When James Madison died, he still owned about one hundred slaves.

He freed none of them, not even Paul Jennings, his valet. Jennings could read and write, and i n fact published the first White House memoir, declaring that Madison was "one o f the best men who ever lived." Modern biographers of Madison, such as Richard B rookhiser and Jeff Broadwater, have frankly acknowledged the shocking truth that such a politically astute and sensitive founding father utterly failed to addre ss the problem of slavery seriously. But most, including not only Mr. Brookhiser and Mr. Broadwater, but also Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Andrew Burstein, and Nancy Is enberg, treat the issue of slavery as a thing apart, in separate chapters, inste ad dealing with the place of the "peculiar institution" in Madison's life in the years after he left the presidency. And yet there never was a time when James Madison (1751 - 1836), a third-generat ion slave owner, did not believe slavery was evil -- or a time when he did not r ecognize the capabilities of African Americans. In 1791, Madison wrote admiringl y about the "industry & good management" of a free African American landowner wh o could read, keep accounts, and supervise six white hired men on a 2,500-acre f arm. In April 1800, Madison dined with Christopher McPherson, a confident and fr ee African American, who came as a guest to Madison's plantation home, Montpelie r, to deliver books and letters that Madison and Jefferson sent to each other. D uring Madison's terms as president, he often heard out his private secretary, Ed ward Coles, who objected to slavery as a violation of the natural rights doctrin e that Jefferson and Madison espoused. In 1816, Jesse Torrey, a zealous abolitio nist visited Montpelier and treated Madison to a tirade against slavery, afterwa rds sending a letter of apology -- only to receive, in reply, a letter from Madi son saying no apology was necessary. In 1824, Madison endured with good grace th e disapproval of Lafayette, then on a triumphal tour of the United States, who v isited Montpelier and told off the retired president, expressing disgust that bo th Jefferson and Madison, such champions of liberty, should still own slaves and support such a vile institution. In 1835, Harriet Martineau, an outspoken aboli tionist and an old friend of Madison's, visited him for the last time, afterward s reporting that her host "talked more on the subject of slavery than on any oth er, acknowledging, without limitations or hesitation, all the evils with which i t has ever been charged." Like Madison himself, his biographers treat slavery as a kind of dirge, faintly heard off-stage and nearly drowned out by the stirring music of the freedom figh ters making an American Revolution and the framers of the Constitution going abo ut the glorious work of creating a democratic republic. Elizabeth Dowling Taylor , however, wants us to listen to that more troubled theme, and the result is a r evelation. In A Slave in the White House: Paul Jennings and the Madisons, we're asked to consider Madison as a "garden-variety slaveholder": "He followed the ba sic patterns and norms for slaves' living conditions and treatment that had long been established on Virginia plantations and like most owners respected the cus tomary "rights" -- such as Sundays off -- that enslaved people had come to consi der their due." If it is not oxymoronic to say so, Madison was a humane slavehol der. He was also not very enterprising, in that his human holdings constituted - as they did for Jefferson -- a losing economic proposition. As soon as her hus band died, Dolley Madison, whose Quaker father had freed his slaves, sold off ba tches of her slaves in order to pay off debts. Ms. Dowling crafts a narrative in which African Americans are virtually never ou t of sight. And that makes a great deal of sense: it is unlikely that Madison ev er spent a day without relying on the services of a slave. He took at least one of them with him when he traveled. And Paul Jennings was the last one out the do or, clutching some of Dolley Madison's treasures, as the British advanced during the War of 1812 and set fire to the White House. Harriet Martineau observed with some surprise how Madison could discourse on the evils of slavery, even as slaves served him at table. It is that Madison we see

in Ms. Dowling's narrative. Here is a sample sentence: "The Virginia Resolution s [1799] was yet another appeal against tyranny that Madison drafted at the plac e where he lived with scores of slaves." When Lafayette comes to Montpelier, Jen nings is there beside Madison, listening, although we do not know what the slave thought. And this silence forces Ms. Dowling, all too often, to resort to what "must have been" going through Jennings's mind. It is no wonder, then, that most historians and biographers are much more comfortable dealing with Madison's wel l-documented mind. Thus Kevin R. C. Gutzman writes a stirring narrative, showing his subject's dexterity as politician and statesman, while Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg portray how well the tag-team of Madison and Jefferson served the ir country. The concluding pages of Richard Brookhiser's concise biography seem to come clos est to revealing why the mild-mannered Madison both deplored slavery and support ed it; started the War of 1812, even as he was trying to negotiate peace with th e British; and fought stoutly for maintaining the Union, even as he remained ver y much a son of the South. Mr. Brookhiser sees Madison as the epitome of the leg islative mind. Madison was the man of principles who made deals, making sure the words "slave" and "slavery" did not appear in the Constitution, but also paying off his Southern vote-counting brethren with the three-fifths compromise. Slave s were partial "persons" for purposes of exerting political power. This politica l accommodation jibed with Madison's statement that slaves were part of his fami ly, but only a "degraded" part. The legislative mind, Mr. Brookhiser suggests, has trouble with the idea of exer ting executive power. Since Madison believed that he could secure no agreement a mong slaveholders to abolish slavery -- let alone arrange some kind of compact w ith the North -- then nothing could be done short of shipping African Americans off to Liberia. But that strategy would work only if African Americans themselve s consented, Madison argued, and most did not. And the cost of reimbursing slave holders proved a problem too large for Madison's limited capacity as an economis t. But there is an even more important factor to consider in exploring why Madison, a mover and shaker of public opinion when it came to engineering such triumphs as the "Federalist Papers" to support the Constitution, never mounted a credible campaign to abolish or even attenuate the institution of slavery. From 1780 to 1784, William Gardner, Madison's slave, resided in Philadelphia with his master, who attended meetings there of the Continental Congress. Upon Madison's return to Virginia, Madison left Gardner behind, writing that his factotum's mind had b een "tainted" with ideas -- the "contagion of liberty," as Elizabeth Dowling Tay lor puts it. This episode is reminiscent of that scene in Frederick Douglass's a utobiography when his white mistress is advised not to teach him to read, becaus e doing so will only give him "notions" that do not befit a slave. Madison's idea of the American polity had no place for educated black men and wo men, let alone the masses of freed slaves that he believed had trouble governing themselves. No matter which biography you read, all of them eventually disclose this fundamental fact: Madison did not believe that white and black Americans c ould live side by side on terms of equality and amity. His failure to imagine a world more capacious and tolerant than his own helps explain a good deal of subs equent history, and America's resistance to the very practice of equality that M adison otherwise did so much to foster.