But she could raise an eyebrow as fast as anyone in Washington when women appeared in extremely revealing dresses. An example of this was a ball at which Dolley saw Betsy Patterson Bonaparte of Baltimore, the American wife of Jerome Bonaparte, Napoleon's nineteen-year-old brother. Betsy wore a very revealing gown with a plunging neckline that was the talk of the town. Mrs. Bonaparte also enjoyed walking back and forth in the window of her bedroom during the day, with little on.
Even women thought that she was gorgeous; Phoebe Morris wrote, “I think I never beheld a human form so faultless,” she said, and she added that Mrs. Bonaparte reminded her of Venus de Medici. “She is truly celestial, it is impossible to look on any one else when she is present.”81 One of the doyens of Washington society wrote that the ladies of the capital would have nothing to do with Mrs. Bonaparte until she “promised to have more clothes on.”82
Dolley joined in the chorus of critics, nodding her head up and down in agreement with the conservative women who harangued the dazzling, young Betsy about her clothing, or lack of any. Dolley did this even though she, herself, was often admonished for her famous, daring, low-cut dresses and her absolute refusal to stick a handkerchief into the neckline of her dresses to cover herself up. And then, to show just how much she despised Betsy, she became one of the girl's best friends.
Dolley also gossiped about sad events, such as slave attempts to force Martha Washington to give them their freedom, promised by President Washington before he died. “Mount Vernon has been set on fire five different times & tis suspected some malicious persons are determined to reduce it to ashes. Oh, the wickedness of men & women,” she wrote her sister.83
One thing Dolley also did as the wife of the secretary of state and the hostess of the president, which she rarely talked about, was put up with two seemingly hopeless medical hypochondriacs. Jefferson was famous for his migraine headaches, either real or imagined. He could be bedridden for a day with a headache, or promptly quit work at nine or ten in the morning to lie down for hours until his headache passed. Dolley's husband was the same. He appeared in good health, although very thin, but he complained endlessly about different ailments he claimed that had made him ill. If it wasn't a headache, it was a stomachache or malaise or aching joints. If everybody else had the flu, he soon had the flu. If a cold was infecting many Washingtonians, Madison suddenly came down with a cold. He would wake up in the morning and announce his daily ailments to his wife.
His friend Jefferson had been aware of his supposed and actual health problems for years. Madison had delayed or canceled visits because of his ailments. Madison was notorious for cancelling meetings because of headaches and colds that might not have been as severe as he described them.84
William Thornton wrote Madison just before his arrival in Washington that “the President…wrote me that you had long experienced delicate health and he even feared a change of climate might finally be requisite,” and then, to make him feel better, he bragged that “I do not think I ever enjoyed such health as since my residence in this place…you will have cause to pronounce it one of the healthiest places in the world.”85
An example was January 1800, a few months before Madison traveled to Washington to become secretary of state. He wrote that morning that “my health still suffers from several complaints, and I am much afraid that any changes that may take place are not likely to be for the better.”86
Dolley did her best to put up with the medical ailments, and sudden moods, of both men. Their ailments upended many of her plans and sometimes threatened to unravel her composure. She once wrote her sister in frustration that her husband was suffering from yet another bad cold and was unable to work. Sick, he still wanted to visit Jefferson, but, Dolley said, the president was sick with one of the headaches that many claimed were psychosomatic.
Whenever either man was ill, it was Dolley's job to rearrange the schedules of the State Department or the White House that day.
Dolley realized that Washington was a brand-new town in a vast, quiet countryside, a long ferry ride across the Potomac from the nearest community, Alexandria. The social life she was building at the White House, with its receptions, dinners, luncheons, and balls, was really the only social life most Washingtonians had. The social bashes were also a way in which they could meet each other and then invite each other to their own parties and dinners. She encouraged foreign ministers to host balls and parties (all learned the latest Russian waltz at a Russian embassy ball). Mrs. Madison also encouraged the leaders of the new Navy Yard to throw large parties. Dolley held it all together. These were mostly people who had moved to Washington from somewhere else to work in the federal government. They did not know anybody in the capital, except Dolley. Through Dolley's effort for Jefferson at the White House and for her husband at their residence, they got to meet each other and make friends. She was building a vast social network that would grow as the years went by and help everybody who moved to the nation's capital.
Why did she, a new arrival, have this opportunity when it had been denied to women for hundreds of years in national capitals? The answer was timing and the wide wave of change, change of all kind, that was sweeping across America. Dolley and her husband moved to Washington when it was a brand-new city, just a little over a year old. Unlike New York's and Philadelphia's societies, it had no social traditions or prominent hostesses. Anyone who wanted to work hard to be anointed the leading social queen of Washington could do so; Dolley did. That convergence of her willingness to work hard to be the social queen, and the vacancy at the top of the social hill, combined to make her the unquestioned leader of Washington society. She recognized that the new capital needed a social life. The social life that worked well in New York and Philadelphia did not work that well in Washington. It needed change, and she brought that. Socializing in Washington was sometimes accomplished outdoors because the spring, summer, and fall seasons were warmer in Washington than in New York and Philadelphia. New buildings housed new parties. New homes were the residences of new social queens. As the city grew, the social life grew, and it grew in the fashions of the new city on the northern banks of the Potomac. Dolley not only recognized that but also helped lead the growth of the social world. She and “her set” were in charge of the social universe for sixteen long years and made that world the new social life of the American capital. It was enormous change in Washington, and in the United States, and Dolly was there to not only organize it but also engineer it.
She was always at President Jefferson's beck and call, any hour of the day. Once, she was sitting at home and received an urgent message, delivered by a runner, that the president required her and/or her sister Anna to rush to the White House right away to help him entertain a group of people that had women in it and whose arrival he had never anticipated. She was there in a few minutes, looking lovely, and she charmed everybody.
In those first years in Washington, as the town was growing quickly, many congressmen and senators brought their wives, sisters, and daughters to the White House to meet Jefferson, who was always eager to see them; and each time Dolley was summoned, literally on a moment's notice, to greet and mingle with the women and arrange entertainment for everybody. She loved it and they loved her.87
The Madisons met everybody through the president. Many of these people became political allies and friends. An example was Samuel Harrison Smith, a journalist. Jefferson recruited him from Philadelphia and brought him to Washington to become the editor of the capital's first Republican newspaper, the tri-weekly National Intelligencer. Smith arrived with his wife, Margaret Bayard Smith, a social gadfly, and his cousin. The Smiths were well connected. He was the son of a member of the Continental Congress and a hero of the Revolutionary War, where he saw service as the colonel of a Pennsylvania regiment. Editor Smith's wife was the daughter of a revolutionary hero, member of the Continental Congress, and speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly. Her cousin was James Bayard, a US senator from Delaware. She was a writer
who contributed stories to several magazines and later authored two novels. She and her husband had become extremely close friends of Thomas Jefferson when he lived in Philadelphia as vice president. The pair was devoted to making Jefferson a success as president and Washington socialite. They had money, lots of it, and spent it to create a far-flung social life for themselves that included Jefferson and his political associates. Mrs. Smith was the head of the Washington social set outside of the White House and had enormous influence in town.88
The Smiths were among Washington's social elite. They lived in a large home, drove a handsome carriage, had a stable full of horses, and bragged about their large wine cellar. Dolley and Margaret, with many common interests, became fast friends. One of the reasons the two women were such good friends was the fact that Margaret had been married just seven months when she met Dolley. She was a newlywed. Mrs. Madison herself had been married for only four years when they met. Each woman also saw the other as a social butterfly who could help them meet hundreds of new friends in Washington. The Smiths were close to the president, too, and often dined at the White House. The editor and his wife also visited Monticello numerous times as Jefferson's guests during his two terms as president. Samuel Smith, in his newspaper columns, always supported the Jefferson government and Madison's work as secretary of state. He was a hopeless cheerleader for the president and the Republican Party and had famously written that “the triumph of Republicanism is the triumph of principal.”89 The editor ran the election results in any race in which Republicans were victorious. In 1801, he hailed George Clinton's election as governor of New York as a “demonstration of complete triumph of Republican principals [in New York].”90 Smith's columns on the strength of the Republicans were numerous, and when he was not clapping his hands for it, other writers were.91 Smith also made it a practice to reprint pro-Republican columns from other newspapers to buttress his own support of the party. In 1801, for example, he ran a column from the Examiner in which the pro-Republican editor urged party members not to be complacent about the upcoming elections just because in recent years they had achieved electoral dominance over the Federalists.92
And, again and again, year after year, he reminded his readers that the Republican Party had been created to protect them against ogres like the Federalists. “Republicanism rests in equal rights for the people…[the party] represents their will” was a well- and often-used line of his.93
When Smith tired of those bombasts, he would find statements he did not like in Federalists'speeches or newspapers and attack them as treasonous. He wrote of one newspaper editorial, “a more naked condemnation of the Republican structure of government cannot be found.”94
Mrs. Smith was enchanted by Dolley, as all seemed to be. “I have become acquainted with and am highly pleased with her; she has good humor and sprightliness, united to the most affable and agreeable manners,” wrote Mrs. Smith, who knew everybody, and knew them well.
The Madisons also socialized with cabinet members, who introduced them to top-ranking government workers. They met senators from one state who introduced them to senators from another state. Congressmen, especially those who knew Madison from his years in the House of Representatives, flocked to the Madisons’ home, bringing their friends.95
In just a few months in Washington, Dolley Madison had become a very famous and important person, the flamboyant wife of the secretary of state and the hostess for the president. No one expected her to create or fulfill either role. She not only met the social challenges but also met them in her own style, making the role of the president's hostess, the First Lady, an important one in the country. She was an important cog in American life. By the end of the spring of 1801, Dolley's first at the capital, people treasured her.
In Dolley, they had something new and different, someone who was exciting. She was the fashionable wife of the secretary of state and the president's more-than-capable hostess, all at the same time as she was an intelligent and sociable woman whom all enjoyed being with and a fashion plate like no one else in the United States. Dolley worked very hard at her new roles and succeeded. She had become special, and quickly so. By the time Christmas 1801 arrived, Dolley was an established part of Washington, just as the Supreme Court or Congress, but a lot more fun.
While Mrs. Madison had to overcome social barriers, her husband had to establish himself as secretary of state, which was not an easy task. He had to work with the president on foreign matters, think like the president, and yet offer advice that the president often did not want to hear. He was the foreign-policy face of the administration in an era in which interest in foreign policy dominated discussions between public officials and the people and took up much space in newspapers (most newspapers devoted their entire first news page to foreign news). At the same time, though, Madison found himself practically drowned by the ordinary details of his job, the mountains of paperwork he had to sign and the seemingly endless meetings, at the office and at home, with the never-ending stream of officials whose letters he had to read and people whom he had to meet.
The secretary not only met with foreign ministers but also had to read hundreds of reports and letters from diplomats, American ambassadors abroad, and American politicians; write and sign letters; hold departmental meetings; and meet with the president, just about every day. He worked in a very small State Department that, including him, had only nine employees. His offices were enlarged as the summer of 1801 began, when Jefferson moved the State Department and the War Department into a new building just one block from the White House and two blocks from Madison's home. Madison let one of his eight clerks go in a budget move and had to run the foreign policy of the United States with only seven aides. Some worked hard, and some did little work and infuriated him. Most were holdovers from the days of Adams's secretary of state Thomas Pickering and did not care for Madison, but he kept them on.1
The stress of the job, he told his wife and colleagues, threatened his very weak physical constitution: “I find myself in the middle of arrears of papers, etc. etc. which little accord with my unsettled health,” he wrote one man. Two months later, he used the work as an excuse for not keeping up correspondence with a friend. “Having brought with me to this place a very feeble state of heath, and finding the mass of business in the department at all times considerable, swelled to an unusual size by sundry temporary causes, it became absolutely necessary to devote the whole of my time and pen to public duties, and consequently to suspend my private correspondences altogether, notwithstanding the arrears daily accumulating,” Madison said.2
And, on top of all that, he remained President Jefferson's closest friend and chief political adviser. He was, with Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, a member of a small “brain trust” given the responsibility of both helping the president navigate through the often-treacherous waters of congressional liaisons and presenting a positive and productive image of the president to the public. In this capacity, Madison saw the president regularly, dined with him, attended parties with him, and socialized with him at every opportunity. Then, when both were at home in the hills of central Virginia during the oppressively hot Washington summer, they continued to see each other because they lived only twenty miles apart. The two men had one of the closest relationships in United States history. Politicians and newspaper editors of the early nineteenth century generally agreed that Madison was just a cabinet officer to the rather glorious, at times, President Jefferson. The president disagreed, and told everyone, upon leaving office in 1809, that the presidency Madison was inheriting was one that he himself had carved out with equal hard work, and grace, as the president himself.
There were drawbacks to his success, though. Madison was under enormous political pressure on all sides from diplomats, senators, congressmen, and members of the press. Everybody lobbied him for something and at parties he was constantly accosted by people looking for a favor. It drove him and his wife crazy. At the start of the summer of 1804, tired of the
politics, Dolley wrote, “I feel now very impatient to be in Montpelier.”3
Jefferson's other close adviser was Gallatin of Pennsylvania, an economic wizard. Gallatin, who came to America from Switzerland in the 1780s and had a slight French accent, was a controversial figure. He had at first supported the very unpopular Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, earning the condemnation of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. He was later elected to the US Senate, but the Federalists hated him and conspired to get rid of him by convincing the Senate that Gallatin had not been in the United States long enough to hold a Senate seat. Gallatin seemed to have proved that he had lived in Pennsylvania for over fourteen years, but the Federalists had documents that seemed to show it was just nine years. There was a furor over the issue, and the Federalists finally ousted Gallatin from his seat by a straight party vote of 14–12 in the Senate chamber. The angry Gallatin came back a year later as a congressman and served three terms before Jefferson named him as his secretary of the treasury. While in Congress, Gallatin convinced that body to establish a special committee on finances that exists to this day.
His primary job as head of the Treasury Department, Jefferson told him, was to reduce US debt from its staggering $80 million. He would do that. Along the way, though, Gallatin became a vital part of the Jefferson team, working with Madison and others to promote foreign policy, internal affairs, and, in 1803, both the Louisiana Purchase and the fabled expeditions of Lewis and Clark. His wife, Hannah, the daughter of wealthy Commodore James Nicholson, became a close friend of Dolley Madison's.
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