First Ladies (6 page)

With the public's curiosity divided between the president and his wife, the weaknesses of one partner could be offset by the strengths of the other. James Madison, who could be appealing in private but appear disinterested around people he did not know, gained from Dolley's ability to charm almost everyone. Washington Irving, who attended a Madison reception soon after he arrived in the capital in 1811, captured the difference when he described Dolley as “a fine, portly buxom dame who has a smile and pleasant word for everybody … but as to Jemmy Madison, ah poor Jemmy—he is but a withered little applejohn.”
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The president preferred an inconspicuous seat at the dinner table so he could avoid having to play the host, and his guests frequently went away thinking he had not even noticed them. “He had no leisure for the ladies,” one woman complained.
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With considerable skill, Dolley Madison could pick out guests who were uncomfortable and quickly put them at ease. One young man, so confused by the acrobatics of a president's party that he dropped his saucer and then, in desperation, stuffed his cup in his pocket, looked up to see a smiling Dolley Madison coming toward him. “The crowd is so great,” she reassured him, “that no one can avoid being jostled.”
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But Dolley's entertaining had its political side as well because she showed the skills of a candidate running for office, rarely forgetting a name or making an inappropriate comment. Aware of the criticism that had surrounded Abigail Adams, Dolley sought to avoid appearing an “active partisan,”
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and she showered her husband's enemies with
the same attention that she gave his friends. Frances Few, who visited the capital during Dolley's first season, pointed to her inscrutability when she wrote: “It is impossible to know what Mrs. Madison is thinking because she tried to be all things to all men.”
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Some critics claimed that Dolley paid too much attention to other men; one White House visitor reported that the president's wife had told an old bachelor that she was “no prude, and then held up her mouth for him to kiss.”
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A political opponent had hinted broadly during a campaign that James “had impaired” himself “by an unfortunate matrimonial connection,”
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but such attacks were rare. Dolley Madison achieved a popularity that her successors would envy for decades to come.

The reputation resulted from more than the style of her parties. In delicate political maneuvering, she could soften a cruel dismissal. After her husband eased Robert Smith, secretary of state, out of his cabinet in 1811, she gave a dinner in Smith's honor. When Smith failed to appear, Dolley took her sister and “called twice,” Smith wrote, “with professions of great affection.”
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Dolley Madison's task became more difficult as the presidential election of 1812 approached. James Madison's first term had not been easy. Both the British and French had continued to interfere with American shipping on the Atlantic, and boundary disputes with Indians erupted frequently in the Great Lakes region. Yet James very much wanted another term and Dolley remained optimistic about his chances. As early as December 1811, she had observed that “the intrigues for President and Vice President [for the 1812 election] go on,” but she correctly predicted victory: “I think it may terminate as the last did.”
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In the summer of 1812, James Madison declared war on Great Britain, and the election a few months later became, in part, a referendum on the incumbent's decision to fight. Opposition Federalists in New England termed this “Mr. Madison's War” and prepared to ship their goods through Canada. In the election, they aligned with dissidents from the president's own Democratic-Republicans in an attempt to defeat him, and they nearly succeeded. When the results came in, James Madison had won but not by much. Had he failed to take one large state, such as Pennsylvania, his opponent, DeWitt Clinton, would have moved into the White House.

Dolley well understood the importance of keeping discontented congressmen in line so that they would not be tempted to vote for the opponent. Six months before the election, she wrote her sister that a large number of legislators were, “all offended [with Madison] and refused to dine with him,” but a week later she had them there “in a
large body.”
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James Blaine, who later tried for the presidency himself, credited Dolley with a large share in her husband's 1812 victory. Her cheerful impartiality brought the disenchanted around, Blaine wrote, and she convinced them to stick with the incumbent.
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James Blaine may have overstated the case (he was, of course, not an observer of the events he described), but historians who have carefully studied the Madison administration tend to agree that Dolley proved a valuable asset to her husband. In the continuing debate between a democratic chief executive and a regal one, she played both sides; and for every critic who thought she went too far on one side, she acquired an admirer on the other. One woman described approvingly how the Madisons maintained a royal setting at their parties where custom dictated that each female guest “courtesy [
sic
] to ‘His Highness' [the President] and then find a seat,”
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but a senator from Massachusetts stressed the egalitarianism at the Madisons' parties. For his tastes, Dolley went a bit too far in implementing democracy, mixing “all classes of people … from the Minister from Russia to under clerks of the post office and the printer of a paper—greasy boots and silk stockings … [with some of the women] giving the impression of ‘high life below the stairs.' “
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Such contrasting evaluations of Dolley Madison led one historian to conclude that she was “brilliant in the things she did not say or do.”
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Moreover, the things she did do, even actions deemed inappropriate for her peers, merely earned her more accolades. Stained fingers left little doubt that she used snuff, not an acceptable habit for nineteenth-century ladies but one that was excused in her. “In her hands the snuffbox, seems only a gracious implement with which to charm,” one woman offered in Dolley's defense,
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and another admirer described the snuffbox as a “perfect security from hostility as bread and salt [are] among many savage tribes.”
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Some of Dolley's observers considered the possibility that she used cosmetics, with some deciding that she surely “painted,” while others offered evidence that her heightened color resulted from natural enthusiasm. “I do not think it true [that she uses cosmetics],” one contemporary wrote, “I saw her color come and go at the naval ball.”
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The desire to cultivate political support for her husband sent Dolley out visiting all the congressmen's families who moved to Washington. The fact that she called first was important—it signaled humility in the president's attitude toward legislators. But the number of congressmen and their aides had grown since the days of Martha Washington and Abigail Adams, and the congressional election of 1810 had brought to the capital a large, new group from the West.

The expectation that Dolley would not only call on each family but also invite them to the President's House imposed a large burden even on someone who thrived on playing the hostess. “We have members in abundance with their wives and daughters,” Dolley wrote to friends in Paris, “[and] I have never felt the entertainment of company oppressive until now.”
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Although often perfunctory (with Dolley leaving her carriage only long enough to drop her card on the silver tray in the front hall), the calls took her from one end of Washington's unpaved streets to the other, consuming entire days so that she had only Sundays for herself. Yet tampering with tradition carried political risks that she understood all too well, since any family slighted might take revenge on her husband.

Dolley's successor, Elizabeth Monroe, was another story, however, and she acted to reduce dramatically the social obligations of all future First Ladies. The results of the 1816 election had hardly come in when it became clear that Elizabeth Monroe had no intention of allowing her daily schedule to be dictated by others, certainly not by the provincial wives of midwestern congressmen. Born to wealthy New Yorkers, she was acquainted with the courts of Europe, having accompanied her husband, James Monroe, when he held diplomatic posts in both Paris and London. She meant to guard her schedule against “democratic” encroachments.

If Dolley Madison was a First Lady of the people, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe was anything but. Extremely reticent, she preferred privacy and insisted on elegance. Parisians had dubbed her “la belle américaine” when she lived among them in the 1790s, and it was generally agreed that she had retained her spectacular beauty at age fifty-four when her husband became president. Portraits made of her at that time show a regal woman, dark and poised, flattered by the new fashions that exposed more arm and breast than had previously been considered proper. She preferred to order her dresses from France and reportedly paid $1,500 per costume for the privilege.
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Her exquisite clothing, remarkable both for its design and workmanship, later added interest to the popular Smithsonian exhibition on First Ladies, but it produced a great deal of envy among her contemporaries.

Elizabeth Monroe's final indiscretion, in the eyes of many Washingtonians, was to appear much younger than her age. One indignant woman complained: “Mrs. Monroe [has] an appearance of youth which would induce a stranger to suppose her age to be 30, in lieu of which, she introduces them to her granddaughter 18 or 19 years old.”
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Fifty years old at the time, Elizabeth Monroe had one granddaughter, then age twelve. There was then some exaggeration in the
statement, but it was generally agreed that she appeared much younger than her years. Since the use of cosmetics still carried the taint of wickedness, long debates ensued as to how much of her attractiveness resulted from nature and how much from “paint.”
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Even while her husband served as secretary of state (1809–1817), Elizabeth Monroe had made clear that she expected to have little to do with the wives of other department heads, and, after seven years in the capital, she and her husband remained “perfect strangers,” one social leader wrote, “not only to me but all citizens.”
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James's elevation to the presidency caused no deviation in the Monroes' custom. Some hope prevailed that invitations to the President's House would flow more freely after the mansion, destroyed in the 1814 burning of Washington by the British, had been rebuilt. However, Elizabeth's handling of her daughter's wedding ended that speculation.

In a “first” for a president's family, Maria, the younger of the two Monroe daughters, was married in 1820, and many Washingtonians expected to find their names on the wedding guest list. This was the chance, reasoned congressmen and diplomats, for the president to make them all one family, sharing the festivities associated with the nuptials. Dolley Madison would doubtless have complied, so dedicated she remained to maintaining political harmony, but Elizabeth Monroe had other ideas. She insisted that the wedding remain strictly private, and she invited only the family's closest friends. Later presidents' sons and especially their daughters, who chose to be married in small ceremonies even though their parents happened to reside at the White House, might well thank Elizabeth Monroe's stubbornness. She resisted all requests that she increase the number of guests invited, and when the diplomatic corps persisted, she dispatched the secretary of state to set them straight.

Such open refusal on the part of a president's wife to court public favor puzzled observers during the first Monroe administration; during her husband's second term, when Elizabeth put even more distance between herself and everyone else, the public reaction became severe. She stayed away from Washington for months at a time visiting her two married daughters. Such absences might have caused little more than speculation about her marital felicity, as happened when Jackie Kennedy took long vacations from the White House in the 1960s, but Elizabeth Monroe's behavior had more serious repercussions. The old rule still prevailed that no women guests came to the President's House in the absence of a hostess. This meant that wives and daughters who had accompanied congressmen to Washington had to keep their party dresses put away until Elizabeth
Monroe chose to make an appearance. Her absence caused, one Massachusetts senator wrote home, “no little mortification and disappointment [among the] ladies.”
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At the stag dinners of President Monroe, who had no reputation for conversational brilliance, long silences and early departures became the pattern.
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Left with much of the detail of running the White House, the president, rather than his wife, received the blame for mishandling furniture purchases. Just before James Monroe's inauguration in 1817, Congress had appropriated $20,000 for furnishing the rebuilt mansion and then two years later, another $30,000. Deeming furniture selection an official responsibility, he assigned the job jointly to his commissioner of public buildings, Colonel Lane, and to the auditor of the Treasury, William Lee. While the president waited impatiently for the new furniture to arrive from Europe, he offered the loan of his own fine pieces, acquired during his years in France.

The money exchanges that followed became so confused that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams expressed unqualified dismay. President Monroe accepted money from the furniture account, paid it back, then took it again.
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When Colonel Lane died in 1823, his personal finances were so tangled, with so much public money missing, that Congressman John Cocke of Tennessee called for an investigation. In the end, stuffy John Quincy Adams concluded that the president had done nothing wrong but had, nevertheless, exposed himself to embarrassment “almost as incongruous to the station of a President of the United States as it would be to a blooming virgin to exhibit herself naked before a multitude.”
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