The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Madison was completely bedridden for the last six months of his life. In her letters during these final days, Dolley called him “my patient,” and in one letter described how she remained constantly at his bedside, “so deep is the interest, & sympathy I feel for him.” During this trying period, she gratefully accepted the nursing help of her niece, Anna Payne, who lived not far from Montpelier. At least as important was the presence of Paul Jennings, Madison’s slave valet, who had served him in this capacity for sixteen years.

  Annie, as Anna Payne was known, soon became devoted to both Madisons. She reported how Dolley guarded her patient against an attempt to exploit him as a national symbol, at the expense of his dignity. By late June 1836, it was evident that Madison had only a few days to live. The doctors offered to prolong his life with stimulants so he could die on the Fourth of July, like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Madison declined the offer and Dolley tearfully supported him.

  On the morning of June 28, 1836, Paul Jennings was at his bedside as usual. He noticed that Madison had trouble swallowing his breakfast. A visiting niece asked her uncle whether anything was wrong. Madison calmly replied, “Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear.” Before anyone could speak or move, Jennings said, “His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out.” He died, Annie Payne wrote, “in the full possession of all his noble faculties.”24

  X

  One of the first letters Dolley received after her husband’s death came from Martha Jefferson Randolph. On July 1, 1836, she wrote from Washington:

  I heard yesterday, my very dear friend, of a misfortune that I believe we were both too well prepared to accept. I would if possible be with you immediately, but shall be detained here some days by circumstances over which I have no control. Friday evening, probably, I shall be at [the Orange County] Court House and if you can send your carriage for me next morning, Cornelia [her daughter] and my self will go to you, if however you should have consented to withdraw yourself for a time from scenes of so much former happiness and present sorrow, tell me frankly, my dear friend, and we will delay our visit until you return home. One line left at the Court House will inform me of your present plan and determine mine. God bless and support you dear friend, under your present affliction, prays most affectionately and unalterably

  M Randolph.25

  Other letters came from Louisa Catherine Adams, a woman who had modeled her Washington career on Dolley’s and took similar satisfaction in having helped her very different husband become president. President Andrew Jackson told Dolley “my own sensibility at the loss sustained by yourself and the nation” could add little to the overwhelming evidence of “the nation’s sympathy.”26

  Dolley responded wholeheartedly to this outpouring of admiration and affection for her and her husband. She welcomed Martha Jefferson Randolph and three of her daughters, as well as nieces Anna Payne and Mary Cutts, to Montpelier. Young people were exactly what she needed to raise her spirits. Soon she was confiding to one of her oldest friends, Eliza Collins Lee, how she was dealing with her sorrow. She had resolved to “be calm, and strive to live long after him—that I should proceed to fulfill the trust he reposed in me.” She was referring to the publication of Madison’s papers, on which they had labored for so many years.27

  This trust was almost betrayed by Dolley’s attempt to involve her son Payne in the sale of the papers. She sent him to Philadelphia and New York to sound out publishers. It is hard to imagine a worse spokesman for a project that had to be sold as a noble venture, vital to the nation’s understanding of its past. One New York writer who tried to advise Payne remarked that he was “the last man in the world to compass such a business.” There was not much enthusiasm for the idea in the publishing world, and Payne managed to dissipate what little there was with his high-handed demands and arrogant style. Eventually, friends with political connections intervened and Dolley sold the papers to Congress in two installments, for a total of $50,000.28

  Alas, much of this cash was committed to paying generous bequests in Madison’s will to the College of New Jersey (Princeton), the University of Virginia, and other institutions he cared about. Still more was consumed by the debts Madison had accumulated in his last years to pay for Payne’s extravagances and gambling and to keep Montpelier solvent. After the Panic of 1819, Virginia sank into an almost permanent recession. The same dismaying decline had ruined Thomas Jefferson’s hopes of paying off his far larger debts at Monticello.

  Dolley struggled to make Montpelier profitable, but it was almost impossible. Madison had sold three-fourths of the acreage to stay solvent during his lifetime and she had to support over one hundred slaves, many of them too old to work. She was extremely reluctant to sell them without their consent. She apparently sold a few to neighbors, which meant a family would not have to be separated. For most of these years, Dolley relied on an overseer to run the plantation. She also depended on Payne, who behaved in his usual irresponsible style, selling books, paintings, some of Madison’s manuscripts, and an occasional slave without asking his mother’s permission.

  XI

  Starting in 1837, Dolley was only a summer visitor at Montpelier. That year she moved to the Cutts house in Washington. Her sister Anna had died and her children had grown to adulthood. The house was available, and Dolley effortlessly rejoined the capital’s social scene. In the month of December, she made no less than sixty-five calls on old friends and new acquaintances. Everyone who mattered or wanted to matter bombarded her with invitations to teas, balls, and dinners. President Martin Van Buren took great pleasure in welcoming her to the White House. One man who sat next to her at a dinner in 1839 enjoyed her company from start to finish. “The old lady is a very hearty good-looking woman of about 75,” he wrote to a friend. “Soon after we were seated we became on the most friendly terms & I paid her the same attentions I should have done to a girl of 15—which seemed to suit her fancy very well.”29

  In 1844, Dolley was forced to give up her struggle to save Montpelier. She sold the property and its slaves to Henry W. Moncure, a wealthy Richmond merchant, who had already bought 750 acres in 1842. It caused her considerable anguish. She took eight months to sign the final papers, handing over the mansion. “No one,” she wrote apologetically to the patient Moncure, “can appreciate my feeling of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home.”30

  Thereafter, Dolley became a permanent Washington resident. She was still hard pressed for cash. One of her most devoted friends was Paul Jennings. Dolley had sold him to Senator Daniel Webster with the understanding that he would be able to buy his freedom. Jennings visited Dolley regularly, sometimes bringing her food and often cash. “Mrs. Madison was beloved by every body in Washington, white and colored,” he said.31

  During these final years, Dolley became more than a popular guest at balls and dinners. She was hailed as a national treasure, a woman who had taken tea with George and Martha Washington and knew personally each of the next eleven presidents and their wives. Sarah Polk, another first lady who shared the political as well as the social side of the presidency with her husband, was especially fond of Dolley. In September 1845, when the Surviving Defenders of 1814, the men who had fought the British forays against Washington and Baltimore, gathered to commemorate their efforts, they marched in a body to Dolley’s house to pay their respects.32

  Invariably, Dolley accepted these tributes as “a token of remembrance of One who has gone before us.” In death as well as in life, she shared her fame with James Madison. It was in this spirit that she joined Elizabeth Hamilton in the campaign to rescue George Washington’s proposed monument. The two matrons watched from the White House while an “immense audience” cheered the laying of the cornerstone.

  During these five years of continual admiration, Dolley grew frail. When an old friend sent her the first rose of the summer from her garden, Dolley thanked her extravagantly and then added t
hat she had risen that morning with the sun and “felt as if I could fly with the aid of a sweet breeze then blowing, but now at 10 o’clock I am so ready for a nap I may not sign my name to this.”33 On July 8, 1849, Dolley was unable to rise from her bed. For several days, she slipped in and out of consciousness. When she awoke, her friend Eliza Collins Lee said, she would “smile her loving smile, put her arms out to embrace those she loved, and who were near her, and gently relapse into the rest that was peace.”34

  Dolley Madison died on July 12, 1849, at the age of eighty-one. President Zachary Taylor cancelled all government business and ordered a state funeral. The crowd was stupendous. All the mourners seemed to sense they were saying farewell to a woman who had not only lived history but made it. Another seventy years would pass before women won the right to vote and became accepted members of the political community. But Dolley’s example remains a landmark on this long, torturous road. She demonstrated what women can bring to the often acrimonious world of American politics—good humor and tolerance of opposing points of view. Equally important is the virtue that won her respect as well as affection: her courage. Above all, Dolley epitomized the significance of a woman’s love in the lives of men who sought history’s most elusive prize, fame.

  Appendix:

  THE EROSION OF JEFFERSON’S IMAGE IN THE AMERICAN MIND

  Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghostwritten account of Madison Hemings’s recollections did not entirely disappear after its 1873 publication in the Pike County Republican. The African-American historian Arthur Calhoun concluded the story was “probably true” in his 1917 Social History of the American Family. W.E.B. Du Bois, a central figure in the evolution of African-American identity, cited it as true in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction. In 1954, Ebony magazine ran a photo essay, “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” about a group of African-Americans who said they were descended from Jefferson. Many were descendants of Sally Hemings. Others claimed Joe Fosset, son of Mary Hemings, Sally’s sister, as their ancestor and asserted Jefferson was Joe’s father. The magazine abandoned its usually moderate tone as it discussed the subject. The Ebony writer heaped sarcasm on white historians, claiming they were well aware that Jefferson had fathered numerous “slave concubines” by Sally and other members of the Hemings family.1

  In 1960, Jefferson scholar Merrill D. Peterson printed a summary of the Madison Hemings story in his landmark book, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. He found it “more credible” than most recollections of Jefferson. But he ultimately concluded the “miscegenation legend,” as he called it, was not true. Peterson cited a story about an African-American carpenter named Robert Jefferson, who died in Ohio in 1882. This Jefferson had been a house slave who belonged to a man named Christian in Charlestown, Virginia. He was born in 1803 and claimed that his mother repeatedly told him Jefferson was his father and he “had no reason to doubt her word.” Peterson decided Madison’s story was refuted by too many “incredible” black claims like Robert Jefferson’s and “by the overwhelming evidence” of Jefferson’s personal life.2

  In 1968, historian Winthrop Jordan wrote another landmark book, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Jordan, a descendant of abolitionists, included more than a few paragraphs about Thomas Jefferson. He dismissed the story of Sally Hemings as stained by “the utter disreputability of the source” (James Thomson Callender). But he noted that Jefferson had been at Monticello nine months before the births of each of Sally’s children.3

  In 1974, historian Douglas Adair, long head of the Institute for Early American Culture at Williamsburg, came to Jefferson’s defense in a posthumous book of essays titled Fame and the Founding Fathers. Included was a hitherto unpublished essay, “The Jefferson Scandals.” Adair had done considerable research into the private lives of Jefferson’s nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr. He emphatically backed Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s testimony that they were guilty. Adair found that the older brother, Peter, had enjoyed a long-running relationship with Sally Hemings, so intense that it left him incapable of a happy marriage. The testimony of an overseer, Edmund Bacon, who worked at Monticello from 1806 to 1822, seemed to confirm this assertion. Bacon said he had seen ___ (he discreetly omitted the name) coming out of Sally’s cabin on “many a morning.” Adair believed he was talking about Peter Carr. His brother, Samuel Carr, had been the lover of Sally’s niece, Betty, the child of her half sister, Mary.

  Adair condemned with special vehemence the idea that sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings had conceived her first child when she was living in Jefferson’s Paris residence. That would have meant Jefferson had traveled home from France with his teenage daughters “in the tight enforced intimacy of shipboard…with his pregnant mulatto mistress as the fourth member of the family group.” He was even more skeptical that Sally became “the overruling passion” of Jefferson’s later life—that Jefferson’s desire for her approached the “obsessive”—making him “oblivious to and contemptuous of the public opinion of the great world and the private judgments of his intimate family.” This did not jibe with the “thin-skinned censure-allergic Virginian” that he and other historians found when they studied Jefferson’s political life.

  If this story were true, Adair concluded, it would require everyone “not merely to change some shadings” in the portrait of Jefferson, but to “reverse the picture of him as an honorable man, painted by both the contemporaries who knew him well and the multitude of later scholars who have studied with care every stage in his career.”4

  Outside the scholarly community, Douglas Adair’s exoneration of Jefferson was scarcely noticed. Several months before its publication, historian Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History. Brodie was a psychobiographer best known for her controversial life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. The details she reported about Smith’s sex life and other matters earned her an excommunication from the church.

  Brodie’s Intimate History accepted Madison Hemings’s narrative as true. She described it as “the most important single document” relating to the story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Her psychosexual study of Jefferson concluded that his affair with Sally was “a serious passion that brought both parties much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.”

  One reviewer called the book “a psychoanalytic history of Jefferson’s complex mind and motivations” and praised it as a “compelling, compassionate case history.” Numerous scholars disagreed. David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, accused Brodie of trying to portray Jefferson as “a secret swinger” and suggested that the title of her book should have been By Sex Obsessed. He thought Brodie refused to believe that the real Jefferson was “somewhat monkish, abstemious, continent and virtually passionless.”

  Garry Wills, professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of several books on or related to Jefferson, was even tougher on Brodie. “Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy,” Wills wrote. “The author’s industry—and her ignorance.”5 Wills was outdone by Julian Boyd, the editor of the Jefferson Papers, who had spent thirty years of his life studying all of Jefferson’s “recorded actions.” He called Brodie’s Jefferson a fiction created by those who “so eagerly embrace the concept of collective guilt, who project views of the rights of women and blacks into the past.”6

  In spite of these denunciations, Brodie’s book was a publishing success. She was interviewed on the Today show, and her version of Jefferson and Sally soon created what the media call “a buzz.” The book was on the New York Times bestseller list for thirteen weeks and sold 80,000 copies in hardback and 270,000 in paperback. The Los Angeles Times named Brodie Woman of the Year.7

  The success of Brodie’s book cast a shadow on the 1976 celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One scholar wrote a troubled letter to Dumas Malone, the nation’s leading Jefferson scholar, bem
oaning the way Ebony was “spreading the Hemings canard all over their bicentennial issue and blacks hereabouts are reading it gleefully.” In numerous articles around this time, Ebony regularly cited Brodie’s book as the source for their denunciations of Jefferson. They accepted Brodie’s contention that it was a love story, but claimed this only “intensified his [Jefferson’s] hypocrisy.”

  Dumas Malone, close to completing his six-volume Jefferson biography, joined the fray with an article in the Journal of Southern History debunking Madison Hemings’s story. Malone ended his article with a quotation from the editor of the Waverly Watchman, Pike County’s Democratic newspaper. That sharp-tongued partisan compared Madison Hemings’s claim to Jefferson’s paternity to “a pedigree printed on the numerous stud horse bills” each spring. “No matter how scrubby the stock,” the owners invented “an exalted lineage for their property.” Such offensive language infuriated blacks already suspicious of the white Jefferson scholars’ establishment—and alienated white sympathizers.8

  In 1979, Barbara Chase-Riboud published Sally Hemings, A Novel. The Philadelphia-born author, who is also a gifted sculptor, accepted Fawn Brodie’s premise of a deeply serious, caring relationship and created a story that opened in 1830 in Albermarle County not far from Monticello. Sally Hemings was free and living with her two freed sons, Eston and Madison. From there the story is told from several points of view and moves back and forth in time, with many pages devoted to Paris, where Jefferson supposedly fell in love with Sally.

  According to the fictional Sally, Martha and Maria Jefferson were fully aware of the affair. Like Sally, they were in awe of Thomas Jefferson and never dreamed of objecting to the liaison. The novel closed with Jefferson dead and Sally freed by Martha after a bitter, mutually abusive exchange. A few months later, Sally watched while all Monticello’s blacks except some of the Hemings clan were sold at auction to pay Jefferson’s debts. Sally bitterly regretted her inability to buy her sister Critta’s children; she felt the scene was “my condemnation to everlasting hell.”