James and Dolley Madison

by Bruce Chadwick

  “It is with understandable grief, my dear brother, that I understand the threatening situation of your affairs. I will not insult your sensibility by descanting on the devoted friendship and affection for you and yours ever felt by Mr. Madison and myself because you know it…. I entreat you to secure to me the amount of all the money lent you in a house, lots or some other property, in case you have at this unlucky moment to part with what you possess in Washington. It is only in such a case, where other creditors may take all, that I would ever remind you of the debt. Yes it is more for your sake than mine that I now write to ask you for God's sake, to do this just thing that you and your children may profit from it…. You must preserve the confidence of a ready and efficient friend by acting as I suggest,” she wrote Cutts in a near panic in 1824. Madison also lost investments in two companies that built roads, the Swift Run Turnpike Company and the James Madison Company. He had tried to get a $6,000 loan from the Bank of the United States, which he had brought back to life as president; he was turned down.14

  Cutts nearly lost his house in Washington, DC, to creditors. James and Dolley stepped in at the very last minute to pay off his creditors and gain ownership of the home. They allowed the Cutts family to stay there for years. Five years later, though, in 1829, Cutts had still not paid back any of the $6,000 to Madison or the $4,000 to Payne on the old loan. “It almost breaks my heart to think of it. Mr. Cutts owed him more than this [Payne's debt] of the money. Payne entrusted to him to place [it] in the bank; still that is not the purpose…my pride, my sensibility, my every feeling of my soul is wounded,” she lamented to her sister about Cutts.15

  Less farm revenue came in at the same time that Madison was stuck paying off family debts. The recession affected everyone. Thomas Jefferson complained to Madison that he was broke. Jefferson, a far less diligent manager of his farms and spending than Madison, had very high monthly bills for the upkeep of his mansion and slaves and owed thousands of dollars in debts he had assumed for relatives. At the same time, the recession had caused his crop prices to plunge. He had no realistic way to raise more money and floundered. Madison's friend James Monroe was practically penniless, too. Monroe had lived lavishly while a foreign minister in Paris, spent a considerable amount of money building his mansion, and used additional funds entertaining hundreds of people at his private home and in Washington for years. He was never able to pay off his debts, which totaled over $75,000 when he left the White House in 1825.

  Madison wrote Jefferson in 1826, “Since my retirement to private life such have been he unkind seasons, and the ravages of insects, that I have made but one tolerable crop of tobacco, and but one of wheat; the proceeds of both of which were greatly curtailed by mishaps in the sale of them. And having no resources but in the earth I cultivate, I have been living very much throughout on borrowed means.”16

  The Madisons were just getting over their anger with Cutts in 1832 when Anna, his wife and Dolley's sister, died suddenly of dropsy to the heart. Dolley was crushed. She wrote a mournful letter of condolence to Richard Cutts and then added a postscript. “She would have parted from her heart's best blood for the happiness of her offspring. One who from the height of worldly prosperity…was reduced…to a small income, and while [her husband] gazed on, his energies paralyzed…this good mother devoted herself to…her children. She brought them up in a fear of the lord, she implanted pure principles…she taught them to listen to the still small voice within…. Her daughters she…taught…a taste for poetry, the classics her own love of the beautiful and true,” she wrote.17

  The death of Anna was just one of the many deaths of family members and friends of the Madisons in those years. As the pair aged, their friends began to pass away. Madison's mother, aged ninety-seven, died in 1829. Catlett Conway, whose father was Nelly Madison's brother, died in 1827. Catlett and James Madison were childhood playmates. Madison's sister Frances “Fanny” Rose died in 1823. His nephew Robert Madison died young in 1828, and his three children lived with Madison much of the year in the years after that. Many of the children of his brother William died in the 1820s; William's wife died in 1832. Dolley's brother-in-law Supreme Court Justice Thomas Todd died in 1826. Two of her nephews died in1831. Her brother-in-law John C. Jackson passed away in 1825. Several grandchildren and nieces and nephews died in the 1820s and in the early 1830s. The Madisons outlived them all.

  Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July in 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of his Declaration of Independence. He corresponded regularly with Madison until his death. Toward the end, sensing he was going to pass on, Jefferson wrote his friend a poignant letter. “The friendship which has subsisted between us now half a century and the harmony of our political principles and pursuits…[have been] sources of happiness to me through that long period,” Jefferson said. He told Madison that if ever there was a good government for a democratic people, “one which, protect by truth, can never know reproach it is that to which our lives have been devoted.” He asked Madison to take care of him when he was dead, and told him “I leave with you my last affections.”18

  Madison wrote back, “You cannot look back to the long period of our private friendship and political harmony with more affecting recollections than I do. If they are sources of pleasure to you, what ought they not be to me? We cannot be deprived of the happy consciousness of the pure devotion to the public good with which we discharged the trusts committed to us.” Then he added, “I offer to you the fullest return of affectionate assurances.”19

  Later, after Jefferson's passing, Madison wrote tenderly about him, “It may be on the whole truly said of him, that he was greatly eminent for the comprehensiveness and fertility of his genius; the vast extent and rich variety of his acquirements, and particularly distinguished by the philosophic impress left on every subject which he touched. Nor was he less distinguished for an early and uniform devotion to the cause of liberty…and to the equal rights of man.”20 Dolley wrote her son, “Mr. Jefferson died on the 4th, about 12 or 1 o'clock. Mr. M feels his departure deeply, as no doubt his family must.”21

  His friend James Monroe, who resumed his close friendship with Madison after he left the White House, died in 1831.22

  As he aged into his eighties, Madison talked more and more of how he had become the very last of the Founding Fathers. They had all died. Now he, James Madison, who was sickly, feeble, and bald, was the last.

  Madison spent much time putting together his official papers, which included letters he had written over the course of fifty years, speeches, and notes. He took his copious notes to the Constitutional Convention, long secret and stored away, and edited them with the idea of publishing them as a book to ease his financial burdens. He had thousands of pages of papers, and he recruited Dolley and his brother-in-law, John Payne, to help him. The trio worked every day for nearly a year, planters turned librarians, to put the papers into an order. They edited them, changing some of the language and adding notes to make the president more likable to history (Dolley's comments indicated changes, but we don't know what all of the changes were).

  At first, Dolley was annoyed by the project because it became very time-consuming and kept her and the president virtual prisoners at Montpelier until the work as finished. After year three of the letters project had concluded in 1824, with the end nowhere in sight, Dolley complained that “this is the third winter in which he has been engaged in the arrangement of papers and the [business] appears to accumulate as he proceeds, so that I calculate its outlasting my patience and yet I cannot press him to forsake a duty so important or find it in my heart to leave him during its fulfillment.” She came to enjoy the project, though, and it was concluded primarily due to her hard work on it.23

  The winter work and worries once again renewed Dolley's hopes to take some trips away from Montpelier, where she often found herself a prisoner, far from the parties, dinners, and glitz of Washington and Richmond. She wanted “to make [her husband] much more [healthy] so
when the season advances, for exercise abroad [for neither] he nor I could ever be quite well again if we remained stationary, as we have been for many years past.”24 She always appreciated the beauty and grandeur of Montpelier but regretted that she had been so close to family and friends for sixteen years in Washington and now was far away from everybody. “The spring advances, the flowers are blooming, the trees changing to green & yet my heart is solitary,” she lamented in a letter to her sister Anna in 1818. “My eyes overflow with tears as I look around on the beauties of nature & reflect that my sisters are far from me.”25 For that reason, she encouraged all of her relatives and friends to visit her at Montpelier, and most of them made the trip from Washington; she had company just about every week in decent weather.26

  Some criticized her for losing touch with them because she had moved far from Washington. “I have anticipated with great delight the pleasure of hearing from you since your residence in the country. You remember my dear friend that you promised me at Washington that you would certainly write, but I have waited with the most anxious solicitude in vain, not one line have I received,” complained Dolley's friend Jackie Blount in 1817.27

  Dolley had many letters from friends in Washington and in other capitals describing the high life that she not only was once part of but ran. “Dinner parties are always going on. We dined in company yesterday with Lord Erskine, who really kept the table in an uproar with his witty anecdotes. He is full of animation and uses very decided language at all subjects,” wrote Kitty Rush, an old friend who had just moved to London; then she filled an entire page with a description of her social life, a life that Dolley craved.28

  Some begged her to get away from Montpelier and visit them; one was Maria Scott, who did it, she said, because of “the happiness you create for friends around you.” Everybody missed her. “We have thought a great deal about you since you left us,” wrote Ellen Coolidge in 1820. Dolley, in quiet, isolated Montpelier, wrote one woman back that she was so bored, “I must therefore write a dull letter.” In another, she wrote that “our amusements in this region are confined to books and rural occupations.” She wrote her friend Caroline Eustis in Washington that she was living in “the midst of enlightened and amiable people,” and she added, “would to heaven we could join you there.”29

  She missed the flashy gossip of Washington. She must have been wide-eyed when she received a note from Ellen Coolidge that James Madison's lifelong enemy, John Randolph, had apparently lost his mind. He had roared in the middle of a bank that he had forgotten his name and made an X on a paper for identification. Then he swore he would not return home without a wife and insisted a Miss Wickham, who did not even like him, marry him. Ellen Coolidge chortled, “He is considered perfectly insane!”30

  Dolley complained to all, “not a mile can I go from home.”31 And she started to tire of people telling her how lovely Montpelier was: “The beauty of the scenery…” oohed one woman after a visit there.32

  Dolley felt herself smothered. She was happy to spend her days caring for her husband, but she was frustrated that her caretaking kept her away from the active and busy life she loved. She wrote that she was “anxious and confined” and received all of her political news from visitors or Washington newspapers. Everything was a step removed for her and the president. They lived just ninety miles from the capital, yet felt a million miles away.

  Friends in Washington, knowing of how she missed the world of parties that she had created, kept her abreast of all the social news. Women such as Judith Walker Rives and Phoebe Morris filled her in on all the slight, trivial personal details that Dolley devoured and then passed on to her husband. The Madisons thirsted after all the political news and gossip they could find. Dolley wrote her niece in the spring of 1830, “I confess I do not admire the contention of parties, political or civil, though in my quiet retreat I am anxious to know of all the maneuverings of both, the one and the other, so, be not timid in laying their claims before me, no one shall see statements by myself.”33

  She was just as interested in scandals, such as the Peggy Eaton uproar in the Andrew Jackson administration. Jackson's secretary of state had married Peggy, and she had become the hostess for President Jackson because he was a widower. She fulfilled Dolley's old role. Peggy, though, had been married to another man when she began her affair with Eaton, causing a gossip nightmare for the entire administration. People took sides and did, or did not, attend parties because of their feelings on the scarlet-tinted Peggy. Jackson ordered cabinet officers to visit her and be seen with her at parties; many refused. Dolley loved it and could never get enough of it. She told friends that the inability of Peggy to function as hostess, and her insistence on doing so, would cause trouble. “The conduct of the P[resident] & his cabinet is indeed astonishing & exhibits a melancholy perspective, as well as re-trospect to our country, but I doubt not of, impeachments, by & by, if they go on in this lawless & unfeeling manner.”34

  Eventually, Jackson became so enraged by the entire affair that he fired his cabinet and appointed a new one, causing huge political ruptures in Washington's political, as well as social, life. The news saddened the former First Lady and president. “I'm afraid the license people take with the tongues & pens will blast the good of the country & display all sorts of evil traits of character that can mark a selfish & savage race,” Dolley told her sister.35

  As the years went by, the Madisons’ friends visited less and less often. When they did arrive, the Madisons were thrilled to see them. An example was a visit from Sam and Margaret Smith, whom they had not seen in nineteen years, when they last stopped at Montpelier, in 1828. The Smiths did not know what to expect from the president, now seventy-seven, or from Dolley, who had just turned sixty. They immediately caught up on each other's lives. “How we did talk,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith. “We went over the last twenty years and talked of scenes long past and of persons far away or dead. These reminiscences were delightful…time seems to favor her as much as fortune. She looks young and says she feels so. I can believe her, nor do I think she will ever look or feel like an old woman.”36

  Their gloom was brightened by two events. First, Madison suddenly felt better after the New Year of 1835. Second, acclaimed British writer Harriet Martineau arrived for a three-day visit to interview Madison. She was writing a multivolume book about the United States. Martineau had already interviewed dozens of national leaders and toured most of the eastern seaboard. She wanted to meet Madison, though, because she believed that everything that was American, and different from the rest of the world, was due to the Constitution that he wrote. She arrived at Montpelier at the end of February, right when Madison was feeling much better and was able to engage people in lengthy conversations.

  Martineau had a bumpy carriage ride from Orange Court House to Montpelier on the highway about which Madison always complained bitterly. She found Madison, then eighty-three, very alert and sitting up in a soft chair in his large apartment on the first floor of the mansion. He was propped up on a large pillow and wore a black silk gown, a grey-and-white cap, and gloves to protect his arthritic hands. He was deaf in one ear but heard well in the other, spoke with elegance, had twinkling eyes, and had a well-shaped face for his age. The English writer said that he looked just like the popular engravings of him. He had an “uncommonly pleasant countenance,” Martineau said.37

  Martineau was worried that Madison would not be able to talk for long at each interview session she wanted to conduct, but it was Martineau, not the president, who became exhausted. She had to be taken to a couch to recline every few hours. The eighty-three-year-old president would then get up and pull his chair next to the couch and keep talking.

  She was surprised and impressed by the fact that the overriding theme of all Madison's talks was his unshakeable belief in the democratic system and the American people. He had “an inexhaustible faith, faith that a well-founded commonwealth may, as our motto declares, be immortal; not only because the people,
its constituency, never die, but because the principles of justice in which such a commonwealth originates never die out of the people's heart and mind.”38

  Martineau was impressed with Dolley, too, whom she found in good spirits. At that point, she had interviewed many public figures who knew the Madisons, and they gave her their own evaluations of Dolley's skills as a First Lady and, behind closed doors, the president's political confidant and adviser. “She is a strong-minded woman, fully capable of entering into her husband's occupations and cares; and there is little doubt that he owed much to her intellectual companionship, as well as her ability in sustaining the outward dignity of his office,” Martineau wrote.39

  Martineau was always surprised at what Madison had to say. The aging president dazzled Martineau with his knowledge of European history and English writers. He talked at great lengths about the history of farming in ancient Rome and how it progressed over the centuries. He stunned Martineau with his beliefs that women should be treated the same as men throughout America and throughout the world.

  Early the next morning, the president was up just after sunrise and in the dining room when Martineau and Dolley came downstairs. He was spry and friendly. “The active old man, who declared himself crippled with rheumatism, had breakfasted, risen, and was dressed before we sat down to breakfast,” she said in surprise.40