James and Dolley Madison (7 page)

Dolley kept busy at Montpelier. In addition to raising her son, Payne, she
became heavily involved in gardening and frequently sent friends jars of gooseberries, pickles, and preserves, and bags stuffed to the top with cherries. She took over the responsibility of running the mansion on a day-to-day basis from her mother-in-law. Early in the morning, usually before 7 a.m., Dolley met with a manager of the twenty-three domestic slaves who worked in the home to plan the day.
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They sweated from high temperatures in summer and shivered from low ones in winter. Madison wrote friends one winter that the temperature dropped all the way to ten degrees. He wrote Jefferson in May 1798 that the temperatures at Montpelier were still in the thirties and there were daily frosts that threatened to kill his crops. There had been little or no rain, he told Jefferson, and called the weather “the evil” (Dolley found the beauty in winter, though, as she did in everything, writing “our mountains are white with snow, the winter's wind is loud and chilling”).
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The lack of rain and the chill had ruined his crops the previous autumn, too. At the end of 1797, he wrote, “The drought is also equal to the cold. Within the last eleven days, the fall of water has been but 1 ¼ inches only. Of snow there has been none. This cold and dry spell, succeeding the dry fall and late seeding, gives to the wheat fields the worst of appearances.”
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The Madisons and everyone else struggled through a generally weak economy that lingered through the end of the 1790s. He complained to friends of high prices in Virginia, and friends complained to him of high prices where they resided. “A great stagnation in commerce generally,” Jefferson wrote him from Philadelphia.
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“During the present uncertain state of things in England, the merchants seem disposed to lie on their oars.”

Madison continued his book buying, as he did wherever he lived. In August 1797, for example, he purchased James Callender's
History of the United States
(thirteen copies of it) from John Snowden and William McCorkle, two Philadelphia booksellers, who, upon finding out who the buyer was, promptly tried to get him interested in becoming an investor in their new newspaper (he declined).
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His wife continued to socialize throughout Virginia, never letting the boundaries of Montpelier tie her down. She traveled to the plantations of friends and the cities of Richmond and Charlottesville frequently, usually with her husband or younger sister. Her social network was ever expanding.
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By the end of his first full year as a retired planter, Madison took great pride in his work renovating his family home and farms. Dolley had established herself as the new leader of the Orange County social world. Dolley and her husband sometimes dined at the tavern in Orange Court House. She brought friends there when they visited. Anna Thornton was impressed with the village
and the tavern, which was a notorious buyer of the moonshine whiskey produced just prior to the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. “A large number of well-dressed and well looking boys and girls collected to their lesson in dancing at the tavern, which is almost the only tolerable looking house at the Court House,” she wrote.
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Dolley also kept up a lengthy stream of letters with old girlfriends in Philadelphia. Many supplied her with juicy tales of gossip in and out of the government. One was Sally McKean, who had married a Spanish ambassador. She filled Dolley in on all the behind-the-scenes doings of her old friends in Congress and their wives, with names, places, and escapades. Another was Eliza Collins Lee, who also did a lot of Dolley's shopping for her when both lived in Philadelphia. Dolley also helped her husband run his huge library and supervised the lending of books to friends, acquaintances, and congressmen. Dolley traveled throughout Virginia from 1797 to 1800, building a network of friends. “I have found the place [Richmond] to my surprise, a most agreeable one. The society is delightful,” she wrote a friend in January 1800.
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Yet, despite his much-publicized disdain for politics and government, Madison felt himself slowly drawn back into the national political wars. This began with a letter from James Monroe in which his disgruntled friend savaged the Adams administration in language that reflected Madison's own rapidly growing disenchantment with the national government. Monroe wrote Madison that “I have read the speech [by Hamilton] and replies and really begin to entertain serious doubts whether this is the country we inhabited 12, or 15, years ago: whether we have not by some accident been thrown to another region of the globe, or even some other planet, for everything we see or hear of the political kind seems strange and quite unlike what we used to see.”
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Monroe's chagrin was triggered by the actions of President Adams, whom Madison intensely disliked. Madison had disagreed with some of Washington's policies but admired him enormously. Madison despised Adams, though. In comparing the two presidents, he wrote that “the one cool, considerate and cautious, the other headling and kindled into flame by every spark that light on his passion: the one scrutinizing into the public opinion, and ready to follow where he could not lead it, the other insulting it by the most adverse sentiments and pursuits. Washington, a hero in the field, yet overweighing every danger in the cabinet—Adams of the smallest disturbance of the ancient discipline, order and tranquility of despotism.”
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To Monroe, Madison wrote of Adams and his friends, “let us hope, however, that the tide of evil is nearly at its flood and that it will ebb back to the true mark, which it has overpassed.”
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Similarly, Madison wrote Jefferson in 1798
that he agreed with Benjamin Franklin's assessment of Adams as being “always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes wholly out of his senses,” and he added that Adams's speeches were “the old song” and that the Senate's answer to his policies “was cooked in the same shop with the speech.”
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He had an equally low opinion of the followers of the second president. Madison wrote of them that “it is a pity that the non-attendance of the Adamsites is not presented to the public in such a manner [newspaper stories], with their names, to satisfy the real friends of Washington, as well as the people, generally, of the true principles and view of those who have been loudest in their hypocritical professions of attachments to him.”
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In April 1798, as the snows around Montpelier melted, he wrote, “the President's message is only a further development to the public of the violent passions and heretical politics which have been long privately known to govern him.”
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Madison took Adams to task for everything. When Adams expressed ill feelings toward the brand-new capital at Washington, DC, Madison whipped him for that, too. “The discovery of Mr. A's dislike to the city of Washington will cause strong emotions,” he said, and he added that the “magnificence of the President's house belongs to a man of very different principles from those of Mr. A.”
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Later, after reading a statement by Adams reprinted in a newspaper, he said that “his language…is the most degrading and abominable that could fall from the lips of the first magistrate of an independent people.”
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His criticisms paled compared to his friend Jefferson's view of Adams. Jefferson called all of Adams's speeches “a national affront” and “follies.”
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Madison slowly became consumed with Adams's misdeeds, as he saw them. He opposed any involvement in a war with France, was annoyed at the XYZ Affair (in which French ministers reportedly tried to bribe US officials to obtain a generous policy decision), and did not think that any of Adams's appointments were credible. His ire, and Jefferson's anger, with Adams and his Federalist cadre came to a head over the Alien and Sedition Acts, one of the most controversial pieces of federal legislation in American history.

For several years, beginning with President George Washington, Federalists had bristled under the lash of critical newspaper editors who worked for Republican-controlled newspapers. They went well beyond freedom of the press, Federalists claimed. Some were severe in their demands that the critics be silenced. The editor of
Gazette of the United States
wrote that one critic was “this scum of party filth and beggarly corruption, worked into a form somewhat like a man” and added that he “was entitled to the benefit of the gallows.”
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US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase agreed, saying that “a licentious press is the bane of freedom and the peril of society.”
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They might have been offended by criticism, Republicans had argued, but the criticism was never treasonous or libelous. James Callender, for example, had called President Adams a “hoary headed incendiary” and wrote that “the reign of Mr. Adams has to be one of continued tempest of malignant passions…the grand object of his administration has been to exasperate the rage of contending parties to calumniate and destroy every man who differs from his opinions.”
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Under the terms of the Sedition Act, anyone who criticized Presidents Adams or his administration could be imprisoned. The Federalists began to jail people quickly, too, sending several newspaper editors to prison and shutting down their papers. One newspaper editor was even sentenced to death for opposing the president (this sentence was overturned on appeal).

The Philadelphia
Aurora
printed long articles on the arrest of its editor, William Duane, with eyewitness accounts of people who saw Duane arrested, beaten, and bruised, while all the time yelling that he was being “murdered.”
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The bills brought about a lengthy correspondence among Madison, Jefferson, and others that lasted for months. Madison saw a bright side to the bills, too, and that was the political repercussions they were sure to bring. He wrote Monroe, “the party which has done the mischief [Federalists] is so industriously co-operating in its own destruction.”
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Newspapers throughout Virginia and the South were filled with stories about the acts. Madison was so angry about the two bills that he listened to friends who told him the best way to fight them was to figure out a way for the state legislators, under states' rights powers, to overturn them within state boundaries. To do that, they told Madison, he needed to get elected to the Virginia state legislature and work with other Republicans in Richmond to write bills to overturn the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Madison had not wanted to return to politics. He had been retired for only two years, and his home and farms still needed his attention. He and his wife, Dolley, were in the middle of constructing a happy social life for themselves. Yet he could not remain home as Adams and his cohorts circumvented the Constitution he wrote to blunt all criticism of their behavior. What was a free country without freedom of speech and freedom of the press? Adams and his aides were trampling on the Bill of Rights Madison had shepherded through Congress.

His return to politics was unusual. Ordinarily, the man running for office traveled to a few dinners and rallies to give speeches, alone, without his wife. Politics was in the male dominion in America in the waning years of the eighteenth century. Madison was different, though. He brought Dolley to his dinners
and rallies. She did not sit in the rear of the audience, either. She sat in the front row on the platform, right next to her husband, and applauded madly when he made his campaign speeches. Soon, other wives joined their husbands on the campaign trail, and the look of the political world in America changed forever.
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He and Jefferson hatched a secret plan to blunt the federal acts. They would each write legislative bills for different states, Kentucky and Virginia, which called upon those state legislatures to overturn the federal acts. Jefferson was vice president and could not publicly do that, so he did so in secret, winning support from Kentuckians to carry on the fight for him. Madison did the same thing in the Virginia legislature, but publicly.

In Richmond, full of indignation for Adams and defensive about the Constitution and Bill of Rights he had authored, Madison took the floor of the legislature and, voice louder and more persuasive than usual, battered Adams over the Alien and Sedition Acts. He argued that the First Amendment guarantee of press freedom absolutely forbid federal-government infringements upon rights in any way, shape, or form. It would be “a mockery to say that no laws should be passed preventing publications from being made, but that laws might be passed for punishing them in case they should be made,” and he added, “to the press alone chequered as it is…the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”
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The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions were not duplicated in any other state legislature. Madison and Jefferson, and their Republican friends, tried to gain support in other state legislatures, making herculean efforts to do so, but failed. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, passed in 1799, had little consequence. They were no longer effective when Adams's term ended.

The battle over the Alien and Sedition Acts wound down right around the time the 1800 presidential election arrived. Thomas Jefferson, an exasperated vice president, decided to run for president against Adams. He was strongly supported in his bid by Madison, who joined one of the Virginia committees connected to the election to make certain that his friend received all of the electoral votes in his state, the largest state in the Union. The election campaign that followed drew Madison back into politics, with his wife's blessing.

Madison had other reasons to return to government, especially since the new federal capital was now located nearby on the Potomac River. His wife, Dolley, a social butterfly, had nowhere to fly in isolated northwest Virginia, especially in the winters when cold and snow set in. Madison's dream of living out his days as a successful lord of the plantation manor had not worked out that well, either. Running a plantation was hard work. He wrote in the spring
of 1798, “It has now become certain that not half crops of wheat can be made, many will not get back more than their seed, and some not even that. We have lately had a severe spell of n.e. rain which in this neighborhood swept off at least 15 per cent of the [harvest] and from accounts in different directions it appears to have been equally fatal. We are at present in the midst of a cold n.w. spell, which menaces the fruit. The tops of the Blue Ridge mountains are tinged with snow and the thermostat this morning was at 31 degrees. It does not appear, however that the mischief is yet done. The coming night, if no sudden change takes place, must I think, be fatal.”
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