by Myron Magnet
I first saw Montpelier when the restoration team had torn down most of the du Pont additions and scraped all the stucco off Madison’s bricks. As they demolished, they had found intact pieces of Madison’s original house—a door frame, paneling, floorboards, a mantelpiece, a hearthstone—and they were placing them back in their original positions by matching up nail holes and chisel marks. They had removed all the modern, waterlogged plaster, leaving behind lathes dating from the 1760s to 1812, so that I could peer through the spaces between the hand-cut slats into room after room after room, as if in a ghost house. The lanky, electrically intense restoration chief, John Jeanes, for whom Montpelier is a calling not a job, showed me how he had been able to re-create missing chair rails by tracing faint profiles of the originals he had found on the sides of the window frames under several layers of paint.
When I returned almost three years later, he showed me how his crew had laid 30,000 new, handmade cypress shingles on the roof (copied from original ones that had fallen into the attic); replastered the walls with the original lime, horsehair, and sand formula; re-created the Chinese Chippendale railings crowning the roof-terraces on the wings; and repaired a structural beam that some previous remodeler had insouciantly sawn through to make a doorway. Of the original furnishings, little remained, having been sold off piece by piece by Dolley’s spendthrift son, and I talked to other restorers about wallpapers and curtains, based on scraps that had turned up, along with a piece of one of Madison’s letters, in a two-century-old mouse’s nest uncovered in a wall. And I couldn’t help thinking of the whole project as a metaphor for the restoration that Madison’s Constitution needs—a clearing away of some of the more vainglorious excrescences added on by twentieth-century modernizers, defacing the simple, classical restraint and balance of the original, which every stage of Madison’s alterations had preserved.
THE REVOLUTION of 1800—as Jefferson dubbed the electoral sweep that gave the Republicans the presidency and control of both houses of Congress—took Madison away from Montpelier for a sixteen-year stretch in Washington, first as President Jefferson’s secretary of state and closest confidant until 1809 and then as his two-term successor.79 Those opening years of the nineteenth century transformed American politics, society, and foreign relations in ways that Madison only marginally controlled; most often, he seemed like a swimmer stroking bewilderedly on time’s ever-rolling stream toward a destination he neither chose nor relished. The magisterial command he showed as a lawgiver deserted him as an executive. Partly because of his deeply ingrained deference to Jefferson, partly because ideology and politics rather than experience and history increasingly became his guides, and partly because he had almost never run anything, he proved no leader at a time when the country badly needed one.
In May 1801, he arrived in the new capital he had won in his bargain with Hamilton—two months after Jefferson’s inauguration, because his father had died in February and he had to wind up the old squire’s affairs before leaving Montpelier to take the oath as secretary of state. The city of Washington, despite architect Pierre L’Enfant’s grandiose plan for its streets and squares, seemed still to be emerging from the primeval ooze. A sad flock of shanties, falling into ruin even as they were built, punctuated the swampy wastes between the capital’s 109 habitable brick houses and 263 wooden ones and promised to doom their “wretched tenants to perpetual fevers,” Treasury secretary Albert Gallatin predicted. “Washington would be a beautiful city if it were built,” an English traveler scoffed, “but as it is not, I cannot say much about it.”80 For the first few weeks, the Madisons moved in with Jefferson at the unfinished President’s House, still as scantily furnished as when Abigail Adams had used what’s now the East Room to hang out her washing.81
Even with Goose Creek off the Potomac ambitiously renamed the Tiber, Washington was still frontier, like so much of the country.82 The population west of the Alleghenies, 150,000 in 1795, exploded to more than a million of the nation’s more than 7 million inhabitants by 1810; that year 70 percent of the country’s white population was twenty-five or younger. Young settlers were filling even the frontier parts of settled states: “Axes were resounding and the trees literally were falling about us as we passed,” reported a traveler through the upstate New York woods in 1805.83 And the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the Jefferson administration’s greatest accomplishment (or stroke of luck), expanded by 900,000 square miles the frontier yet to settle. As part of the Revolution of 1800, Congress made it ever easier for settlers to buy western land in smaller and smaller parcels, at cheap prices and on easy credit terms.84
WHAT KIND OF CULTURE would this young, mobile society invent for itself? Above all, Madison and Jefferson vowed, it would be republican. Even at the start of George Washington’s administration, Madison had urged the new president to resist anything that smacked of aristocratic or monarchist pretension. As he saw it, “the more simple, the more Republican we are in our manners, the more rational dignity we shall acquire.”85
By manners he meant more than using the correct fork. He meant, as Hobbes had defined it long before, “those qualities of man-kind, that concern their living together in Peace, and Unity”—the customs and ceremonies, allied to virtue, by which men humanize their interactions: we wait our turn, we dine, we thank, we marry, we mourn.86 For Madison and Jefferson, republican manners would ban all show of deference or superiority. “The principle of society with us, as well as of our political constitution, is the equal rights of all,” Jefferson explained; “and if there be an occasion where this equality ought to prevail preeminently, it is in social circles collected for conviviality.”87 With proud simplicity, Jefferson set the tone by walking from his boardinghouse to his inauguration. That day, he declared, “buried levees, birthdays, royal parades, and the arrogation of precedence in society by certain self-stiled friends of order, but truly stiled friends of privileged orders.” Away with George Washington’s controlled, majestic bearing and his yellow coach with six white horses. The slouching Jefferson, when he rode at all, rode in a one-horse cart.88
Soon enough, these republican manners created an international incident. As a national capital, raw little Washington, with around 3,000 whites and 750 blacks when the Madisons arrived, acquired its share of more or less exotic foreign diplomats: General Louis-Marie Turreau, the French ambassador, who often beat his wife, Dolley Madison’s close friend, at home and in public, and who reportedly danced quadrilles in his embassy with naked ladies, for example, and the turbaned Sidi Suleiman Melli Melli, the Bey of Tunis’s envoy, who earnestly discussed women and God with several Creek and Cherokee chiefs at a President’s House reception, and for whom Secretary of State Madison procured one “Georgia a Greek,” whose fee he expensed on the State Department ledger as “appropriations to foreign intercourse.”89 But the real scandal concerned Anthony Merry, Britain’s envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary—and it was a scandal Jefferson and Madison precipitated.
AS DIPLOMATIC PROTOCOL required, the newly arrived Merry, escorted by Madison and “all bespeckled,” the envoy’s secretary wrote, “with the spangles of our gaudiest court dress,” came to the President’s House in late 1803 to present his credentials.90 Jefferson, having by now recoiled against that aristocratic finery and hauteur he had sported in his portrait as ambassador to France, received Merry in sloppy dress and bedroom slippers, lounged in his chair in his characteristic slouch, legs crossed and one hip cocked higher than the other, and dangled a slipper off one toe. Merry took this demeanor as an “actually studied” insult.91
His next President’s House visit a few days later, for a dinner in his and his wife’s honor, confirmed this interpretation. Instead of ushering Elizabeth Merry into the dining room and seating her to his right, as custom dictated, Jefferson offered his arm to a startled Dolley Madison, who whispered, “Take Mrs. Merry.” The secretary of state took charge of Mrs. Merry, however, leaving His Britannic Majesty’s envoy to fend for himself. As Mer
ry pulled out a chair to sit beside the Spanish ambassador’s wife, a young congressman elbowed him aside, and Merry stumbled down the table until he found an empty place.
Making things even worse, the French envoy was there too, a gross breach of the commonsense diplomatic rule of never inviting representatives of two warring countries to the same event, and Merry later heard with disgust that Jefferson had specially asked the Frenchman to come back from out of town for the dinner. A few days later, the Merrys went to dinner at the Madisons’ and got the some treatment, though this time Mrs. Merry stared down Treasury secretary Gallatin’s wife and displaced her from the seat at Madison’s right hand.92
Jefferson was an ex-ambassador to the French court, and he and Madison, as Virginia grandees, knew better than this, as indeed Madison later admitted, when he said that he would have escorted Mrs. Merry to his own dinner table but felt obliged to toe the presidential line. “Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison were too much of the gentlemen not to feel ashamed of what they were doing,” the British legation secretary reported, “and consequently did it awkwardly, as people must do who affect bad manners for a particular object.”93 Their object of course was to express resentment at Britain, and Merry got the message all too clearly—as did the Spanish ambassador’s wife, who exclaimed, as Jefferson snubbed Mrs. Merry, “This will be the cause of war!”94
Knowing they had gone too far, Jefferson and Madison tried to backpedal; they printed up and presented to Merry a pamphlet misspelled Cannons of Etiquette, stating that American diplomatic occasions, large or small, would follow the rule of pêle-mêle, meaning that guests would crowd in and take whatever place they could, though ladies would go first. Merry huffed that they should have told him this before and that he’d seek instructions on how to proceed; meanwhile he continued to turn down President’s House dinner invitations. “I shall be highly honored,” Jefferson acidly remarked, “when the King of England is good enough to let Mr. Merry come and eat my soup.”95
But he never did. Convinced by this charade of America’s implacable hostility to Britain and partiality for France, Merry consistently advised his government never to make concessions to the United States or to believe American overtures of friendship. So the “Merry Affair” helped sow the seeds of the War of 1812.96
THE MERRY AFFAIR, said Madison, was about “the right of the government here to fix its rules of intercourse and the sentiments and manners of the country.”97 But the kind of manners he and Jefferson were “fixing” at once reflected and legitimated a trend that was already running strong in the country: a powerful streak of resentment in the assertion of independence and equality.
In the 1790s, the pro-French Democratic-Republican Societies thronged with farmers and tradesmen who seethed with class anger against “aristocrats” who devalued them, they believed, for having “not snored through four years at Princeton.” And who were these aristocrats? “Judges, Lawyers, Generals, Colonels,” and “all men of talents,” sneered one Republican, whom his party strove “to prevent . . . from being elected” to office.98 Another northern Republican in the late 1790s railed against “the merchant, phisition, lawyer & divine, the philosopher and school master, the Juditial & Executive Officers” who “asotiate together and look down with two much contempt on those that labour.” Such men “that git a Living without Bodily Labour” use their “art & skeems” to control the banks, the newspapers, and the government, which they employ to keep themselves rich and the poor poor.99 By 1800, the country’s eighty-five Republican newspapers were constantly vibrating with resentment against the Federalist “prigarchy”—the “great men,” such as “merchants, speculators, priests, lawyers,” and government officials, who, enriched “by their art and cunning,” supposedly looked down “upon the honest laborer as a distinct animal of an inferior species.”100
Madison and Jefferson recognized the political force of such passions and played them for all they were worth. Having shed his former yearning to leaven government with the wise and virtuous, Madison wasn’t content merely to flay the Hamiltonians as monocrats itching to reinstate an aristocracy, but went on to tar them as “Tories”—not just opponents but enemies with blood on their hands, supporters of the actual hierarchical oppressors whom Americans had only recently stopped with bullets. These Federalists, whom Madison renamed “anti-republicans” while rebranding the anti-Federalists as the Republicans, believe the “people are stupid, suspicious, licentious,” and “should think of nothing but obedience, leaving the care of their liberties to their wiser rulers,” Madison wrote.101
Jefferson, the philosopher and polymath who boasted on his tombstone that he was “Father of the University of Virginia,” declared: “State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor; the former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules.”102 This was long before the politicization of academe, of which William F. Buckley, Jr., could jibe he’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the highly partisan Harvard faculty; and if Jefferson meant to uplift the ploughman rather than denigrate the professor, his was a generously commendable sentiment. But in fact he was pandering to know-nothingism. Montpelier and Monticello are pure embodiments of the Enlightenment spirit, in their classical balance, harmony, restraint, order, urbanity, and deep historical learning, and their builders were sons of the Age of Reason. But the Revolution of 1800 marks the end of the Enlightenment in America.
The society that republican manners fostered was a society of inflamed egos, of I’m-just-as-good-as-you self-assertion and readiness to take offense. By 1800, foreign visitors spoke of Americans as slobs who pushed and shoved in public and trampled ordinary civilities. The incivility increased as one traveled west, where there were “no private or publick associations for the common good,” and “every man is for himself alone and has no regard for any other person farther than he can make him subservient to his own views,” one acute observer noted. “Natural freedom,” a foreign traveler remarked, “is what pleases them.” Out in the West, a Kentuckian told Madison, “society is yet unborn,” there is “no distinction assumed on account of rank or property,” and a “certain loss of civility is inevitable.”103
That was an understatement. Out west, “savage” fights were common, complete with “choking, gouging out each other’s eyes, and biting off each other’s noses,” recalled another Kentuckian. “But what is worst of all,” according to an English visitor, “these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles.”104 In the rest of the world, a New Englander mused, “progress has been from ignorance to knowledge, from the rudeness of savage life to the refinements of polished society.” But in America, “the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.” Maybe the naturalist Buffon was right: that in the unhealthful climate of the New World, species degenerated.105
Out on the frontier that was Washington—where some backwoods congressmen had never before seen a piano or a Frenchman,106 where Republican congressman Matthew Lyons notoriously spat in Connecticut Federalist Roger Griswold’s face in the legislative chamber and later beaned him with the House of Representatives’ fire tongs after Griswold caned him, and where Dolley Madison’s brother-in-law, Congressman John G. Jackson, got badly hurt in a duel over policy differences, while her cousin (President Madison’s secretary) horsewhipped yet another congressman in the Capitol for the same reason—Dolley resolved to do some civilizing.107
She made her first try while her husband was still secretary of state. As de facto first lady—President Jefferson and Vice President Aaron Burr were widowers—she presided with her sunny good nature over the presidential table at dinners that ladies attended. But these were few. Believing that women had no place in politics, Jefferson mostly held weekday dinners for eight or a dozen congressmen at a time, all Republicans or all Federalists, where he wooed them to his views with his good wine, high cuisine,
and fascinating talk, even though they could sometimes see their breath in his cold dining room.108
So Dolley took it upon herself to bring the sexes and the political parties together, at her famously convivial New Year’s Day celebrations at her F Street house, to which all Washington trooped with relief after the stiff, obligatory President’s House reception, and at her weekly dinners for up to seventy guests, which Elizabeth Merry sniffed were “more like a harvest-home supper than the entertainment of a Secretary of State.” Dolley had her own ideas of hospitality, however. She told her friend and first biographer, Margaret Bayard Smith, that “she thought abundance was preferable to elegance; that circumstances formed customs, and customs formed taste; and as the profusion, so repugnant to foreign customs, arose from the happy circumstance of the superabundance and prosperity of our country, she did not hesitate to sacrifice the delicacy of European taste, for the less elegant, but more liberal fashion of Virginia.”109 The sentiment is Dolley’s, the prose Mrs. Smith’s: Dolley served ham and called visitors “Honey,” and after supper she liked a pinch or two of snuff from her monogrammed silver snuffbox and a few hands of loo, for money.
MADISON’S INAUGURATION as president on March 4, 1809, marked Dolley’s launch as “the Presidentess,” as the National Intelligencer dubbed her, and she went to work in earnest.110 Congress had voted $20,000 to complete and furnish the White House, as it now came to be called, and Madison put Dolley in charge of architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s redesign. With clear-sighted self-assurance, she aimed to create a theater where she would dramatize her own vision of American civility, hospitality, and republican manners. Stiff, courtly, European-style “etiquette she delighted to throw aside at all times,” a niece recalled; “she liked no form which separated her from her friends.”111 At her celebrated weekly receptions, “Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday nights,” she set the model of how the political parties, sexes, and classes could mingle with democratic equality but also with style, sociability, and decorum. She united, said Margaret Bayard Smith, “all the elegance and polish of fashion” with “unadulterated simplicity, frankness, warmth, and friendliness.”112
