James and Dolley Madison (44 page)

The Madisons joined guests for dinner around 4 p.m. each day. Dinner usually lasted until 6 p.m. or so, depending on how many visitors were at the table. Visitors loved dinners because Madison, far more cheerful among friends and relatives than strangers, regaled everyone with stories from his life, which, of course, featured the most famous and important men and women in the world. Margaret Bayard Smith said that at these dinners, guests listened to “living history” and added that she had been with Madison at other times, with strangers, when the president was cold and repulsive.

A visitor to Montpelier, H. D. Gilpin, who visited him in retirement, said that Madison looked good. “[He] is quite a short, thin man, with his head bald except on the back, where his hair hangs down to his collar and over his ears, nicely powdered, old as he is…and seems very hale and hearty. The expression of his face is full of good humor. He was dressed in black, with breeches and old-fashioned top boots…looked very nice.” Then Dolley arrived with panache, as she always did. Gilpin wrote that she was “quite stylish in a turban and fine gown. She has a great deal of dignity blended with good humor and knowledge of the world.”
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After dinner was over, guests would join the Madisons in the parlor during wintertime, or on the front porch or in the flower-filled back gardens during the spring and summer months. They would spend two hours or more talking about the events of the day, friends, and family.

Madison spent much of the time talking to guests about his own career, the War of 1812, and current politics. It was then, when darkness began to slowly fall over the Blue Ridge Mountains, that the real James Madison emerged, the colorful and funny raconteur who loved to tell stories and listen to a good joke. It was at these after dinner discussions that Madison let down what little hair he had left. The talks were especially engaging when he had old friends from his political days at his side, a glass of wine in their hands. People like Jefferson,
Monroe, and Henry Clay, relaxing in large, comfortable chairs, joined Madison in stories of presidents and wars and Congress and arrogant diplomats. They sat for hours, engaging all with the stories of the United States they had made. Their tales soared with drama and shook with humor. It was there, with the sun setting on the hills and with close friends and old political allies around him, that James Madison shone.

The president also loved to talk just after breakfast, before the sun drenched the fields in front of his home. Paulding sat with him many mornings that first summer of retirement. “I seat myself on the western portico, looking towards the Blue Ridge, while Mr. Madison would commence a conversation sometimes on public affairs, in connection with his previous public life, in which he spoke without reserve & from which I gathered lessons of wise practical experience, sometimes in literary and philosophical subject and not infrequently, for he was a capital story teller, he would relate anecdotes highly amusing as well as interesting. He was a man of wit, relished wit in others & his small bright blue eyes would twinkle most wickedly when lighted up by some whimsical conception or exposition.”
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Dolley had always enjoyed gardening at Montpelier and in retirement had plenty of time for it. She worked as hard in her fruit-filled gardens, which were next to the house, as Madison did in the fields. She wrote one of her nieces, “our garden promises grapes and figs in abundance but I shall not enjoy them unless your mamma comes and brings you to help us with them,” she wrote, adding that a frost had killed most of her green peas.
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Work outdoors did not diminish Dolley's beauty. Many thought the gardening, and the hours on her knees and hands caked in dirt made her even more attractive. Margaret Bayard Smith saw her in the gardens in 1827. “Time seems to favor her as much as fortune. She looks young and she says she feels so. I can believe her, not do I think she will ever look or feel like an old woman,” she wrote.
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The president also spent a considerable amount of time discussing farming with guests. All considered him one of the best farmers in Virginia and listened intently to his advice. He told visitors to carefully irrigate and rotate their crops, maintain large forests for firewood, and keep a careful eye on what produce England and European countries needed. That was how he had become so successful. For example, the European need for wheat had dropped throughout the recent war, so Madison shifted over and grew tobacco.

He also experimented with seeds to grow new crops, such as those Jefferson brought him from Monticello. He grew strains of new wheat and corn from seeds sent to him from friends in South America. He produced his own special
ears of corn and then sent boxes of them to Monroe and other friends so that they could use them for their own experimentation.
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The former president went into detailed discussions of farming equipment—how much of it he had and how he had always tinkered with it in order to make farm machines more suitable for Virginia soil than for soil they had been tried out upon in New England and the Middle Atlantic States. One example was a plow invented by George Logan in Philadelphia in 1793. Madison and workers fused together the two parts of the plow, making it one machine. He wrote Jefferson that “the detached form may answer best in old, clean ground but will not stand the shocks of our rough & rooty land, especially in the hands of our ploughmen.” In another note, he wrote that “I have tried the patent plow amended by fixing the colter in the usual way. It succeeds perfectly and I think forms the plow best suited to its object.”
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As a farmer, Madison often experimented with his livestock to create new breeds. He tried to breed ordinary sheep with imported Merino sheep that were rams. The president was one of several farmers in Virginia who did that. George Washington had inbred types of buffalo.

At postdinner discussions with friends about agriculture, Madison said that he also believed that farmers led better lives and lived longer. He said the exposure to plants and trees, and just walking about in fresh air all day, was healthy. The president told his friends and relatives that hard farming made men stronger psychologically as well as physically. Farm work was good for the body and the soul. He reminded all, too, that he had farms in other areas of Virginia and in Kentucky. He and Dolley owned a home in Washington as well as Montpelier and, he said quietly, they had nearly one hundred slaves. He thought that depressions and recessions would not hurt the Madisons because they had large assets. He was wrong on that. A depression in farming in the 1820s and early 1830s, plus several bad harvests highlighted by lengthy frosts and a lack of rain, plus general crop failure, plus an economic downturn, did cause him severe financial problems—as did his practice of paying for relatives' college tuitions and covering the bills of his brother-in-law John and stepson, Payne. The reason that he survived the depression was that he had so much land that he could sell off 100-acre patches of it for several thousand dollars each and use that money to pay bills, retire the debts of family members, cover college tuitions, and simply hand out money to friends and relatives—even though there were many who asked for it. Jefferson and Monroe barely broke even on their farms each year, even with an unpaid workforce of slaves. Others, who went bankrupt, left the county and moved somewhere else in Virginia or to another state.
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When the postmeal talks ended, around nine or so in the evening, everyone was escorted upstairs to bed by the servants. If there was a large crowd of overnight guests, the servants would bring out beds and set them up in rooms or in the hallways. In hot weather, doors and windows were flung open for ventilation, much like they had in the times of Madison's presidency.

Madison loved to sit on his front porch and look out over his land in the morning; so did Dolley. Sometimes his wife reminisced about their days in Washington with friends and said she would like to move back there. She missed the parties and the politics. She told her niece Dolley that she was happy in her “quiet retreat,” but missed the “maneuverings and gossip of the old days” at White House socials. She missed Richmond, too. Except for Washington, Richmond was the social capital of the South. Socialite Abigail Mayo wrote in 1804 that in Richmond she attended a ball, dozens of dinner parties, and several theater parties in a month. Everyone there was eager to see Dolley. Mayo wrote her, “I have had many inquiries about you from your friends here, who would delight to see you again in this capital and if you will but make me a visit I am sure you will have reason to believe they are sincere in their professions of admiration and esteem.” Dolley remembered all of the good times there and constantly reminded friends of them. “I told you how delighted I had been with the society of Richmond,” she wrote one in 1800.
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The First Lady, like everyone, did the best she could to protect her husband and family when medical epidemics struck Virginia. Sometimes her exertions did little good, such as in 1831, when cholera took the lives of George and Sam Washington, her sister Lucy's two sons, who were in their early twenties.

In his late seventies, Madison began to show some signs of physical deterioration. His eyesight was not as sharp as it used to be and his hearing was impaired. He walked slower than he had previously. Yet those who met him then thought he was doing far better than they expected in an era when three quarters of men died before the age of fifty. A man who met him in 1829 remarked that he “was in tolerably good health, thin of flesh, rather under the common size and dressed in his customary black, old fashioned clothes. His form [was] erect, his step firm but somewhat slow, [he] walks without a staff, his visage pale and abounding in small wrinkles, his features well-proportioned but not striking, his head bald…his forehead of common size, his brow grey, heavy and projecting, his eyes small and faded, his nose of ordinary size and straight, his mouth rather small.”
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His wife hardly ever left his side, whether to help him with his books, arrange his schedule, care for him when he was sick, or just have an early-morning conversation with him. He told all who visited how much he loved her.
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In retirement, Madison was urged to join the Agricultural Society of Albemarle (County) and soon became its very respected president. He became absorbed in the work of the society and its farmers and even wrote a lengthy pamphlet on farming that was widely read and frequently discussed.

He worked hard on his farm, consulted with anyone interested in his opinion, took care of a very large extended family, visited friends and relatives throughout Virginia, wrote speeches, answered hundreds of letters, cared for his wife, oversaw work crews in the fields at Montpelier, and paid his son's debts. He was always annoyed by people who accused him of relaxing in retirement. The president wrote one man that “it is an error very naturally prevailing that the retirement from public service, of which my case is an example, is a leisure for whatever pursuit might be most inviting. The truth, however, is that I have rarely, during the period of my public life, found my time less at my disposal than since I took my leave of it; nor have I the consolation of finding that as my powers of application necessarily decline, the demands on them proportionately decrease.”
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Throughout his retirement, Madison's advice was constantly sought by newspaper editors and public officials, at both the state and federal levels. He always stood by the Constitution, no matter how many political schemes were hatched. One idea that infuriated him was Jefferson's suggestion that conventions be called to settle disputes between state and federal court systems. Madison castigated Jefferson for his plan and reminded him that the cornerstone of the Constitution was the ability of the US Supreme Court to overrule state courts.

The president quickly became a revered elder statesman. He kept up with all the international and national news by reading newspapers, which he had on subscription, plus magazines and, as always, a torrent of books on history and politics. Friend Richard Rush, now minister to England, sent him copies of all his diplomatic correspondence, as did President Monroe. Madison consulted with both and was deeply involved in decisions to make treaties and choose allies in diplomatic squabbles (he was instrumental in the planning of the Monroe Doctrine).

Madison quickly forgave England for the War of 1812 and urged all to make peace with the British. He became one of history's first proponents of an organization that would serve a purpose akin to the later United Nations, writing in 1820, “were it possible in human contrivance to accelerate the intercourse between every part of the globe that all its inhabitants could be united under the superintending authority of an ecumenical council, how great a portion of human evils would be avoided. Wars, famines, with pestilence as far
as the fruit of either, could not exist; taxes to pay for wars, or to provide against them would be needless and the expense and perplexities of local fetters on interchange beneficial to all would no longer oppress the social state.”
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His wife helped in his work as an elder statesman. She constantly wrote the wives of diplomats around the world and invited all to visit them at Montpelier on any trip they took to America. Many did.

Madison avoided politics but complained bitterly about the rise of his former general, Andrew Jackson. He was disgusted with Jackson's uncouth manners and egomaniacal personality, and the crude, rude followers who surrounded him day and night. He was all in favor of the westerners becoming part of the political process, just not
those
westerners. His wife was aghast when she learned that some of her magnificent red drapes had been ruined at the riotous postinaugural party Jackson threw at the White House.