James and Dolley Madison (13 page)

But there was far more to Dolley and James Madison at parties than mere dress. It was a time, Dolley understood, to let her husband shine, and to help him shine. The public view of Madison was that he was a quiet, laid-back, pale-skinned, doughty, boring, tiny man who had little to say—and when he did, he said it very softly and without much conviction. She knew, and Jefferson knew, that Madison was not like that at all. He had a rapier wit, was conversant about all the topics in the news, and was a persuasive man who could carry on conversations with anybody, from counts to congressmen, and tell marvelous stories. Dolley engineered her receptions so that many people got to meet her husband under the best of circumstances and came away with a good impression of him. She arranged seating plans so that he could shine in conversations during dinner, always talking to a different group of people each night. He was funny and told humorous stories, or engaged in colorful conversations with Jefferson's guests. She often positioned him at one place in a room at a reception or ball and then, in a subtle way that few recognized, casually brought people over to meet him and chat with him. He could glow as both the very public secretary of state and the private Mr. Madison, with Dolley helping along via her party work and dinner planning. People who had only read about Madison or only knew him slightly came away with a whole new, and better, opinion of him at these parties, thanks to his wife.

Edward Coles, a young Virginian neighbor of Madison's who later became his secretary, had the same negative opinion of Madison when he first met him, as did many others. Outlining the dour secretary of state, he began,

I never knew him to wear any other color than black; his coat cut in what is termed dress fashion; his breeches short, with buckles at the knees, black silk stockings, and shoes with strings or long fair boot tops when out in cold weather, or when he rode on horseback of which he was fond. His hat was of the shape and fashion usually worn by gentlemen of his age. He wore powder on his hair, which was dressed full over the ears, tied behind, and brought to a point above the forehead, to cover in some degree, his baldness…. [He had] a small and delicate form, of rather a tawny complexion, bespeaking a sedentary and studious man; his hair was originally of a dark brown color; his eyes were bluish, but not of a bright blue; his form, features and manner were not commanding.

Then Coles changed his tone. “But his conversation [was] exceedingly [commanding] and few men possessed so rich a flow of language, or so great a fund of amusing anecdotes, which were made the more interesting from their being well timed and well told. His ordinary manner was simple, modest, bland and unostentatious, retiring from the throng and cautiously refraining from doing or saying anything to make himself conspicuous,” he finished.
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One thing Madison did accomplish at parties was to renew acquaintances from old political wars. He became friendly with John Quincy Adams, the son of his archenemy, President John Adams. A friend told John Quincy Adams in 1805 that “Mr. Madison had expressed himself in very favorable terms of me…it was his wish to employ me on some mission abroad, if I was desirous of it.”
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And, of course, too, Dolley worked very hard to give President Jefferson the chance to socialize with as many important people as possible and to show off his many skills, which ranged from a sharp sense of humor to a far-ranging intellect (she also cautioned Jefferson that it was perfectly all right to wear his slippers when he met people during the day at the White House, but he could not wear them at receptions, balls, and dinner parties). Dolley worked with a large staff of servants to make certain that the parties featured fine food and lots of it, served in covered dishes. Guests ate everything from steak to ice cream, with plates of nuts (George Washington loved nuts and had bowls full of them all over the President's Mansion and at his home in Mount Vernon). Jefferson had brought a famous French chef over from Paris to be the full-time White House chef, and this impressed all. Small musical groups and orchestras played at the receptions. Everybody danced to the music that wafted through the president's home until the late hours of the evening (except Dolley, who did not dance).

Friends told Dolley that she was overdoing it as the official White House hostess. There was no reason to work so hard to aid Jefferson in his official life. Her long hours and hard work would wear her out and make her ill, they insisted. The more they criticized her work habits, the harder she worked. Dolley did not like being told what to do or how to do it. “I have had a lecture from S.L. on seeing too much company, and it brought to my mind the time when our Society [Quakers] used to control me entirely, and [kept] me from so many advantages and pleasures. Even now, I feel my ancient terror revive in a great degree,” she wrote.
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Some, especially the British, hated Dolley's parties. Mrs. Mary Bagot, who arrived with her husband, the British minister, after the War of 1812, wrote that “the women usually sit stuck around the room close to the wall. The men—many of whom come in boots & perfectly undone & with dirty hands & dirty
linen—stand mostly talking with each other in the middle of the room Tea & coffee & afterwards cld punsh [
sic
] with glasses of Madeira & cakes are handed around & by ten o'clock everyone s dispersed,” and she added after another party that Mrs. Madison was “very stupid and very much stared at.”
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Mrs. Bagot did not have much love for anyone in America. She was invited to an elegant dinner party at the home of James Monroe, and she wrote that it was “the dullest dinner I ever was at. Mrs. Monroe gives herself the airs of a fine lady without succeeding in being one.”

But Mrs. Bagot went to them all and was impressed at the number. She wrote home that the White House levees run by Mrs. Madison were packed with partygoers who seemed to have a wonderful time, even if she did not. The Washington party schedule, she wrote, “ran from twelve at noon to 12 at night without intermission—tired to death.”
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The gourmet dinner tables that Dolley set were famous throughout the country. Dr. Samuel Mitchill, a guest, described one meal in his diary, “dined at the President's…rice, soup, round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, loin of veal, cutlets of mutton or veal, fried eggs, fried beef. A pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust filled with the stribbions of onions or shallots…tasted very strong and not very agreeable, ice cream very good, crust wholly dried, crumbled into thin flakes…very porous and light, covered with cream-sauce—very fine. Many other jimcracks, a great variety of fruit, plenty of wines, and good.”
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Congressman William Plumer said that Dolley's tables in the White House were filled with delicious sweet meats and, he added with great enthusiasm, very fine French wines. He laughed that Dolley's French wines were far more successful than Jefferson's French politics.

Another enchanted guest, Dr. Mannassah Cutler, a congressman from Massachusetts, wrote of Dolley's parties, “an excellent dinner. The round of beef of which the soup is made is called boulli. It had in the dish spices and something of a sweet herb (basil) and garlic kind, and a rich gravy. It is very much boiled and is still very good. We had a dish with what appeared to be cabbage, much boiled, then cut in long strips and somewhat mashed; in the middle a large ham…the dessert [was] apple pie in the form of half of a musk-melon, the flat side down, tops creased deep and the color a dark brown.”
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She was also adamant about serving American food in an American setting for dinners with foreign diplomats. If they wanted to know America and Americans, she contended, they needed to know how Americans ate.

She was criticized by one diplomat, British minister Augustus Foster, for a meal that he sneered at for being “more like a harvest home supper than the
entertainment of a Secretary of State.” She snapped back, with a little smile on her lips, socialite Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “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.” (Not everyone was pleased. New Hampshire senator Jeremiah Mason dined with the Madisons and wrote to his wife of Mrs. Madison that “she by no means answers my ideas of a high-bred, courtly woman.”)
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The Madisons also made friends at casual visits to homes on weekend afternoons. The Madisons and their hosts would sit outside in good weather, lay in hammocks, eat apples and other fruit, chat about events and friends, drink tea, and later go inside for a casual dinner, sometimes in a formal dining room and sometimes in a kitchen, where a large table would be set up. Sometimes, in late spring and summer, people would eat a makeshift dinner at a picnic table in the yard.
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Or a woman would invite seven or eight women to her home in the afternoon for drinks and then, later, a dinner. Informal afternoon and evening soirees, with just a dozen people, were also popular. Many Washingtonians would go to the local military barracks on weekend afternoons to listen to bands play. They would go with other couples or meet other couples at the concerts.

Dolley re-created Washington's social world back home at Montpelier in the summers when they lived there, hosting long strings of parties, receptions, and balls, and inviting dozens of people to stay over at their home for as often as they wanted. British foreign minister Foster, as an example, stayed for an entire week one summer. She wrote at the end of the summer of 1807 that “we have had, my dear, a constant round of relations and neighbors to visit us, so that I have been unable to steal an hour for writing.”
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People loved to go riding on horseback, or in carriages, because the new capital was such a beautiful place, a newly carved, bucolic Garden of Eden along the Potomac. “Conrad's boardinghouse…was on top of the hill, the precipitous sides of which were covered with grass, shrubs and trees in their wild uncultivated state. Between the foot of the hill and the broad Potomac extended a wide plain, through which the Tiber wound its way…. Its banks were shaded with tall and umbrageous forest trees of every variety, among which the superb Tulep-Poplar rose conspicuous; the magnolia, the azalea, the hawthorn, the wild rose and many other indigenous shrubs grew beneath their shade, while violets anemonies and a thousand other sweet wood flowers found shelter among their roots, from the winter's frost and greeted with the earliest bloom the return of spring. The wild grapevine climbing from tree to tree hung in unpruned luxuriance
among the branches of the trees and formed a fragrant and verdant canopy over the greenward, impervious to the noon day sun,” wrote one resident.
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The idea of a “dancing assembly,” or club, so popular in both New York and Philadelphia, caught on, too, and hundreds of Washingtonians joined the one that opened there in 1802. The dances were usually held in public rooms of the new hotels. They were run by Captain Thomas Tingey, an audacious naval officer. Dolley ran them with Tingey and tried to make them as lively as the ones she attended in Philadelphia.
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Being the president's hostess was not an easy task. Jefferson paid little attention to the women of Washington when he took over the reins of government. He held dinner parties that were attended almost entirely by men. It wasn' t until the second year of his first term, at the urging of Dolley, that he began to invite women to his dinners. Those dinner parties that Dolley supervised for men were a struggle for her, too. To fit his egalitarian image, President Jefferson insisted that all of his dinner parties be held at a round table so that no one in attendance would feel socially slighted by where he sat at a rectangular table. Jefferson invited only Federalists to one dinner party and only Republicans to another to avoid the same kind of arguments and rancor that existed in the halls of Congress. The dinner ordinarily started in late afternoon, but after the meal, guests lingered, at Jefferson's insistence, and talked diplomacy and politics well into the night, all under the watchful eye of Dolley and the White House staff.

Dolley was the official hostess at all the dinner parties, whether all-male or mixed company. In addition to being at the dinner, she met guests before and after the meal to fraternize. “[We] sat in the drawing room with Mrs. Madison and her sister, whose social disposition soon made us well acquainted with each other,” said one woman guest at a White House dinner.
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She also served as hostess each New Year's Day, when Jefferson, with her husband at his side, flung open the White House doors for a day-long reception for anyone in town who wanted to socialize with the president. It was “a festal day in high style,” wrote Congressman Cutler. “Mrs. Madison wore a headdress like a white turban.”
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Another problem Dolley had at the beginning of Jefferson's term, and in her own household, was that few of the congressmen brought their wives to live with them in Washington. In many years, there were only twenty or thirty congressional wives in town. In 1801, just seven congressmen of 130 representatives and 34 senators brought their wives to the capital. The women stayed for the fall and winter and went home with their spouses in the spring. Dolley had to make certain that all of them were invited to the White House, and the Madisons' home, as frequently as possible and that she befriended them so that they would
feel comfortable in this new and growing city far from their own homes, family, and friends. It was not easy.
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Dolley also went out of her way to create a large social community in Washington that included not only elected representatives, government workers, and diplomats but also local residents, regardless of their line of work. She had maps drawn of residential areas and made up long lists of citizens whom she invited to different parties. She and her husband were seen throughout Washington. They rode around town in an easy-to-spot, elegant, horse-drawn, dark-green coach with silver monogram
M
s on each door, glass windows, and venetian blinds, plus candles for nighttime traveling. They stopped at the homes of different friends, traveled to Alexandria and Georgetown, and made social connections everywhere. Dolley was convinced that merging the residents, government officials, and visiting diplomats was the best way, the only way, to create a vibrant social life in the nation's capital.
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