If George Washington is the father of our country, James Madison is the father of our Constitution. He was an unlikely soldier in the Revolution. Barely five-foot-four and a hundred pounds, he became a colonel in the Orange County militia in Virginia only because his father was a Virginia squire of substantial property. Madison served for just one year before being elected, at age 25, to Virginia’s revolutionary convention. He seems, by all accounts, to have been quite the revolutionary firebrand in 1775 — and a bit stiff-necked. He failed to get re-elected to the convention because “he disdained the election practice of providing drinks and jollity at the polls.” Madison finished out the War as an appointee in Governor Patrick Henry’s Council.

In 1786, the Continental Congress agreed to call a special meeting in Philadelphia to consider amendments to the Articles of Confederation. With Hamilton and others, Madison maneuvered to transform this into a true constitutional convention. He persuaded Washington to attend the convention and give it stature. As a delegate from Virginia, Madison drafted “The Virginia Plan” presented by Edmund Randolph, which essentially ignored the Articles of Confederation and shifted all debate to the form that a new, federal government should take. When the Constitution was ready for ratification, Madison joined with Hamilton and John Jay in writing The Federalist Papers, which answered the Constitution’s critics and allow us even today to hear the voices of the Founders. Madison was a member of the first Congress when he proposed nineteen amendments to the new Constitution, ten of which were adopted as The Bill of Rights.

Madison became Secretary of State under Jefferson in 1801, and in 1809, he began the first of his own two terms as President. He then almost destroyed what he had created. He provoked a ruinous conflict with Great Britain, pushed New England to the brink of secession from the Union, and botched the military defense of the country so badly that he barely escaped with his own neck when British troops advanced on Washington, DC, and torched the White House. With good reason, Garry Wills devotes this gem of a book to a great puzzle about Madison — “ how to put together the shrewd constitutionalist and the hapless commander-in-chief”?

The War of 1812, we were told as school children, was about Britain’s practice of seizing American sailors on the high seas. As Wills tells the story, it was more about Madison’s stubborn refusal to recognize facts. Britain was engaged in war against Napoleon’s France, and to staff its navy, Britain needed every able-bodied recruit it could find. British sailors understandably preferred the higher pay and looser discipline of merchant ships. So they deserted to American ships, and the British navy halted and searched ships in order to retrieve its deserters. Given the difficulties of distinguishing which sailors were British and which American, occasionally the British Navy seized Americans as well. The United States could have stopped all this by banning British sailors from its ships. But American shipping could not survive without British sailors. So Madison persuaded himself that a ban on all American trade with Britain would be so painful to the British that they would prefer to risk defeat by Napoleon rather than continue offending the United States. Since Britain was itself blockading major European ports, Madison’s policy threatened to strangle all American trade overseas. When the American embargo failed to budge the British, Madison secured a declaration of war in the House by a vote of 78 to 45, and in the Senate by a bare 18 to 13. Both votes there thoroughly partisan, with not a single member of the opposition Federalist party voting for war.

Madison’s first objective in the war was Canada. He calculated that if the United States could conquer Canada, it could cut off yet another source of trade for Britain. Why Madison selected the military commanders that he did is part of Wills’s great puzzle. For an invasion to be mounted from Detroit, the President chose William Hull (an aging veteran of the Revolution, reduced to incoherence by a stroke) and William Henry Harrison (who had claimed “victory” at Tippecanoe to cover-up his own incompetence when the Indians who had ambushed him ran out of ammunition and withdrew). For an invasion mounted from New York, Madison chose Henry Dearborn, who dithered about, insulted and alienated his own soldiers, and had to abandon the invasion just as it began when his troops fell into confusion and fired on each other. What deepens the puzzle is why, two years later, the disorder in the army was still so great that Madison himself (aged 63) rode out to Bladensburg, Maryland, to oversee the defenses against the British army that was advancing on the nation’s capital. The American defenders outnumbered the British attackers by two-to-one, yet within minutes of engagement, the American forces — and the President — were in headlong retreat. If Madison had not overruled his generals and ordered sailors and their cannon from a nearby navy yard to block the British path, the American forces might not have escaped. As it was, the British advanced at their leisure, encamped outside Washington, and selectively burned all the government buildings.

As the war against Napoleon in Europe wound down in 1814, Madison faced the prospect that the full weight of the British army and navy would now be turned on the United States. American and British peace negotiators met in the Belgian city of Ghent, and the British diplomats opened by demanding complete capitulation by the United States on all points. The Duke of Wellington was asked by the British government to take command of the war, but he declined, warning that subduing America would be far too costly. So the British diplomats soon settled for a peace treaty that restored matters to where they stood when the United States had declared war. As Wills notes, “the Ghent treaty was received with such relief that it was ratified by the Senate overnight.” The United States had gained not a single objective of “Mister Madison’s War.”

In probing the reasons for Madison’s abysmal record as a commander-in-chief, Wills is thorough, prudent, and fair-minded. The reasons that Wills finds have much to do with Madison’s distinctive personality and foibles, and much to do with the passions and inexperience of the adolescent country that he led. Garry Wills displays his skill as a historian by placing all this in its rich historical context. Yet it is impossible to read this tale without thinking of one or another of our modern presidents and of certain foreign policy ventures of our own times.

James Madison retired to his Montpelier estate in the Virginia hills, and there he died in 1836 at the age of 85, beset by illness and financial despair. He was a flawed man and a flawed President. Yet in this short biography, Garry Wills sketches a Founder worthy of our respect. If Madison embroiled the nation in a fruitless war, he also conducted the war without compromising the Constitution and the civil liberties it enshrines. How many modern presidents can claim as much? Wills is surely correct: “No man could do everything for the country — not even Washington. Madison did more than most, and did some things better than any. That is quite enough.”