James “Jemmy” Madison was the “Father of the Constitution,” a political philosopher, and America’s fourth president, but he cared little about the food on his plate or the political value of entertaining. His wife, Dolley Madison, on the other hand, was a consummate hostess, social activist, romantic matchmaker, and political fixer extraordinaire who essentially created the role of First Lady as we know it today.
“Poor Jemmy! He is but a withered little apple-John,” cackled Washington Irving, the diplomat and author of “Rip Van Winkle.” But “Dolley” (as everyone called her) was “a sunny little Quakeress,” Irving enthused, “a fine, portly, buxom dame—who has a smile & pleasant word for every body.”
She was an unlikely “Mrs. Presidentress,” as First Ladies were called. Born Dolley Payne, she was raised a strict Quaker in Virginia, married a lawyer, and had two sons in Philadelphia. Then, in a blink, she lost her husband, a son, her mother-in-law, and her father-in-law to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. The brutal loss helps explain why Dolley was so attuned to maintaining harmony: having witnessed how short and capricious life can be, she wanted to welcome, entertain, and fill the belly of every person she met.
Dolley and “the great little Madison,” as she called him, were introduced by Aaron Burr in 1794. Jemmy was a small, thin man with an outsized intellect who appeared taciturn in public but revealed a sharp wit in private. Seventeen years older than Dolley, he was wealthy, unmarried, childless, an Episcopalian, and a distinguished congressman from Virginia. Dolley was a plump woman with pale white skin, rouged cheeks, blue eyes, and curly black hair and, despite being a poor single mother, possessed an irrepressible energy and unerring social instinct. After a whirlwind romance the Madisons married, and Dolley became the mistress of Montpelier, the Madison family plantation just down the road from Jefferson’s Monticello. (Madison doted on Dolley’s aptly named son Payne, who repaid him by squandering the family fortune.) The tobacco farm, blacksmith shop, store, and brandy distillery at Montpelier relied on nearly a hundred slaves, a fact that troubled Madison—who was responsible for much of the Bill of Rights—but did not overly concern Dolley.
Though rough around the edges when she arrived in Washington in 1800, she learned social niceties on the job, as it were. Her husband was Jefferson’s secretary of state, and Mrs. Madison insisted on renting a large home on F Street suitable for entertaining. She befriended the wives of congressmen and the Spanish and French ambassadors and regularly hosted dinner parties for forty or more guests. In the meantime, she worked with the architect Benjamin Latrobe to help the president decorate the Executive Mansion and often pinch-hit as a hostess at his parties.
Dolley was a gifted conversationalist with a knack for remembering names and faces, and disarmed critics with her personal warmth. Though she claimed to be uninterested in politics (“men’s work”), she quietly pushed her husband’s legislation, and was so adept at backroom patronage that she staffed many positions in the growing federal bureaucracy. Frequently, her social grace paid bountiful political dividends. When Thomas Jefferson snubbed the British ambassador, Anthony Merry, in 1803, for instance—by escorting Mrs. Madison to the dinner table instead of Mrs. Merry, which deeply offended the British—Dolley unsnarled the diplomatic tangle by befriending Elizabeth Merry and hosting the British couple for dinner at her F Street home.
At a time when women were expected to hang back and play a subordinate role, Mrs. Madison gleefully chucked her drab Quaker outfits and strode into the limelight sheathed in pink satin dresses and red velvet gowns, glittering turbans, and regal headdresses festooned with bird of paradise feathers, the better for her admirers to spot her in a crowd. “The accomplished Mrs. Madison…presides, it is said, better than any other woman can in the country,” noted the Maine Republican James C. Jewett. And a friend noted that Washingtonians could not resist Dolley’s “conciliatory disposition…her frank and gracious manners, [and] frequented her evening circle and sat at her husband’s table.”
When the Madisons moved into the Executive Mansion in 1809, Dolley took presidential entertaining to new peaks. As if presiding over a tribal watering hole, she encouraged people of all stripes to mingle, eat, and converse at the Madison White House.
Starting on March 30, 1809, and lasting through the end of Madison’s second term in 1817, Dolley hosted “drawing rooms” (a less Eurocentric-sounding term than Washington and Adams’s “levees”) every Wednesday night. To ensure a large and diverse crowd, she published invitations in newspapers, welcomed both men and women, and included everyone from carriage drivers and barbers to students, foreign dignitaries, socialites, businessmen, and legislators. She understood that the dining room was “a stage from which to convey an image of power, cultivate political loyalties, and project dignity and authority,” wrote the historian Edith Mayo.
Like Jefferson, Dolley was an adept stage manager who employed a veteran French steward, Jean-Pierre (“French John”) Sioussat, and a dozen servants and slaves who served dinners prepared in Jefferson’s now familiar Anglo-French-Virginia style and bottle after bottle of enviable European wine, procured with Jefferson’s help.
While Jemmy sat in the middle of a long table, where he could converse and avoid “the trouble of serving guests, drinking wine, etc.,” observed the society columnist Sarah Seaton, Dolley sat herself amid cabinet members and took command of the food, drink, and table talk. She liked to carve the ham or turkey to start, then had a second course of fruits, nuts, and desserts delivered to the table. She often showcased special or regional dishes—especially southern ones, such as ham croquettes, corn and lard “oysters,” “fairy butter” (hard-boiled eggs mixed with sugar, butter, and orange-flower water), chicken and okra soup, and crab omelets with eggplant and tomatoes—that would surprise her guests. Dolley had a sweet tooth and was fond of apricot or pink peppermint ice cream for dessert.
After dinner, the president would retreat to a corner to murmur with his Democratic-Republican cronies. Dolley would serve a Yard of Flannel punch (ale, rum, eggs, ginger, sugar), pass snacks, make introductions, and ask young women to play the piano or dance “figures” for the crowd. Then she would sweep her guests off for rounds of parlor games and dancing.
So popular, and politically necessary, did these evenings become that her guests referred to them as “Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday nights,” or, due to the hot crush of bodies, “squeezes.”
Attending a squeeze in 1811, Washington Irving was dazzled by the “collection of great and little men, of ugly old women, and beautiful young ones,” and felt as if he had “emerged from dirt and darkness into the blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison’s Drawing room.” And when a group of Federalists refused to attend a squeeze out of pique, Dolley responded by packing her drawing room with so many of their rivals that it “alarm’d [the Federalists] into a return,” she noted triumphantly.
When the political rhetoric blew too hot, Dolley cooled things down with her secret weapon: a pinch of snuff. The tobacco from her silver snuffbox had “a magic influence” on combatants, friends would say, chuckling. One evening the fiery Kentucky congressman Henry Clay defied President Madison, and Dolley took him aside to offer him a snort of tobacco. It was, Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, a “perfect security from hostility.”
“Everybody loves Mrs. Madison,” Clay said, relenting his opposition.
“That’s because Mrs. Madison loves everybody,” Dolley sweetly replied.
In spite of her outsized persona, Dolley Madison maintained a studied neutrality and was a cipher in public. “By her deportment in her own house, you cannot discover who is her husband’s friends or foes,” Congressman Jonathan Roberts of Pennsylvania said. And a woman from New York observed, “There is something very fascinating about her—yet I do not think it possible to know what her real opinions are; she is all things to all men.”
Dolley’s social strategy was perfectly calibrated for an era when the idea of bipartisanship was rare and President Madison had few levers to control a sharply divided House—a body some historians have described as “the worst Congress ever dealt a president.” Bloody-knuckled electioneering, scandalous innuendo, duels, and the occasional political murder were routine, though recompense was not. When the Madisons’ enemies falsely accused him of offering to trade sex with Dolley for votes, he had no meaningful way to defend himself or his wife’s honor. But Mrs. Madison played a long game, as poker players say. As an outsider, she understood that small gestures can have a great impact. Smiling and welcoming even the most venal critics into her home Wednesday after Wednesday, she wore them down with unflappable kindness.
At times, it seemed as if Dolley Madison were the glue that held the Republic together—with smiles, a bite of ice cream, a pinch of snuff, and an iron will. She was hailed by Daniel Webster as “the only permanent power in Washington.”
Writing of Mrs. Madison’s social prowess, the historian Catherine Allgor observed, “The superior food, the lovely setting, and the refined behavior allowed people to feel open, relaxed, and included. The power of dining, of course, went both ways. Even the most backward rube understood this, as when one southern representative responded to a dinner invitation from James Madison: ‘I won’t dine with you because you won’t dine with me.’ For foreign diplomats in Washington, the dinner table was their office, and they spent plenty of money in the primitive city on dinner parties, leaving guest lists and tactical memoranda for their successors….[T]he social atmosphere successfully masked the high political stakes.”
The cumulative effect of Dolley’s “remorseless equanimity,” as a friend described her social tact (and tactics), was to assert Jemmy’s leadership, bolster the constitutionally weak Office of the President, and solidify the role of the Executive Mansion as the nucleus of All That Mattered in Washington, D.C. In the process, she helped define the role of First Lady as we currently understand it, though that title did not yet exist.
At the time, the chief executive’s wife was known as “the President’s Lady,” “Mrs. President,” or “Mrs. Presidentress.” Her duties were not clearly stated but seemed obvious: to be a supportive spouse and official hostess who directed the kitchen and orchestrated presidential entertaining. That role has more or less endured, at least in the public imagination. But the reality is more complicated. In fact, First Ladies have always played a political role, overtly or covertly, and they have always used food and drink to further their husbands’ agendas.
The role of Mrs. President is not a job, exactly. It is not a paid position or an elected one. It comes with no official duties. Yet it is a high-profile, full-time occupation laden with symbolic importance. The position has evolved steadily and quietly, for the most part, with occasional breakthrough moments—Eleanor Roosevelt’s social activism, Jackie Kennedy’s gastronomic revolution—that make news. Today, First Ladyhood encompasses political duties and social causes, along with the raising of children, the planting of gardens, and socializing on a grand and intimate scale. The position comes with a full-time staff with offices in the East Wing of the White House, and it has become increasingly politicized and scrutinized.
Some women—such as Martha Washington, Mamie Eisenhower, Nancy Reagan, and Hillary Rodham Clinton—enjoyed the role, with caveats. Others—such as Barbara Bush and Michelle Obama—had decidedly mixed feelings about it. And a few—such as Margaret Taylor, Bess Truman, and Melania Trump—shied away from, or outright resented, the role of First Lady. Dolley Madison loved being “Mrs. President” and became the most famous hostess in America. Yet she is best remembered for a dinner that was never served.
On August 24, 1814, thousands of British troops were advancing on Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. Two days earlier, James Madison had left the President’s House to take charge of his army in Virginia. Assuming he would return victorious, Dolley prepared a celebratory dinner. The slave Paul Jennings described it as an opulent meal. “I set the table myself, and brought up the ale, cider, and wine, and placed them in the coolers,” he wrote. (Others recall the details differently.) But when the redcoats marched through the city largely uncontested, Mrs. Madison instructed two servants to spirit away the red velvet drapes from the Oval Room, a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the blue-and-gold Lowestoft china, and Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from the State Dining Room. As evening set, she fled.
Entering the abandoned President’s House, the British found “a bountiful dinner spread for forty guests,” an English correspondent wrote, and “several kinds of wine in handsome cut glass decanters.” Details of the menu have been lost, but the officers sampled the Madisons’ food and drank an ironic toast with the president’s wine—“to ‘Jemmy’s health’ ”—then smashed all of the mansion’s windows and burned the white building down to a charred shell.
Madison was blamed for the debacle, and his opponents called for his impeachment. But with several dizzying military victories, including General Andrew Jackson’s rout of the British at New Orleans, and a hastily sketched-out peace treaty, the administration was rescued. Jubilant once again, Dolley hosted a rowdy victory party at their temporary residence, the John Tayloe House (known as the Octagon House, for its shape, and still extant). “No one…who beheld the radiance of joy which lighted up [Dolley’s] countenance [could doubt that] all uncertainty was at an end,” reported the National Intelligencer.
Though the truce with England was less secure than Dolley made it appear, her good cheer helped persuade Congress not to move the capital back to Philadelphia, as some called for. She had every wineglass filled for a toast and invited the servants to eat and celebrate late into the night. It took some of the revelers two days to recover. But with that shrewd bit of commensality, Dolley Madison convinced Americans they had won a second war of independence against the king of England.