James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  The role of First Lady was not mentioned in the Constitution. No one planned for the arrival of a First Lady. Martha Washington invented the job when she arrived in New York in 1789. She had managed a busy social calendar at Mount Vernon for years, one in which Washington felt comfortable, and proceeded to do the same thing in the new president's mansion in New York. It worked. Most applauded her for establishing the role. Some, such as Albert Gallatin, were critical. “She was Mrs. President not of the United States but of a faction,” he said.41

  Martha, and Abigail Adams after her, quickly became the First Lady of the land (although the term was not used officially until the 1840s). Normally, a president's wife had to organize a social life for the chief executive; throw parties; send out invitations; schedule receptions, lunches, breakfasts, and dinners; plan a daily menu; supervise cooking; socialize with the wives of public officials and foreign diplomats; talk to members of the press; serve as a liaison with the ladies of Washington; support causes; and, through her good works, build up an admirable image that reflected well on herself—and the president.

  Jefferson did not have a wife or companion to do all of that for him. But he did have Dolley Madison. The president had liked Dolley from the first time he met the vivacious wife of his best friend. On the personal side, he thought she was a superb companion for James Madison. He recognized, as did all, that the Madisons were as alike as night and day. He saw, too, as everybody saw, that opposites did, indeed, seem to attract. She was gorgeous, socially oriented, very friendly, and at ease with men and women of any background, and she was a great conversationalist. Dolley was also a fine head of his household, of anybody's household. She was completely in charge of meals, social events, receptions, and an army of servants. She got along with everybody and seemed to have an easy way with workers at the White House. Her husband slept late, but Dolley was usually up at 6 a.m., and began arranging the day, and everybody's work in it, before the sun had risen very high in the Maryland sky. Everybody liked her; so did the president.

  Dolley was the perfect First Lady. She had all of the social strengths needed to be the First Lady and the administrative skills to fill the job. She just wasn't his wife. Fortunately, that was not an obstacle to overcome in 1801 Washington. She was the wife of his best friend, the secretary of state. It seemed natural that, not having a wife, the wife of a cabinet member should help him put together a social calendar and greet people as an unofficial hostess at the White House. So he asked Dolley to be his hostess. She agreed. No one objected.

  Dolley Madison had been asked by Jefferson to serve as his hostess just after he was inaugurated. In the third week of March, he began to tell foreign diplomats that Mrs. Madison would formally greet them on his behalf when she arrived in Washington.42 Dolley was glad to do so for several reasons of her own. First, her husband was Jefferson's best friend. Second, Jefferson was her friend and said he needed her assistance. Third, the president needed someone and she knew that she could do the job better than most women. Fourth, she and her husband were newcomers in town. What better way to meet people? To meet everyone? And, too, she thought to herself, what better way to help her husband's career than to act as First Lady and spend all that time in the White House, with her husband there with her?

  Jefferson also needed her because he rose early in the morning, worked hard all day in his office, and had no time to plan parties. “[Work] keeps me from 10 to 12 and 13 hours a day at my writing table, giving me an interval of four hours for riding, dining and a little unbending,” he wrote; and he always referred to work as “a steady and uniform course.”43

  Jefferson wanted someone to devise a social life for the White House and just tell him when to show up and what to do. Dolley understood how he thought, was familiar with his moods through several years of friendship, and served him well in that capacity.

  She probably did not know how busy the role of First Lady would make her, or perhaps she relished the job precisely because it did keep her so busy. Abigail Adams had done little in Washington as First Lady because the White House was still being constructed and she lived there for just one year. She complained bitterly to family and friends that it was a large, cold, airy place and that there were no bells to summon servants and no wood to throw into the many fireplaces to keep the rooms warm. Most of the rooms were still incomplete when the Adamses lived in the White House. “The house is made habitable but there is not a single apartment finished and all within, except the plastering, has been done. We have not yet fence, yard or other convenience, without and the great unfinished audience room I make a drying roof, to hang up the clothes in. The principal stairs are not up and will not be this winter,” she wrote.44

  Now, there was so much to do. Dolley did not want to replicate what Abigail did. She used Martha Washington's active social life as a model but expanded upon it. Martha had hosted four receptions a week at the president's mansions in both New York and Philadelphia. Dolley discontinued that schedule, but, in a new and different way, expanded upon it and increased its size.

  Dolley's forte was the large, elegant dinner parties, public receptions, and balls that she designed. Elaborate planning went into each. She used accepted protocols of the day—who should sit next to whom and at what time different things should happen—but enhanced them. She took the view that she was the president's hostess and this was the White House, so she could do whatever she wanted—and did.

  No cost was spared. Servants drove the White House wagon from Pennsylvania Avenue out to the shops in Georgetown, where they purchased the food Dolley had ordered. They went over bumpy dirt roads to Georgetown just about every day and brought back expensive bills that were passed along to Dolley, who passed them on to Jefferson, who signed them and then promptly forgot about the cost.

  Dolley entertained several dozen people at each dinner at the White House and twenty or more people at “quiet” dinners at her own home.

  “He always thought twenty five thousand dollars a great salary when Mr. Adams had it. Now he will undoubtedly think twelve thousand five hundred enough,” the editor of the Federalist New England Palladium newspaper wrote sarcastically of her expenses in 1801.45

  Mrs. Madison also dressed in whatever fashion she desired. She did not feel that she had to look staid or conservative just because she represented the president and secretary of state at social events. Somber was not a word in her vocabulary. Dolley and her husband were a sight to see. Madison, as always, wore all-black suits and had his powdered hair pulled back and tied behind his head. He never wavered from his conservative, dreary, and a bit outmoded, dress. His wife, though, was a rainbow. Dolley brought down all of her ballroom gowns from Montpelier and bought many more. The women's style of dress in the era was the wide skirt, tight waist, and low-cut bodice, a style that really only worked well for full-busted women. Dolley was one of them. She also had beautiful shoulders and soft, white skin, all shown off nicely by her gowns with their deeply plunging necklines. The dresses accentuated all of her admirable physical features but were of splashy colors that stood out no matter where she was standing in the White House. Her dresses were of many colors and designs, and she wore so many different ones that many Washingtonians swore that she never wore the same clothes twice. She often wore a French beret, a radical look, and loved wandering about the floor of an official reception with it tilted buoyantly on her head. Sometimes she replaced the beret with high, brightly colored feathers that could be seen throughout whatever building she was in. All the talk of the capital the day after a reception at the White House was about what Dolley Madison wore.

  She had a unique style at parties and balls that no one had encountered before. Dolley had the rare ability, those who saw her at parties said, “to move from place to place, room to room” to meet each and every guest at the White House parties, which were quickly named “Mrs. Madison's levees.” She did this very smoothly, very nonchalantly. “It became evident, in the course of the evening,” o
ne partygoer wrote, “that the gladness which played in the countenances of those whom she approached was inspired by something more than respect…we have not forgotten how admirably the air of authority was softened by the smile of gayety; and it is pleasing to recall a certain expression that must have been created by the happiest of all dispositions, a wish to please and a willingness to be pleased.”46

  Other levee guests enjoyed the tours of the White House that Dolley relished giving. “Then through the house we sallied forth from one end to the other, Mrs. M seemed quite at home here, and in fact appeared to be mistress. She took us from room to room, in her usual sprightly and droll manner,” said one. As an added treat, she loved to show them the dumbwaiters that Jefferson had invented to carry food and wine from the basement to the dining room and all of Jefferson's carefully designed apparatuses upon which to hang his clothes.47

  But there was far more to Dolley and James Madison at parties than mere dress. It was a time, Dolley understood, to let her husband shine, and to help him shine. The public view of Madison was that he was a quiet, laid-back, pale-skinned, doughty, boring, tiny man who had little to say—and when he did, he said it very softly and without much conviction. She knew, and Jefferson knew, that Madison was not like that at all. He had a rapier wit, was conversant about all the topics in the news, and was a persuasive man who could carry on conversations with anybody, from counts to congressmen, and tell marvelous stories. Dolley engineered her receptions so that many people got to meet her husband under the best of circumstances and came away with a good impression of him. She arranged seating plans so that he could shine in conversations during dinner, always talking to a different group of people each night. He was funny and told humorous stories, or engaged in colorful conversations with Jefferson's guests. She often positioned him at one place in a room at a reception or ball and then, in a subtle way that few recognized, casually brought people over to meet him and chat with him. He could glow as both the very public secretary of state and the private Mr. Madison, with Dolley helping along via her party work and dinner planning. People who had only read about Madison or only knew him slightly came away with a whole new, and better, opinion of him at these parties, thanks to his wife.

  Edward Coles, a young Virginian neighbor of Madison's who later became his secretary, had the same negative opinion of Madison when he first met him, as did many others. Outlining the dour secretary of state, he began,

  I never knew him to wear any other color than black; his coat cut in what is termed dress fashion; his breeches short, with buckles at the knees, black silk stockings, and shoes with strings or long fair boot tops when out in cold weather, or when he rode on horseback of which he was fond. His hat was of the shape and fashion usually worn by gentlemen of his age. He wore powder on his hair, which was dressed full over the ears, tied behind, and brought to a point above the forehead, to cover in some degree, his baldness…. [He had] a small and delicate form, of rather a tawny complexion, bespeaking a sedentary and studious man; his hair was originally of a dark brown color; his eyes were bluish, but not of a bright blue; his form, features and manner were not commanding.

  Then Coles changed his tone. “But his conversation [was] exceedingly [commanding] and few men possessed so rich a flow of language, or so great a fund of amusing anecdotes, which were made the more interesting from their being well timed and well told. His ordinary manner was simple, modest, bland and unostentatious, retiring from the throng and cautiously refraining from doing or saying anything to make himself conspicuous,” he finished.48

  One thing Madison did accomplish at parties was to renew acquaintances from old political wars. He became friendly with John Quincy Adams, the son of his archenemy, President John Adams. A friend told John Quincy Adams in 1805 that “Mr. Madison had expressed himself in very favorable terms of me…it was his wish to employ me on some mission abroad, if I was desirous of it.”49

  And, of course, too, Dolley worked very hard to give President Jefferson the chance to socialize with as many important people as possible and to show off his many skills, which ranged from a sharp sense of humor to a far-ranging intellect (she also cautioned Jefferson that it was perfectly all right to wear his slippers when he met people during the day at the White House, but he could not wear them at receptions, balls, and dinner parties). Dolley worked with a large staff of servants to make certain that the parties featured fine food and lots of it, served in covered dishes. Guests ate everything from steak to ice cream, with plates of nuts (George Washington loved nuts and had bowls full of them all over the President's Mansion and at his home in Mount Vernon). Jefferson had brought a famous French chef over from Paris to be the full-time White House chef, and this impressed all. Small musical groups and orchestras played at the receptions. Everybody danced to the music that wafted through the president's home until the late hours of the evening (except Dolley, who did not dance).

  Friends told Dolley that she was overdoing it as the official White House hostess. There was no reason to work so hard to aid Jefferson in his official life. Her long hours and hard work would wear her out and make her ill, they insisted. The more they criticized her work habits, the harder she worked. Dolley did not like being told what to do or how to do it. “I have had a lecture from S.L. on seeing too much company, and it brought to my mind the time when our Society [Quakers] used to control me entirely, and [kept] me from so many advantages and pleasures. Even now, I feel my ancient terror revive in a great degree,” she wrote.50

  Some, especially the British, hated Dolley's parties. Mrs. Mary Bagot, who arrived with her husband, the British minister, after the War of 1812, wrote that “the women usually sit stuck around the room close to the wall. The men—many of whom come in boots & perfectly undone & with dirty hands & dirty linen—stand mostly talking with each other in the middle of the room Tea & coffee & afterwards cld punsh [sic] with glasses of Madeira & cakes are handed around & by ten o'clock everyone s dispersed,” and she added after another party that Mrs. Madison was “very stupid and very much stared at.”51

  Mrs. Bagot did not have much love for anyone in America. She was invited to an elegant dinner party at the home of James Monroe, and she wrote that it was “the dullest dinner I ever was at. Mrs. Monroe gives herself the airs of a fine lady without succeeding in being one.”

  But Mrs. Bagot went to them all and was impressed at the number. She wrote home that the White House levees run by Mrs. Madison were packed with partygoers who seemed to have a wonderful time, even if she did not. The Washington party schedule, she wrote, “ran from twelve at noon to 12 at night without intermission—tired to death.”52

  The gourmet dinner tables that Dolley set were famous throughout the country. Dr. Samuel Mitchill, a guest, described one meal in his diary, “dined at the President's…rice, soup, round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, loin of veal, cutlets of mutton or veal, fried eggs, fried beef. A pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the stribbions of onions or shallots…tasted very strong and not very agreeable, ice cream very good, crust wholly dried, crumbled into thin flakes…very porous and light, covered with cream-sauce—very fine. Many other jimcracks, a great variety of fruit, plenty of wines, and good.”53

  Congressman William Plumer said that Dolley's tables in the White House were filled with delicious sweet meats and, he added with great enthusiasm, very fine French wines. He laughed that Dolley's French wines were far more successful than Jefferson's French politics.

  Another enchanted guest, Dr. Mannassah Cutler, a congressman from Massachusetts, wrote of Dolley's parties, “an excellent dinner. The round of beef of which the soup is made is called boulli. It had in the dish spices and something of a sweet herb (basil) and garlic kind, and a rich gravy. It is very much boiled and is still very good. We had a dish with what appeared to be cabbage, much boiled, then cut in long strips and somewhat mashed; in the middle a large ham…the dessert [was] apple pie in the form of half of a musk-melon
, the flat side down, tops creased deep and the color a dark brown.”54

  She was also adamant about serving American food in an American setting for dinners with foreign diplomats. If they wanted to know America and Americans, she contended, they needed to know how Americans ate.

  She was criticized by one diplomat, British minister Augustus Foster, for a meal that he sneered at for being “more like a harvest home supper than the entertainment of a Secretary of State.” She snapped back, with a little smile on her lips, socialite Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “as profusion so repugnant to foreign customs arose from the happy circumstances of the abundance 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.” (Not everyone was pleased. New Hampshire senator Jeremiah Mason dined with the Madisons and wrote to his wife of Mrs. Madison that “she by no means answers my ideas of a high-bred, courtly woman.”)55

  The Madisons also made friends at casual visits to homes on weekend afternoons. The Madisons and their hosts would sit outside in good weather, lay in hammocks, eat apples and other fruit, chat about events and friends, drink tea, and later go inside for a casual dinner, sometimes in a formal dining room and sometimes in a kitchen, where a large table would be set up. Sometimes, in late spring and summer, people would eat a makeshift dinner at a picnic table in the yard.56