IT ALL BEGAN IN THE DARK, IN MRS. HOUSE’S FLICKERING SITTING ROOM, where Madison and Jefferson, sheltered from the cold outside, mulled the day’s developments in the legislature with other guests and visiting friends. William Floyd, a delegate from New York State, arrived with his wife and three daughters. The youngest, Catherine, was nicknamed Kitty. She had large, wide-set eyes, a strong chin, soft hair, gentle cheekbones, and delicate lips. When Madison had met her a year earlier, she was fourteen. Now fifteen, Madison was entranced.
Madison had become his own man in Philadelphia. He was respected in most quarters, and revered in others. Since arriving, he dressed more finely, and he had become more assertive. His insecurity about his vocation had receded, as he had put to rest—or at least silenced for a while—the infernal question of whether he would ever become a lawyer. Now, he felt ready to fall in love.
The house was close, lit by candles and firelight. Sharing meals with Kitty and her family around a common table, he stared at the girl. His heart pounding in bed late at night, he thought about her obsessively. Jefferson noticed his friend behaving differently around the girl, at once more awkward and more manful. Kitty was charming, effervescent, intellectual, and composed. She was also young, unformed, and, in many respects, a foil for Madison’s broader aim for normalcy, for his intense desire to terminate his nomadic political life and join polite society as a married man.
But as with some of Madison’s more ambitious brainstorms, he was vulnerable to making castles out of concepts. He likely had not had a romantic relationship since his abortive affair at Princeton. Barely out of childhood, Kitty seemed to perfectly mirror Madison’s adolescent fantasies about both a wife and a sexual partner. But in the end, the events that unfolded were perhaps no more complicated than the oldest passion of them all.
Madison was not experienced in seduction or even flirtation, but he understood politics. He had real power now in Philadelphia, which he knew he could leverage to gain the crucial approval of Kitty’s father. He and William Floyd had much business to discuss, and the Virginia congressman’s growing prestige impressed Floyd. Pretty soon, Madison was sure that Kitty’s family would approve his eventual proposal of marriage. His enthusiasm began to color everything. He almost never described his personal situation in his letters to his family, particularly to his father, yet on February 12, he wrote, “[I] have little more to say to you than that I hope you & the family may be as well as I am myself.”1 He might as well have added exclamation points.
The courtship seemed to go well through the late winter months. For Jefferson, the pursuit was more than diverting; it was life-affirming. He cheerfully encouraged Madison’s quest, even going out of his way to befriend Kitty himself. When Madison was absent from the house, Jefferson sat with Kitty, joking and praising Madison. They made a strange pair—the tall, debonair, silver-tongued Virginian, haloed by melancholy, and the cheerful, fanciful teenager. Kitty liked literature; she gave Jefferson a poem, which he later returned in a letter to Madison. “Be so good as to return with my compliments to miss Kitty,” he wrote his friend. “I apprehend she had not got a copy of it, and I retain it in my memory.” He fondly recalled the “pleasing society” of the house, including the teenager.2
Madison felt Kitty was warming to him. His letters—even those on matters of state—betrayed his happiness. On March 25, he updated Randolph on Congress’s upcoming ratification of the peace treaty with Great Britain. He enclosed a newspaper article that described the “happy event,” and explained, “Happy it may be indeed called whether we consider the immediate blessings which it confers, or the cruel distresses and embarrassments from which it saves us.”3
In the meantime, Jefferson, tired of the dilatory appointment process for the ambassadorship to France, returned to Virginia. But he still tracked his friend’s affair. In mid-April, Madison opened a letter from Jefferson that contained a large section in cipher, in which Jefferson recalled that the joking and laughing, the “raillery you sometimes experienced” at the boardinghouse, “strengthened by my own observations,” had given him “hopes there was some foundation for” Madison’s marriage to Kitty. Jefferson was himself, he said, an ardent advocate of the match: “I wished it to be so as it would give me a neighbor whose worth I rate high.” At long last, his shy friend might find himself a wife: “I know it will render you happier than you can possibly be in a single state,” he assured Madison, even confiding a curious fact—that he, Jefferson, had been pressing the case all along. “I often made” a relationship with Madison “the subject of conversation” with Kitty, he confessed. Indeed, he “was able to convince” himself that Kitty “possessed every sentiment in your favor which you could wish.”4
IMAGE 14.1. KITTY FLOYD, BY CHARLES WILLSON PEALE, 1783. COURTESY OF PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
Completing the decoding, Madison must have laid down his quill with satisfaction. Kitty would be his. His personal and professional life, so long divorced, were finally entwining, and at just the right time. His two terms in Congress were about to end. With his reputation as a leading political figure firmly established, Madison would return to Orange as a professional, married man. He might even become a lawyer.
Likewise in cipher, he composed an excited response to Jefferson. Even within the disguise of code, Madison wrote coyly, with an intricate weave of double negatives, about “Miss K.” “Your inference on that subject,” he told his friend, “was not groundless.” Even before Jefferson left Philadelphia, he said—with a bit of swagger—“I had sufficiently ascertained her sentiments.” Since Jefferson had left for Virginia, progress had accelerated; Madison had electrifying news. “Since your departure,” he wrote, “the affair has been pursued.” Kitty, in other words, had accepted his proposal of marriage. He said that “Most preliminary arrangements although definitive” would need to wait until the end of the congressional term in the autumn, when the couple would plan their triumphal return to Virginia.
He was so intensely grateful for the older man’s support that he began gushing. Jefferson’s “interest” in Madison’s “happiness,” he said, was a “pleasing proof that the disposetions which I feel are reciprocal.”5 Why should Jefferson’s enthusiasm about the match have provided any information whatsoever about Kitty’s feelings? Madison’s excitement about the alchemical effect of marriage was at once so inexperienced and fervent that he confused applause and performance—to his peril.
ON APRIL 29, FLOYD, HIS WIFE, AND THEIR THREE DAUGHTERS STEPPED onto their coach to return to Floyd’s district in New York. Floyd invited Madison to accompany them. For sixty miles, he traveled a journey of romantic promise, as the company bounced along the spring road through Brunswick, Trenton, and Princeton, with Madison pointing out familiar sights along the way. He had never left Congress for so long, and he wrote Jefferson afterward, unashamedly, that his long absence “disables me from giving you the exact information of their latest proceedings.”6
His long habit of overwork had always provided him with a perverse equilibrium, but his new emotions were tilting him off his axis; losing his balance, he had never been happier. His hypochondria began to ease, and people commented that he seemed healthier. On May 24, Jameson wrote him, “I have the pleasure of being informed by Mr. Jones that you enjoy a good state of health—a close & constant application to business seems not to have been so prejudicial to you as I feared it would.”7 The floodgates to his heart were springing open. On May 27, he went shopping on the streets for presents for his little sisters Sally and Fanny and bought a piece of silk for Sally, which he wrote his father he would “send by the first opportunity.” He even added, teasingly, “Perhaps I may make an addition to it,” as “Fanny I suppose too must not be overlooked.”8 As an eldest brother, he was accustomed to being an authority. As a lover, he now saw himself as a caretaker as well.
With the Floyds back in New York for the time being, his engagement pending, and his term in Congress coming to an end, Madison settled in for a pleasant if open-ended summer. He was keeping Kitty a secret, planning on bringing home to his family a surprise bride in the autumn. He slyly wrote his father, “The time of my setting out is as uncertain as at the date of my last” letter, but “it will certainly take place before the fall.”9
He had only to wait. But an unplanned obstacle was thrown into his path—mutiny.
MONTHS EARLIER, GOVERNOR HARRISON HAD CONFESSED TO MADISON and the other Virginia delegates his fears about a revolt by unpaid army officers, while conceding his inability to do anything about it. To pay them, he lamented, was “absolutely out of our Power.” The state could not even revert to tobacco as currency, as the state treasury only held five thousand pounds’ worth. He pathetically rationalized that the soldiers’ situation was “not worse than it has been.”10 With such reasoning from the country’s leaders, the contagion naturally began spreading across Virginia’s state lines toward Philadelphia.
In mid-June, three hundred angry men marched toward Congress. Storming into nearby taverns, they gulped down strong ale, angrily rehearsed their grievances, then stormed outside, tankards in hand. They began stamping their feet and cursing at the State House that they must be paid, once and for all, the salaries they were owed. Several pointed their muskets at the windows and threatened to fire on Congress.11
The rally lasted for three hours. Barricaded within the building, the delegates fearfully looked through the shutters at the angry mob. They then fled through the building’s exits to surrounding taverns and to their boardinghouses. With nobody to further assail, the drunken men began dispersing, mostly to fall asleep. By six o’clock, all was clear, and Congress reassembled in the State House. But nothing could ever be the same.
Dismayed, Madison noted that the delegates seemed deeply shaken. Three days later, Congress announced that the “Dignity and Authority of the United States” had been so “constantly exposed to a repetition of Insult” that Congress actually could not “continue to sit in this City”—and would move to Princeton.12 Madison was embarrassed by Congress’s weakness, particularly before such wayward opponents. But he had no choice; he needed to join the body to which he had been duly elected. And so he and his colleagues piled atop horses and into carriages and bolted the city, traipsing along the dirty, dusty road to Princeton.
In his humiliation, Madison branded the mutineers as vacillating opportunists—“in constant vibration” one moment, then “penitent and preparing submissions” at the next, and finally “meditating more violent measures.” They could not even make up their mind about their goal—whether they wanted to topple the bank, or to kidnap members of Congress, or both. As he summarized for Jefferson, “The real plan & object of the mutiny lies in profound darkness.”13 Tellingly, after Congress left for Princeton, the insurrection quickly deflated, and their leadership, featuring such luminaries as a “deranged officer” named Carbery, escaped.
But even as any real threat dissipated, Congress remained mired in lethargy and cowardice. The Friday after the rebellion, only six states’ representatives showed up in Princeton, meaning Congress lacked a quorum to do any actual business. Democracy’s ancient foe was rearing; days later, Hamilton condemned to Madison the “passion” that led the legislative body to flee its own city and lamented the embarrassing “timidity” that lingered.14 Congress’s flight had become “a subject of much conversation and criticism.” With nothing to do that weekend, Madison returned in his coach to Philadelphia on Friday night.15
In September, when Congress pardoned the sergeants who led the revolt, the affair became as pointless for Madison as it was humiliating. The revolt’s only effect was to further paralyze Congress, who settled into an awkward life in its new Princeton home. Whether it would ever return to Philadelphia was, Madison sardonically wrote Randolph, an “interesting question.”
His distraction by Kitty and his pending marriage, his lame-duck status in Congress, and his disgust at the body’s ineptitude all combined to erode his prodigious work ethic. He had previously produced a nearly perfect record of congressional attendance, from March 20, 1780, to June 24, 1783. But after Congress moved to Princeton, he became less exacting. The first quorum assembled in Princeton on June 30. Between then and the expiration of his term on October 31, Madison voted only half as often as did two of the other Virginia delegates. He stayed in Philadelphia as often as he could, where he could write more easily, borrow books from friends, and meet with visiting Virginians.16
In Philadelphia, he could also avoid his preposterous living situation in Princeton, where his continuing poverty forced him to economize by sharing a room with Joseph Jones. He liked Jones, but that didn’t mean he wanted to live with him in a single room “not 10 feet square.” Madison had to write from his bed, in candlelight, “in a position that scarcely permits the use of any of my limbs.”17 He longed for the lambent memories of his future wife at his boardinghouse and returned as often as possible. He kept busy, making the necessary trips back and forth from Princeton to Philadelphia. He was particularly interested in one ongoing task—the location for the new capital. With the southern and northern states fighting for the territory, he favored George Town, midway between the regions.18
But this pleasant-enough plateau was about to come to a precipitous end.
IN AUGUST, MADISON FOUND A CURIOUS LETTER FROM KITTY IN HIS MAIL. He must have had a sinking feeling in his stomach when he noticed the letter was sealed not with the usual wax but with an ugly lump of raw brown material. He peered at the stuff more closely. It was, according to Floyd family legend, a lump of rye dough pressed onto the paper—as unceremonious and dismissive as what was inside.19 He had no choice but to open the letter. The words were not at all in cipher, their meaning mercilessly clear. He read as Kitty, in her youthful script, brusquely ended their engagement, with what he drily described later as a “profession of indifference.”20
That letter destroyed him. He would never speak to, or even see, Kitty again. He apprised Jefferson of the development with his familiar fretwork of technicalities, elision, and double negatives, this time not to channel his passion for Kitty, but to unveil his heartbreak. He described “several dilatory circumstances on which I had not calculated.” He shared his “disappointment.” He tried to seem worldly. Kitty’s rejection, he said airily, was “one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable.” He admitted that he no longer knew when he would come back to Virginia, as his return—previously planned to reveal his bride—was suddenly “less material.” He even held out hope that Kitty might change her mind; the situation, he declared, was in an “uncertain state,” and a “more propitious turn of fortune” was still possible.21
To Jefferson, it was obvious that his sensitive friend had been deeply wounded. Jefferson responded quickly: “I sincerely lament the misadventure which has happened,” he wrote, “from whatever cause it may have happened.” He reassured Madison that the “world still presents the same & many other resources of happiness.” Not only that, he told him, “You possess many within yourself.” That recourse to self-reliance was new to Madison, who had no habit of introspection, but Jefferson explained that “firmness of mind & unintermitting occupations”—hardly unfamiliar to his driven friend—would “not long leave you in pain.”
Jefferson himself lashed out a bit at Kitty. Nothing could have been “more contrary to my expectations,” he said—and he prided himself as an expert on women—for his assurances to Madison had been “founded on what I thought a good knowledge of the ground.” But females—the young as well as the adult—were just that way. Of “all machines,” Jefferson mused, “ours is the most complicated & inexplicable.”22 But Jefferson’s ruminations were thin gruel indeed for his grieving friend. Adding insult to injury, Kitty went on to marry a nineteen-year-old medical student who had also stayed at Mrs. House’s boardinghouse, where he had “hung round her at the harpsichord.”23
IN 1937, A FOLDED PIECE OF PAPER WAS DISCOVERED IN THE LOCKET containing Madison’s miniature portrait, prompting the Daily Princetonian to publish an article titled, “Madison Paid Court to ‘Sweet Dulcinea’ Outside Old Nassau’s Sequestered Walls.” The piece was riddled with giddy undergraduate apocrypha. The student who wrote the article apparently interviewed William Floyd, a descendant of Kitty, who opined that Madison “met and lost his beloved” on Long Island, while accompanied by Thomas Jefferson on a mission directed by General Washington to investigate the Poosepattuck Indians. “We believe that both young men fell in love with the Floyd girls,” Floyd recalled, “and they, not knowing that their swains would become so prominent let them slip.”24
There’s no evidence that any of this was true. But overheated rumor can be a symptom of subterranean insight. There has long been a cartoon of Madison as a hollow, brittle man defined by his dryness and rationality. The Kitty story still fascinates us, as it did that Princeton undergraduate journalist, because it so violently ruptures that caricature.
No surprise that the collapse with Kitty sent tremors through every filament of Madison’s life. During his time in Philadelphia, he had been living with a slave named Billey, whom his maternal grandmother had deeded to him when he was just a baby. Billey was eight years older than Madison, and Madison had a sympathetic relationship with him. Billey despised his enslaved condition so palpably that he seemed not to be a slave at all. His unforced humanity, combined with Madison’s own unguarded conscience, sparked a surprising decision.
MADISON WROTE HIS FATHER, “I HAVE JUDGED IT MOST PRUDENT NOT to force Billey back to Va. even if it could be done.” The enslaved man’s mind, he explained, had become “too thoroughly tainted to be a fit companion for fellow slaves in Virga.” He knew that he would not get “near the worth of him”; in this instance, he firmly declared, principle would have to trump economy. He could not “think of punishing him” for “coveting that liberty for which we have paid the price of so much blood,” he told his father, “and have proclaimed so often to be the right, & worthy the pursuit, of every human being.” In his mind, at least, one thing was settled—Billey was no longer a slave, but a human being. In his own upheaval, the principle of freedom could no longer be confined to whites. It was a right for all human beings, black and white alike.
Pennsylvania law made overt manumission difficult, so Madison sold Billey into a contract for “personal servitude or apprenticeship” for seven years, after which he would be freed.25
But while Madison was preoccupied by matters of the heart in Philadelphia, events were conspiring to give Patrick Henry his greatest powers yet in Virginia.
IT WAS THE SUMMER WHEN AMERICA BEGAN TURNING FROM ITS REVOLUTIONARY chapter to the business of becoming an independent nation. In November 1782, Great Britain and the United States had signed a preliminary peace treaty. On April 15, 1783, Congress ratified the treaty. And on September 3, 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the Treaty of Paris at the Hotel d’York with Great Britain, Spain, and France, formally ending the Revolutionary War and recognizing the independence of the United States. The Mississippi River now formed the new country’s western border, with British North America established as a separate territory, and all prisoners of war to be released by all parties.
Henry rose anew as the hero of a successful revolution; the looming question for Madison and thousands of others was what Henry would use his great prestige for.
George Mason sent Henry a letter congratulating him on the accomplishment of “the warmest wish of your heart, the establishment of American Independence and the liberty of our country.” It was in Henry’s power, Mason declared, to do “more good and prevent more mischief” than any one else; he hoped Henry would “exert the great talents with which God has blessed you” to promote the “general happiness and prosperity.”26
Madison did not share Mason’s optimism. Among his friends and him, concern began to grow. How would Henry use the tremendous authority he had earned of Father of the Revolution? Would he become Father of the Nation as well?