Madison had expected to be elected to the Senate, but senators then were chosen by the state legislatures, and Henry adroitly blocked Madison. He and his allies also redrew the House districts, stacking Madison’s Fifth with anti-Constitution voters. And they passed a law forbidding Madison to run anywhere but in the unfriendly district they’d created. Henry and George Mason then recruited 30-year-old attorney James Monroe, who had opposed ratification, to compete for the Fifth District seat.

Virginia’s political elite was small. In 1784, Jefferson had supplied a written introduction of Monroe, telling Madison, “A better man cannot be,” and the two men had corresponded over the next four years. Now they agreed to travel together across the sketchy roads of the rural Fifth District, and speak jointly to the voters who gathered at crossroads and county seats. The experience changed both men. In rude country inns, they even shared a bed.

Years later, at the end of his life, Madison wrote, “We used to meet in days of considerable excitement, and address the people on our respective sides; but there never was an atom of ill will between us.” In fact, when he became president 18 years later, Madison recruited Monroe as his secretary of state and heir apparent.

But much more than a friendship was forged at those impromptu stump debates. Madison had begun the campaign opposed to a Bill of Rights; he regarded such provisions as “parchment barriers,” of no real use in restraining majorities. Only governmental structure could protect liberty. Monroe insisted a Bill was needed.

Chris DeRose, author of Founding Rivals: Madison v. Monroe, The Bill of Rights, and the Election that Saved a Nation, sums up what happened on the trail: “In the course of the campaign Madison becomes convinced that he needs to get behind the Bill of Rights, not because of political expediency but because some people who were acting in good faith would never be reconciled to the Constitution without one.”

As history shows, Madison (helped by a spell of bad weather that kept Monroe voters from the polls) won the race. Once in office, he braved the apathy and disdain of many of his colleagues to introduce and push a set of amendments. Ten of them were adopted and form the foundation of our individual liberties.

Because the republic survived its birth pangs, today we often assume that the “Founding Fathers” agreed on the values and aims of the new government. But their struggles were every bit as bitter, and seemed as important, as the partisan passions that animate debate today.

Today, in Virginia’s Seventh District, the prospect is for a one-sided slugfest, with Brat repeating far-right pieties about guns and God and Trammell speaking up for President Obama and government programs to aid the poor. The Glenn Becks and Ed Schultzes of the world will hurl fiery slogans from afar. Soon sleepy Ashland will echo with appeals to religion, attacks on opponents’ patriotism, and the obligatory references to Hitler.