Dolly Payne Todd Madison (May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the spouse of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison, and was First Lady of the United States from 1809 to 1817. During the previous administration of Thomas Jefferson, a widower and their friend, she occasionally acted as First Lady to fulfill the ceremonial functions more usually associated with the President's wife.[1] She was notable for her social gifts and is credited with helping define the role of the First Lady, as well as contributing to the popularity of Madison as president.
Spelling of name
In the past, biographers and others stated that her given name was Dorothea after her aunt, or Dorothy, and that Dolly was a nickname. But, her birth was registered with the New Garden Friends Meeting as Dolley, and her will of 1841 states "I, Dolly P. Madison".[2] Based on manuscript evidence and the scholarship of recent biographers, Dollie, spelled with an "i", appears to have been her given name at birth.[3] Spelling was more variable in those years. Historians have settled on using Dolley as the spelling of her given name.
Early life and first marriage
Dolley Payne was born as the first girl in her family on May 20, 1768, in the Quaker settlement of New Garden, North Carolina, in Guilford County.[4] Her parents, both Virginians, had moved there in 1765. Her mother, Mary Coles, a Quaker, had married John Payne, a non-Quaker, in 1761. Three years later, he applied and was admitted to the Quaker Monthly Meeting in Hanover County, Virginia, where Coles' parents lived. Dolley Payne was raised in the Quaker faith.
By 1769, the family returned to Virginia to live near the Coles family.[4] As a young girl, Dolley grew up in comfort at her parents' plantation in rural eastern Virginia, deeply attached to her mother's Coles family. In total, the Paynes had four boys (Walter, William Temple, Isaac, and John) and four girls (Dolley, Lucy, Anna, and Mary).
In 1783, following the American Revolutionary War, John Payne emancipated his slaves,[4] as did numerous slaveholders in the Upper South.[5] Some, like Payne, were Quakers, who had long encouraged manumission; others were inspired by revolutionary ideals. From 1782 to 1810, the proportion of free blacks to the total black population in Virginia increased from less than one percent to 7.2 percent, and more than 30,000 blacks were free.[6]
Payne moved his family to Philadelphia, where he went into business as a starch merchant. By 1789, however, his business had failed. He died in October 1792. Dolley's mother Mary Payne initially made ends meet by opening a boarding house. A year later she moved to western Virginia to live with her daughter Lucy, who had married George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of George Washington. The widow Mary Coles Payne took her two youngest children, Mary and John, with her.
In January 1790, Dolley Payne had married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer in Philadelphia. They had two sons: John Payne (born February 29, 1792[4]) and William Temple (born July 4, 1793). After their mother left Philadelphia in 1793, Dolley's sister Anna Payne moved in with the Todds to help with the children.
In the fall of 1793, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia due to poor sanitation of water. As doctors did not know how to treat the disease, more than 4,000 people died during that epidemic. Dolley lost both her husband and younger son William in the epidemic, as well as her Todd parents-in-law.[4] John and Baby Wiliam died on October 24, 1793 at the ages of twenty-nine and three months, respectively. Dolley Todd was a widow at the age of twenty-five, with a young child to support.
Second marriage
Dolley Payne Todd and James Madison, a delegate to the Continental Congress, likely encountered each other at social events in Philadelphia. In May 1794, Madison asked his friend Aaron Burr to introduce him to the young widow. Madison was seventeen years her senior and, at the age of forty-three, a longstanding bachelor.
The encounter apparently went smoothly, for a brisk courtship followed; by August she accepted his proposal of marriage. For marrying Madison, a non-Quaker, she was expelled from the Society of Friends. They were married on September 15, 1794 and lived in Philadelphia for the next three years.
In 1797, after eight years in the House of Representatives, James Madison retired from politics. He returned with his family to Montpelier, the Madison family plantation in Orange County, Virginia. There they expanded the house and settled in. They expected to remain as planters living quietly in the country.
When Thomas Jefferson was elected as the third president of the United States in 1800, he asked James Madison to serve as his Secretary of State. Madison accepted, and his family: Dolley, her son Payne Todd (as he was commonly called), and her sister Anna Payne, moved to Washington, D.C., the new capital. They stretched to take a large house, as Dolley believed entertaining would be important in the capital.
In Washington 1801-1817
Sketch of Dolley, c. 1800
Dolley Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to furnish the White House, the first official residence built for the president of the United States. In addition, as Jefferson was a widower, she sometimes served as his First Lady for official ceremonial functions.
In the approach to the 1808 presidential election, with Thomas Jefferson ready to retire, the Democratic-Republican caucus nominated James Madison to succeed him. He was elected President, serving two terms from 1809 to 1817, and Dolley became the official First Lady. She became renowned for her social graces and hospitality, and contributed to her husband's popularity as president. In 1812 Madison was re-elected, during the War of 1812.
Burning of Washington, 1814
As the invading British army neared Washington in 1814 during the war, Dolley Madison ordered the Stuart painting to be removed, as the White House staff hurriedly prepared to flee:
"Our kind friend Mr. Carroll has come to hasten my departure, and in a very bad humor with me, because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. The process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out"..... "It is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen from New York for safe keeping. On handing the canvas to the gentlemen in question, Messrs. Barker and Depeyster, Mr. Sioussat cautioned them against rolling it up, saying that it would destroy the portrait. He was moved to this because Mr. Barker started to roll it up for greater convenience for carrying." [10][11][page needed]
Popular accounts during and after the war years tended to portray Dolley Madison as the one who removed the painting, and she became a popular hero.
Madison's slaves in the White House in 1814 helped collect the valuables such as silver, Gilbert Stuart's noted Lansdowne portrait of George Washington, and original drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.[citation needed]
JH McCormick (1904) and Gilson Willets (1908), historians of the White House, wrote in their books published in 1904 and 1908, respectively, that the man directing the removal of the painting was Jean Pierre Sioussat, a Frenchman[12] and the first Master of Ceremonies of the White House.[13] They cited the 1865 memoir by Paul Jennings, a slave and personal servant of James Madison:
" a negro servant, named Paul Jennings, issued in 1865, A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison, in which he, as a White House employee, insists; 'She (Mrs. Madison) had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Suse (meaning Jean Sioussat), a Frenchman, then doorkeeper, and still living, and McGraw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon with some larger silver urns and other such valuables as could be hastily got hold of. When the British did arrive, they ate up the very dinner, and drank the wines, etc., that I had prepared for the President's party.'"
The White House historians {{<--who?-->}} give accounts of the First Lady's escape from the burning of Washington in 1814:
"The friends with Mrs. Madison hurried her away (her carriage being previously ready), and she, with many other families, retreated with the fleeing army. In Georgetown they perceived some men before them carrying off the picture of General Washington (the large one by Stewart)[sic], which with the [silver] plate was all that was saved out of the President's house. Mrs. Madison lost all her own property. Mrs. Madison slept that night in the encampment, a guard being placed round her tent; the next day she crossed into Virginia, where she remained until Sunday, when she returned to meet her husband."[citation needed]
In Montpelier 1817-1837
Dolley at the end of her tenure as First Lady in 1817
On April 6, 1817, after his retirement from the presidency, Dolley and James Madison returned to the Montpelier plantation in Orange County, Virginia.
In 1830, Dolley Madison's son by her first marriage, Payne Todd, who had never found a career, went to debtors prison in Philadelphia. The Madisons sold land in Kentucky and mortgaged half of the Montpelier plantation to pay his debts.
James Madison died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836. Dolley remained at Montpelier for a year. One of her nieces, Anna Payne, came to live with her, and Todd also came for a lengthy stay. During this time, Dolley Madison organized and copied her husband's papers. In 1837, Congress authorized $30,000 as payment for the first installment of the Madison papers.
In the fall of 1837, Dolley Madison decided to return to Washington, D.C., charging Todd with the care of the plantation. She moved with her niece Anna Payne into a house located on Lafayette Square. It was bought by her sister Anna and her husband Richard Cutts.
In Washington 1837-1849
While Madison was living in Washington, Payne Todd was unable to manage the plantation, due to alcoholism and related illness. Madison tried to raise money by selling the rest of the president's papers. Unable to find a buyer, she sold the whole plantation, its slaves, and its furnishings to pay off outstanding debts.
Paul Jennings, the former slave of James Madison, later recalled in his memoir,
"In the last days of her life, before Congress purchased her husband's papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant to Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her."[14]
In 1848, Congress agreed to buy the rest of James Madison's papers for the sum of $22,000 or $25,000.
In 1842, Dolley Madison joined St. John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. This church was attended by other members of the Madison and Payne families.
She died at her home in Washington in 1849 at the age of 81. She was first buried in the Congressional Cemetery, Washington, DC., but later re-interred at Montpelier next to her husband.[15]
Representation in other media
References
- ^ Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York: Henry Holy & Co., 2006), 43
- ^ "Will of Dolly Payne Todd Madison, February 1, 1841," Papers of Notable Virginia Families, MS 2988, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville Virginia, United States.
- ^ Allgor, 415-416; Richard N. Cote, Strength and Honor: the Life of Dolly Madison (Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Corinthian Books, 2005), 36-37
- ^ a b c d e "Chronology and Dolley Madison", The Dolley Madison Project, University of Virginia Digital History
- ^ Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877, New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, p. 81
- ^ Kolchin (1993), p. 81
- ^ http://www.nationalcenter.org/WashingtonBurning1814.html
- ^ Gilson Willets, Inside History of the White House, 1908, material quoted from Dolley Madison's letter to her sister.
- ^ Review: Gilson Willets, Inside History of the White House-the complete history of the domestic and official life in Washington of the nation's presidents and their families, The Christian Herald, 1908
- ^ JH McCormick, The First Master of Ceremonies of the White House, 1904
- ^ "Paul Jennings", Documents of the American South, University of North Carolina
- ^ "Dolley Payne Madison", National First Ladies Library
Further reading
- Allgor, Catherine, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
- Allgor, Catherine, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation, New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
- Arnett, Ethel Stephens, Mrs. James Madison: The Incomparable Dolley, Greensboro, N.C.: Piedmont Press, 1972.
- Howard, Hugh. Mr. and Mrs. Madison's War: America's First Couple and the Second War of Independence, (Bloomsbury Press, 2012)
- Witteman, Barbara (2003). Dolley Madison: First Lady (illustrated ed.). Mankato: Capstone Press. pp. 48. ISBN 0-7368-1551-1.
- Hart, Craig (2004). A Genealogy of the Wives of the American Presidents and Their First Two Generations of Descent (illustrated ed.). Jefferson: McFarland Publishing. pp. 309. ISBN 978-0-7864-1956-2.
External links
