James and Dolley Madison (35 page)

She also helped him navigate tricky political waters. The president often found himself helping businessmen with official clearances and permissions. It was perfectly legal, and they were very grateful for his assistance and wanted to thank him with gifts. Madison did not know how to handle businessmen, but Dolley did. She would write them, on his behalf, and, in vague notes, suggest they visit the White House and talk to him about their successful ventures. “Come then, as soon as possible, to my husband who will not call, though he wishes for you, every day,” she wrote in 1810 to John Astor, whose trade with China had benefitted enormously from Madison's assistance in permitting Astor's fleets of ships to use US ports. Two years later, when the American treasury was practically bankrupt, Astor stepped in, and, through his own savings and that of friends, raised $12 million in government bonds for Madison to fight the war of 1812.
³⁶

Dolley was involved with intrigue often. She also spent much time during the war lobbying for her husband with recalcitrant senators and congressmen of his own party. Her charm went much further than her husband's political threats. At one point, Henry Clay told her “everybody loves Mrs. Madison.” She smiled and said, “And that's because Mrs. Madison loves everybody.”
³⁷

Mason Weems, an elderly man who spent a considerable amount of time with public officials over the years, insisted that Dolley's smoothly-running social world gave the president not only a place to escape the pressures of office but also an easy atmosphere in which to conduct unofficial business and get things done. “The crowds that attend your levees give you an influence which no other lady can pretend to have,” Weems told Mrs. Madison.
³⁸

The First Lady's levity held up well in the short spring of 1812, the last calm days before the war. Washington was, as always, full of foreign ministers, old and new. There were tired old congressmen and energetic new ones, rich old merchants and hardworking new ones, lots of writers, and a few painters. There were foreigners who were spotted as frauds, duplicitous men disguising themselves just to be a part of Dolley's social world. There were inventors, such as Robert Fulton of steamship fame, bankers, and actors.

Dolley's sister Lucy was married again that winter, to Supreme Court Justice Thomas Todd, aged forty-seven, “a man of the most estimable character,” according to Dolley in a ceremony attended by hundreds. Her sister was happy about being married but “in deep distress” at leaving Dolley and the White House. Dolley made her sister promise to live with her at the White House each autumn and winter when the judge returned to sit with the Supreme Court.
³⁹

Dolley did not really have to look out for Lucy; her sister was a realist who did not travel through life with mistaken apprehensions about anyone. In
one letter to Dolley, she blurted out that she just hated Kentucky, where her new husband had taken her. “The solitude we live in here is almost killing. I have been out twice since we came home.” She added, too, that Dolley must be “mortified” at some of the people she had to meet and told her to “bear it like a Christian.” Dolley gossiped wildly with her sisters, sizing up male suitors for girlfriends and then quickly cutting them down. She said of someone she knew that “Miss Hay will play him false. I'm pretty certain she does not love him, but it won't hurt him much to be jilted.” She wrote of one man, whom she herself had recently dropped, that no one liked him and that “everybody hooted at him for a fool,” and she peppered her letters with snide remarks about dozens of men and women they both knew. Lucy had nowhere near the skill that Dolley had in keeping her mouth shut and her pen dry.
⁴⁰

The First Lady was happy Judge Todd had won her sister's heart, and happier still that young Lucy listened to her and did not marry beneath herself. She told all of her friends “how wise Lucy was to choose him in preference to the gay flirts who courted her. Yes, my regrets are all selfish, not for her, but myself.”
⁴¹

She lived in a world of rumors. Several people hinted that her sister Lucy was pregnant and had to get married. A rumor spread that Lucy had engaged in a feud with the wife of another Supreme Court justice. And, according to yet other rumors, several women close to Dolley feuded with each other. The wives of new ministers to Washington wondered what their role, if any, would be in a Washington social world completely dominated by Mrs. Madison. And John Payne continued to drink no matter where the family hauled him to dry out.

Dolley's parties helped to push away the blues for her, but they were not always as enjoyable as they might have been. She wrote in the dead of winter 1813, when there were few soirees, that “the city is more dissipated than I ever knew it; the week is too short for parties.” To overcome that dissipation, of course, she threw more parties, regardless of plunging temperatures and snow that January. In March, she could write back to Phoebe Morris that she would have written her “if I had been blessed with one hour's leisure or quiet.”
⁴²

It was a time for fending off rumors of war, too. She told James Taylor in the spring of 1811 that “vessels are expected hourly & the state of our relations in Europe will decide whether an extra session [of Congress] will be necessary—some very wicked & silly doings at home.” Later, in the spring of 1813, after the war began, she said that “if I could, I would describe the feats & alarms that circulate around me. For the last week all the city & Georgetown have expected a visit from the enemy and were not lacking in their expressions of terror.”
⁴³

The winters of 1810, 1811, and 1812 were bad ones for President Madison,
too. Tensions had been building. One of his casual aides, Isaac Coles, the older brother of Madison's secretary, Edward Coles, even got into a fistfight with a man in the Senate chamber. His country had been submitting to British depredations on the high seas for years, doing nothing about it, and he had been bullied by British ministers and politicians. Just before Christmas 1811, the London newspaper
Courier
insulted him in yet another of its seemingly endless anti-American editorials. “America fluctuates between her inclinations and her apprehensions,” wrote its editor. “She seems always to stand TREMBLING and HESITATING on the slippery verge of war; and to be incessantly tossed about at the mercy of every event; a condition which, of all others, most directly tends to palsy the spirit, and to destroy the confidence of a nation.”
⁴⁴

Young William Preston, who would later be a senator from South Carolina, wrote that Madison “appeared in society daily, with an unmoved and abstracted air, not relaxing, except towards the end of a protracted dinner, with confidential friends.”
⁴⁵

At those dinners, with friends and political allies, the president, Dolley at his side, exploded. There in the dining room of the White House, behind closed doors, he was tough and strident and a different man than the wispy leader the public knew. Richard Rush, the new attorney general, who attended many of those dinners, wrote, “…the President, little as he is in bulk, unquestionably, [is] above [cabinet and Congress] in spirit and tone. While they are mere mutes…he on every occasion and to everybody, talks freely…says the time is ripe, and the nation, too, for resistance.”
⁴⁶

At this point, with the country so close to war, the Madisons swatted away anyone opposed to the government's war policy, now in the planning stages. Dolley fumed at critics more than her husband. “John Randolph has been firing away at the House this morning against the declaration of war, but we think it will have little effect,” she sneered in a letter to her sister. She told everyone she knew, as she had told people since his first inauguration, that her husband was working very hard. “I know…by the intense study of Mr. M and his constant devotion to the cabinet, that affairs are troublesome & difficult. You see, the English are stubborn yet but we anticipate their yielding before long.”
⁴⁷

In the spring of 1812, the diplomatic picture was further clouded. Napoleon continued to resist all American efforts to achieve an agreement for freedom of the seas. In England, new parliamentary leaders were harsher than their predecessors on Americans and the war against American shipping became much worse, with no end to British oppression in sight. British prime minister Spencer Perceval was assassinated by a madman, but his death did not soften policy toward America at all.

Under enormous pressure, one night James Madison attended one of his wife's White House parties. Dolley kept watching him. He was stressed out from politics, the war, the weak military state of the United States, and pressure from nonwar politicians and newspaper editors, particularly in New England.

He looked terrible. A Federalist at the party that night was shocked by his appearance. “[Madison] has a serious look, devoid of penetration; his face is crooked and wrinkled; and his countenance does not exhibit the least trait of sincerity or candor. He is a little, dried up politician. He does not know how to behave in company; instead of going about among his guests and setting them at ease by saying something to each, he stands in the middle of the room and expects his visitors to approach him if they want to be favored by his conversation.”
⁴⁸

The president's wife took extra care of him, always worried that his various ailments would return under the stress of the job and what appeared to be the upcoming war. “My dear husband is overpowered with business, but is in good health,” she wrote confidently to her sister that week.
⁴⁹

One thing that strengthened Dolley's morale was the stream of visitors who came to the White House to support her and her husband in the upcoming war, which now appeared certain to start. She also had letters from friends all over the world, cheering her up. One lengthy letter from Sally McKean d'Yrugo, who was now the American wife of the Spanish minister, was a particular joy. Sally told her how much she had missed her on her recent trip to Brazil and how much Americans in Brazil admired Dolley. She signed off by writing “believe me, my dear Mrs. Madison, you are an old and affectionate friend.”
⁵⁰

One thing that annoyed the Madisons was the endless swirl of rumors about the British. Rumors filed the newspapers and Dolley's parties. Everybody had some information, from an irrefutable source, that such and such was happening. An example was the spring of 1813, just before the first anniversary of the conflict. Ceaseless rumors caused Dolley to worry that the British would soon be on her doorstep. “Fears and alarms circulate around me,” she wrote. “For the last week, all the city and Georgetown…have expected a visit from the enemy and were not lacking in their expression of terror and reproach.”
⁵¹

She did take solace from her husband's efforts to protect Washington. He had ordered the repair of a fort on the outskirts of town and sent five hundred regular soldiers and five hundred militia volunteers to camp on a large meadow in town, near a windmill, to protect the city and its residents if a British attack did come. It pleased her. “The twenty tents already look well in my eyes,” she said.
⁵²

Madison's insistence on protection for the capital paid off because from time to time there were reports that a British army was marching toward Washington
or sailing toward it on the Potomac. In 1813, a Thursday, for example, there was a rumor that several British warships were sailing up the river and were only fifty miles from Washington. As planned by the president, alarm guns were fired, church bells were rung, and every person in town was scurried toward an assignment. “Soldiers in every direction were mustering and in a few hours 3,000 or 4,000 troops were on their march to the fort fourteen miles distant. They were followed by carts loaded with ammunition, provisions an bagged of all kinds,” wrote Elbridge Gerry Jr., the son of Vice President Gerry, caught in the middle of it.
⁵³
Like many, Gerry Jr. wrote his name down on a list for volunteer guards to defend the town and waited for the call up, which did not come on that day.

Throughout the war, everyone acknowledged the hard work and effervescent spirit of the First Lady. Early in the war, in November 1812, Dolley was at a ball at Tomlinson's Hotel in Washington to honor some recent US war heroes. Suddenly, Lieutenant Hamilton, the son of naval secretary Paul Hamilton, arrived, fresh from the battle of a ship he served on, captained by Stephen Decatur, which had defeated the British ship, the
Macedonian
. Dozens of Hamilton's friends rushed around him, music was played, and the story of the battle was told. Without warning, Hamilton walked across the room and laid the flag of the captured
Macedonian
at the feet of Mrs. Madison, giving the battle flag to her, something that had never been done before. Dolley did not know what to do. A friend said her face changed colors because she was so astonished. Finally, praising Hamilton and all the sailors in the war, she accepted it to great applause.
⁵⁴

Mrs. Madison's influence in the war grew in the spring of 1813, after Edward Coles, Madison's personal secretary, became ill. Dolley, who was at the White House all day anyway, took over his responsibilities. This meant that she now arranged the president's appointments, decided who whom he would write letters to, met with visiting congressmen, and, most important, became privy to the all the top secrets of the war, as well as the president's private opinions of the country's military leaders. In a way, for a spring and summer she served as the assistant president.

All of the letters she wrote during the war were out-and-out propaganda. For instance, she wrote her son in the summer of 1814 that “the British on our shore are stealing & destroying private property, rarely coming to battle, but when they do are always beaten…. If the war should last six months longer the United States will conquer her enemies.”
⁵⁵