The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (47 page)

Margaret Bayard Smith was a talented writer and a shrewd woman. She liked Dolley from the moment they met. Dolley’s lively good humor and “affable and agreeable manners” won her wholehearted affection. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Smith expressed amazement at the warmth of her feelings in so short a time. She felt almost as fond of Dolley’s sister Anna. “It is impossible for an acquaintance with them to be different,” she wrote.
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Another important woman friend was Anna Maria Thornton, wife of Dr. William Thornton, the architect who had won the competition to design the capitol. He was a man for all seasons, a talented inventor and businessman. The Thorntons and the Madisons were next-door neighbors, and Anna Maria had a personality almost as lively as Dolley’s. A third vital woman friend was Marcia Burns Van Ness, the wealthiest woman
in Washington. She had inherited $1.5 million from her landowner father before marrying John Peter Van Ness of New York. The money and Marcia’s charming personality made the Van Nesses the Federal City’s social leaders before Dolley arrived on the scene, and they were easily persuaded to join forces with her.
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Among the innovations Dolley introduced at her dinners and late-evening teas was gambling at cards. The favorite game was loo, a version of euchre, in which players bet on their ability to win tricks. The stakes were low, but the fun was high. Ladies, when they lost, squealed in the most piquant way that they had been “looed.” Dolley was an enthusiastic player. During this diversion, she frequently paused to inhale some snuff, a smokeless form of tobacco to which she soon became addicted. Like tobacco users before and since, she urged all her friends never to become fond of the habit—but found it impossible to stop using it. Not a few people thought it added to Dolley’s image as a woman of the world.

This public personality may have helped Dolley achieve some of her most important political-social successes in these early Washington years. Far more than the ascetic Republican Thomas Jefferson or the shy, reserved James Madison, she was crucial to making the diplomats from foreign nations feel welcome in the primitive capital city. Here, Dolley had an inside track; her Philadelphia friend, acerbic, beautiful Sally McKean, had married the handsome young Spanish minister Carlos Fernando Martinez de Yrujo. She introduced Dolley to many of the wives of other ministers, notably the French minister’s spouse, Marie-Angelique de Turreau, who had a wicked sense of humor. Dolley told her sister Anna that in her company “I crack my sides laughing.”
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A dividend of this friendship was Dolley’s acquisition of the French language. Marie-Angelique was a clever and encouraging teacher. She also undertook to instruct Dolley in dressing with Parisian panache. The closeness of their relationship made Dolley supersensitive to the way red-faced, mustachioed General Louis Marie Turreau treated his pretty wife. More than once, when she disagreed with him in public, he struck her. It should be added that she was not exactly a shrinking violet; she once hit him in the head with a flatiron.
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Turreau was blatantly unfaithful to his wife, regularly riding through Washington in his gilded carriage to the house of a woman “of easy virtue.” At other times, he insisted on bringing prostitutes into their home.
In 1805, when Dolley was in Philadelphia undergoing surgery for an ulcerated knee, General Turreau and three male friends attempted to visit her in her bedroom. She declined to entertain them, implying in a letter to Madison that she was worried about her reputation. It was also an undoubted pleasure to tell the swaggering wife-beater to go away.
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Dolley proved to be a valuable asset to both her husband and President Jefferson when the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France led to a serious quarrel with Spain. Secretary of State Madison insisted the western part of Spanish-owned Florida was part of the historic transfer. Minister Yrujo stormed into Madison’s office at the State Department and screamed insults in his face. Madison declared him persona non grata, and Yrujo and his wife retreated to Philadelphia. But Dolley’s close friendship with the former Sally McKean enabled the government to maintain at least a semblance of friendly relations. Dolley told her sister that she still felt “a tenderness” for the Yrujos, “regardless of circumstances.”
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VII

Dolley became even more important when President Jefferson decided to apply his ideals of Republican simplicity to dealing with the new British minister, Anthony Merry, and his ultra-dignified wife, Elizabeth. At an official dinner in the executive mansion, Jefferson announced that the guests would be seated at the table without the usual attention to honor and importance. “Pell-mell” was his name for this new etiquette, which enabled the president to ignore Mrs. Merry and lead Dolley to the place of honor beside him at the table. She knew this was a bad move and whispered urgently, “Take Mrs. Merry.”

The president ignored her. Secretary of State Madison extended his arm to Mrs. Merry, but she was obviously outraged and insulted. Her flustered husband was left standing at the door without a woman to escort. When he attempted to sit down beside Sally Yrujo, a congressman who took the president’s pell-mell rule too literally pushed him aside, and the minister was left to wander to a chair near the bottom of the table.

The infuriated Merrys were convinced that Jefferson was expressing his disrespect for both them and their country. They refused all further invitations from the president. But they decided they could and would accept an invitation from the Madisons after Dolley called on Mrs. Merry and did
her best to make amends to the formidable lady. This was no easy task, because Dolley could not admit that Jefferson was in the wrong.

At first, things went no better at the Madisons. Mrs. Merry dismissed Dolley’s dinner as a mere “harvest home” supper—peasant fare. Dolley kept her temper and calmly replied that it was the American custom to prefer “abundance to elegance,” evidence of the “superabundance and prosperity of our country.” She was aware of the “elegance of European taste” but chose to dine “in the more liberal fashion of Virginia.” Mrs. Merry was temporarily reduced to silence. The French military attaché, hearing of Dolley’s reply, wrote home that “Mrs. Madison has become one of America’s most valuable assets.”
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The contretemps between the Merrys and the president got into the newspapers. The Federalists sided with the British minister, and in the ugly style of the day, some of their reporters began spreading nasty slanders about Dolley and her sister Anna. They claimed that Dolley was Jefferson’s secret mistress with Madison’s covert approval because he was impotent—as his failure to produce a child supposedly proved. Soon other papers were suggesting that Madison and Jefferson “pimped” Dolley and Anna to win the goodwill of visiting foreign officials. The president bemoaned the way “the brunt of the battle” was falling on “the secretary’s ladies,” but he declined to call off his ridiculous and unnecessary social war.
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Dolley continued to woo Mrs. Merry. She persuaded her and Mr. Merry that dinners at the Madisons could be regarded as private affairs, so there was no need to invoke rules of precedence or worry about national honor being impugned. She sent her small gifts, such as a bottle of perfume whose scent Mrs. Merry admired. Soon, Dolley was describing their relationship as “unusually intimate,” though the term applied only to the current moment. She never knew when the large, combative lady would get angry “at persons as well as circumstances.”

Dolley was more than a little surprised—and pleased—when Mrs. Merry, hearing she was ill, appeared at the Madison’s F Street house offering to be her nurse and spent three hours with her. Behind this feminine bridge-building lay some important political conversations between Merry and Madison, which helped repair some of the damage the president had inflicted with his pell-mell etiquette.
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Dolley Madison learned a great deal from this attempt to intrude poli
tics on social occasions in such a literal way. Although she never publicly revealed her opinion of President Jefferson’s experiment, in years to come she made it clear by her actions and style that she considered it an unfortunate blunder. Her tact was a tribute to her political shrewdness—and her generous heart.

Dolley also learned much from watching Mrs. Merry in action. Too often the ambassador’s wife almost relished the conflict and the attention it won for her in the public spotlight. She was much too quick to speak for herself as well as her husband, which enabled President Jefferson and his supporters to christen her a virago unworthy of a shred of sympathy. Dolley concluded that a woman who waded into the contentious side of politics aroused the always lurking hostility between the sexes and won no friends for her side of the argument.

At this point in her journey to fame, Dolley was demonstrating her talents as a politician, but she still hesitated to apply that term to herself. She was under the influence of President Jefferson’s opinion that women—especially American women—should stay out of politics. While she was being treated for her ulcerated knee in Philadelphia, she wrote a revealing letter to her husband, who had remained in Washington. “You know,” she began, “I am not much of a politician but I am extremely anxious to hear (as far as you may think proper) what is going forward in the cabinet.” She knew that Madison did not want his wife to be “an active partisan,” and she assured him there was not “the slightest danger” of such a thing. She remained conscious of her “want of talents” and her wariness about expressing opinions “always imperfectly understood” by her sex.
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VIII

After the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson’s second term was almost bound to be an anticlimax. It soon became something much more unpleasant—one of the least successful four years in the history of the American presidency. Relations between both France and Great Britain deteriorated steadily as the two superpowers battled for global supremacy. They blockaded each other’s ports and forbade all neutral trade. The British were especially obnoxious, repeatedly kidnapping American sailors from ships at sea under the pretext that they were deserters from the royal navy. President Jefferson, having reduced
the army and the navy to skeleton forces in his passion for minimum taxes, was looking weak and feckless. His secretary of state proposed taking a leaf from the history of the American Revolution and declaring an embargo on all commerce between America and Europe. Madison confidently assured the president it would starve England into submission.

These boycotts, as the revolutionaries had called them, were very effective in the 1760s and 1770s. But the Madison-Jefferson embargo was a national disaster. The loss of American commodities such as wheat and cotton had only a minimal impact on the two superpowers, but it devastated the American economy. Exports declined 80 percent from 1807 to 1808. One disgusted critic compared it to “cutting a man’s throat to cure a nosebleed.” New England, where commerce was a way of life, was soon in semi-revolt, condoning and even encouraging wholesale smuggling in blatant violation of the law.

A dismayed and baffled President Jefferson grew more and more discouraged. In his final year in office, he virtually abdicated, handing over most of his executive responsibility to his secretary of state. He even began shipping the furniture he had brought to the Executive Mansion back to Monticello. In this atmosphere of disillusion and disarray, James Madison became a candidate for president. He had Jefferson’s backing, but that was not worth much. Few presidents have been more unpopular in their final year in office.

The secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, accused Jefferson of launching the embargo against the advice of the majority of his cabinet. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, another hostile Republican, wrote: “Madison has acquired a complete ascendancy over him.” Complicating matters was the prevailing code that a candidate could not campaign openly for president. Confessing a desire for power stirred fears of executive tyranny in too many minds, especially among Republicans. Soon two other candidates were in the race: Jefferson’s aging vice president, George Clinton of New York, and James Monroe, who had almost as much claim to being Jefferson’s chief disciple as Madison.
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There was little doubt that James Madison needed help. He found his rescuer in his own household. By now there were few more astute observers of the political scene than Dolley Madison. “Public business was perhaps never thicker,” she wrote cheerfully to her aunt. Dolley was not even slightly intimidated. Political nominating conventions were far in the
future. Candidates were chosen by congressional caucuses of both parties. This added heft to Dolley’s social skills. She brushed off claims from Monroe’s backers that Madison was a Federalist in disguise. As for Vice President Clinton, he was suffering from New York’s long-running jealousy of Virginia’s power. She did not say these things publicly, of course. But the VIPs who thronged her dinner parties did not hesitate to voice them.
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Monroe’s chief backer was Congressman John Randolph of Virginia. He was a veritable walking, talking compound of all the neuroses long associated with his family. He disliked women in general, but Dolley’s lush beauty and her revealing gowns stirred raging antagonism in his dour soul. He began telling Monroe and anyone else who would listen that Dolley was promiscuous and using her favors to promote Madison’s presidency.
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A local Federalist newspaper ran a pseudo-ad for a book that supposedly told all about a powerful, impotent man with an oversexed wife. Soon other anonymous stories were sprouting, even naming some of Dolley’s supposed lovers. The Madisons took this mudslinging seriously enough to refute one story by inviting one of Dolley’s rumored flames to a small family dinner at their F Street house. The key to dealing with such slanders, Dolley told a friend, was to “listen without emotion” when they were repeated in your hearing, knowing that “they were framed but to play on your sensibility.” This was a lesson thin-skinned Abigail Adams never learned. It is still good advice for anyone and everyone in politics.
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