James and Dolley Madison (27 page)

Dolley would engage several people to help her conduct lengthy investigations into the lives of people whom she felt were being unfair to her and her husband or causing unnecessary trouble. She once utilized Edward Coles, Madison's secretary, for that purpose, sending him on trips to visit members of the family of General Alexander Smith to discover why the Smiths were involved in a vendetta against the Madisons. They had, Dolley charged, spread false rumors about the president and First Lady and, she said, written a pamphlet and slanderous newspaper articles about them in journals such as the
Whig
. A friend asked her if she laughed about the articles and pamphlet. She said her husband did, but she was furious at the Smiths. She vowed revenge, too. “It was too impertinent to excite any other feeling in me than anger. He will be sick of his attempt when he reads all that will be replied to it,” she wrote.
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Coles visited the Smiths, dined with them, and drank with them in an effort to get at the truth. He also discovered that the scurrilous newspaper articles about the Madisons signed “Timolean” were actually written by George Stevenson, a nephew of one of the Smiths. These inquiries were not only meant to discover some secret but also to let the targets, and everyone else in Washington, know that Dolley Madison was going to investigate them. It was a powerful warning from the First Lady of the United States.
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Dolley gossiped continually with friends. She wrote Phoebe Morris in 1813: “You remember the Judges. They have been some time amongst us, and are as agreeable as ever. They talk of you continually, particularly [Supreme Court Justice] Joseph Story”
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Dolley's high-paced social life at the White House spurred others to host parties, too, officially and unofficially. The embassies of countries, such as France, England, and Turkey, all held receptions, dinners, and parties at their official houses, and the Madisons were always invited. “We had a breakfast at the French Minister's which was quite pleasant, a small party & profusion of fruit,” wrote Dolley of one. Diplomats, congressmen, and Washington residents held dinners and receptions at their homes—very unofficial—and the Madisons attended those, too. By the time her husband's first term as president was over, Dolley had significantly increased the social world of Washington, and it all radiated from the White House.
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The parties did not just attract the beautiful and powerful. They attracted many people, including egotistical men and women who used the gatherings to showcase their looks and grace, sometimes looks and grace that they no longer possessed. Some were convinced that gowns and diamonds would cover up their age, wrinkles, and physical shortcomings. They were the targets of much behind-the-scenes talk. Congressman Joseph Story joked to his wife that the parties were filled with “some aged damsels, flirting in the gay undress of 18 and antiquated country squires assuming the air of fashionable beaux.”
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When her husband became secretary of state, Dolley's signature headgear was the French beret that she wore casually over her hair. French fashions waned after a few years, though, and she replaced the beret with her own invention—the turban. She created the dazzling-looking turban, which looked like the headgear of Turkish princes, by simply wrapping a three- or four-foot-long piece of silk or other material around her hair in a wide cone. The turban was not just stylish but also enabled her to wrap up her uncombed hair in a few seconds. Women loved it because it also covered one's head and prevented the need, at the time, to powder one's hair. Women also did not want to spend endless hours combing their hair. And it was fast and simple to wrap the turban.
Dolley decorated her turbans with jewels and pins, making them quite stylish. Dolley first wore a turban at a White House ball, and hundreds of women in Washington began to wear it the following week. The turban then swept through America and overseas. It found its way to France, where Josephine Bonaparte began to wear it.

The turban also added another foot or so to Dolley's height, making her 6'8” tall when she walked through her parties, a wandering beacon of a hostess in blazing color, easy to find and easy to talk to about anything. James Madison never liked the turbans. Before each party he would tell her how much he disliked them and how they detracted from her natural beauty. They would argue a bit and then Dolley would spin around, wrap her hair in the turban, and walk to the party. Her husband, the president, would grumble and follow her.
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Dolley copied the daring French dress styles of the day, too. At one party, the belle of the ball was the rather daring, voluptuous, young American wife of Jerome Bonaparte, Betsy, whom Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte refused to meet and who seemed to dress for the sole purpose of creating scandal. She always wore low-cut, tight dresses that showed much cleavage. She looked like she had been poured into them. Betsy knew what she looked like, too, and she moved her body to show it off. She was so shapely that the
Baltimore American
newspaper even published a poem devoted to her physical beauty. Betsy had her own full-time hair dresser, too.

“Mobs of boys have crowded around her splendid equipage to see what I hope will not often be seen in this country, an almost naked woman…her back, her bosom, part of her waist and her arms were uncovered and the rest of her form visible,” wrote one woman.
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Men certainly enjoyed the new, daring women's dresses. One man at a White House party wrote that “the ladies were not remarkable for anything so much as for the exposure of their swelling breasts and bare backs.”
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Women out-dressed each other. Mrs. Anthony Merry, the British ambassador's wife, arrived covered in diamonds, from bracelets on her wrists to a necklace to a diamond tiara at one party. Then, fashionably late, the president and his wife arrived. Dolly was dressed in a beautiful, tight, ivory satin gown with a plunging neckline. On her head she had one of her turbans, decked out in jewels and, to top it all off, two large, flamboyant ostrich plumes stuck up out of the turban. All gasped; Dolley smiled.

Ambassador Merry and his wife were a constant problem for both Jefferson and the Madisons. The Merrys were thin-skinned and overly socially conscious. Success in Washington's social world seemed as important as success on the international front. At one White House party, the Merrys felt they
were official invited dinner guests and that protocol dictated that the president, without a companion, should offer his arm to Mrs. Merry and escort her in to dinner. Instead, Jefferson turned to Dolley Madison and gave her his arm. She demurred and told him he had to take in Mrs. Merry. Jefferson smiled wryly, tightened his grip on Dolley, and led her into the dining room. Mrs. Merry, furious, followed them in the official procession. A week later, the Merrys felt similarly disrespected at a party at the Madisons' home and left early, offending everyone. Madison later explained to Merry that American dinner-party rules were quite loose, unlike those of England, and that no snubs were intended. The Merrys were still angry. Mrs. Merry steamed about the snubs for months and, with her ambassador husband, made it a huge social issue in the capital. No one in Washington paid much attention to the Merrys, and, Madison learned through snoopy gossips in London, neither did the British.
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On another occasion, Dolley invited the Merrys to a party and insisted that it was very unofficial and very informal. The president escorted Mrs. Merry into dinner on his arm, as required by social and political protocol. There, the smiling Merrys were introduced to the guests at the dinner. Then, at the end of the table, Mrs. Merry was introduced to a local haberdasher and his wife, invited by Dolley because she thought both were quite funny and would liven up the political dinner. Mrs. Merry was aghast. British legation chief Augustus Foster wrote his mother that America was “indeed a country not fit for a dog.”
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It was that same Foster who also paid Dolley one of the finest backhanded comments she ever received. After a visit to Montpelier, Foster said of her that “she was a very handsome woman and tho' an uncultured mind and fond of gossiping, was so perfectly good tempered and good humored that she rendered her husband's house as far as depended on her agreeable to all parties.”
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Mrs. Madison shone at Montpelier, where she reigned as the First Lady of both the United States and Orange County. She hosted numerous parties each summer, and each one was larger, louder, and gaudier than the other. On the Fourth of July in 1816, she outdid herself, throwing a party for ninety guests outdoors on her lawns. “The dinner was profuse & handsome,” she said, “and the company very orderly…the day was cool & quite pleasant.”
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As his first year as president ended, Madison told friends that the government he ran, and the country that he represented, had turned out well and functioned as a smooth-running union of states. His party retained its strong majority in Congress, Republican newspapers were solidly behind the administration, and the nation's farming and business was good. The people were happy. “With a union of its citizens, a government thus identified with the nation may be considered as the strongest in the world; the participation of every individual
in the rights and welfare of the whole, adding the greatest moral, to the greatest physical strength of which political society is susceptible,” he wrote at the end of 1810.
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It had been a tough first year, filled with international problems and political infighting at home, but he was satisfied with it. Those who saw him when he was not in the president's office said that the burdens of office were not wearing him down, as many feared. “When he can disengage himself for a moment from the [chores] attached to the painful honor of being Chief of a republican government, the wrinkles smooth out of his face, his countenance lights up, it shines then with all the fire of the spirit and with a gentle gayety; and one is surprised to find in the conversations of the great statesman…as much sprightliness as strength,” wrote Baron de Montlezun, a diplomat.
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Madison had become a strong and resourceful chief executive after his first year in office. He had stepped out of the shadow of Thomas Jefferson and become his own man, his own president.

From the first day he arrived at his office in the White House until the end of his administration, James Madison was crippled by the British. His embargo and subsequent Non-Intercourse Act had not succeeded, and neither had the diplomatic missions of any of his State Department envoys to London, all sent there to end the British search and seizure of American ships and impressment of American sailors. The British were determined to stop American ships wherever they found them, whether in the English Channel, the high seas of the rolling Atlantic Ocean, or the faraway ports of the Caribbean. They captured sailors whom they claimed were British Navy deserters and also grabbed Americans. They threatened to fire upon and sink American ships, and, in fact, had done so in American waters off the coast of Maryland in 1807 when, after a dispute over their right to board the ship to search for British deserters, they opened fire on the USS
Chesapeake
. Three American sailors were killed and eighteen wounded.

British diplomats resisted every effort by Americans to talk them out of their policies. The Brits argued that under a 1756 law, they had the right to stop the ships of all countries trading with a wartime enemy, and that enemy was France. The British had every reason to suspect, too, that—like so many European wars—the conflict with Napoleon and France might last many years. They could not permit America to trade with Napoleon. The Americans argued that they were a neutral nation and were sending only commercial goods, not arms, to Napoleon. The stone-faced British refused to listen.

John Quincy Adams even argued that Britain's action betrayed its own history and Constitution. “[It] is justified on the plea of necessity which being above all law, claims equal exemption from responsibility to the tribunal of reason,” he wrote, adding that he cheered Madison's tenacity.
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That tenacity never wavered. Madison was, and would remain throughout his entire presidency, furious with the British. He wrote Jefferson in 1809 that the new British ministry was laden with “quackeries and corruption.” He said it was going from bad to worse and he saw no change for the better in the future. Jefferson, as angry as he, wrote back that he could not believe the British public went along with its government on their anti-American policies. “They are on the point of being blown up and they still proceed with the same madness and increased wickedness,” he wrote.
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Madison's conversation and correspondence was dominated by his woes with England. The time and energy he had to spend on the British trouble left him little time to address domestic problems that grew each year.

Why should the British be interested in any agreement, British supporters asked. Britain ruled the high seas; had the largest navy in the world; were officially at war with France; and had the right to stop neutrals such as the United States from aiding and abetting its enemy.

There was another reason, though—revenge. England continued to smart from its catastrophic defeat in the American Revolution. The empire had lost the war to George Washington and his armies and also had been forced into fighting a far-ranging and very costly world war for eight years. The American Revolution had cost Britain nearly twenty thousand soldier and sailor lives and tens of millions of dollars. The British had been embarrassed. It was a defeat that would be remembered throughout hundreds of years of their history. They never forgot the debacle.

In the winter of 1810, Robert Livingston, writing from London, reminded President Madison of that: “The King & the people of [England] hate, dread and envy us. And that they will do so until the memory of our having been rebel colonies is entirely lost and till the sordid spirit peculiar to a nation of merchants and tradesmen from the days of Carthage to the present era is extinguished by some great calamity.”
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The Brits had refused to shut down their northwest forts in America, which was agreed upon in the peace treaty of 1783, for more than ten years. They had become involved in complicated negotiations over money owed to British merchants during the war and from the years prior to it. Now, in 1809, they would use their powerful navy to both interdict American shipping and humiliate America. They would do it for years, too, under the guise of the 1756 laws and the argument that they were always at war, somehow, someway, and needed to curtail American shipping for that reason.

If America did not like that, well, British officials shrugged their shoulders, do something about it. America did not. It continually submitted; it constantly backed down.

The president was only in office a few months when he fired off an angry note to the Republican Meeting of South Carolina. “The very unexpected and inauspicious turn given to our relations with Great Britain by the disavowal of the friendly arrangements concluded by her accredited minister, [do] not fail to excite a lively sensibility among a people conscious of their own just purposes and satisfied of the reasonable views and good faith, which have been evinced by their own government,” he told them.
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England was not Madison's only problem, though. The French navy was just as bad as the British when it came to stopping American ships and seizing cargo and sailors. Madison's ministers had complained to Napoleon about his search-and-seizure policies, done under the same guidelines as the British, but the French emperor dismissed them. His attitude inflamed Madison. “The late confiscations by Bonaparte comprise robbery, theft and breach of trust, and exceed in turpitude any of his enormities not wasting human blood,” he wrote.
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He began to get pledges of support for military action by local militias in different states. He wrote one that “with every allowance for the extraordinary course of events in Europe, the violent and unprovoked conduct of the principal belligerents towards the U.S. justifies the feelings which it has existed in all good citizens.”
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He wailed about the British to his ambassadors. He told William Pinkney that “the British government continues to be equally ignorant of our character” and that “it is impossible not to see that the avowed object is no longer to retaliate on an enemy, but to prevent our legitimate commerce.” He concluded his note to Pinkney by asking, “How can a national expect to retain the respect of mankind whose government described to so ignoble a career?”
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And he exploded in a letter to Jefferson late in his first year in office about “the extremity to which things must rapidly proceed under the quackeries and corruption of an administration headed by such a being as [Spencer] Perceval [the new primate minister]?”
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In a long letter, William Duane, the editor of the
Aurora
, told Madison that he should consider military options and that the people would support him. The British, he told the president, were so tied up in their European wars that they paid no attention to any American pleas on impressment. “The course which is best adapted to the interests and policy of the United States, though it cannot be very well mistaken by men of sober minds, is not so easily pursued directly, as it would be were the attacks upon the nation open instead of insidious—or by other weapons than those of diplomacy and intrigue,” Duane told him.
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Madison was also told by many that he should not get involved in any war with Britain, and that if he did, he could not win. An ambassador, John Jackson,
wrote him in the autumn of 1809, “I would now as soon attempt to move the rocky top of the Alleghany to battle as make war with G B for existing differences without some new crisis to aid me. We…must play a cautious game.”
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Near Christmas, Pinkney wrote back that Madison should push the British government harder and added that the people of England did not loathe Americans as their government did. Peace could be brokered by a public-relations blitz. “They [British people] seem to have awaked for the flattering dreams by which their understandings have been so long abused. Disappointment and disaster have dissipated the brilliant expectations of undefined prosperity which had dazzled them into moral blindness,” he said.
¹¹

Madison was livid against England in his first Annual Message to Congress, delivered at the end of November 1809. He told the congressmen that America was, in fact, already involved in a “disastrous and protracted war, carried on in a mode equally injurious and unjust to the U.S.”
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As the new president he was happy, as Jefferson had been, that not only Congress but also various state legislatures had passed proclamations supporting the administration in its troubles with Great Britain, such as the Pennsylvania Assembly, whose proclamation read “we have the fullest confidence in the wisdom, the patriotism and the integrity of the administration of the general government and we pledge ourselves to co-operate with them to maintain…our national rights.”
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Similarly, the North Carolina legislature sent him a message agreeing with his stand and said that it agreed with “unqualified and unanimous approbation of the course which you have pursued…in times portentous and alarming as the present…citizens of the United States, unassisted by that firmness, wisdom and patriotism which have characterized your public conduct would, indeed, have much to fear…support with energy and at the risk of our lives and fortunes such measures as the government shall think proper.”
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War was in the air. Even former president John Adams, who despised Jefferson and Madison, wrote lengthy letters to newspapers espousing war over embargos or further diplomatic maneuvers. “I think a war would be less evil than a rigorous enforcement of the embargo,” Adams wrote, and he added that “no nation under the sun” would put up with the indignities that England had hurled at America. In a second letter, just as strident, Adams wrote that in the late 1790s he, as president, had assurances from French diplomats that they would never put into effect stringent sea laws as they did just a few years later. Adams wrote that he now felt betrayed.
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Throughout these years, Madison's men stood by him with loyalty and fierceness. Albert Gallatin, in a long letter to the
National Intelligencer
, wrote that
the British were continually trying to rewrite history by misquoting American officials and party leaders. He told British ministers in strong language that there was no difference in American policy toward England in the Madison administration than in that of Thomas Jefferson. He warned the Brits, too, that they must listen to Madison and not opposing party leaders. “The groundless accusations of foreign bias and influence have been generated solely by the virulence of party spirit; and they were adopted abroad as an apology or pretense for unprovoked aggressions,” he wrote.
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President Madison was tough with the British, and the longer they ignored him, the tougher he became. In late May 1809, as the temperature rose in Washington, the temperature rose in Madison's writings. He sent a message to Congress on May 23 that outlined a massive American buildup for war, including the spending of millions for national defense, the creation of a system of militia and a military call-up plan, plus the moving of all US gunboats to form a stronger navy. His message was clear. If Britain's leaders wanted war, Madison was happy to give it to them.
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So were many Americans. Congressmen rallied around Madison, and newspapers pledged their support. Robert Price, the head of the Washington and Jefferson Artillery Company, a militia unit in northern Virginia, said that his men were “ready to march at a moment's notice” to wherever the president needed them for a war with England.
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All over the country, political clubs at their meetings toasted Madison and, shortly afterward, the American seamen who were the object of the British searches and seizures. Newspapers began running letters from disgruntled seamen held in French or British ports or serving on British ships. One impressed American sailor wrote that “no man has ever yet writhed under the tyrant's lash without wishing to breathe the murmurs of his spirit and enlist the world in his cause.”
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Each search and seizure on the high seas or at a British port wound up described in American newspapers. The editor of the Philadelphia
Aurora
complained that the British were “disregarding the petty obligations of oaths and bonds, and other legal restraints, to swell the coffers of their principals.”
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During these years, Madison solidified much presidential power. He agreed with Gallatin's view that the presidential power Jefferson exercised in purchasing the Louisiana Territory could be used by him, or succeeding presidents, to purchase parts of or all of Florida.
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He also understood that Britain might be scheming to gain rights not only to Florida but to Cuba, too. Jefferson told Madison that the United States should buy Cuba from Spain, but, to calm down those who would think America too aggressive, put up a monument on
the southern shore of the island that would state the United States would not buy or take any islands south of Cuba. Madison declined.
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