James and Dolley Madison (40 page)

In the morning, below deck, Dr. Beams asked Key what had happened to Fort McHenry. He asked him if the American flag was still there. Key went up to the deck, and, to his amazement, the American flag was still flying high over the battered walls of the fort. It had not been lowered; the Americans had withstood the horrific bombardment. Key scribbled a short poem as he looked at the flag over the fort and, later, expanded it. He called it “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and later it became America's national anthem.

By the end of 1814, the British and the Americans had problems that did not seem to be solvable. The British constantly had trouble supplying their troops and never could harness their sea power into a formidable force. They did hold Canada for most of the war but could never invade the New England states successfully. For every victory the British achieved, they later suffered huge defeats. By the summer of 1814, the Redcoats had seemed to establish their mastery of the battlefield, but then, in just a few months, they were defeated at Chippewa, Lundy's Lane, and Fort Erie. By the end of 1814, too, the war, added to the price of the Napoleonic Wars, was becoming costly—with little result.

In America, throughout the war, thousands of merchants and farmers illegally traded with the British. Smuggling had become a sport. One Massachusetts customs official said local merchants did so much illicit trade with the British that “his inspectors dare not now attempt to search stores or houses there, for smuggled goods, as the mass of the population are interested in their concealment and so far from giving assistance, threaten such oppositions as renders the attempt…futile.”
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Selling goods to the British was kept secret in most places, but in some, such as Provincetown, Massachusetts, it was quite open. Nearly sixty ships were engaged in carrying American goods out to British ships, where they were purchased by the Crown. “The fact is notorious,” wrote the editor of the
Lexington Reporter
in the summer of 1813, “that the very squadrons of the enemy now annoying our coast…derive their supplies form the very country which is the theater of their atrocities.”
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The president tried to stop the illegal sales of goods to England and open trade with the British with a new embargo that forbid American ships from leaving ports for worldwide trade and with a series of restrictive measures, such as closing all American ports to foreign ships unless three quarters of its crew were from that nation, forbidding the importation of most British goods, and
putting an end to the ransoming of captured ships. There were other, harsher, restrictions, but Congress would not pass them.

Both sides were harsh in the treatment of prisoners in 1813 and 1814. The British tossed some American prisoners into dank British prisons back in England, such as the notorious Dartmoor, which housed 6,500 Americans, most from New England, all of whom were treated badly. In one dispute, six American prisoners were shot dead by their guards. Letters home from Dartmoor outlined the terrible conditions there. “The return of our people from British prisons have filled the newspapers with tales of horror,” wrote the editor of
Niles Register
.
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President Madison threatened to execute British prisoners. The American press protested the confinement of Americans in England, and the British press screamed about threatened executions by Madison. “If Mr. Madison dare to retaliate by taking away the life of one English prisoner America puts herself out of the protection of the law of nations and must be treated as an outlaw,” complained the
London Courier
.
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By the end of 1814, both armies and navies had ground to a stalemate. America was simply too big to defeat, and Britain was too powerful to lose the war. Almost no progress was being made, and when it was, setbacks somewhere else in the war counterbalanced them. All was gloomy.

Everyone who visited Montpelier was amazed at the way the road, the very bumpy road, out of Orange Court House wound gracefully past streams and forests westward to the sprawling plantation. Carriages, wagons, and horses carried travelers to the 5,000-acre farm through forests of poplar trees, weeping willows, and stands of oak trees. They arrived from the west side, below the hill where the gracious mansion sat gently on top of a long ridge. If they arrived early in the morning, the sun crept over the tops of the forests and shone down on them. Just after he became president, in 1809, Madison added two spacious wings, one on the north side and one on the south, and finished his basement into a long set of additional spaces, with oversized rooms throughout the home to accommodate all of the guests who visited the president and his wife, many of whom stayed for days. When completed, Montpelier consisted of thirty-three rooms and 12,500 square feet.

Madison added the new wings to give the home a presidential look, although it was nowhere near as big as the White House. The north wing was turned into a large bedroom for the Madisons, plus another room, and the south wing added more living space for James Madison's aging mother, who previously lived in two rooms. It looked regal, like a palace awash in kings and queens in some far-off European country.

The front of the house impressed visitors. “You now pass through a gate into a large field & just before you is the house of Mr. Madison. It stands in a long slope of land, the country about it being somewhat diversified, a slat fence painted black with white posts surround the house at quite a respectable distance, curving in front,” wrote visitor George Shattuck.
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Charles Ingersoll, who visited later, after Madison had left office, said the house and its grounds resembled “something like a park” lined with white-thorn and red-bud trees. It was “a well looking house about half a mile off, the whole cleared and improved with trees in clumps and other signs of ornamental agriculture,” he wrote. In summer, the pillars of the front portico were encircled by roses and strands of jasmine that climbed up to the second-floor terrace.
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Harriet Martineau, who visited around the same time as Ingersoll, enjoyed Montpelier but said the surrounding area was dismal. “For the greater part of the way, all looked very desolate; the few dwellings were dingy. The trees were bare, the soil one dull red, the fences shabby,” she wrote.
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The lawn behind the home was filled with trellises overwhelmed with plants climbing their way up them. The forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains were about fifty yards behind the house. A tin cup that was used to measure rainfall hung near the front gate. A mill and several farm buildings sat about one hundred yards from the house, near a creek that connected to the Rapidan River.

A small village of slave homes stretched away from the home to the south, along with farm sheds, a building for the outdoor kitchen, smokehouses, and fruit orchards. To the southeast was a formal garden, designed by Frenchman Monsieur Charles Bizet, where the Madisons and visitors often strolled. The garden was started just after Madison's first inauguration and was completed shortly afterward.

Inside, visitors found numerous changes to the home from before Madison's elevation to the highest office in the land. In his first-floor parlor, where guests were greeted once they entered the mansion through an interior lobby, the president had installed a number of white, marble busts of famous people and had hung large portraits of Napoleon and other people, which were purchased by Payne Todd in 1816 on a trip to Europe. More large portraits hung in a second parlor behind the main parlor that was often turned into a bedroom for guests. The floors of the hallways were continually washed and waxed by servants. Visitors were surprised at Madison's collection of busts and portraits. The walls of one entire first-floor hallway were lined with portraits of famous people. Anna Thornton thanked him for “displaying a taste for the arts which is rarely to be found in such retired and remote situations.”
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Several new fireplaces had been built in the home to provide more heat for the expanded structure. The new, wooden dining-room table was large enough for a dozen people to sit around it, and more tables were set up in the room and in the hall when more guests were there. There were splashes of red included in the color scheme to reflect Dolley's favorite hue.
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Upstairs, Madison turned the flat rooftops of each of his two new wings into outdoor terraces. Jefferson designed the Chinese railings, painted white, that stood on the perimeters of the terraces. Both rooftop terraces were used for parties in spring and summer, and guests were urged to spend time there. Anyone standing or sitting on the terrace had a view of the tobacco fields and the mountains in the distance.

The south terrace also overlooked a second street of new slaves homes, built around the time that Madison was first inaugurated. The large, rectangular houses were designed by Madison as duplexes, with living space upstairs and downstairs. All of the twenty-three domestic slaves who worked with Dolley in the house lived there because it was close by. Madison had architectural suggestions from Thomas Jefferson in the renovations of the main house in both 1797 and 1808–1809. He used some of his ideas and discarded others because he wanted a presidential home, but not a second Monticello. Madison employed two design and construction chiefs, James Dinsmore and John Nielson, to complete the renovations in 1808 and 1809; and he paid for them both with his $25,000 salary as president and out of his own funds.

The home was the centerpiece of his farm. Montpelier sat in the Piedmont area of western Virginia and was on Davidson soil, special, rich, natural dirt that was considered to be among the best in America for raising crops.

Getting to Montpelier had always been a chore. It was a tiring and tedious three-day trip from Washington by wagon, carriage, or horseback. All of that ended when Madison was elected president, though. Many families in Virginia invited the Madisons to stay at their houses on the way to Montpelier, and there were festivals for them from the capital all the way to Orange Court House. In the summer of 1811, for example, the First Couple left Washington, accompanied by militia troops, to the bridge that led to Alexandria. Virginia troops met them and escorted them over the bridge in a parade attended by hundreds of well-wishers. That night there was a dinner and a ball in Alexandria to honor them. Then, on the way to Montpelier, they stayed two nights at the homes of a wealthy friend and were lavishly entertained on both evenings. The Madisons always traveled in style; it was good to be the president.
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Visitors to Montpelier found the president and his wife far more relaxed there than in Washington. “It was five o'clock when we arrived and met at the door by Mr. M who led us into the dining room where some gentlemen were still smoking cigars and drinking wine. The [stress of each day was] dispelled by the cheering smile of Mr. Madison. Then Mrs. Madison entered the moment afterwards and after embracing took my hand,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith.

Later, Mrs. Madison took Smith to her room upstairs. She sat on the sofa.
Dolley pulled her up by her hands and placed her on the wide, comfortable bed, then jumped up in the air and landed on the bed next to her, laughing heartily. “Wine, ice, punch and delightful pineapples were immediately brought [to us]. No restraint, no ceremony. Hospitality is the presiding genius of this house and Mrs. M is kindness personified,” Smith added.
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Friends could not wait to get there. Anna Thornton thought that on all her visits to Montpelier. “We shall turn our backs on this dull tho' great city [Washington] and greet with joy our beloved friends beyond the mountains,” she wrote.
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Montpelier was always filled to capacity with relatives and visitors. The average number of people staying in the home when the Madisons were in residence ranged from twenty to twenty-six, and sometimes more. Madison was one of seven remaining children, and each of them had large families. Most of the children were old enough to travel by the time he was president, and Madison welcomed them whenever they arrived. James Madison's nieces and nephews stayed with him for days and weeks on end. He supported many of them with gifts of horses and clothing, gave them loans, and even paid for the college tuitions of some. One was nephew Robert Madison. The president paid his way through Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania. Madison's favorite was niece Nelly Conway Willis, who continued to live at her plantation just a few miles from Montpelier after her husband died. She had fifteen slaves whom her father gave her in his will and brought some of them to Montpelier when she visited. She was often at the Madison estate, and the president rode to her home frequently. Neighbors nicknamed a large tree in front of her home “the president's tree” because Madison always tied his horse up there when he visited. Also, his sister Sarah gave birth to nine children and visited Montpelier frequently, bringing all of them with her.

Dolley had three sisters and three brothers. The two older brothers drifted away from her, but her three sisters and John Payne remained close. Anna, her husband, and their children visited often, and so did Lucy after her husband, Judge Todd, died in 1826. The Madison and Todd relatives always brought their children to Montpelier; there were often more than a dozen kids in the house at any one time. Madison's marriage gave him a stepson, Payne, and a fourteen-year-old sister-in-law, Anna, who had lived with them until her wedding. Dolley's other sisters lived with them at Montpelier for long periods of time, too. In addition to this, they all lived in his private home in Washington, and in the White House, for years, bringing their own children back with them to stay for weeks and months at a time. When those children became adults, they then brought their own kids to the Madisons' homes. The president also had the company of the children of his friends and relatives in Orange County.

Dolley loved the children and never complained of the noise they made. “I should not have known that they were here,” she said to a friend. “At this moment, we have only [twenty-three] in the house. We have house rooms aplenty.” She always encouraged friends and relatives to bring their children with them on visits.
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As a child, President Madison had been part of a very large family with twelve children. Montpelier was a small home then, with only a few bedrooms. They were quite crowded with the twelve noisy children. The dozen siblings played together, rode horses together, and visited friends and relatives with their family. It was a large and happy family.
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He had always wanted a family like that when he became an adult. Madison was a man who, until the age of forty-three, had no prospects of a family, and then a limited one due to his apparent sterility. But through circumstance, and to his joy, he wound up with one of the largest and most boisterous families in the country. The president's Montpelier was a home teeming with loud and energetic children racing through the halls and across the lawns. They loved their uncle, who, with his wife, did everything he could for them. The ones who gave him grief, such as Payne and brother-in-law John, the president put up with and assisted whenever he could, never complaining about them to outsiders.

Dolley's brother John, who remained an alcoholic all of his life, lived a few miles away with his eight children on a farm that Madison helped him purchase. His meager income from farming was augmented by a salary the president paid him to help with paperwork. Even though he lived nearby, John was often late in arriving at Montpelier and often disappeared for weeks, as he had done over the years. In the late summer of 1811, Dolley complained to her sister that “John was to follow us directly but three weeks gone by & he has not come. You may guess at my anxiety. He set out from Washington several days ago for Orange but he lingers, I know not where.”
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After John died, three of his children moved to Montpelier permanently, and the other five lived there much of the year. They were all at Montpelier often during Madison's presidency. Dolley's youngest sister, Mary, married John Jackson, a Republican congressman. She died in 1808, and her daughter, Mary, began to spend a lot of time at Montpelier. She practically lived there permanently after 1825. Sister Anna and her children were usually at Montpelier each summer, as her husband, Richard Cutts, struggled through one financial crisis after another throughout the war and afterward. He lost his investments in a shipping company in the war, along with $5,000 Madison had loaned him. He owed a significant amount of money, went bankrupt, and even spent time in debtors' prison. He nearly lost his home in Washington, but the Madisons, with a loan, saved it for him.

The Madisons were constantly visited at Montpelier by senators, congressmen, governors, and other officials while he was president. That's why he expanded the house. Ironically, during some years as president, he spent only a week on Montpelier because presidential business was so pressing. When he did travel to his plantation, he used it as the “summer White House,” working from his office, his bedroom, the front porch, the backyard, or the library, which grew even larger with books that visitors gave him as gifts. Dolley hosted parties for all, whether relatives, friends, or politicians. The most important people in the country dined side by side with her nieces and nephews and friends from Orange Court House. One summer, she had ninety guests for dinner; extra tables were set up in different rooms of the home. In another summer, the Madisons had nearly fifty unexpected visitors one night and had to feed and entertain them. Sometimes at large barbecues or parties the president and his wife had so many guests, and so few cots in the house, that they set up tents in the fields in front of the mansion, where the guests stayed overnight.