James and Dolley Madison (41 page)

“At these feasts, the woods were alive with carriages, horses, servants and children—all went—often more than one hundred guests…happy at the prospect of…pleasure and hilarity; the laugh with hearty good will, the jest after the crops, farm topics and politics…. If not too late, these meetings were terminated by a dance,” wrote one guest.
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People did not enjoy visiting Montpelier just because of all the people there whom they would meet. They liked to go because Montpelier was one of the most opulently decorated homes in America. Madison's father had seen to that. Colonel Madison was convinced that a person's station in life was determined not only by business success but also by how he lived. He purchased expensive dishes and glasses for his home, laid imported Turkish rugs down on the floors, and hung expensive paintings on the walls. The house that President Madison grew up in was a well-appointed home already. When his father died and Dolley took over the interior decoration of Montpelier, it became an even classier abode. Madison left the interior work to his wife and concentrated on the physical renovations and expansion of the building. He did such a good job that friend James Monroe and other Virginians asked him for architectural advice in the construction of their own homes.
¹³

Renovating the home, whether in the 1790s or in 1809, took up a considerable portion of Madison's time. In 1798, he wrote James Monroe that he was “in the vortex of house building in its most hurried stage” and that “I have met with some mortifying delays in finishing off the last shaft of the chimneys and in setting about the plastering job. The prospect is at present flattering, and I shall have no time in letting you know that we are ready to welcome Mrs. M and yourself to our habitation.”
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The house was always full of people and loud with noise. The Madisons did not have enough bedrooms for everybody, so, like many Virginians, they put cotlike beds and bunk beds in the main hallways upstairs and downstairs, and in many other rooms, so guests could sleep. On oppressively hot nights, they kept all the doors and windows open to allow fresh air to drift through the mansion. Servants would remove the beds, quickly, in the morning when everyone rose for the day, and the house would return to its normal look.

The relatives and guests kept Dolley busy. “The house is now full of family,” she wrote in the summer of 1811. “William Madison, his wife and children & [others]. I have scarcely a moment to breath [
sic
]. They are here for some days…. We have Mr. & Mrs. Bassett two days, expect Mr. & Mrs. Eustis, Mrs. Page & family every day & all those people, with Miss Hornerzill of Richmond, are here but Mitchell is with us. We have four additional chambers. My head is turned.”
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During Madison's presidency, Montpelier was the place to be, socially, when the Madisons were in residence there, and everybody who visited the Madisons told friends back in Washington what they discussed and did for activities. Madison's friends in the capital all knew what was going on at Montpelier and how busy it was. Mrs. Anna Thornton wrote Dolley in the summer of 1809, for instance, that “I understand that you are overwhelmed with company.”
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Dolley received all of the Washington news from guests who visited her, and she sent out dozens of letters each summer to relatives and friends apprising them on the events of her life. She let friends in one state know what their mutual friends in another were doing, who was courting and marrying whom, and, from 1812 to 1815, how hard her husband was working on the problems of the war.

Their social life at Montpelier was less elegant than it was in Washington, but the parties were just as frequent and the dinners just as crowded. The isolation of Montpelier did not bother James and Dolley; they visited Jefferson at Monticello, spent time in Richmond, and visited friends in Orange Court House and other villages.
¹⁷
One thing they insisted on was the continuation of their impressive dinner parties. Dinner at Montpelier was more casual than at the White House, but servants brought endless trays of food that included cakes, bread, cold meat, and pastries. After dinner, the men smoked cigars on the porch and the women chatted in the parlor. Servants carrying lamps through the hallways took guests to their rooms around nine or ten in the evening, and the house quieted down. Servants and maids acted as quasi hosts for the Madisons when guests were there, taking them to their bedrooms, waking them in the morning, and bringing them downstairs for a lavish breakfast.
¹⁸

During their summers at Montpelier, the Madisons caught up on local news
that they did not get during the ten months they spent in Washington and discussed mutual topics, such as oppressive heat and snow-filled winters. In the summer of 1812, the Madisons exchanged stories with friends in Orange County about the series of earthquakes that had rolled through Washington, DC, and central Virginia the previous winter and shook houses and scared residents.
¹⁹

By the time Madison's second term ended, the home, with its gorgeous new wings, was as complete as it would ever be. Now, by 1816, it was a finished estate with many stables, slave quarters, outbuildings, gardens, and lawns. When Anna Thornton visited in 1802, she wrote in her diary that “the grounds are susceptible to great improvements and when those he contemplated are executed, it will be a handsome place and approach very much in similarity to some of the elegant seats in England.”
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By 1816, it was.

The Montpelier that Madison returned to during his two terms as president had grown into one of the most successful plantations in Virginia, and all of that success was due to Madison's skills as a farmer. By the early 1790s, he had taken over the administration of the farm from his father, who was then in his eighties. Madison read all the books on farming he could and solicited advice from Jefferson. Throughout the 1790s, Montpelier bloomed as a plantation. Madison, who oversaw an average of forty to fifty slaves a year then, had his “hands” (as he called the men and women in bondage) plow long, straight rows for planting and brought in water from nearby creeks that was run into and out of his field with small dams. Slaves built new outbuildings, tobacco warehouses, corn houses, and stables. Each year or two, they worked with Madison in opening up new fields for cultivation. He grew fruit orchards wherever he could. With the help of his overseers, Madison studied the different parcels of land and knew which were in the “Davidson soil” tract and which were not. The president knew how to irrigate the fields from streams that ran down from the mountains around his farms. And he had maps on which he wrote where underground limestone deposits were located. Showing all the skills of an accomplished farmer, Madison wrote Jefferson with satisfaction in the 1790s, “On one of two little farms I own, which I have just surveyed, the crop is not sensibly injured by either the rot or the rust and will yield 30 or 40 per cent more than would be a good crop in ordinary years.”
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He not only kept accurate notes on farm business and plantings while at Montpelier but also remembered everything when he was away in Philadelphia as a congressman. For example, he and his father had planned an orchard they would start with some nuts Jefferson had brought to Montpelier on one of his visits. “It does not seem necessary to decide now on the spot for the Pecan trees….
They can be easily removed at any time. I have not fixed on any particular no. of apple trees. I would choose a pretty large orchard if to be had and of the sort you think best. If a sufficient number cannot be got for Black Meadow [a farm] and Sawney's [another farm], I would be glad to have them divided.”
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He had, like Washington, Jefferson, and others, mastered the art of tilling his soil and rotating his crops to keep it fertile. Like Washington, he was one of the few farmers in Virginia to realize that Europe needed more and more wheat from America as the years passed, in addition to the regular amounts of tobacco. He reorganized his lands to grow more wheat and make more of a profit off it. He received good notices on his wheat and tobacco from intermediary distributors in Richmond and in London, too.
²³

The president was justifiably proud of his farm.

The year 1815 started with the same sad dreariness in which 1814 had ended. No peace treaty had been delivered to America from Ghent, Belgium, where diplomats had been meeting in an effort to end the conflict; British troops were rumored to be preparing a land and sea assault on New Orleans; and the Federalist press throughout the country continued to criticize President Madison for his war policies.

Added on to all of that trouble was the Hartford, Connecticut, secession convention, called by delegates from three states in New England who were intent on taking their states out of the United States in order to resume their shipping business with England and other European countries. The secession movement in New England had been growing since July 1813, when Madison almost died, when longtime Massachusetts politician Thomas Pickering wrote, “I believe an immediate separation would be a blessing to the ‘good old thirteen states.'” To spite Madison, the proponents of secession continually quoted his own persuasive essays in
The Federalist
that argued colonies could break away from the motherland if they had good reasons to do so. The secession movement, endorsed by many Federalist newspapers in New England, picked up steam. At Hartford the delegates voted to oppose federal orders concerning the war and said that state taxes could only go to state expenses and not to pay for the war, that the federal government could not draft New Englanders for its army, and that New England would be responsible for its own defense. They also voted to eliminate the three-fifths slave-voting clause in the Constitution and added several more inflammatory, anti-South, amendments to it. The members of the convention, held in the middle of the chilly 1814 December, sent a delegation to Washington to apprise Madison and Congress of their decision.

Madison was worried sick over the convention. He feared that if the three New England states fled the Union, so would others. He also thought the New
Englanders were traitors. “You are not mistaken in viewing the conduct of the eastern states as the source of our greatest difficulties in carrying on the war; it is the greatest if not the sole inducement to the enemy to persevere in it,” he wrote.
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His secretary, Edward Coles, told him that the delegates were meeting “to hatch treason, if New England will support them in it” and that they wanted to do everything possible to cripple the country. Monroe was even angrier. He told Madison to dispatch a company of troops to Hartford and arrest everyone there for sedition. Madison, ever the moderate, decided to wait and see what the outcome of the convention turned out to be.
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Madison may have fretted over his troubles in Hartford, but he had reasons to celebrate, too. The British believed that the army attacks along the East Coast, the bombardment of Fort McHenry outside of Baltimore, and the torching of Washington, DC, would destroy American morale and end its will to fight, but they had just the opposite effect. Americans rallied around the cause, their troops, and the president in a complex blend of patriotism. First, they were furious that the British had the nerve to burn down the Capitol and the White House, which they considered a violation of all military tradition. Second, they steeled their resolve to win the war. Third, although the people at first blamed Madison for the losses in the war and especially the torching of the capital, they now reversed their opinion and saw him as a heroic figure for commanding the troops in the field and for risking his life by returning to Washington to start an immediate drive to revive the war. He refused to admit defeat and never took a step backward. Madison was not unnerved by the torching of Washington, either. He refused to flee town. He was a little man who was standing tall, and all Americans applauded him for that. Even DeWitt Clinton, who ran against him for president, stopped blaming him.

There was an extra, special, dimension to the public's view of the burning of Washington—Dolley Madison. The First Lady's saving of George Washington's portrait was seen as a heroic act because she risked being captured by the British. But there was something else. The people, like Dolley, connected the portrait of first president with the American cause in the war. The public agreed with Dolley that if the British could have destroyed that picture, they could have destroyed the United States. So she risked her life to save it, and did. That act, combined with her husband's front-lines leadership of the army in the heat of the battlefield, and his tough stance when he returned to Washington, impressed everyone. There would be no turning back now. America would not be defeated.

The Madisons had an immediate problem that was just as important as reorganizing the armed forces. The loss of the Capitol and the White House meant that the country had no housing for its government. The president tried
to get the government running again as he returned to the charred corpse of the White House, now just a hulking set of walls. He had no home and no office. Senators and congressional committees had to meet in small rooms in boardinghouses, in the living rooms of private homes, or in taverns. When Congress met in full session, it had to cram itself into one of the large public rooms at Blodgett's Hotel.

Across the river in Alexandria, the British had looted a series of warehouses, carting off thousands of dollars' worth of food and supplies. Residents of that town were terrified that the English would be back again, and soon, to attack their warehouses once more. People were depressed throughout the region. “I do not suppose the government will ever return to Washington. All those whose property was invested in that place will be reduced to poverty…the consternation about us is general, the despondency still greater,” said Margaret Bayard Smith.
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People who met the president in the days following the burning of the city found him deflated. William Wirt wrote his wife that Madison was “visibly shattered and woebegone. In short, he looks heartbroken.”
⁴
He said Madison was furious at New Englanders who still opposed the war and had held a secession convention. Wirt said that the president felt they were “full of sedition.”

Mrs. Madison was angry, too, when she returned to tour the smoking ruins of her home and the other buildings on a warm June day. Her friend Margaret Bayard Smith said she was very perturbed and found it difficult to speak without tears forming in her eyes. Later, Dolley told Mary Latrobe , the wife of interior decorator Benjamin Latrobe, of the day the White House was torched, “I confess that I was so unfeminine as to be free from fear, and willing to remain in the Castle! If I could have had a cannon through every window; but alas! Those who should have placed them there fled before me and my whole heart mourned for my country.”
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The president also had to deal with the seemingly endless parade of refugees returning to the city on horseback or in wagons, heads down and just as depressed as him at what they saw. Their beautiful government buildings, including the Treasury and War Departments, destroyed, burned to the ground. The city's leading newspaper, the
National Intelligencer
, had been shuttered by the British and its presses wrecked. All of the books of the Library of Congress were destroyed. The roofs of both wings of the Capitol were in ashes, with charred pieces of timber sticking up out of them. The Navy Yard and the arsenal grounds were large piles of rubble. The stale smell of smoke still drifted in the hot summer air. People displayed blocks of stone with accusatory graffiti against General Winder and Secretary Armstrong strewn throughout lots.
There were charcoal-etched signs everywhere critical of the government and the army. One read, “James Madison is a rascal, a coward and a fool.”
⁶

Madison could not have found an unhappier band of people than his neighbors. At least they had housing to return to, though; he did not.

A Virginian who rode through town just after the attack wrote, “The appearance of our public buildings is enough to make one cut his throat, if that were a remedy. The dissolution of the Union is the theme of almost every private conversation.”
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Madison's friend William Thornton met him and James Monroe on horseback and told the president that he represented a large group of citizens who wanted Madison to dispatch a delegation to the British and surrender. The president fumed. “It would be dishonorable to send any deputation, and…we [will] defend the city to the very last,” he shouted at him, his voice full of fury.

Thornton told the president that he had no army to defend the city. Then, even angrier than Madison, James Monroe snapped at Thornton, “It the deputation moves toward the enemy, it will be repelled by the bayonet.”

A shaken Thornton turned and rode away.
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In addition to the attack, there was the fear all over the United States that Britain could now turn all of her ships, guns, and men on the country because the war against Napoleon had ended. A writer in the London press wrote that the British “talk with delight of the sending of Lord Wellington's army to the United States; they revel in the idea of burning the cities and towns, the mills and manufactories of that country; at the very least they talk of forcing Mr. Madison from his seat and new-modeling the government.”
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Around then, at his lowest point in the war, the president received an unexpected, rousing letter of support from Thomas Jefferson. “Had [General] Washington himself been now at the head of our affairs, the same event would probably have happened,” he wrote; he congratulated him on his tough stand, his leadership of the army, and his recent victories. It bolstered Madison's spirits.
¹⁰

The one thing that surprised Washingtonians, and all Americans at that point, was the overall toughness and resolute, evenhanded, and calm leadership of the commander in chief. Lieutenant James Edwards said that “[Mr. M] was tranquil as usual and tho' much distressed by the dreadful event…not dispirited,”
¹¹

Officials of the cities of Philadelphia and New York invited the beleaguered government back. Georgetown offered to lend the government its seminary building for a fee of a mere $10 a week. Local hotels wanted to become home to the government for $16 a week. One man snorted that efforts would be made by southerners to move it to Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
¹²

The Madisons saw the efforts to move the government back to Philadelphia, and they were considerable, as not only a bad idea but also as an effort that would show Britain, and the world, that England had won its battle with Washington. That could not happen. The Madisons were intent on remaining in Washington to carry on the war, taking up residence somewhere in town. Leaving would be a sign of weakness, of defeat. It could not be done. Friends of Dolley's said she told them outside the ruins of the White House, “we shall rebuild; the enemy cannot defeat a free people.”
¹³

Washingtonians sprang into action and came to the rescue of the president and Congress. John Tayloe, the wealthiest man in town, invited Madison and his wife to live at his home, the luxurious Octagon House, one of the biggest homes in America, until they could move back into the White House. Octagon House was a huge, elegantly decorated, three-story house at the corner of New York Avenue and Eighteenth Street that was large enough for the Madisons' residence, government offices, and drawing rooms for receptions. They moved in right away. Madison set up an office, moved aides into the building, and resumed running both the government and the army.

Local men, led by bankers Thomas Law, John Van Ness, Daniel Carroll, and Richard Lee, met in one of Dolley's drawing rooms at Octagon House to conduct a drive to raise $500,000 to pay for new offices for Congress. A red-brick building was constructed in just six months on the site of the present-day Supreme Court to house both houses of Congress, and all offices and rooms were rented in a number of other buildings throughout town. Wealthy city residents began a building boom with the construction of new, large homes, a signal to the nation that they were sticking with the government and that the government was staying in Washington.

At that same time, Dolley was asked to become an official at the City Orphan Asylum. She brought friends along to serve on the board and went to work raising money and running the asylum. She saw it not only as a good deed but also, given the timing, as a way to let the rest of the nation know that she and her influential friends were staying in Washington; that the capital would bounce back; that the British had merely burned down buildings, not a city; and that Americans could stick together, no matter what, and fight on.

The president went right back to running the government and the army. Secretary of War John Armstrong was forced to resign; Madison appointed James Monroe to take his place as the temporary secretary of war. The army was quickly reorganized by Monroe and was ready to fight again in just days.

There were calls from many politicians to move the nation's capital but others were against the idea.