James and Dolley Madison (12 page)

They were a good pair. “The mutual influence of these two mighty minds upon each other is a phenomenon, like the invisible and mysterious movements of the magnet in the physical world,” John Quincy Adams said of them.
³⁴

Republicans were happy to see Madison back in government. His friend James Monroe told him that he was a sterling choice as secretary. “His [Jefferson's] outset is as favorable as it could have been. His admin. is formed of characters that will draw to him an increased portion of the publick [
sic
] confidence, and in other respects give him all the support he could expect from one. So that on the whole I think you all have a fair prospect of promoting the welfare of your country, and of being rewarded for the service by a due acknowledgement on the part of the people,” he wrote Madison.
³⁵

A veteran New York politician, Samuel Osgood, wrote that both Madison and Jefferson “promote to the first Office in our republican government the man who has so richly merited the confidence of his country; who, regardless of the torrents of slander & abuse, has so ably supported the genuine principles of civil liberty, as delineated in our excellent constitution. Malevolence and slander are still using every effort here to defame and blacken the characters of the virtuous and upright in politics, but their edge is very much blunted.”
³⁶

Madison worked diligently, arriving at his office early and remaining past nightfall. He was a good overall manager and fine micromanager. “Mr. M. is overwhelmed with business—the British, French & Spanish—infringements are all under his pen—M wishes to write Col. C but has not a moment,” his wife once wrote.
³⁷

The Madisons stayed at the White House as the president's guests for three weeks. Jefferson was thrilled to have them. The only other person who lived in the White House with the president was his secretary, Meriwether Lewis. The two men felt like they were walking through the halls of a large museum. The irony of their condition is that living in the mammoth White House was one of the enticements the president used to lure Lewis to the job. After telling him why he should take the job, the president wrote Lewis, “you would of course save also the expense of subsistence and lodging as you would be one of my family.”
³⁸
Jefferson wanted more friends there with him, and, at least for three weeks, he had them.
After their short stay in the White House, for two months, the Madisons settled into one of the connected houses that comprised the “Six Buildings” complex.
³⁹
Following that, they moved to a much larger home that architect Thornton had located for them at 1333 F Street NW, just a few blocks from the White House. The Madisons liked their new home. Madison was the secretary of state and had to live like one. He needed a home where his wife could host parties, hold receptions, and socialize with all the men and women in Washington. It had to be a home where people could mingle in rooms throughout the entire first floor and hallway, or tumble out into the backyard in the hot spring and summer months. A small apartment, even a large apartment, would not do. This new home was a three-story-high, brick residence topped by a handsome cupola. There were four bedrooms on the third floor, and plenty of rooms for offices and social receptions on the first two floors. There were servants' quarters, a stable for four horses, a coach house, and several outbuildings to the rear of their house. The building had a large wine cellar. They were both very comfortable living in it and would remain there for eight years. It would soon be home to Dolley and what everybody in Washington began to call her “young set.”
⁴⁰

Dolley, dazzled by the city, which looked different every day as streets were finished and buildings erected, found herself in a very unusual spot when she arrived. President Jefferson lamented the living conditions in the still-under-construction White House. His predecessor, John Adams, and his wife, Abigail, found them appalling. People who walked through the President's Mansion thought the home resembled a large, drafty barn rather than the home of a head of state. Jefferson hired teams of carpenters and asked them to finish the White House as quickly as possible. He had another, larger, problem, though. He was a widower, had no romantic interest in any woman in Washington, and spent his nights in the White House alone. He had no woman to serve as an official hostess for him, as a president's wife, or as a “First Lady.” He needed a First Lady badly to set the social calendar for the White House and to serve as the feminine side of the new administration.

The role of First Lady was not mentioned in the Constitution. No one planned for the arrival of a First Lady. Martha Washington invented the job when she arrived in New York in 1789. She had managed a busy social calendar at Mount Vernon for years, one in which Washington felt comfortable, and proceeded to do the same thing in the new president's mansion in New York. It worked. Most applauded her for establishing the role. Some, such as Albert Gallatin, were critical. “She was Mrs. President not of the United States but of a faction,” he said.
⁴¹

Martha, and Abigail Adams after her, quickly became the First Lady of the
land (although the term was not used officially until the 1840s). Normally, a president's wife had to organize a social life for the chief executive; throw parties; send out invitations; schedule receptions, lunches, breakfasts, and dinners; plan a daily menu; supervise cooking; socialize with the wives of public officials and foreign diplomats; talk to members of the press; serve as a liaison with the ladies of Washington; support causes; and, through her good works, build up an admirable image that reflected well on herself—and the president.

Jefferson did not have a wife or companion to do all of that for him. But he did have Dolley Madison. The president had liked Dolley from the first time he met the vivacious wife of his best friend. On the personal side, he thought she was a superb companion for James Madison. He recognized, as did all, that the Madisons were as alike as night and day. He saw, too, as everybody saw, that opposites did, indeed, seem to attract. She was gorgeous, socially oriented, very friendly, and at ease with men and women of any background, and she was a great conversationalist. Dolley was also a fine head of his household, of anybody's household. She was completely in charge of meals, social events, receptions, and an army of servants. She got along with everybody and seemed to have an easy way with workers at the White House. Her husband slept late, but Dolley was usually up at 6 a.m., and began arranging the day, and everybody's work in it, before the sun had risen very high in the Maryland sky. Everybody liked her; so did the president.

Dolley was the perfect First Lady. She had all of the social strengths needed to be the First Lady and the administrative skills to fill the job. She just wasn't his wife. Fortunately, that was not an obstacle to overcome in 1801 Washington. She was the wife of his best friend, the secretary of state. It seemed natural that, not having a wife, the wife of a cabinet member should help him put together a social calendar and greet people as an unofficial hostess at the White House. So he asked Dolley to be his hostess. She agreed. No one objected.

Dolley Madison had been asked by Jefferson to serve as his hostess just after he was inaugurated. In the third week of March, he began to tell foreign diplomats that Mrs. Madison would formally greet them on his behalf when she arrived in Washington.
⁴²
Dolley was glad to do so for several reasons of her own. First, her husband was Jefferson's best friend. Second, Jefferson was her friend and said he needed her assistance. Third, the president needed someone and she knew that she could do the job better than most women. Fourth, she and her husband were newcomers in town. What better way to meet people? To meet everyone? And, too, she thought to herself, what better way to help her husband's career than to act as First Lady and spend all that time in the White House, with her husband there with her?

Jefferson also needed her because he rose early in the morning, worked hard all day in his office, and had no time to plan parties. “[Work] keeps me from 10 to 12 and 13 hours a day at my writing table, giving me an interval of four hours for riding, dining and a little unbending,” he wrote; and he always referred to work as “a steady and uniform course.”
⁴³

Jefferson wanted someone to devise a social life for the White House and just tell him when to show up and what to do. Dolley understood how he thought, was familiar with his moods through several years of friendship, and served him well in that capacity.

She probably did not know how busy the role of First Lady would make her, or perhaps she relished the job precisely because it did keep her so busy. Abigail Adams had done little in Washington as First Lady because the White House was still being constructed and she lived there for just one year. She complained bitterly to family and friends that it was a large, cold, airy place and that there were no bells to summon servants and no wood to throw into the many fireplaces to keep the rooms warm. Most of the rooms were still incomplete when the Adamses lived in the White House. “The house is made habitable but there is not a single apartment finished and all within, except the plastering, has been done. We have not yet fence, yard or other convenience, without and the great unfinished audience room I make a drying roof, to hang up the clothes in. The principal stairs are not up and will not be this winter,” she wrote.
⁴⁴

Now, there was so much to do. Dolley did not want to replicate what Abigail did. She used Martha Washington's active social life as a model but expanded upon it. Martha had hosted four receptions a week at the president's mansions in both New York and Philadelphia. Dolley discontinued that schedule, but, in a new and different way, expanded upon it and increased its size.

Dolley's forte was the large, elegant dinner parties, public receptions, and balls that she designed. Elaborate planning went into each. She used accepted protocols of the day—who should sit next to whom and at what time different things should happen—but enhanced them. She took the view that she was the president's hostess and this was the White House, so she could do whatever she wanted—and did.

No cost was spared. Servants drove the White House wagon from Pennsylvania Avenue out to the shops in Georgetown, where they purchased the food Dolley had ordered. They went over bumpy dirt roads to Georgetown just about every day and brought back expensive bills that were passed along to Dolley, who passed them on to Jefferson, who signed them and then promptly forgot about the cost.

Dolley entertained several dozen people at each dinner at the White House and twenty or more people at “quiet” dinners at her own home.

“He always thought twenty five thousand dollars a great salary when Mr. Adams had it. Now he will undoubtedly think twelve thousand five hundred enough,” the editor of the Federalist
New England Palladium
newspaper wrote sarcastically of her expenses in 1801.
⁴⁵

Mrs. Madison also dressed in whatever fashion she desired. She did not feel that she had to look staid or conservative just because she represented the president and secretary of state at social events.
Somber
was not a word in her vocabulary. Dolley and her husband were a sight to see. Madison, as always, wore all-black suits and had his powdered hair pulled back and tied behind his head. He never wavered from his conservative, dreary, and a bit outmoded, dress. His wife, though, was a rainbow. Dolley brought down all of her ballroom gowns from Montpelier and bought many more. The women's style of dress in the era was the wide skirt, tight waist, and low-cut bodice, a style that really only worked well for full-busted women. Dolley was one of them. She also had beautiful shoulders and soft, white skin, all shown off nicely by her gowns with their deeply plunging necklines. The dresses accentuated all of her admirable physical features but were of splashy colors that stood out no matter where she was standing in the White House. Her dresses were of many colors and designs, and she wore so many different ones that many Washingtonians swore that she never wore the same clothes twice. She often wore a French beret, a radical look, and loved wandering about the floor of an official reception with it tilted buoyantly on her head. Sometimes she replaced the beret with high, brightly colored feathers that could be seen throughout whatever building she was in. All the talk of the capital the day after a reception at the White House was about what Dolley Madison wore.

She had a unique style at parties and balls that no one had encountered before. Dolley had the rare ability, those who saw her at parties said, “to move from place to place, room to room” to meet each and every guest at the White House parties, which were quickly named “Mrs. Madison's levees.” She did this very smoothly, very nonchalantly. “It became evident, in the course of the evening,” one partygoer wrote, “that the gladness which played in the countenances of those whom she approached was inspired by something more than respect…we have not forgotten how admirably the air of authority was softened by the smile of gayety; and it is pleasing to recall a certain expression that must have been created by the happiest of all dispositions, a wish to please and a willingness to be pleased.”
⁴⁶

Other levee guests enjoyed the tours of the White House that Dolley relished giving. “Then through the house we sallied forth from one end to the other, Mrs. M seemed quite at home here, and in fact appeared to be mistress. She
took us from room to room, in her usual sprightly and droll manner,” said one. As an added treat, she loved to show them the dumbwaiters that Jefferson had invented to carry food and wine from the basement to the dining room and all of Jefferson's carefully designed apparatuses upon which to hang his clothes.
⁴⁷