ed no
votes; nobody got drunk at his expense; and he lost the election. An
attempt was made to contest the return of his opponent on the ground of
corrupt influence, but, adds Mr. Rives, in his sesquipedalian measure,
"for the want of adequate proof to sustain the allegations of the
petition which in such cases it is extremely difficult to obtain with
the requisite precision, the proceeding was unavailing except as a
perpetual protest, upon the legislative records of the country, against
a dangerous abuse, of which one of her sons, so qualified to serve her,
and destined to be one of her chief ornaments, was the early though
temporary victim." Mr. Rives does not mean that Mr. Madison was for a
little while in early life the victim of a vicious habit, but that he
lost votes because he would do nothing to encourage it in others.

The country lost a good representative, but their loss was his gain. The
Assembly immediately elected him a member of the governor's council, and
in this position he so grew in public favor that, two years afterward
(1780), he was chosen as a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was
still under thirty, and had he been even a more brilliant young man than
he really was, it would not have been to his discredit had he only been
seen for the next year or two, if seen at all, in the background. He had
taken his seat among men, every one of whom, probably, was his senior,
and among whom were many of the wisest men in the country, not "older"
merely, but "better soldiers."

If not the darkest, at least there was no darker year in the Revolution
than that of 1780. Within a few days of his arrival at Philadelphia,
Madison wrote to Jefferson--then governor of Virginia--his opinion of
the state of the country. It was gloomy but not exaggerated. The only
bright spot he could see was the chance that Clinton's expedition to
South Carolina might be a failure; but within little more than a month
from the date of his letter, Lincoln was compelled to surrender
Charleston, and the whole country south of Virginia seemed about to fall
into the hands of the enemy. Could he have foreseen that calamity, his
apprehensions might have been changed to despair; for he writes:--

"Our army threatened with an immediate alternative of disbanding or
living on free quarter; the public treasury empty; public credit
exhausted, nay, the private credit of purchasing agents employed, I
am told, as far as it w