James and Dolley Madison (54 page)

Other family news was bad, too. James Todd, the son of her niece Lucy, had adopted many of Payne's habits. He owed money everywhere, and it brought his mother nothing but worry. “I did not know that you had ever borrowed any
money from Joseph Crane until lately. What amount did you borrow and has it been paid? Let me know in your next letter. If it is too great an amount I can settle it,” she wrote him of one bill. She inquired, too, what happened to money she had recently sent him to pay a second bill that had “vanished.”
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Dolley's brother, John, had floundered in Kentucky. A friend there, George Washington Spotswood, said he “does not have an acre of land fenced. He has devoted most of his time to dissipation.” He added that one of John's daughters married an alcoholic and the other married a man he considered “good for nothing.” He smirked that “if they were my daughters, I would rather see them dead.” Spotswood added that John was penniless, his farms were bankrupt, and his wife had left him.
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Dolley was distraught, but she hid her horror and looked magnificent when she moved to Washington as a half-time resident in 1836. Everyone who knew her in her retirement at Montpelier marveled at how well Dolley appeared and how the years had not ravaged her. “She looks just as she did twenty years ago and dresses in the same manner, with her turban and cravat; rises early and is very active, but seldom leaves the house,” said Charles Ingersoll, who spent several days with the Madisons just before the president's death in 1836.
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She was glad to be back in the capital. Dolley had always missed Washington and its active social life. Back in 1822, she had told her sister Anna about all the miles from her in the capital that “I am at such a distance & am so despairing at the difficulties & disappointments of seeing my sisters.” In 1838, after Madison's death, she told Margaret Bayard Smith that “in truth, I am dissatisfied with the location of Montpelier, from which I can never separate myself entirely, when I think how happy I should be if it joined Washington, where I could see you always and my valued acquaintances also of that city.” She lived the Washington life vicariously through her nieces who resided there. She wrote them often and begged them to give her all the details of their social lives. In one letter she told Mary Cutts that “I should have been delighted to see [niece] Dolley and yourself [with] those pretty and brilliant characters at Mrs. White's elegant ball.”
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The First Lady's love of Washington over Montpelier was evident throughout her public life, when she wrote letters from Montpelier asking about Washington, even when she was due to return to the capital in a few weeks. In 1808, just a week before her planned arrival in the capital, she wrote Anna Thornton, “I am glad to find that you have gay parties now & then & hope they will continue as I hope to join in your bustle by & by. I should like to see
a good play once more.” A year earlier she asked her niece Lucy, “tell me how you amuse yourselves in Washington.”
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When Dolley arrived back in Washington in 1837, twenty years after she had left it, she feared that most of her old friends had died or moved away. The diplomats she knew would have returned to their countries. The merchants who had attended her parties were now probably in their seventies, too, deceased, or retired. When she looked through the Washington directory, though, she was surprised to find that many people and families that she had known remained in town. Many were now older and had sons and daughters who lived and worked in town, too. Some of the politicians she knew so well, such as Henry Clay, were still in office and were more powerful than ever. Many of the socialites she knew in her forties were now in their sixties but were still hosting parties.

What surprised her the most was that so many Washingtonians remembered her, and fondly so. She had dozens of welcome letters upon her return, some from ministers from European countries, all wishing her well in what appeared to be the final chapters of her life. One of the very first people in town to visit her on Lafayette Square was former president John Quincy Adams, now serving as a congressman from Massachusetts. Adams had been a casual acquaintance of Dolley when her husband was president and had never visited Montpelier. He expected to find a decrepit old woman but was astonished at Mrs. Madison. “I had not seen her since 1809. The depredations of time are not so perceptible in her personal appearance as might be expected. She is a woman of placid appearance equable temperament and less susceptible of laceration of the scourges of the world abroad than most others,” he wrote.
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A parade of well-wishers followed Adams. They all found Dolley, in her seventies, as delightful as ever and were all stunned that she had not aged much in appearance. And she looked just like the Dolley of old—elegant. Her grandniece wrote of one party that “Aunt Madison wore a purple velvet dress, with plain straight skirt amply gathered to a tight waist, cut low and filled in with soft tulle. Her pretty white throat was encircled by a lace cravat…thrown lightly over her shoulders was a little lace shawl or cape, as in her portrait…I thought her turban very wonderful, as I had never seen anyone else wear such a head-dress…her eyes were blue and laughed when she smiled and greeted her friends who seemed so glad to see her.”
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Mrs. Madison was also the lucky beneficiary of political history. She brought one of her grandnieces to a White House gala when Martin Van Buren was president, as she always brought her grandnieces along with her in order to introduce them to high society. The girl met Abraham Van Buren, the president's son, and fell in love with him. They were married shortly thereafter
and Dolley immediately found herself on the guest list for every White House function. The fortuitous marriage returned her to her social glory.

Several years later, Van Buren lost his reelection bid to William Henry Harrison, who ran with Dolley's longtime friend and prominent Virginian John Tyler as his running mate. Harrison died a month later and Tyler became president. He was unmarried and made his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert Tyler, his “First Lady.” She did not know what to do and turned to family friend Dolley, America's longest-serving First Lady, for advice. Dolley took her under her wing and happily trained the girl in Washington and White House social life. Mrs. Tyler also put Dolley on the permanent guest list and turned to her for advice at all the White House dinners and balls. Daniel Webster joked to Dolley that since she had been prominent in the administrations of Jefferson, Madison, Van Buren, and Tyler, she was “the only permanent power in Washington.”
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Dolley was back on the social circuit again, and invitations poured in as she set her own calendar of parties at her home. Lists she kept showed that she made two hundred visits to friends in 180 days and attended an average of three parties a week, plus her own. In addition to parties, she was often invited to musical concerts, plays, and public ceremonies. In Washington, she was just as close to nieces and nephews as she had been to sisters twenty years earlier and spent much time at their homes. She was a welcome guest at weddings for the children of adults she had known once and now knew again. Many of her old friends, such as Eliza Collins Lee, Anna Thornton, Mrs. Tobias Lear, and Margaret Bayard Smith, were widows who lived in town and were thrilled to renew their friendships with her. It was the first time she had seen Mrs. Lear in years. The last time was the funeral of her husband, President Madison's close friend, who stunned Washington when he committed suicide in 1816 following a political smear campaign against him. At her own parties, Dolley entertained as elegantly as she had at the White House and as lavishly as any hostess in town. A New Yorker, Phillip Hone, wrote that “she is a young lady of fourscore years and upward, goes out to parties and receives company like the ‘Queen' of this new world.”
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Her niece Lucy wrote that “her return to Washington was hailed by all, those who formerly knew her and those who desired to know this First Lady of the land. Her home was filled morning and night with most distinguished of all parties…. It had been twenty years since she had left the city, the favorite of society, yet she came [back] without influence or power and the citizens welcomed her return…. She had infinite tact, and always saw the good and not the evil, which exists in all.”
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One of her new friends was Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts,
who wanted to be president. He lived in Swann House, just a few blocks from Dolley, and oversaw a lavish social life at his home with his wife, who had befriended Dolley. Webster noticed how popular Dolley was and saw that many viewed her as a bridge back to the old pre-Jackson Washington, when life was calmer and more elegant. Webster invited Dolley to dozens of his parties and saw her frequently. He made an arrangement to purchase her slave, Paul Jennings, and give him his freedom after a few years. When Jennings started to work for him, he told him that whenever he returned to Swann House from the market, he should buy extra food and drop it off at Dolley's on the way home.

Not everybody was happy to have the charismatic former First Lady around, though. William Seward of New York, a rising Whig star who later served as Abraham Lincoln's secretary of state in the Civil War, saw her as a major nonpolitical star of the Democratic Party (the old Republicans had become the Democrats) and a threat. “All the world paid homage to her, saying that she was dignified and attractive. It is the fashion to say so. But, I confess, I thought more true dignity would have been displayed by her remaining in her widowhood, in the ancient country mansion of her illustrious husband.”
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Mrs. Madison, like everyone else, was jolted by events in the ever-growing and ever-tempestuous Washington. In February 1838, a friend of hers, Mr. Graves, killed a man named Cilly in a duel that followed an argument. The city's population was shocked, and many demanded justice; lynch mobs were formed to punish the survivor, Graves. “[I] feel more horror at the wicked act than if I had never seen them. You can have little idea of the sensation it has created here…there was danger of a mob in the city,” she wrote.
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Mrs. Madison traveled all over and by land and by sea. Dolly was a guest on board the
Princeton
, an elegant yacht, with President Tyler, most of his cabinet, and a number of senators , congressmen, and diplomats. After dinner, the guests went on deck to witness the firing of new, large cannon on board the ship. The top government officials were on the deck where the gun was bolted; Dolly and other women were finishing dinner in the dining room with President Tyler. Inexplicably, the gun suddenly blew up, causing an explosion that ripped open the ship and was seen and heard for miles. The secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, and numerous other officials were killed. Rumors flew that it was a plot to assassinate Tyler. All night, Lafayette Square was crowded with Dolley's friends, who believed she had been killed, too. They were relieved to see her alive. Mrs. Madison was so shaken by the explosion that she refused to talk about it for the rest of her life.

And she kept quiet about her son, Payne, too, whose eccentricities grew as the years flew by. Just before the sale of Montpelier, he spent time in his
father's library, sitting down amid the more than four thousand books. He read the works of William Cowper, who was said to be insane, a sure sign of trouble, friends told his mother. He ruminated about his fortunes. Then he decided that as the son of a president he would claim his rightful place in the world and began to replicate his now-deceased father's personality, an effort that seemed comical to many. At forty-four, Payne had accomplished nothing. At forty-four, his father had been married, had run a successful plantation for years, had served numerous terms in Congress, and had written the United States Constitution.

And Payne was losing money every month at Montpelier. “I am now as low in finances as I well can be,” he wrote in his diary.
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Mrs. Madison had hoped that life on quiet Montpelier in tranquil Orange County, far from the urban world of bars and casinos, would help him. The solitude had just the opposite effect. He drank even more in his odd housing at Toddsberth and, when sober, managed to single-handedly drive Montpelier into bankruptcy. His management of the plantation was so bad, and his treatment of the slaves was so haughty, that Dolley left the comfort of Washington and headed back to Montpelier for two entire years. There, back home, she tried to make the farms profitable, but failed.

During those final two years at Montpelier, Dolley rented out her Washington home to pay her bills, kept in touch with friends in the capital, and had assistance with everything to do with Washington from her old White House manager, Jean Pierre Sioussat, who had become a bank executive. He did everything possible to handle her business in Washington and tried to help her straighten out her hopelessly tangled financial affairs.