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American First Ladies Dolley Payne Todd Madison Born: May 20, 1768 - Guildford County, North Carolina Died: July 12, 1849 - Washington, D.C. President: James Madison, 1809 1817 Overview Over many years, Dolley Madison developed tactics and strategies befitting a practical politician that set the model for successful First Ladies-and presidents-ever after. She established an office not even mentioned in the Constitution and made it integral to the presidency. By relieving the president of social chores and using her interpersonal skills, she helped James Madison's administration achieve more national unity than those of his three predecessors put together. Early Life The woman who would become a national icon was registered at birth by the Quaker New Garden Monthly Meeting as "Dolley," the name she retained all her life. She also considered herself a lifelong Virginian, though she was born in what is now Greensboro, North Carolina, where her parents, John Payne and Mary Coles Payne, were searching for opportunities for a merchant farmer. By the time Dolley was eleven months old, they had returned to Mary's ancestral plantation, Coles Hill, in rural Hanover County, in eastern Virginia. When Dolley was seven, her family moved to a plantation of their own: Scotchtown, the former home of her mother's cousin Patrick Henry. The mansion, said to have been Virginia's largest, proved useful for the growing Payne brood, which would number four boys and four girls. Its attic was large enough for a ballroom, but since pious Quakers frowned upon dancing, the door was kept locked. Nevertheless, Dolley could teach other youngsters the latest steps. With her brothers and sisters, she went to an old field school, that is, a school set up by neighbors in a field lying fallow. An itinerant tutor would teach rudimentary reading, writing, and arithmetic. For more advanced schooling, Dolley attended coeducational classes in the Quaker meeting house at Cedar Creek. At the same time, she was learning the arts of homemaking and hospitality. Slaves would do the menial work, but she learned to train and supervise them, preserve and prepare food, and receive regular or random guests, in or out of visiting season, as a good Virginia housewife should. Oval faced and fair, with jet black hair, sky blue eyes, and a tilted nose, she would wear close fitting bonnets and gray gowns with elbow length sleeves and square necklines but no jewelry. When she was fifteen, postwar agricultural depression forced her father to abandon farming and try manufacturing cornstarch in Philadelphia, then the nation's capital and largest city. After six years, he had accumulated so much debt that the Quakers read him out of meeting (expelled him from their community). At that time in Philadelphia, yellow fever had become a fact of city life. Open sewers, pools of stagnant water, and piles of rotting garbage bred disease bearing mosquitoes. The Paynes' eldest son succumbed at age twenty one from the perennial Philadelphia fever. That, coupled with his bankruptcy, led John Payne into a depression so deep he no longer left the house. Mary Payne supported the family by boarding government officials, one of whom was the New York senator Aaron Burr. Meanwhile, life in Philadelphia proved a finishing school for Dolley. The city, as capital, commercial center, and cosmopolitan seaport, set the national taste for fashion and style. The prevailing influence during Dolley's adolescent years was French, but after the French Revolution fashion trends became more British and, in democratic eyes, more aristocratic. In the course of Dolley's youth, some of her friends split from their religious community to form a more liberal meeting of Free Quakers, but she remained conservative. Marriage and Family In 1790, Dolley married John Todd, a rising young Philadelphia lawyer from a respectable, middle class Quaker family. They could afford a fine three story home at Fourth and Walnut Streets. Within a year, she gave birth to a boy, Payne, and brought her ten year old sister, Anna, to live with them as a daughter. Having given birth to another baby boy two years later, she seemed content to live happily ever after as middle class wife and mother. About that time, Dolley's sister Lucy wed George Steptoe Washington, a young nephew of the president, and made a home for their mother and two youngest siblings, Mary and John, at Harewood, a plantation near what is now Charleston, West Virginia. The location was close enough for occasional visits and far enough to avoid Philadelphia's fatal fevers. The summer of 1793 brought the worst fever epidemic in years. Up to mid August, burials averaged three to five per day. By month's end, they rose to twenty four per day. Dolley joined the exodus to suburban Gray's Ferry with her babies, sisters Anna and Mary, brother John, and their mother. Her husband stayed behind to nurse his stricken apprentice, and her in laws stayed behind to nurse their son. The apprentice and both elder Todds died within two weeks. Her husband lived to join the little family at Gray's Ferry for a month before he, too, died. On the same day, their two month old baby, sickly from birth, also died. Dolley Todd was left far from home with only nineteen dollars. She appealed for funds from the babies' nurse in Philadelphia, but once back at home, she found no relief. Her late husband's brother James tied up her legacy for two years, even selling his brother's books, meant for baby Payne's future. It was after Aaron Burr introduced her to the "great little Madison," that the famous congressman from Virginia, James Madison, came to Dolley's rescue, persuading James Todd to pay Dolley her fair share. Though James and Dolley were the same height, he had been rheumatic since childhood and so slight as to appear shorter than she, who carried herself like a queen. James, at forty three, conducted a breathless four month courtship of the twenty six year old widow. On her wedding night, she took time to send a letter to her best friend, Eliza Lee, who had been a bridesmaid at her first wedding, announcing that she was now "Dolley Madison! Alass! Alass!" Because they married at her sister Lucy's estate, on September 15, 1794, before an Episcopalian clergyman, Dolley's Pine Street Meeting disowned her for marrying a non Quaker before "a hireling priest." She gradually set aside traditional Quaker simplicity for more fashionable French gowns befitting the wife of the congressional leader-though retaining her Quaker caps until becoming First Lady. Bucolic Montpelier, the Madison family's Virginia plantation, became Dolley's new home in 1797 and gave her full range for her role as Virginia housewife. The region's first brick house, the small mansion was named Montpelier for its spectacular ninety mile panorama of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Madisons, junior and senior, shared the four rooms until the death of James's father in 1801, when the younger Madisons added a wing so that the widow could have privacy from the constant stream of visitors. While her husband spent hours in his study, Dolley made sure they lived well and within their means, furnishing the home with fashionable furniture from France, bought second hand, and entertaining sometimes thirty guests at a time with homegrown, abundant meals. Even in prosperous years for agriculture, the Madisons realized no profit from ten acres of corn and tobacco. In addition to James's rheumatic fevers, he suffered recurring bouts of malaria. The only time Dolley left his side for any length of time was when he sent her to spend a summer in Philadelphia to cure an abscessed knee. Even then, he spent most of the summer by her bedside. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801 and asked James to be secretary of state, Madison acceded only after weeks spent recovering his own health. Because Jefferson and Burr, the vice president, were widowers and Jefferson's two daughters could not afford to live in Washington, D.C., Dolley played First Lady for his two terms, along with Jefferson's daughter Patsy. Other cabinet wives helped, but as the wife of the secretary of state, Dolley assumed the risky role of hostess under Jefferson's policy that ceremony was undemocratic. At their first banquet, Jefferson openly snubbed the British ambassador's wife, Elizabeth Merry, by escorting Dolley to dinner-not Mrs. Merry, as protocol demanded. Jefferson offered the Madisons a home in the White House, but after three weeks they moved to one of the few brick houses in town. Located on F Street, it was three stories high with plenty of rooms for eleven year old Payne, twenty year old Anna, and the hundreds of guests attracted to Dolley's abundant dinners and informal receptions, including exclusive receptions for women that rivaled the all male affairs at the White House. From 1804 through 1809, there followed in seemingly endless succession a series of deaths in the family: two beloved nieces, still toddlers; their mother, sister Mary; Mrs. Madison's mother; two brothers; and sister Lucy's husband. All this came during a time of political tempests, both foreign and domestic. Britain, again at war with France, harassed American ships at sea because the United States was friendly with France; the northeastern states talked of secession over the embargo on foreign goods; and members of Madison's own party tried to block his election as president. Presidency and First Ladyship When Dolley assumed the role of First Lady in her own right in March, 1809, her first goal was to cool the political heat. She did so by refashioning the role of First Lady with a keen sense of public relations. Jefferson still inhabited the White House, so the reception for James's inaugural was at the Madisons' home. That wintry afternoon, it took a cold half hour just to get in to shake the new president's hand. At his side, Dolley glowed in a plain, American made cambric dress with no jewelry except her gold engagement ring of diamond roses. That night, four hundred guests attended the inaugural ball. Some stood on benches, just to see Dolley enter to the Marine Band's rendition of "Madison's March." She dressed down in a plain, pale buff velvet gown with no trimming. In place of the afternoon's bonnet, however, she wore a velvet and white satin turban, topped in the latest Parisian style by two towering white feathers. With Benjamin Latrobe as interior designer and French born Jean Pierre Sioussat as butler and master of ceremonies, Dolley set about refurbishing the twenty three room White House as a palace fit for an American president. She started with the drawing room for her Wednesday receptions. Jefferson had brought a few spare pieces from his home, Monticello, but from Montpelier Dolley brought her French furniture. With funds from Congress, she redecorated with large lamps illuminating sunflower yellows and reds, red velvet cushions, and superb red silk curtains, which cost four dollars per yard. Dolley's sisters Anna Cutts and the widowed Lucy Washington came to live with her, and rumors of promiscuity among the women of the White House caused a minor scandal. The president's ally Postmaster General Gideon Granger, Jr., accused Congressman Samuel Hunt of spreading such rumors. Hunt challenged him to a duel. Dolley made a great point of publicly inviting Hunt to lunch, and the duel was called off. Still, the president's enemies forged ahead. Their Georgetown newspaper advertised a fake book that claimed Madison's impotence was the cause of Dolley becoming the model for "the insatiability of democratic women." Nevertheless, Dolley's informal receptions showed off her remarkable skills as a hostess. With the hospitality of a Virginia housewife, she made each guest feel like the most important person in the room. No matter how naïve or sophisticated, young people particularly fell under her spell. On his first visit, twenty three year old Elbert Gerry, Jr., spoke for all: "She treated me more like a son than a stranger." New Yorker Frances Few saw her as "all things to all men," telling people what they wanted to hear. "I do not think it possible to know what her real opinions are," she said and yet found it impossible to be with her and not be pleased. At formal dinners, Dolley would seat the president's secretary at one end of the table and herself at the head, so that James sat in the middle of his guests, the better to converse with the greatest number. So smoothly did she maintain her policy of nonpartisanship at receptions and dinners that one congressman remarked, "You cannot discover who are her husband's friends or foes." Her friend Benjamin Latrobe insisted that she was a closet Federalist, applying pressure to appoint favorites of her own. She did have her network of cabinet and congressional wives to exchange information, but nobody knows the extent to which pillow talk influenced James's decisions. She made sure that every day, no matter how full the schedule, she would visit him to impart a cheerful story or news. Aware of intrigues playing all around them, she had to be circumspect even in correspondence. "I could tell you many curious things . . . but I must not trust my pen." Yet it was her pen that assured her place in the pantheon of national heroines. She herself was responsible for publicizing the dramatic story of how in 1814, at the height of the War of 1812, she rescued George Washington's famous Lansdowne portrait by Gilbert Stuart when the British burned down the White House. A woman who takes time on her wedding day to write a letter to her best friend would surely be capable of penning a running account of the action as it was happening. In the form of a letter to her sister Lucy, she told how she refused to leave the White House, waiting for the president to come home from the front and fearing for his safety. With dramatic immediacy she told how, the next day, finally persuaded to flee, she insisted on rescuing official papers, valuable articles, and Washington's portrait, even as troops advanced unimpeded up Pennsylvania Avenue. The account was not published until 1836, by which time she had so endeared herself to the nation as to overcome intimations of exaggeration. Perhaps she had forgotten that the portrait was only a copy of Stuart's original by the landscape artist William Winstanley, but she surely knew its value as a national icon. Her own adventures were dramatic enough without embellishment. She and James had planned to meet at a tavern in Maryland, but in a night filled with tempestuous rain and fear of marauding troops, she stopped to rest, missing him in the darkness by just five miles, then arriving at the tavern only to find that she had missed him again. Finally, she disobeyed his order to stay until he sent for her, commandeered a carriage, and raced home through crowds of refugees. Their cheers encouraged her to think that she was thus sustaining the nation's morale in this, its darkest hour. She returned about noon on August 27, 1814, to find Washington gutted. The War, Navy, and Treasury buildings, along with the arsenal and Navy yard, were destroyed; the White House was a burned out shell. The Madisons took up temporary quarters in the fashionable Octagon House, which was large enough to restore the Wednesday receptions as an act of defiance, another boost to local morale. In public, she and the president made a great show of returning to normality, but in private Dolley suffered from depression. Visitors were surprised at her violent outbursts against the British and her complaints against Americans who were blaming her husband for the devastation and even refusing to visit her. Intimates said she had moments of uncontrolled sobbing, the immediate reaction to seeing her lovely White House in ruins and a delayed reaction to the trauma of pursuing James in the dark of dreadful night. Compounding her anxiety, reports from abroad said that Europeans had been treating her son, Payne, who was part of the peace mission, as an American crown prince and leading him into a life of drinking and gambling all night long. Worse, wandering in the field of battle had done frail James's health no good. The Madisons were forced to move from the dampness of Octagon House to a smaller place in the Seven Buildings. One town house there served as James's executive office building, with the adjacent house having to do as Dolley's White House for the rest of their two years in Washington. By Christmas, the enemy seemed to have given up. Dolley celebrated Andrew Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans in January, 1815, with a gala open house and the peace treaty in February with receptions on a scale unseen in years. Now she complained in a different key: "Such overflowing rooms I never saw before-I sigh for repose." As she stood at the door receiving soldiers on their way home, all tossed their hats in the air, cheering wildly. Good times had come again. Her receptions remained the hub of the social whirl. As Madison's term came to a close, former president John Adams marveled that Madison had somehow managed to establish "more Union, than all his three Predecessors." When Georgetown held a gala farewell ball, it was to honor Dolley in her own right. Even the conservative press praised the retiring First Lady for perfecting the principle expressed by "We are all Federalists, we are all Republicans," referring to the two political factions of the time. Retirement at Montpelier, only ninety three miles away, could have been a romantic idyll. Dolley was surrounded by spectacular scenery, a library of nine hundred books, and a collection of fine art acquired during forty three years of public service and diplomacy. She was also surrounded with visitors; ninety attended the Fourth of July picnic of 1820. "I am," she said, "less worried here with a hundred visitors than with twenty five in Washington." She would have liked to travel, and she missed keeping up with the latest fashions, but James's illness kept her close to home. Besides her husband's health, her chief anxiety was for her son Payne. At twenty six, he had led a life of reckless wandering so that she seldom knew where he was. Her letters had gone unanswered so long that she wrote to the postmaster, asking if they had been delivered. She had, however, heard from his many creditors, and both she and James, unknown to each other, had been keeping him out of debtors prison. Payne finally returned home, living on land he purchased nearby. Without Dolley knowing, her husband had paid an estimated twenty thousand dollars to cover Payne's debts-and she did know he had paid about a third more. At retirement, they had owned the five thousand acre Montpelier estate plus one thousand acres in Kentucky. The continual drain to cover Payne's debts led to selling off lands, mortgaging half the Montpelier estate, and selling those of their slaves who consented to be sold to a kindhearted neighbor. From 1830 on, as James suffered severe arthritis and the ophthalmia that she had suffered for years made Dolley give up reading, they began a Herculean task of organizing his papers. They put Payne to work as a copyist alongside three hired clerks and Dolley's brother John. As a legacy for her and for the United States, they hoped that Congress would buy James's records of the Federal Convention of 1787, at least, and that a commercial publisher would print the remainder of Madison's public papers. They burned their personal correspondence. James died at breakfast on June 28, 1836, at the age of eighty five. Drained, Dolley took to her bed for the next six months. Payne's demands on New York publishers ruined hopes for commercial sale of the papers, but through such friends as Senator Henry Clay, Congress paid her thirty thousand dollars for records of the convention. At age seventy, she returned to their Washington house at Lafayette Square and H Street, there to take on the role of venerated national monument. For a few years, Montpelier provided a retreat from Washington summers, but Payne continued to drain her resources, both emotional and financial. Fur magnate John Jacob Astor gave her a mortgage on the Washington house, and she had to rent out Montpelier until 1844, when her brother in law William Madison sued the estate, forcing her to sell it. Her appeals to Payne to help make decisions went unanswered. By the mid 1840's, Payne had become a chronic alcoholic and deadbeat. Whatever his mother gave him, he spent on liquor, marked cards, and women. She asked him to help decide what to salvage from Montpelier for Lafayette Square, and he thereupon sold the furnishings-along with assorted loot and papers from her safe deposit box. Loving not wisely but too well, she insisted only that he return the silver service, then eventually allowed him to pawn it anyway. When Congress paid twenty five thousand dollars for some of Madison's papers Payne had not purloined, the funds were put in trust so that he could not get his hands on them so long as she lived. Although Payne was keeping her penniless, Dolley kept up appearances appropriate to a relic of the revolution. One of the first things she did with the payment from Congress was to take a party of friends on a pleasure cruise along the Potomac River before returning to her diurnal course of the past dozen years, paying and returning visits, enjoying homage with Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton's widow, as the last of the Founding Mothers and in her own right, eldest First Lady of them all. Few officials, foreign or domestic, visited the White House without a pilgrimage across Lafayette Square to Dolley Madison's comfortable, two story home on the corner of H Street. New Year's Day visits to a president were considered incomplete without a visit to Dolley Madison. For presidents from Martin Van Buren to James Buchanan, she was both constant visitor and confidential consultant. After her twenty two year old cousin, Angelica Singleton, wed Van Buren's son and acted as First Lady for the widowed president, Dolley became a featured fixture in the White House. After mourning the loss of his first wife, President John Tyler reinstituted public receptions as "a Virginia notion," to bring all people together. With a nod to Dolley Madison, he told the New York Herald, "It Americanizes them." When he wed Julia Gardiner, Dolley, who tutored the new First Lady, found her own ideas of hospitality discarded for imitation imperial glamor. Making guests wait until all were assembled before making her grand entrance, Julia Tyler would greet guests from an elevated armchair with her hair shaped to resemble a crown and with six maids of honor on each side, dressed as elegantly as she was, in grotesque contrast to Dolley's elegant but democratic style. Dolley still rode around town in her old fashioned chariot so disreputable that some wag tagged it with a sign reading "This is gentility." She remained a model of gentility in poverty with a glamor all her own. At nearly eighty, she looked much younger, still attending parties and receiving company. With her niece Annie Payne as adopted daughter and constant companion, she presided over Washington as dowager First Lady. As pilgrims venerated the tall, handsome octogenarian in a shabby old gown of black velvet or brocade, short waisted, puff sleeved, with a muslin handkerchief tucked into the low waist, and a stiff quilling of net to cover the scragginess of her neck, they could not see the depth of her poverty. She would wear basic black to hide the fact that her once overflowing wardrobe now stood emptied. Friends declined her wine, knowing the wine cellar was bare. Her old slave Paul Jennings, now free and a civil servant, would deliver food baskets to her and occasionally give her small sums from his own pocket. She kept up appearances, joining ninety two year old Elizabeth Hamilton at the laying of the cornerstone for the Washington Monument. Both had chaired the drive to raise funds for the monument, founded orphan societies, and had devoted their lives to guarding their husbands' fame, but Elizabeth seldom visited or entertained and almost never went out in society. Dolley, by contrast, seldom missed a social event. In the freezing January cold, she attended a wedding party where guests marveled at her consumption of oysters, ice cream, chicken salad, jelly, tongue, and champagne. Not long afterward, she stood for three hours on the receiving line at President James Polk's reception, this time in a white satin gown that revealed shoulders and arms youthful as ever and in one of her favored turbans, also fringed with white satin. The fatigue was too much for her to last till midnight. Polk's successor, Zachary Taylor, knowing she was too weak to attend his inauguration, crossed Lafayette Square to seek her blessing. At eighty one, a stroke had left her too weak to attend even the inauguration balls. Confined to her bed, she slept peacefully through her final days, with Annie Payne her constant nurse, relieved by Dolley's best friend and bridesmaid Eliza Lee and other friends. Just two days after dictating her will, between 10:00 and 11:00 on the night of July 12, 1849, Dolley died. President Taylor, along with hundreds of Washingtonians, mourned at services in nearby Saint John's Episcopal Church, which Dolley had joined after James's death. She who had followed long processions as a refugee from Philadelphia's yellow fever and marauding British troops was now followed by a procession reported to be the largest yet seen in the city. The Washington National Intelligencer spoke for the nation: "She touched all hearts by her goodness and won the admiration of all by the charms of dignity and grace." Years later, after Virginians raised an obelisk over James Madison's grave in the Montpelier burying grounds, Dolley Madison's remains were removed from the Congressional Cemetery in Washington to lie near James's with a small stone of her own, inscribed: "To the Memory of Dolley Payne wife of James Madison." It was half hidden by the obelisk, just as her inner thoughts were hidden with the destruction of her intimate letters. What remains is the image that she forged.
Legacy Dolley Madison brought the First Ladyship out of the shadow of the presidency and gave it a life of its own. Counting two terms as Jefferson's hostess, she served sixteen years, longer than any president served in his office before or since. It was no accident that, when they were displaced by fire in 1814, the Madisons had to set up an executive office house for James separate from her temporary White House. While he took care of governing, she took care of everything else. By force of personality, she fused the political concerns of Abigail Adams with the ceremonial concerns of Martha Washington, creating a First Lady who cared for people rather than party. Her extraordinary sense of public relations enabled her to sustain a neat balance between the rhetoric of democracy and the ritual of royalty, the formula for successful First Ladies. If she is now known more for having served ice cream in the White House than as the first modern First Lady, it is a sign of how well Dolley did her job. Suggested Readings Arnett, Ethel S. Mrs. James Madison: The Incomparable Dolley. Greensboro, N.C.: Piedmont Press, 1972. Arnett, a regional historian skilled in research, offers reliable coverage of Dolley Madison's early life. Brant, Irving. James Madison. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1941 1961. Standard biography of the president; the last four volumes include the most authentic information about Dolley Madison in the context of American and European history. Clark, Allen C. Life and Letters of Dolly Madison. Washington, D.C.: W. F. Roberts, 1914. While not up to modern editorial standards, provides a large selection of letters by and about Dolley Madison, her family, and friends, with interesting appendices. Cutts, Lucia Beverly. Memoirs and Letters of Dolley Madison, Wife of James Madison, President of the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886. Edited by her grandniece. Hunt Jones, Conover. Dolley and the "Great Little Madison." Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Foundation, 1977. A succinct treatment of Dolley Madison's life, lifestyle, and material culture, with full illustrations of fashions in costume, art, and furnishings at Montpelier and the White House. Paul M. Zall |
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