No one paid much attention to these squawks of protest. Throughout Madison’s first term, Dolley’s parties and dinners had grown more lavish and splendid. She hired a French chef who served duck and venison cooked in an elaborate style seldom seen in American kitchens. Dolley regularly sat at the head of the table and took charge of the conversation, freeing the president from the task, which he did not enjoy or handle well. This enabled him to relax and indulge in genial small talk with nearby guests, who often came away charmed.
Far from being aristocratic affairs, Dolley’s parties were democratic with a small “d.” Anyone could come, once they had been introduced to Mrs. Madison or the president. George Washington and John Adams held “levees” at which guests remained stationary, waiting for their host to greet them and exchange a few words. Dolley encouraged her guests to feel free to move around all three of her redecorated rooms, chatting with friends and with her or the president if they were so disposed. At dinners, not a few people marveled at the way she sat diplomats such as the Russian minister beside a local tradesman and his wife.
XI
The first test of the popularity of the war with Britain was Madison’s campaign for reelection. His opponent was DeWitt Clinton, nephew of vice president George Clinton, who had died in 1811. The candidate was a good politician and a popular former mayor of New York City with a strong Republican following in his native state. He was backed by the Federalists, who remained a force in New England. Dolley struggled to maintain her public neutrality, but she was heard to refer to Clinton as “that fellow” when he paid a visit to Washington.
The Federalists cried petticoat politics and tried to convince people that Madison lacked the forcefulness to lead the country in a war. In the original thirteen states, Clinton came within one electoral vote of beating Madison. But in the new states of the West, the War Hawks were dominant, and they gave the president a comfortable margin of victory.
Clinton did not claim that he would have won if President Madison lacked Dolley. The words would have been superfluous. Everyone who read a newspaper knew that Dolley was an essential part of the Madison administration. But no one anticipated that the war would make her a national heroine.
HOW TO SAVE A COUNTRY
The war did not go well. In the preceding years, Madison had been unable to stop his penny-pinching secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, from blocking congressional resolutions to expand the country’s armed forces. The Americans began the conflict with no regular army worth mentioning. Their navy consisted of a handful of frigates and a fleet of pathetic gunboats, each armed with a single cannon, which President Jefferson had designed as defenders of America’s ports. In 1811, Congress had voted to abolish Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, making it almost impossible for the government to raise money. Worst of all, the British defeated Napoleon and the United States found itself fighting the most powerful army and navy in the world, alone.
By 1813, Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin was telling the president, “We have hardly enough money to last to the end of the month.”1 Along the Canadian border, American armies stumbled into ruinous defeats. A huge British naval squadron blockaded the American coast. The only good news came from victories over lone British men-of-war by warships of the tiny American navy. In Congress, New Englanders sneered at “Mr. Madison’s War,” and the governor of Massachusetts refused to permit any of the state’s militiamen to join the attack on Canada. Madison fell ill and the aged vice president, Elbridge Gerry, also grew so feeble that Congress began arguing about who would be the next president if they both died.
Dolley Madison’s White House receptions and dinners became the only place in the nation where hope and determination continued to flourish. Soon she herself became a symbol of America’s refusal to be daunted by British power. Although she was born a Quaker, Dolley maintained she had always believed in fighting back “when assailed.” Her instinct for defiant drama came to the fore at an 1812 ball given by naval officers celebrating Congress’s decision to expand the American navy. Everyone’s spirits rose when news of an American victory over the British frigate Macedonian off the Canary Islands reached the White House. A few minutes later, a young lieutenant arrived at the ball carrying the flag of the defeated ship. Senior naval officers paraded it around the floor and laid it at Dolley’s feet.2
At her social events, Dolley struggled, in the words of one observer, “to destroy rancorous feelings, then so bitter between Federalists and Republicans.” Affability and good manners remained her watchwords, and members of Congress, weary with flinging curses at each other during the day, were willing to relax and even discuss compromise and conciliation in the evening. Their wives and daughters were almost all allies of Mrs. Madison. By day Dolley was a tireless visitor, leaving her calling cards all over the city. Before the war, most of her parties attracted about three hundred people. Now attendance climbed to five hundred, and young people began calling them “squeezes.”
There were times when Dolley felt the pressure of presiding over these crowded rooms. She confessed to one friend, “My head is dizzy!” But she maintained what another observer called her “remorseless equanimity,” even when the war news was bad.3 Critics heaped scorn on the president, calling him “Little Jemmy” and reviving the smear that he was impotent, making it a symbol of his failures as commander in chief. But Dolley seemed immune to such slanders. President Madison might look as if he had one foot in the grave, but Dolley remained blooming and seemingly tireless. More and more people began bestowing a new title on her: the First Lady. Dolley had created a semipublic office as well as a unique role for women in the American government.
By this time, the relationship between James and Dolley had moved several light years beyond the diffidence with which she brought up politics in her letters to him in 1805. They had both abandoned the idea that a woman should not and could not think about the thorny subject. As early as the first summer of his presidency (1809) Madison had been forced to rush back to Washington from a vacation at Montpelier, leaving Dolley behind. In a note he wrote just after he returned to the White House, he told her that he intended to bring her up to date on “intelligence” just received from France in his next letter. Meanwhile he sent her the morning paper, which had a story on the subject. In a letter two days later, he sent “the foreign news in the inclosed papers” and discussed a recent speech by the British prime minister. There was little doubt that Dolley had become the president’s political partner in every imaginable sense of the word.4
II
Dolley’s charms and political acumen had their limits. The British were relentless in their determination to reduce Americans to obedient colonists once more. Checked by an American naval victory on Lake Erie and the defeat of their Indian allies in the West, they concentrated their assault on the coastline from Florida to Delaware Bay. Again and again their landing parties swarmed ashore to pillage homes, rape women, and burn public and private property. The commander of these operations was a strutting red-faced admiral named Sir George Cockburn. As arrogant as he was ruthless, he sent word to Mrs. Madison that he soon expected to “make his bow” in her drawing room as the ruler of a captured Washington, D.C.
Dolley did her best to reassure her friends. She told them it was impossible for a British army to get within twenty miles of Washington. But many people began moving wives and children and furniture out of the city. The drumbeat of news about British landings elsewhere intensified local criticism of the president. Some people claimed that Dolley herself was planning to flee Washington and if Madison attempted to follow her, they would make sure that he and the city would “fall” together. At one point Dolley exploded in a letter to a friend: “I am not the least alarmed at these things but entirely disgusted & determined to stay with him.”5
On August 17, 1814, a large British fleet anchored at the mouth of the Patuxent River, only thirty-five miles from Washington. Aboard were four thousand veteran tr
oops under the command of a tough professional soldier, General Robert Ross. Soon they were ashore without a shot being fired at them and they began a slow, cautious advance on Washington. There was not a single trained American soldier in the vicinity to oppose them. All President Madison could do was call out thousands of militia. The commander of these jittery amateurs was Brigadier General William Winder, an aged veteran of the Revolution. Madison had appointed him early in the war for only one reason: his brother was the governor of Maryland.6
When Winder’s incompetence became glaringly obvious, friends urged Dolley to flee the city. Thousands of Washingtonians were crowding the roads. Dolley demurred: “I am determined to stay with my husband,” she said. She welcomed Madison’s decision to station one hundred militiamen under the command of a regular army colonel on the White House lawn. Not only was it a gesture of protection on his part; it was also a declaration that he and Dolley were going to stand their ground. She applauded when the president joined the six thousand militiamen who were marching to confront the British in Maryland. She was sure his presence would stiffen their resolve to protect the capital.
Doing her share to display defiance, Dolley decided to give a dinner party on August twenty-third, after the president had ridden off with the army. All her guests either ignored her invitations or sent hasty regrets. The National Intelligencer had reported that the British had received six thousand reinforcements, panicking the city. Again and again, Dolley ascended to the White House roof to scan the horizon with a spyglass, hoping to see evidence of an American victory. Meanwhile, Madison sent her two scribbled messages. The first assured her that the British would easily be defeated; the second warned her to be ready to flee on a moment’s notice.
If the worst transpired, Madison had told her to save the cabinet papers and all the other public documents she could fit in her carriage. Late in the day, Dolley began a letter to her sister Lucy, describing her situation. Her carriage was loaded with trunks full of public papers. “All my friends and acquaintances have gone,” she wrote. The army colonel and his hundred-man guard had also fled. But Dolley refused to budge. “I am determined not to go until I hear Mr. Madison is safe,” she continued in her letter. She wanted to appear beside him “as I hear of much hostility toward him…disaffection stalks around us.” She felt her presence might deter enemies who were ready to harm the president.
At dawn the next day, after a mostly sleepless night, Dolley was back on the White House roof with her spyglass. Resuming her letter to Lucy, she told her that she had spent the morning “turning my spy glass in every direction and watching with unwearied anxiety, hoping to discern the approach of my dear husband and his friends.” Instead, all she saw was “groups of military wandering in all directions, as if there were a lack of arms or of spirit to fight for their own firesides!” She was seeing the egregious disintegration of the American army that was supposed to be confronting the British at nearby Bladensburg, Maryland.
Soon the boom of cannon rattled the White House windows. The battle remained beyond the range of Dolley’s spyglass. She was spared the sight of the American militia fleeing at their first glimpse of the charging British infantry. President Madison was swept away in the rout, along with General Winder and everyone else with some authority. In the White House, Dolley stood her ground. She had found a wagon, and packed it with the red silk velvet draperies of the Oval Room and the silver service and the blue and gold Lowestoft china she had purchased for the state dining room.
Resuming her letter to Lucy, Dolley wrote: “Would you believe it, my sister? We have had a battle or skirmish…and I am still here within sound of the cannon!” Gamely, she ordered the table set for a dinner for the president and his staff, and insisted that the cook and his assistant begin preparing it. “Two messengers covered with dust” arrived from the battlefield, urging her to flee. Still she refused, determined to wait for Madison. She ordered the dinner to be served. She told the servants that if she were a man, she would post a cannon in every window of the White House and fight to the bitter end.
The arrival of a close friend, Major Charles Carroll of the prominent Maryland family, finally changed Dolley’s mind. He told her it was time to go and she glumly acquiesced. As they headed for the door, Dolley saw the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington in the state dining room and declared she could not abandon it to the enemy to be mocked and desecrated. While Carroll watched, all but rending his garments with anxiety, Dolley ordered the servants to take down the painting. It was screwed to the wall, and they lacked the tools or the time to deal with the problem. Dolley told them to break the frame and extract the canvas. At that point, “two gentlemen from New York” appeared, to see if they could help. Dolley gave them the painting with orders to conceal it from the oncoming British at all costs. Finally, with amazing self-possession, she closed her letter to Lucy: “And now, dear sister, I must leave this house…where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell!”7
Again on the way to the door, Dolley further endangered Mr. Carroll’s sanity by spotting a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a display case and stopping to extract it and stuff it into one of her suitcases. As they reached the door, one of the president’s free black servants, Jim Smith, who had accompanied him to the battlefield, rode up on a sweaty horse and shouted: “Clear out! Clear out!” The British were only a few miles away. Dolley climbed into her carriage and rode off with Carroll to a comfortable refuge at his family mansion, Belle Vue, in Maryland.
III
The British arrived a few hours later, as darkness fell. With them was Admiral Cockburn, eager to savor the results of the victory. He and General Ross issued orders to burn the Capitol and the Library of Congress and headed for the White House. They were vastly amused to find the dinner Mrs. Madison had ordered still on the table in the dining room. “Several kinds of wine in handsome glass decanters were cooling on the sideboard,” one officer wrote. They sampled some of the dishes and drank a toast to “Jemmy’s health.”
Soldiers roamed the house, grabbing souvenirs. One man strutted around with one of President Madison’s hats on his bayonet and boasted that he would parade it through the streets of London if they failed to capture “the little president.” Admiral Cockburn commandeered a portrait of Dolley and a cushion from one of her chairs, which inspired him to make vulgar comments about the size of the first lady’s derriere.
Tiring of their fun and games, the British got down to business. Under Admiral Cockburn’s direction, 150 men smashed out the windows and piled the furniture in the center of the various rooms. Outside, fifty of the marauders seized poles with oil-soaked rags on the ends and surrounded the house. At a signal from the admiral, men with torches ignited the rags and the poles were flung through the smashed windows like fiery spears. Within minutes a huge conflagration soared into the night sky. Not far away, the Americans had set the navy yard on fire, destroying numerous ships and warehouses full of uniforms, ammunition, and other war materiel. For a while, it looked as if all Washington was ablaze.
The next day, the British continued their depredations, burning the Treasury, the State and War Department, and other public buildings. But they were distracted and not a little spooked by a freak storm that suddenly erupted, with hurricane-force winds and violent thunder and lightning. Just before this display of nature’s seeming wrath, an ammunition dump on Greenleaf’s Point exploded while the British were preparing to destroy it. Thirty-five men were killed and forty-five suffered horrific injuries. The shaken British commanders decided to retreat to their ships.8
Meanwhile, Dolley received a note from Madison, urging her to join him in Virginia. After not a little wandering they were finally reunited. The president had barely slept in days. He had been in the saddle for five and six hours at a stretch. Dolley was deeply worried about his health. But he was determined to return to Washington as soon as possible, lest he be accused of cowardly flight. He insisted on Dolley staying in Virginia until he knew
the city was safe. The moment this surety was confirmed, “you cannot return too soon.” The words convey not only Madison’s need for her, but his awareness that Dolley was an equal and in some ways a more potent symbol of his presidency. A chance encounter with some Washington refugees amply confirmed this remarkable fact. When they saw Dolley, they cheered her.9
Four days later, Dolley was back in Washington with her husband. They found hospitality at the home of her sister Anna Payne Cutts, who had taken over their house on F Street. The sight of the ruined capitol—and the charred, blackened shell of the White House—was almost unbearable for Dolley. For several days she grew morose and tearful whenever she thought of them. But she soon regained her legendary self-control. She realized that the president needed her help. One friend who saw Madison at this time described him as “miserably shattered and woebegone…. he looks heartbroken.”10
The president saw the ravaging of Washington as a humiliating personal defeat. He felt betrayed by the incompetent general he had appointed and by the ragtag army that had abandoned him. He blamed the soldiers’ lack of courage on the deluge of insults and denunciations of “Mr. Madison’s War” from New England. The sneering Yankees had demoralized the country.
IV
Dolley undertook the task of restoring the president’s battered morale. He was being assailed by advice from friends and pseudo-friends urging him to move the government to a safer place. The common council of Philadelphia issued an invitation to return to their hospitality, declaring they were ready to offer buildings for both the president and Congress. Dolley fervently maintained they should stay in Washington and the president agreed with her. He issued a call for an emergency session of Congress to meet on September nineteenth. Meanwhile, Dolley persuaded the Federalist owner of a handsome brick dwelling on New York Avenue and 18th Street known as the Octagon House to let the Madisons use it as an official residence. She opened the social season there with a reception on September twenty-first that was so crowded, the proponents of deserting Washington were nonplused and not a little annoyed.11
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Page 46
