The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Dolley continued to woo Mrs. Merry. She persuaded her and Mr. Merry that dinners at the Madisons could be regarded as private affairs, so there was no need to invoke rules of precedence or worry about national honor being impugned. She sent her small gifts, such as a bottle of perfume whose scent Mrs. Merry admired. Soon, Dolley was describing their relationship as “unusually intimate,” though the term applied only to the current moment. She never knew when the large, combative lady would get angry “at persons as well as circumstances.”

  Dolley was more than a little surprised—and pleased—when Mrs. Merry, hearing she was ill, appeared at the Madison’s F Street house offering to be her nurse and spent three hours with her. Behind this feminine bridge-building lay some important political conversations between Merry and Madison, which helped repair some of the damage the president had inflicted with his pell-mell etiquette.19

  Dolley Madison learned a great deal from this attempt to intrude politics on social occasions in such a literal way. Although she never publicly revealed her opinion of President Jefferson’s experiment, in years to come she made it clear by her actions and style that she considered it an unfortunate blunder. Her tact was a tribute to her political shrewdness—and her generous heart.

  Dolley also learned much from watching Mrs. Merry in action. Too often the ambassador’s wife almost relished the conflict and the attention it won for her in the public spotlight. She was much too quick to speak for herself as well as her husband, which enabled President Jefferson and his supporters to christen her a virago unworthy of a shred of sympathy. Dolley concluded that a woman who waded into the contentious side of politics aroused the always lurking hostility between the sexes and won no friends for her side of the argument.

  At this point in her journey to fame, Dolley was demonstrating her talents as a politician, but she still hesitated to apply that term to herself. She was under the influence of President Jefferson’s opinion that women—especially American women—should stay out of politics. While she was being treated for her ulcerated knee in Philadelphia, she wrote a revealing letter to her husband, who had remained in Washington. “You know,” she began, “I am not much of a politician but I am extremely anxious to hear (as far as you may think proper) what is going forward in the cabinet.” She knew that Madison did not want his wife to be “an active partisan,” and she assured him there was not “the slightest danger” of such a thing. She remained conscious of her “want of talents” and her wariness about expressing opinions “always imperfectly understood” by her sex.20

  VIII

  After the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase, President Jefferson’s second term was almost bound to be an anticlimax. It soon became something much more unpleasant—one of the least successful four years in the history of the American presidency. Relations between both France and Great Britain deteriorated steadily as the two superpowers battled for global supremacy. They blockaded each other’s ports and forbade all neutral trade. The British were especially obnoxious, repeatedly kidnapping American sailors from ships at sea under the pretext that they were deserters from the royal navy. President Jefferson, having reduced the army and the navy to skeleton forces in his passion for minimum taxes, was looking weak and feckless. His secretary of state proposed taking a leaf from the history of the American Revolution and declaring an embargo on all commerce between America and Europe. Madison confidently assured the president it would starve England into submission.

  These boycotts, as the revolutionaries had called them, were very effective in the 1760s and 1770s. But the Madison-Jefferson embargo was a national disaster. The loss of American commodities such as wheat and cotton had only a minimal impact on the two superpowers, but it devastated the American economy. Exports declined 80 percent from 1807 to 1808. One disgusted critic compared it to “cutting a man’s throat to cure a nosebleed.” New England, where commerce was a way of life, was soon in semi-revolt, condoning and even encouraging wholesale smuggling in blatant violation of the law.

  A dismayed and baffled President Jefferson grew more and more discouraged. In his final year in office, he virtually abdicated, handing over most of his executive responsibility to his secretary of state. He even began shipping the furniture he had brought to the Executive Mansion back to Monticello. In this atmosphere of disillusion and disarray, James Madison became a candidate for president. He had Jefferson’s backing, but that was not worth much. Few presidents have been more unpopular in their final year in office.

  The secretary of the navy, Robert Smith, accused Jefferson of launching the embargo against the advice of the majority of his cabinet. Senator William Plumer of New Hampshire, another hostile Republican, wrote: “Madison has acquired a complete ascendancy over him.” Complicating matters was the prevailing code that a candidate could not campaign openly for president. Confessing a desire for power stirred fears of executive tyranny in too many minds, especially among Republicans. Soon two other candidates were in the race: Jefferson’s aging vice president, George Clinton of New York, and James Monroe, who had almost as much claim to being Jefferson’s chief disciple as Madison.21

  There was little doubt that James Madison needed help. He found his rescuer in his own household. By now there were few more astute observers of the political scene than Dolley Madison. “Public business was perhaps never thicker,” she wrote cheerfully to her aunt. Dolley was not even slightly intimidated. Political nominating conventions were far in the future. Candidates were chosen by congressional caucuses of both parties. This added heft to Dolley’s social skills. She brushed off claims from Monroe’s backers that Madison was a Federalist in disguise. As for Vice President Clinton, he was suffering from New York’s long-running jealousy of Virginia’s power. She did not say these things publicly, of course. But the VIPs who thronged her dinner parties did not hesitate to voice them.22

  Monroe’s chief backer was Congressman John Randolph of Virginia. He was a veritable walking, talking compound of all the neuroses long associated with his family. He disliked women in general, but Dolley’s lush beauty and her revealing gowns stirred raging antagonism in his dour soul. He began telling Monroe and anyone else who would listen that Dolley was promiscuous and using her favors to promote Madison’s presidency.23

  A local Federalist newspaper ran a pseudo-ad for a book that supposedly told all about a powerful, impotent man with an oversexed wife. Soon other anonymous stories were sprouting, even naming some of Dolley’s supposed lovers. The Madisons took this mudslinging seriously enough to refute one story by inviting one of Dolley’s rumored flames to a small family dinner at their F Street house. The key to dealing with such slanders, Dolley told a friend, was to “listen without emotion” when they were repeated in your hearing, knowing that “they were framed but to play on your sensibility.” This was a lesson thin-skinned Abigail Adams never learned. It is still good advice for anyone and everyone in politics.24

  Other papers with a tilt to the Republican radicals claimed Dolley was a secret Federalist and British supporter. They investigated her first husband’s death and concocted a story of her abandoning him as he writhed in the final throes of yellow fever. Again and again they assayed Madison as “cold”—a synonym for impotence—and wondered how he could be expected to lead the country when he lacked the strength to satisfy his wife.

  Dolley began blaming some of these assaults on Monroe personally, because he remained silent, never saying a word in defense of Madison, his supposed close friend. At one dinner party, she made several uncharacteristically cutting remarks about Monroe and his wife. Her disapproval had an impact in political Washington, and Monroe soon faded as a candidate. Meanwhile, Dolley’s tireless entertaining was a tactic that the widower vice president, George Clinton, soon saw as an insurmountable advantage. He, too, retreated from any public confrontation, and Madison faced only one serious opponent in the general election, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the Federalist whom Alexander Hamilton had tried
to make president instead of John Adams in 1800.25

  Pinckney’s chief issue was the hated embargo, but Congress repealed it on Jefferson’s last day in office. Madison was elected in what passed for a landslide, with Pinckney winning almost no support outside New England. When he grudgingly conceded, he added a nasty but historically significant embellishment. He said he had lost to “Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I might have had a better chance if I faced Mr. Madison alone.”26

  IX

  Dolley Madison entered the executive mansion or president’s “palace” with a great many people watching her. The wife of a New York congressman who had backed George Clinton noted that she had grown more dignified. She seldom played loo or wore revealing French dresses. But on inauguration day, her F Street parlor was jammed with visitors all “now worshipping the Rising Sun.” The comparison was more apt than the writer realized. Dolley had a plan already worked out, aimed at making the president’s house the social center of Washington, D.C.27

  She began her campaign with an inaugural ball at Long’s Hotel that attracted more than four hundred mesmerized guests. Dolley wore a velvet gown with a train so long, it cried out for several young pages or ladies-in-waiting to deal with it. Her friend Margaret Bayard Smith implied as much. “She looked like a queen,” she wrote. Even more eye-catching was Dolley’s gleaming white satin turban trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers. Shrewdly, she limited her jewelry to a pearl necklace and earrings and a few bracelets. The effect was a striking combination of royal elegance and American simplicity. When the dancing began, and the master of ceremonies offered to lead her to the floor, she replied, “I don’t dance.” Again, everyone was charmed by this calm adherence to her Quaker roots.28

  In the glow of this performance, the president, worn out by the long inaugural day, was scarcely noticed. Dolley proceeded to deal with this problem, too. At dinner, she sat herself between the British and French ambassadors and soon had them smiling and chatting. Gone was President Jefferson’s pell-mell etiquette. The representatives of the warring great powers led the way to the dinner table. General Turreau, still the French ambassador, escorted Dolley; she concealed her dislike of him with the smile of a master diplomat. Behind him, the Briton who had replaced Ambassador Merry escorted Dolley’s sister Anna. Ex-president Jefferson, also a guest, gave not so much as a hint of disapproval.29

  People swarmed onto the dance floor to get a closer look at Dolley. Soon the room was so crowded that some ladies grew faint. An alarmed male guest broke the upper panes of several windows to let in more air. Everyone went home talking about Mrs. Madison. In The National Intelligencer, her friend Margaret Bayard Smith came close to exhausting her supply of admiring verbs and adjectives. To no one’s surprise, the paper christened Dolley “The Presidentress.”30

  This only emboldened Dolley to push ahead in her campaign to make herself and other women a vital part of James Madison’s presidency. Ignoring blasts of vituperation against the president from Congressman Randolph, she led groups of women to the visitors’ gallery to watch both houses of Congress in action. Occasionally she led similar groups in visits to the Supreme Court. As for Randolph, she decided to treat him as a public amusement. After one of his performances, she asked a visitor if he had heard about it. “It was as good as a play,” she said. Soon people were marveling at the way women were playing a part in American politics that was “not known elsewhere.”31

  The heart of Dolley’s plan became visible when President Madison asked Congress for $24,000 (about 400,000 modern dollars) to renovate the executive mansion and buy much-needed furniture, china, and other civilizing necessities. Aside from essential work such as shoring up the roof, widower Jefferson had done little or nothing to finish the house during his eight years. Congress acquiesced, and Dolley went to work with architect Benjamin Latrobe. As soon as possible, she wanted a large drawing room and a small parlor for entertaining. Also on the list was a state dining room. Dolley had decorated all three of these rooms in her head before Latrobe went to work. Although some luxury items were unavailable because of the aftereffects of the embargo, the architect managed to find acceptable substitutes.32

  First to be finished was what dazzled guests called “Mrs. Madison’s Parlor” (the Red Room in the modern White House). The dominant feature was the sunflower-yellow damask silk draperies that adorned the windows. High-backed sofas and chairs had the same lush color, as did a damask fireboard in front of the mantel. Another eye-catcher was Gilbert Stuart’s regal portrait of Dolley.

  Her first reception in the room, on May 31, 1809, swiftly became the talk of Washington. Military music filled the air, and a buffet offered ice cream, punch, cookies, and fruit. A smiling Dolley, in another spectacular gown and turban, dominated the room. Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday “drawing rooms” quickly became a destination for everyone in Washington and many beyond the city’s borders.

  Writer Washington Irving described his eagerness to attend during a visit to the capital. “I swore by all the Gods I should be there,” he said, when he learned Dolley was having a reception on the day he arrived in town. Wangling an invitation, Irving found himself in “the blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison’s drawing room,” where he met “a crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and beautiful young ones” and in ten minutes was “hand in glove with half the people in the assemblage.” He found Dolley to be “a fine portly buxom dame who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody.” As for her sisters, Anna and Lucy, they were “like the two merry wives of Windsor.”33

  On New Year’s Day, 1810, Dolley and the president held their first reception in the much larger Oval Room, which had remained an unused wasteland during Jefferson’s administration. This time the impact of Dolley’s decorations was nothing less than palatial. Great gold lamps lined the entrance, and a huge mirror gleamed above the mantle. The walls were papered in rich cream, and the woodwork shadowed in blue and gray. The floor-to-ceiling windows were adorned with red silk velvet curtains, which were matched by the red cushioned furniture, with thirty-six “Grecian” chairs. “The President’s house is a perfect palace,” gasped one visitor.34

  The state dining room, which opened off the Oval Room, was even more palatial. The ceilings were three times the height of the rooms in an average house. A gigantic sideboard occupied an entire wall. At the far end of the room hung a life-sized portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Public approval of Dolley’s interior decorating was virtually universal. Members of both political parties competed for an invitation to the mansion that everyone began calling “The White House.” A Baltimore newspaper warmly approved the title. It was, they opined, “the people’s name.”35

  As guests by the hundreds swarmed into the White House and swirled around Dolley, some people wondered whether she was almost too successful. She enjoyed herself hugely, but her sixty-year-old husband did not seem to have such a good time. One 1809 visitor described Madison as “a very small thin pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved and forbidding countenance.” He seemed “incapable of smiling” but talked agreeably to all comers. By 1810, another guest thought Madison looked as if he were “bending under the weight and cares of his office.” Whereas Dolley remained “a robust and hearty lady.”36

  X

  Madison’s personality and leadership style were not well suited to an executive role. He was at his best in Congress or on a committee, where his weak voice and mild manner did not matter so much because the logic and depth of his arguments were so persuasive. A president leads in a very different way. Compounding Madison’s problems was the disintegration of the Republican Party into a half dozen factions, each with its own ambitious leader. As a result, the United States drifted irresolutely through the political turbulence that was tearing the world apart as the war between Great Britain and Napoleonic France rumbled toward a climax.

  Madison had no illusions about Napoleon, who played a cat-and-mouse game with America, agreeable one week, nasty
the next. But his focus on dominating Europe gave him little chance to harm the United States. Britain’s high-handed attitude toward American ships at sea was another matter. Their arrogance slowly convinced Madison that only a war would settle America’s relationship with the mother country. He apparently discussed this growing conviction with Dolley. In December 1811 she wrote to her sister Anna, now married to a Maine congressman, “I believe there will be a war as M sees no end to our perplexities without it.”37

  Unfortunately, President Madison could not convince some members of his cabinet or key members of Congress to prepare the country for a serious conflict. He let newly arrived western politicians such as Henry Clay of Kentucky do the orating in Congress. Dubbed The War Hawks, they assured everyone that the British, embroiled with Napoleon, were pushovers and would never be able to defend thinly populated Canada. New England’s politicians and the states that followed their lead, such as New York and New Jersey, remained stubbornly opposed to the war. Dismaying proof of Madison’s failure to rally support in Congress was the Senate’s approval of a declaration of war by a mere six votes. The margin in the House of Representatives was not much better: 79–49.

  Nevertheless, Madison signed the war resolution in June 1812. The Federalist Alexandria Gazette promptly accused him of persuading many congressmen to vote for the declaration with invitations to Dolley’s Wednesday drawing rooms and splendid dinners. The paper called her parties “extravagant imitations of a royal court” and claimed Americans were being taught to bow and curtsy before the president and his wife and otherwise “play the parasite.”38