James Madison Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
47 free James Madison trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
James Madison was five foot four, sickly, never joined the bar and never fought in the Revolution, yet he drafted the Virginia Plan, wrote the most famous of the Federalist Papers, pushed the Bill of Rights through the first Congress, co-founded a political party with Jefferson and then led the country into the War of 1812, fleeing Washington as the British burned the White House. He is the only president to have a Supreme Court landmark, Marbury v. Madison, named against him. This quiz covers the whole arc: Princeton in two years alongside Aaron Burr, the gerrymandered 1789 race against James Monroe, the Compromise of 1790, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Embargo, Dolley and the Washington portrait, the Hartford Convention, the Second Bank, the Bonus Bill veto, and his retirement spent editing his own letters. Fifty questions in sets of ten, from facts every civics class covers to the details only serious students of the founding will know.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which post did James Madison hold under Jefferson?
Secretary of State
Secretary of State. Madison ran American diplomacy for all eight years of Jefferson's presidency, and the post became a stepping stone: his two successors as president both held it first too.
Q 02James Madison is popularly known by which nickname?
Father of the Constitution
Father of the Constitution. Besides drafting the plan the convention started from, Madison sat at the front, missed no session and kept the fullest record of its secret debates.
Q 03What was the name of James Madison's plantation home in Virginia?
Montpelier
Montpelier. The duPont family bought it in 1901 and more than doubled the house; a restoration finished in 2008 removed their additions and returned it to the Madisons' day.
Q 04James Madison's proposal that became the basis for debate at the 1787 Constitutional Convention was called what?
Virginia Plan
Virginia Plan. Madison shaped it, but Governor Edmund Randolph was the one who presented it to the delegates, which is why it is also known as the Randolph Plan.
Q 05With which two men did James Madison write The Federalist Papers?
Alexander Hamilton and John Jay
Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. Hamilton wrote most of the essays and Madison about a third; Jay managed only five, because illness cut his part short.
Q 06Under what pseudonym were The Federalist Papers published?
Publius
Hamilton recruited Madison after John Jay dropped out of the project.
Q 07The Federalist essays were written to win over which state?
New York
New York. The essays ran there from October 1787, yet the state held out until July 1788, by which time ten others had ratified and the Constitution was already sure to take effect.
Q 08Federalist No. 10, James Madison's first essay in the series, warns of the danger posed by what?
Factions
Factions. Against the accepted view that a republic had to be small, Madison argued that a large one is safer, because no single faction can easily become a majority.
Q 09James Madison studied at the College of New Jersey; by what name is that university known today?
Princeton
Princeton. Most young Virginians of his class went to William & Mary, but its humid lowland climate was thought a danger to Madison's fragile health, so he went north.
Q 10During James Madison's presidency, who wrote 'The Star-Spangled Banner' after watching the British bombard Fort McHenry?
Francis Scott Key
Francis Scott Key. The lawyer watched the 1814 attack from a truce ship, where he had gone to win a captured friend's release, and set his poem to the tune of a London gentlemen's club song.
Q 11Which college president, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, taught James Madison?
John Witherspoon
John Witherspoon. Madison stayed on after graduating to study Hebrew and other subjects under the Scottish minister, who steeped his students in Enlightenment philosophy.
Q 12The capital of which U.S. state is named after James Madison?
Wisconsin
Wisconsin. Land speculator James Doty named his planned city for the former president in 1836, then won it the capital by offering undecided legislators cheap lots there.
Q 13Dolley Madison is credited with saving a full-length portrait of whom before the British burned the White House?
George Washington
Q 21Which Philadelphia newspaper did James Madison and Thomas Jefferson help Philip Freneau found?
National Gazette
National Gazette. To lure Freneau, a college friend of Madison's, to Philadelphia, Jefferson gave him a government job as a translator, though French was his only foreign language.
Q 22Which 1794 agreement with Britain ended James Madison's friendship with President Washington?
Jay Treaty
Jay Treaty. Madison led the opposition to it in Congress, convinced it would ruin American economic independence, and the fight ended his long partnership with the president for good.
Q 23Dolley Madison was expelled from which religious group for marrying James Madison, an outsider to it?
The Quakers
George Washington. By her own account she had the frame broken so the Gilbert Stuart canvas could be carried off, though a servant who was there later wrote that others took it down.
Q 14Which Virginia measure written by Jefferson did Madison steer to passage in 1786?
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. Jefferson's bill had sat unpassed for years; Madison first defeated a rival plan to fund Christian teachers by tax, then pushed it through while its author was in Paris.
Q 15Which general won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, two weeks after the treaty ending Madison's war was signed?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson. News of the peace signed in Europe had not yet crossed the Atlantic, and the lopsided victory made him a national hero and, fourteen years later, president.
Q 16Which former governor led the fight against the Constitution at Virginia's 1788 ratifying convention?
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry. The 'liberty or death' orator dominated the speeches against it, yet Madison answered him point by point, promised a bill of rights and carried the vote.
Q 17Which future president did James Madison defeat in 1789 for a seat in the first Congress?
James Monroe
James Monroe. The rivals often rode from debate to debate together and stayed friends; Madison won after promising to back amendments protecting individual rights.
Q 18Whose 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights did James Madison draw on when he drafted the Bill of Rights?
George Mason
George Mason. He had refused to sign the Constitution in 1787 and opposed it in Virginia, yet his own declaration became the model for the amendments Madison wrote two years later.
Q 19A Madison amendment from 1789, ratified in 1992, covers what?
Congressional pay
Congressional pay. The 27th Amendment makes any change to Congress's salary wait for an election; a Texas student revived it in 1982 with a paper, graded C, arguing it could still be ratified.
Q 20In the Compromise of 1790, Madison accepted Hamilton's debt plan in exchange for what?
A federal capital on the Potomac
A federal capital on the Potomac. By Jefferson's account the deal was struck over a dinner he hosted for the two men, the scene behind 'The Room Where It Happens' in the musical Hamilton.
The Quakers. Dolley was a 26-year-old widow who had lost her first husband and baby son to yellow fever the year before; marrying outside the faith cost her membership of the Society of Friends.
Q 24Who formally introduced James Madison to his future wife in 1794?
Aaron Burr
Aaron Burr. The future vice president knew the young widow from a Philadelphia boarding house where he had lodged, and arranged the meeting at the 43-year-old Madison's own request.
Q 25Whose debts and mismanagement helped ruin James Madison's finances in his retirement?
His stepson's
His stepson's. John Payne Todd, Dolley's son from her first marriage, ran up debts the Madisons kept paying, and with tobacco prices falling they left the plantation in deep financial trouble.
Q 26In his Virginia Resolutions of 1798, James Madison favoured which doctrine over Jefferson's nullification?
Interposition
Interposition. A state could declare a federal law unconstitutional and protest, but not block it alone; Madison spent the rest of his life insisting his text gave no support to nullification.
Q 27James Madison's Report of 1800 attacked which laws of John Adams's presidency as unconstitutional?
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The Alien and Sedition Acts. They made it a crime to criticise the president or the government, and newspaper owners who backed Jefferson were convicted under them.
Q 28The landmark case Marbury vs. Madison arose because Madison, on Jefferson's orders, refused to deliver what?
A judge's commission
A judge's commission. John Adams had appointed William Marbury in his last days in office; the Court ruled he was owed the post but that it could not order delivery, and in doing so claimed the power to strike down laws.
Q 29Which 1807 act did Jefferson and Madison push through to pressure Britain and France?
Embargo Act
Embargo Act. Its ban on all exports hurt the American economy far more than Europe's, and Congress replaced it in March 1809, days before Madison became president.
Q 30Whom did James Madison defeat in the 1808 presidential election?
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. The Federalists counted on anger at the government's ban on foreign trade to carry the South Carolinian, yet Madison beat him by 122 electoral votes to 47.