summed up in numbers 17, 18, and 19 of The Federalist, he had concluded that no confederacy could long endure if it acted upon states only and not directly upon individuals. As the time for the convention of 1787 approached he drew up an outline of a new system of government, the basis of the “Virginia plan” presented in the convention by Edmund Jennings Randolph. Madison’s scheme, as expressed in a letter to Washington dated the 16th of April 1787, was that individual sovereignty of states was irreconcilable with aggregate sovereignty, but that the “consolidation of the whole into one simple republic would be as inexpedient as it is unattainable.” He considered as a practical middle ground changing the basis of representation in Congress from states to population; giving the national government “positive and complete authority in all cases which require uniformity”; giving it a negative on all state laws, a power which might best be vested in the Senate, a comparatively permanent body; electing the lower house, and the more numerous, for a short term; providing for a national executive, for extending the national supremacy over the judiciary and the militia, for a council to revise all laws, and for an express statement of the right of coercion; and finally, obtaining the ratification of a new constitutional instrument from the people, and not merely from the legislatures. The “Virginia plan” was the basis of the convention’s deliberations which resulted in the constitution favourably voted on by the convention on the 17th of September 1787. Among the features of the plan which were not embodied in the constitution were the following: proportionate representation in the Senate and the election of its members by the lower house “out of a proper number of persons nominated by the individual legislatures”; the vesting in the national Congress of power to negative state acts; and the establishment of a council of revision (the executive and a convenient number of national judges) with veto power over all laws passed by the national Congress. Madison, always an opponent of slavery, disapproved of the compromise (in Art. I. § 9 and Art. V.) postponing to 1808 (or later) the prohibition of the importation of slaves. He took a leading part in the debates of the convention, of which he kept full and careful notes, afterwards published by order of Congress (3 vols., Washington, 1843). Many minute and wise provisions are due to him, and he spoke before the convention more frequently than any delegate except James Wilson and Gouverneur Morris. In spite of the opposition to the constitution of the Virginia leaders George Mason and E. J. Randolph, Madison induced the state’s delegation to stand by the constitution in the convention. His influence largely shaped the form of the final draft of the constitution, but the labour was not finished with this draft; that the constitution was accepted by the people was due in an eminent degree to the efforts of Madison, who, to place the new constitution before the public in its true light, and to meet the objections brought against it, joined Alexander Hamilton (q.v.) and John Jay in writing The Federalist, a series of eighty-five papers, out of which twenty certainly, and nine others probably, were written by him. In the Virginia convention for ratifying the constitution (June 1788), when eight states had ratified and it seemed that Virginia’s vote would be needed to make the necessary nine (New Hampshire’s favourable vote was cast only shortly before that of Virginia), and it appeared that New York would vote against the constitution if Virginia did not ratify it, Madison was called upon to defend that instrument again, and he appeared at his best against its opponents, Patrick Henry, George Mason, James Monroe, Benjamin Harrison, William Grayson and John Tyler. He answered their objections in detail, calmly and with an intellectual power and earnestness that carried the convention. The result was a victory against an originally adverse public opinion and against the eloquence of the opponents of the constitution, for Madison and for his lieutenants, Edmund Pendleton, John Marshall, George Nicholas, Harry Innes and Henry Lee. At the same time Madison’s labours in behalf of the constitution alienated from him valuable political support in Virginia. He was defeated by Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson in his candidacy for the United States Senate, but in his own district he was chosen a representative to Congress, defeating James Monroe, who seems to have had the powerful support of Patrick Henry.