It was during this year of hard work and little result that he renewed an acquaintance with James Madison, Jr., afterward fourth President of the United States, and Gouverneur Morris, one of the most brilliant and disinterested young men in the country, now associated with Robert Morris in the Department of Finance.  With the last the acquaintance ripened into a lifelong and intimate friendship; with Madison the friendship was equally ardent and intimate while it lasted.  Madison had the brain of a statesman, energy and persistence in crises, immense industry, facility of speech, a broad contempt for the pretensions and mean bickerings of the States, and a fairly national outlook.  As Hamilton would have said, he “thought continentally.”  But he lacked individuality.  He was too patriotic, too sincere to act against his principles, but his principles could be changed by a more powerful and magnetic brain than his own, and the inherent weakness in him demanded a stronger nature to cling to.  It happened that he and Hamilton, when they met again in Congress, thought alike on many subjects, and they worked together in harmony from the first; nevertheless, he was soon in the position of a double to that towering and energetic personality, and worshipped it.  In their letters the two young men sign themselves, “yours affectionately,” “yours with deep attachment,” which between men—­I suppose—­means something.  So noticeable was Madison’s devotion to the most distinguished young man of the day, and a few years later so absorbed was he into the huge personality of his early friend’s bitterest enemy, that John Randolph once exclaimed in wrath, “Madison always was some great man’s mistress—­first Hamilton’s, then Jefferson’s:”  a remark which was safe in the days of our ancestors, when life was all work and no satiety.

Gouverneur Morris had sacrificed home, inheritance, and ties in the cause of the Revolution, most of his family remaining true to the crown.  His education was thorough, however, and subsequently he had nine years of Europe, of which he left to posterity an entertaining record.  Tall, handsome, a wit, a beau, notable for energy in Congress, erratic, caustic, cynical, but the warmest of friends, he was a pet of society, a darling of women, and trusted by all men.  He and Hamilton had much in common, and to some degree he took Laurens’s place; not entirely, for Laurens’s idealism gave him a pedestal in Hamilton’s memory which no other man but Washington ever approached; and Morris was brutal in his cynicism, placing mankind but a degree higher than the beasts of the forest.  But heart and brain endeared him to Hamilton, and no man had a loftier or more burning patriotism.  As for himself, he loved and admired Hamilton above all men.  He was as strong in his nationalism, believing Union under a powerful central government to be the only hope of the States.  Both he and Madison were leaders; but both, even then, were willing to be led by Hamilton, who was several years their junior.