James Madison

James Madison (1751–1836) was born at Port Conway, Virginia, and studied at what is now Princeton. He drafted much of the Constitution at the 1787 Philadelphia convention and wrote roughly a third of the Federalist essays; authorship of a further dozen, disputed with Hamilton for over a century, has since been credited to him too. He went on to help write the Bill of Rights, serve as Secretary of State under Jefferson, and become the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817), leading the country through the War of 1812.