James and Dolley Madison (33 page)

Every tiny village in the country seemed ready for war. The town of Lynn, in Massachusetts, appropriated a $7 per week salary for any local resident who joined the army in addition to his regular federal army pay. Another Massachusetts town bragged that its local militia now numbered 1,200 men and was growing daily. Banks in Newport, Rhode Island, ordered British companies to withdraw their money. Several towns and counties urged an immediate draft to raise a huge army. Maryland began to raise militia units with a goal of six thousand men and prepared to pay them out of state funds.
²³

Rumors flew. One man reported that, without question, the British had six frigates lying in harbors in Bermuda ready to attack American seaports.
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Not all Americans favored an armored clash with Britain, though. Many New Englanders were against it. In a column in the Federalist
Palladium
, a paper that Madison hated, a writer argued that England had a huge army and the United States only had one thousand men. England had a mammoth navy and the American navy consisted of just a handful of ships sailing under inexperienced captains. The war could cost as much as $25 million, perhaps even more, he argued, and Congress had appropriated little money for the army in 1812. It was not a winnable war, and, he added, it was a war that would not be popular with the people.
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Another writer argued that President Madison had overstepped his boundaries as commander in chief in declaring the war. He said that Massachusetts had been at the forefront in the revolution because America needed to separate from Britain and form a new, democratic government. Now, he argued, fears that the new, powerful government would run amok were all coming true.
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As early as 1810, New Englanders, including Madison's friends, were arguing that most of the sailors impressed by the British were English deserters anyway, so why go to war over that? Weren't the English right? “What right has the United States to protect a deserter from the service of a foreign nation, whilst in the practice of punishing its own citizens guilty of a similar offense…a war with Britain at once unites us as an ally to Bonaparte and will dissolve the union,” wrote one friend, Dr. George Logan.
²⁷

Many Americans were afraid that the United States would not only lose the war but be humiliated, too. Even Mrs. William Gale, the wife of the editor of the
National Intelligencer
, Madison's friend, was afraid of that. She wrote her mother that the British had a plan, that she was certain would succeed, under which
the capital would be captured by their troops and the president, vice president and the entire cabinet arrested. It would “render this nation a laughing stock to every other in the world,” she said.
²⁸

In a special session of the Massachusetts legislature, many members stood and spoke openly against the war. One legislator scoffed at Madison's reasons for the conflict. “This cursory view of the alleged causes of hostility, compared with your own observations, and recollection of the course of events, will enable you to judge not only of the sincerity of the administration, but of the solidity of their motives,” he said.
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And it was in Massachusetts where the phrase “Mr. Madison's War,” which would stick throughout the conflict and all of history, was coined by veteran essayist John Lowell, who made that the title of one of his 1812 political pamphlets. Another man who used the popular phrase about the struggle said he did so because “nobody else would father it” and then proceeded to blast the president for running it. He called it “a war of paradoxes” and added that “future historians will be extremely puzzled to know the hidden springs, the secret cause, of so paradoxical and extraordinary measure.” The writer joked that Madison's war policy must come from the secret files of the Paris police department.”
³⁰
That writer argued that since New England dominated American shipping, it was New England that would suffer the most from a war. New Englanders urged the administration to work out some peaceful solution to the navigation problems American vessels had with Britain.

A New Englander wrote a friend from Washington that anti-British riots in Baltimore the previous week were an unwelcomed opening to the conflict. “The intention is to overawe all opposition by means of mobs, and the ‘reign of terror' by our mad-caps is approved. May heaven protect our betrayed country.”
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Some newspaper editors attacked Madison with his own words. They dug up copies of the Federalist papers and reprinted Madison's essays stating that states' rights were just as important as federal rights and that America could not let the federal government overwhelm the states. They said that was exactly what Madison was doing now, as president.
³²

The
Palladium
attacked the war against England with venom. “The cruel and unnatural war, into which the folly and wickedness of our rulers, entangled in the wiles of Bonaparte, has plunged our ill-fated country leads to speculation and inquiries in which we meet with much doubt and uncertainty. What is to be the fate of our country?” its editor asked.
³³

Officials of several New England towns and counties jointly protested the war in a long letter to President Madison printed in numerous New England newspapers. They called the war “an injustice” and “morally wrong” and said
that the federal government was now treating residents of New England as enemies of the country, and not as friends. They were friends, too, they added with great pride, that had helped win the revolution.
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Two weeks after the conflict was declared, nearly seventy New England town officials called a special convention in Ipswich, Massachusetts, to see what the New England states should do about what a local newspaper called “the ruinous war.” Two weeks later, in a lengthy statement, the convention came out against the conflict. “It is impossible to submit in silence,” the chair wrote, “[when] a great people find themselves oppressed by their government, their rights neglected, their interests overlooked.” Citizens of Plymouth and other towns did the same thing, and most of them voted to oppose the war.
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Nearly two thousand citizens of Rockingham County, in New Hampshire, met at a convention to denounce it. “We have witnessed, with sincere and deep regret, a system of policy pursued by the general government, from the embargo of 1807 to the present time, tending most obviously, in our view, to the destruction of the commerce of the states,” the convention's official statement read.
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One man sneered, “I give you joy. I give you joy, friends from the bottom, the very bottom of my heart. A war with England! Thanks be to Mr. Jefferson. Thanks be to Mr. Madison. Thanks be to their illustrious fellow laborers, the very exact thing I wished !”
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One critic from Virginia, Madison's home state, expressed fears that everybody's taxes would be raised by the war. He said that the eleven million dollars the nation had to borrow to start the conflict would increase as the years of combat passed, and he assured friends that new taxes would be levied in each state to pay off the loans.
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The president ignored all of his critics. He found himself working alone more and more; he got things done. And the American president was in complete control of the war at all times. “Mr. Madison governs by himself,” wrote the French minister.
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The war caused newspaper editors throughout the country to weigh in on the 1812 presidential election, just a half a year away, in which Madison would surely seek a second term. Some supported him, some denounced him, and some wondered if he decided until the summer to start a war to garner timely patriotic support for his re-election bid. Would he suspend the election because of the war?

To some Federalists editors, it did not matter. They just hated him. “We allude to the deficiencies of the present administration with affectionate regret, and solely with a view to their amelioration. The ministers of the President are responsible to him and he is responsible to the people for their adequacy in
the duties of office. And our duty to our country will not suffer us to witness in silence the growing complaints of the insufficiency of [Madison].”
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It did not matter whom the Federalists nominated; they were behind him. That opposition candidate was a question mark for months, though, and wound up as a surprise. In the spring, New York Republicans, sour on Madison because of the embargo and transfixed by charismatic New York mayor DeWitt Clinton, sailed out of the Republican mainstream and nominated Clinton at their own convention. The Federalists, with no candidate, decided to back Clinton, too, in a “fusion” movement.

Most Republican newspapers supported Madison, but some supported Clinton. “The time when this nomination is urged demands its warmest support and forbids the admission of the faintest idea of postponing it. The administration must be stimulated to their best exertions, or the reputation of prosperity of the country sink into the most alarming jeopardy,” wrote one Clinton supporter.
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The
Palladium
wrote that the election of anyone but Madison “would bind the union, which seems now ready to be dissolved by the distracted doings of Madison and Co.” The editor noted that 91 of the 215 electoral votes were from New England and added that another few dozen anti-Madison votes could be round up in the Middle Atlantic States.
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Madison's opponents made fun of his height throughout the campaign, constantly referring to him as “the little man,” “the little president” and “the little man in the palace.”
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The highly personable DeWitt Clinton, eager to be president, decided to be all things to all voters. He was prowar, antiwar, and maybe-war. He was a nationalist and a states' rights champion, all in the same speech. He and his supporters were certain this big-tent approach would work.

Clinton's strategy failed miserably. Madison won the election, garnering 128 electoral votes to just 89 for Clinton. Observers attributed most of his success to the patriotism and support caused by the war (he was the first president to be re-elected in wartime. No president running for re-election in wartime has ever lost).

None of this criticism bothered James Madison. He moved on with dramatic steps. The president leaked the complete strength of the United States Army, with a list of officers and men, to the
National Intelligencer
, which immediately published the information. All the leading newspapers in the country reprinted the lists.
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Americans were not afraid of the British.

Mrs. Madison was a radical patriot throughout the war, never giving an inch of compromise in her support of her husband. One night, her friend
Mrs. William Thornton stood within earshot of Dolley and Secretary of State Monroe. The pair were standing in front of a window, watching a small regiment of army troops march down the street. “I wish we had ten thousand of them,” said the First Lady, and an angry Monroe answered that “they [the English] are all damned Rascals from the highest to the lowest.”

“I wish we could sink them all to the bottomless pit,” Dolley answered.

“She was absolutely violent against the English,” wrote Thornton later.
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Nobody explained the success of the war better than Madison contemporary Daniel Barnard after the president's death. Barnard said that the war was waged “to compel the enemy to forego his injurious practices, not for the price of forcing him to a formal recognition of our doctrines, or to a formal promise of good behavior in the future, but to teach him that we understood our rights if he did not; that, hold what opinions he would, the actual violation of these rights would no longer be tolerated and that the practices of which we complained must cease now and cease forever; and that henceforward our security should be found not in any concessions on his part if he chose to withhold them, but in the promptness with which the good right arm of a brave and gallant nation should be bared to do battle for justice and the right, in the name and by the strength of the God of armies.”
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During the War of 1812, all remained the same at the White House. The First Lady went out of her way keep the social life of the capital running at full speed, uninterrupted by the conflict, a war that, after all, was very far away. She continued the pace of hosting dinners, parties, receptions, and balls; living with relatives; shopping with friends; attending concerts; receiving visitors daily at the White House; serving as her husband's public relations director; and, as always, being the best-dressed woman in America. Dolley said good-bye to two young women from Virginia who had stayed with her that winter and reminded both that the parties never stopped at the White House, war or no war. They left, she bragged to a friend, “after having their heads turned with gaiety beau. Last night we were all at the Russian Minister's party which was brilliant, and pleasant.”

She ended the letter with a note that a good friend of hers would visit her on his return to her city. The “good friend”? It was Judge Story, who as a congressman just a few years before had been critical of Dolley. Now he, like all who started out critical of the First Lady, was in her complete confidence.
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Dolley maintained two worlds in Washington, one with the war and the other without it. She insisted that the social life of the White House and the city continue unabated, and then, on her own, in the daytime, spent time on war matters with her friends and husband. The nonstop parties at the White House and embassies assured all that the United States was not hurt at all by the conflict with England, that it would soon emerge from it victorious.

Dolley prided herself on increasing the number of attractive women at White House parties. “Miss Hay is to be in the city soon, as well as Madame Bonaparte
& a multitude of beauties,” she wrote her friend Phoebe Morris with pride. She conducted polls with young women she knew to determine whom everybody thought was the best looking woman at parties. She evaluated two women for a friend and then decided that they were both winners in the unofficial beauty contest. “You thought Miss Mayo less beautiful than Miss Caton. I think she has rather the advantage in this, but Miss C. excels in grace,” Dolley decided.
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Dolley even wrote friends in Paris to buy expensive hats and dresses for her. “As you have everything and we have nothing, I will ask the favor of you to send me by a safe vessel large headdresses, a few flowers, feathers, gloves and stockings, black and white, and any other pretty things…draw upon my husband for the amount,” she wrote Mrs. Joel Barlow, who lived in Paris with her diplomat husband.
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Mrs. Barlow complied, poking her head into all the high-end women's clothing shops in Paris and putting together a collection so vast and expensive that the shipping costs alone were over $2,000. She sent Dolley dresses, shoes, hats, and plenty of turbans. The First Lady did not know it, but she had an entire wartime ensemble. One of those dresses she wore at the 1815 White House New Year's Day party, just before word of the peace treaty and the victory at New Orleans arrived. She dazzled the crowd. She wore a robe of rose-colored satin, trimmed with ermine; with gold chains and clasps around her waist and arms; and with a white, satin turban upon her head, with a tiara of white ostrich plumes. “The towering feathers and excessive throng distinctly pointed her station wherever she moved,” said Mrs. Seaton. Just two weeks earlier, she appeared at a ball, dressed in a sky-blue, striped, velvet dress, with a white turban adorned with emeralds and gold-and-white feathers. Two weeks prior to that, she hosted a reception at which she wore a white, cambric gown, buttoned up to the neck and ruffled around the bottom. She wore a peach-colored silk scarf over her shoulders, and the whole ensemble was topped off by a peach-colored turban.
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She bought all the elegant dresses she could find and encouraged everyone she knew in Washington to throw more parties. She told friends how much she anticipated the start of the racing season at the end of October 1812 and all of its social functions, and she wrote with delight to a friend that the Hamiltons had given an elegant ball at the Navy Yard. “They danced til morning,” she wrote to a friend. She was pleased, too, she told all, that the French minister was not letting the war bother him. He was paving the road to his embassy. “[He] intends to frolick continually,” she said.
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Why did she spend so lavishly and entertain so heartily while the country was at war? Public appearance. Dolley wanted all of Washington, all of America,
to know that the president had no fear of England. Life would roll along as usual, parties and visits, as it always had. The war would be won by America. Nothing had changed. Nothing would. Everybody in America might have been nervous about the conflict, but not the First Lady nor the president.

Those who met her in those years were impressed and surprised at her appearance. One woman later wrote of her in those tension-filled years, “I can see her now. As we entered [the room], she was crossing the crowded vestibule, conducted by two fair girls, one on each side. She surrendered herself to their sprightly guidance with her benign sweetness. Her hair hung in ringlets on each side of her face, surrounded by the snowy folds of her unvarying turban, ornamented on one side by a few heads of green wheat. She may have worn jewels, but if she did they were so eclipsed by her inherent charms as to be unnoticed.”
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Her husband worked harder than ever when the year 1813 began. He was consumed by the war and madder at Great Britain as each day, and each battle, went by. He told Congress that England's sea policies were “a system which, at once, [were] violating the rights of other nations and resting on a mass of forgery and perjury unknown to other times” and that it was “distinguished by the deformity of its features and the depravity of its character.”
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Later that winter, Madison, seeing the war clearly as always, offered a succinct analysis of the fighting to friend John Nicholas. He told him that the United States should have entered the war with a large army and a powerful navy, but had not. Then they had lost early battles of Canada when General William Hull surrendered his army. “The decisive importance of this [a strong army] has always been well understood, but until the first prospect ceased, other means of attaining it were repressed by certain difficulties in carrying them into effect,” he said, and he added that as commander in chief he had to veto several radical measures to assault Canada again. In his letter to Nicholas, and in letters to others, Madison exhibited a keen sense of what could be done and what could not.
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He paid equal attention to his regular army and militia units and, to do so, was in touch with people all over the country, not just in Washington. He was half commander in chief, half cheerleader. For example, in the late summer of 1813, he wrote a Kentucky man, “If any doubt had ever existed of the patriotism or bravery of the citizens of Kentucky, it would have been turned into an admiration of both by the tests to which the war has put them. Nor could any who are acquainted with your history and character wish the military services of your fellow citizens to be under better direction than yours.”
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By the end of 1813, Madison had accrued as much military knowledge as his generals and secretary of war. He sent careful and detailed analyses of the
war and the movements of both sides to all and understood why each side was operating the way it was. He could have been a general himself by that time.
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He had disappointing messages from his commanders all spring. General Henry Dearborn wrote him that his army was at a standstill because little of its equipment had arrived from the quartermaster's corps. Who was in charge of the quartermaster corps, the section of the army that issued supplies? It was Dearborn himself. He not only shrugged off his failures but also said he could not even do the job. “It is beyond my power,” he told Madison.
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The president was happy to have Russia mediate the conflict but did not see much hope. He told William Plumer, a former Federalist senator from New Hampshire who had switched parties and was now the Republican governor of New Hampshire in April 1813, that only England could end the war. “Whether or not we are to have peace this year depends upon the enemy; our disposition & terms being known to everybody.” He added that there would be no cease-fire “unless the B. govt. should entertain views & hopes with respect to this country.”
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It seemed like every day someone in Congress or an important person in the government sent him lengthy letters full of diplomatic and military advice. They were all well-intentioned, but, requiring responses, did little more than take up the valuable time of the president.
¹³

President Madison worked tirelessly on the war, staying at the office seven days a week and often each night, too. The stress on him rose dramatically by the middle of June 1813. The army and navy had suffered significant losses, and press criticism of the war had grown. Congress balked at the administration's plea for more money for the war and demanded a lengthy explanation of its supervision by the president. His frail body could not take the burden of the work and pressure, and he became very ill, wracked with a high fever, along with the return of the general weakness that had annoyed him all of his life. His doctors, not knowing what to do, merely prescribed quinine and plenty of rest. Dolley was not satisfied. She put the president to bed, monitored his care, gave him his quinine, washed him, dressed him, and nursed him twenty-four hours a day. She was terrified that he was going to die. The First Lady did not tell anyone of her fears, though, in order to prevent panic. A president dying at the height of a war? How would power be transferred to the vice president for the first time in history? Would the enemy step up the offensive to take advantage of a shaken country?

Others broadcast the bad news, though. One of the first to discover how sick Madison had become was new congressman Noah Webster of Massachusetts. He had visited the White House to give Madison paperwork from Congress and thought the president was very sick. “I did not like his looks any better than his
Administration,” he said. Later, Webster was back again, and Madison looked worse. This time he was in bed, under the covers, drenched in sweat, Dolley at his side. Webster came back a few days later and reported that “Madison still sick…I went…to the Palace to present the resolutions. The President was in his bed sick of a fever his night cap on his head, his wife attending him.” On June 19, Webster was back a third time and was surprised that Madison had taken a bad turn. “He is worse today,” he wrote.
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The president's close friend, Monroe, asked politicians to stay away from the White House until Madison was better and told friends that he seemed stricken with a fever that would not go away. He knew how ill the president had often felt and that the chief executive had not been away from the White House for more than two weeks in two entire years because of the war. He was physically and emotionally battered and very vulnerable to illness.

The deathwatch began. Various resolutions of near-condolence were offered in the House and Senate. The
National Intelligencer
started to print daily health reports on the president. Republican newspapers wrote about him as if he were dead already. Former president John Adams, in Massachusetts, told friends that he heard Madison had just four months to live. “His death, in the circumstances in which the Republic is placed, would be a veritable national calamity,” said French minister M. Serrurier.

The Federalist newspapers were sure Madison was going to die and lamented that his vice president, Elbridge Gerry, would make a poor replacement. Some speculated that the aging Gerry would die, too, and that Henry Clay would somehow wind up in charge. Some called for an immediate change in the Constitution to produce a better successor.
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At this point, in the middle of June, in an extraordinary move and angry with everybody, the First Lady shut the bedroom door and cancelled all White House functions. She did not permit anybody, not even the vice president or cabinet members, to see Madison while he recovered. He remained bedridden for three entire weeks; not even close friend Monroe could get in to see him. Numerous friends wrote her, begging for information about the president, but she refused to answer any of those letters, keeping her husband's condition very secretive. He was under the care of his wife and only his wife. The rumors now escalated. Had the president died? Was he incapacitated? If so, who was acting as president? Who was in charge? Was Dolley running the war? The country?
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It was the high-water mark of Madison's life. He had feared an illness just like this since he was a young man, certain that it would kill him. If he did not die, he would surely be incapacitated. He would have to stop work, whatever that work was, and permanently retire to Montpelier. This was doomsday.