James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  The plans of Pierre L'Enfant, the architect who designed Washington, DC, called for a fabulous city full of wide avenues and lovely neighborhoods with river vistas, parks, and elegant private homes, but that city remained sitting on his blueprints, gathering dust. Right then, in the spring of 1801, Washington was a city of the future, of the far future, a city of promise. It was a town, though, even in its infancy, that would grow as the federal government grew and, with it, as the Madisons grew.

  The town's fully developed newspapers offered one bright spot on the otherwise-under-construction horizon. In addition to the brand-new National Intelligencer, and its weekly version, the Universal Gazette, the Washington area was home to several papers. The Washington Federalist, the New York Weekly Museum, and the Cabinet were printed in Georgetown; and, across the river, the Alexandria Advertiser, later named the Alexandria Gazette, and the Expositor. The three Georgetown papers expired after a few years, as did many newspapers in Washington in the nineteenth century, but the Intelligencer and the Alexandria Gazette had a long life.

  The arrival of the new secretary of state and his wife, Dolley, on May 1, 1801, was a quiet one. They were over two months late because Madison's father had died on February 27. The new secretary of state, deep in mourning, had to bury his father and take care of his affairs at Montpelier. His father left a complicated will and had named James Madison as his executor; unraveling the will was time-consuming. Madison had overseen his father's last days while battling a bout of rheumatism. Then, right after he and his family buried James Madison Sr., Madison came down with another illness and was bedridden for four days and unable to travel to Washington. It was so debilitating, he told Jefferson, that it “has not yet permitted me to leave the house.”16 Further delays were caused by inclement weather that turned highways into muddy roadways that could not be traversed. Jefferson, well aware of his friend's chronic medical ailments, had Attorney General Levi Lincoln serve as his stand-in on the job until Madison arrived.17 The president also consoled him on his sickness, as he had always done throughout their long friendship. “[I have] learned with regret that you have been so unwell,” he wrote him in condolence.18

  Even though he was stuck at Montpelier and sick, Madison did a fine job as an absentee secretary of state, working from home. Lincoln ran the office, met with Jefferson, saw foreign diplomats, and sent out voluminous correspondence, but Madison read all of the letters from ambassadors and foreign diplomats and kept abreast of foreign conflicts, such as the touchy situation with the Barbary pirates and the leaders of Tripoli. He kept up a steady stream of correspondence, oversaw Lincoln's work, and did almost as much at Montpelier as he might have done in Washington in those early days of Jefferson's first term. The only chore that Madison did not do was interview job applicants and read résumés. Lincoln did that and he was overwhelmed by them. He wrote Jefferson on April 26 that “it is much to be regretted that Mr. Madison's indisposition continues.” No one was happier to see Madison and his wife arrive in Washington than was Lincoln.19

  The Madisons had driven down over five days and were still sore from the road bumps and holes their small carriage had pounded through. Traveling in 1801 was not only time-consuming but dangerous. Virginia was a southern state, but in many winters it snowed in parts of the state, and the melted snow brought about ruts in the dirt roadways (it snowed on February 11, the day on which the House of Representatives started its special election to select the new president, and snow remained on the ground for a long six weeks after that as the weather remained chilly throughout the Washington, DC, and northern Virginia area).20 Trees fell. Some roads were flooded out. Others, particularly in the hillier section of the state where Jefferson and Madison resided, were extremely steep and hard for a carriage to climb. Yet others ran for miles before there was any stop for food or water. Inns that offered accommodations to travelers were small and miles apart. For Madison and his wife to travel almost eighty miles in five days was an accomplishment. Dolley wrote of one journey, “In truth my limbs yet tremble with the terror & fatigue of our journey…difficulties and danger…our horses had no chance but to swim.”21

  Accompanying the pair were Dolley's younger sister Anna and several servants. People who saw them arrive that day had a pretty good glimpse of what they would be like. James Madison, aged fifty, the secretary of state and the cofounder of the Republican Party with President Jefferson, was clad in black and sported a dated revolutionary ensemble of clothes. He was very short, dour-looking, unsmiling, determined, and blandly dressed. One man said that he looked like “a schoolmaster dressed up for a funeral.”22 His wife, Dolley, aged thirty-three, was just the opposite. She was a tall, buxom, beautiful woman whose dark-brown curls fell gently over her forehead. She was well dressed, even for a long and arduous carriage ride. Dolley was “still young, happy, hopeful and very beautiful,” her sister wrote. Mrs. Madison's eyes beamed as she looked over her new hometown, a city that, although she did not know it, would be home for most of the rest of her life and would see her rise from a barely known new arrival to one of the most famous women in the world.23

  The Madisons would live in Washington for the next sixteen years. They arrived in a slow-moving parade of wagons and carriages, the mode of transportation in the day, but in 1817 they would return home by stepping onto a fast-moving steamboat that would take them up the Potomac River. The transportation revolution would be just one of the epic transformations in the United States during their time in power.24

  Madison arrived in the capital to serve as secretary of state in Jefferson's cabinet after the new president was elected chief executive over Aaron Burr by the House of Representatives in a historic vote after the Electoral College was unable to decide the contest. Electors had mistakenly voted for both Jefferson and Burr, who was running for vice president, creating a tie (Madison had gone along with Burr as the vice presidential nominee and helped to start all the trouble, after his political colleagues in Pennsylvania assured him that Burr had support everywhere).25

  Jefferson had already established a brand-new look for the presidency. He had stayed at a local boardinghouse while Congress thrashed about in its unprecedented election of the chief executive and, after the vote, remained there for two weeks, dining with everyone, as usual, and immediately creating the image of the “ordinary man.” He luxuriated in the support of his friends, such as Madison. His new secretary of state had never wavered in his support of Jefferson for president or his belief that the House of Representatives would elect him in its extraordinary vote. “I can scarcely allow myself to believe that enough will not be found to frustrate the attempt to strangle the election of the people, and smuggle into the Chief Magistracy the choice of a faction. It would seem that every individual member who has any standing or stake in society, or any portion of virtue or sober understanding, must revolt at the tendency of such a maneuver,” Madison wrote.26

  Afterward, when he moved to the White House, Jefferson answered the front door when people arrived, which startled many (in fact, one visitor thought he was a servant). He went horseback riding around town, waving to residents as he passed them on the street. He wore ordinary clothes, favored slippers and not shoes at work, never wore a wig, and rarely powdered his blazing red hair.27

  His newfound “man of the people” manners pleased Americans but annoyed diplomats, who had met kings and queens dressed in their regal best at royal balls. Many complained that Jefferson did not seem to care what he looked like when he met them and often appeared unshaven, with his hair uncombed. Anthony Merry, the British minister, was aghast when he was first introduced to Jefferson at the White House. Jefferson, Merry complained, was dressed in “an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small clothes much soiled, woolen hose and slippers without heels.”28

  In addition to all of that, Jefferson framed his election, and the roaring rise of his political party, as a new era in America, an era dramatically different than that which he said ended wi
th the administration of New England Federalist John Adams. “The revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form,” he later wrote proudly.29

  The election of 1800 was seen as a bellwether election by the Republicans; the common people agreed with Jefferson that a political revolution had taken place and that America was headed in a new direction. Most of the Federalists whom the Republicans despised had been swept out of office and had left town. The first president, Federalist George Washington, had died a year before. The second Federalist president, Adams, was back in Massachusetts. Alexander Hamilton, the influential Federalist secretary of the treasury, was not just out of office but also out of politics entirely. Many of the original Federalists elected with Washington twelve years earlier had retired or died. Now, in 1801, as the new century bloomed, America was run by a different party, the Republicans, whose belief in small government, states’ rights, and people's rights would move the nation down a new path.

  The change in politics was enormous in many ways. The brand-new Republican Party made America a two-party system, something no one anticipated when the revolution ended. Within a few months, the busy city scenes of the national capitals in New York and Philadelphia were long forgotten, and the huge, sprawling, wide-open Washington, DC, was the backdrop for the nation's political story. The old presidents’ mansions, elegant homes in New York and Philadelphia, had been replaced by the gargantuan President's Mansion in Washington, one of the most magnificent homes in the world, a building that towered over every other structure in Washington except the Capitol. All of the traditions of the President's Mansion, and the president living in it, were new. The social calendar at the White House was brand-new; the social lions, new; and the sites of all the parties, new—and very different.

  Importantly, too, the new capital, thanks to a tricky political deal between Jefferson and Federalists, was now located on the banks of the Potomac, just about halfway down the eastern seaboard. It was now centrally located and not a northern capital, as were those in Philadelphia and New York. It was a southern capital within the boundaries of the new District of Columbia, but that was within the boundaries of Maryland, a southern state.

  In just the twelve years since the passage of the Constitution, America had sped through one political era and entered another.

  Jefferson had been elected by the House of Representatives, but he certainly did not see himself as a compromise president or a minority president. A confident leader, he saw himself as a powerful new president who had majorities in the House and Senate behind him. He would take steps to get rid of many Washington and Adams appointments to the judicial bench and government offices; ally himself with Republican state and city officeholders; draft editors for brand-new, influential Republican newspapers; push manufacturing in the northern states and farming in the southern states; embrace the new Industrial Revolution; and try, when possible, to enlarge the physical size of the United States (particularly with Spanish-held Florida). Jefferson would chart a new and different course for the United States and do it as the leader of a government that he saw as a merger of the state and federal governments, unlike the top-heavy federal government of Washington and Adams.

  Both Jefferson and Madison loathed Adams. “The conduct of Mr. Adams was not such as was to have been wished, or, perhaps, expect. Instead of smoothing the path for his successor, he plays into the hands of those who are endeavoring to strew it with as many difficulties as possible and with this view, does not manifest a very squeamish regard for the Constitution,” wrote Madison just before Adams left office.30

  Madison had yet another reason to cheer his friend's election as president. The election process proved, despite its critics, that the new form of democratic government Madison had devised with the Constitution worked. Referring to the force frequently used in European transitions of power, he wrote, “What a lesson to America & the world is given by the efficacy of the public will when there is no army to be turned against it!”31

  Jefferson was buoyant. He wrote his friend Madison of Washington, DC, that “we shall have an agreeable society here.”32 To his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jefferson said of the city that “we find this a very agreeable country residence…good society and enough of it and free from the heat, the stench and the bustle of a close built town.”

  Jefferson was thrilled to have Madison in his cabinet because the two men were such good friends. Madison's slave said they were “like brothers.”33

  The new president had significant experience in foreign policy. He had been the minister to France in the late 1780s and served as Washington's secretary of state until 1794. He knew, as he took office, just how foreign powers saw him and his new government. They understood the advances the United States had made during its first twelve years and understood the changes he wanted to make in the country. They understood, too, that the new, red-haired president, who could play his violin as well as pass his legislation, was tough. He was not a compromiser and would get what he wanted in foreign policy. He took office at a stormy time. The United States had been involved in a police action against France, dubbed the Quasi War, just a year before he moved into the White House; the French and British were often battling each other; and the pesky Barbary pirates, based on the coast of northern Africa in Tripoli, were harassing shipping in the Straits of Gibraltar and in the Mediterranean.

  Jefferson had brought Madison to Washington with him as his secretary of state because the men were close personal friends and cofounders of the Republican Party, but there were other reasons. No one understood the workings and promises of the American government more than Madison. Madison knew everybody in government from his years of service in the House. He was a smooth and clever politician who could help Jefferson write legislation and get bills passed (he had been nicknamed “the Big Knife” for his ability to cut through problematic areas and move legislation through the halls of Congress). Madison's views on foreign policy were the same as his, and Madison could always rely on the president, a former secretary of state himself, to understand what he was trying to do in his job.

  They were a good pair. “The mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world,” John Quincy Adams said of them.34

  Republicans were happy to see Madison back in government. His friend James Monroe told him that he was a sterling choice as secretary. “His [Jefferson's] outset is as favorable as it could have been. His admin. is formed of characters that will draw to him an increased portion of the publick [sic] confidence, and in other respects give him all the support he could expect from one. So that on the whole I think you all have a fair prospect of promoting the welfare of your country, and of being rewarded for the service by a due acknowledgement on the part of the people,” he wrote Madison.35

  A veteran New York politician, Samuel Osgood, wrote that both Madison and Jefferson “promote to the first Office in our republican government the man who has so richly merited the confidence of his country; who, regardless of the torrents of slander & abuse, has so ably supported the genuine principles of civil liberty, as delineated in our excellent constitution. Malevolence and slander are still using every effort here to defame and blacken the characters of the virtuous and upright in politics, but their edge is very much blunted.”36

  Madison worked diligently, arriving at his office early and remaining past nightfall. He was a good overall manager and fine micromanager. “Mr. M. is overwhelmed with business—the British, French & Spanish—infringements are all under his pen—M wishes to write Col. C but has not a moment,” his wife once wrote.37

  The Madisons stayed at the White House as the president's guests for three weeks. Jefferson was thrilled to have them. The only other person who lived in the White House with the president was his secretary, Meriwether Lewis. The two men felt like they were walking through the halls of a larg
e museum. The irony of their condition is that living in the mammoth White House was one of the enticements the president used to lure Lewis to the job. After telling him why he should take the job, the president wrote Lewis, “you would of course save also the expense of subsistence and lodging as you would be one of my family.”38 Jefferson wanted more friends there with him, and, at least for three weeks, he had them. After their short stay in the White House, for two months, the Madisons settled into one of the connected houses that comprised the “Six Buildings” complex.39 Following that, they moved to a much larger home that architect Thornton had located for them at 1333 F Street NW, just a few blocks from the White House. The Madisons liked their new home. Madison was the secretary of state and had to live like one. He needed a home where his wife could host parties, hold receptions, and socialize with all the men and women in Washington. It had to be a home where people could mingle in rooms throughout the entire first floor and hallway, or tumble out into the backyard in the hot spring and summer months. A small apartment, even a large apartment, would not do. This new home was a three-story-high, brick residence topped by a handsome cupola. There were four bedrooms on the third floor, and plenty of rooms for offices and social receptions on the first two floors. There were servants’ quarters, a stable for four horses, a coach house, and several outbuildings to the rear of their house. The building had a large wine cellar. They were both very comfortable living in it and would remain there for eight years. It would soon be home to Dolley and what everybody in Washington began to call her “young set.”40

  Dolley, dazzled by the city, which looked different every day as streets were finished and buildings erected, found herself in a very unusual spot when she arrived. President Jefferson lamented the living conditions in the still-under-construction White House. His predecessor, John Adams, and his wife, Abigail, found them appalling. People who walked through the President's Mansion thought the home resembled a large, drafty barn rather than the home of a head of state. Jefferson hired teams of carpenters and asked them to finish the White House as quickly as possible. He had another, larger, problem, though. He was a widower, had no romantic interest in any woman in Washington, and spent his nights in the White House alone. He had no woman to serve as an official hostess for him, as a president's wife, or as a “First Lady.” He needed a First Lady badly to set the social calendar for the White House and to serve as the feminine side of the new administration.