SIZE ISN’T EVERYTHING
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both quite tall. Even John Adams had size (albeit width, not height). Compared with his predecessors, James Madison was virtually a prawn, and he still holds the distinction of being the shortest chief executive in the nation’s history. At 5′4″, the impression he made was hardly presidential. At his inauguration, Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of future president John Quincy Adams, described the new president as “a very small man in his person, with a very large head.” (She was referring to the man’s intellectual capacity, by the way, not the size of his actual cranium—just in case you were envisioning the fourth president of the United States as some sort of extraterrestrial.)
FRAIL THE CHIEF
James Madison was without a doubt the sickliest president in American history. The man’s life reads like the index to a medical textbook. Influenza, dysentery, rheumatism, hemorrhoids—you name it, he had it. He suffered frequent bouts of illness from a young age and abstained from serving in the Continental Army during the Revolution on account of them. In accordance with a common eighteenth-century belief that avoiding outdoor activities could weaken a man’s constitution, his sorry state of health was blamed on his love of books and studying. Doctors actually told him to lay off the excessive scholarship. (Fortunately for us, he didn’t listen.)
The location of the founded capital—Washington—didn’t help. The area’s proximity to a swamp meant summers there could be infernally humid and plagued by fetid, unhealthy air. While unpleasant for most people, it was downright crippling for Madison, whose “bilious indispositions,” as he called them, usually forced him to flee D.C. during the hot months. In March 1807, when hostilities between France and Britain started posing a dire threat to American commerce overseas, then–Secretary of State Madison, weak with fever, could barely make it to his office. It was a sorry state of affairs indeed when you consider that during the very same period, President Thomas Jefferson was suffering one of his notorious migraines, requiring him to seek seclusion in a dark room by as early as nine o’clock in the morning.
Stiff One
According to one observer who met Madison in Philadelphia during the first Continental Congress, the diminutive Virginian was “the most unsociable creature in existence.” Another fan of Madison’s observed in 1809 that he was “a very small thin pale-visaged man of rather a sour, reserved and forbidding contenance [sic]. He seems to be incapable of smiling.” Yet more fawning praise from one who’d met the president-elect on his inauguration night: “Mr. Madison . . . is a small man quite devoid of dignity in his appearance—he bows very low and never looks at the person to whom he is bowing but keeps his eyes on the ground. His skin is like parchment.”
If you haven’t figured it out yet, James Madison was no charmer. Yet his wife would go down in history as one of the capital’s most beloved and respected hostesses. No event more clearly emphasized the differences between them than Madison’s inauguration party. While the president-elect showed up looking more like an undertaker than a politician (he even told one reveler that he’d rather be home in bed), Dolley was the focus of much attention, an intelligent and eager hostess whose natural gift for gab and wit shone in such an environment. “She was all dignity, grace and affability,” hailed one partygoer. Unfortunately, the first lady’s graces couldn’t completely compensate for the huge crowd—4,000 visitors jostled and elbowed one another, and windows were actually broken to let some air in. As John Quincy Adams observed, “The crowd was excessive, the heat oppressive, and the entertainment bad.”
JEMMY GET YER GUN
When James and Dolley Madison arrived at the White House in 1809, it was mostly barren—the majority of the furnishings had been Thomas Jefferson’s, and he took them back to Monticello. As a result, Congress appropriated some $26,000 for Dolley and an extravagant architect named Benjamin Henry Latrobe to overhaul the place. Within just a few years, virtually all of their hard work would be in ashes. War can make a mess of things.
The War of 1812 lies at the heart of the controversy surrounding James Madison’s administration. The central cause of the conflict can be summed up neatly in one word, impressment, which was the British navy’s nasty habit of boarding American vessels and stealing their sailors. Madison handled it by attempting to play the British and the French off each other with threats of commercial boycotts. Unfortunately, neither nation took him very seriously, New England merchants went berserk when their shipping interests were threatened, hawks in Congress started calling him a wuss, and the impressments continued apace. After settling on a more aggressive path and getting Congress to declare war against the British, Madison faced an even worse problem. The army and the navy were laughably unprepared, a condition for which his own antimilitary policies were mostly to blame. As defeat followed defeat, the conflict—soon mockingly referred to as “Mr. Madison’s War”—was leading many Americans to hate their own president more than the British.
Then things went from awful to horrid. In August 1814, the British landed on the coast, sent the American militia scurrying like mice, and captured Washington, D.C.—which they proceeded to torch. All Dolley Madison could save before fleeing the Executive Mansion was the household silver, a clock, some exorbitant red velvet curtains, bundles of state papers, and—last but not least—the famous portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. Dinner was set and still waiting to be eaten when, at around 7:30 on the evening of August 24, British Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn and company entered the evacuated mansion.
The British sat down to dine on the spread before them, and the admiral toasted Madison (whom he always referred to as “Jemmy”). Then they trashed the place and set fire to it. Before leaving, Cockburn snatched two souvenirs: one of Madison’s hats and a chair cushion belonging to the first lady—with which, the admiral was heard to say, he would remember her seat (wink, wink).
By the next day, a hurricane had rolled in, hastening the British back to their ships and extinguishing much of the conflagration they’d left behind. It was an omen of things to come. Within another five months, the Treaty of Ghent would end the war, and James Madison—his incompetence seemingly forgotten—would be a hero for winning America’s second war of independence. How’s that for a comeback?
5 JAMES MONROE
April 28, 1758–July 4, 1831
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Taurus
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1817–1825
PARTY: Republican
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 58
VICE PRESIDENT: Daniel D. Tompkins
RAN AGAINST: Rufus King (first term); John Quincy Adams (second term)
HEIGHT: 6′
NICKNAME: “Last Cocked Hat”
SOUND BITE: “Mrs. Monroe hath added a daughter to our society who, tho’ noisy, contributes greatly to its amusement.”
James Monroe was the last president to hail from the revolutionary generation, and he was the last of the Virginia dynasty that included Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. As a junior officer during the Revolution, he had been with Washington at the Battle of Trenton, where he’d received a musket ball in the shoulder for his efforts. He was elected to the Virginia legislature and had been sent as a delegate from that state to the convention that ratified the Constitution. He went on to represent the United States as a diplomat to both Britain and France, was elected a senator, and served as Madison’s secretary of state and acting secretary of war.
Jefferson once remarked that his friend Monroe was “a man whose soul might be turned wrong side outwards without discovering a blemish to the world.” Such opinions of Monroe were common, and his stint as president would, for the most part, mirror his hardworking, good-natured qualities. The period became known as the “Era of Good Feelings,” during which the country’s pride in defeating the British for a second time in the War of 1812 went hand in hand with growing industry and declining partisanship in government. The result was a nationwide warm and fuzzy
feeling.
Isn’t that nice? Of course, all was not sweetness and light. Monroe’s two terms would witness the acquisition of Florida (thanks to a reckless brute named Andrew Jackson, who went crashing into Spanish Florida looking for Seminole Indians and proceeded to turn a bloody international incident into a real estate opportunity), a frightening recession called the “Panic of 1819,” the extension of the Louisiana Purchase all the way to the Pacific Ocean, an ominous struggle over the admission of Missouri into the Union as a slave state, and—most famously—the Monroe Doctrine. This last, though shaped and worded mostly by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, would forever be attached to Monroe’s name, and it let the predatory European powers know that their cutthroat colonizing days in the Western Hemisphere were over—simply put, the United States was saying, “Hear me roar.”
In the middle of a heated argument, James Monroe chased his secretary of the treasury out of the White House with a pair of fire tongs.
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THAT’S SOOO LAST CENTURY
Everybody knew Monroe was a member of the old revolutionary gang, but he felt obliged to remind people anyway by dressing the part—right down to his britches and buffcoat, clothes that were already out of style. He even wore an old-fashioned wig and one of those eighteenth-century cocked hats. The effect was odd and a little disquieting. (Imagine George W. Bush appearing in public dressed like Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch.)
“ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS”?!
Despite the fact that Monroe’s administration has been remembered for its relative tranquillity, his White House bore witness to some moments that were anything but tranquil, notably:
Era of Good Feelings Personal Foul #1: Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford once came calling on the president with a stack of patronage recommendations, all of which Monroe rejected. Enraged, Crawford threw a temper tantrum and demanded to know whom Monroe intended to appoint; the president replied it was none of Crawford’s damn business. Crawford snapped and actually advanced on the chief executive with his cane raised, calling Monroe a “damned infernal old scoundrel.” Monroe then stepped to the fireplace, seized a pair of fire tongs, and chased his secretary of the treasury from the Executive Mansion.
Era of Good Feelings Personal Foul #2: At a White House dinner for foreign dignitaries, the British minister Sir Charles Vaughan and the French minister Count de Sérurier drew swords on each other following an exchange of insults. The two may well have mixed it up if the president hadn’t drawn his own blade and stepped between them. Today, one can’t help wondering why nineteenth-century society considered it acceptable for high-ranking, excitable officials to dine together at the American president’s home armed with deadly rapiers.
Esprit Décor
James Monroe was the only U.S. president to inherit a White House completely devoid of furnishings (everything had been burned by the British, remember), and he took the mansion’s redesign very seriously—so seriously, in fact, that he persuaded Congress to give him a hefty $50,000 for the project. Being an inveterate Francophile, he relied heavily on Parisian style, lavishing the White House with all manner of extravagant furniture and knickknacks. It didn’t take long for the price tag to spin out of control, and—unbeknownst to Monroe—the man in charge of handling the funds, Samuel Lane, was cooking the books. Years later, when Congress found out that some $20,000 was unaccounted for, a legislative inquiry determined that Monroe had sold some of his own White House furniture to the government for more than $9,000. (Monroe was always strapped for cash.) He reasoned that, because many of the furnishings had been paid for out of his own pocket, the money was rightfully his. Though seemingly unrelated to the connivings of Lane (who by this time was dead), the nature of the transaction raised more than a few eyebrows and compelled Monroe to allow Congress complete access to all the financial transactions he’d made, public and private, during his terms as a government official. Congress backed off.
But Monroe’s money problems were far from over. When he ran into more financial troubles later in life, he proceeded to barrage Congress with letters demanding reimbursement for funds he had paid out of his own pocket during his administration. Congress’s limited compliance to his request wasn’t enough, and Monroe had to abandon his own failing Virginia estate for his daughter’s digs in New York City. He died there in 1831, a virtual pauper.
IT’S GETTING OLD, GUYS
Unoriginal to the very end, James Monroe died on the auspicious date of July 4—the third president to do so.
6 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
July 11, 1767–February 23, 1848
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Cancer
TERM OF PRESIDENCY: 1825–1829
PARTY: Republican
AGE UPON TAKING OFFICE: 57
VICE PRESIDENT: John C. Calhoun
RAN AGAINST: Andrew Jackson, William Harris Crawford, Henry Clay
HEIGHT: 5′7″
NICKNAMES: “Accidental President,” “Old Man Eloquent”
QUOTE: “The four most miserable years of my life were my four years in the presidency.”
John Quincy Adams was the first son of a previous president to become president. It was a role he was destined to play from an early age, when, accompanied by his mother, Abigail, he personally witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill from the crest near his childhood home. His father, John Adams, second president of the United States, went out of his way to cultivate in John Quincy the pursuit of excellence and public service. When you’re an Adams, you’d better do things.
John Quincy Adams loved to skinny-dip in the Potomac River.
And JQA did lots of things. At the age of fourteen, he was indispensable to the American legation in Russia, where he spent a lot of his time translating French (the official language of the Russian court) for the American minister Francis Dana. He would go on to become his nation’s most esteemed diplomat, holding posts not only in St. Petersburg but in Berlin and London as well. (He would spend more than twenty years of his life overseas.) He spoke seven languages, was a published poet, and remains the only president to serve in the House of Representatives after leaving the White House. Indeed, it was in Congress—where he earned the nickname “Old Man Eloquent”—that he made perhaps his greatest contribution to American history: the repeal of the official gag rule that prevented representatives from raising the issue of slavery for debate. His passion for the subject would earn him the right to successfully defend the freedom of Africans from the slave ship Amistad, another notable success.
But such laurels came after his term as president. His mother, Abigail, despite her belief in public service, once said that she’d rather see JQA “thrown as a log on the fire than see him president of the United States.” They were ominous words, for John Quincy’s years as chief executive turned out to be a living hell. The election of 1824 was a fiasco in which none of the four candidates won a large enough margin in the electoral college. Despite the fact that Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, Congress proceeded to elect JQA president, largely because of his buddying up to Henry Clay, whose influence swung the balance. (When the popular vote threw Clay out of the race, he decided to back Adams over Jackson.) When the new president then appointed Clay secretary of state, Jackson and his cronies cried foul and vowed to do everything in their power to make JQA’s administration impotent. They succeeded, for virtually everything the president attempted to accomplish—including an ambitious public works program that called for the building of everything from roads and canals to national observatories—became utterly stymied by a hostile Congress. The result was one of the most ineffectual administrations in American history.
By 1828, Jackson had done everything in his power to ensure an easy victory over JQA, whose elitist dislike of political campaigning only sealed his fate. He then had to endure the sort of humiliation that, until then, only his father had faced: getting voted out of a second presidential term.
But then, virtually not
hing about being JQA was easy . . .
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AQUATIC NEUROTIC
John Quincy Adams’s obsession with self-improvement often left him soaking wet. He believed in ice-cold baths, wherein he scrubbed himself raw with a mitten made of horsehair. In addition to taking long walks (sometimes six miles a day), he was an avid swimmer, especially fond of doing so in the nude—until he discovered that swimming with his clothes on was much more difficult, and therefore more therapeutic. While president, he set time aside virtually every day for a swim in the Potomac—a preoccupation that nearly killed him when, upon rowing with a servant to the far shore with the intent of swimming back, a storm brewed. After their flimsy canoe filled with water and sank, the two only barely made it to the far shore. The servant set off in search of clothing, and JQA waited patiently, sitting naked on the riverbank, until the man returned.
High-Office Highbrow
John Quincy Adams was no man of the people. Haughty, arrogant, and incapable of small talk, he had an icy effect on everyone around him. It didn’t help that he was thin-lipped and spoke in a shrill, high-pitched voice. He was confrontational, quick to anger, and scornful of indulgences of every sort. While negotiating the Treaty of Ghent (which ended the War of 1812), he insulted the rest of the American contingent by insisting on dining alone and galvanized his unsociable reputation by scolding Henry Clay for his smoky late-night card games. To be fair, JQA was the first to admit his glaring lack of basic interpersonal skills; writing from Ghent to his wife, Louisa, he went on about his “dogmatic, overbearing manner” and “forgetfulness of the courtesies of society.”
CLOSE CALL
While serving in London as minister to England, JQA attempted to instruct his sons in the proper use of firearms. Taking pistol in hand, he showed the eager young students how to load a gun, ignorant of the fact that it had already been loaded. Upon firing it, the thing went off in his face. He suffered damage to his eye and was treated by the finest ocular doctor in London. Fortunately, the wound healed.
Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents Page 3