Opening paragraphs............................

     Alexander Hamilton's hardscrabble youth was unique among America's founders, and not at all like Madison's upbringing.  Born on the island of Nevis, a flyspeck in the Caribbean, Hamilton knew turbulence and squalor.  His parents, who lived together but never married, struggled financially.  His father was the wastrel son of a landed Scottish family.  He left when Hamilton was ten.  Hamilton's mother died of  fever not long after, leaving two sons in the care of a cousin who soon committed suicide.
-Part One, Madison's Gift

     Madison's partnership with George Washington was no accident.  In the late summer of 1783, Madison began an assiduous courtship of America's first citizen.  The general had moved his headquarters to be near Congress's temporary home in Princeton.  With the war against the British winding down, Washington wanted to influence the nation's postwar defenses.  As a member of the congressional committee on that subject, Madison, met with the general professionally.  As a Virginian who shared a room with one of Washington's old friends, Madison saw him socially.  It was a start.
-Part Two, Madison's Gift

     They were the long and short of it - Jefferson a lanky six feet two inches, and Madison at least eight inches shorter.  They were best friends who held the presidency in turns, each serving for eight years from 1801 to 1817.  Through their forty-year partnership, they transformed American politics.  Which was exactly what they intended to do.
-Part Three,  Madison's Gift

     When Madison's term in the Confederation Congress expired at the end of 1783, he already knew about the twenty-five-year-old James Monroe, a former Continental Army officer who was one of the new delegates from Virginia.  Madison's closest congressional colleague was Monroe's uncle and mentor, Joseph Jones.  Madison and Jones lodged together in Philadelphia and Princeton, while Jones was working to smooth his nephew's entry into the world of politics and government.
-Part Four, Madison's Gift

     By the spring of 1794, when Aaron Burr introduced James Madison to her, Dolley Payne Todd had endured as many reversals in fortune as a Dickens heroine.  She was the second of eight children, the oldest girl.  Born to Quaker parents in North Carolina and related to several eminent Virginia clans, she spent her early years on plantations owned or leased by her father.  Though rural Virginia afforded few intellectual opportunities for your females, Dolley developed a taste for reading and always placed a high value on education.  In a will prepared while her son was an infant, she directed that "no expense be spared" on his education, which was "to him and to me the most interesting go all earthly concerns."
-Part Five,  Madison's Gift

-all paragraphs from David O. Stewart,  Madison's Gift:  Five Partnerships That Built America