James and Dolley Madison (34 page)

But it was not. Madison fought his illness, with his wife's assistance. He did not die, did not permit himself to become incapacitated, and never, as far as can be ascertained, thought about resigning as president. What decisions Dolley made, or did not make, for him in those dark weeks remained a mystery. Madison recovered and went back to work in early July. He did not work full-time, and he did not look well, but he worked. His health was not completely recovered until the middle of July. Those weeks were as hard on Mrs. Madison as they were on him. “Now that I see him get well I feel as if I might die myself from fatigue,” she said.
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The president's illness came just a year after Dolley's sister Anna went through a health crisis herself. In the spring of 1812, Anna was suffering from depression of some sort. She wrote her sister that she was miserable and felt alienated from her husband and family. Dolley, alarmed as always when it came to the well-being of her sisters, wrote a very sympathetic note to her. She said her sickness “causes me more grief than I can speak” and told her that “your constant indisposition, your low spirits, everything that disturbs you never fails to vibrate through all my heart. I flatter myself that you were healthy & happy. Without health, we enjoy nothing. Your estimable husband, lovely children fail to yield you that sweet peace which we ought only to seek for in this world.”
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Then Dolley asked Anna to come and visit her at the White House. There, she knew, she could cheer her up.

In the weeks after Madison's emergence from his bedroom, letters arrived at the White House from well-wishers all over America. Jefferson released a sigh of relief. “If the prayers of millions have been of avail, they have been poured forth with the deepest anxiety,” he wrote. Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey was one of many who wrote that Madison had become such a skilled commander in chief that his death would have caused the collapse of the army. “I almost tremble, sir, when I think of the contentions, division & disasters to which your sudden removal at the critical period must have exposed us and have frequently thanked heaven for yet longer sparing your life to us.”
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The nation's first presidential crisis had been averted, not by luck but by the desire of Madison to beat his sickness and by his wife's determination to keep him alive.

Throughout his sickness, and the conflict with England, Dolley worried constantly about national affairs. “[We are] in the mist of business & anxiety, anxious for the fate of the war,” she wrote in the fall of 1812.
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At that same time, the Madisons lost their private secretary, Edward Coles. He had become ill, and they sent him to their physician, Dr. Physick, in Philadelphia, for treatment. Coles spent the fall and winter of 1812–1813
in Philadelphia, recovering. Dolley told him that she and the president missed him. “You will soon be well in spite of yourself. We indulge this pleasing hope in addition to that of your remaining with us to the last…there are none who feel a more affectionate interest in you than Mr. Madison and myself…your leaving us [would be] a misfortune.”
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She wrote friends that Madison's illness made her sick, but there were many other times as First Lady that Dolley fell ill. For instance, she wrote Edward Coles in the summer of 1811 that “I have been extremely ill. I am just now recovering from three weeks' confinement during which I was most carefully nursed.” In June 1811, she was confined to bed (with a “dangerous and severe illness”) and was nursed back to health by Hannah Gallatin and a cousin. In the summer of 1812, she fell ill yet again, writing a friend that “for the last 10 days I have been very sick, so much so that I could not write or do anything. I am yet in my chamber.”
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Dolley labored through her husband's crisis, and the war, with her own political and emotional grit, but she also had the love and support of her friends, who constantly picked up her spirits when they saw her or wrote letters of encouragement. Phoebe Morris was one. She wrote Dolley in the year leading up to the war that “I can love no other person as I now love you. In the moment of my separation from you tears were my only language. My affection for you is a sensation new to my heart; it differs from that love I feel for many of my young friends; it is more pure, it is more refined.” Dolley wrote her back and told her that “I have wept over your charming letter” and added that she and the president cherished their friendship with her and her family.
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Dolley spent much of her time receiving and answering letters from men who wanted officers' appointments to the army as the fear of a war heated up and then began; they thought she could use her sway over the president to their favor. She received pleas from the wives, mothers, and girlfriends of soldiers who had been tossed into military brigs, asking for leniency. Other women begged her to use her influence with the president to gain pardons for their husbands, charged with desertion from the army. One woman, Deborah Stabler, asked her to get her son released from jail, where he had been put when he refused to serve in the army, telling recruiters he was a conscientious objector.
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She also had to keep track of the letters of introduction she received from all over America, telling her that the subject of the letter would soon by dropping by to see her and that she should meet them. These came from close friends, such as Molly Randolph, and total strangers.
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Throughout the war, she found herself spending large amounts of time helping political and military figures get over snubs from congressmen. She
also found herself writing dozens of letters to sick friends and relatives, wishing them well and in some cases suggesting homegrown medical cures for their ailments.
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Dolley was surprised at the number of times she was misquoted or misrepresented by people and how that angered others. In the fall of 1809, someone told White House interior decorator Benjamin Latrobe that Mrs. Madison was very unhappy with his work, which was not true. She immediately wrote Latrobe that what he had been told was false; that she had nothing but admiration for his work, as did everybody else; and that she and the president had the highest regard not only for Latrobe but for his wife, too. She would investigate the matter, find out who the culprit was, and punish him or her. She did that frequently, and right away, and it easily repaired the damage by gossips.
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Dolley helped her husband as president whenever she could. Madison, like all presidents, was quickly consumed by all the work that faced him, especially with the added burden of the tattered relationship with Great Britain. Dolley told friends that the president did not get a good night's sleep and often awoke in the middle of the night to write down notes. She kept a candle on all night and left quills, ink, and paper nearby for his work. She told people that the stress wore out not only the president but her, too.

Those who saw Dolley in the prewar and war years all commented on how the stress of the war, her husband's labors, and the increased work of being in charge of an ever-growing social scene at the White House had affected her. One congressman who saw Mrs. Madison, dressed plainly, on a Washington street one morning at the start of the 1811 winter was stunned by her appearance. “Her eyes [were] dark and neither large nor brilliant—her cheeks I think were painted. The whole contour of her features was dull and un-interesting, her habit is too full to be graceful. She must be considered in ruins,” he said.
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Dolley had reasons to be worn out in the early days of that winter. The fortunes of her brother, John, a clerk to the minister of Tunis, a job the president got him, had turned bad. The Payne sisters all felt that the new climate in Africa would help John cure his drinking; it did not.

He had been in Tunis since 1806. Over the years, Dolley had written him dozens of letters, most of which he ignored. In 1809, she wrote him that she wished he could come home and live in the White House with her and other members of the family. She filled him in on the death of their mother and sister. Then, fearful that his drunken stupors had made him unaware of news in America, she told him, incredibly, that her husband was now the president of the United States. She begged him to come home, where she and her sisters could take care of him. She did not want anything “to stay you one moment from my
arms & heart, that are open to receive you” and added that she would arrange a life for him in America in which he would be completely independent.
²⁹

Dolley then used her influence with her husband to have John promoted to the number two post in Paris, where her friends Joel Barlow, the consul, and his wife could look after him. All was well at last, she hoped. Dolley was wrong. Her brother never showed up in Paris. The Barlows waited months in Washington, hoping he would arrive there instead to join them in the voyage to France, but he never did. They finally sailed for France, more than four months behind schedule, angering French officials and President Madison, too. Months later, in June 1811, John Payne finally arrived in America, with no explanation for where he had been. He was spotted in New York by a cousin, who told Dolley her brother had to sell everything he had to pay his bills.

He soon turned up at the White House, where he promptly borrowed $150 from Dolley. She told his sister Anna that “he has returned in greater difficulties than he went, being obliged as he thought to borrow money.” She told her sisters that she had been wrong to send him to Tripoli, and blamed his drinking and dissipation there on people in the embassy in Tunis. She wondered, in letters to her sisters, what had gone wrong. They, like her, blamed everybody but their brother. The three agreed to take turns taking care of him, and John bounced around from mansion to mansion, disappearing for days at a time on the journeys. Dolley finally decided that she could persuade him to live a sober life. “He has taken up a good deal by my persuasion,” she wrote. “I have dressed him and forced him to change bad for good society.” And she had to keep in touch with her sisters to find out where he was, if they knew. Back in America, he continued to drink and wander, running up large bills that he could not pay.
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Dolley's overseeing did not work. John continued to drink. Like all alcoholics, he spent much of his life as a talkative and charming man, but then he slid into alcoholism. Dolley sent him to one of his sisters after a period of time and blamed the entire city of Washington for his problems, writing that she had sent way from “this den of thieves.”
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John Payne was also a shadowy figure. He would disappear and remain absent for weeks, months, at a time and then, without warning, arrive at the front door of the White House, startling everyone. In the summer of 1811, Mrs. Madison wrote Edward Coles that “it seems that my dear brother was landed at Cape Henry. From thence, we suppose that he went to Norfolk. I am watching every carriage with impatience to see him arrive.”
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When her brother was at the White House, Dolley took him everywhere. She showcased him at White House parties and brought him with her, or sent him with someone, to balls at foreign embassies. She then bragged to friends at
how accepted John was and how much people enjoyed being around him. She had the same attitude toward her son, Payne, constantly fearing for his safety and his health when he traveled abroad to countries such as Russia. All the while, Dolley was up nights with her brother, sorting out his debts and talking to him about his problems. John was deeply in debt. He explained to her on one visit that he had to borrow money at Malta, an island in the Mediterranean, in order to enter France without being arrested. Then he ran out of money completely and returned to America. “He stays to sell his lands, arrange his debts
of all sort
here & then he intends to go into some business, heaven only knows what,” she complained to her sister. “I have paid $100 for him since he got home & advanced $50 for his current expenses alas!”
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In April of 1812, as pressure was growing on Madison from all sides to declare war on England, Dolley again found herself saddled with her brother, John, and his problems. She sent him off to Harewood to stay with relatives and seemed glad to be rid of him. “It's not worthwhile to tell you the particulars of his last frolick, or the sum he spent on it. I re-fixed him with my all, even my credit, & sent him off in a hack with his friend Green, whose expenses I also paid, in order to secure his retreat [from here].”
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The president, frustrated by his brother-in-law, continually shook his head about John's problems and the inability of his wife to see that at this point there was really nothing anybody could do for him. At the same time, though, he told friends that his admiration for his wife was growing daily. She had stood beside him in every crisis of his administration and had not only chided his opponents but also howled at them. One example was the Gideon Granger affair in the winter and spring of 1812. Granger, Jefferson's old postmaster general, stayed on when Madison was inaugurated and caused nothing but trouble. He appointed local postmasters Madison did not approve of, was staunchly opposed to any war with Britain, and threatened to make public sexual digressions of Dolley and Anna Cutts (that he had invented). Madison fired him. A furious Dolley blasted him to all. In a letter to her sister, she called Granger “a fiend” and told her “you know what G. had been, and what he has done, years ago. I should tell you nothing new when I repeated his conduct & his communications to Davis. It is all beneath our notice though. G. is not below our contempt & hatred.”
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The presidency, family troubles, war, and lengthy and severe domestic political scuffles, however, drew the Madisons closer. James Madison never referred to her anymore as “Mrs. Madison” at parties, balls, and state dinners, but just “Dolley.” And he depended on her more and more to run the social calendar of the White House and, as his wife, to ease the worries he had from the office. Her buoyancy helped him considerably.