The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (46 page)

For good measure, Catherine Coles added, “He has consented to every thing that I have wrote about him with sparkling eyes.” For even better measure, Madison enlisted none other than Martha Washington, who reportedly wrote Dolley a warm letter, urging her to marry her ardent forty-three-year-old suitor.
¹²

Dolley played the reluctant game for a while. But in the summer of 1794, while visiting her sister Lucy in Virginia, she wrote Madison a letter, saying yes. Madison replied that he had received her “precious favor” and hoped she could “conceive the joy it gave me.” The once jilted suitor anxiously added, “I hope you will never have another deliberation on that subject. If the sentiments of my heart can guarantee those of yours, they assure me they can never be cause for it.”
¹³

The couple were married on September 15, 1794, at Harewood, the Virginia plantation of George Steptoe Washington. Before the afternoon ceremony began, Dolley found time to write a letter to Eliza Collins, who had just married Congressman Lee. The bride’s remarks about James Madison were notably unromantic. She mentioned her “respect” for him and thought their marriage would give her “everything that is soothing and grateful.” What she meant was clear in the next sentence: “My little Payne will have a generous & tender protector.” She was thinking of her two-year-old son, Payne Todd, who needed a father.

The word “love” went unmentioned in this intimate semi-confession. She signed the letter “Dolley Payne Todd.” That evening, after the ceremony and the wedding dinner, she added beneath the previous signature: “Dolley Madison! Alas!”
¹⁴

D
olley Payne Todd wrote another letter on her wedding day that suggests it was a good thing James Madison campaigned vigorously for her hand. The letter was to her lawyer, William Wilkins, who had helped her settle her late husband’s complicated estate. He was not pleased by the news of her marriage. He gave his
very
reluctant approval and confessed that he was “not insensible to your charms.” Another hint of his feelings was the way he called her “Julia,” apparently a private name. This was a device lovers used—as we have seen in the correspondence of John and Abigail Adams.

Wilkins added words that may further explain Dolley’s “alas.” He warned her that “the eyes of the world” were on her and “your enemies have already opened their mouths.” Wilkins probably meant Dolley’s Todd in-laws, who had already quarreled with her over her late husband’s estate. They were likely to be unhappy about her new husband obtaining control of her modest inheritance and would probably inform their fellow Quakers that she had married an Anglican. That meant Dolley would be “read out” of their congregation. Aside from the romantic feelings she had aroused in Wilkins, Dolley’s marriage to Madison represented a radical break with her Quaker past.

Dolley may not have married for love. But as the newlyweds visited friends on other plantations in Virginia, she soon realized that for her husband, there was no other reason. Beneath the rational logical persona James Madison presented to his fellow politicians, he was a romantic, a man whose heart spoke to him as often as his head. For him, marriage
was a step that could be authorized only by his heart. The intensity of Madison’s feelings swiftly awoke a similar response in Dolley. Whatever ambivalence she felt about their marriage vanished forever.

Madison’s heart also explained his loyalty to Thomas Jefferson and his hostility to Alexander Hamilton’s attempt to transform America into an industrial mirror image of Great Britain.
¹
Madison unhesitatingly shared his inner political self with Dolley. A warm letter of congratulations from Jefferson no doubt helped unite politics and personal affection. Jefferson himself was adept in that department. His letter included a plea not to retire from politics. “This must not be,” he wrote. He hoped Mrs. Madison would “keep you where you are for your own satisfaction and the public good.” How could any woman resist such a challenge?
²

II

During the next three years in Philadelphia, Dolley experienced the excitement of being a political insider. She saw first hand the bruising partisan warfare of the 1790s, and participated in it as James Madison’s wife. She observed the toll that the insults and accusations of his opponents sometimes took on her husband’s fragile health—and also realized that he and his fellow politicians enjoyed such risks as well as the other less than wonderful effects of the pursuit and use of power in the name of a cause. As a fellow Virginian, Dolley had no difficulty identifying with the Jeffersonian Republicans’ hostility to Hamilton and his commercial ways.

Philadelphia was a lively city, especially for political insiders. There was an almost perpetual round of balls and dinners. At the center of the action were a number of wealthy women who were determined to find a role for their sex in the new republic. They embraced the idea that this could be done by urging men to live up to the ideals of republicanism. It was a very American twist on the role that aristocratic French women had created for themselves in Paris. Dolley was a frequent and always welcome guest at their parties and dinners, and had a unique opportunity to study their methods and estimate their success. Perhaps the most memorable social event staged by these women was the 1795 Washington’s Birthday Ball given by the city’s dancing assembly. It attracted 450 members of the city’s political and social elite.
³

James and Dolley also enjoyed an ultimate compliment that very few
Philadelphians received: an invitation to dine with the Washingtons “in a family way”—at a private meal with several other couples rather than at the far larger weekly official dinners. Even though Madison opposed many of the president’s policies, Washington still regarded him with affection for his contributions to the creation of the Constitution. Martha demonstrated her fondness for Dolley by giving her a lovely cream pitcher from a set given to the president by a French nobleman.
⁴

Dolley’s teenage sister, Anna Payne, lived with the Madisons and was as attractive as Dolley. Suitors thronged their parlor day and night. The young ladies and young matrons like Dolley all wore the latest French fashions, which revealed not a little of their figures. Abigail Adams was shocked by certain young women, notably wealthy Anne Bingham’s daughter, Marie, who wore dresses you “might literally see through.” The men thought differently, of course. Even New Englander Harrison Gray Otis adored Miss Bingham’s costume, which enabled him to see her legs “for five minutes together.”
⁵

Dolley’s friends took a dim view of Abigail Adams. One of the most outspoken was Sally McKean, daughter of a powerful Pennsylvania politician. Sally referred to Abigail as “that old what shall I call her—with her hawk’s eyes.” She described one of Abigail’s Smith nieces as “not young and confounded ugly,” and told how she and Abigail had recently departed for Boston, “where I suppose they want to have a little fuss made with them for dear knows they have had none made here.”
⁶

Dolley and her sister Anna, perhaps underscoring their divorce from Quakerism, never uttered a critical word about the French styles Abigail deplored. Madison seems to have had no objections to viewing bosoms and legs galore in his house on Spruce Street and elsewhere. One Federalist politician, noting how marriage had made Madison “more open and conversant than I ever saw him before,” wondered if Dolley could take credit for relieving him of the bachelor “bile” that had made him such a combative political opponent.
⁷

III

When John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson for the presidency in 1796, James Madison decided to retire from the fray for a few years. Jefferson had become vice president and returned to Philadelphia as their party’s
chief spokesman. The Federalists seemed likely to be in power for years to come. Madison, Dolley, and her sister Anna retreated to Montpelier for the next three years. James Madison Sr. had begun to decline into old age, and his oldest son took charge of their large extended family.

During these first Montpelier years, the intimate side of the Madison marriage flowered. Together they enlarged and redecorated the mansion, using furniture and art shipped to them by James Monroe, who was in Paris as America’s ambassador. Dolley learned how to preside at large parties and dinners in a style befitting a southern hostess.

There was only one disappointment in these years of tranquil happiness. In spite of evident ardor on both sides, Dolley did not become pregnant. Neither partner ever publicly expressed disappointment about this nonevent. In addition to Dolley’s son Payne, they had so many nieces and nephews in the families of their siblings that there was never any sense of deprivation. But it must have caused an occasional pang in their otherwise all-but-perfect union.

IV

One of Jefferson’s first official acts when he became president in 1801 was his appointment of James Madison as his secretary of state. To underscore Madison’s importance, the president invited him and Dolley to live at the executive mansion. The future White House was a vast unfinished semi-barn in which Jefferson and his secretary and a few servants rattled around, the president said, “like mice in a church.” A member of the departing Adams administration called the house “a large naked ugly looking building.” The rest of the so-called Federal City was in a similar unfinished state. In the words of one wit, the place was mostly houses with no streets and streets with no houses.
⁸

The Jeffersonian Republicans liked it that way. They saw the oozing swamps and muddy roads and generally primitive landscape as the ideal site from which to govern a nation on pure democratic principles—an atmosphere that could never be achieved in the two previous capitals, New York and Philadelphia. Those cities were full of wealthy merchants and artful lawyers ready and eager to corrupt and ultimately dominate the political process.

For the moment, Washington, D.C, was a city—and a society—that was little more than an embryo, waiting for leaders to nurture and guide
it. Not a few people had grave doubts about the future of this idealistic vision. One exasperated legislator, living in a boardinghouse with twenty or thirty fellow politicians, muttered that they reminded him of a tribe of monks. All they did was legislate by day and argue with each other by night. No one brought wives or children to this semi-wilderness.
⁹

In the executive mansion, the widower president seemed to have left women out of his formula for political perfection. He entertained lavishly, drawing on a wine cellar stocked with the expertise acquired during his sojourn in Paris as America’s ambassador, but his guests were invariably all men. This was not entirely accidental. As we have seen, Jefferson had acquired a distinct hostility to the way French women participated in France’s politics, with their crowded salons and their readiness to bestow sexual favors on men in power.

Into this social vacuum came thirty-three-year-old Dolley Madison, wife of the second most important man in Washington. (Vice President Aaron Burr was a widower and had had a falling-out with Jefferson.) Dolley began by charming President Jefferson as she charmed everyone. On the rare occasions when he invited women to one of his dinner parties, he asked Dolley to join him and act as the hostess. But neither Dolley nor her husband was inclined to accept Jefferson’s invitation to become his permanent guests. They soon moved to a comfortable three-story brick house on F Street, two blocks east of the Executive Mansion.

V

While her husband and Jefferson grappled with the turbulent politics of a Europe in which Napoleon Bonaparte became a primary player and a Republican Party that began splitting into quarrelsome factions, Dolley put herself in charge of creating a civilized Washington. Day after day, she braved the atrocious roads in her elegant green carriage, paying calls on the few women who had accompanied their husbands to the capital, and on the relative handful of diplomats who had come from Britain and France and a few other countries, sometimes bringing their wives and children.

Dolley also paid cheerful attention to the numerous local families who had moved from Virginia and Maryland, hoping to share the Federal City’s promised prosperity. With her sister Anna in residence, often joined by her sister Lucy, who was always ready to escape the rural society of her
husband’s plantation, Harewood, Dolley began giving lively dinner parties at which the number of women roughly equaled the number of men.

Dolley must have known she was doing something that Thomas Jefferson did not entirely approve. But the president may have realized it was a job that needed doing. Early in his first term, a group of Federal City ladies began fretting because there were no “levees”—the large receptions hosted by presidents Washington and Adams. Jefferson opened the executive mansion’s doors to the public only twice a year, on July fourth and January first. The ladies decided to force the president’s hand. One day they arrived at the White House in their party clothes, hair coiffed and jewelry glittering, hoping to embarrass him into giving them a levee.

Jefferson had just returned from a horseback ride, and was covered with dust and grime from the capital’s primitive roads. But he did not lose his cool. He pretended that each of the ladies had come separately, and by wonderful coincidence they had all arrived at the same time. After fifteen minutes of forced good humor, the ladies departed in a very disgruntled mood. This experience may have made the president more tolerant of Dolley’s parties.

She also took advantage of President Jefferson’s dependence on James Madison as his chief adviser and most trusted political confederate. The president was not going to provoke a quarrel with the secretary of state by criticizing his beloved wife. Even when Dolley began giving a New Year’s party that competed with the president’s reception at the executive mansion, Jefferson never said a negative word. Everyone trudged dutifully to the mansion to pay their respects—and then headed for F Street, where there was a party they would enjoy.

Dolley’s dinners were not the small affairs that Jefferson preferred because they gave him an opportunity to press his ideas and political plans on his guests. She liked big parties because they enabled people to relax. Senator John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that there was “a company of about seventy persons of both sexes” at one dinner. Nevertheless, he found a chance to have a conversation about politics with James Madison, which began Adams’s exit from the moribund Federalist party.

Madison’s shyness made him awkward and reserved when he met people individually or spoke at public events. But seated at his own dinner table, with Dolley weaving good humor into the conversation, he relaxed and became almost as charming as his spouse. At one dinner party,
Champagne was poured with a lavish hand. Madison drank his share and observed somewhat ruefully that tomorrow would almost certainly begin with a headache. It was hard to judge when one exceeded his limit.

An impish smile played across Madison’s face as he observed that tomorrow was Sunday. Why not conduct an experiment and find out exactly how much Champagne it took to induce a hangover? The victims would have the next day to recover. Soon, Champagne was being lugged into the dining room by the case. No one got drunk, but one diner recalled that the conversation grew more and more animated and humorous remarks flew in all directions. If anyone kept a record of how many heads were throbbing on Sunday, it has vanished.
¹⁰

VI

Within eighteen months of her arrival in the Federal City, Dolley Madison had established her house as the social center of Washington. She was clearly violating President Jefferson’s dictum against women in politics, but she got away with it by ingeniously blending friendship and hospitality with political concerns until most outside observers were hard put to separate them. Dolley had a rare ability to choose her women friends wisely. Among the most important was Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of Washington’s only newspaper,
The National Intelligencer
. Smith had been invited to Washington by Jefferson to serve as his semi-official spokesman.