The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (48 page)

Other papers with a tilt to the Republican radicals claimed Dolley was a secret Federalist and British supporter. They investigated her first husband’s death and concocted a story of her abandoning him as he writhed in the final throes of yellow fever. Again and again they assayed Madison as “cold”—a synonym for impotence—and wondered how he could be expected to lead the country when he lacked the strength to satisfy his wife.

Dolley began blaming some of these assaults on Monroe personally, because he remained silent, never saying a word in defense of Madison, his supposed close friend. At one dinner party, she made several uncharacteristically cutting remarks about Monroe and his wife. Her disapproval had an impact in political Washington, and Monroe soon faded as a candidate. Meanwhile, Dolley’s tireless entertaining was a tactic that the widower vice president, George Clinton, soon saw as an insurmountable advantage. He,
too, retreated from any public confrontation, and Madison faced only one serious opponent in the general election, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, the Federalist whom Alexander Hamilton had tried to make president instead of John Adams in 1800.
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Pinckney’s chief issue was the hated embargo, but Congress repealed it on Jefferson’s last day in office. Madison was elected in what passed for a landslide, with Pinckney winning almost no support outside New England. When he grudgingly conceded, he added a nasty but historically significant embellishment. He said he had lost to “Mr. and Mrs. Madison. I might have had a better chance if I faced Mr. Madison alone.”
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IX

Dolley Madison entered the executive mansion or president’s “palace” with a great many people watching her. The wife of a New York congressman who had backed George Clinton noted that she had grown more dignified. She seldom played loo or wore revealing French dresses. But on inauguration day, her F Street parlor was jammed with visitors all “now worshipping the Rising Sun.” The comparison was more apt than the writer realized. Dolley had a plan already worked out, aimed at making the president’s house the social center of Washington, D.C.
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She began her campaign with an inaugural ball at Long’s Hotel that attracted more than four hundred mesmerized guests. Dolley wore a velvet gown with a train so long, it cried out for several young pages or ladies-in-waiting to deal with it. Her friend Margaret Bayard Smith implied as much. “She looked like a queen,” she wrote. Even more eye-catching was Dolley’s gleaming white satin turban trimmed with bird-of-paradise feathers. Shrewdly, she limited her jewelry to a pearl necklace and earrings and a few bracelets. The effect was a striking combination of royal elegance and American simplicity. When the dancing began, and the master of ceremonies offered to lead her to the floor, she replied, “I don’t dance.” Again, everyone was charmed by this calm adherence to her Quaker roots.
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In the glow of this performance, the president, worn out by the long inaugural day, was scarcely noticed. Dolley proceeded to deal with this problem, too. At dinner, she sat herself between the British and French ambassadors and soon had them smiling and chatting. Gone was President Jefferson’s pell-mell etiquette. The representatives of the warring
great powers led the way to the dinner table. General Turreau, still the French ambassador, escorted Dolley; she concealed her dislike of him with the smile of a master diplomat. Behind him, the Briton who had replaced Ambassador Merry escorted Dolley’s sister Anna. Ex-president Jefferson, also a guest, gave not so much as a hint of disapproval.
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People swarmed onto the dance floor to get a closer look at Dolley. Soon the room was so crowded that some ladies grew faint. An alarmed male guest broke the upper panes of several windows to let in more air. Everyone went home talking about Mrs. Madison. In
The National Intelligencer
, her friend Margaret Bayard Smith came close to exhausting her supply of admiring verbs and adjectives. To no one’s surprise, the paper christened Dolley “The Presidentress.”
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This only emboldened Dolley to push ahead in her campaign to make herself and other women a vital part of James Madison’s presidency. Ignoring blasts of vituperation against the president from Congressman Randolph, she led groups of women to the visitors’ gallery to watch both houses of Congress in action. Occasionally she led similar groups in visits to the Supreme Court. As for Randolph, she decided to treat him as a public amusement. After one of his performances, she asked a visitor if he had heard about it. “It was as good as a play,” she said. Soon people were marveling at the way women were playing a part in American politics that was “not known elsewhere.”
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The heart of Dolley’s plan became visible when President Madison asked Congress for $24,000 (about 400,000 modern dollars) to renovate the executive mansion and buy much-needed furniture, china, and other civilizing necessities. Aside from essential work such as shoring up the roof, widower Jefferson had done little or nothing to finish the house during his eight years. Congress acquiesced, and Dolley went to work with architect Benjamin Latrobe. As soon as possible, she wanted a large drawing room and a small parlor for entertaining. Also on the list was a state dining room. Dolley had decorated all three of these rooms in her head before Latrobe went to work. Although some luxury items were unavailable because of the aftereffects of the embargo, the architect managed to find acceptable substitutes.
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First to be finished was what dazzled guests called “Mrs. Madison’s Parlor” (the Red Room in the modern White House). The dominant feature was the sunflower-yellow damask silk draperies that adorned the
windows. High-backed sofas and chairs had the same lush color, as did a damask fireboard in front of the mantel. Another eye-catcher was Gilbert Stuart’s regal portrait of Dolley.

Her first reception in the room, on May 31, 1809, swiftly became the talk of Washington. Military music filled the air, and a buffet offered ice cream, punch, cookies, and fruit. A smiling Dolley, in another spectacular gown and turban, dominated the room. Mrs. Madison’s Wednesday “drawing rooms” quickly became a destination for everyone in Washington and many beyond the city’s borders.

Writer Washington Irving described his eagerness to attend during a visit to the capital. “I swore by all the Gods I should be there,” he said, when he learned Dolley was having a reception on the day he arrived in town. Wangling an invitation, Irving found himself in “the blazing splendor of Mrs. Madison’s drawing room,” where he met “a crowded collection of great and little men, of ugly old women and beautiful young ones” and in ten minutes was “hand in glove with half the people in the assemblage.” He found Dolley to be “a fine portly buxom dame who has a smile and a pleasant word for everybody.” As for her sisters, Anna and Lucy, they were “like the two merry wives of Windsor.”
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On New Year’s Day, 1810, Dolley and the president held their first reception in the much larger Oval Room, which had remained an unused wasteland during Jefferson’s administration. This time the impact of Dolley’s decorations was nothing less than palatial. Great gold lamps lined the entrance, and a huge mirror gleamed above the mantle. The walls were papered in rich cream, and the woodwork shadowed in blue and gray. The floor-to-ceiling windows were adorned with red silk velvet curtains, which were matched by the red cushioned furniture, with thirty-six “Grecian” chairs. “The President’s house is a perfect palace,” gasped one visitor.
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The state dining room, which opened off the Oval Room, was even more palatial. The ceilings were three times the height of the rooms in an average house. A gigantic sideboard occupied an entire wall. At the far end of the room hung a life-sized portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Public approval of Dolley’s interior decorating was virtually universal. Members of both political parties competed for an invitation to the mansion that everyone began calling “The White House.” A Baltimore newspaper warmly approved the title. It was, they opined, “the people’s name.”
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As guests by the hundreds swarmed into the White House and swirled around Dolley, some people wondered whether she was almost too successful. She enjoyed herself hugely, but her sixty-year-old husband did not seem to have such a good time. One 1809 visitor described Madison as “a very small thin pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved and forbidding countenance.” He seemed “incapable of smiling” but talked agreeably to all comers. By 1810, another guest thought Madison looked as if he were “bending under the weight and cares of his office.” Whereas Dolley remained “a robust and hearty lady.”
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X

Madison’s personality and leadership style were not well suited to an executive role. He was at his best in Congress or on a committee, where his weak voice and mild manner did not matter so much because the logic and depth of his arguments were so persuasive. A president leads in a very different way. Compounding Madison’s problems was the disintegration of the Republican Party into a half dozen factions, each with its own ambitious leader. As a result, the United States drifted irresolutely through the political turbulence that was tearing the world apart as the war between Great Britain and Napoleonic France rumbled toward a climax.

Madison had no illusions about Napoleon, who played a cat-and-mouse game with America, agreeable one week, nasty the next. But his focus on dominating Europe gave him little chance to harm the United States. Britain’s high-handed attitude toward American ships at sea was another matter. Their arrogance slowly convinced Madison that only a war would settle America’s relationship with the mother country. He apparently discussed this growing conviction with Dolley. In December 1811 she wrote to her sister Anna, now married to a Maine congressman, “I believe there will be a war as M sees no end to our perplexities without it.”
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Unfortunately, President Madison could not convince some members of his cabinet or key members of Congress to prepare the country for a serious conflict. He let newly arrived western politicians such as Henry Clay of Kentucky do the orating in Congress. Dubbed The War Hawks, they assured everyone that the British, embroiled with Napoleon, were pushovers and would never be able to defend thinly populated Canada. New England’s politicians and the states that followed their lead, such as New
York and New Jersey, remained stubbornly opposed to the war. Dismaying proof of Madison’s failure to rally support in Congress was the Senate’s approval of a declaration of war by a mere six votes. The margin in the House of Representatives was not much better: 79–49.

Nevertheless, Madison signed the war resolution in June 1812. The Federalist
Alexandria Gazette
promptly accused him of persuading many congressmen to vote for the declaration with invitations to Dolley’s Wednesday drawing rooms and splendid dinners. The paper called her parties “extravagant imitations of a royal court” and claimed Americans were being taught to bow and curtsy before the president and his wife and otherwise “play the parasite.”
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No one paid much attention to these squawks of protest. Throughout Madison’s first term, Dolley’s parties and dinners had grown more lavish and splendid. She hired a French chef who served duck and venison cooked in an elaborate style seldom seen in American kitchens. Dolley regularly sat at the head of the table and took charge of the conversation, freeing the president from the task, which he did not enjoy or handle well. This enabled him to relax and indulge in genial small talk with nearby guests, who often came away charmed.

Far from being aristocratic affairs, Dolley’s parties were democratic with a small “d.” Anyone could come, once they had been introduced to Mrs. Madison or the president. George Washington and John Adams held “levees” at which guests remained stationary, waiting for their host to greet them and exchange a few words. Dolley encouraged her guests to feel free to move around all three of her redecorated rooms, chatting with friends and with her or the president if they were so disposed. At dinners, not a few people marveled at the way she sat diplomats such as the Russian minister beside a local tradesman and his wife.

XI

The first test of the popularity of the war with Britain was Madison’s campaign for reelection. His opponent was DeWitt Clinton, nephew of vice president George Clinton, who had died in 1811. The candidate was a good politician and a popular former mayor of New York City with a strong Republican following in his native state. He was backed by the Federalists, who remained a force in New England. Dolley struggled to
maintain her public neutrality, but she was heard to refer to Clinton as “that fellow” when he paid a visit to Washington.

The Federalists cried petticoat politics and tried to convince people that Madison lacked the forcefulness to lead the country in a war. In the original thirteen states, Clinton came within one electoral vote of beating Madison. But in the new states of the West, the War Hawks were dominant, and they gave the president a comfortable margin of victory.

Clinton did not claim that he would have won if President Madison lacked Dolley. The words would have been superfluous. Everyone who read a newspaper knew that Dolley was an essential part of the Madison administration. But no one anticipated that the war would make her a national heroine.

T
he war did not go well. In the preceding years, Madison had been unable to stop his penny-pinching secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, from blocking congressional resolutions to expand the country’s armed forces. The Americans began the conflict with no regular army worth mentioning. Their navy consisted of a handful of frigates and a fleet of pathetic gunboats, each armed with a single cannon, which President Jefferson had designed as defenders of America’s ports. In 1811, Congress had voted to abolish Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, making it almost impossible for the government to raise money. Worst of all, the British defeated Napoleon and the United States found itself fighting the most powerful army and navy in the world, alone.

By 1813, Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin was telling the president, “We have hardly enough money to last to the end of the month.”
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Along the Canadian border, American armies stumbled into ruinous defeats. A huge British naval squadron blockaded the American coast. The only good news came from victories over lone British men-of-war by warships of the tiny American navy. In Congress, New Englanders sneered at “Mr. Madison’s War,” and the governor of Massachusetts refused to permit any of the state’s militiamen to join the attack on Canada. Madison fell ill and the aged vice president, Elbridge Gerry, also grew so feeble that Congress began arguing about who would be the next president if they both died.

Dolley Madison’s White House receptions and dinners became the only
place in the nation where hope and determination continued to flourish. Soon she herself became a symbol of America’s refusal to be daunted by British power. Although she was born a Quaker, Dolley maintained she had always believed in fighting back “when assailed.” Her instinct for defiant drama came to the fore at an 1812 ball given by naval officers celebrating Congress’s decision to expand the American navy. Everyone’s spirits rose when news of an American victory over the British frigate
Macedonian
off the Canary Islands reached the White House. A few minutes later, a young lieutenant arrived at the ball carrying the flag of the defeated ship. Senior naval officers paraded it around the floor and laid it at Dolley’s feet.
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At her social events, Dolley struggled, in the words of one observer, “to destroy rancorous feelings, then so bitter between Federalists and Republicans.” Affability and good manners remained her watchwords, and members of Congress, weary with flinging curses at each other during the day, were willing to relax and even discuss compromise and conciliation in the evening. Their wives and daughters were almost all allies of Mrs. Madison. By day Dolley was a tireless visitor, leaving her calling cards all over the city. Before the war, most of her parties attracted about three hundred people. Now attendance climbed to five hundred, and young people began calling them “squeezes.”

There were times when Dolley felt the pressure of presiding over these crowded rooms. She confessed to one friend, “My head is dizzy!” But she maintained what another observer called her “remorseless equanimity,” even when the war news was bad.
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Critics heaped scorn on the president, calling him “Little Jemmy” and reviving the smear that he was impotent, making it a symbol of his failures as commander in chief. But Dolley seemed immune to such slanders. President Madison might look as if he had one foot in the grave, but Dolley remained blooming and seemingly tireless. More and more people began bestowing a new title on her: the First Lady. Dolley had created a semipublic office as well as a unique role for women in the American government.

By this time, the relationship between James and Dolley had moved several light years beyond the diffidence with which she brought up politics in her letters to him in 1805. They had both abandoned the idea that a woman should not and could not think about the thorny subject. As early as the first summer of his presidency (1809) Madison had been forced to rush back to Washington from a vacation at Montpelier, leaving Dolley
behind. In a note he wrote just after he returned to the White House, he told her that he intended to bring her up to date on “intelligence” just received from France in his next letter. Meanwhile he sent her the morning paper, which had a story on the subject. In a letter two days later, he sent “the foreign news in the inclosed papers” and discussed a recent speech by the British prime minister. There was little doubt that Dolley had become the president’s political partner in every imaginable sense of the word.
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II

Dolley’s charms and political acumen had their limits. The British were relentless in their determination to reduce Americans to obedient colonists once more. Checked by an American naval victory on Lake Erie and the defeat of their Indian allies in the West, they concentrated their assault on the coastline from Florida to Delaware Bay. Again and again their landing parties swarmed ashore to pillage homes, rape women, and burn public and private property. The commander of these operations was a strutting red-faced admiral named Sir George Cockburn. As arrogant as he was ruthless, he sent word to Mrs. Madison that he soon expected to “make his bow” in her drawing room as the ruler of a captured Washington, D.C.

Dolley did her best to reassure her friends. She told them it was impossible for a British army to get within twenty miles of Washington. But many people began moving wives and children and furniture out of the city. The drumbeat of news about British landings elsewhere intensified local criticism of the president. Some people claimed that Dolley herself was planning to flee Washington and if Madison attempted to follow her, they would make sure that he and the city would “fall” together. At one point Dolley exploded in a letter to a friend: “I am not the least alarmed at these things but entirely disgusted & determined to stay with him.”
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On August 17, 1814, a large British fleet anchored at the mouth of the Patuxent River, only thirty-five miles from Washington. Aboard were four thousand veteran troops under the command of a tough professional soldier, General Robert Ross. Soon they were ashore without a shot being fired at them and they began a slow, cautious advance on Washington. There was not a single trained American soldier in the vicinity to oppose them. All President Madison could do was call out thousands of militia. The commander of these jittery amateurs was Brigadier General Wil
liam Winder, an aged veteran of the Revolution. Madison had appointed him early in the war for only one reason: his brother was the governor of Maryland.
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When Winder’s incompetence became glaringly obvious, friends urged Dolley to flee the city. Thousands of Washingtonians were crowding the roads. Dolley demurred: “I am determined to stay with my husband,” she said. She welcomed Madison’s decision to station one hundred militiamen under the command of a regular army colonel on the White House lawn. Not only was it a gesture of protection on his part; it was also a declaration that he and Dolley were going to stand their ground. She applauded when the president joined the six thousand militiamen who were marching to confront the British in Maryland. She was sure his presence would stiffen their resolve to protect the capital.

Doing her share to display defiance, Dolley decided to give a dinner party on August twenty-third, after the president had ridden off with the army. All her guests either ignored her invitations or sent hasty regrets.
The National Intelligencer
had reported that the British had received six thousand reinforcements, panicking the city. Again and again, Dolley ascended to the White House roof to scan the horizon with a spyglass, hoping to see evidence of an American victory. Meanwhile, Madison sent her two scribbled messages. The first assured her that the British would easily be defeated; the second warned her to be ready to flee on a moment’s notice.

If the worst transpired, Madison had told her to save the cabinet papers and all the other public documents she could fit in her carriage. Late in the day, Dolley began a letter to her sister Lucy, describing her situation. Her carriage was loaded with trunks full of public papers. “All my friends and acquaintances have gone,” she wrote. The army colonel and his hundred-man guard had also fled. But Dolley refused to budge. “I am determined not to go until I hear Mr. Madison is safe,” she continued in her letter. She wanted to appear beside him “as I hear of much hostility toward him…disaffection stalks around us.” She felt her presence might deter enemies who were ready to harm the president.

At dawn the next day, after a mostly sleepless night, Dolley was back on the White House roof with her spyglass. Resuming her letter to Lucy, she told her that she had spent the morning “turning my spy glass in every direction and watching with unwearied anxiety, hoping to discern the
approach of my dear husband and his friends.” Instead, all she saw was “groups of military wandering in all directions, as if there were a lack of arms or of spirit to fight for their own firesides!” She was seeing the egregious disintegration of the American army that was supposed to be confronting the British at nearby Bladensburg, Maryland.

Soon the boom of cannon rattled the White House windows. The battle remained beyond the range of Dolley’s spyglass. She was spared the sight of the American militia fleeing at their first glimpse of the charging British infantry. President Madison was swept away in the rout, along with General Winder and everyone else with some authority. In the White House, Dolley stood her ground. She had found a wagon, and packed it with the red silk velvet draperies of the Oval Room and the silver service and the blue and gold Lowestoft china she had purchased for the state dining room.

Resuming her letter to Lucy, Dolley wrote: “Would you believe it, my sister? We have had a battle or skirmish…and I am still here within sound of the cannon!” Gamely, she ordered the table set for a dinner for the president and his staff, and insisted that the cook and his assistant begin preparing it. “Two messengers covered with dust” arrived from the battlefield, urging her to flee. Still she refused, determined to wait for Madison. She ordered the dinner to be served. She told the servants that if she were a man, she would post a cannon in every window of the White House and fight to the bitter end.

The arrival of a close friend, Major Charles Carroll of the prominent Maryland family, finally changed Dolley’s mind. He told her it was time to go and she glumly acquiesced. As they headed for the door, Dolley saw the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington in the state dining room and declared she could not abandon it to the enemy to be mocked and desecrated. While Carroll watched, all but rending his garments with anxiety, Dolley ordered the servants to take down the painting. It was screwed to the wall, and they lacked the tools or the time to deal with the problem. Dolley told them to break the frame and extract the canvas. At that point, “two gentlemen from New York” appeared, to see if they could help. Dolley gave them the painting with orders to conceal it from the oncoming British at all costs. Finally, with amazing self-possession, she closed her letter to Lucy: “And now, dear sister, I must leave this house…where I shall be tomorrow, I cannot tell!”
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Again on the way to the door, Dolley further endangered Mr. Carroll’s
sanity by spotting a copy of the Declaration of Independence in a display case and stopping to extract it and stuff it into one of her suitcases. As they reached the door, one of the president’s free black servants, Jim Smith, who had accompanied him to the battlefield, rode up on a sweaty horse and shouted: “Clear out! Clear out!” The British were only a few miles away. Dolley climbed into her carriage and rode off with Carroll to a comfortable refuge at his family mansion, Belle Vue, in Maryland.

III

The British arrived a few hours later, as darkness fell. With them was Admiral Cockburn, eager to savor the results of the victory. He and General Ross issued orders to burn the Capitol and the Library of Congress and headed for the White House. They were vastly amused to find the dinner Mrs. Madison had ordered still on the table in the dining room. “Several kinds of wine in handsome glass decanters were cooling on the sideboard,” one officer wrote. They sampled some of the dishes and drank a toast to “Jemmy’s health.”

Soldiers roamed the house, grabbing souvenirs. One man strutted around with one of President Madison’s hats on his bayonet and boasted that he would parade it through the streets of London if they failed to capture “the little president.” Admiral Cockburn commandeered a portrait of Dolley and a cushion from one of her chairs, which inspired him to make vulgar comments about the size of the first lady’s derriere.

Tiring of their fun and games, the British got down to business. Under Admiral Cockburn’s direction, 150 men smashed out the windows and piled the furniture in the center of the various rooms. Outside, fifty of the marauders seized poles with oil-soaked rags on the ends and surrounded the house. At a signal from the admiral, men with torches ignited the rags and the poles were flung through the smashed windows like fiery spears. Within minutes a huge conflagration soared into the night sky. Not far away, the Americans had set the navy yard on fire, destroying numerous ships and warehouses full of uniforms, ammunition, and other war materiel. For a while, it looked as if all Washington was ablaze.

The next day, the British continued their depredations, burning the Treasury, the State and War Department, and other public buildings. But they were distracted and not a little spooked by a freak storm that suddenly
erupted, with hurricane-force winds and violent thunder and lightning. Just before this display of nature’s seeming wrath, an ammunition dump on Greenleaf’s Point exploded while the British were preparing to destroy it. Thirty-five men were killed and forty-five suffered horrific injuries. The shaken British commanders decided to retreat to their ships.
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Meanwhile, Dolley received a note from Madison, urging her to join him in Virginia. After not a little wandering they were finally reunited. The president had barely slept in days. He had been in the saddle for five and six hours at a stretch. Dolley was deeply worried about his health. But he was determined to return to Washington as soon as possible, lest he be accused of cowardly flight. He insisted on Dolley staying in Virginia until he knew the city was safe. The moment this surety was confirmed, “you cannot return too soon.” The words convey not only Madison’s need for her, but his awareness that Dolley was an equal and in some ways a more potent symbol of his presidency. A chance encounter with some Washington refugees amply confirmed this remarkable fact. When they saw Dolley, they cheered her.
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