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language a strong stimulus for Madison. 14
    Writing to his friend Bradford early in 1774, Madison noted that while the recently engineered Boston Tea Party may have involved too much “boldness,” it was ultimately right because of the “
ministerialism
” of the royal governor. His choice of words was not accidental. Madison saw a direct connection between Britain’s ministers—the king’s chief political advisers—and the established church. Referring to the primacy of the Congregational Church in New England, he wrote: “If the Church of England had been the established and general Religion in all the Northern Colonies as it has been among us here [in Virginia], and uninterrupted tranquility had prevailed throughout the Continent, it is clear to me that slavery and subjection might and would have been gradually insinuated among us.”
    A state of “tranquility” was nothing desirable—it meant surrender of the will. Madison was saying that the Bostonians’ love of liberty flourished in a dissenting religious environment, for Anglicans were without power there. If the Anglican Church had held sway in Massachusetts as it did in Virginia, a general passivity—“slavery and subjection”—would have sunk the colonies into a political grave. Virginia could learn from Boston’s example.
    Madison possessed the fire of a young activist. Thinking of the contest between freedom and servitude, he was livid that religious persecution should continue in Virginia. In a county near Orange, a half dozen Baptists had been thrown into jail for publishing their beliefs. Madison expressed his disgust with “knavery among the Priesthood,” and the “Hell conceivedprinciple of persecution” that raged among the Anglican clergy. Though the House of Burgesses was then considering petitions on behalf of dissenters, he doubted much would change. The self-interested clergy were “numerous and powerful” due to their connection to the “Bishops and the Crown”; they would do all they could to retain control.
    Just as he admired the Boston patriots, Madison told Bradford that he wished Virginia could be more like Pennsylvania, where the “air is free” and free people evinced a “liberal and equitable way of thinking as to the rights of conscience.” Pennsylvania had long been a haven for religious dissenters; its original charter protected liberty of conscience from state interference. Madison said that Pennsylvania “bore the good effects” of its history. If only, he mused, liberty of conscience might be revived among Virginians. 15
    His 1774 visit to Philadelphia further convinced Madison of the need for change in Virginia. After he returned south, he became a member of the local committee of safety in Orange, where he took part in the confiscation of Tory pamphlets being distributed by an Anglican minister, recommending that the offensive literature be reduced to ashes. Nor did he have qualms about applying tar and feathers to another minister who denied the authority of the Virginia Convention. By January 1775 Madison was reporting to Bradford that Virginians were “procuring the necessaries for defending ourselves.” Within a short time, he predicted, there would be “some thousands of well trained High Spirited men ready to meet danger whenever it appears.” Between then and early May 1776, when he presented himself to Pendleton, Madison had become a passionate proponent of revolutionary change. The interior counties of Virginia, where he had grown up, were in general more radical than the vulnerable coastal, or Tidewater, region, where the threat to life and property felt more immediate and made men more tentative in their questioning of royal authority. 16
    It is especially interesting that Madison in his early twenties should have sounded so combative and should have so eagerly assumed a leading role in Virginia politics. He had a preoccupation with his physical infirmities, a history of convulsive