Born eight years and twenty miles apart, James Madison and James Monroe cut very different figures: The robust, six-foot tall Monroe gloried in Revolutionary War combat. Madison, short statured and prone to illness, preferred the life of the mind, developing the intellect to guide the drafting of the US Constitution and the savvy to engineer its success. Yet these two unlike men shared an impassioned devotion to the new American nation, and they formed a friendship that lasted decades, even surviving the serious political differences that led them to run against each other in the United States’ first congressional election.