James and Dolley Madison (22 page)

That night, in yet another precedent-setting change, the first inaugural ball in Washington was held as a formal activity at the new, large Long's Hotel in the downtown area of the city. Over four hundred dignitaries and local residents attended. Mr. Madison arrived a bit late with Dolley on his arm. She was radiant in a long gown of yellow velvet, her neck and arms adorned in pearls. She wore a turban on her head with an outrageous bird-of-paradise plume sticking out of it. All eyes were on her as she entered and the orchestra played. “She looked like a queen…dignity, sweetness, grace,” wrote a woman there.
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Dolley stood out, as she always did, but now, in the winter of 1809, there were far more well-dressed women in Washington than there had been when she arrived in town in 1801. There were many more women's clothing stores in Washington and the nearby towns, and newspapers now wrote about ladies' fashion, and Dolley's example had spurred many women to dress up. No one had to fear criticism for opulence; after all, the First Lady dressed that way.

The hall in the hotel where the inaugural ball was held was overheated, and the temperature rose as more and more guests arrived. Everybody at the ball began to get uncomfortable. There did not seem to be a way to drop the temperature, so the clerks finally broke the glass windows to permit air to flow in from the capital's night sky. After that, the guests breathed easier and danced all night.

While the inaugural ball did wonders for Dolley's reputation, as did everything, it hurt the new president's image. The ballroom of the hotel was very crowded, and the short Madison often became lost in the crowd. He was trying to draw attention and had to contend with the dynamic Jefferson, there at the ball to say good-bye to everyone. And Madison, working all day on his inaugural address; delivering it; and then spending the rest of the day with receptions, celebrations, and parties, was tired. Even his friends frowned on his appearance.
Margaret Bayard Smith said he looked “spiritless and exhausted” and added that he “looked as if could scarcely stand.”
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He told all around him that he wished he could go to bed. And he did. He and his wife left the party while the revelers continued to dance and drink—and talk about the new president's very early departure.

Madison could not, at first, escape withering criticism from some, even supposed “friends.” Frances Few, Albert Gallatin's sister-in-law, scalded Madison when he took office. “Mr. Madison, the President-elect, is a small man quite devoid of dignity in his appearance—he bows very low and never looks at the person to whom he is bowing but keeps his eyes on the ground. His skin looks like parchment—at first I thought his appearance was occasioned by the small pox,” she said.
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Alexander Dick wrote that President Madison was “a very small man…he seems to be incapable of smiling but talks a great deal.”
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Joseph Story, soon to be a Supreme Court judge, went to several of the Madison receptions. He thought the president felt like a duck out of water at social events. He said that Madison at parties “has grace and sober character and retired life lead him far from the pleasantries of a coterie.” Many who met him described him sarcastically. “She looks like an Amazon; he like one of the puny knights of Lilliputia,” sneered one.
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Historian Gaillard Hunt, who edited Madison's papers and probably knew him better than most scholars, agreed. “He was an old, sour eyed man” when he became president, Hunt wrote. “There was never any dash or fire of youth in him.” But yet, Hunt said, as everybody who knew the president when he was in office remarked that there were two James Madisons.

“His charm was unassailable,” Hunt wrote, and he added that he had hazel eyes that twinkled and a voice that could be very animated. Madison was, to those who knew him well, “an inexhaustible mine of information, frank, communicative.” And, too, they all added, he had “good teeth” and a “nice smile.”
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Catharine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams, met Madison just after he was inaugurated. She was struck by his size, like everybody else. “Mr. Madison was a very small man in his person, with a very large head,” she said, but quickly added that he was an unassuming man with a “lively, often playful conversation.”
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Part of his problem, too, some said, was that his wife was so charismatic, so stylish, and so personable that whenever she was in the room with the president, she always overwhelmed him. That was fine with her husband, but it made it difficult for him to establish himself when in a crowd with his wife. Mrs. Adams noticed that, too. “There was a frankness and ease in her deportment that won golden opinions from all, and she possessed an influence so decided with her little man,” she said.
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And, too, Madison followed Jefferson into office. Jefferson was leaving in glory as the man who annexed all of the Louisiana Territory and defeated the Barbary pirates. The end of his second term had been trouble-free and peaceful, and Madison was coming into a term that might lead the nation into a war with England. British writer Harriet Martineau, who met Madison years later, wrote that if he had not followed Jefferson in office, he might have been considered a great president.
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Friends scoffed at the criticism. “If he does not guide the helm successfully, the requisite qualifications for that station cannot be found on earth,” snapped brother-in-law John Jackson.
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When he took office, the town's and nation's newspapers wondered how he would do. The editor of the
Washington Expositor
, like many, told him not to listen to his advisers and do what he thought was best for the nation. He wrote that “you will either be at once proclaimed by shouts and hosannas as the second savior of the liberties of the United States or you will stand charged and justly loaded with all the evil consequences upon that state of public affairs which shall shake the very existence of the union and overwhelm the peace and happiness of the country…like all men going into power, your virtues are now trumpeted forth and there are not wanting characters, and a good many of them, who are prepared to assure you that you are transcendentally great.”
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The Federalist press was critical, but Madison paid little attention to them. Jefferson had ignored them, too, but in private he admitted that the criticism hurt. One had to expect “the extreme of their wrath,” he wrote Levi Lincoln in 1801.
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“The laws of the present day withhold their hands from blood, but lies and slander still remain to them.”

President Jefferson told Madison that he would be a fine president and told all Americans with confidence that “what man can do will be done by Mr. Madison.” His beaming smile at Madison's swearing in, and congratulations to him at the ball, reminded all of their deep friendship. “I do believe father never loved son as more than he loves Mr. Madison,” wrote Margaret Smith.
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Jefferson left town shortly after the ceremonies. The third president simply saddled a horse and headed home to Monticello. He left Washington amid a torrent of praise and thanks from Republican newspapers. “As members of a great and flourishing nation, over which you have so illustriously presided, your virtue, talents and service commanded their esteem, admiration and gratitude,” wrote Robert Brent in the
Aurora
.
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Thomas Jefferson and his friend would keep in close touch over the coming years. They were so friendly that Jefferson would ask Madison to bring him clothes that he had left in the White House the next time Madison visited him
at Monticello. Few people in American public life were as close as the pair. They were so attached that Dolley was at Monticello when Jefferson's alleged illegitimate son with Sally Hemings was born in 1803. The story went that Sally asked Dolley if she could name the boy Madison, after her husband. Dolley approved heartily (another version of the story has Jefferson just doing it and telling a delighted Madison later). Madison said that he had known Jefferson as “a luminary of science as a votary of liberty, as a model of patriotism, and as a benefactor of human kind. I have known him…for a period of…years…during which there was not an interruption or diminution of mutual confidence and cordial friendship, for a single moment in a single instance.”
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Jefferson was glad to be back at Monticello and as far away from Washington as his horse could carry him. His party had fallen into infighting among different factions, and the oppression of Britain against American merchant ships on the high seas had increased during his last two years in office to the point where it was insufferable. Now he could have breakfast at Monticello, take a walk, look down over the forested valleys that surrounded him, and ignore the rapidly growing problems of Washington. “Never did a prisoner, released from his chains, feel such relief as I shall in shaking off the shackles of power,” he said of his retirement.
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President Madison faced a world that had changed considerably since he wrote the Constitution and lobbied to get it ratified by writing most of the essays in the Federalist papers and campaigning with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay to have it approved in all the state conventions. Now, in the winter of 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte was wreaking havoc with his wars in Europe, the government of the Caribbean-island nation of Haiti had been overthrown in a slave revolt, the Russian oligarchy grew, and England had started to harass American shipping once again. At home, the invention of the cotton gin and the profitability of farm products had brought about a dramatic increase in slavery in the southern states. The size of the country had doubled with the Louisiana Purchase; two political parties now ran the country, with the Federalists in decline and the Republicans on the rise; newspapers had increased by tenfold, and many of them were controlled by Federalists and were highly critical of the Jefferson/Madison government; hundreds of political clubs of all kinds had started to appear; the Supreme Court was feeling its power; cities had exploded in population; and the Industrial Revolution had started, pitting farmers against manufacturers. Young men and women had started to leave their families and farms to find jobs in the burgeoning cities. The failed embargo had pitted many American business and interest groups against the federal government.

America was, in 1809, settling in as a country of many factions struggling
to succeed individually and, together, as a nation. It was exactly the kind of country Madison had envisioned when he wrote the Constitution and the kind of diversified population, driven by religious, social, and political factions he had foreseen. His Republican government, on paper, had been realized. All of these factions, no matter how loud or aggressive they became, would push hard against the fabric of democracy, but not tear it. He was certain that a large government, designed to represent everybody, would hold up under the pressures of many new and very vocal opponents.

It was a stressful time to become president. The embargo had failed, Britain had continued to impress seaman, and now, it seemed, the United States had no means by which to stop them from establishing draconian rule of the sea. “Aversion to war, the inconveniences produced by or charged on the embargo, the hope of favorable changes in Europe, the dread of civil convulsions in the East and the policy of permitting the discontented to be reclaimed to their duty by losses at sea,” Madison wrote, telling friends that these all contributed to the weakness of the new Non-Intercourse Act.
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He had written Jefferson in 1787 that those who believed that all Americans had the same interests were wrong. “We know, however, that no society ever did or can consist of so homogeneous a mass of citizens…. In all civilized societies, distinctions are various and unavoidable. A distinction of property results from that very protection which a free government gives to unequal faculties for acquiring it…[there are also] differences in political, religious or other opinions, or an attachment to the persons of leading individuals,” he wrote.
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Madison had said the same thing in his essay “Federalist #10,” when he told newspaper readers that a large government would function like a big tent, expansive enough to cover all, no matter what their political and social beliefs. The government would change as the people under the tent changed, too, so it would always work well.

Now Madison was in charge of the government itself and the head of it at a time when there were far more factions than he had ever anticipated and more acrimony between the factions than he had ever envisioned. Now he had to hold it together. He could do so not with his starry-eyed dreams but with practical political skills. It would be a challenge for him just as it had been for Jefferson, Adams, and Washington.

His critics said he made one great mistake as president. Madison had misread the British from the day he became secretary of state back in 1801. They were not going to back down over anything, and he never realized that. And, too, his archenemies said, he was a president of a struggling country who had absolutely no administrative experience. He had been a long-term congressman
and a long-term secretary of state, but he never actually ran anything like Jefferson, who had been a governor, and Washington, who had run the army for eight long years.
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What kind of a president was America getting? James Madison had been a figure on the public stage since the 1770s, and yet few truly understood him. Critics had numerous complaints about him. In public, they said, he seemed a quiet and staid figure, soft-spoken, reluctant to give speeches, happy to bathe in the glory of his wife and not take center stage himself. Many thought he was not able to make decisions and, when made, would not stand by them. He was good working for somebody else, but not good at being in charge. He was a magnificent counsel but not a capable leader. He was cold and cheerless. He took a very long time to make a decision. He did not want to offend anybody. Madison seemed to rely more on his aides in the State Department than on himself. He never stepped forward and always remained in his friend Jefferson's shadow.