Coles always reminded Dolley that Madison had read the letters and consented to all of them. In fact, she added to one letter, he did so “with sparkling eyes.”
Coles's letters and James Madison arrived on Dolley's doorstop nonstop throughout the late autumn and the winter of 1793–94. The union between Madison and the widow Todd surprised all who knew them. There were merits to marrying James Madison for Dolley. He was a wealthy and important man who could instantly give her one of the most comfortable lives in America. He had also impressed her. Madison was, friends and associates knew, a very complicated man. He was somber and sober in public, but behind closed doors, with trusted friends, he was reportedly quite a storyteller and wit. He was a quiet man at most public social events but a bon vivant at private parties. Those who knew him slightly described his personality as chilly, but those who knew him well described him as a colorful character full of charm and resilience.
He was a man of two distinct faces. Mrs. Margaret Bayard Smith, a friend for more than sixteen years in Washington, wrote that “in public life and as a writer, James Madison was the most solemn of men. In private life he was an incessant humorist, and at home at Montpelier used to set his table guest daily into roars of laughter over his stories and whimsical way of telling them.”10
But there were problems, too. He was much older than Dolley, his temperament was decidedly far cooler than hers, their entertainment interests varied greatly, and James would bring her back to his slave plantation in Virginia, very isolated from the world.
There was her religion. Because she married a non-Quaker, and might have done so within a year of her husband's death, the Quakers would probably exclude her from their meeting, a disastrous religious and social punishment. She knew that the Society of Friends did not care whom she married—she was marrying outside the religion. They had banished her younger sister Lucy from the Society because she married outside the faith—and she had married the nephew of the president of the United States, George Steptoe Washington. Dolley had little hope that the Quakers would keep her if she married Madison.
Her young child would have a father, well, a stepfather, forty-three years older than him. When her son, Payne, was twenty, his father would be sixty-three, a very old man in that era. Payne might have had friends in crowded Philadelphia, but there would be no one for him to play with at the mammoth plantation where she and Madison would live in the Virginia forests. Where would he go to school? Dolley worried constantly about the relationship between Payne and her prospective husband, any prospective husband. Dolley had lost her young husband and her other child; Payne was all she had left. Her boy needed a stepdad who would be a role model for him, spend a lot of time with him, play with him, tuck him in at night, have common interests, love him, and take care of him.11 All widows felt that way about their second husbands. How could Madison, already forty-three, do that?
What she did not know, but later found out, was that Madison had delayed courting more women because he thought he might have epilepsy. He also declined to volunteer for the American Revolution as a soldier for fear he would suffer attacks while in the service. His brother-in-law said that he had physical tremors as a teenager that he thought made him an epileptic. He had “a constitutional liability of sudden attacks, of the nature of epilepsy.”12 Madison said that his seizures were “somewhat resembling epilepsy and suspending the intellectual functions.” A Madison biographer, Irving Brant, wrote that it was “epileptoid hysteria.” Thomas Jefferson believed that Madison was an epileptic and gave him a book by a French physician that covered epilepsy. The seizures did not return as he became an adult, though, as they might have if he had epilepsy (there were no medicines for it in that era). What he had might have been twitches of some kind brought on by temporary nervous disorders or stress, but it was probably not epilepsy. It might also have been another of Madison's minor ailments that he had, as usual, built up into some monumental disease. As he aged, he forgot about it.
Dolley was not disheartened, though. She studied Madison from many different angles. She had wanted to spend all of her life with her first husband, John. Now she wanted to spend her life with a second husband. Madison had to meet a lot of expectations from her, perhaps too many. One of them was that he play the role of stepdad. She had become convinced, in her months of seeing him, and spending much time with him alone, that he had the temperament to be a good stepdad. It was not enough for Dolley that Madison had a lot of money and lived on an enormous plantation. Money did not mean everything. It would provide comfort for Payne, but not love. The little boy needed a lifetime of love from her, and from a stepdad.
Dolley wanted to find out everything she could about Madison. She had very close friends investigate the congressman to see what he was really like. She feared that his fame would overwhelm people and that she would not receive an honest evaluation from most. Friends would give her an honest opinion and would be able to find out things she needed to know. She knew several men who were very close friends of Madison. One, William Wilkins, who had been her lawyer, knew Madison very well. He wrote Dolley that “Mr. Madison is a man whom I admire. I consulted those who knew him intimately in private life. His personal character therefore I have every reason to believe is good and amiable. He unites to the great talents which have secured him public approbation those engaging qualities that contribute so highly to domestic felicity. To such a man therefore I do most freely consent that my beloved be united and happy.”13
Dolley also had a resounding, and quite surprising, character reference for Madison from a most unlikely source, the First Lady of the United States, Martha Washington. Dolley was invited to the President's Mansion one day in the summer of 1794 and was greeted warmly by Mrs. Washington. Her husband and Madison had been extremely close friends for years, as Dolley and everyone in Philadelphia knew, and Martha was intent on brokering a marriage between Madison and the Todd widow. “Do not be ashamed to confess it [love]; rather, be proud. He will make thee a good husband and all the better for being so much older [Mr. Washington and I] both approve of it; the stem and friendship existing between Mr. Madison and my husband is very great and we would wish thee to be happy,” Martha said.14
Dolley left Philadelphia in the summer of 1794 for a visit with relatives in Virginia that was scheduled to last several weeks. Madison was crestfallen by her departure from town. He shook with worry. Kitty Floyd had broken up with him when she went on a summer vacation, too. It would happen again. To halt that chain of events, Madison and Catherine Coles kept up their steady chain of love letters (it is unknown how many Coles wrote). In a letter sent toward the end of that summer, Madison asked Dolley to marry him and dreaded receiving any mail after that, fearing that she would say no.
In mid-August, Madison received a letter from Fredericksburg, Virginia, in which Dolley agreed to be his wife. He was jubilant. “I can not express but hope you will conceive the joy it gave me. The welcome event was endeared to me by the style in which is conveyed,” he wrote. Then Madison added, “If the sentiments of my heart can guarantee those of yours, they assure me there can never be a cause for [pain].”15
The pair were married on September 15, 1794, the wedding anniversary of James Madison's parents. The ceremony took place at Harewood, the estate of Dolley's sister Lucy and George Steptoe Washington, located near what is now Charlestown, West Virginia. Dolley wore a white, patterned, silk and lace dress, cut low in the neck and tightly fitted at the waist. She wore a headdress of orange blossoms. She wore heel-less white, satin shoes so that she would not tower over her much shorter husband. Madison, of course, dressed in black, as always.16 Madison gave her a necklace and earrings of carved gems that were supposed to represent scenes from early Roman history. She smiled widely at the unique gift.
On the afternoon of the wedding, Dolley wrote a very personal letter to a friend, Eliza Collins Lee, who had married another Virginia congressman. In it, she said that she expected the marriage to bring her h
appiness. She wrote that “in this union I have everything that is soothing and grateful in prospect and my little Payne will have a generous and tender protector.”
She signed the letter Dolley Payne Todd. Later that evening, as she prepared to send it off, she looked at her signature again, smiled, crossed it out, and with great joy wrote for the first time in her life “Dolley Madison! Alass!”17
The new couple did not have time for a honeymoon. They spent a few days with Madison's sister Nelly; were in limbo for a week while Dolley fought off an attack of the flu; and then drove back to the nation's capital, Philadelphia, where Madison quickly returned to his duties as a congressman, political operative, and close friend to President Washington. Dolley and her son moved in with her new husband, as did her younger sister Anna, who would be with them for several years.
Madison had been a key player in the brand-new US government since its inception. He was one of the friends who urged George Washington to become the first president, despite his reluctance. Madison had Washington's ear right from the beginning of that first administration, which began in 1789 with Madison's best friend, Thomas Jefferson, as the secretary of state. Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania wrote that Madison was “deep in the business” of helping Washington put together the government.1
The president also told Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton that they could spend all the time they wanted in intellectual discussions about politics, but he could not. His job, he told Madison, was simple—keep the brand-new country together. If he could finish his term with a united nation, he knew he would have done a good job. He was walking, he wrote one man, “on untrodden ground.”2
The first term of the Washington administration was a great success. For most of it, he headed up the only political party at the time, the Federalists, and they went along with his wishes as the chief executive. He was cheered and honored wherever he went, and his friends—such as Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton—applauded, too. The new government established a new paper currency, assumed all of the state debts from the war, increased sea trade, established a sensible foreign policy run by the president, levied taxes, and filled the seats of the Supreme Court.
In his first four years, Washington achieved great success with the people and with Congress. The government, through import taxes, helped the nation achieve financial stability. The state governments became powerful because the federal government allowed them to do so.
Throughout this period of time, Madison operated as perhaps the most powerful congressman in the country. He wound up in Congress because an enemy, fellow Virginian Patrick Henry, used his influence in the state legislature to deny Madison the coveted US Senate seat he desired. Undaunted, the Montpelier intellectual won a seat in the House of Representatives. In Congress, he had operated as the “whip,” or floor manager, for the new government, wrote and had passed the Bill of Rights, and became a close ally to President Washington and even closer to Thomas Jefferson.
He had been consulted by Washington on just about all the key pieces of legislation that were introduced, on both foreign affairs and domestic policy. As a bachelor, he had no domestic responsibilities to take time away from governmental work, and he was a hopeless workaholic.
Slowly, Madison became disappointed in both Washington and Hamilton. He had admired both as the founders of the new republic, but now, after a few years in office, they seemed determined to create a strong and monolithic federal government that might, in the future, overwhelm the states. They were creating a country that Madison had never wanted.3
He was also tired of Hamilton's frequent verbal abuse of him. In 1791, that same year he and Jefferson started their party, Hamilton told George Washington that Madison had unethically used the friendship between the two to help friends of his in Virginia. He said he had material that “furnishes proof of Mr. Madison's intrigues…an abuse of the President's confidence in him be endeavoring to make him, without his knowledge, take part with one cabinet officer against another,” and that “Madison's character is the reverse of that simple, fair, candid one which he has assumed.”4
Madison refuted these charges and said that Hamilton's accusations were political and stated to hurt the new alliance between Jefferson and Madison.
Madison had moved beyond the boundaries of Congress and had, in the summer of 1791, with Jefferson, started a major new political party, the Democratic-Republicans, with a states’ rights focus, and worked hard to make it grow, and grow quickly. Within a year of its beginning, the Republicans had thousands of members. It started to field candidates for federal, state, and local offices. They began to win numerous offices in the elections of 1794 and by 1796 would be as strong as the Federalists.
The two men also started their own Republican newspaper, the National Gazette, to counterbalance the pro-Federalist Gazette of the United States. Jefferson gave editor and poet Philip Freneau a job in the State Department as a printer, hoping that would get him started with the new Republican newspaper, but Freneau did not earn enough money to launch it. Jefferson and Madison then obtained contributions and worked to build up a subscription list. In late 1791, the newspaper, opposed to Washington's administration, hit the streets. Madison was proud of it. He “entertained hopes that a free paper meant for general circulation and edited by a man of genius, of republican principles and a friend to the Constitution, would be some antidote to the doctrines and discourses circulated in favor of monarchy and aristocracy and would be an acceptable vehicle of public information I many places not sufficiently supplied with it.”5 A year later, an all-out newspaper war developed between the papers backed by the Federalists and the Republicans. Hamilton, under a number of pseudonyms, routinely blasted Jefferson in the columns of the Federalist paper, driving the pair even further apart.
Throughout the remainder of his life, Madison always continued his admiration of Washington, even after their friendship cooled during Washington's second term, and never believed the first president had much admiration for the second. He told friends that “the hotheaded proceedings of Mr. A are not well relished in the cool climate of Mount Vernon.”6
Then Dolley Todd walked into Madison's life and everything changed. He saw his future entirely differently with his new, young wife and son. Now, finally, when his term ended in 1796, he could be a family man, a husband, a dad. He could return to Montpelier and become the farmer he had always dreamed about being—the planter, the well-dressed, high-society patron of Virginia—like so many of his friends. At the same time, Madison had lost Jefferson. His best friend had left Washington's cabinet, retired, and moved back to Monticello. And Madison was tired. He had been in public life since 1776, twenty long years, and was worn-out. He was exasperated, too, by the political fights in Congress and now, too, additional battles as one of the heads of the new political party. His numerous physical ailments returned and irritated him. He lost his zest for Philadelphia and government, ignored the advice of Washington, Jefferson, and others to stay in government, and retired.7
Madison was determined to leave the political stage and would not let anyone, especially Jefferson, talk him back into government.
Jefferson, surprised at the actions of his friend, pleaded with him to stay in government. “I do not see in the minds of those with whom I converse a greater affliction than the fear of your retirement,” he wrote him.8 In fact, Jefferson was so intent on keeping his friend in government that he told him he should not only remain in Congress but run for president. He said that Madison should be elected to “that more splendid and…most efficacious post”: the presidency.9 He told him he would make a fine president and if his urging was not enough to help him retain his congressional seat, at least, he should ask Dolley “to keep you where you are.”
This opposition to his retirement must have caused Madison to smile. After all, no one had extolled the virtues of retirement from political life more than Jefferson himself. He told friend Edward Rutledge that that he enjoyed retired livin
g “like an Antediluvian patriarch among my children and grand children, and tilling my soil.”10
He told Madison that he did not have to write a dozen political letters a day and never missed newspaper debates about politics. He was “so thoroughly weaned from the interest I took in the proceedings there…that I never had a wish to see one [newspaper] and believe that I never shall take another newspaper of any sort.”11
Madison told Jefferson he had no desire to be president and then turned the tables on him, telling him that he, Jefferson, should run for the office. “You ought to be preparing yourself…to hear truths, which no inflexibility will be able to withstand,” he wrote him.12
Madison would not be cajoled into a campaign for any office, either. He even wrote his father at Montpelier, “If Mr. Jefferson should call and say anything to counteract my determination; I hope it will be regarded as merely expressive of his own wishes on the subject, and that it will not be allowed to have the least effect. In declining to go into the Assembly…I am sincere and inflexible.”13
This stunned his friend Jefferson. The former secretary of state feared that his marriage to Dolley had taken his mind off government, politics, and everything else.14
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