by Andrea Wulf
From the porch more than an acre of velvety green stretched toward the forest. As the only boundary was a ha-ha, the garden appeared to blend seamlessly into the wilderness beyond. In autumn visitors admired the “contrasting shades of color” of the earthy red leaves of oaks, the coppery orange of American beeches and the buttery yellow of the tulip poplars. Wild climbers wove along the tall forest trees, garlanding them with color and scent, “decorating,” as one visitor observed, “their crests with a rich tapestry.” Whereas at Monticello Jefferson led his guests along a circuitous route through miles of forest which grew gradually more “tamed” toward the house, Madison embraced nature even more by enclosing the lawn with thick forest. It was such an unusual design that most visitors commented on it.
Rather than fashionable shrubberies or colorful flowers, the lawn itself featured only trees, including many fine specimens such as Osage oranges,1 grown from the seeds that Meriwether Lewis had sent to Jefferson from St. Louis, and chinaberry, which Madison had almost certainly received from Monticello, where it was planted in the upper Grove. There were “ornamental trees,” weeping willows and two enormous tulip poplars so identical that Madison called them his “twins.”
Walking across the lawn from the back portico on that hot summer’s day, visitors could also see the entrance to a large horseshoe-shaped flower and kitchen garden in the distance. Instead of turning the sloping land into a softly undulating landscape, as had been fashionable in England for many decades, Madison had carved it into a descending series of level semicircular terraces. This was where he cultivated much of the produce that the cooks had used for the feast, such as sweet strawberries, figs and various types of vegetables, including some from Jefferson’s experimental plots. Madison also grew flowers in this more formal part of the garden, which one guest enthusiastically described as “a paradise of roses.”
There were hotbeds for cucumbers, and probably a hothouse, so that the Madisons could serve pineapples as well as other rare fruits and vegetables that friends occasionally sent him, such as seeds from Algiers and a new giant beetroot species from France. George Divers, one of Jefferson’s closest gardening neighbors, swapped his “Hudson bay strawberry” for Madison’s “Hautboy strawberry plants” and shared dwarf roses with Dolley. Madison was so knowledgeable about plants that neighbors who were unsure about the precise botanical descriptions, for example, would call upon his expertise to clarify the correct Latin names. He also exchanged seeds with botanists from Europe, such as the director of the Botanic Garden in Madrid, who sent the spoils from his collection in return for North American species.
As he reveled in the music and merriment, the company of friends and the beautiful surroundings that day, Madison was not just celebrating the harvest. He was also enjoying his first summer since his retirement in March 1817, when he had triumphantly left office after two terms. After the War of 18122 against Britain, the country had emerged with a revived sense of national unity. Their victory over the Old World was also an assertion of the future of the New World, with the United States emerging as a confident and strong nation.3 The country was flourishing, the former secretary of the treasury Albert Gallatin wrote, “more united at home and respected abroad than at any period.” The United States that Madison had consigned to his successor, James Monroe, was not only beaming with self-confidence but also boasted a $9 million surplus in the treasury. After the Republicans’ sweeping victory at the beginning of Jefferson’s second term, the Federalists had continued to dwindle and had all but disappeared as a powerful party, leaving the Republicans to pursue their dream of a nation of farmers unopposed. It was the so-called Era of Good Feeling, and Monroe’s Inaugural Address was a celebration of the blessings of the United States. “Never did a government commence under auspices so favorable,” proclaimed the new president. Across all other nations of the world, he continued, “we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy.”
Even John Adams wrote that Madison’s administration “has acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, put together.” During this time the country had changed: since Washington had taken the oath of office in 1789, the population had more than doubled to almost nine million. Communication had radically improved with an increase in post offices from a mere 75 to almost 3,500, and the cotton gin (a machine that separated cotton fibers from the seeds) had altered the face of the South by mechanizing the process of cleaning cotton.
Transport and travel were also on the cusp of a revolution. During Madison’s last year as president, a regular steamboat service had been established on the Mississippi, connecting New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, thereby giving fast access to the largest area of fertile soil in the world. In the same year Baltimore became the first American city to illuminate its streets with gas, and by the time Madison brought in the first harvest of his retirement, construction had begun on the Erie Canal in the state of New York. Mechanization slowly began to transform the United States of America, and Jefferson was hugely excited by all these changes—“schools, roads and canals are every where in operation or contemplation,” he wrote excitedly to a friend in Paris in June 1817, and all would aid the United States. “I am not afraid of new inventions or improvements,” he explained to another acquaintance, “nor bigotted to the practices of our forefathers.” Canals in particular, he believed, would give the republic of farmers access to the interior of the continent and would “render our country the garden which nature has destined it to be.”
Madison was equally optimistic, having invested $500 in the Potomac Steam Boat Company two years before his retirement, as well as becoming an early supporter of the inventor John Stevens, the first American to propose the railroad. So much had changed that Madison and his traveling companion James Paulding had been able to take a steamboat down the Potomac for part of the return journey to Montpelier, rather than having to navigate the rugged roads that Jefferson had ridden along eight years previously. Madison had been “playful as a child,” Paulding later recalled, as they glided homeward along the river.
Part of this excitement may have been caused by the new mode of transport, but Madison also couldn’t wait to arrive back at Montpelier. “If ever man rejoiced sincerely in being freed from the cares of Public Life,” Paulding said, “it was him,” echoing remarks made by Washington and Jefferson about their own respective retirements years earlier. Madison was particularly looking forward to putting on his old gardening trousers, which were so worn that they were “patched at the knees.” He loved working and relaxing in the garden, sometimes picking pears, figs or grapes and other times asking one of his slaves to carry out a chair so that he could sit in the shade reading and writing. Every day he rode across the plantation and when he returned, Dolley would be waiting on the portico with a drink in her hands. The retired Madisons were, as Dolley’s close friend Eliza Collins Lee put it, “like Adam and eve in Paradise.”
Jefferson congratulated him “on your return to your books & farm, to tranquillity & independence,” but Madison also quickly discovered that, like the other founding fathers, he would have to deal with a constant stream of visitors. “He has no particular Business,” an old friend wrote apologetically as he introduced one such visitor in June 1817, “but to see those great men of whom he has heard so much.” It was as if Madison had become part of the Virginia tourist itinerary—“few visit our country without visiting Monticello and Montpelier,” noted Margaret Bayard Smith. Fortunately Dolley, who had earned a reputation during her time as first lady for sociability, was in her element. She loved having visitors, and Montpelier was a great place for a party—the informality of plantation life made the organization of entertainment all the easier. Visitors were greeted with a “cheering smile” and were delighted at the lack of ceremony, many of them repeating over the years that hospitality was the presiding spirit at Montpelier.
Over the
past two decades Madison had adapted his father’s house to fit his needs. The transformation had begun in 1797 with Madison’s first, short-lived, retirement from politics during John Adams’s presidency. He had enlarged the house by a third—because with his father and mother still living there, he needed to create a separate space for himself and Dolley. He had also added an enormous two-story portico to the front, displaying his taste for classical architecture. A little more than a decade later, when they moved to the White House at the beginning of his presidency in 1809, Madison had begun the last and most substantial alteration of the mansion. He had added a one-story wing to each side with terraces on the roofs (like the ones Jefferson had designed for the wings of the White House, Monticello and Poplar Forest), enlarged the windows and changed the internal arrangement of rooms, creating the central drawing room through which guests could see the back lawn.
As part of this final redesign of Montpelier, Madison also created a new landscape setting for the mansion, changing his father’s much smaller garden, which was surrounded by work yards, to sweeping ornamental grounds. He had spent much time talking to friends and visitors about his vision. William Thornton, the architect of the Capitol and the man who had first tried to create a garden at the White House for John Adams, had visited Montpelier with his wife already in 1802 to discuss the designs in detail. There was clearly much room for improvement, Thornton’s wife commented, “and when those he [Madison] contemplates are executed, it will be a very handsome place.” Thornton was an amateur painter and had during his visit produced a watercolor depicting the new Montpelier. For years the proposed changes remained just a picture in a frame, a reminder to Madison of what could be done.
It was not until the first year of his presidency, with the alterations to the mansion under way, that Madison turned his attention to the garden and began to implement the new design. First his slaves transformed the rolling land at the back into one large flat expanse, moving hundreds of tons of soil and clay with shovels and picks, draft animals, wheelbarrows and carts. Brick rubble from the building work at the house and huge amounts of red clay that the slaves had excavated from the basement of the new wings was used to fill the dips of the land. With cutting sledges the slaves also removed a ridge behind the house and carted the clay on top of the building rubble. When they had leveled the area, they covered it with topsoil and grass seeds to create the smooth, level lawn.
Given the scale of the alterations, Madison decided it would be a good idea to hire a professional gardener, and so had asked friends and neighbors for recommendations. At the end of July 1810, fellow Virginian James Monroe responded to Madison’s pleas and facilitated the services of Charles Bizet, a French gardener who worked in his neighborhood. Bizet was delighted at the prospect of working at Montpelier, though Monroe warned Madison that the Frenchman was no longer quite up-to-date with the latest garden fashions. In addition, Monroe admitted, “his vision is too imperfect to allow him to embrace distant objects”—not an ideal condition for a landscape designer. With his impaired vision and old-fashioned style Bizet was probably not employed to create sweeping vistas or grand landscape schemes, but having been trained in France, he would have been the right man to oversee the terracing, planting and maintenance of the more formal horseshoe-shaped garden.4 Madison continued his garden improvements and at the beginning of his retirement hired a second gardener, Archibald Blair, who was originally from Scotland—he had the advantage of having been trained in the English landscape tradition without actually being English. With this background Blair was probably in charge of the creation and maintenance of the more natural-looking aspects of the ornamental landscape, such as the planting of clumps of trees on the lawn and in front of the house.
Assisted by his gardeners, books and friends Madison had created a much-admired garden. Unlike Jefferson, who in the face of the Embargo Act had purposefully combined agricultural utility with America’s beauty when he designed Monticello as an ornamental farm, Madison—as the youngest of the founding generation and the one who had led his newly confident, mature country on its “wonderful march of national prosperity and glory”—created grounds that dispensed with any pretense of productivity or practicalities. As if to reflect these new United States, Madison built a classical temple “surmounted by a statue of Liberty” (which also concealed his icehouse) where his father had run a large blacksmith workshop next to the house. Instead of noisy clatter, smoke and dirt, Madison’s design exuded serenity, elegance and tranquillity.
What was also remarkable about Montpelier was that Madison eschewed fashionable shrubberies, instead staging the forest as the main feature. This was an approach that celebrated the American landscape as it was (with a bit of pruning and cutting) rather than creating something entirely new and European. He had certainly discussed this with Thornton, who years later, when making suggestions to Jefferson for the gardens at the University of Virginia, could have been describing Montpelier. “I would advise that the Site be chosen in the woods,” he wrote, because this way it would be easier to “clear out whatever is not wanted.” By “clumping the most beautiful and thriving of the forest Trees, handsome Groves, and leaving straggling ones occasionally,” Thornton continued, “Nature may be so artfully imitated, as to produce a perfect Picture.” This was exactly what Madison had done—he had taken elements of the English landscape park and combined them with the American wilderness.
In the midst of this carefully designed space, however, was something that seemed completely incongruous with the Arcadian scene: in the middle of his elegant lawn, less than fifty yards away from the back portico and in full view of the house and roof terraces, Madison had placed the slave quarters. Six small buildings in two rows nestled around a small yard—a kitchen, two smokehouses and three double cottages (for two households each). Unlike the usual flimsy slave cabins with dirt floors and mud-and-stick chimneys, these were sturdy frame buildings with raised wooden floors, brick chimneys and glass windows. Slaves here ate off decorated plates, admittedly cast-offs and chipped items from the Madisons’ kitchen, but certainly finer tableware than one would normally expect to find. The yard was neat and clean, animated by chickens pecking for grains and slaves raking the paths or crossing the lawn to disappear into the basement kitchen in Madison’s mother’s wing of the house. In one cabin lived “Granny Milly,” who by 1825 had reached the stately age of 104, retired from her “labors” and, according to one visitor, “living happily.”
In order to create this, Madison had razed the old cabins that his father had built farther away from the house behind brick walls. By doing so, he consciously rejected what his father and other plantation owners had done when they separated the slave quarters from the ornamental pleasure grounds with walls, fences, shrubberies or groves. Instead Madison created a model village that was part of the landscape design—a tableau of virtuous industry and paternalistic care. The village was, as Dolley’s niece Mary Cutts put it, “an object of interest” for visitors, who would wander across the lawn to the bucolic scene. The children of Madison’s friends and family packed luxurious breakfasts to take as gifts for the slaves who lived in the little village—proudly dashing back to the mansion with a potato or fresh egg they had received in return. “None but an eye witness can know of the peace and ease of these sable sons of toil,” Cutts said admiringly after her visit.
Madison’s immaculate slave village was a radical gesture. Washington, by contrast, had created distinct slave areas around the mansion at Mount Vernon, dividing the space with walls, plantings and buildings. In fact, Washington had instructed his estate manager to reprimand any slave who ventured into the shrubberies and bowling green: “besides bad habit—they too frequently are breaking limbs, or twigs from, or doing other injury to my Shrubs.” Similarly, at Monticello the quarters for the house slaves were hidden in the low wings of the mansion, while those along Mulberry Row (located between the vegetable terrace and the lawn at the back of the house) were
part of the utilitarian areas of the landscape. Mulberry Row was not pretending to be anything other than a working road with slave cabins, a joinery and a “nailery,” but it was screened from the back lawn by trees and shrubs as well as being tucked away due to the lie of the land.
In addition to the highly visible model village, Madison had also built a hidden, detached kitchen that was linked by a large work yard to Dolley’s basement kitchen in their wing of the mansion (on the opposite side to the slave village). Madison had concealed it behind a latticework screen and two rows of pine trees that led from the wing to the temple. Dolley’s detached kitchen was one of the most intensely used domestic workspaces, unlike the kitchen in the slave village, which was linked by a path to the cellar kitchen in the wing that Madison’s mother occupied. Given Madison’s mother’s age (she was almost ninety when he retired in 1817) it seems certain that the kitchen in the slave village was used far less than the one on the other side of the house.
The rationale behind hiding the busy kitchen from the eyes of visitors while purposefully placing the neat slave cottages in full view lies in the changing attitudes to slavery and the social changes in Virginia. Like Washington and Jefferson, Madison had long struggled to reconcile the idea of slavery with his beliefs in equality and liberty. Throughout his life he called slavery a “stain” and a “blot” on the American nation. Northerners, abolitionists and many foreigners found it difficult to accept that the revolutionaries, who had created this republic, owned fields that were worked by slaves. Madison expected large numbers of visitors to come to Montpelier during his retirement and he also knew that the slave quarters, in particular, would be scrutinized by such travelers (who often published their accounts in America and Europe).