There, at the Minorses’, Dolley watched the fires rising in the sky over Washington. Matilda Roberts, a seven-year-old child at the house with her, was astonished by the sight. “I thought the world was on fire,” she wrote later in her diary.50 “Such a flame I have never seen since.”
On Friday, President Madison, who had still not found Dolley, was riding in Maryland, trying to find General Winder's scattered army in order to rally them for an attack against the British troops holding Washington. When he received news that the British had left, he pulled hard on the reins of his horse, turned around, and rode back to the capital. The president of the United States, aged sixty-four, a man who had complained bitterly of physical ailments all of his life, including rheumatoid arthritis, had now finished nearly four entire days in the saddle, commanding troops in the field, making decisions about the war, and getting his wife out of Washington and himself into it between British regiments that planned to seize him if they could. His forces had been badly defeated and pushed back and his capital burned. None of the citizens of Washington, returning with him, thought the president had done a good job. Those who saw him on his horse during the attack and torching of Washington criticized him and even scolded him. Some angry men sketched vicious cartoons about him, and others wrote scathing poems about the president. Rumors flew that there were threats on his life by Washingtonians. His wife even feared that someone with a gun would shoot him if he saw him during those turbulent days.
President Madison was demoralized by what he saw in the capital, as was everyone else. Margaret Bayard Smith lamented in her journal, “The poor capitol! Nothing but its blacken'd walls remained. Four or five houses in the neighbourhood were likewise in ruins…but none was so thoroughly destroy'd as the House of Representatives and the President's House. Those beautiful pillars in that Representatives’ Hall were crack'd and broken, the roof, that noble dome, painted realized that he had no army, no home and no wife and carved with such beauty and skill, lay in ashes in the cellars beneath the smouldering ruins….”51
The president of the United States, Dolley's “great little Madison,” leaned forward on his horse as he reached the front of the White House, looked at the charred building, and frowned. “Mr. Madison's War” had now become a disaster, personally as well as politically. That hot Friday afternoon, the fierce storms were gone a half day and the countryside was sot with rain, demolished buildings, and fallen trees, and the forlorn president realized that he had no army, no home, and no wife.
Yellow Fever struck the city of Philadelphia, the largest in America, in the quiet, lazy summer of 1793. It arrived suddenly, without warning, as the Yellow Fever always did in colonial America, and attacked voraciously. Thousands died. Medical experts estimated that nearly five thousand people, or close to 20 percent of the residents of the community, were killed in the epidemic. So many people died each day, and their deaths were so well publicized around the nation, that betting-obsessed gamblers wagered tens of thousands of dollars on the final death toll, turning the Yellow Fever casualties into a macabre lottery.
Many people fled Philadelphia, traveling on horseback, by carriage, in wagons, or by whatever form of transportation they could find, led by President George Washington. The president was not afraid of medical catastrophe. He had not only stayed in the army when smallpox struck his troops, and parts of the country, in the winter of 1776–1777, but also invented a new way to vaccinate his troops, and thousands of civilians, by eliminating the preinoculation “rest” period of two weeks, long believed necessary by the medical profession, and inoculating people at once. Washington had been struck by smallpox at age nineteen and survived. He still had pockmarks on his face from the attack. The general told his soldiers what he wanted to do and then supervised town meetings, held in halls, churches, and large barns, to explain the new procedure to civilians who lived near his winter camp, and other winter army camps in America. His innovative practice worked; few of those inoculated right away died in the epidemic. Many who were not inoculated perished, and Washington and his soldiers had to bury them in grey village churchyards. General Washington had been praised throughout America, and in Europe, for his efforts and successes. The medically adept president did not feel he was any match for the tidal wave of Yellow Fever that swept over Philadelphia in 1793, though, and he fled the metropolis with his wife, Martha, and his servants to Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, hundreds of miles away.
American doctors did not know how Yellow Fever arrived, and they did not know how to treat it. They assumed, as doctors all over the world did, that it grew in contaminated water in overly hot weather and that anyone who drank the tainted water was susceptible to it. They also believed that it had been brought into Philadelphia from the Caribbean by sailors who had caught it there. They were also certain that it was contagious, that anyone could catch it, even those not in contact with someone sickened from it. The doctors offered rest periods and odd diets to fight it, but had no real cure. If anyone in a family came down with it, people in contact with them might be afflicted by it, too. There was no way to contain it, either; at least smallpox could be fought with quarantine. The fever had struck again and again in the United States throughout the eighteenth century, usually in warm-weather states. It killed a large percentage of those who contracted it and made another high percentage of people very ill. The Yellow Fever spread, and spread quickly. In the summer of 1793, it rolled through the streets of Philadelphia toward Dolley Todd, her husband, and her family.
Yellow Fever brings about an awful death. It causes high fever; chills; aching joints; intense stomach pains; jaundiced, yellow skin; liver failure; and black vomit. People struck by it can die within a day; some linger for a few days before succumbing, and some lucky victims survive it. Parents who were afflicted by the fever transmitted it to their children, who transmitted it to their friends, who then transmitted it to their parents.
Nearly half the population of Philadelphia fled along with the president, including Dolley. Entire families fled together, packing supplies and clothing into any carts, wagons, or carriages they could find and, horses struggling to pull the oversized loads of people and supplies, left town as fast as they could. It was a flight that took place in a near panic. Dolley's husband, John, sent her and the two children, one just a baby, to a community called Gray's Ferry, on the banks of the Schuykill River just southeast of Philadelphia, where he hoped they would be safe. Dolley was carried down the roads to Gray's on a litter amid what appeared to be a thick army of refugees, of all shapes and sizes, professions, ages, colors, and religions, seeking safe shelter from the disease. Dolley's two children went with her.1
Her husband did not. John returned to Yellow Fever–ravaged Philadelphia, a ghost town now with so many residents gone, dead, or dying, to take care of his parents, who had come down with the fever. He put himself to work trying to organize the care for neighbors stricken with the sickness, a bold but dangerous thing to do. He also helped others take care of business in the city, left unattended since so many clerks had left. He rode out of town on horseback every week or so to visit Dolley, who begged him not to go back. She was terrified that he would catch the fever, too. This went on for several months. He often wrote her affectionate letters. “I hope my dear Dolley is well & my sweet little Payne can lisp mama in a stronger voice than when his papa left him. I wish he was here to run after Mr. Withy's ducks. He would have fine sport,” he wrote in July.2
Each time his visit with her and the children was over, Dolley would beg her husband to remain with them and be safe. She even tried to get her brother-in-law, James, to intercede to get John to join her permanently at Gray's Ferry.
“Oh, my dear brother, what a dread prospect has thy last letter presented to me,” she wrote, adding that “love'd husband in perpetual danger.” She told her brother-in-law that she had “repeatedly entreated John to leave home…but alas he cannot leave his father…. Is it too late fo
r their removal? Or can no interferance of the earthly friends rescue them from the too general fate?”3
Her husband, John, and her son William both died from the fever on October 14, 1794. Dolley, who had been ill for weeks prior to their deaths, although not from the fever, was crushed. It was a dual tragedy, though, that would show her inner strength, a strength that would later save a nation.
Those who knew her felt badly that she had lost both her husband and her baby on the same day. They could see that she was not only staggering along physically but was emotionally distraught. As if to add insult to injury, right after the double burial, she was stunned by the reluctance of the Todd family to give her the inheritance that her husband had left her.
“My poor dear Dolley,” wrote her mother, “what does she and will she suffer…the same day consigned her dear husband and her little babe to the silent grave,” Mary Payne told Dolley's nurse. She added that with John Todd dead, her daughter had a grand total of only nineteen dollars to her name, and she owed that money for her husband's and child's funeral and other debts.
Mary Payne, fed up with Philadelphia, the Yellow Fever, and the Todds, left and traveled to Virginia, where she moved in with her daughter Lucy. Lucy had married George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of the president, and lived in grand style on a large plantation with servants. Dolley was left all alone in Philadelphia, sick, grief stricken, and penniless.
But she was determined. She wrote her brother-in-law, James, and demanded that he give her all of her husband's estate, money as well as property. Her brother-in-law refused. America in 1794 was a man's world, and a widow had little standing in the courts to sue. In most states, a widow could not sue; she had to hire a man to sue on her behalf. Much to her disappointment, her husband had thought too highly of her. John Todd knew that the men one usually hired to help a grieving widow were not needed for his wife. No man was as smart, competent, resourceful, and capable as she was, in or out of court. So, in his will, in which he clearly left her everything, he did not name any executors or aides to help her. She was left all alone to battle in court for an estate that clearly should have been hers. James knew all of this but did not know his feisty sister-in-law as well as he should have. She was relentless. Dolley started a nearly daily letter-writing campaign to James to get the estate. He refused.
Then, fed up with her letters and growing angrier by the day, James wrote her that he would agree to selling off parts of the estate, month by month, and sending whatever money came in from the sale to her. He would start by selling the books in John's library. Dolley was furious. “I was hurt my dear Jamy that the idea of his library should occur as a proper source for raising money. Books from which he wished his child improved shall remain sacred and I would feel the pinching hand of poverty before I disposed of them,” she wrote.4
He was adamant in his plan to sell off the books and then the rest of the estate, piece by piece. She wrote him again. “I am constrained once more for request and if a request is not sufficient—to demand that they may be delivered this day,” she said of the estate papers. “I cannot wait…without material injury to my affairs.”
Her brother-in-law, probably with a smug look on his face, still refused. Then Dolley startled him; she retained a lawyer. She hired a friend of her late husband's, William Wilkins, to sue James Todd to get all of the property, house, and monies in her husband's estate. She meant business. Her brother-in-law, taken aback by the suit, the boldness of Dolley, and the angry demeanor of his sister-in-law and her lawyer, gave in. Dolley received everything from her husband's estate, and immediately. James did not get anything; nor did anyone else on her husband's side of the family.
The receipt of the house, property, and monies made Dolley a comfortable widow. She was twenty-five, in the prime of life, with a home. She would now slowly get back on her feet and try to make a life for herself and her baby, Payne. She took off her black grieving clothes and settled into her house again, and felt a very long way from her log-cabin beginnings in the thick forests of the Piedmont plateau in North Carolina.
The new and very lovely widow Todd was considered quite a prize for the men of Philadelphia, who could not resist looking at her every time she strolled down a city street. Distinguished merchants, lawyers, and bankers gawked at her as she walked by, a thin smile always on her lips. She was a very tall woman, nearly 5’8” in height, well proportioned, with a large bust and wide hips, and she possessed a beautiful and expressive face. She dressed well, attended Quaker meetings when she could, spent time shopping in the slowly reviving Philadelphia business district, went to plays and concerts, and met hundreds of men, many smitten with her good looks and vivacious personality. By this time, she had already made the acquaintances of many congressmen and government workers in Philadelphia, the nation's capital, through visits to her mother's inn, where many of them lived. Her lawyer, William Wilkins, was one, and another was Aaron Burr, the congressman from New York. Both had resided at her mother's inn in downtown Philadelphia for long periods of time and met Dolley there whenever she visited. She had become so close to Burr that she made him guardian for her son.5
One day, Burr, who would later become one of the most infamous figures in US history, took her aside. He told Dolley that a congressman who was a friend of his, James Madison of Virginia, one of the country's most renowned bachelors, would like to meet her. The two had never met, but Madison apparently knew a great deal about her. He had been investigating her, checking up on her family and talking to people who knew her to find out what she was like. She was reluctant to go. Some people had said admirable things about Madison, but others had criticized him. Many felt about Madison the way Washington Irving of New York did; Irving later wrote that Madison was “a withered little applejohn.” A Washington socialite later said of Madison that he was “mute, cold and repressive.”6
Dolley was charming and outgoing. She was, friends and relatives said, a person who could get along with anyone, regardless of their station in life. Madison, she knew, based on what she had read about him and what everybody said, was shy and low-key. She was twenty-five years old, and he was forty-three, an age considered quite old in that era. She was a flamboyant dresser, and he dressed in black, head to toe, nearly every day. She loved loud and raucous parties; he loved quiet moments in front of a fireplace. She was a Quaker, and he was an Episcopalian. She hated slavery, and his family owned dozens of slaves. She was a relatively uneducated girl from the woods of North Carolina; he was one of the most brilliant men in the world. She was an unknown, unaccomplished widow; he was the author of the US Constitution, a close friend of both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and one of the most important congressmen in America. She was one of the tallest women in America at 5'8” and had a shapely, buxom figure. He was one of the shortest men in America, at 5'4” and weighed only about one hundred pounds.
They had nothing in common at all. She said yes.
Dolley actually looked forward to meeting the very famous Madison, one of twelve children (only seven survived). Why would a man so different from her be interested in a meeting? There were so many women in Philadelphia who she thought were much better matches for him, older women and better-connected women. Why her? With a twinkle in her eye, she wrote her niece, Mary Cutts, “Aaron Burr says the great little Madison has asked him to bring him to see me this evening.”7
Madison was transfixed by Dolley when he met her. Many men in the era married for convenience, but Madison, whom everyone thought was a lifelong bachelor, wanted to marry for love. He had been “engaged” twice to younger women with whom he was deeply in love. Both unceremoniously jilted him. “Kitty” Floyd, the teenaged daughter of a New York congressman, dropped him and married William Clarkson, a medical student. She hurt Madison by writing him a letter of departure telling him that she was completely indifferent to him. She sealed the letter with rye dough to show that her affections for Madison had “soured.” A few years later, he fell in
love with Henrietta Colden, a New York socialite, who broke off the engagement as well. Madison, who could talk with eloquence to men all over the world and by his writing through the ages, could not talk to women at all.
While Madison was not surprised by Dolley, she must certainly have been surprised by him. People had warned her that Madison was a chilly, frumpish man who was dreary in physical appearance, a hopeless hypochondriac, and, worse, dour in disposition and personality. She found him just the opposite. Dolley found him to be a man who was a delight to be with, once you got to know him. Everybody who knew Madison felt that way; those who did not know him accepted the erroneous sour public view of him.
No one expressed that sentiment better than bookseller Samuel Whitcomb, who met Madison late in life. “Mr. Madison is not so large or so tall as myself and instead of being a cool reserved austere man is very sociable, rather jocose, quite sprightly and active…. [He] appears less studied, brilliant and frank but more natural, candid and profound than Mr. Jefferson. Mr. Madison has a sound judgment, tranquil temper and logical mind…nothing in his looks, gestures, expression or manners to indicate anything extraordinary in his intellect or character, but the more one converses with him, the more his excellences are developed and the better he is liked.”8
The “great little Madison” made up his mind to marry Dolley. He decided to win her affections by a carefully planned romance. He took her to lunches, dinners, musical concerts, and plays and spent an inordinate amount of time with her. She began to call him “Jemmie,” a nickname only his friends used. To bolster his crusade to win her heart, he conspired with a cousin of Dolley's, Catherine Coles, to write letters to Dolley on his behalf, expressing his romantic feelings toward her. Young Coles thought it was a wonderful idea, a terribly romantic little game for her to play with him, full of love, and she plunged into the writing, turning out a string of fascinating love letters for Madison. The girl, quite a gifted author, wrote with gusto. Madison approved everything the girl wrote. In one letter, she wrote Dolley that “he thinks so much of you in the day that he has lost his tongue, at night he dreams of you and starts in his sleep a calling on you to relieve his flame, for he burns to such an excess that he will be shortly consumed and he hopes that your heart will be callous to every other swain but himself.”9
James and Dolley Madison Page 4