James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  And, as always, Coles would slash people whom he did not like. In a letter to Dolley in 1832, he slammed the Gallatins, Hannah and Albert. “She has become very fleshy & he much changed in his appearance by wearing an ugly wig,” he wrote.39

  Mrs. Madison moved back to Washington on a part-time basis, in the fall and winter of 1837, the flowers in full bloom, forests deep green, and the creeks gurgling throughout Orange County. Dolley Madison had lived at Montpelier since she was a new bride in 1794, forty-two years earlier, and now she was leaving for half the year. It was a big step in her life.40

  She had always enjoyed the house on Lafayette Square. Her son had the walls painted a soft color so that a loud color would not disturb her eyes. “I like it, of course,” she said of the color. The house was large but not too large and centrally located for visiting friends and getting around in the ever-growing town. “My house in Washington will do very well, no doubt,” she told all.41

  Dolley's health was not good. Her eyes continued to bother her. They were either inflamed or did not enable her to read well, except when she wore glasses. She bathed them in different solutions and was often bedridden for days at a time. In 1836, to get some rest and to seek a cure for her eyes, she took the advice of friends and spent several weeks on vacation at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, not far from her home and a favorite vacation spot for the elite in Virginia that featured special waters that all believed had medicinal benefits. She went there, she wrote a friend, with a “sad, impatient spirit” but enjoyed the visit. “[I was] drinking moderately at the waters and bathing my poor eyes a dozen times a day. The effect was excellent. My health was strengthened to its former standing and my eyes grew white again,” she wrote Anthony Morris.42

  By 1842, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the North, the former First Lady realized that her enhanced farming business, co-run with her by Payne, had failed. Revenues were low and there were no profits. “Produce of every kind is down to the lowest ebb…. Crops are tolerably good yet the farmer realizes nothing from them,” Dolley wrote her niece Lucy Todd that October. Bad crops and low prices were nothing new. The Madisons had dismal crops for years. In 1832, Dolley told her son that “the last tobacco both of Mr. Madison and John's was a failure.” They had expected $17 per hogshead and received only $7.43

  She had to juggle high costs for her extra slaves, loans to her son, and upkeep at the mansion. She, like all the other homeowners in the South in that era, were part of a “hosting system” in which travelers, many complete strangers, stayed at her house for days at a time, at her cost. She welcomed all and had hundreds of visitors each year. In addition to that, Dolley could never give up her crown as America's queen and continued to spend lavishly on parties for relatives and friends at Montpelier.

  Everybody who knew her assumed that her husband had left her an extraordinary amount of money to pay for her plantation, enlarged workforce, and extravagant lifestyle. After all, he was the president, wasn't he? And the couple had lived lavishly in Washington and in Montpelier for nearly fifty years. They must be rich. Dolley never told anyone except her inner family that she was broke and could not continue at Montpelier. Her brother-in-law Richard Cutts wanted her to pay back a $1,500 loan, and she could not. She was considered a credit risk in Orange County and told Cutts that she could not borrow money from anyone, adding that she was now spending more than she had with no financial answer in sight. “I stay at home in waiting…here is property in both land and Negroes but they cannot command one hundred [dollars] at this time, and I fear that I have not sufficient in the bank to pay my discount there.” Family members were shocked.44

  They were also surprised at her new attitude toward slavery. She had been against the practice all of her life and had vowed, with her husband, never to sell her slaves because the Madisons took good care of them and did not want to sell them to unscrupulous planters who might make their lives miserable. Her need for money changed her view. In 1836, she sold a number of her slaves to the slave buyers that wandered throughout Virginia, looking for good property at reasonable prices. Edward Coles was with her one day in November 1836, when she permitted slave buyers to examine her slaves for possible purchase. “The poor creatures would run to the house & protest against being sold & say their old master had said in his will that they were not to be sold but with their consent,” said Coles.

  He watched Dolley sell a woman and her two children to nephew Ambrose Madison, leaving the woman's husband at Montpelier. Coles said that Mrs. Madison did not want to sell the slaves, or break up families, “a most painful task,” but felt she had to do so to earn money to pay her bills.45

  Dolley was extremely worried, yet never let anyone outside the immediate family know about her problems. She continued to charm the world. Noted artist J. Eastman Johnson was one of those enamored of her when he painted her portrait. “She comes in every morning at 10 o'clock in full dress for the occasion, and, as she has much taste she looks quite imposing with her white satin turban, black velvet dress and a countenance full of benignity and gentleness. She talks a great deal and in such quick, beautiful tones. So polished and elegant are her manners that it is a pleasure to be in her company,” he said.46

  The only way she could stay solvent, friends and lawyers told her, was to sell Montpelier and live off the money in Washington. She found a buyer for the entire plantation in 1842, Henry Moncure, who bought it in increments over several years. Payne remained at his farm with a small staff of slaves. Moncure, who did not care for Payne, bought everything, including Mrs. Madison's slaves. She moved to Washington on a permanent basis, leaving behind Montpelier, but not Payne's problems and his never-ending requests for money.

  What she also left behind was a dangerous, new life for her slaves. They were all to go with the property to Moncure, and she paid no further attention to them, even though, in the summer of 1844, they were still hers. She received a frantic letter from one of the slaves, Sarah, that stunned her. “The sheriff has taken all of us and said he will sell us at next court unless something is done before to prevent it. We are afraid we will be bought by what are called Negro buyers and sent away from our husbands and wives. If we are obliged to be sold perhaps you could get neighbors to buy us that have husbands and wives so as to save us some misery which will in a greater or less degree be sure to fall upon us at being separate from you as well as from one another. The sale is only a fortnight [away].”

  Mrs. Madison was shaken. She did not know that William Madison, determined to get his $2,000, was working with the sheriff to seize the slaves and hold them as payment on Madison's debt. Dolley also did not know that a full month before the threatened seizure William Madison had gone to her son, Payne, and convinced him that what he wanted to do was proper. Payne went along with it and, worse, never told his mother about it. When Dolly did hear about it, she immediately signed all the papers to sell Montpelier to Moncure, so that the slaves all went to him and not to William Madison. “The beautiful place was sold and the colored population with it, far below value, to prevent separation from their homes,” wrote Lucia Cutts.47

  Dolly had always wanted Payne to inherit Montpelier, but now that was not possible. He remained at his shabby dwelling nearby at Toddsberth, with his eccentric habits and odd businesses, and Moncure moved into Montpelier.

  An era ended.

  In the end, it was Payne's recklessness and general incompetence that drove Dolley to sell her beloved Montpelier. She had trusted Payne to run it with her, hoping, as always, that he could succeed at something in his life. She was wrong, of course. Payne could not succeed at anything. She waved off attacks on Payne's catastrophic handling of the farms, but friends and relatives were cutting in their denunciation of Payne. Her niece Lucy wrote scathingly that Dolley's “extravagant, idle son” ran the farms so badly that his ineptitude “obliged her to sell the dearly loved Montpelier, together with the slaves, to Mr. Moncure.” A friend, Septima Meikleham, said that Payne “
had run through the fortune her husband left her, $100,000 and Montpelier.”48

  Whenever friends or relatives questioned Dolly about Payne and his strange ideas, Dolly always smiled and said “my poor boy, forgive his eccentricities—his heart is in the right place.”49

  Other family news was bad, too. James Todd, the son of her niece Lucy, had adopted many of Payne's habits. He owed money everywhere, and it brought his mother nothing but worry. “I did not know that you had ever borrowed any money from Joseph Crane until lately. What amount did you borrow and has it been paid? Let me know in your next letter. If it is too great an amount I can settle it,” she wrote him of one bill. She inquired, too, what happened to money she had recently sent him to pay a second bill that had “vanished.”50

  Dolley's brother, John, had floundered in Kentucky. A friend there, George Washington Spotswood, said he “does not have an acre of land fenced. He has devoted most of his time to dissipation.” He added that one of John's daughters married an alcoholic and the other married a man he considered “good for nothing.” He smirked that “if they were my daughters, I would rather see them dead.” Spotswood added that John was penniless, his farms were bankrupt, and his wife had left him.51

  Dolley was distraught, but she hid her horror and looked magnificent when she moved to Washington as a half-time resident in 1836. Everyone who knew her in her retirement at Montpelier marveled at how well Dolley appeared and how the years had not ravaged her. “She looks just as she did twenty years ago and dresses in the same manner, with her turban and cravat; rises early and is very active, but seldom leaves the house,” said Charles Ingersoll, who spent several days with the Madisons just before the president's death in 1836.52

  She was glad to be back in the capital. Dolley had always missed Washington and its active social life. Back in 1822, she had told her sister Anna about all the miles from her in the capital that “I am at such a distance & am so despairing at the difficulties & disappointments of seeing my sisters.” In 1838, after Madison's death, she told Margaret Bayard Smith that “in truth, I am dissatisfied with the location of Montpelier, from which I can never separate myself entirely, when I think how happy I should be if it joined Washington, where I could see you always and my valued acquaintances also of that city.” She lived the Washington life vicariously through her nieces who resided there. She wrote them often and begged them to give her all the details of their social lives. In one letter she told Mary Cutts that “I should have been delighted to see [niece] Dolley and yourself [with] those pretty and brilliant characters at Mrs. White's elegant ball.”53

  The First Lady's love of Washington over Montpelier was evident throughout her public life, when she wrote letters from Montpelier asking about Washington, even when she was due to return to the capital in a few weeks. In 1808, just a week before her planned arrival in the capital, she wrote Anna Thornton, “I am glad to find that you have gay parties now & then & hope they will continue as I hope to join in your bustle by & by. I should like to see a good play once more.” A year earlier she asked her niece Lucy, “tell me how you amuse yourselves in Washington.”54

  When Dolley arrived back in Washington in 1837, twenty years after she had left it, she feared that most of her old friends had died or moved away. The diplomats she knew would have returned to their countries. The merchants who had attended her parties were now probably in their seventies, too, deceased, or retired. When she looked through the Washington directory, though, she was surprised to find that many people and families that she had known remained in town. Many were now older and had sons and daughters who lived and worked in town, too. Some of the politicians she knew so well, such as Henry Clay, were still in office and were more powerful than ever. Many of the socialites she knew in her forties were now in their sixties but were still hosting parties.

  What surprised her the most was that so many Washingtonians remembered her, and fondly so. She had dozens of welcome letters upon her return, some from ministers from European countries, all wishing her well in what appeared to be the final chapters of her life. One of the very first people in town to visit her on Lafayette Square was former president John Quincy Adams, now serving as a congressman from Massachusetts. Adams had been a casual acquaintance of Dolley when her husband was president and had never visited Montpelier. He expected to find a decrepit old woman but was astonished at Mrs. Madison. “I had not seen her since 1809. The depredations of time are not so perceptible in her personal appearance as might be expected. She is a woman of placid appearance equable temperament and less susceptible of laceration of the scourges of the world abroad than most others,” he wrote.55

  A parade of well-wishers followed Adams. They all found Dolley, in her seventies, as delightful as ever and were all stunned that she had not aged much in appearance. And she looked just like the Dolley of old—elegant. Her grandniece wrote of one party that “Aunt Madison wore a purple velvet dress, with plain straight skirt amply gathered to a tight waist, cut low and filled in with soft tulle. Her pretty white throat was encircled by a lace cravat…thrown lightly over her shoulders was a little lace shawl or cape, as in her portrait…I thought her turban very wonderful, as I had never seen anyone else wear such a head-dress…her eyes were blue and laughed when she smiled and greeted her friends who seemed so glad to see her.”56

  Mrs. Madison was also the lucky beneficiary of political history. She brought one of her grandnieces to a White House gala when Martin Van Buren was president, as she always brought her grandnieces along with her in order to introduce them to high society. The girl met Abraham Van Buren, the president's son, and fell in love with him. They were married shortly thereafter and Dolley immediately found herself on the guest list for every White House function. The fortuitous marriage returned her to her social glory.

  Several years later, Van Buren lost his reelection bid to William Henry Harrison, who ran with Dolley's longtime friend and prominent Virginian John Tyler as his running mate. Harrison died a month later and Tyler became president. He was unmarried and made his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert Tyler, his “First Lady.” She did not know what to do and turned to family friend Dolley, America's longest-serving First Lady, for advice. Dolley took her under her wing and happily trained the girl in Washington and White House social life. Mrs. Tyler also put Dolley on the permanent guest list and turned to her for advice at all the White House dinners and balls. Daniel Webster joked to Dolley that since she had been prominent in the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, Van Buren, and Tyler, she was “the only permanent power in Washington.”57

  Dolley was back on the social circuit again, and invitations poured in as she set her own calendar of parties at her home. Lists she kept showed that she made two hundred visits to friends in 180 days and attended an average of three parties a week, plus her own. In addition to parties, she was often invited to musical concerts, plays, and public ceremonies. In Washington, she was just as close to nieces and nephews as she had been to sisters twenty years earlier and spent much time at their homes. She was a welcome guest at weddings for the children of adults she had known once and now knew again. Many of her old friends, such as Eliza Collins Lee, Anna Thornton, Mrs. Tobias Lear, and Margaret Bayard Smith, were widows who lived in town and were thrilled to renew their friendships with her. It was the first time she had seen Mrs. Lear in years. The last time was the funeral of her husband, President Madison's close friend, who stunned Washington when he committed suicide in 1816 following a political smear campaign against him. At her own parties, Dolley entertained as elegantly as she had at the White House and as lavishly as any hostess in town. A New Yorker, Phillip Hone, wrote that “she is a young lady of fourscore years and upward, goes out to parties and receives company like the ‘Queen’ of this new world.”58

  Her niece Lucy wrote that “her return to Washington was hailed by all, those who formerly knew her and those who desired to know this First Lady of the land. Her home was filled morning and night with mo
st distinguished of all parties…. It had been twenty years since she had left the city, the favorite of society, yet she came [back] without influence or power and the citizens welcomed her return…. She had infinite tact, and always saw the good and not the evil, which exists in all.”59

  One of her new friends was Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, who wanted to be president. He lived in Swann House, just a few blocks from Dolley, and oversaw a lavish social life at his home with his wife, who had befriended Dolley. Webster noticed how popular Dolley was and saw that many viewed her as a bridge back to the old pre-Jackson Washington, when life was calmer and more elegant. Webster invited Dolley to dozens of his parties and saw her frequently. He made an arrangement to purchase her slave, Paul Jennings, and give him his freedom after a few years. When Jennings started to work for him, he told him that whenever he returned to Swann House from the market, he should buy extra food and drop it off at Dolley's on the way home.

  Not everybody was happy to have the charismatic former First Lady around, though. William Seward of New York, a rising Whig star who later served as Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state in the Civil War, saw her as a major nonpolitical star of the Democratic Party (the old Republicans had become the Democrats) and a threat. “All the world paid homage to her, saying that she was dignified and attractive. It is the fashion to say so. But, I confess, I thought more true dignity would have been displayed by her remaining in her widowhood, in the ancient country mansion of her illustrious husband.”60

  Mrs. Madison, like everyone else, was jolted by events in the ever-growing and ever-tempestuous Washington. In February 1838, a friend of hers, Mr. Graves, killed a man named Cilly in a duel that followed an argument. The city's population was shocked, and many demanded justice; lynch mobs were formed to punish the survivor, Graves. “[I] feel more horror at the wicked act than if I had never seen them. You can have little idea of the sensation it has created here…there was danger of a mob in the city,” she wrote.61