Dolley 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.
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.11
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.12
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.”13
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.14
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.15
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.”16
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.”17
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.18
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.19
Dolley Madison learned a great deal from this attempt to intrude politics 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.20
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.21
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.22
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.23
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.24
Other papers with a tilt to the Republican radicals claimed Dolley was a secret Federalist and British supporter. They investigated her first husband’s death and concocted a story of her abandoning him as he writhed in the final throes of yellow fever. Again and again they assayed Madison as “cold”—a synonym for impotence—and wondered how he could be expected to lead the country when he lacked the strength to satisfy his wife.
Dolley began blaming some of these assaults on Monroe personally, because he remained silent, never saying a word in defense of Madison, his supposed close friend. At one dinner party, she made several uncharacteristically cutting remarks about Monroe and his wife. Her disapproval had an impact in political Washington, and Monroe soon faded as a candidate. Meanwhile, Dolley’s tireless entertaining was a tactic that the widower vice president, George Clinton, soon saw as an insurmountable advantage. He, too, retreated from any public confrontation, and Madison faced only one serious opponent in the general election, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the Federalist whom Alexander Hamilton had tried to make president instead of John Adams in 1800.25
Pinckney’s chief issue was the hated embargo, but Congress repealed it on Jefferson’s last day in office. Madison was elected in what passed for a landslide, with Pinckney winning almost no support outside New England. When he grudgingly conceded, he added a nasty but historically significant embellishment. He said he had lost to “Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I might have had a better chance if I faced Mr. Madison alone.”26
IX
Dolley Madison entered the executive mansion or president’s “palace” with a great many people watching her. The wife of a New York congressman who had backed George Clinton noted that she had grown more dignified. She seldom played loo or wore revealing French dresses. But on inauguration day, her F Street parlor was jammed with visitors all “now worshipping the Rising Sun.” The comparison was more apt than the writer realized. Dolley had a plan already worked out, aimed at making the president’s house the social center of Washington, D.C.27
She began her campaign with an inaugural ball at Long’s Hotel that attracted more than four hundred mesmerized guests. Dolley wore a velvet gown with a train so long, it cried out for several young pages or ladies-in-waiting to deal with it. Her friend Margaret Bayard Smith implied as much. “She looked like a queen,” she wrote. Even more eye-catching was Dolley’s gleaming white satin turban trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers. Shrewdly, she limited her jewelry to a pearl necklace and earrings and a few bracelets. The effect was a striking combination of royal elegance and American simplicity. When the dancing began, and the master of ceremonies offered to lead her to the floor, she replied, “I don’t dance.” Again, everyone was charmed by this calm adherence to her Quaker roots.28
In the glow of this performance, the president, worn out by the long inaugural day, was scarcely noticed. Dolley proceeded to deal with this problem, too. At dinner, she sat herself between the British and French ambassadors and soon had them smiling and chatting. Gone was President Jefferson’s pell-mell etiquette. The representatives of the warring great powers led the way to the dinner table. General Turreau, still the French ambassador, escorted Dolley; she concealed her dislike of him with the smile of a master diplomat. Behind him, the Briton who had replaced Ambassador Merry escorted Dolley’s sister Anna. Ex-president Jefferson, also a guest, gave not so much as a hint of disapproval.29
People swarmed onto the dance floor to get a closer look at Dolley. Soon the room was so crowded that some ladies grew faint. An alarmed male guest broke the upper panes of several windows to let in more air. Everyone went home talking about Mrs. Madison. In The National Intelligencer, her friend Margaret Bayard Smith came close to exhausting her supply of admiring verbs and adjectives. To no one’s surprise, the paper christened Dolley “The Presidentress.”30
This only emboldened Dolley to push ahead in her campaign to make herself and other women a vital part of James Madison’s presidency. Ignoring blasts of vituperation against the president from Congressman Randolph, she led groups of women to the visitors’ gallery to watch both houses of Congress in action. Occasionally she led similar groups in visits to the Supreme Court. As for Randolph, she decided to treat him as a public amusement. After one of his performances, she asked a visitor if he had heard about it. “It was as good as a play,” she said. Soon people were marveling at the way women were playing a part in American politics that was “not known elsewhere.”31
The heart of Dolley’s plan became visible when President Madison asked Congress for $24,000 (about 400,000 modern dollars) to renovate the executive mansion and buy much-needed furniture, china, and other civilizing necessities. Aside from essential work such as shoring up the roof, widower Jefferson had done little or nothing to finish the house during his eight years. Congress acquiesced, and Dolley went to work with architect Benjamin Latrobe. As soon as possible, she wanted a large drawing room and a small parlor for entertaining. Also on the list was a state dining room. Dolley had decorated all three of these rooms in her head before Latrobe went to work. Although some luxury items were unavailable because of the aftereffects of the embargo, the architect managed to find acceptable substitutes.32
First to be finished was what dazzled guests called “Mrs. Madison’s Parlor” (the Red Room in the modern White House). The dominant feature was the sunflower-yellow damask silk draperies that adorned the windows. High-backed sofas and chairs had the same lush color, as did a damask fireboard in front of the mantel. Another eye-catcher was Gilbert Stuart’s regal portrait of Dolley.
Her first reception in the room, on May 31, 1809, swiftly became the talk of Washington. Military music filled the air, and a buffet offered ice cream, punch, cookies, and fruit. A smiling Dolley, in another spectacular gown and turban, dominated the room. Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday “drawing rooms” quickly became a destination for everyone in Washington and many beyond the city’s borders.
Writer Washington Irving described his eagerness to attend during a visit to the capital. “I swore by all the Gods I should be there,” he said, when he learned Dolley was having a reception on the day he arrived in town. Wangling an invitation, Irving found himself in “the blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison’s drawing room,” where he met “a crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and beautiful young ones” and in ten minutes was “hand in glove with half the people in the assemblage.” He found Dolley to be “a fine portly buxom dame who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody.” As for her sisters, Anna and Lucy, they were “like the two merry wives of Windsor.”33
On New Year’s Day, 1810, Dolley and the president held their first reception in the much larger Oval Room, which had remained an unused wasteland during Jefferson’s administration. This time the impact of Dolley’s decorations was nothing less than palatial. Great gold lamps lined the entrance, and a huge mirror gleamed above the mantle. The walls were papered in rich cream, and the woodwork shadowed in blue and gray. The floor-to-ceiling windows were adorned with red silk velvet curtains, which were matched by the red cushioned furniture, with thirty-six “Grecian” chairs. “The President’s house is a perfect palace,” gasped one visitor.34
The state dining room, which opened off the Oval Room, was even more palatial. The ceilings were three times the height of the rooms in an average house. A gigantic sideboard occupied an entire wall. At the far end of the room hung a life-sized portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Public approval of Dolley’s interior decorating was virtually universal. Members of both political parties competed for an invitation to the mansion that everyone began calling “The White House.” A Baltimore newspaper warmly approved the title. It was, they opined, “the people’s name.”35
As guests by the hundreds swarmed into the White House and swirled around Dolley, some people wondered whether she was almost too successful. She enjoyed herself hugely, but her sixty-year-old husband did not seem to have such a good time. One 1809 visitor described Madison as “a very small thin pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved and forbidding countenance.” He seemed “incapable of smiling” but talked agreeably to all comers. By 1810, another guest thought Madison looked as if he were “bending under the weight and cares of his office.” Whereas Dolley remained “a robust and hearty lady.”36
X
Madison’s personality and leadership style were not well suited to an executive role. He was at his best in Congress or on a committee, where his weak voice and mild manner did not matter so much because the logic and depth of his arguments were so persuasive. A president leads in a very different way. Compounding Madison’s problems was the disintegration of the Republican Party into a half dozen factions, each with its own ambitious leader. As a result, the United States drifted irresolutely through the political turbulence that was tearing the world apart as the war between Great Britain and Napoleonic France rumbled toward a climax.
Madison had no illusions about Napoleon, who played a cat-and-mouse game with America, agreeable one week, nasty the next. But his focus on dominating Europe gave him little chance to harm the United States. Britain’s high-handed attitude toward American ships at sea was another matter. Their arrogance slowly convinced Madison that only a war would settle America’s relationship with the mother country. He apparently discussed this growing conviction with Dolley. In December 1811 she wrote to her sister Anna, now married to a Maine congressman, “I believe there will be a war as M sees no end to our perplexities without it.”37
Unfortunately, President Madison could not convince some members of his cabinet or key members of Congress to prepare the country for a serious conflict. He let newly arrived western politicians such as Henry Clay of Kentucky do the orating in Congress. Dubbed The War Hawks, they assured everyone that the British, embroiled with Napoleon, were pushovers and would never be able to defend thinly populated Canada. New England’s politicians and the states that followed their lead, such as New York and New Jersey, remained stubbornly opposed to the war. Dismaying proof of Madison’s failure to rally support in Congress was the Senate’s approval of a declaration of war by a mere six votes. The margin in the House of Representatives was not much better: 79–49.
Nevertheless, Madison signed the war resolution in June 1812. The Federalist Alexandria Gazette promptly accused him of persuading many congressmen to vote for the declaration with invitations to Dolley’s Wednesday drawing rooms and splendid dinners. The paper called her parties “extravagant imitations of a royal court” and claimed Americans were being taught to bow and curtsy before the president and his wife and otherwise “play the parasite.”38
No one paid much attention to these squawks of protest. Throughout Madison’s first term, Dolley’s parties and dinners had grown more lavish and splendid. She hired a French chef who served duck and venison cooked in an elaborate style seldom seen in American kitchens. Dolley regularly sat at the head of the table and took charge of the conversation, freeing the president from the task, which he did not enjoy or handle well. This enabled him to relax and indulge in genial small talk with nearby guests, who often came away charmed.
Far from being aristocratic affairs, Dolley’s parties were democratic with a small “d.” Anyone could come, once they had been introduced to Mrs. Madison or the president. George Washington and John Adams held “levees” at which guests remained stationary, waiting for their host to greet them and exchange a few words. Dolley encouraged her guests to feel free to move around all three of her redecorated rooms, chatting with friends and with her or the president if they were so disposed. At dinners, not a few people marveled at the way she sat diplomats such as the Russian minister beside a local tradesman and his wife.
XI
The first test of the popularity of the war with Britain was Madison’s campaign for reelection. His opponent was DeWitt Clinton, nephew of vice president George Clinton, who had died in 1811. The candidate was a good politician and a popular former mayor of New York City with a strong Republican following in his native state. He was backed by the Federalists, who remained a force in New England. Dolley struggled to maintain her public neutrality, but she was heard to refer to Clinton as “that fellow” when he paid a visit to Washington.
The Federalists cried petticoat politics and tried to convince people that Madison lacked the forcefulness to lead the country in a war. In the original thirteen states, Clinton came within one electoral vote of beating Madison. But in the new states of the West, the War Hawks were dominant, and they gave the president a comfortable margin of victory.
Clinton did not claim that he would have won if President Madison lacked Dolley. The words would have been superfluous. Everyone who read a newspaper knew that Dolley was an essential part of the Madison administration. But no one anticipated that the war would make her a national heroine.