Mrs. Madison traveled all over and by land and by sea. Dolly was a guest on board the Princeton, an elegant yacht, with President Tyler, most of his cabinet, and a number of senators , congressmen, and diplomats. After dinner, the guests went on deck to witness the firing of new, large cannon on board the ship. The top government officials were on the deck where the gun was bolted; Dolly and other women were finishing dinner in the dining room with President Tyler. Inexplicably, the gun suddenly blew up, causing an explosion that ripped open the ship and was seen and heard for miles. The secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, and numerous other officials were killed. Rumors flew that it was a plot to assassinate Tyler. All night, Lafayette Square was crowded with Dolley's friends, who believed she had been killed, too. They were relieved to see her alive. Mrs. Madison was so shaken by the explosion that she refused to talk about it for the rest of her life.
And she kept quiet about her son, Payne, too, whose eccentricities grew as the years flew by. Just before the sale of Montpelier, he spent time in his father's library, sitting down amid the more than four thousand books. He read the works of William Cowper, who was said to be insane, a sure sign of trouble, friends told his mother. He ruminated about his fortunes. Then he decided that as the son of a president he would claim his rightful place in the world and began to replicate his now-deceased father's personality, an effort that seemed comical to many. At forty-four, Payne had accomplished nothing. At forty-four, his father had been married, had run a successful plantation for years, had served numerous terms in Congress, and had written the United States Constitution.
And Payne was losing money every month at Montpelier. “I am now as low in finances as I well can be,” he wrote in his diary.62
Mrs. Madison had hoped that life on quiet Montpelier in tranquil Orange County, far from the urban world of bars and casinos, would help him. The solitude had just the opposite effect. He drank even more in his odd housing at Toddsberth and, when sober, managed to single-handedly drive Montpelier into bankruptcy. His management of the plantation was so bad, and his treatment of the slaves was so haughty, that Dolley left the comfort of Washington and headed back to Montpelier for two entire years. There, back home, she tried to make the farms profitable, but failed.
During those final two years at Montpelier, Dolley rented out her Washington home to pay her bills, kept in touch with friends in the capital, and had assistance with everything to do with Washington from her old White House manager, Jean Pierre Sioussat, who had become a bank executive. He did everything possible to handle her business in Washington and tried to help her straighten out her hopelessly tangled financial affairs.
The summers of the 1830s were not only hot and oppressive but also dry. A terrible drought hit the area in the summer of 1838. Dolley, at Montpelier, suffered with everyone else. “The whole South has partaken deeply in this misfortune…. In the region of the White Sulphur [Springs] water to drink has been scarce…there was hope in the mountains that the millennium was near,” she wrote.63
Back home at Montpelier in the summers of the 1830s, Dolley made light of the recession, her sagging plantation business, and her son's troubles. She was chipper when she wrote Anthony Morris one summer, “we are all in high health, and looking on promising crops, flocks and herds as well as on the world of fashion around us. My great nephew & niece with a pair of neighbors being pleased to get married since our return has brought about more than our usual gaiety. I gave them in unison a large party of two or three days continuance, before and after which Anna and Payne went the rounds as bridesmaid and Best Man.”64
Dolley's parties in Washington were popular, as popular as those she hosted at Montpelier. In its annual New Year's Day party coverage, the National Intelligencer highlighted the reception at the White House hosted by President Van Buren, a party thrown by former president John Quincy Adams, and Mrs. Madison's soiree. A reporter at Dolley's house that day said that Mrs. Madison, now seventy years old, was “young in old age, cheerful, animated and happy in conversation, loving all and beloved by all…James Madison owed something of his greatness to his wife.”65
Dolley was just as popular as a dinner guest. William Kemble met her at a dinner at the White House in 1839. “The old lady is a very hearty, good looking woman of about 75. Soon after we were seated, we became on the most friendly terms & I paid her the same attentions I should have done a girl of 15, which suited her fancy very well.”66
And she met many people in her old age whom she had first met thirty or thirty-five years earlier. Senator William Preston was one. He first met her as a teenager when James Madison was secretary of state. He saw again her in 1839. “For my part I loved and venerated you from my earliest dawn off reason and those sentiments inculcated upon my infancy have been confirmed by the knowledge of [your] life and by the concurrent feelings of all who have a perception of the influence of benevolence, grace, worth and wisdom. I do hope that you may long live to enjoy the high consideration in which you are held,” he gushed.67
There were those who wished her well upon her return to Washington because she had made it such a wonderful place to live when she was First Lady. “That a long and happy evening of life may be before you in Washington, and that you may ever find in its society those rational enjoyments and pleasures which you so long and singly dispensed to others there is, dear Madam, the sincere wish,” said Richard Rush, who served in her husband's cabinet.68
Everybody in Washington wanted to meet her and be seen with her. Samuel Morse invited her as a guest when he sent the first Morse code message over the telegraph. When both Charles Dickens and Washington Irving visited Washington as the guests of President Tyler, each insisted on meeting Dolley at dinner parties. President James K. Polk invited her to his inauguration and she sat in his presidential box. In an unprecedented move, Congress authorized that a seat in the chamber of the House of Representatives be kept for her so she could sit in on congressional sessions whenever she pleased.
Her last years were not always easy. In 1845, Payne was once again broke and pleaded with his mother for $6,000 to pay his bills. She took some money she had from the sale of Montpelier and borrowed more and sent it to him. The loan to Payne completely bankrupted her. Upon hearing of her plight, a congressional committee voted to give her $25,000 for the remaining trunk of James Madison's papers, not really sure what was in them. They made certain that she received $5,000 of it right away to pay her bills. Payne hastened to Washington when he heard about the extra money and argued with several members of the board that oversaw the payments that they should give him some of that money. They refused. Angry, he sued the board.
Dolley, approaching her eightieth birthday, finally snapped when she heard about the arguments and subsequent suit. Furious with Payne, she wrote him a heated letter. In it, she asked him to apologize to the trustees. She told him that “I am much distressed at the conversations you held and the determination you expressed on the subject of bringing suit against my trustees…. I say all of this for you because I do not believe even yourself if you declared such an intention [no apology] which would at once ruin your fair fame. Your mother would have no wish to live after her son issued such threats, which would deprive her of her friends.”69
Payne's reaction? He read the letter at Toddsberth, shrugged, and never wrote back.70
He reappeared in Washington several months later, though, when he heard his mother was going to finally make out her will. He wanted to be sure that he received everything. He badgered Dolley, now eighty years old and with her health failing, to give him all that she had. Payne had written her husband's will for him, Payne reminded her, so it was natural for him to write hers. She did not resist. In it, she deeded everything to her son. He brought in friends of his to witness the signing. The reading of the will to verify what it said and the signature took only thirty minutes. Payne had, at long last, apparently gained everything the Madisons had.
When Dolly told her nephew
Madison Cutts, he was outraged. He demanded that she write a new will that replaced Payne's, and she did. In the new will she gave Payne her Lafayette Square home and all of her possessions. She split what was left of the $20,000 trust fund between Payne and her niece Annie Payne Cutts, who had lived with her for fifteen years and taken care of her; Annie was thankful and Payne was furious.
Dolley signed the new will on her deathbed. She passed away on July 12, 1849, just a week after the Fourth of July. What followed was a historical marvel.
All of the leading newspapers in the country published eulogies of her, which hailed her long years of public work, her years as First Lady, her work for the City Orphan Asylum, and her assistance to so many people. They all remembered her as far more than one of the First Ladies, though. She was revered in death, as she had been revered in life: as an American icon, a singular sensation that the United States had never seen before and would never see again.
The National Intelligencer obituary reflected the thousands printed around America:
She continued until with a few weeks [of death] to grace society with her presence and to lend to it those charms with which she adorned the circle of the highest, the wisest and best during the bright career of her illustrious husband. Whenever she appeared, everyone became conscious of the presence of the spirit of benignity and gentleness united to all the attributes of feminine loveliness…all of her own country and thousands in other lands will need no language of eulogy to inspire a deep and sincere regret when they learn the demise of one who touched all hearts by her goodness and won the admiration of all by the charms of dignity and grace.71
Her funeral service was held at St. John's church, in Washington. From there, the funeral cortege traveled to the city's Congressional Cemetery, where she was laid to rest. The service was similar to that accorded American presidents. The processional line was led by Reverend Smith Payne, a family friend who conducted the service, then followed her doctors, the pallbearers, her family, and then, in a long line, President Polk and his wife, the members of the cabinet, hundreds of members of the diplomatic corps, nearly all the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, judges of the Supreme Court and district courts, military officers from all branches of the service, the mayor and city officials, and representatives from all departments of the federal government. There was one last prayer session at her grave, and then she was buried in the middle of the city that she and her husband had loved so dearly. Her body would be moved to Montpelier nine years later, where it was buried next to the president's.
On January 17, 1852, Payne Todd, at sixty-one, died in Washington of typhoid fever. His body was taken by carriage to Congressional Cemetery; the carriage was followed by one, single, unknown mourner. During his last days, talking about his relationship to his parents, Payne Todd told a friend that throughout his life he had been his own worst enemy.
Dolley Madison and her niece Annie Payne Cutts—who took care of her during her later years in Washington, DC—in an 1848 daguerreotype by Matthew B. Brady. (From Greensboro Historical Museum Archives.)
Dolley in an 1848 daguerreotype by Matthew B. Brady, one of the very last images of her. (From Greensboro Historical Museum Archives.)
Portrait of Dolley Payne Todd Madison, ca. 1850, attributed to John Vanderlyn after a portrait by Gilbert Stuart. (From Greensboro Historical Museum.)
Payne Todd was the reckless, impulsive, sociopathic son of James and Dolley Madison. The president had to bail him out of jail on several occasions and pay about $1 million to cover his debts. Payne, who never married, ruined the Madisons financially in later life. Watercolor on ivory by Joseph Wood, ca. 1817. (Currently held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.)
The government gave President James Madison free lifetime franking, or mailing privileges, and, as an act of courtesy, extended them to Dolley when the president died. (From Greensboro Historical Museum Archives.)
The British army burned down the US Capitol, which was still under construction, when it attacked Washington, DC, in the summer of 1814. Hand-colored aquatint by William Strickland (engraver) and George Munger (artist), 1814. (From the Library of Congress.)
Not content with burning the Capitol, the British army moved to the White House. There, soldiers first ate a dinner set for American diplomats who had fled, and then they torched the building. The act enraged the American public. This lithograph by R. Farnham depicting the aftermath was completed in 1848. (From the Library of Congress.)
The naval heroes of the War of 1812 were turned into historical legends by the media, as shown in this large portrait of some of them by Currier & Ives, completed by N. Currier in 1846. (From the Library of Congress.)
The battle of New Orleans was actually fought after the treaty to end the War of 1812 was signed, and the victory of Andrew Jackson and the American forces there turned the war into a public-relations triumph for the United States. The battle is depicted in this lithograph by Peter Duval, 1840. (From the Library of Congress.)
The US frigate United States, commanded by Stephen Decatur, defeated the HBM frigate Macedonian in the War of 1812. Painted by Thomas Birch and engraved by Benjamin Tanner, 1813. (From the Library of Congress.)
Madison lived at his Montpelier mansion most of his life. In 1797 and in 1809, he renovated it. The first floor was changed by Madison to provide more room for his new wife and her sister when they arrived with him in 1797. A new front door (to the left on the map) was installed to offer access to the new wing of the home. He expanded the number and size of his mother's quarters on the right side of the floor, too. (Courtesy of Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site.)
The second floor included more living space and terraces built on the roof of the first floor. Guests filled the terraces at parties. (Courtesy of Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site.)
For decades, the original Montpelier building was buried beneath a larger structure. This is the actual plantation home, finally restored in the early 2000s. (Courtesy of Montpelier, a National Trust Historic Site.)
President John Adams and Madison were at first rivals, but Adams later became Madison's friend and lent him his full support when the War of 1812 began. Painting by Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1791–1794. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
Alexander Hamilton and Madison lobbied together to have the US Constitution ratified in 1788, but they split over political differences during George Washington's second term as president. Painting by Charles Willson Peale, ca. 1790–1795. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
James Madison in his forties. In midlife he had married and planned to retire from public life at his Montpelier plantation, but the Adams administration's unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts brought him back to the public stage, where he would remain. Painting by James Sharples Sr., 1796–1797. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
Madison and longtime friend James Monroe split when Monroe ran against him for president, but Thomas Jefferson brought the pair back together. Monroe was Madison's secretary of state and succeeded him in the White House. Painting attributed to Felix Sharples, ca. 1807–1811. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
Thomas Jefferson and Madison were longtime friends; Jefferson made Madison secretary of state. Madison succeeded Jefferson as president, and the two remained close all of their lives. Painting by Charles Willson Peale, 1791–1792. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
The Madisons frequently visited Richmond, Virginia, seen here in an 1808 painting completed just before Madison's inauguration, and they often stayed there for weeks. Watercolor on paper by J. L. Bouqueta de Woiseri, 1882. (From Virginia Historical Society [1953.2].)
This map, drawn shortly after the American Revolution ended, shows the United States during Madison's lifetime. Map by John Wallis, 1783. (From the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Museum Purchase.)
Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, was the setting for the signing of the Decl
aration of Independence and the US Constitution. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith, ca. 1980–2006. (From the Library of Congress.)
James Madison was the driving force at the US Constitutional Convention. Painting by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter, 1872. (From Independence National Historical Park.)
CHAPTER 1. SAVING GEORGE WASHINGTON IN A CITY ON FIRE
1. National Intelligencer, August 20, 1814.
2. Dolley Madison to Edward Coles, May 12, 1813, in Dolley Madison Digital Edition, ed. Holly C. Shulman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Online Rotunda Edition, 2010–2013) (hereafter referred to as DMDE).
3. Ibid.
4. Dolley Madison to Edward Coles, May 18, 1813, in ibid.
5. Abigail Adams to her sister Elizabeth, in Dolley Madison: Her Life and Times, by Katherine Anthony (New York: Doubleday, 1949), p. 116; National Geographic Society, The Capital of Our Country (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1923), p. 7.
6. Noble Cunningham Jr., ed., “The Frances Few Diary,” Journal of Southern History 29, no. 3 (August 1963): 349.
7. Ibid., pp. 351–52.
8. Lucia Cutts, Memoirs and Letters of Dolley Madison, Wife of James Madison, President of the United States (1886; repr. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1971), pp. 108–11.
James and Dolley Madison Page 48