James Madison: A Life Reconsidered (56 page)

MADISON SPENT
long hours at Montpelier collecting and editing his papers. He wrote to friends and their descendants to retrieve copies of letters he had written, separated official correspondence from private, and, to the everlasting regret of Madison scholars, destroyed or gave
away documents that he considered personal. Mrs. Madison often worked with him, and both he and she struck out lines in letters that they thought might be hurtful. When Madison came across a letter he had written to Jefferson some fifty years before, he changed the description of Lafayette it contained from “I take him to be as amiable a man as his vanity will admit” to “I take him to be as amiable a man as can be imagined.” The description had originally been in code, but Jefferson’s decipherment of it was plain for all to see. Thus in order to change the passage, Madison had to imitate Jefferson’s writing, which he did. Madison clearly thought that after a half century of friendship and all that Lafayette had endured, he deserved better.
⁴⁶

Scholar that he was, working on his notes of the Constitutional Convention must have brought him particular gratification. They were a gift for posterity, contributing, in his words, to “the history of a constitution on which would be staked the happiness of a people great even in its infancy and possibly the cause of liberty throughout the world.” He also hoped that the sale of his papers would prove a financial benefit to family members and institutions that he valued. He no doubt particularly hoped to protect Mrs. Madison from the poverty that was beginning to encroach on Montpelier. A visitor noted that Madison’s well-designed house was “decayed and in need of considerable repairs, which, at a trifling expense would make a great difference in favor in the first impression of his residence.”
⁴⁷

Although Madison sold off land, he did not want to sell slaves, which meant that there were fewer and fewer resources to support an enslaved workforce that continued to grow. Finally, in 1834, he sold sixteen slaves to William Taylor, a relative in Louisiana. He told Edward Coles that the slaves had consented “to be transferred,” and although slaves were generally—and rightfully—terrified of being sent to the sugar and cane fields of the Deep South, there is contemporary testimony to slaves as well as slaveholders wanting to leave an increasingly impoverished Virginia. It would have been obvious to those who were enslaved at Montpelier, as it was to its master, that the farmland that remained could not produce enough to feed and clothe all those who lived there.
⁴⁸

Madison had intended for the sale to take care of his most urgent debts, but one of the first creditors he paid was Edward Coles, who does not seem to have been pressing for payment. But Coles had become agitated by what he called the “revolting heresies” of Andrew Jackson and peremptorily demanded that the eighty-three-year-old Madison step forth and condemn the president. Madison answered that given “the debilitating effects of age and disease,” he had “withdrawn from
party
agitations,” which is what he believed the quarrels surrounding Jackson were about. He no doubt also had in mind Jackson’s firm opposition to nullification. The president had been on the right side of that controversy. Coles responded furiously that Jackson was violating the Constitution and again demanded that Madison speak out. Coles was not the first person to think that being a creditor entitled him to more than money, but Madison, apparently finding his attitude intolerable, used proceeds from the slave sale to pay Coles. He also wrote him a stern letter that had apparent effect: Coles, though still not lacking in self-righteousness, henceforward was respectful.
⁴⁹

•   •   •

MADISON’S MOTHER
died in 1829 at the age of ninety-eight, and he was also losing younger people whom he loved: Robert Madison, the nephew in whom he had placed such hopes, died in 1828. Anna Cutts, whom he had helped Dolley raise and seen through many troubles, died in 1832. As happens to those who attain great age, compatriots passed from his life, including James Monroe, who, having fallen into financial ruin, had been forced to sell his Albemarle property. Plagued by ill health, Monroe went to live with his daughter in New York City, and it was from there that he wrote to Madison, “I deeply regret that there is no prospect of our ever meeting again.” Madison responded, “Closing the prospect of our ever meeting again afflicts me deeply. . . . The pain I feel at the idea, associated as it is with a recollection of the long, close, and uninterrupted friendship which united us, amounts to a pang which I cannot well express.”
⁵⁰
Monroe died a few months later—on July 4, 1831.

In a letter to historian Jared Sparks, Madison observed that since the death of Georgia’s William Few, he was “the only living signer of the Constitution of the United States,” and he joked, “Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not to forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.” In his last years, he suffered from what he called “the crippling effects of a tedious rheumatism” that made it very difficult for him to write and caused him to spend much of his time on a couch. When friends came to visit him, he excused his reclining posture by saying that “he could converse better lying.”
⁵¹
Despite age, illness, and financial stress, signs of good humor remained.

His life became ever more narrowly circumscribed, until he was living in a single room where he had a bed and a chair, next to the Montpelier dining room, but even then visitors noted the vigor and relish of his spirit. They often gave Dolley credit for the loving care she provided him, and it was well deserved. During one eight-month period when he was ill, she did not venture farther than the black picket fence surrounding their Montpelier home. One particularly astute guest, English writer and feminist Harriet Martineau, noted how much Madison owed to his wife’s “intellectual companionship.” Martineau, who arrived to visit the Madisons on “a sweet day of early spring” in 1835, found Mrs. Madison “a strong-minded woman, fully capable of entering into her husband’s occupations and cares.” Dolley had been with the man whom she called her best beloved through presidential elections, war, and the burning of Washington, and during his long retirement she helped him edit his papers. One doubts that she any longer prefaced political questions as she once had by stressing her “want of talents.”
⁵²

The Madisons had specifically invited Martineau, who was touring the United States, to visit Montpelier, perhaps because they had heard that she admired the former president’s political philosophy, but the fact that she was an abolitionist probably played an important part. Madison did not want to die without making clear that he, too, abhorred slavery, that it was guilty of every evil with which it had ever been charged.

Perhaps it was the recent effort of working on his will that made him feel a need to explain himself. Certainly the task was a harsh reminder
of the realities of trying to disentangle himself from an institution he despised. Friends were encouraging him to free his slaves in his will, but to do so immediately upon his death would leave Dolley Madison with an indebted estate and no way to run it. To free them upon her death would leave her in the same situation in which George Washington’s will left his wife. Martha Washington became so afraid of being killed that she freed his slaves a year after his death. But she had 153 slaves of her own remaining, “dower slaves” they were called, with which to manage Mount Vernon.
⁵³
There were no “dower slaves” at Montpelier.

And even if there were a way for Dolley to manage with the slaves at Montpelier freed, where were they to go? As Madison explained to Martineau, “The free states discourage the settlement of blacks; . . . Canada disagrees with them; . . . Haiti shuts them out.” He told her that “Africa is their only refuge.” The American Colonization Society, of which he had become president, was, he said, the only thing that kept him from utter despair about ending slavery.
⁵⁴

Martineau was deeply skeptical of the colonization scheme, and Madison admitted the difficulties, primary among them being that enslaved people did not want to go to Liberia. But it was all he had found to cling to and he held on hard, deluding himself, but refusing to die without some hope that the “dreadful calamity” of slavery would end.
⁵⁵

Slavery was the subject Madison talked most to Martineau about, but their conversation ranged widely, from the death of British scholar Thomas Malthus to the size of Roman farms. Observing Madison’s keenness for conversation and the remarkable vigor of his mind, Martineau asked herself what uplifted him as he faced the yawning grave, and she concluded that it was his “inexhaustible faith; faith that a well-founded commonwealth may . . . be immortal; not only because the people, its constituency, never dies; but because the principles of justice in which such a commonwealth originates never die out of the people’s heart and mind.” He had used his remarkable gifts in one of the most important ways a man could, by playing a key role—the key role, one might say—in creating a framework for laws and establishing institutions that would secure liberty and happiness for generations to come.
“This political religion resembles personal piety,” Martineau observed, “in its effect of sustaining the spirit through difficulty and change, and leaving no cause for repentance, or even solicitude, when, at the close of life, all things reveal their values to the meditative sage.”
⁵⁶

•   •   •

ON THE MORNING OF
June 28, 1836, Madison died at home, in his room. An enslaved woman named Sukey had brought his breakfast, but he had trouble swallowing. “What is the matter, Uncle James?” asked his favorite niece, Nelly Willis. “Nothing more than a change of
mind,
my dear,” he answered. Paul Jennings, born a slave at Montpelier and now Madison’s manservant, described what happened next: “His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.”
⁵⁷

He was buried in the family graveyard, where his grandfather Ambrose and his grandmother Frances lay and near where he had buried his mother and father. Modest to the end, he had not, as his friend Jefferson had, designed a tombstone, and for twenty years his grave remained unmarked.

MADISON LEFT MOST
of his worldly goods to his wife, including the slaves at Montpelier. Friends clung to the idea that there was a secret codicil instructing Mrs. Madison to free them upon her death, but if Madison left such instructions, they have never been found. His will simply asked that Dolley Madison sell slaves only with their consent or if they misbehaved, a request that for several years she largely managed to fulfill.
¹

In the expectation that the sale of his papers would bring $100,000, Madison left bequests amounting to $5,500 to institutions such as the American Colonization Society, the University of Virginia, and Princeton. In addition to individual bequests of land and cash amounting to $7,000 to specified relatives, he made a general bequest of $9,000 to be divided among his nieces and nephews, or, if they should be deceased, their heirs. But when Congress purchased the first three volumes of his writings in 1837, it was for just $30,000. Even as Mrs. Madison was distributing funds according to his will, creditors were almost certainly dunning her for payment of debts incurred before his death, and meanwhile Payne Todd continued his wastrel ways. A friend, noting that Todd’s friends were
“blacklegs and gamblers,” worried that “this money will in all likelihood be lost to Mrs. Madison if he has any power over it.”
²

In October 1837, Dolley returned to Washington for a long stay, occupying the house on Lafayette Square where her sister had once lived. Warm and gracious as ever, she soon found her days filled with visiting and her evenings with elegant events. At one dinner to which she was invited, twenty courses were served, each accompanied by wine. But even as she attended such festivities, she was falling into a genteel but very real poverty. No longer able to buy new clothes, she wore outfits she had had for years. Among her favorites was an old black velvet dress that she paired with a worn white satin turban.
³

Back at Montpelier in the summer of 1839, Dolley found herself a caregiver again. Her sister Lucy, who had suffered a stroke, moved in, and Dolley became her devoted nurse. Dolley’s son, Payne, constructed an eccentric home near Montpelier that he called Toddsberth, and that project ended as badly as the rest of his ventures, with the main structure burning to the ground in the spring of 1841. The economy persisted on its downward path, and Virginia continued its long agricultural decline. Making matters worse, the overseer neglected the fields, and Dolley lost an entire season’s crop. In her early seventies now, she was often not well. A recurrent and painful eye inflammation made it difficult for her to write.
⁴

She was also under pressure from William Madison, who still harbored resentment over the settlement of James senior’s will. Determined to get his due, he sued Dolley for two thousand dollars that he claimed was owed him from his work on that will. When he died in 1843, his son continued the suit, and when the court ruled in his favor, Montpelier slaves were seized to pay off the debt. By countersuing, Dolley managed to stay the sale of the slaves, and she transferred ownership of some forty of them to Payne Todd.
⁵

It was impossible to keep Montpelier any longer, and after a long negotiation she sold it and the rest of the estate’s slaves to merchant Henry Moncure. She wrote to him, “No one, I think, can appreciate my feeling of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home.”
⁶

Living on Lafayette Square in Washington again, Dolley received more invitations than she could possibly accept and was even given her own seat on the floor of the House of Representatives. But the sale of Montpelier had not alleviated her financial distress. A journal she kept in 1845 and 1846 shows her dependent on a seventy-dollar loan on which she paid thirty-five cents a month in interest. In 1847, she wrote to her son, “I have borrowed as you
must
know to live since and before we parted last, but now I am at a stand until supplies come from you.”
⁷
Recognizing that Payne was a financial threat to his mother rather than a resource for her, Congress, in purchasing an additional four volumes of James’s papers in 1848, paid Dolley Madison five thousand dollars outright but put the remaining twenty thousand dollars of the purchase price in a trust from which she could draw the interest.

Word of the congressional purchase led creditors to demand payment, and Dolley was soon making plans to sell off paintings that had hung at Montpelier, which she had managed to keep out of Payne Todd’s hands. In the years before Henry Moncure bought the estate, Payne had regularly removed valuable items from the mansion to sell—including some of his stepfather’s papers—but Dolley had some items remaining, and she intended either to auction or to raffle them to raise cash to fend off creditors.
⁸

Dolley found comfort for her trials at St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, where she was confirmed as a member, and in loving friends and relatives who were with her in her dying days. Not long after her eighty-first birthday, she fell into a coma from which she woke occasionally to smile at those gathered around her. On the evening of July 12, 1849, she drew her last breath. Her funeral, held at St. John’s four days later, was the largest that the capital city had ever seen. Afterward, a cortege of dignitaries, led by President Zachary Taylor, accompanied her body to the Congressional Cemetery, where her casket was placed in a vault. Her son, Payne, did not long outlive her, dying on a cold and stormy day in 1852.
⁹

In 1858, one of her beloved sister Anna’s sons traveled with her remains to Montpelier, where she was buried in the family graveyard next to James.
¹⁰
Once again she was with her darling—and he with the woman to whom he had pledged his unalterable love.

•   •   •

JAMES’S GRAVE
was marked by an obelisk now, paid for by admirers who could not bear to let his final resting place go unacknowledged. Five years after Mrs. Madison’s interment, his grave marker would be sketched by a soldier in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. Private Watkins Kearns drew the obelisk in August 1863 after he had retreated with General Robert E. Lee from Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Upward of fifty thousand men had been killed or wounded.
¹¹

The Constitution, without which there would have been no Union, could not prevent the war that threatened the Union’s destruction, but when peace finally came, the Constitution remained. It was amended to end slavery according to the process Madison had drafted in Philadelphia three-quarters of a century before, the same process he had used to achieve the Bill of Rights, the same process that would be used to extend the vote to women, the same process that would achieve—by way of the Fourteenth Amendment and later rulings—one of his longest-sought goals: the protection of individual rights in the states.
¹²

The founding framework endured and pays tribute to Madison’s genius still today, as does the great nation that the Constitution has made possible. The United States of America is testimony to the strength of the well-founded commonwealth—and proof of the righteousness of James Madison’s unbounded faith in liberty.