James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  He was a successful congressman but not, at first, a successful politician. Madison hid behind his books, reading long into the night, and never developed the political skills necessary for dealing with other congressmen. His writings were dry; they did not soar with the lyrical prose of other public figures. He was a low-key public speaker whose speeches were barely audible; his voice did not soar with eloquence like that of other Virginians, such as Henry. He was effective, but not a leader. One Massachusetts congressman wrote that Madison was “a man of sense reading, address and integrity” but “a little too much of a book politician and too timid in his politics.”5

  But he was effective.

  The great political change in Madison came after the war, in the fall and winter of 1787–88 and in the spring and summer of 1788, when, with John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, he lobbied to get all of the thirteen colonies to ratify the brand-new Constitution, the Constitution he wrote. To do that, George Washington warned him, he had to step back from his long-held image as a political theoretician and put on the coat of a political arm twister. He needed to engage in hardscrabble politics to win views and get votes. Madison needed to make friends and make deals. That was the only way the Constitution, objected to by many, was going to be ratified in each state. Madison listened to Washington, and others who offered him the same advice, and changed his ways. His voice never grew louder or stronger, but the way he delivered speeches improved. His ability to talk others into agreeing with him, and to rebut the arguments against the Constitution and to refute powerful speakers, increased dramatically in just a single year.

  Another bit of advice Washington told Madison was that his fellow Virginian had to make better use of the country's newspapers to gain support for the Constitution. He had to court editors and make them a part of his campaign. Later, just like Washington, Madison began the practice of reading every newspaper he could find so that he knew what the media and the people thought of his policies.6

  One Georgian congressman, William Pierce, said of him later that “every person seems to acknowledge his greatness. He blends together the profound politician with the scholar…he is a most agreeable, eloquent, and convincing speaker…he always comes forward the best informed man of any point in debate. In the affairs of the United States, he perhaps has the most correct knowledge of any man in the Union. He was always thought one of the ablest members that ever sat in Congress.”7

  Massachusetts senator Samuel Otis wrote of him that he had “the endowments of a great statesman and a fine scholar, in the study of men and books, possesses a cool, deliberate, cautious judgment [and] writes his friends in Congress in terms very encouraging.”8 Others said that he combined the skills of the statesman and politician, that he not only had ideas but also could do the difficult work needed to bring those ideas to fruition. Brissot de Warville, a French statesman, wrote that “he distinguished himself particularly well at the time that the conventions met to vote on the new Federal Constitution. For a long time, Virginia hesitated to join the Union, but by his logic and his eloquence Mr. Madison persuaded the convention to favor acceptance…he looked tired, perhaps, as a result of the immense labors to which he had devoted himself recently. His expression was that of a stern censor; his conversation disclosed a man of learning, and his countenance was that of a person conscious of his talents and of his duties.”9

  Madison had not only designed the Constitution but implemented the document's ideas into his everyday job as a congressman. He was not rash or flighty; he thought before he spoke; and he always expressed his appreciation of every view on a subject, as well as his own. New Hampshire senator William Plumer said of him that “no man was more tenacious of his opinions than he was—he would die sooner than give them up, but then no man was more ready to save for the present the applications to existing circumstances…. Something of this disposition is no doubt seen in most men, but was remarkably characteristic of Mr. Madison, and forms the true explanation of his conduct in more than one important transaction.”10

  A friend who was a Virginia historian, Hugh Grigsby, said of him that “Madison was more elaborate in his argumentation [than Jefferson]. It is difficult to cull from the papers or even the speeches of Madison written purely on party topics, an adage or a maxim or even a pointed phrase, as a weapon to be used in the existing contest.”11

  When he returned to Philadelphia with his new bride, Dolley, Madison was even more of a political dynamo than when he had left. He had learned in his courtship of Dolley that two of her sisters had married congressmen. They, and Dolley, knew as much about American politics from their husbands as most congressmen. The women kept their knowledge of domestic and world affairs and the working of the political game quiet, as women did in that era. Their friends knew of their political wizardry, as did their husbands. No one else did, though, enabling the sisters, especially Dolly, to enjoy a much-appreciated persona of the lovely women above politics when they were, behind closed doors, immersed in the political landscape of America.

  Dolley found her family a new home and furnished it. Then she resumed her friendships with various women she had known in Philadelphia and, rather quickly, met many more at receptions she attended with her husband. By the fall, she had started friendships with President Washington, members of his cabinet, and dozens of congressmen. She hosted numerous parties at the home she now shared with her husband; dozens of Philadelphia couples invited them to their homes for dinners and parties. Everybody wanted to meet James Madison's vivacious new wife, who, socially, took Philadelphia by storm.

  Madison found himself in another storm upon his return to the nation's capital—the Whiskey Rebellion. Hundreds of men in western Pennsylvania who produced whiskey refused to pay taxes on their brew. General Washington raised an army of fifteen thousand men, larger than any he had commanded in the American Revolution, and marched across the state, determined to defeat the whiskey rebels; Alexander Hamilton served as Washington's chief general. The rebels surrendered before Washington's army arrived, but the Whiskey Rebellion sparked a national debate on federal versus states’ rights.

  And to Madison it was yet another attempt by Hamilton, whom he and Jefferson by now despised, to create a monolithic federal government that would rule over the states and the people by imperial force. Hamilton had hinted at that in letter to Rufus King. In it, he said that the whiskey rebels were “outlaws.” He added that “this business must not be skimmed over. The political putrefaction of Pennsylvania is greater than I had any idea of. Without rigor everywhere our tranquility is likely to be of very short duration and the next storm will infinitely rise [more] than the present one.”12

  Madison wrote James Monroe that “if the insurrection had not been crushed in the manner it was I have no doubt that a formidable attempt would have been made to establish the principle that a standing army was necessary for enforcing the laws.”13

  What really annoyed Madison, though, was that he believed Washington and Hamilton were scheming to blame the Whiskey Rebellion on the various Democratic-Republican clubs of his new party. He criticized the president's annual message to Congress, which contained veiled criticism of the clubs. “The introduction of it [reference] by the President was perhaps the greatest error of his political life…. The game was to connect the Democratic Societies with the odium of the insurrection—to connect the Republicans in Congress with those societies—to put the President ostensibly at the head of the other party, in opposition to both—and by these means prolong the illusion in the north and try a new experiment on the south.”14

  Madison was a great champion of the various democratic societies because they supported the party he had started with Jefferson and because they offered people a choice at election time. The society heads nodded knowingly. “The collision of opposing opinions produces the spark which lights the torch of truth,” wrote the head of the Patriotic Society of Delaware.15

  The seemingly endless disputes between Madison, Hamilton, a
nd President Washington all stemmed from the creation of the Democratic-Republican Party by Madison and Jefferson in 1791. The new party satisfied Madison and Jefferson because it provided a choice for voters, represented states’ rights, and gave both men a platform upon which to express their views in addition to the halls of Congress and the newspapers. President Washington was astonished that a second party emerged, aghast that his friend Madison helped form it, and fearful that this new political-party system would plunge the country into ruin.

  Washington told friends that he was of “no party” and that he was a man “whose sole wish is to pursue with undeviating steps a path which would lead this country to respectability, wealth and happiness.” He scalded political parties in his farewell address, at the end of his second term. “Parties,” he wrote, “may now and then answer popular ends, [but] they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” He added that parties were “the worst enemy” of popular government.16

  Madison and the “Madisonians,” as his allies were starting to be called, began to oppose Washington and his administration more and more. They were against the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison was against a treaty engineered by Chief Justice John Jay with England that attempted to gain better political and business relations with Great Britain. He saw the Washington administration pushed farther and farther toward a despotic government by Alexander Hamilton, whom Jefferson hated. His own, new, party was still a minority in the Senate and Congress and while a threat, had no real power yet.

  The new Republican Party, struggling to gain power, should have been weakened when Jefferson quit the cabinet and went home to Monticello, but it was not. The cofounder, Madison, took up the reins and ran it very smoothly from Congress. He took over quickly, too. Congressmen saw him as the leader right away. “[He is] the great man of the party,” said Massachusetts politician Theodore Sedgwick in 1794, who would be Speaker of the House five years later. A few weeks later, Senator Samuel Smith referred to the upstart political organization as “Madison's party.” The Virginia congressman, in touch with Jefferson constantly, kept the party growing and running smoothly for three more years, until Jefferson's return to government as vice president.17

  He not only ran the party but also quickly defined it as not just another party but a party needed to blunt the force of the Federalists. He told all that the two parties were very different, with different supporters and different goals. The Federalist Party “consists of those who from particular interest, from natural temper or from the habits of life are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society…having debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves, it follows with them of course that governments can be carried on only by the pageantry or rank, the influence of money and the terror of military force,” he wrote in one newspaper. In another, he argued that the Republicans had always supported the constitutional government and that history had already shown that the country did not have three branches of government just at the federal level, but at the state level, too, giving the people a second set of checks and balances.18

  Back in Philadelphia, the Madisons lived in a comfortable home on Spruce Street, a cobblestoned, tree-lined avenue with fashionable brick sidewalks in the heart of the affluent residential district. The Madisons hosted many parties under the skilled leadership of Dolley, who invited not only the rich and powerful but also friends and people in the arts. They attended numerous private parties and the frequent, large public affairs, such as Washington's birthday celebrations, already a national holiday.

  Dolley was asked to join the Philadelphia City Dancing Assembly, one of the most prestigious social groups in the city. She attended just about all of their meetings, dances, and dinners. Everyone was glad to see her at the events. Men and women alike crowded around her when she arrived. As always, James Madison, eyes wide in admiration, trailed alongside her, glowing in her glory, never envious and loving every minute of it.19

  Dolley Madison assumed her place in the busy social season just as women's fashions took a dramatic turn. Started in Paris, there was a new trend in women's dresses—low-cut necklines, bare arms, and no lengthy trains for gowns. They were smart, they were sexy, and they were a scandal to many. Abigail Adams was enraged by the new dresses. “The style of dress…is really an outrage upon all decency…most ladies wear their clothes too scant upon the body,” she wrote.20

  Adams and her conservative friends also complained that the new dresses were cinched in such a way as to show off even more bosom than intended. Even the commonly accepted practice of placing a handkerchief between the breasts in such a dress did not hide much, they protested.

  And the amply endowed Dolley Madison? She loved the new, low-cut dresses so much that she not only wore them in public all the time but had one of her official portraits painted of her in one of the dresses, with, of course, no handkerchief to be seen. Frances Few, Albert Gallatin's niece, gushed about Dolley that “she had the most beautiful…neck and bosom…I ever saw.”21

  Change was everywhere. The new wife of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, Josephine, had started to wear daring, low-cut, form-fitting dresses that caused quite a scandal. Dolley had to get one as soon as she read about it in the newspapers. She bought one at a Philadelphia shop and put it on, all ready for a formal dance and dinner at the City Dancing Assembly. She did not think she looked quite right, so she picked up two brightly colored plumes and stuck them into her hair and smiled.

  Many women were outraged by her dress. Abigail Adams thought Dolley looked like a tart. “Since Dolley Madison and her sisters adopted the new fashions and seemed in every way delighted with the French-influenced manner of Philadelphia society, we may assume ex-bachelor Madison enjoyed fully the ‘luxuriant’ feminine displays,” she wrote.22

  Dolley caused an absolute uproar at the dance, and the next day, all of her critics rushed out and bought their low-cut gowns, too. She did not accept change after it was in place; she accepted it right away. Dolley not only greeted fashion changes warmly, but immediately, within days, she changed her own dress and led the new fashion charge. She did this easily, as she did everything easily, and that skill enabled her to maintain her position as the nation's social lioness.23

  She became such a fashion queen so quickly that right after her portrait painter, William Dunlap of New York, met her, he described her in his diary as “the wife of the Secretary of State and leader of everything fashionable in Washington.”24 Everyone who met Dolley liked her. Even truculent, grouchy John Adams was smitten by her. “I dined yesterday with Mr. Madison. Mrs. Madison is a fine woman and her two sisters (Anna and Lucy) are equally so,” he wrote his wife in 1796.25

  The parties and receptions that made up the social life of Philadelphia, “the season,” featured and were run by what locals called “the young set” of women, married and unmarried, living in town. The leader of the “young set” was Dolley Madison. Her marriage to the influential Madison had made her an instant social leader, and her style and personality added to her social power. Everyone wanted to have Dolley, and her husband and her sisters, at their party. Women in Philadelphia kept in touch with Dolley and her sisters when they were back at Montpelier, too.

  One year, Sally McKean, daughter of a Pennsylvania political leader, wrote Dolley's sister Anna a letter in which she urged her to return to Philadelphia as quickly as possible to meet all of the handsome, very eligible, young men in the city. “For heaven's sake, make as much haste to town as you can for we are to have one of the most charming winters imaginable.”26

  Dolley Madison was one of the best-dressed women in America. She dressed well because she understood that well-dressed people make a greater impression than others. She and h
er husband had the money to dress elegantly, and so they did. Mrs. Madison, though, always went an extra step in her fashion pursuits. It was never enough for her to be one of the best-dressed women in the social world; she had to be the best dressed. To achieve that end, she spent enormous amounts of the Madison money on clothes. She had friends keep an eye out for attractive dresses, bonnets, shawls, and shoes for her. Friends in New York and Philadelphia, who knew her sizes, would purchase clothing for her and send it on to Washington. Dolley had other friends in London and Paris who did the same thing. The dresses and hats usually fit; sometimes they did not. It was the chance all American women took who bought clothes from abroad. If she saw someone else in a new style dress, she told friends to find one for her immediately. She purchased to excess. For example, following the approval of federal funds to redecorate the White House, she added, at her own expense, two dozen pairs of white kid gloves; one dozen pairs of black, silk stockings; two dozen pairs of white stockings; one dozen pairs of shoes with heels; one dozen pairs without heels; four Merino shawls; a large, white shawl “with a rich border”; and one dozen more snuffboxes. That was just one of hundreds of clothing orders while she was First Lady.27

  Dolley could be fussy. She would return clothes that did not fit her as well as she assumed they should. She once had several pianos ordered for the White House, had someone play them, judged them out of tune, and sent them all back. She continued to do that until one was delivered whose music she enjoyed.28