Madison’s Montpelier

Here lies and here lived James Madison, a man who embodied our nation’s idyllic contradictions, our belief in equality and our conflict with slavery and racism, our right to republican self-defense and our eventual function as a world power, our belief in cooperation and our obsession with partisanship. He embodied all these things and more, and this land offers yet another contradiction, an American embrace of wealth and beauty with a quieter suppression of poverty and the less beautiful parts of those communities we love.