The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (50 page)

The one person who might have eased Dolley’s sense of isolation, her son Payne, spent as little time as possible with his mother and stepfather. Instead, he filled Dolley’s nights and days with worry and anxiety, disappearing for weeks at a time. Only when bills he ran up at hotels and restaurants, or unpaid loans from Madison friends arrived in the mail did they discover where Payne was spending his time—and their money. In 1829, they were appalled to learn that he was in debtor’s prison in Philadelphia. In his old age, Madison estimated he had spent $40,000—more than 800,000 modern dollars—settling Payne’s debts. Most of the time, Madi
son never mentioned this drain on their finances to Dolley, knowing how much it would upset her.
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Dolley’s brother, John C. Payne, was another drinker and gambler who became a financial leech. After various expensive adventures, he settled on a farm near Montpelier with a wife and growing family, where he continued to drink and require constant supervision. Another unpleasant surprise was the financial collapse of Anna’s husband, Richard Cutts, who went bankrupt in the Panic of 1819. Although he had a government job, Cutts’s bad investments overwhelmed him. He was soon on the brink of destitution. Dolley persuaded Madison to buy their house on Lafayette Square near the White House, and the Cutts continued to live there, thus surviving the crisis without public embarrassment.
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VIII

For twenty years, Dolley remained at Madison’s side at Montpelier. Toward the end of his life, rheumatism made him an almost helpless invalid. But his mind remained marvelously unimpaired, and politicians continued to visit him and seek his advice on the country’s problems, above all the mounting conflict over slavery and states’ rights. In the 1830s, a coalescence of these two ideas threatened to sunder the American union that Madison had devoted so much time and thought to creating.

Orators in South Carolina began accusing Congress of favoring northern merchants with a policy of high tariffs. They insisted they had the right to “nullify” an act of Congress if it suited them. If Congress objected, the South Carolinians were prepared to secede from the union, which they argued was merely a “confederation” that individual states could vote to leave whenever it pleased them.

As the quarrel deepened, President Andrew Jackson turned to Madison for advice. The president’s private secretary, Nicholas Trist, was married to Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter Cornelia Randolph, and belonged to the Philadelphia family that had played an intimate role in Madison’s life during his years as a continental congressman. Trist became a link between Madison and Jackson.

The anti-tariff zealots had an alarming number of allies in Virginia. In 1831, a group met at the Orange County Court House, only five miles from Montpelier, and issued a statement that Madison found “extraordi
nary” for its total ignorance of the Constitution’s arrangement of political power. If Virginia joined the South Carolinians, the union might well collapse. The zealots pointed to the two sets of resolutions that Madison and Jefferson had written to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts. Madison’s statement had been endorsed by the Virginia legislature, Jefferson’s by Kentucky. Jefferson’s language was far more radical. He had used the word “nullification.” The Virginia zealots tried to convince themselves and others that Madison agreed with Jefferson. Northern orators such as Daniel Webster truculently declared Congress’s power was virtually absolute. Suddenly the threat of civil war was in the political air.

Though his rheumatic fingers could barely grip a pen, Madison plunged into the controversy, with Dolley’s enthusiastic help. He published a long letter in the influential
North American Review
, declaring that the union created by the ratified Constitution was indissoluble, and explaining how it worked: Congress had certain powers such as the right to tax; other powers were left to the states. It was a “mixed” government with power carefully distributed to avoid two ever-present threats, tyranny and anarchy. The zealots were courting anarchy with their reckless talk of secession over a minor disagreement about the tariff. As for Mr. Jefferson’s tilt toward nullification, Madison dismissed it as part of his friend’s habit of “expressing in strong and round terms the impressions of the moment.” Jefferson’s entire political career testified to his devotion to the union.

The zealots’ reaction was neither respectful nor friendly. They dismissed Madison as senile. He fired back hard-hitting answers that clearly proved they were wrong. Soon, to his and Dolley’s delight, other Virginians were castigating the “youthful arrogance” of the nullifiers, who dared to ignore the living voice of the man who had created the Constitution. President Jackson, no great shakes as a constitutional thinker, instinctively sided with Madison. When South Carolina nullified a new tariff law and all but seceded from the union in 1833, Jackson was ready to act with the confidence that he had Madison’s backing and approval. The president ordered the nullifiers to retract their stand or face an invading army under his personal command. The South Carolinians collapsed and the Union was preserved. The Madison partnership had saved the country a second time.
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IX

To an amazing extent, Dolley retained her vigor and good looks during these Montpelier years. When her colleague in decorating the White House, architect Benjamin Latrobe, visited her, he was stunned. “It seemed to me I had parted with her only yesterday, so little has time been able to change her personal appearance,” Latrobe later wrote. “Not a wrinkle, no alteration in her complexion, no difference in her walk.”
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This escape from what Latrobe called “the spoiler” of old age made Dolley’s devotion to Madison all the more remarkable. She could have found excuses to escape the narrow world in which she was confined. But her love for her husband made such an idea unthinkable. “I never leave him [for] more than a few minutes at a time,” she told one friend, “and have not left the enclosure around the house for the last eight months.”

Madison was completely bedridden for the last six months of his life. In her letters during these final days, Dolley called him “my patient,” and in one letter described how she remained constantly at his bedside, “so deep is the interest, & sympathy I feel for him.” During this trying period, she gratefully accepted the nursing help of her niece, Anna Payne, who lived not far from Montpelier. At least as important was the presence of Paul Jennings, Madison’s slave valet, who had served him in this capacity for sixteen years.

Annie, as Anna Payne was known, soon became devoted to both Madisons. She reported how Dolley guarded her patient against an attempt to exploit him as a national symbol, at the expense of his dignity. By late June 1836, it was evident that Madison had only a few days to live. The doctors offered to prolong his life with stimulants so he could die on the Fourth of July, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Madison declined the offer and Dolley tearfully supported him.

On the morning of June 28, 1836, Paul Jennings was at his bedside as usual. He noticed that Madison had trouble swallowing his breakfast. A visiting niece asked her uncle whether anything was wrong. Madison calmly replied, “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.” Before anyone could speak or move, Jennings said, “His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.” He died, Annie Payne wrote, “in the full possession of all his noble faculties.”
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X

One of the first letters Dolley received after her husband’s death came from Martha Jefferson Randolph. On July 1, 1836, she wrote from Washington:

Other letters came from Louisa Catherine Adams, a woman who had modeled her Washington career on Dolley’s and took similar satisfaction in having helped her very different husband become president. President Andrew Jackson told Dolley “my own sensibility at the loss sustained by yourself and the nation” could add little to the overwhelming evidence of “the nation’s sympathy.”
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Dolley responded wholeheartedly to this outpouring of admiration and affection for her and her husband. She welcomed Martha Jefferson Randolph and three of her daughters, as well as nieces Anna Payne and Mary Cutts, to Montpelier. Young people were exactly what she needed to raise her spirits. Soon she was confiding to one of her oldest friends, Eliza Collins Lee, how she was dealing with her sorrow. She had resolved to “be calm, and strive to live long after him—that I should proceed to fulfill the trust he reposed in me.” She was referring to the publication of Madison’s papers, on which they had labored for so many years.
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This trust was almost betrayed by Dolley’s attempt to involve her son Payne in the sale of the papers. She sent him to Philadelphia and New York to sound out publishers. It is hard to imagine a worse spokesman
for a project that had to be sold as a noble venture, vital to the nation’s understanding of its past. One New York writer who tried to advise Payne remarked that he was “the last man in the world to compass such a business.” There was not much enthusiasm for the idea in the publishing world, and Payne managed to dissipate what little there was with his high-handed demands and arrogant style. Eventually, friends with political connections intervened and Dolley sold the papers to Congress in two installments, for a total of $50,000.
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Alas, much of this cash was committed to paying generous bequests in Madison’s will to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), the University of Virginia, and other institutions he cared about. Still more was consumed by the debts Madison had accumulated in his last years to pay for Payne’s extravagances and gambling and to keep Montpelier solvent. After the Panic of 1819, Virginia sank into an almost permanent recession. The same dismaying decline had ruined Thomas Jefferson’s hopes of paying off his far larger debts at Monticello.

Dolley struggled to make Montpelier profitable, but it was almost impossible. Madison had sold three-fourths of the acreage to stay solvent during his lifetime and she had to support over one hundred slaves, many of them too old to work. She was extremely reluctant to sell them without their consent. She apparently sold a few to neighbors, which meant a family would not have to be separated. For most of these years, Dolley relied on an overseer to run the plantation. She also depended on Payne, who behaved in his usual irresponsible style, selling books, paintings, some of Madison’s manuscripts, and an occasional slave without asking his mother’s permission.

XI

Starting in 1837, Dolley was only a summer visitor at Montpelier. That year she moved to the Cutts house in Washington. Her sister Anna had died and her children had grown to adulthood. The house was available, and Dolley effortlessly rejoined the capital’s social scene. In the month of December, she made no less than sixty-five calls on old friends and new acquaintances. Everyone who mattered or wanted to matter bombarded her with invitations to teas, balls, and dinners. President Martin Van Buren took great pleasure in welcoming her to the White House. One
man who sat next to her at a dinner in 1839 enjoyed her company from start to finish. “The old lady is a very hearty good-looking woman of about 75,” he wrote to a friend. “Soon after we were seated we became on the most friendly terms & I paid her the same attentions I should have done to a girl of 15—which seemed to suit her fancy very well.”
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In 1844, Dolley was forced to give up her struggle to save Montpelier. She sold the property and its slaves to Henry W. Moncure, a wealthy Richmond merchant, who had already bought 750 acres in 1842. It caused her considerable anguish. She took eight months to sign the final papers, handing over the mansion. “No one,” she wrote apologetically to the patient Moncure, “can appreciate my feeling of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home.”
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Thereafter, Dolley became a permanent Washington resident. She was still hard pressed for cash. One of her most devoted friends was Paul Jennings. Dolley had sold him to Senator Daniel Webster with the understanding that he would be able to buy his freedom. Jennings visited Dolley regularly, sometimes bringing her food and often cash. “Mrs. Madison was beloved by every body in Washington, white and colored,” he said.
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During these final years, Dolley became more than a popular guest at balls and dinners. She was hailed as a national treasure, a woman who had taken tea with George and Martha Washington and knew personally each of the next eleven presidents and their wives. Sarah Polk, another first lady who shared the political as well as the social side of the presidency with her husband, was especially fond of Dolley. In September 1845, when the Surviving Defenders of 1814, the men who had fought the British forays against Washington and Baltimore, gathered to commemorate their efforts, they marched in a body to Dolley’s house to pay their respects.
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Invariably, Dolley accepted these tributes as “a token of remembrance of One who has gone before us.” In death as well as in life, she shared her fame with James Madison. It was in this spirit that she joined Elizabeth Hamilton in the campaign to rescue George Washington’s proposed monument. The two matrons watched from the White House while an “immense audience” cheered the laying of the cornerstone.