The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Philadelphia was a lively city, especially for political insiders. There was an almost perpetual round of balls and dinners. At the center of the action were a number of wealthy women who were determined to find a role for their sex in the new republic. They embraced the idea that this could be done by urging men to live up to the ideals of republicanism. It was a very American twist on the role that aristocratic French women had created for themselves in Paris. Dolley was a frequent and always welcome guest at their parties and dinners, and had a unique opportunity to study their methods and estimate their success. Perhaps the most memorable social event staged by these women was the 1795 Washington’s Birthday Ball given by the city’s dancing assembly. It attracted 450 members of the city’s political and social elite.3

  James and Dolley also enjoyed an ultimate compliment that very few Philadelphians received: an invitation to dine with the Washingtons “in a family way”—at a private meal with several other couples rather than at the far larger weekly official dinners. Even though Madison opposed many of the president’s policies, Washington still regarded him with affection for his contributions to the creation of the Constitution. Martha demonstrated her fondness for Dolley by giving her a lovely cream pitcher from a set given to the president by a French nobleman.4

  Dolley’s teenage sister, Anna Payne, lived with the Madisons and was as attractive as Dolley. Suitors thronged their parlor day and night. The young ladies and young matrons like Dolley all wore the latest French fashions, which revealed not a little of their figures. Abigail Adams was shocked by certain young women, notably wealthy Anne Bingham’s daughter, Marie, who wore dresses you “might literally see through.” The men thought differently, of course. Even New Englander Harrison Gray Otis adored Miss Bingham’s costume, which enabled him to see her legs “for five minutes together.”5

  Dolley’s friends took a dim view of Abigail Adams. One of the most outspoken was Sally McKean, daughter of a powerful Pennsylvania politician. Sally referred to Abigail as “that old what shall I call her—with her hawk’s eyes.” She described one of Abigail’s Smith nieces as “not young and confounded ugly,” and told how she and Abigail had recently departed for Boston, “where I suppose they want to have a little fuss made with them for dear knows they have had none made here.”6

  Dolley and her sister Anna, perhaps underscoring their divorce from Quakerism, never uttered a critical word about the French styles Abigail deplored. Madison seems to have had no objections to viewing bosoms and legs galore in his house on Spruce Street and elsewhere. One Federalist politician, noting how marriage had made Madison “more open and conversant than I ever saw him before,” wondered if Dolley could take credit for relieving him of the bachelor “bile” that had made him such a combative political opponent.7

  III

  When John Adams defeated Thomas Jefferson for the presidency in 1796, James Madison decided to retire from the fray for a few years. Jefferson had become vice president and returned to Philadelphia as their party’s chief spokesman. The Federalists seemed likely to be in power for years to come. Madison, Dolley, and her sister Anna retreated to Montpelier for the next three years. James Madison Sr. had begun to decline into old age, and his oldest son took charge of their large extended family.

  During these first Montpelier years, the intimate side of the Madison marriage flowered. Together they enlarged and redecorated the mansion, using furniture and art shipped to them by James Monroe, who was in Paris as America’s ambassador. Dolley learned how to preside at large parties and dinners in a style befitting a southern hostess.

  There was only one disappointment in these years of tranquil happiness. In spite of evident ardor on both sides, Dolley did not become pregnant. Neither partner ever publicly expressed disappointment about this nonevent. In addition to Dolley’s son Payne, they had so many nieces and nephews in the families of their siblings that there was never any sense of deprivation. But it must have caused an occasional pang in their otherwise all-but-perfect union.

  IV

  One of Jefferson’s first official acts when he became president in 1801 was his appointment of James Madison as his secretary of state. To underscore Madison’s importance, the president invited him and Dolley to live at the executive mansion. The future White House was a vast unfinished semi-barn in which Jefferson and his secretary and a few servants rattled around, the president said, “like mice in a church.” A member of the departing Adams administration called the house “a large naked ugly looking building.” The rest of the so-called Federal City was in a similar unfinished state. In the words of one wit, the place was mostly houses with no streets and streets with no houses.8

  The Jeffersonian Republicans liked it that way. They saw the oozing swamps and muddy roads and generally primitive landscape as the ideal site from which to govern a nation on pure democratic principles—an atmosphere that could never be achieved in the two previous capitals, New York and Philadelphia. Those cities were full of wealthy merchants and artful lawyers ready and eager to corrupt and ultimately dominate the political process.

  For the moment, Washington, D.C, was a city—and a society—that was little more than an embryo, waiting for leaders to nurture and guide it. Not a few people had grave doubts about the future of this idealistic vision. One exasperated legislator, living in a boardinghouse with twenty or thirty fellow politicians, muttered that they reminded him of a tribe of monks. All they did was legislate by day and argue with each other by night. No one brought wives or children to this semi-wilderness.9

  In the executive mansion, the widower president seemed to have left women out of his formula for political perfection. He entertained lavishly, drawing on a wine cellar stocked with the expertise acquired during his sojourn in Paris as America’s ambassador, but his guests were invariably all men. This was not entirely accidental. As we have seen, Jefferson had acquired a distinct hostility to the way French women participated in France’s politics, with their crowded salons and their readiness to bestow sexual favors on men in power.

  Into this social vacuum came thirty-three-year-old Dolley Madison, wife of the second most important man in Washington. (Vice President Aaron Burr was a widower and had had a falling-out with Jefferson.) Dolley began by charming President Jefferson as she charmed everyone. On the rare occasions when he invited women to one of his dinner parties, he asked Dolley to join him and act as the hostess. But neither Dolley nor her husband was inclined to accept Jefferson’s invitation to become his permanent guests. They soon moved to a comfortable three-story brick house on F Street, two blocks east of the Executive Mansion.

  V

  While her husband and Jefferson grappled with the turbulent politics of a Europe in which Napoleon Bonaparte became a primary player and a Republican Party that began splitting into quarrelsome factions, Dolley put herself in charge of creating a civilized Washington. Day after day, she braved the atrocious roads in her elegant green carriage, paying calls on the few women who had accompanied their husbands to the capital, and on the relative handful of diplomats who had come from Britain and France and a few other countries, sometimes bringing their wives and children.

  Dolley also paid cheerful attention to the numerous local families who had moved from Virginia and Maryland, hoping to share the Federal City’s promised prosperity. With her sister Anna in residence, often joined by her sister Lucy, who was always ready to escape the rural society of her husband’s plantation, Harewood, Dolley began giving lively dinner parties at which the number of women roughly equaled the number of men.

  Dolley must have known she was doing something that Thomas Jefferson did not entirely approve. But the president may have realized it was a job that needed doing. Early in his first term, a group of Federal City ladies began fretting because there were no “levees”—the large receptions hosted by presidents Washington and Adams. Jefferson opened the executive mansion’s doors to the public only twice a year, on July fourth and January first. The ladies d
ecided to force the president’s hand. One day they arrived at the White House in their party clothes, hair coiffed and jewelry glittering, hoping to embarrass him into giving them a levee.

  Jefferson had just returned from a horseback ride, and was covered with dust and grime from the capital’s primitive roads. But he did not lose his cool. He pretended that each of the ladies had come separately, and by wonderful coincidence they had all arrived at the same time. After fifteen minutes of forced good humor, the ladies departed in a very disgruntled mood. This experience may have made the president more tolerant of Dolley’s parties.

  She also took advantage of President Jefferson’s dependence on James Madison as his chief adviser and most trusted political confederate. The president was not going to provoke a quarrel with the secretary of state by criticizing his beloved wife. Even when Dolley began giving a New Year’s party that competed with the president’s reception at the executive mansion, Jefferson never said a negative word. Everyone trudged dutifully to the mansion to pay their respects—and then headed for F Street, where there was a party they would enjoy.

  Dolley’s dinners were not the small affairs that Jefferson preferred because they gave him an opportunity to press his ideas and political plans on his guests. She liked big parties because they enabled people to relax. Senator John Quincy Adams noted in his diary that there was “a company of about seventy persons of both sexes” at one dinner. Nevertheless, he found a chance to have a conversation about politics with James Madison, which began Adams’s exit from the moribund Federalist party.

  Madison’s shyness made him awkward and reserved when he met people individually or spoke at public events. But seated at his own dinner table, with Dolley weaving good humor into the conversation, he relaxed and became almost as charming as his spouse. At one dinner party, Champagne was poured with a lavish hand. Madison drank his share and observed somewhat ruefully that tomorrow would almost certainly begin with a headache. It was hard to judge when one exceeded his limit.

  An impish smile played across Madison’s face as he observed that tomorrow was Sunday. Why not conduct an experiment and find out exactly how much Champagne it took to induce a hangover? The victims would have the next day to recover. Soon, Champagne was being lugged into the dining room by the case. No one got drunk, but one diner recalled that the conversation grew more and more animated and humorous remarks flew in all directions. If anyone kept a record of how many heads were throbbing on Sunday, it has vanished.10

  VI

  Within eighteen months of her arrival in the Federal City, Dolley Madison had established her house as the social center of Washington. She was clearly violating President Jefferson’s dictum against women in politics, but she got away with it by ingeniously blending friendship and hospitality with political concerns until most outside observers were hard put to separate them. Dolley had a rare ability to choose her women friends wisely. Among the most important was Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of Washington’s only newspaper, The National Intelligencer. Smith had been invited to Washington by Jefferson to serve as his semi-official spokesman.

  Margaret Bayard Smith was a talented writer and a shrewd woman. She liked Dolley from the moment they met. Dolley’s lively good humor and “affable and agreeable manners” won her wholehearted affection. In a letter to her sister, Mrs. Smith expressed amazement at the warmth of her feelings in so short a time. She felt almost as fond of Dolley’s sister Anna. “It is impossible for an acquaintance with them to be different,” she wrote.11

  Another important woman friend was Anna Maria Thornton, wife of Dr. William Thornton, the architect who had won the competition to design the capitol. He was a man for all seasons, a talented inventor and businessman. The Thorntons and the Madisons were next-door neighbors, and Anna Maria had a personality almost as lively as Dolley’s. A third vital woman friend was Marcia Burns Van Ness, the wealthiest woman in Washington. She had inherited $1.5 million from her landowner father before marrying John Peter Van Ness of New York. The money and Marcia’s charming personality made the Van Nesses the Federal City’s social leaders before Dolley arrived on the scene, and they were easily persuaded to join forces with her.12

  Among the innovations Dolley introduced at her dinners and late-evening teas was gambling at cards. The favorite game was loo, a version of euchre, in which players bet on their ability to win tricks. The stakes were low, but the fun was high. Ladies, when they lost, squealed in the most piquant way that they had been “looed.” Dolley was an enthusiastic player. During this diversion, she frequently paused to inhale some snuff, a smokeless form of tobacco to which she soon became addicted. Like tobacco users before and since, she urged all her friends never to become fond of the habit—but found it impossible to stop using it. Not a few people thought it added to Dolley’s image as a woman of the world.

  This public personality may have helped Dolley achieve some of her most important political-social successes in these early Washington years. Far more than the ascetic Republican Thomas Jefferson or the shy, reserved James Madison, she was crucial to making the diplomats from foreign nations feel welcome in the primitive capital city. Here, Dolley had an inside track; her Philadelphia friend, acerbic, beautiful Sally McKean, had married the handsome young Spanish minister Carlos Fernando Martinez de Yrujo. She introduced Dolley to many of the wives of other ministers, notably the French minister’s spouse, Marie-Angelique de Turreau, who had a wicked sense of humor. Dolley told her sister Anna that in her company “I crack my sides laughing.”13

  A dividend of this friendship was Dolley’s acquisition of the French language. Marie-Angelique was a clever and encouraging teacher. She also undertook to instruct Dolley in dressing with Parisian panache. The closeness of their relationship made Dolley supersensitive to the way red-faced, mustachioed General Louis Marie Turreau treated his pretty wife. More than once, when she disagreed with him in public, he struck her. It should be added that she was not exactly a shrinking violet; she once hit him in the head with a flatiron.14

  Turreau was blatantly unfaithful to his wife, regularly riding through Washington in his gilded carriage to the house of a woman “of easy virtue.” At other times, he insisted on bringing prostitutes into their home. In 1805, when Dolley was in Philadelphia undergoing surgery for an ulcerated knee, General Turreau and three male friends attempted to visit her in her bedroom. She declined to entertain them, implying in a letter to Madison that she was worried about her reputation. It was also an undoubted pleasure to tell the swaggering wife-beater to go away.15

  Dolley proved to be a valuable asset to both her husband and President Jefferson when the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France led to a serious quarrel with Spain. Secretary of State Madison insisted the western part of Spanish-owned Florida was part of the historic transfer. Minister Yrujo stormed into Madison’s office at the State Department and screamed insults in his face. Madison declared him persona non grata, and Yrujo and his wife retreated to Philadelphia. But Dolley’s close friendship with the former Sally McKean enabled the government to maintain at least a semblance of friendly relations. Dolley told her sister that she still felt “a tenderness” for the Yrujos, “regardless of circumstances.”16

  VII

  Dolley became even more important when President Jefferson decided to apply his ideals of Republican simplicity to dealing with the new British minister, Anthony Merry, and his ultra-dignified wife, Elizabeth. At an official dinner in the executive mansion, Jefferson announced that the guests would be seated at the table without the usual attention to honor and importance. “Pell-mell” was his name for this new etiquette, which enabled the president to ignore Mrs. Merry and lead Dolley to the place of honor beside him at the table. She knew this was a bad move and whispered urgently, “Take Mrs. Merry.”

  The president ignored her. Secretary of State Madison extended his arm to Mrs. Merry, but she was obviously outraged and insulted. Her flustered hu
sband was left standing at the door without a woman to escort. When he attempted to sit down beside Sally Yrujo, a congressman who took the president’s pell-mell rule too literally pushed him aside, and the minister was left to wander to a chair near the bottom of the table.

  The infuriated Merrys were convinced that Jefferson was expressing his disrespect for both them and their country. They refused all further invitations from the president. But they decided they could and would accept an invitation from the Madisons after Dolley called on Mrs. Merry and did her best to make amends to the formidable lady. This was no easy task, because Dolley could not admit that Jefferson was in the wrong.

  At first, things went no better at the Madisons. Mrs. Merry dismissed Dolley’s dinner as a mere “harvest home” supper—peasant fare. Dolley kept her temper and calmly replied that it was the American custom to prefer “abundance to elegance,” evidence of the “superabundance and prosperity of our country.” She was aware of the “elegance of European taste” but chose to dine “in the more liberal fashion of Virginia.” Mrs. Merry was temporarily reduced to silence. The French military attaché, hearing of Dolley’s reply, wrote home that “Mrs. Madison has become one of America’s most valuable assets.”17

  The contretemps between the Merrys and the president got into the newspapers. The Federalists sided with the British minister, and in the ugly style of the day, some of their reporters began spreading nasty slanders about Dolley and her sister Anna. They claimed that Dolley was Jefferson’s secret mistress with Madison’s covert approval because he was impotent—as his failure to produce a child supposedly proved. Soon other papers were suggesting that Madison and Jefferson “pimped” Dolley and Anna to win the goodwill of visiting foreign officials. The president bemoaned the way “the brunt of the battle” was falling on “the secretary’s ladies,” but he declined to call off his ridiculous and unnecessary social war.18