Patriot Hearts

by Barbara Hambly

  In all other things, Dolley believed herself to be fairly rational: firm with the slaves, since there was no keeping house unless one learned to be firm; tactful with her tribe of new sisters-in-law; adept at balancing the demands of running a plantation household against the constant stream of Virginia hospitality and her own need for a quiet hour now and then.

  But with Payne she was helpless.

  It was a good thing, she reflected, that the boy was so good-hearted. She had been less concerned during the first two years of her marriage, when she and Jemmy had wintered in Philadelphia every year for the sessions of Congress. Payne had had his familiar friends around him. Only in the summers had they returned to the relative isolation of Montpelier, where Payne’s only company was the children of either slaveholders or slaves.

  But in 1797, so many things had changed.

  The vicious Presidential election of 1796 had gone to Adams by three electoral votes. And because the Constitution had been written before the emergence of distinct political parties—not to mention before such events as the bloody Revolution in France and England’s ruthless decision to seize American ships, cargoes, and seamen—Thomas Jefferson had emerged from retirement to become Vice President to his former friend, whose political views were now in direct opposition to his own. (“One can’t think of everything,” Jemmy had sighed.)

  But the country’s unofficial Vice President—the man who privately gave orders to, and received privileged information from, the new President’s Cabinet—was Alexander Hamilton. A man who had never been elected to any office in his life.

  Standing in the crowd of Philadelphians outside Congress Hall on a chilly March day in 1797, Dolley had watched Jefferson go up to take office as president of the Senate, tall and lanky in a long-tailed blue coat. And she’d smiled a little, remembering him two years earlier, when Jemmy had first brought her to Monticello. Untidy and eccentric-looking in the old clothes he wore while gardening, he strode down the front steps—that was before he’d started tearing the house apart—with his hands held out to greet his old friend. “Jemmy! I do hope you know what you’ve let yourself in for, my dear Mrs. Madison,” he’d added in his soft voice, bowing over her hand. “When you marry a Virginian, you marry his entire family and his friends—”

  “—And their horses and dogs and Negroes—” Jemmy added with his dry smile.

  “—in season and out, bed and board—”

  “My dear Mr. Jefferson,” Dolley drew herself up with an air of assumed haughtiness and a twinkle in her eyes. “I see you mistake me for a Philadelphian. I happen to be a Virginian, born and raised. There is nothing about the feeding and housing of two dozen strangers at five minutes’ notice that I hadn’t mastered before the age of twelve.”

  His eyes widened with pleasure. Instantly, it was as if they’d known one another for years. “Really? What county?”

  “Hanover, if you please.”

  “Good Lord! There are some quite remarkable remains of a Pamunkey Indian village on the banks of—”

  “Mrs. Madison,” interposed Jemmy patiently, “please permit me to introduce my friend Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson, my wife. And I warn you, Dolley, that if you encourage Tom with the smallest query about the Indians, or fossil mammoths, or what varieties of alfalfa best grow in these mountains, you shall be kept awake until dawn with the natural history of the entire region.”

  Two years after that meeting, moving through the crowd around Congress Hall, Jefferson had looked grave and collected, Dolley thought, and a little grim. The Federalists were strong in the Senate, and feelings were running so high about whether to ally with a domineering Britain or revolutionary France that there had been outbreaks of mob violence.

  Even so, she thought, as she watched George Washington cross the State House yard, kingly in black velvet, with stout little gray-clad Mr. Adams bobbing in his wake, she had been aware that she was seeing something that no one in the world had ever seen before: the ruler of a nation quietly handing off power to his successor, then returning home to private life.

  “No severed heads—no daggers in the dark—no rioting in the streets,” she murmured to Anna, who stood at her side. “No blood on the steps of the throne—no more fuss, really, than taking over as vestryman of the parish. Flat dull, in fact,” she added with a laugh. “Canst think of another time in history, when the transfer of rulership from one man to another did not involve someone dying?”

  At her elbow, the black-clothed widow Sophie Hallam responded with a wintry smile. “We do indeed witness a remarkable event. Yet I’m sure that somewhere, Dolley, someone has died for it.”

  Sophie had returned to Philadelphia in time to attend that same Christmas reception of 1796 at which Dolley had first encountered James Callendar. Across the very crowded double-parlor, the black and gray of second mourning had caught Dolley’s eye, striking in a room filled with women determined to show off their best. As she approached, Dolley saw the woman was in conversation with Aaron Burr—who stood several inches shorter—and coming close heard her voice, a wry alto like smoke and honey: “One must allow it’s an effective way to raise money: If your people are too poor to tax, send your army on a looting-expedition across the border into your neighbor’s territory.”

  Bonaparte. Dolley identified the topic of conversation at once and with an inner sigh. Since the Directorate of France had begun sending its troops into Italy, very little else was being talked about.

  And the next instant, identified the voice.

  “Sophie!”

  The woman in gray turned, her cool sardonic smile melting into an expression of genuine pleasure. “Dearest!” The two women clasped hands, then, impulsively, embraced. “My mother always vowed you should marry a planter! She would be pleased to see herself proved right.”

  Dolley’s eye flickered over the exquisitely fashionable somberness of her friend’s dress, and she bit back her query, And how is thy dear mother…? Sophie seemed to read both her unspoken words and her instantaneous afterthought, and added, more quietly, “She would have been pleased to see you looking so well, too, Dolley. She always said you were the best of my friends.”

  That time, the past tense was unmistakable.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Sophie shook her head, though her features tightened momentarily with some unsaid and bitter reflection. “In many ways I miss her more than I miss Mr. Hallam—who was a good husband, as husbands go….” She waved away his specter dismissively, and smiled her sidelong smile. “I am a mere dressmaker these days, but as we live in a democracy now, both Colonel Burr and Lady Washington assured me there would be no objection to my accompanying him here.”

  “Mrs. Hallam? Art thou the Mrs. Hallam whose needlework Lady Washington doth praise so highly? She hath said she knew thee as a child—”

  “And so she did. My father consulted with her on her own health and her daughter Patcy’s, when she’d bring her into Williamsburg. I owe Lady Washington a good deal.”

  And Dolley thought, as Aaron Burr turned aside to bow over Maria Morris’s hand, that the diminutive Senator gave Sophie a curious, speculative look.

  After years of wondering, Dolley had learned almost by chance from Tom Jefferson that her friend had made it to Cornwallis’s camp at Yorktown, and that she had done nursing for a Yorktown doctor in the final year of the War. Later, Patsy Jefferson Randolph had spoken of meeting Sophie again in Paris. Dolley learned that Sophie and her mother had taken ship with the departing British troops in 1783, and that her mother had died on the voyage. Hence, Sophie remarked with brittle lightness, her stint as a paid companion to an Englishwoman in Paris when all Hell was about to break loose. But how she had gotten out of Paris, who Mr. Hallam had been, and how and why Sophie had returned to Philadelphia to take up life as a seamstress, she would not say.

  Because of her friendship with Martha Washington, and because of her undeniable good breeding and wit as well as her skill at cutting a gown, Sophie Hall
am rapidly made herself a fixture in Philadelphia society. She knew everyone and everything, and was welcome in both Federalist and Republican circles. For she had early issued her own Proclamation of Neutrality, she claimed, in imitation of the President’s: listening to any gossip and never passing a word of it along.

  Which was odd, Dolley thought, in a woman whom she recalled as being sharply outspoken in her loyalty, long ago, to the Crown.

  Certainly Sophie’s letters had enlivened the next few years.

  Only weeks before John Todd’s death, Jemmy’s brother Ambrose had died back at Montpelier. Each summer after that, when Jemmy and Dolley had returned to the plantation, it had been to find more tasks undone, more bills unsettled, more finances entangled by debt and poor management as old Colonel Madison grew less and less able to ride his own acres daily the way he once had. Thus it was that when Virginians gathered to elect their representatives to the Fifth Congress, Jemmy stepped aside. For the first time since the Revolution, he returned to private life.

  Watching the sunlight on the flanks of the carriage-team, on Payne’s gold hair as the boy galloped his pony into the green stillness of the wooded hills, Dolley was still hard-put to piece together how the country had come, so swiftly, from that point—that astonishingly peaceful handover of power from Washington to Adams—to the very verge of darkness that threatened to undo everything Jemmy, and Tom, and Mr. Adams himself had fought for.

  Tyranny masquerading as the necessary actions of reasonable men, the way it now did in France.

  Even as a permanent resident at Montpelier, of course, Jemmy was never completely detached from politics. He would always, Dolley reflected wryly, be a kingmaker at heart.

  Sophie, and Lizzie Collins, and Aaron Burr kept them up on the gossip of the capital, sending them clippings from newspapers and, as Sophie phrased it, reports on the gales in various tea-pots around town. It was Sophie who sent them the tracts published by James Callendar entitled The History of the United States for the Year 1796, which detailed Alexander Hamilton’s 1792 affair with a certain Mrs. Maria Reynolds, whose husband was involved in speculation with Hamilton’s Treasury funds to the tune of thirty thousand dollars. So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching, Callendar wrote of the letters which he claimed Hamilton had helped Mrs. Reynolds forge. No man of sense can believe that it did.

  Hamilton, livid, had challenged Jim Monroe to a duel on the grounds that Monroe, to whom Mrs. Reynolds’s husband had sent proof of the affair in an effort at blackmail back in ’92, had, after four years, passed along the details to Callendar. After words like “liar” and “scoundrel” had been exchanged, the two opponents had been talked out of bloodshed by Aaron Burr. Instead, Hamilton published a confession in the Gazette of the United States: The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation, he wrote. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife.

  Alexander Hamilton, who had already retired as Secretary of the Treasury, never held public office again, which as far as Dolley was concerned was just as well. Sophie noted—goodness knew what her sources were—that when Hamilton’s books were examined, his assistant (a cousin of his wife) was found to be $238,000 short.

  Sophie related all this with a kind of relish, as if profoundly entertained by the murderous infighting of men who had begun their careers as traitors to the King. “The Constitution gives your friend every right to laugh at us to our faces,” sighed Jemmy, as he laid down the letter that contained the Gazette confession. “God help this country, if she could not say of us whatever she wished.”

  But Jefferson’s letters were first disquieting, and then frightening. In May of 1797, in response to the treaty Washington had negotiated with England, France started seizing American ships and cargoes. The new President Adams sent a delegation to Paris to iron things out, and mortally offended his Vice President and half the Congress by requesting “measures of defense.”

  Adams’s Cabinet consisted mainly of men hand-picked by Hamilton, and the second President found himself surrounded by pro-British New England merchants and bankers. No doubt remembering Jefferson’s championship of Citizen Genêt, Adams shut his Vice President out of nearly every aspect of the government. By November of that year, with Bonaparte preparing, it was said, to conquer Switzerland and then invade England, anti-French hysteria had reached dangerous proportions.

  By January of ’98 feelings in Congress were running so high that the Honorable Representative of Vermont (Republican) crossed the floor of the House chamber to spit in the face of the Honorable Representative of Connecticut (Federalist). This in turn led to a brawl on the floor with a cane and some fire-tongs as weapons. (“Not,” wrote Sophie, who’d been in the gallery, “the Congress’s finest hour.”)

  By the following April, when word came to Philadelphia that French Foreign Minister Tallyrand had refused to receive the American envoys unless they lent France twelve million dollars and gave the Foreign Minister himself a further quarter million as a “sweetener,” anti-French mobs were storming the streets of Philadelphia, and the country was clamoring for war.

  In June, a Naturalization Act was passed. Effectively blocking the citizenship of émigrés from both France and Ireland, it was followed, a week later, by the Aliens Act, which permitted the President to summarily banish any foreigner he personally deemed a threat (for instance, Jefferson’s staunch supporter Albert Gallatin).

  And in the blazing heat of July, the Sedition Act was passed, forbidding any newspaper to print attacks on the President—in direct disregard of the Constitution.

  “It is a reign of witches,” declared Jefferson softly, as he paced the darkness of Montpelier’s pillared porch in the heat of a July night in 1798. He’d arrived after a day of blistering sun; Dolley, sitting at Jemmy’s side, had heard in the throb of the cicadas, smelled in the damp thick air, the coming of storm. “Because one Frenchman is dishonest, and another is greedy, they seek to go to war with the only nation strong enough to counterbalance England’s desire to swallow us up, to transform us back into her colonies again. To hold us not in chains of iron this time but of gold. It is enough to give you a fever.”

  July 2, 1798. Twenty-two years to the day, Dolley remembered, since the Congress had voted to declare independence.

  Bitter years. Since taking up his office again, Jefferson had been spending as little time in Philadelphia as he could manage, coming home from the capital in early July and not returning until December. During those long summers and falls he was in and out of Montpelier, and Jemmy and Dolley would go to stay with him at Monticello, where the older man seemed to take refuge from his savage frustration in the remodeling of the Big House: Dolley hoped by the time they went for their next stay there would at least be a roof.

  So preoccupied had their friend been with what was happening in Philadelphia, she wasn’t certain he’d notice whether he was sleeping under the stars or not.

  “Now Adams has called for an army, to fight the French—Does he really believe that Bonaparte will invade our shores? They’ve even got Washington to come out of retirement to lead it—”

  Dolley had wondered what Martha had had to say to that.

  “—which of course he is too old to do. So he’s demanded that Hamilton—Hamilton!—be his second in command: in effect, the generalissimo in the field.”

  She asked, “Can the President ask the Congress to set aside the Constitution?”

  “He certainly has,” replied Jemmy, grimly.

  And Jefferson whispered fiercely, “Who’s to stop him? With a standing army in the field, they’ve made the President into a sort of elective King, and the State Representatives his subjects, not his partners in rule. Adams tells them what he wishes, and they do it—which I understood was the entire reason we fought in ’76.”

  In the dark that followed the lightning, Dolley could sense his eyes meeting Jemmy’s. “I think it is for the States, don’t you, t
o tell Adams that he’s overstepped his bounds? It is we who made the Constitution, we—the States—who agreed to give up our individual liberties and enter into the Union. It is up to us, to abrogate the laws which violate it.”

  More silence followed, broken only by the rumble of thunder on the mountains, and, some minutes later, the patter of the rain. The house behind them was dark, that long house of yellow brick whose southern half—completely separated from the north end where Jemmy, Dolley, Payne, and Anna lived—still housed the Old Colonel and Mother Madison, Jemmy’s sister Fanny, and, since March, his brother Ambrose’s orphaned daughter Nell.

  The house that seemed some days so profoundly peaceful, and some nights, as if it were isolated from the world by the endless miles of the sea.

  Jemmy said at last, “I think you’re right, Tom. And I think we must speak further of this. Speak,” he added quietly, “not write. Nor commit a word to paper, until we are ready for the States to draft resolutions to that effect. For if we appear to be urging the adoption of such resolutions, that would set the States in opposition to the Congress, I think that you and I, my friend, would find ourselves in danger of prosecution. For conspiracy, certainly. And I would not put it past Hamilton, to bring a charge against us of treason.”

  As the carriage emerged from the trees at the foot of Montpelier’s long hill, Dolley saw at once that something was going on. Every window in the house was illuminated, and even at that distance she could see far more people than usual moving about the porch.