Dolley Madison and the War of 1812

Background Information:

Dolley Madison: An article written by Holly Shulman for the James Madison University alumni magazine:

In 1993, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrated her birthday with a costume party. It was her first year in the White House and Clinton was still experimenting with how to graft the traditional public role of the first lady as hostess and partner onto her own style of independent woman cum lawyer. She decided to go the ball dressed as one of her predecessors: Dolley Madison.

While Clinton never publicly commented on her choice, to the observer it indicates the ways in which Dolley Madison is publicly viewed today. It demonstrates Madison's current iconic status; why Americans still admire her.

In part, Clinton was simply reaching back to confirm the long history of the institution of First Lady and its continuing importance. Dolley Madison was not only the wife of the fourth president of the United States, but the first presidential spouse to reside permanently in the brand-new national capital of Washington, D.C. Madison became not only the District of Columbia's first First Lady, but the distaff side of a new national institution: a democratically elected head of state who would preside over American society.

There were other reasons for Clinton to identify with Madison as well. Mrs. Madison's name has come to epitomize the role of hostess, of graciousness and hospitality extended in a very whole-hearted and very American fashion. Madison did not bake her own cookies, but she did serve at teas and preside over official dinners. Her first biographer, Margaret Bayard Smith, wrote that in 1804 the wife of a British diplomat looked down her nose at the Madison style, calling dinner at the Madisons a "harvest-home supper."

Mrs. Madison responded that the diplomat's wife had simply failed to understand the American spirit, observing that "she thought abundance was preferable to elegance; that circumstances formed customs, and customs formed taste; and as profusion so repugnant to foreign customs arose from the happy circumstances of the abundance and prosperity of our country, she did not hesitate to sacrifice the delicacy of European taste, for the less elegant, but more liberal fashion of Virginia." The story was written down more than thirty years after the event. But apocryphal or not, it is revealing. Dolley Madison understood that generous country hospitality was distinctly American. In recalling Madison, Clinton was evoking that long-ago patriotic statement of abundance, simplicity, and graciousness of American style.

Madison has come down to us as a woman of courage and as a loyal wife who always supported her husband, no matter how difficult the circumstances, a non-partisan precedent for an independent and committed First Lady. For Clinton, as for many Americans, Madison expressed fidelity and bravery. It was Dolley Madison who stayed in the White House in August of 1814 while her husband rode out of Bladensburg to rally the American troops against the British soldiers, and it was Dolley Madison who stood up to the British and saved what she could from the White House before the British set the mansion on fire. As she had written to her cousin, Edward CO les, a year earlier, "I have always been an advocate for fighting when assailed, tho a quaker." And, she went on to tell him – as if to authenticate with detail the conviction of her words – "I therefore keep the old Tunisian Sabre within my reach."

Dolley Payne was born on May 20, 1768m and raised in the Quaker faith. One of eight children, four boys and four girls, she grew up in comfort in Hanover County, in rural eastern Virginia. In 1783 her father, John Payne, emancipated his slaves and moved his family to Philadelphia, where he went into business as a starch merchant. By 1789, however, his business had failed, and he died a broken man in 1792.

In January of 1790 Dolley Payne married a young Quaker lawyer, John Todd. The couple produced two boys in rapid succession, John Payne Todd in 1790 and William Temple Todd in 1792. But in the fall of 1793 yellow fever struck Philadelphia claiming John Todd and their younger son that October.

In May of 1794, James Madison asked his friend Aaron Burr to introduce him to the twenty-five year-old widow. Madison was seventeen years her senior and a confirmed bachelor. A member of a Virginia planter family, he had created in 1787 the Virginia Plan, a draft framework for the federal constitution. His plans and his intellectual energy had defined the agenda for the Constitutional Convention, and his influence as a delegate had been great. Subsequently he became the leader of the emerging Democratic-Republican Party, the party later led by Thomas Jefferson, which opposed the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton.

The Madisons were a good match. He was charming and witty among friends, but often shy and remote in public; she was outgoing, warm, and a charming hostess. He was brilliant and successful. She brought a family to his childless life. It was also a love match. As her cousin Catherine Coles wrote her on June 1, 1794, Mr. Madison "thinks so much of you in the day that he has Lost his Tongue, at Night he Dreams of you & Starts in his Sleep a Calling on you to relieve his Flame for he Burns to such an excess that he will shortly be consumed." They were married on September 15, 1794, and lived in Philadelphia for the next three years, after which the couple returned to Montpelier, the 5,000-acre Madison family estate in Orange County, Virginia, with her son Payne Todd and her sister Anna.

In 1800, when Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States, he asked James Madison to serve as his secretary of state, and the Madison family moved to Washington, D.C., a raw town of half-finished buildings set amid forests and swamps. As the wife of the secretary of state, Dolley Madison had no official duties, but she did assume a special position. Jefferson, a widower whose daughters lived with their families in central Virginia, was determined to create a new republican society established on the principle of equality. He often entertained Congressmen without their wives in small intimate groups; for this he needed no hostess. But on occasions when he did he most often turned to Dolley Madison, who quickly became the most prominent woman in Washington society.

She became more important in 1809 when James Madison succeeded Jefferson, and she became First Lady. Madison's historical reputation rests on three of her accomplishments during those years: decorating the White House, her role as hostess, and her courage during the War of 1812.

Thomas Jefferson had furnished the otherwise empty Executive Mansion with possessions he brought from Monticello. The Madisons did not follow this precedent. Dolley Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Latrobe to make the White House as beautiful as possible within the budget set by Congress. But the two also made sure that the style of the mansion was appropriate for a republic. While the White House had to be elegant enough to entertain foreign ministers, it should not offend members of Congress who worried that excessive refinement betrayed monarchical principals, or simply made them feel uncomfortable. One Pennsylvania Congressman felt that in his decision whether or not to attend a White House party "embarrassments may arise that may subject one of the sneers of the narrow minded." Put more simply, he worried that his manners were not up to the occasion. Mrs. Madison, however, made him feel at home. She is, he wrote his brother, "a democrat."

Dolley Madison invented the role of first lady as republican hostess, establishing certain ceremonies, just as she had created public spaces. She managed to be elegant, even stunning, in a simple and unaffected way. Her supporters called her "queenly" but her enemies smeared her with the inaccurate taunt that she was an innkeeper's daughter. During a period in our history when rancor and partisanship dominated public and political life, she reached out to people and made them feel comfortable.

Finally, she faced the British invasion of Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1814 with bravery and dignity. By the third week of August invasion was imminent and the city was in a state of chaos as the British approached. On August 22, President Madison left town to review the troops, Mrs. Madison remained in the city. As the British troops moved forward on August 23 Mrs. Madison packed government papers into trunks. The next day, with James Madison still off with the army, Dolley Madison found herself guarding the gates of the executive mansion. By that afternoon the British were drawing too close to be ignored. After filling a wag on with silver and other valuables and sending them off to the Bank of Maryland for safekeeping, she decided there was one more task to be done: to save the irreplaceable Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington lest the British burn, or worse yet capture and bring back to England, this picture of the icon of the new republic. She has the canvass cut from the frame, and as the enemy closed in she fled in the nick of time. The British burned the White House.

Afterwards her husband was politically abused for cowardice in the face of British troops. Dolley Madison's courage, spunk, and political savvy helped compensate for her husband's dutiful modesty. She became the heroine of the War of 1812.

In 1817, with the war over and her husband's second term of office finished; with her son grown and her sister Anna long married; Dolley and James Madison retired to Montpelier where the world came to them. They had streams of visitors, including not only her large and devoted family and his, but leaders of American politics and European dignitaries. They were never short of company or out of touch with national politics and Washington gossip. By the mid-1830s, however, James Madison had become seriously ill, and Dolley Madison was compelled to devote increasing time to his physical care, to "comforting my sick patient," as she wrote one of her nieces.

After nineteen years together at Montpelier, James Madison died. Dolley Madison remained on their estate for another year, but in 1837 she moved back to Washington where she took up her role as a leader in the city's social life. No longer the doyenne of the White House, she still held a uniquely important place as the widow of the last of the Founding Fathers. Distinguished visitors would first call on the president of the United States – Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James K. Polk, or Zachary Taylor – and then cross Lafayette Square to pay their respects to her. The driving force of her last years was to keep her husband's work and memory alive; she was his "relic."

Returning to Washington helped alleviate her loneliness, but it did nothing to address her growing insolvency. The Madisons has already spent much of their personal fortune paying off the gambling debts of her son, an alcoholic, who ran Montpelier into the ground. Dolley Madison was left without an income.

Over the summer of 1843 she sold off part of Montpelier and rented out the house. But a year later one of her slaves wrote to her that the county sheriff was trying to sell the slaves to a slave dealer to pay off a debt her husband had never resolved with his brother, William Madison. She decided it was better simply to sell the whole estate, rather than allow the forced separation of the slave families. But it was not done without pain. "No one I think can appreciate my feelings of grief and dismay at the necessity of transferring to another a beloved home," she wrote to the buyer, Henry Moncure, on August 12, 1844.

Dolley Madison fell ill in July 1849. She lingered for five days, and died on Thursday evening, July 12. She was eighty-one and had known every president from George Washington to Zachary Taylor. Her funeral oration on July 17 was a state occasion, attended by the president, the cabinet officers, the diplomatic corps, members of the House and Senate, the justices of the Supreme Court, officers of the army and navy, the mayor and city leaders, and "citizens and strangers." As the Washington newspaper, The Daily Intelligencer, noted: "All of our country and thousands in other lands will need no language of Eulogy to inspire a deep and sincere regret when the learn the demise of one who touched all hearts by her goodness and won the admiration of all by the charms of dignity and grace."

When a century and a half later Hilary Clinton went to her birthday ball dressed as Dolley Madison, Clinton was calling up the myth of the national icon of hospitality, patriotism, and courage. Madison remains one of our best-known and important First Ladies. We find in her, perhaps even invest in her, qualities of character that resonate in our own times. She is a model for the possibilities, within the narrow constraints of women's roles two hundred years ago, for an independent and important First Lady. She reminds us of the critical functions the President and "Presidentess" play as our ceremonial heads of State, our democratically elected, temporary, monarchs. She helps us feel proud of herself, and lucky, because we are Americans, for whom, as Dolley Madison told Margaret Bayard Smith, circumstances have formed customs, and customs formed taste, from the happy circumstances of abundance. She represents heroism in the face of an enemy invasion, and the actions a proud, brave, and determined woman can take to uphold our national honor. We believe her to be more than an interesting historic figure; she is an important woman and leader – a founding mother to balance our founding fathers.

Her real life was more complex. She suffered the burdens of emotional loss, financial hardship, and physical pain. She found in the job of First Lady personal pleasure, political satisfaction, and exhausting private labor. Taking care of her husband in his old age and enduring the privations of widowhood were difficult. She died in poverty. But for the generations of Americans who have come after her she remains a symbol of national pride. James Madison University, which began nearly a century ago as a woman's college, can by doubly proud of its name.

Center for Technology and Teacher Education, University of Virginia, This module was created by Tom Fallace and Holly Shulman University of Virginia