The History of North America podcast is a sweeping historical saga of the United States,

Canada, and Mexico from their deep origins to our present epoch.

Join me, Mark Vinet, on this exciting, fascinating epic journey through time, focusing on the compelling,

wonderful, and tragic stories of North America's inhabitants, heroes, villains, leaders,

environment, and geography.

I invite you to come along for the ride.

History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.

It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explain how and why we got here.

Welcome to the History and Plug podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,

and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.

I'm your host, Scott Rank.

James Madison is called the father of the Constitution because of the role he played in drafting

and promoting the Constitution of the U.S. and along with that the Bill of Rights.

He also co-wrote the Federalist Papers.

So what that means is if you're looking at the legal underpinnings of the U.S. and its

idea of liberty and the rights of citizens, it probably has James Madison's fingerprints

all over it.

But at the same time, Madison owned a plantation at Montpillier along with more than a hundred

slaves.

Also the three-fist compromise in which a slave was counted as three-fifths of a person

for the census appears in Federalist 54, which was probably written by James Madison.

So there's contradictions that exist in his person.

...