James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  Members of Congress were not as visionary as the president, though, and, despite all of his lobbying, turned down the request. They suggested that if New York stood to profit so much from a canal, if New York would gain all of these thousands of new jobs, and if New York would win enormous publicity from the canal, then New York should pay for it. Why should Maryland pay for it? Or Pennsylvania?

  New York did; a bill in the state legislature in 1817 funded early canal construction, in combination with a very successful state-wide lottery to raise money for the project. Work then began on what would become the world's longest canal to that date, 300-plus miles in length with eighteen aqueducts and eighty-three locks that would raise and lower ships nearly two hundred yards.28

  In the end, the Erie Canal, which Madison was so enthusiastic about, was called the engineering miracle of the world, along with Egypt's pyramids. It not only connected cities such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse but also made them boom towns. They flourished with business from canal builders during construction and then canal users for years afterward.29

  The canal was a success right away. It made back its $7 million cost in just twelve years. It earned millions of dollars each year for decades. The canal caused freight to drop from $32 a ton by wagon for one hundred miles to just $1 a ton for that same distance on canal boats.

  The early success of the Erie Canal spurred the building of dozens of others. Most were designed to move goods a great distance to an economic market for sale, in the hopes that the canal would increase jobs of all kinds and create thriving towns along its route.

  The Delaware Canal carried goods from Easton, Pennsylvania, down to Philadelphia, and then to the ocean on a path that hugged the Delaware River. The Lehigh Canal, an east–west waterway that opened in 1829, carried goods from inland factories and coal mines to Philadelphia. It changed the face of heating and manufacturing in the city. In the 1840s and 1850s, the canal carried over 1.2 million tons of coal per year, an unheard-of total at the time.30

  The president listened to many people on canals and highways, and one of them was Dolley. One thing everybody noticed about President Madison was the way that he listened to his wife on everything she had to say, and how he listened in conversations with other women. Most men in the colonial era saw women as second-class citizens, fit for child rearing, housekeeping, and little else. James Madison did not. His years of marriage to his wife had changed his mind about women. He wrote an educator that “the capacity of the female mind for studies of the highest order cannot be doubted; having been sufficiently illustrated by its works of genius, of erudition and of science.”31

  By the start of his second term, the Washington community, social and political, had become used to Madison the man and the differences between him and his predecessor, Jefferson. When his second term commenced, he had been in the White House for four long years, out of Jefferson's shadow, and the differences between the two were obvious. “Force and point and rapid analysis are the characteristics of the style of Jefferson; full, clear and deliberate disquisition carefully wrought out, as if the writer regarded himself rather as the representative of truth than the exponent of the doctrines of party or even a nation, is the praise of Madison,” wrote Hugh Grigsby, who knew both men when they were older.32

  In his second term, Madison continued to feud with Congress. Full of Republicans, Congress had voted down some of his important bills and, he thought, acted as their own branch of government, rather than one of three. He never lost his basic faith in Congress that he had outlined long ago, though. He had written that “the general legislature will do every mischief they possibly can and that they will omit to do everything good which they are authorized to do,” but added that despite that, the democratic system ensures that the people will elect men of virtue who will be devoted to the public good. “If there be not, we are in a wretched situation,” he added. Sometimes, though, he had to wonder.33

  Madison urged Congress to do all that it could to promote education at all levels. In 1810, in his annual message to the legislature, he urged funding for a national university. “Such an institution…would be universal in its beneficial effects. By enlightening the opinions, by expanding the patriotism and by assimilating the principles, the sentiments and the manners of those who might resort to this Temple of Science, to be redistributed, in due time, through every part of the community, sources of jealousy and prejudice would be diminished, the features of national character would be multiplied,” he said.34

  Even though President Madison was assaulted on many sides by political enemies and foreign schemers, he still had his wife, the dauntless and invincible public-relations machine who worked overtime to make him look good. “Amid this cruel warfare of conflicting parties, so calculated to excite angry feelings, Mrs. Madison…met these political assailants with a mildness which disarmed their hostility of its individual rancor and sometimes even converted political enemies into personal friends…she succeeded at neutralizing the bitterness of opposition,” said a friend.35

  War with England had been a hot issue since Jefferson's first term, when Great Britain began to intercept American shipping. For years, Jefferson and Madison had begged Congress to hold off on hostilities while diplomatic efforts were made to halt British aggression on the high seas. Everybody agreed to let them proceed. “It has been constantly contended by the republicans that they have the means in their possession, short of hostility, to coerce their antagonists into a sense of propriety; and they have always inculcated the prompts and courageous use of these valuable means, for the prevention of war and the assertion of our national privileges,” wrote the editor of the Washington Federalist in the early days of 1808.1

  The government had used subtle means to drive home its unhappiness with the British impressment of American sailors by the British. As early as 1808, James Madison had issued lengthy lists of names of impressed seaman to American newspapers that ran them in special stories. Later, he and others authorized the release of navy and army ship- and troop-strength lists to newspapers for publications to show the British the United States was ready for war.2

  In Congress, some members were mild in their criticism of Great Britain and some were bold. Virginia senator William Giles stood up as tall as he could and read a long list of travesties from the British, from impressment of seamen to seizing of ships, to blockading ports. He fumed that it was nothing short of “British insolence.”3

  There were pro-British factions, just as there were British sympathizers in the American Revolution. “Such a faction has been nurtured among us since the peace of 1783, have been derived from various sources and have not failed to make a deep impression upon the minds of all who wished to preserve the independence of their country unimpaired,” wrote the editor of the Albany Register in the spring of 1809. Diplomat William Pinkney told Madison the same thing a few months later when he wrote that “the British government has acted for some time upon an opinion that its partisans in America were too numerous and strong to admit of our persevering in any system of repulsion to British injustice.”4

  Throughout the years 1809, 1810, and 1811, a long parade of state legislatures passed resolutions backing any quasi-warlike decisions Madison chose to make. They all reflected the angry legislature of Georgia, whose resolution decried the “outrages of the British cabinet.”5 Madison thanked them all. “The full strength of every nation requires a union of its citizens. To a government like ours, this truth is peculiarly applicable…[we need] more universal support of the constituted authorities in the measures for maintaining the national honor and rights,” he told the Vermont legislature.6

  There was a new Congress in 1809, though, swept into office with Madison, and it was an angry and resentful Congress. There were two new, young, persuasive leaders who took charge of Congress immediately—Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Representative Henry Clay of Kentucky. Clay, a dynamic individual, was elected Speaker of the House on the very
first day he took office. He and Calhoun were both fed up with the embargo, saw no point in the Non-Intercourse Act, and tirelessly lobbied for war with Great Britain. They were the leaders of a strong prowar faction called the War Hawks. Clay would run for president three times and Calhoun would be vice president. Later, Calhoun, with his chiseled face, would let his hair grow long, which gave him a haunting look. Their view was that diplomatic means to halt England and France from stopping US ships and seizing American sailors had failed, the embargo had failed, and all media crusades and political crusades to convince the two belligerent nations to cease and desist had failed. All that was left was war. “If war came, it would be backed by ‘the combined energies of a free people’…wreaking a noble and manful vengeance upon a foreign foe,” Clay thundered, and he added that if America did not fight Britain, it would “forfeit the respect of the world” and, worse, he added, “ourselves.”7

  Clay and Calhoun led a very large population of opinion, except for many residents of New England, who seemed to want to keep things the way they were and accepted the impressment of New England sailors as a small price to pay for continued profitable business with Europe.

  Some powerful men felt that all nonwar means had been exhausted. Some suggested, too, that, financially, a war would cost less than the continued shipping crisis, which had cost American merchants, it was estimated, over $50 million per year. Even Jefferson was swinging toward war. He wrote the minister to France, John Armstrong, that the embargo had been discontinued “because losing $50,000,000 of exports annually…it costs more than war…war therefore must follow if the edicts are not repealed before the next meeting of Congress.”8

  Madison's time was repeatedly taken up with the crisis involving England and France. The conversation at all of Dolly's parties was consumed by it. Madison sometimes had to leave Montpelier in summer and return to the White House just to find out what returning US vessels’ captains had to say about their trip across the Atlantic from Europe had been like. He came back to find out what passengers on British ships had to say. He always went back to the capital alone, leaving Dolly at Montpelier. He wrote her often from Washington. Once he wrote, “My dearest…the period, thou may be sure, will be shortened as much as possible. Everything around and within reminds me that you are absent and makes me anxious to quit the solitude…. God bless you, and be assured of my constant affection.”9

  The difficulties with England brought on hard times for his wife, too. In the winter of 1811, she thanks her sister for a letter “that raised my spirits which have been rather low in these troublous times.”10

  At the same time that Madison was traveling back and forth from Montpelier to Washington to address the crisis, Britain replaced its minister to America with Francis John Jackson, a tough-as-nails diplomat who looked down on American leaders as little more than snippy colonists. He had several cantankerous meetings with President Madison, whose angry demeanor caused Jackson to write home that Madison was as “tough as a mule.” The new minister did not care for the Madisons at all. He wrote home to England that Madison was “a plain and rather mean looking little man, of great simplicity of manners and an inveterate enemy of form and ceremony.” His regard for the president was laudatory compared to his views of the First Lady. He wrote that Dolley was “fat and forty but not fair.” Jackson's wife annoyed Americans, too. She wrote that Washington food was “detestable, gross, no claret, champagne and Madeira indifferent.” Jackson, playing politics, then traveled to New England, an antiadministration region, and met with the editors of Federalist newspapers, who took up his cause in denouncing the president.11

  The more that Jackson denounced Madison, though, the more public opinion rose up in favor of the president. “[How] can a nation [England] expect to retain the respect of Mankind whose government descends to so ignoble a career?” Madison said, referring to Jackson.12

  The country was glad that he never backed down against the British or French and that he was as tough as their ministers were. Around this time, too, the French minister told Madison that he had to stop merely calling Napoleon “Great and Good Friend” and call him “Emperor.” Madison flatly refused. His popularity surged after that. “I think that James Madison's administration is now as strongly entrenched in the public confidence as Thomas Jefferson's ever was at its fullest tide,” wrote Representative Ezekiel Bacon, then. And, too, voters backed up their verbal support of the president in November 1809 by electing another large majority of Republicans to the House and Senate. The Republicans kept majorities where they existed and gained them in many other districts. Both houses of the New Jersey legislature went Republican; and the Republicans picked up two more congressional seats in New York. Strident Federalist leader Thomas Pickering of Massachusetts was forced out of office, and the Republicans gained congressional and state legislative seats throughout traditionally Federalist New England.13 Jefferson, watching the 1810 elections carefully, was pleased. He wrote a friend that “our difficulties are indeed great, but when viewed in comparison to those of Europe, they are the joys of paradise.”14

  Throughout 1809, 1810 and 1811, Dolley Madison took good care of her husband. Fully realizing the pressure he was under, and well aware of his many physical weaknesses, she did all she could to relieve his stress. She sat with him for an hour each day before dinner to talk about the presidency, the family, Montpelier, and anything else he wanted to discuss. She carefully arranged receptions and balls in such a way so that it was easy for Madison to leave early and get a good night's sleep as Dolley took his place as the social leader of all occasions. She changed the seating at dinners so that her husband sat in the middle of the table and she at the head so that she, and not he, could lead conversations, giving him much-needed rest. In Washington and at home in Montpelier, she took up more and more of the responsibility of running the households, supervising all personnel, arranging transportation, and making certain that friends often visited to take Madison's mind off the growing hostilities with England and France. She made certain that she and her husband visited Thomas Jefferson as often as possible, and hosted him frequently at Montpelier. She spent extra time with Jefferson's grandchildren at Monticello, playing with them and helping them make children's clothing. She invited many more families to Montpelier so that dozens of children were always around to help relieve the pressure on her husband.

  In Washington, she bent easily to the political winds that blew stronger. At first, many Federalists now refused to attend her dinners, receptions, balls, and parties because they were angry at the president. Their boycott, the Federalists felt, was a well-designed show of force. Dolley shrugged her shoulders. She simply invited more Republicans and friends from around town. The parties rolled on, and the Federalists were not missed. Then they were back. “They have changed,” Dolley wrote, “such a rallying of our party has alarmed them. They came in a large body last night…young and old together.”15

  Dolley was even more of a whirlwind when Madison was president than in her previous years in Washington. The number of her dinners and parties grew, and so did the number of people attending them. The party guest list was now around two hundred or more people per soiree. There were dinners just about every evening and a party, ball, or reception at the White House nearly every night. Madison's secretary, Edward Coles, complained that out of every fourteen nights he went to eleven dinner parties at the White House. He was sent to parties just about every night, so many, in fact, that he tired of them. He wrote in 1810 that “I am sick, yes heartily sick, with the number of our parties.”16

  Dolley cautioned her husband that the British had looked down their noses at the Americans for decades, so he should not worry about new slights or new, dim versions of American resolve. During these years, British diplomats in Washington continually wrote back to their prime minster that America would never fight a war. The administration and the people did not have the weapons or troops to do so and, more important, did not have the emotiona
l resolve.

  Dolley also insisted that Madison accompany her to numerous plays that were being produced in Washington. The pair loved the theater. One night, at the height of the worry over a prospective war with England, when the pressure was the greatest on Madison, they attended a production of King Lear. On the way home, their frightened horse bolted, flew out of his harness, and ran away. The driver, the president, and the First Lady were stranded. It was just after midnight, and the streets of Washington were empty. Horseless and with no one in sight to assist them, the three simply walked home. All the way, on that quiet night, Dolley chatted with both men in a conversation laden with small talk. The pair were all alone, arm in arm, walking quietly to the White House, the only sound in the air the sounds of their voices.17

  By 1812, Dolley had become a master politician. Anything that the president did was praised or criticized as a political move, but the First Lady received none of that criticism. Everyone understood that the things Dolley did were always done to help her husband politically, but it was always one step removed. This freedom gave her enormous room to maneuver in the political work, but always in a subtle way. Congressmen who were mad at her husband were invited to White House parties and, if not turned into friends there, were at least made neutral by Dolley. Men who got into arguments at White House affairs were soon interrupted by a waiter, sent by Dolley, who offered them cakes and drinks. The argument cooled off. Certain people were seated next to other certain people at dinners so they could resolve their differences in a social way. The wives of leading political figures were all immediately befriended by Dolley and invited to all White House functions. If people liked her, they would like the president, too.