The Founders at Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

by Myron Magnet

  Worse by far, the Sedition Act violates the Virginia Ratifying Convention’s solemn statement “that, among other essential rights, the liberty of conscience and of the press cannot be cancelled, abridged, restrained or modified by any authority of the United States.” The act usurps a power that the Constitution not only doesn’t confer but indeed positively prohibits in the Bill of Rights—and the usurpation “ought to produce universal alarm, because it is levelled against the right of freely examining public characters and public measures, and of free communication among the people thereon, which has ever been justly deemed, the only effectual guardian of every other right.”48 And remember, Madison wrote in a later report on the Virginia Resolutions, “that to the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity, over error and oppression.” Without freedom of the press, the United States might still “possibly be miserable colonies, groaning under a foreign yoke.”49 As for journalistic abuses: out of the clash of assertions and opinions, however false and biased, would emerge truth, he believed, with a radical faith in freedom of thought and expression, and a belief in the power of information, that uncannily prefigure John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

  As to what to do, the Virginia Resolutions are less clear, merely advising that the states “are in duty bound, to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil” that threatens their citizens’ “rights and liberties.”50 When in September 1799, Madison, Monroe, and Jefferson gathered at Monticello to discuss how best to proceed, Madison was aghast to hear Jefferson say that Virginia and Kentucky should declare themselves ready “to sever ourselves from that union we so much value, rather than give up the rights of self government . . . in which we alone see liberty, safety and happiness.” Spluttered Madison, “We should never think of separation except for repeated and enormous violations.”51 He trusted in the wisdom of the electorate and the diffusion of republican culture through the newspapers to right this wrong, and soon enough Jefferson became president and let the Alien and Sedition Acts lapse.

  Imagine Madison’s horror, then, when in the late 1820s South Carolinians opposed to a protective tariff began to speak of their state’s right to nullify it, citing the authority of Madison and Jefferson’s Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. As Vice President (and, later, Senator) John C. Calhoun fanned the flames into the 1830s, the elderly Madison wrote one earnest letter after another, recalling that the Constitution was not a pact among the state legislatures but among “the people in each of the states, acting in their highest sovereign authority,” so no state legislature had the authority to nullify an act of Congress, which was the supreme law of the land. If states seized such authority, they would “speedily put an end to the Union itself.”52 And to gain what? “The idea that a Constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings, and a Union admitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty and happiness of the people of the States comprizing it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than existing causes is more painful than words can express.”53

  By 1833, Madison noted, northerners began voicing “unconstitutional designs on the subject of . . . slaves” (as Patrick Henry had predicted they would forty-five years earlier), and talk in the South turned from nullification to secession. If a state or bloc of states were actually to secede, Madison wrote, what the other states might do raises questions too painful to consider. “God grant,” he concluded, that we are spared “the more painful task of deciding them!”54 The next year, he wrote a note of Advice to My Country, to be read after his death: “The advice nearest to my heart and deepest in my convictions is that the Union of the States be cherished and perpetuated. Let the open enemy to it be regarded as a Pandora with her box opened; and the disguised one, as the Serpent creeping with his deadly wiles into Paradise.”55 However inadvertently, and much to his sorrow, he was complicit in opening the lid of that box, if only a tiny crack, and letting the evils loose. And when his Advice first appeared in print in 1850, inflamed states’-rights partisans dismissed it as a forgery.56

  JAMES MADISON was a remarkable mind. But what of his heart—his passions as well as his reason, as he would say? That too is an extraordinary story, with a sadly unpromising start ending in one of the legendarily successful political marriages in American history.

  Madison was not the stuff of which fairy-tale lovers are made. Not for nothing did his detractors dismiss him as “Little Jemmy.” Five foot six at the highest estimate, though some guess five four (and we do shrink with age), slight and delicate in build, he was, one contemporary said, “no bigger than half a piece of soap.”57 When he first arrived in Congress at twenty-nine, one delegate mistook him as being “just from the College.”58 By his midthirties, suffering periodic attacks of “bilious indisposition” and chronic hypochondria, he was balding and wore his powdered hair in a comb-over that ended in a little point on his forehead.59 In his customary suits of solemn black, with knee breeches and black silk stockings, he looked, thought Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (later a leading Girondin), like “a stern censor, . . . conscious of his talents and duties.”

  As a public speaker, swaying back and forth, and consulting notes in his hat, he had, according to an unsympathetic congressional colleague, “no fire, no enthusiasm, no animation; but he has infinite prudence and industry.”60 An admiring Bushrod Washington, by contrast, saw the intellectual brilliance behind the low-voiced, undramatic presentation and told his uncle, the General, that Madison spoke “with such force of reasoning, and a display of such irresistible truths, that opposition seemed to have quitted the field.”61 The Virginia Journal blossomed into verse to praise his Constitutional Convention oratory:

  Maddison, above the rest

  Pouring, from his narrow chest

  More than Greek or Roman sense

  Boundless tides of eloquence.62

  MANY OBSERVERS noted the contrast between his awkward reserve with crowds and strangers, and his genial fluency with intimates. Perhaps Edward Coles, Madison’s secretary and his wife’s cousin, caught it best: “his form, features, and manner were not commanding, but his conversation exceedingly so and few men possessed so rich a flow of language, or so great a fund of amusing anecdotes, which were made the more interesting for their being well-timed and well-told. His ordinary manner was simple, modest, bland, and unostentatious, retiring from the throng and cautiously refraining from doing or saying anything to make himself conspicuous.”63 But in private, ever since Princeton, he even liked a dirty joke.

  Most delegates to the Continental Congress lived in boardinghouses, and at Mrs. Mary House’s harmonious and agreeable one a block from Independence Hall, Madison’s Philadelphia lodging from 1780 to 1793, the Virginia congressman met his New York colleague and fellow boarder, William Floyd, who brought his family to stay in late 1782. Madison, thirty-one, fell in love with the youngest Floyd daughter—harpsichord-playing Catherine, then fifteen—and by April 1783, just when Kitty was about to turn sixteen, Madison wrote Jefferson that he “had sufficiently ascertained her sentiments” and that “the affair has been pursued” so successfully that the “preliminary arrangements” were “definitive”—a roundabout way of saying that they were engaged.64 They exchanged miniature portraits by Charles Willson Peale, and when the congressional session ended, the thirty-two-year-old swain accompanied his betrothed and her family on their trip home and stayed for a brief visit.

  But in July, in a letter brattily sealed with a blob of rye dough, Kitty wrote Madison to break it off, doubtless because she preferred the young medical student she had also met at Mrs. House’s and whom she married in 1785. It’s a problem for biographers that Madison asked his correspondents to return his letters and destroyed or defaced most of the personal ones, directing his wife to burn the remaining nonpolitical ones after his death. Though his August 11, 1783, letter to Jefferson survives, he crossed out its account of the Kitty Floyd affair; but
the heartache still bleeds out from under the inkblots: “one of those incidents to which such affairs are liable . . . profession of indifference . . . more propitious turn of fate.” Jefferson replied with the usual bromides, enlivened by his golden pen: “the world still presents the same and many other resources of happiness, and you possess many within yourself.” He had thought the match a done deal, he wrote, “[b]ut of all machines ours is the most complicated and inexplicable.”65

  AS MADISON shepherded the Constitution, the new government, and the Bill of Rights into existence, he himself entered into middle age as a confirmed bachelor. But instead of being just a short, slight, balding, diffident middle-aged bachelor, he was a famous and powerful one—so when he asked his friend Senator Aaron Burr in May 1794 to introduce him to Philadelphia’s most eligible young widow, Dolley Payne Todd, she readily, if nervously, agreed to meet the man she called “the great little Madison.”66 All the young and youngish men of Philadelphia were “in the Pouts” for the famously buxom twenty-five-year-old and would “station themselves where they could see her pass,” one friend recalled.67 She was “the first & fairest representative of Virginia, in the female society of Philada,” her old friend Anthony Morris wrote, “and she soon raised the mercury there in the thermometers of the Heart to fever heat.”68 It wasn’t just her external charms that fascinated everyone; she had an inner radiance, visible to all, which she herself summed up better than anyone. “Everybody loves Mrs. Madison,” Senator Henry Clay once said to her, much later. “That’s because,” she replied without missing a beat, “Mrs. Madison loves everybody.”69

  For all her sunniness, Dolley was acquainted with grief, which perhaps explains her habitual caginess about her past. Her father was a high-principled failure, who therefore inflicted upon his family some of the cost of those principles. He and Dolley’s mother had moved from Virginia to join a Quaker settlement in North Carolina, where Dolley was born three years later, in May 1768. But the Paynes didn’t make a go of Carolina farming, and, a year after Dolley’s birth, they sold their farm at a big loss and returned to farm in Virginia, with their slaves. When Virginia legalized manumission in 1782, the state’s Quakers faced a stern choice: free their slaves, since the Quakers increasingly found slavery morally intolerable, or leave the sect. John Payne chose emancipation, moved to Philadelphia and became a laundry-starch merchant, failed, got thrown out of the Pine Street Meeting for insolvency, shut himself in his room, and died in 1792.70

  By then, his temperature-raising Dolley had been married for two years to Quaker lawyer John Todd and had borne her first child, John Payne Todd. In the summer of 1793, she gave birth to her second son, just as a horrific yellow-fever plague was about to scourge Philadelphia. It killed perhaps one in every ten inhabitants and devastated Dolley’s family. After sending her and the babies to supposed safety in the countryside, John Todd stayed in town to look after his parents, who refused to leave and soon succumbed. By the time he fled, it was too late. He died on October 14, 1793, as did his infant son, leaving Dolley a twenty-five-year-old widow with a toddler to raise.71

  Seven months later, within days of Dolley’s twenty-sixth birthday in May 1794, Burr introduced her to Madison. In June, one of Dolley’s young relatives wrote her that forty-three-year-old “Mad—” told her to say that “he thinks so much of you in the day that he has Lost his Tongue, at Night he Dreames of you & Starts in his Sleep a Calling on you to relieve the Flame for he Burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed.”72 In August, Dolley accepted Madison’s proposal. “I can not express, but hope you will conceive the joy it gave me,” he wrote her.73 In September, they were married at Harewood in West Virginia, home of Dolley’s younger sister, Lucy, wife of George Steptoe Washington, the General’s ward and nephew (so interconnected were the Virginia oligarchs).

  That day, Dolley wrote to her oldest friend, Eliza Collins Lee, wife of Light-Horse Harry Lee’s brother, Congressman Richard Bland Lee: “I have stolen from the family to commune with you—to tell you in short, that in the cource of this day I give my Hand to the Man who of all other’s I most admire,” and she signed herself “Dolley Payne Todd.” Later, after Madison had slipped on her tiny finger a ring with a circle of modest diamonds lovingly preserved at Montpelier, she penned this addendum: “Evening: Dolley Madison! Alass!” The paper being torn off at this point, who knows what was in her heart on her wedding night?74 The Society of Friends, however, knew what it thought of her marrying a non-Quaker eleven months after her first husband’s death: it expelled her.

  BEGINNING IN January 1793, when the French revolutionaries murdered Louis XVI, the Republican embrace of France caused a steady erosion of the party’s influence, which Republican adulation of French ambassador Edmond Genêt speeded up. But the envoy’s presumptuous disregard of President Washington’s neutrality proclamation soon began to “surprize and disgust” Republican leaders, wrote Madison; they grasped that the young man’s “folly” would “do mischief which no wisdom can repair.”75 When Washington himself publicly blamed the “self-created” Democratic-Republican Societies, with their glorification of the increasingly radical and violent French Revolution, for sparking the antitax Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in the summer of 1794, Madison lost heart.

  Federalist journalists had already been calling the societies “Madisonian” and terming their “Jaco-Demo-Crat” members “the Mads”—a dig that stuck.76 “The game,” said Madison, “was to connect the democratic Societies with the odium of insurrection—to connect the Republicans in Congress with those Societies—to put the President ostensibly at the head of another party, in opposition to both” the Republicans and the societies.77 By the end of the 1796–97 congressional session, a dispirited Madison, having failed to stop the Jay Treaty with Britain from going into effect and no longer leader of what had been called “Mr. Madison’s Party” or the “French Party,” chose to retire from Congress and take Dolley home to Virginia.

  His parents needed him there. As his father, James Madison, Sr., had grown old and frail, Madison’s brother Ambrose had taken over the management of Montpelier. But Ambrose died suddenly in 1793, and when Madison returned home, he grasped the reins of the plantation and became, for the first time, a Virginia farmer.

  HE MOVED HIS WIFE, her young son, and her beloved youngest sister Anna—whom Dolley called her sister-daughter—into his parents’ nine-room brick house, Orange County’s biggest when his father had built it in the mid-1760s. To this conventional five-bay, two-story Georgian house—in other words, it had four windows and a central doorway on the first floor, and five windows on the second—he immediately began adding a four-room extension to the north, with its own internal staircase. By ingeniously adding three more bays—another door and two more windows on the first floor, with three windows above—he produced a still-symmetrical eighty-six-foot-long building, with three pairs of windows on the first floor, separated by doorways on each side of the central pair. To emphasize the symmetry and unify the façade further, he built a two-story columned portico as a central focal point, embracing the two doorways. The second floor of the enlarged building was a connected whole, but to get from the new first floor to the old meant going out one front door and walking across the porch to the other, so that Madison’s young family had some sense of privacy from his elderly parents.

  THE EVOLUTION OF MONTPELIER

  Courtesy of The Montpelier Foundation and Partsense, Inc.

  The house Madison’s father built in the mid-1760s

  The house with the extension Madison added after his return to Montpelier with his new bride in 1797, with its entrance between the two left-hand columns of the new portico

  Montpelier as enlarged during President Madison’s first term

  When Madison became president in 1809, he began preparing for his second retirement by enlarging Montpelier further, adding two one-story wings with roof terraces on each side, one of them housing a grand library, and the
other a comfortable residence for his mother—still living there when Madison retired for good, visited daily by her son and daughter-in-law, until her death at ninety-seven in 1829, when Madison was seventy-eight and more wrinkled than she.78 With advice (and workmen) from his friends Jefferson, Capitol architect William Thornton, and White House interior designer Benjamin Henry Latrobe, he reunified the first floor and added a stylish, pedimented central entrance door with a fanlight above, and he knocked down more walls to make a large, stately, presidential drawing room, hung with a mini-museum of second-rate old-master paintings, at the heart of the house. He also built a lovely domed tempietto—a whimsical, classical covering for an icehouse dug into the ground below—just to the northwest of what was now a serene, self-confident, late-Georgian mansion, tripartite, harmoniously proportioned, unostentatiously grand, and looking out to the heart-melting Piedmont view over Madison’s 5,000 lush patrimonial acres.

  These details, so easy to relate, cost restorers and archeologists immense labor to discover, not simply because Montpelier grew up through three successive stages of Madison family development but more especially because the presidential mansion underwent continual “modernization” and enlargement almost from the moment the widowed Dolley Madison had to sell it in 1844. The family who bought it in 1848, for example, stuccoed over the rose-colored handmade bricks and replaced the wooden-shingle roof with a metal one, to make the house look more fashionably Greek Revival. But William du Pont, Sr., an heir to the great chemical and gunpowder fortune, made the biggest change after he took over Montpelier in 1901. A mere presidential mansion seems not to have been grand enough for him: he more than doubled the size of the house, from twenty-two rooms when he started to a Brobdingnagian fifty-five. His daughter Marion, married for a time to cowboy-movie idol Randolph Scott, inherited the house in 1928, making the grounds into a famous thoroughbred center and turning part of Mother Madison’s wing into an art deco fantasy of chrome and lacquer, with a Steuben crystal mantelpiece, that more evokes a streamlined diner than the metropolitan suavity of an art deco icon like Rockefeller Center—and that the restorers have moved to a separate building.