James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (54 page)

One of the drawing room’s finest features was that it opened to a portico and lawn in back of the house. Beyond the lawn were woods and mountains, which the drawing room’s large mirrors reflected. In summer,
when the doors to the portico were opened, the sweet scent of the jasmine and roses that twined around the portico’s pillars drifted into the room, adding, in the words of one visitor, “an air of indescribable charm to the whole scene, like a bit of fairyland in this prosaic world.”
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Guests reported dining at about 4:00 p.m. and, after lingering over excellent wines, adjourning with the Madisons to the portico, where they could view the Blue Ridge Mountains and admire the classical temple that Madison had built to disguise the icehouse. There was also a telescope on the portico with which guests could amuse themselves by bringing distant fields into view and espying visitors as they wound their way up the road to Montpelier. One day, challenging a young guest to a footrace, Mrs. Madison told of another entertainment that the portico provided. “Madison and I often run races here when the weather does not allow us to walk,” she said.
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MADISON SPENT
untold hours writing and talking to Jefferson about the creation of the University of Virginia, a project in which Jefferson had involved Madison even before he had settled back into Montpelier. Madison’s work on behalf of the university was more than dutiful service to a friend. As he explained to a correspondent in Kentucky, knowledge was essential to a free people: “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” By establishing institutions of learning, the United States showed the world that free governments “are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights.” This thought led him to one of the most charming images in all of his writings. “What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable,” he asked, “than that of liberty and learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual and surest support?”
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The great walls of the university’s Rotunda, designed by Jefferson
after the Pantheon in Rome, began to rise, and when the thrilling news came that Lafayette was to visit the United States, Jefferson invited him to dine in the magnificent building. In the early afternoon of November 4, 1824, the sixty-seven-year-old Lafayette arrived at Monticello, where he and the eighty-one-year-old Jefferson, who had been ill, had a tearful reunion. Madison, a spry seventy-three, joined them at sunset. “My old friend embraced me with great warmth,” he reported to Mrs. Madison. “He is in fine health and spirits but so much increased in bulk and changed in aspect that I should not have known him.”
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The next day the three men traveled from Monticello to the university in what a French visitor called an “elegant calash.” Cavalry accompanied them, and a large crowd followed. Lafayette and the two presidents walked up the lawn to the Rotunda amid much waving of handkerchiefs, and although the building was not quite complete, four hundred people were seated for dinner on the top floor beneath the dome. As a French visitor described the scene, “The sight of the nation’s guest seated at the patriotic banquet between Jefferson and Madison, excited in those present an enthusiasm which expressed itself in enlivening sallies of wit and humor. Mr. Madison . . . was especially remarkable for the originality of his expressions and the delicacy of his allusions.” From Monticello, Lafayette went to Montpelier, where one of the French guests observed that Madison’s “well preserved frame contained a youthful soul full of sensibility, which he did not hesitate to show when he expressed to General Lafayette the pleasure he felt at having him in his house.” Mrs. Madison was praised for “the graces of her mind” and the way that “the amenity of her character” exalted “the excellence of that frank hospitality with which strangers are received at Montpelier.”
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The university opened in March 1825. Jefferson, who had declared that it would “be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” shied away from prescribing “the principles which are to be taught”—except in the case of the law school. There he believed that the board of visitors ought to require certain texts: the Declaration of Independence,
The Federalist,
and the resolutions of Virginia against the Alien and
Sedition Laws. Madison, seeing subtleties where his friend did not, argued that if books and documents were to be required, the list should be lengthened to include George Washington’s inaugural speech and Farewell Address. He also made the case that dictating the way these texts should be taught, which Jefferson clearly intended, would excite controversy and ultimately prove unworkable. “The most effectual safeguard against heretical intrusions into the school of politics,” Madison wrote, “will be an able and orthodox professor.”
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While he was ahead of Jefferson in his notion of academic freedom, that principle did not in his mind require the trustees of the university to blind themselves to the views of candidates for the law professor’s post—a feat that would have been impossible in any case.

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FAMILY, BEGINNING WITH DOLLEY,
was a great source of happiness for Madison in his later years. Mrs. Madison, according to her niece Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts, was the former president’s “solace and comfort”: “He could not bear her to leave his presence, and she gratified him by being absent only when duty required. No matter how agreeably employed [she was], he was her first thought, and instinct seemed to tell her when she was wanted. If engaged in conversation, she would quickly rise and say ‘I must go to Madison.’ On his return from riding round the plantation she would meet him at the door with refreshment in her own hands.” One guest who observed them together noted that “they looked like Adam [and] Eve in their bower.”
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Relatives from both sides of the family were among the frequent visitors to Montpelier. Madison particularly enjoyed the company of Nelly Madison Willis, the cheerful and good-hearted daughter of his late brother Ambrose. In the summer Dolley’s sister Anna Cutts and her children made long visits. Anna’s oldest son was a namesake, James Madison Cutts, and her youngest, Richard D. Cutts, was the apple of his uncle James’s eye. Madison sent young Richard a copy of the
Spectator,
telling him that he had read it as a boy and recommending it for the “lively sense of the duties, the virtues, and the proprieties of life” it
imparted. There were strains between Madison’s brother William and other members of the family, particularly Frances Madison Rose, the youngest sister, arising from the settlement of James senior’s estate. William seemed perpetually angry, perhaps because of the awful circumstances of his life. Tuberculosis decimated his family. By the time of James Madison’s retirement, William had lost four children, and during James’s retirement he would lose five more and his wife. James seems to have looked beyond his brother’s bitterness to recognize the gifts of William’s son Robert, whose way he paid at Dickinson College. Robert’s wedding was celebrated at Montpelier.
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Other family members were also a source of worry. After Anna’s husband, Richard Cutts, lost his inherited fortune during the War of 1812, he persuaded Madison to lend him $11,500 so that he could invest his way out of his financial troubles. Dolley Madison contributed another $4,000. But Cutts’s ventures failed, and he was forced to declare himself insolvent. A bank to which he owed money seized the home he had built for his family on the square north of the White House, and Madison signed notes for another $6,000 to buy it so that Anna Cutts and her children would not be displaced. This arrangement infuriated other creditors of Cutts’s (including architect William Thornton), who resented his living in fine style while he owed them money. It also led to Madison’s being named and having to hire lawyers to defend him in two suits brought against Cutts.
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Payne Todd was angered by the initial loan to Cutts because, he wrote, the four thousand dollars his mother contributed was from his trust and he had not been consulted. It is hard to have confidence in many of Todd’s statements, but this one has the ring of truth about it. Dolley Madison had raised Anna and regarded her as her daughter as well as a sister. She would have gone to almost any length to prop up the Cutts family’s fortunes. Todd brooded over the Cutts loan, and although he already had a habit of disappearing for months at a time and running up bills that James Madison ended up being responsible for, Todd’s resentment over his mother’s spending a significant part of his patrimony might have made matters worse. In 1825, after one long period of not
hearing from him, Madison wrote, “What shall I say to you? It is painful to utter reproaches; yet how can they be avoided?” Todd was not only beggaring him, he was bringing grief to Mrs. Madison, “the tenderest of mothers.” She was “wound up to the highest pitch by this addition to your long and mysterious absence,” Madison wrote, urging Todd to explain the reasons for it. “You owe it to yourself as well as to us to withhold them no longer.”
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Both Madisons were concerned that Todd had ended up in debtors’ prison, as indeed he had.

Until 1825, Madison had managed to stay afloat with bank loans, but in April of that year, when he had tried to borrow six thousand dollars from the Bank of the United States, the bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle, turned him down, explaining that the bank was no longer lending money secured by real estate. Madison managed to get Payne out of prison and, in an effort to keep him from going back, assumed responsibility for a number of his debts. Short of funds himself, however, he had to seek delays and make excuses. In 1826 he wrote to a Philadelphia boardinghouse owner, “Inconsiderable as the amount may be thought, such have been the failures of my crops and the prices for them for a series of years and such the utter failures of payments when I am the creditor, and I may add, such the pecuniary distress and prospects here at present, that in undertaking unforeseen payments the time must be left to my own conveniency.” In 1827, when Philadelphia’s postmaster, Richard Bache, covered a three-hundred-dollar draft of Todd’s “to prevent his arrest and imprisonment,” Madison had to ask for time in repaying him. He simply didn’t have the money.
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Madison found buyers for Montpelier lands as well as some adjacent and in 1827 gratefully received a loan of two thousand dollars from Edward Coles, the young Virginian who had been his private secretary while he was president. Since his time with Madison, Coles, who was just six years older than Payne Todd, had accomplished many things, including freeing ten slaves he had inherited from his father. He had taken them out of state, as Virginia law required, and settled them in Illinois, giving each family 160 acres of land. Subsequently elected governor of Illinois, Coles had tried but failed to change the infamous
“black code” of Illinois, which placed restrictions on free blacks. He did manage to turn back a serious effort to make slavery legal in the state.
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Coles had been fervently opposed to slavery since he was a young man and had not hesitated to let Madison know his views. When Madison continued as a slaveholder, Coles tried to understand how a good man could tolerate such a great moral wrong. He described Madison’s principles as “sound, pure, and conscientious”: “To give pain always gave him pain; and no man had a more instinctive repugnance to doing wrong to another than he had; yet from the force of early impressions, the influence of habit and association, and a certain train of reasoning which lulled in some degree his conscience, without convincing his judgment (for he never justified or approved of it), he continued to hold slaves.” Madison congratulated Coles for his success in pursuing “the true course” but cautioned him that white prejudice would keep those whom he had freed from full liberty. Over the years the people Coles had emancipated worked hard and did well, but along the way they were also duped and cheated, as well as deprived of their rights by the Illinois black code. Coles, convinced that all free blacks would find better lives in Africa, became an outspoken member of the American Colonization Society.
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Madison had other young friends who wanted to leave Virginia. Nicholas Trist, grandson of Eliza, studied at West Point, read law, and tried unsuccessfully to make a career for himself as a planter in Louisiana. Trist returned home to marry his sweetheart, Virginia Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, but like many of his generation couldn’t find a way to make a living in the Old Dominion and spent most of his life outside it. His friend (and Thomas Jefferson’s grandson) Francis Eppes expressed the frustration of a younger generation of Virginians as financial depression continued. He wrote to Trist, “
We
will never witness better times here.”
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MADISON WAS NOT
the only former president with financial woes. Jefferson’s troubles made the newspapers when he sought permission from the Virginia legislature to organize a lottery to sell Monticello
property. After the stories appeared, Madison received a letter from his friend mentioning the “mortification” he was going through and explaining how it had happened: poor crops, low crop prices, plummeting property values, and former governor Wilson Cary Nicholas’s default on a twenty-thousand-dollar note that Jefferson had co-signed and for which he was now liable. That, Jefferson explained, was “the
coup de grace
.”
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Madison wrote back that he, too, was struggling: “Since my return to private life (and the case was worse during my absence in public) such have been the unkind seasons and the ravages of insects that I have made but one tolerable crop of tobacco and but one of wheat, the proceeds of both of which were greatly curtailed by mishaps in the sale of them. And having no resources but in the earth I cultivate, I have been living very much throughout on borrowed means.” Madison did not mention Payne Todd, though surely it must have occurred to him that Todd was a greater blight on Madison fortunes than Wilson Cary Nicholas was on those of Jefferson. Receipts that Madison saved from payments he made on Todd’s behalf would eventually total some twenty thousand dollars—about half, Madison would estimate, of the amount he had actually paid.
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