James Madison

James Madison

Today, March 16, is James Madison's birthday. It's a good day to take a moment to think about the 4th President, his home at Monteplier and the Museum dedicated to him.

 Just about 30 minutes from Charlottesville, Montpelier is the lifelong home of James Madison, Father of the Constitution, architect of the Bill of Rights, and 4th president of the United States. Nestled in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Montpelier is located in the heart of Virginia's wine country on Route 20, four miles south of Orange, Virginia. It was here at Montpelier where James Madison first imagined the Constitution, spending six months in his upstairs library researching governments, organizing his thoughts into what he believed were the ideal principles for a representative democracy. Madison’s ideas would become the “Virginia Plan,” and later the framework for the Constitution.

Now that the home's architectural restoration is complete, visitors can see the progress of rediscovering James and Dolley Madison through the "Presidential Detective Story" with guided house tours, as well as a myriad of special "behind the scenes" experiences. You can also stroll the garden and forest and take in the galleries, hands-on activities, and many other attractions on the estate's 2,650 acres. Montpelier is a National Trust for Historic Preservation site administered by The Montpelier Foundation.

 Not far from Montpelier, the James Madison Museum is located in Orange, Virginia. There are display exhibits that allow the guest to discover the life and works of James Madison, his first cousin Zachary Taylor, and friend James Monroe. They have the original documents of Virginia's ratification of the United States Constitution, Madison's campeachy chair, one of Dolley Madison's large oval mirrors, the lovely carved pipe Zachary Taylor gave his wife, a punch bowl owned by James Monroe featuring hand-painted portraits of his daughters and wife, and numerous other artifacts. There is also a wing with a Model T, a 1733 cube house, numerous farming implements and vehicle and an exhibit for the forgotten African-American heroes of our founding history.

Orange County celebrated the 262nd birthday of the Father of the Constitution on the grounds of his lifelong home today. Admission was free all day. Birthday acknowledgements included a wreath-laying ceremony in the Madison family cemetery by the U.S. Marines by order of President Obama. Re-enactors portraying James and Dolley Madison were present. If you missed it this year, plan ahead for next year.

A Cup of Hot Chocolate, S’good for What Ails Ya, Part 2

The first Englishmen to encounter chocolate were pirates, or, more politely, privateers, commissioned by the English monarch to prey on Spanish vessels. They didn't know what it was at first. On at least one occasion in the 1500s, English privateers burned a shipload of valuable cacao seeds, having no idea what the ugly little brown things were worth. Chocolate reached England in the middle of the seventeenth century, just as two other exotic beverages—coffee and tea—were making their debut.

It was no coincidence that these beverages were all consumed hot and sweet. “Hot melts sugar,” says Jim Gay. He’s Colonial Williamsburg’s Historic Foodways journeyman cook and an authority on the history and manufacture of chocolate. “All these beverages were sweetened with cane sugar. The British didn’t start growing sugar on Barbados until the 1640s. First comes sugar, then comes chocolate and coffee and tea . . . all of them introduced to the British in the late 1640s.”

The first known English recipe for chocolate called for sugar, long red pepper, cloves, aniseed, almonds, nuts, orange flower water, and, of course, cacao. “The hotter it is drunk, the better it is,” said the recipe’s author in 1652. Unaware of the Aztec custom of drinking it cool, the recipe said that “being cold it may doe harm.”

Chocolate was usually sold ground and pressed into cakes wrapped in paper. In England, the cakes were small, two or four ounces, because of the high cost of the product. In America where it was cheaper, the one-pound size was more common. By the start of the eighteenth century, the British were drinking chocolate with water and brandy, with milk, and with port or sherry. All three versions used sugar and spices and were frothed with a chocolate mill.

Once it snatched Jamaica from the Spanish in 1655, England had its own island with flourishing cacao plantations. Chocolate became widely available, although still expensive. Making it more so were the import duties levied on all chocolate brought into England. In the Atlantic colonies, however, the duties were lower, putting the cost of the beverage within reach of more pocketbooks. Perhaps that explains why, at the time of the Revolutionary War, there was one commercial chocolate maker in Britain and nearly seventy in the thirteen colonies.

Some historians think that chocolate drinking spread from England to its North American colonies, but it seems more likely that it came directly in ships that plied the trade routes from the West Indies to the major colonial ports of Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island. Whatever the route, chocolate arrived in English North America at about the same time it arrived in England. It was available as chocolate nuts, as shells, and in processed “chocolate cakes,” lumps of grated powder and sugar ready to be stirred into boiling water, mixed with whatever ingredients one preferred, and frothed with the little hand mill.Those who bought the cacao seed had to roast and grind the chocolate themselves or, more likely, have their servants or slaves do the tedious job. Those who, like Martha Washington, purchased the cacao shells, steeped them in hot water to make a thin chocolaty drink that was easier on the stomach than oily chocolate.