In 1993, First Lady Hillary Clinton celebrated her birthday with a
costume party. It was her first year in the White House, and Clinton
was still experimenting with how to graft the traditional public role
of the first lady as hostess and partner onto her own style of independent
woman-cum-lawyer. She decided to go to the ball dressed as one of her
predecessors, Dolley Madison.
While Clinton never publicly commented on her choice, to the observer
it indicates the ways in which Dolley Madison is publicly viewed today,
and it demonstrates her current iconic status and why Americans still
admire her.
In part, Clinton was simply reaching back to confirm the long history
of the institution of first lady and its continuing importance. Dolley
Madison was not only the wife of the fourth president of the United
States, but the first presidential spouse to reside permanently in the
brand new national capital of Washington, D.C. Madison became not only
the District of Columbia’s first first lady, but the distaff side
of a new national institution: a democratically elected head of state
who would preside over American society.
There were other reasons for Clinton to identify with Madison as well.
Mrs. Madison’s name has come to epitomize the role of hostess,
of graciousness and hospitality extended in a very whole-hearted and
very American fashion. Madison did not bake her own cookies, but she
did serve at teas and preside over official dinners. Her first biographer,
Margaret Bayard Smith, wrote that in 1804 the wife of a British diplomat
looked down her nose at the Madison style, calling dinner at the Madisons
a “harvest-home supper.”
Dolley Madison responded that the diplomat’s wife had simply
failed to understand the American spirit, observing that “she thought
abundance was preferable to elegance; that circumstances formed customs,
and customs formed taste; and as profusion so repugnant to foreign customs
arose from the happy circumstances of the abundance and prosperity of
our country, she did not hesitate to sacrifice the delicacy of European
taste, for the less elegant, but more liberal fashion of Virginia.”
The story was written down more than 30 years after the event. But
apocryphal or not, it is revealing. Madison understood that generous
country hospitality was distinctly American. In recalling Madison, Clinton
was evoking that long-ago patriotic statement of abundance, simplicity
and graciousness of the American style.
Madison has come down to us as a woman of courage and as a loyal wife
who always supported her husband, no matter how difficult the circumstances,
a nonpartisan precedent for an independent and committed first lady.
For Clinton, as for many Americans, Madison expressed fidelity and bravery.
It was Dolley Madison who stayed in the White House in August of 1814
while her husband rode out of Bladensburg to rally the American troops
against the British soldiers. And it was Dolley Madison who stood up
to the British and saved what she could from the White House before
the British set the mansion on fire. As she had written to her cousin,
Edward Coles, a year earlier, “I have always been an advocate for
fighting when assailed, tho a quaker.” And, she went on to tell
him — as if to authenticate with detail the conviction of her words
— “I therefore keep the old Tunisian Sabre within my reach.”
Dolley Payne was born on May 20, 1768, and raised in the Quaker faith.
One of eight children, four boys and four girls, she grew up in comfort
in Hanover County, in rural eastern Virginia. In 1783, her father, John
Payne, emancipated his slaves and moved his family to Philadelphia,
where he went into business as a starch merchant. By 1789, however,
his business had failed, and he died a broken man in 1792.
In January of 1790, Dolley Payne married a young Quaker lawyer, John
Todd. The couple produced two boys in rapid succession, John Payne Todd
in 1790 and William Temple Todd in 1792. But in the fall of 1793, yellow
fever struck Philadelphia, claiming John Todd and their younger son
that October.
In May of 1794, James Madison asked his friend Aaron Burr to introduce
him to the 25-year-old widow. Madison was 17 years her senior and a
confirmed bachelor. A member of a Virginia planter family, in 1787 he
had created the Virginia Plan, a draft framework for the federal constitution.
His plans and his intellectual energy had defined the agenda for the
Constitutional Convention, and his influence as a delegate had been
great. Subsequently, he became the leader of the emerging Democratic-Republican
Party, the party later led by Thomas Jefferson, which opposed the Federalists,
led by Alexander Hamilton.
The Madisons were a good match. He was charming and witty among friends,
but often shy and remote in public; she was outgoing, warm and a charming
hostess. He was brilliant and successful. She brought a family to his
childless life. It was also a love match. As her cousin, Catherine Coles,
wrote her on June 1, 1794, Mr. Madison “thinks so much of you in
the day that he has Lost his Tongue, at Night he Dreams of you &
Starts in his Sleep a Calling on you to relieve his Flame for he Burns
to such an excess that he will shortly be consumed.” They were
married on Sept. 15, 1794, and lived in Philadelphia for the next three
years, after which the couple returned to Montpelier, the 5,000-acre
Madison family estate in Orange County with her son, Payne Todd, and
her sister, Anna.
In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United
States, he asked James Madison to serve as his secretary of state, and
the Madison family moved to Washington, D.C., a raw town of half-finished
buildings set amid forests and swamps. As the wife of the secretary
of state, Dolley Madison had no official duties, but she did assume
a special position. Jefferson, a widower whose daughters lived with
their families in central Virginia, was determined to create a new republican
society established on the principle of equality. As president, he often
entertained congressmen without their wives in small intimate groups;
for this he needed no hostess. But on those occasions when he did need
a hostess, he most often turned to Dolley Madison, who quickly became
the most prominent woman in Washington society.
She became more important in 1809 when James Madison succeeded Jefferson,
and she became first lady. Dolley Madison’s historical reputation
rests on three of her accomplishments during those years: decorating
the White House, her role as hostess and her courage during the War
of 1812.
Thomas Jefferson had furnished the otherwise empty executive mansion
with possessions he brought from Monticello. The Madisons did not follow
this precedent. Dolley Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Latrobe
to make the White House as beautiful as possible within the budget set
by Congress. But the two also made sure that the style of the mansion
was appropriate for a republic. While the White House had to be elegant
enough to entertain foreign ministers, it should not offend members
of Congress who worried that excessive refinement betrayed monarchical
principals or simply made them feel uncomfortable. One Pennsylvania
congressman felt that in his decision whether or not to attend a White
House party “embarrassments may arise that may subject one to the
sneers of the narrow minded.” Put more simply, he worried that
his manners were not up to the occasion. Mrs. Madison, however, made
him feel at home. She is, he wrote his brother, “a democrat.”
Dolley Madison invented the role of first lady as republican hostess,
establishing certain ceremonies, just as she had created public spaces.
She managed to be elegant, even stunning, in a simple and unaffected
way.
Her supporters called her “queenly” but her enemies smeared
her with the inaccurate taunt that she was an inn-keeper’s daughter.
During a period in our history when rancor and partisanship dominated
public and political life, Dolley reached out to people and made them
feel comfortable.
Finally in the summer of 1814, she faced the British invasion of Washington,
D.C., with bravery and dignity. By the third week of August, invasion
was imminent and the city was in a state of chaos as the British approached.
On Aug. 22, President Madison left town to review the troops; Mrs. Madison
remained in the city. As the British troops moved forward on Aug. 23,
Mrs. Madison packed government papers into trunks.
The next day, with James Madison still off with the army, Dolley Madison
found herself guarding the gates of the executive mansion. By that afternoon,
the British were drawing too close to be ignored. After filling a wagon
with silver and other valuables and sending them off to the Bank of
Maryland for safekeeping, she decided there was one more task to be
done: to save the irreplaceable Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington
lest the British burn or, worse yet, capture and bring back to England
this picture of the icon of the new republic. She had the canvas cut
from the frame, and as the enemy closed in, she fled in the nick of
time. The British burned the White House.
Afterward, her husband was politically abused for cowardice in the
face of British troops. Dolley Madison’s courage, spunk and political
savvy helped compensate for her husband’s dutiful modesty. Thus,
she became the heroine of the War of 1812.
In 1817, with the war over and her husband’s second term of office
finished; with her son grown and her sister, Anna, long married; Dolley
and James Madison retired to Montpelier, where the world came to call.
They had streams of visitors, including not only her large and devoted
family and his, but leaders of American politics and European dignitaries.
They were never short of company or out of touch with national politics
and Washington gossip. By the mid-1830s, however, James Madison had
become seriously ill, and Dolley Madison was compelled to devote increasing
time to his physical care, to “comforting my sick patient,”
as she wrote one of her nieces.
After 19 years together at Montpelier, James Madison died. Dolley Madison
remained on their estate for another year, but in 1837 she moved back
to Washington where she took up her role as a leader in the city’s
social life. No longer the doyenne of the White House, she still held
a uniquely important place as the widow of the last of the America’s
founding fathers.
Distinguished visitors would first call on the president of the United
States — Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler,
James K. Polk or Zachary Taylor — and then cross Lafayette Square
to pay their respects to Mrs. Madison. The driving force of her last
years was to keep her husband’s work and memory alive; she was
his “relic.”
Returning to Washington helped alleviate her loneliness, but it did
nothing to address her growing insolvency. The Madi-sons had already
spent much of their personal fortune paying off the gambling debts of
her son, an alcoholic, who ran Montpelier into the ground. Sadly, Dolley
Madison was left without an income.
Over the summer of 1843, she sold part of Montpelier and rented out
the house. But a year later, one of her slaves wrote to her that the
county sheriff was trying to sell the slaves to a slave dealer to pay
off a debt her husband had never resolved with his brother, William
Madison. Rather than allow the forced separation of the slave families,
she decided it was better simply to sell the whole estate. But it was
not done without pain. “No one I think can appreciate my feelings
of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved
home,” she wrote to the buyer, Henry Moncure, on Aug. 12, 1844.
Dolley Madison fell ill in July 1849. She lingered for five days, and
died on Thursday evening, July 12. She was 81 years old and had known
every president from George Washington to Zachary Taylor. Her funeral
oration on July 17 was a state occasion, attended by the president,
cabinet officers, diplomatic corps, members of the House and Senate,
Supreme Court justices, officers of the army and navy, the mayor and
city leaders, and “citizens and strangers.” As the Washington
newspaper, The Daily Intelligencer, noted: “All of our 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.”
When a century and a half later Hillary Clinton went to her birthday
ball dressed as Dolley Madison, Clinton was calling up the myth of the
national icon of hospitality, patriotism and courage. Madison remains
one of our best known and important first ladies. We find in her, perhaps
even invest in her, qualities of character that resonate in our own
times. She is a model for the possibilities, within the narrow constraints
of women’s roles 200 years ago, for an independent and important
first lady. She reminds us of the critical functions the president and
“presidentess” play as our ceremonial heads of state, our
democratically elected, temporary, monarchs. She helps us feel proud
of ourselves and lucky because we are Americans, for whom, as Dolley
Madison told Margaret Bayard Smith, circumstances have formed customs,
and customs formed taste, from the happy circumstances of abundance.
She represents heroism in the face of an enemy invasion, and the actions
a proud, brave and determined woman can take to uphold our national
honor. We believe her to be more than an interesting historic figure;
she is an important woman and leader — a founding mother to balance
our founding fathers.
Her real life was more complex. She suffered the burdens of emotional
loss, financial hardship and physical pain. She found in the job of
first lady personal pleasure, political satisfaction and exhausting
private labor. Taking care of her husband in his old age and enduring
the privations of widowhood were difficult. She died in poverty. But
for the generations of Americans who have come after her, she remains
a symbol of national pride. James Madison University, which began nearly
a century ago as a woman’s college, can be doubly proud of its
name.
Story by Holly Cowan Shulman, Dolley Madison scholar
