[264] A slaveholder, Madison was aware that his actions contradicted his revolutionary values,[265] but, as a pragmatist, this sort of self-contradiction was a common feature in his political career.[266] Historian Drew R. McCoy wrote that Madison's antislavery principles were indeed "impeccable".[267]   As historian Ralph Ketcham wrote: "Although Madison abhorred slavery, he nonetheless bore the burden of depending all his life on a slave system that he could never square with his republican beliefs".[6]
There is no evidence that Madison believed in the innate inferiority of black people.[268] He implicitly denied that people of African descent were inferior,[263] but he believed that blacks and whites were unlikely to co-exist peacefully, at present,[268] due to "the prejudices of the whites" and due to both sides retaining "the feelings inspired by their former relation as oppressors and oppressed".[269] As such, he became interested in the idea of freedmen establishing colonies in Africa,[270] and he later served as the president of the American Colonization Society, which relocated former slaves to Liberia.[271] Madison believed that this solution offered a gradual, long-term, but potentially feasible means of eradicating slavery in the United States.