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outbursts attributed to a combination of “feebleness” in constitution and “epileptoid hysteria,” or hypochondria. These were believed to be diseases of the learned (those who sap their own strength with too much study). Now generally used to refer to an imaginary medical complaint,
hypochondria
was defined in Madison’s day as a weakness in the nervous system producing low spiritedness, fearfulness, and distrust. “I am too dull and infirm now to look out for any extraordinary things in this world,” he wrote to Bradford at one point. “My sensations for manymonths past have intimated to me not to expect a long or healthy life.” It may be that he suffered from a form of depression. 17
    “Dull and infirm,” Madison, who also had gastrointestinal complaints, was an unlikely candidate for the army. So was the unmartial Jefferson, who though a competent hunter in his youth was too mild and bookish now to partake in acts of physical aggression, even at the moment of revolution. Yet in the expectant autumn months of 1775, Madison was named a colonel and Jefferson a lieutenant (and commander in chief) in their respective county militias. The lead signature on both commissions was that of Edmund Pendleton. Neither would ever put on a uniform. But they were, on paper at least, officers. 18
“Most of Them Glowing Patriots”
    Of those Virginians who preceded Jefferson and Madison in attaining political eminence, Edmund Pendleton was one of the few who did not need to justify his position within the governing elite. Having risen gradually over several decades, he was respected in all corners of the Old Dominion. After Pendleton came the militant Patrick Henry. Forty years old in 1776, Henry was still not content with where he stood among the powerful, though his reputation for soaring oratory held steady and his rustic appeal to ordinary men was making him appear more and more heroic.
    Pendleton warmed to the younger patriots Madison and Jefferson, partly because of the quality of their minds and partly because of who their parents were. But he was decidedly unimpressed with Henry, for reasons that had nothing to do with his pedigree—his father, born in Scotland, had achieved respectability in Virginia—and everything to do with his pose.
    Patrick Henry was Virginia’s darling who became, as time passed, leader of the knee-jerk opposition to every reform that the Madison-Jefferson partnership stood for. Jefferson’s account of Henry’s career, written in later years to William Wirt, Henry’s first biographer, tells how Jefferson disparaged (and no doubt also envied) the talents of the sensation-causing oracle, who was seven years his elder. Jefferson’s prejudices may also help to explain Pendleton’s discomfort with Henry’s ambition.
    Jefferson told Wirt that he first met Patrick Henry at the end of 1759, when, just shy of seventeen, he left Albemarle County and rode off to college. At a holiday party, he witnessed the vaunted sociability of Henry, then twenty-four, and came to know of his passion for deer hunting. Should hisreference to rusticity be read as neutral in tone, Jefferson added for Wirt that Henry lived for weeks in the wilderness without changing his dirty shirt. In Jefferson’s eyes, Henry was a man of hunger and passion and little else, one who resisted gentrification and was a lazy thinker.
    A few months after their first meeting, Henry was in Williamsburg to be licensed as an attorney. According to Jefferson, “he told me he had been reading law only 6. weeks.” Two of Henry’s examiners, brothers Peyton and John Randolph, “signed his license with as much reluctance as their dispositions would permit them to shew.” But Jefferson’s own law tutor, the virtuous George Wythe, “absolutely refused.” The Randolph brothers subsequently acknowledged to Jefferson that they considered Henry “very ignorant of law.”
    As far as Jefferson was concerned, the facts proved Henry’s