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While
serving in the Congress in Philadelphia (then the
capitol), Madison met and wed a widow 17 years his
junior in 1794. (They were introduced by Aaron
Burr, Madison's fellow student at Princeton.)
Dolley Payne Todd was a Quaker, and was expelled for
marrying Madison outside the faith.
She
happily dropped Quaker practices, and portraits show her
in decidedly un-Quaker attire. She was considered
a beauty and an ebullient spirit. She became the
first of the Washington celebrity hostesses serving as
White House hostess for the widower, Jefferson, as well
as for her husband. She and James were happily
married, and she helped him and Jefferson politically as
well as socially. The nation had abjured grandiose
titles for the President, but the women of Washington
called Dolley "Lady Madison" and even referred
to her as "Her Majesty."
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Dolley
Madison became a hero of the War of 1812 when the
British burned the White House. She was reported
to have abandoned her own belongings and rescued the
Gilbert Stuart's life-size portrait of George
Washington. Years later Paul Jennings in his
memoir specifically denied that Dolley Madison saved the
Stuart portrait: he credited a doorkeeper and a gardener
with the rescue. Dolley, on the other hand, did
claim credit in a contemporaneous letter to her
sister. Dolley Madison is also credited with
initiating two enduring Washington social practices: the
Inaugural Ball and the White House Easter Egg Roll. |
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In
1796 Jefferson ran for President and narrowly lost to John Adams
of Massachusetts, Washington's Vice President and a
Federalist. As the Constitution (Article
II, section 1.3) provided, the electors at that time cast
two votes with no distinction between the votes as to President
and Vice President. The candidate who received the most
electoral votes (and the vote of a majority of the electors)
became President; the candidate with the second most votes (and
a majority) became Vice President. Jefferson received
three fewer electoral votes than Adams: Adams became President
and Jefferson Vice President.
President
Adams offered Madison a mission to France, which he declined,
and in 1797 Madison left the House of Representatives and
retired to Montpelier, with Dolley and her son by her previous
marriage. However, the animosity between the two parties
intensified as the federal government, controlled by the
Federalists, enacted and enforced the Alien and Sedition
Acts. Madison had always been an impassioned advocate of
freedom of religion. The Sedition Act, in particular,
forced him to rethink the role of free speech and press.
Madison developed the position, commonplace today, that the
freedom of speech and press is essential to the competition
between candidates and parties that is at the heart of
representative democracy:
[T]he
right of electing the members of the government constitutes
more particularly the essence of a free and responsible
government. The value and efficacy of this right depends
on the knowledge of the comparative merits and demerits of the
candidates for public trust, and on the equal freedom,
consequently, of examining and discussing these merits and
demerits of the candidates respectively. Madison's
Report on the Virginia Resolutions (in the American
Memory collection of the Library of Congress)
James
Madison came out of his brief retirement to draft the Virginia
Resolutions of 1798 and the subsequent Report on the
Virginia Resolutions which were adopted by the Virginia
legislature to protest the Alien and Sedition Acts and to assert
the freedom of speech and press. The careful Madison used
the first two clauses of the Virginia Resolution to assert
Virginia's loyalty to the Constitution and to the maintenance of
the Union. However, the third clause asserts the
obligation of the state to "interpose" between its
citizens and unconstitutional federal actions. Jefferson
authored the less cautious, more radical, Kentucky Resolutions. |
