James and Dolley Madison (4 page)

“I had no objection to burning arsenals, dockyards, frigates, buildings, stores, barracks etc…. but we were horrified at the order to burn the elegant Houses of Parliament,” wrote one young British officer.
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Weeks later, the British press bitterly criticized the army for torching Washington, DC, and singled out Admiral Cockburn for their most vicious scorn. The
London Statesman
called him “a buccaneer” and wrote that “the cossacks spared Paris, but we spared not the capital of America.” The
British Annual Register of 1814
called the burning of the capital “barbarism.”
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The Capitol building was immense. It sat on a slight hill overlooking the rest of the town. The structure was three stories high. It was not finished. The two enormous wings, the Senate and House of Representatives, were intact, but to get to either, one had to take a wooden plank walkway that connected them. The dome above the building, soon to be one of the most famous in the world, was not there.

Troops entered through doors to the House of Representatives. Many said later that they were stunned at the beauty of the large chamber, with its elegant desks and seats and sixty-seven-foot-high ceiling. The British fired rockets into the ceiling, expecting it to burn, fall down, and set the rest of the chamber on fire. They did not realize that the ceiling was metal; it did not burst into flames. Then they piled up all the wooden furniture that they could find and made a large bonfire. The heat and flames from the bonfire ignited the desks and walls and the entire structure soon started to burn. Within a half hour, most of the building was engulfed in flames. It was a dark and cloudless night, and the sight of the rising flames, soaring into the night sky like crimson fingers, could be seen for miles. Those who had fled Washington watched from their safe houses in Georgetown or Virginia, miles away, and grimaced as the sky was lit bright orange with the flames.
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“You never saw a drawing room so brilliantly lighted as the whole city was that night,” wrote Mary Hunter from her home in town. “Few thought of going to bed—they spent the night in gazing on the fires and lamenting the disgrace of the city.”
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Nearby villages like Georgetown were overcrowded with refugees. “Night. Ten o'clock. The streets of this quiet village [Georgetown], which never before witnessed confusion, are now filled with carriages bringing out citizens, and baggage wagons and troops. Mr. Bentley's house is now crowded; he has been the whole evening sitting at the supper table, giving refreshment to soldiers and travelers. Every house in the village is equally full,” wrote Margaret Bayard Smith, so stricken with fear that she told friends the government would have to abandon Washington and move somewhere else.
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At about 11 p.m., after the Capitol was set on fire, dozens of troops rode up to and walked into the vacant White House of James and Dolley Madison. They trudged through the house on an inspection tour and to survey the building in order to determine the best way to set it ablaze. They were astonished when they entered the dining room. They may have noticed that a large painting had been removed from the wall, but their eyes focused on the table. It was laid out for a dinner party for thirty or forty people, and a dozen or more bottles of wine lay in buckets of ice, all set earlier by Paul Jennings and other servants on the orders of the First Lady. The British had not eaten much all day, had been in combat, and had marched six long miles down the highway to Washington. They were tired and hungry. Dozens of them sat down in the dining room and enjoyed a delicious dinner and some of America's best wines. The spectacle enraged the American people.

Finished with their surprise dinner party, the soldiers went about their work to destroy the White House. First, the men looted the building, stealing everything they could find that marauders who went through it earlier had not taken. One man grabbed one of the president's hats and held it aloft on the tip of his bayonet. He said that if the troops were unable to capture “the little President,” they could at least bring his hat to England. Another soldier stole the president's dress sword. Others took some of his clothing and jewelry that probably belonged to Dolley.

The mansion was still full of stacks of kindling wood for the many fireplaces. The troops spread the wood in front of wooden furniture, drapes, and other items that seemed combustible. Others simply set wallpaper, books, and drapes on fire in individual rooms and let them burn. Within minutes, all of the rooms in the building, the heart of American heritage and freedom, were on fire. The troops and officers, happy with their work, withdrew and watched the structure incinerate from the street. They were disappointed that the thick, sandstone walls of the outer structure did not burn, though, permitting reconstruction of the building much later.

That night, the troops, on orders, burned down the Treasury building,
one block from the White House. They were going to burn the nearby War Department building, but the high command rejected that. There was an attempt to burn a local bank, but that was rejected, too. They were sometimes stopped by residents of the town, who begged them on the streets in front of the buildings not to destroy America's landmarks. William Thornton, an architect, ran to the Patent Office building to try to take art treasures out of it when he heard it would be burned. He encountered British troops in front of it and begged them to leave it alone. If they destroyed it, he told them, they “would be like the soldiers who burned the legendary library at Alexandria” two thousand years earlier. They did not. The British had certainly done enough work for one night, destroying America's Capitol building, its presidential mansion, and the Treasury building.
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One of the trips Admiral Cockburn made with his men that night was to the offices of the
National Intelligencer
newspaper, the paper of record for government activities. The editor had fled on news that the British were coming into town, and the offices were empty by the time the British soldiers arrived with Cockburn. First, he ordered them to burn down the building, but the quick arrival of four women who lived in houses that surrounded the newspaper halted that. They pleaded with Cockburn that the flames would leap to their homes and destroy them. He canceled the order. Then Cockburn told his men to take the hundreds of books and files in the newspaper's small library and pile them up in the street. They were burned. Cockburn then ordered them to destroy all of the printing presses and metal used to make letters for stories, and then trash the office. He wanted to make sure the city's most prominent paper did not publish for quite some time. “Make sure all the ‘C's are smashed,” he told them, “I don't want any more abuse of my name.” (All of this did little good; the newspaper was printing again, in smaller-sized editions, one week later.
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)

Bad weather saved further depredations in the American capital. The next day, Thursday, the region was battered by terrible thunderstorms that dumped several inches of rain on Washington in wide, unending sheets of water. Small, fierce tornadoes, a rarity in the Chesapeake region, whipped through the area, knocking down buildings like they were made of paper, uprooting large, hundred-year-old trees, knocking over carriages, terrifying horses, and in one area of the city forcing an entire building to collapse, killing several British soldiers inside of it. The dreadful weather, reports of American soldiers still in the area regrouping for a fight, and the realization that they were some distance from their ships in Maryland convinced the British to leave the city and march back to the Patuxent River.
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On Wednesday, the night of the fire, the whereabouts of the president and First Lady were largely unknown. The president, some cabinet officers, two dragoons from the army, and a few servants rode around northern Virginia, evading British troops and seeking shelter. The president missed his wife. Madison's first stop was Wiley's Tavern, where he planned to spend the night and then reunite with his wife the following day. He was there only a short time when soldiers arrived with (untrue) news that British patrols were riding through northern Virginia, looking for him. He and his entourage then rode to the Great Falls of the Potomac, hoping to make a crossing and reunite with General Winder's army near Georgetown. The party was unable to cross the river, though, and turned back. One report had him sleeping in a grimy, old cabin in a forest, with most of the others sleeping on the grounds around it. There were other reports that he spent the night at Salona, a 466-acre estate owned by a friend, Rev. William Maffitt. It was a large, brick mansion only four miles from Washington.
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The president was supposed to ride to Wren's Tavern, in Virginia, to meet his wife. On the stormy Thursday, he arrived there when darkness fell, had some dinner, and then left after only one hour. He told his hosts he had to find his wife; he did not really know where she was. He was halted by the storm, though, and sought shelter at the Crossroads Tavern, where he spent the night. Dolley had gone on to Wiley's Tavern, an inn on the road from Georgetown to Leesburg, on her husband's orders. She received a harsh welcome. Men and women driven from their homes by the British and fed up with the war yelled at her when she arrived and blamed her and Madison for the war and the loss of their houses. Dolley spent the night in her room for safety.

The next day, she left Wiley's and drove to the home of George Minor and his wife, her friends. The house was jammed with refugees from Washington who knew the Minors. Dolley was not scorned there. She decided to spend her time there not as a bedraggled refugee on the run from the enemy, but as the First Lady of the United States. She wore her best gowns and her makeup, and carried herself with great elegance and dignity. All who spent the time there with her remembered the gracious way that she presented herself and spent her time with them.

There, at the Minorses', Dolley watched the fires rising in the sky over Washington. Matilda Roberts, a seven-year-old child at the house with her, was astonished by the sight. “I thought the world was on fire,” she wrote later in her diary.
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“Such a flame I have never seen since.”

On Friday, President Madison, who had still not found Dolley, was riding
in Maryland, trying to find General Winder's scattered army in order to rally them for an attack against the British troops holding Washington. When he received news that the British had left, he pulled hard on the reins of his horse, turned around, and rode back to the capital. The president of the United States, aged sixty-four, a man who had complained bitterly of physical ailments all of his life, including rheumatoid arthritis, had now finished nearly four entire days in the saddle, commanding troops in the field, making decisions about the war, and getting his wife out of Washington and himself into it between British regiments that planned to seize him if they could. His forces had been badly defeated and pushed back and his capital burned. None of the citizens of Washington, returning with him, thought the president had done a good job. Those who saw him on his horse during the attack and torching of Washington criticized him and even scolded him. Some angry men sketched vicious cartoons about him, and others wrote scathing poems about the president. Rumors flew that there were threats on his life by Washingtonians. His wife even feared that someone with a gun would shoot him if he saw him during those turbulent days.

President Madison was demoralized by what he saw in the capital, as was everyone else. Margaret Bayard Smith lamented in her journal, “The poor capitol! Nothing but its blacken'd walls remained. Four or five houses in the neighbourhood were likewise in ruins…but none was so thoroughly destroy'd as the House of Representatives and the President's House. Those beautiful pillars in that Representatives' Hall were crack'd and broken, the roof, that noble dome, painted realized that he had no army, no home and no wife and carved with such beauty and skill, lay in ashes in the cellars beneath the smouldering ruins….”
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The president of the United States, Dolley's “great little Madison,” leaned forward on his horse as he reached the front of the White House, looked at the charred building, and frowned. “Mr. Madison's War” had now become a disaster, personally as well as politically. That hot Friday afternoon, the fierce storms were gone a half day and the countryside was sot with rain, demolished buildings, and fallen trees, and the forlorn president realized that he had no army, no home, and no wife.

Yellow Fever struck the city of Philadelphia, the largest in America, in the quiet, lazy summer of 1793. It arrived suddenly, without warning, as the Yellow Fever always did in colonial America, and attacked voraciously. Thousands died. Medical experts estimated that nearly five thousand people, or close to 20 percent of the residents of the community, were killed in the epidemic. So many people died each day, and their deaths were so well publicized around the nation, that betting-obsessed gamblers wagered tens of thousands of dollars on the final death toll, turning the Yellow Fever casualties into a macabre lottery.

Many people fled Philadelphia, traveling on horseback, by carriage, in wagons, or by whatever form of transportation they could find, led by President George Washington. The president was not afraid of medical catastrophe. He had not only stayed in the army when smallpox struck his troops, and parts of the country, in the winter of 1776–1777, but also invented a new way to vaccinate his troops, and thousands of civilians, by eliminating the preinoculation “rest” period of two weeks, long believed necessary by the medical profession, and inoculating people at once. Washington had been struck by smallpox at age nineteen and survived. He still had pockmarks on his face from the attack. The general told his soldiers what he wanted to do and then supervised town meetings, held in halls, churches, and large barns, to explain the new procedure to civilians who lived near his winter camp, and other winter army camps in America. His innovative practice worked; few of those inoculated right away died in the epidemic. Many who were not inoculated perished,
and Washington and his soldiers had to bury them in grey village churchyards. General Washington had been praised throughout America, and in Europe, for his efforts and successes. The medically adept president did not feel he was any match for the tidal wave of Yellow Fever that swept over Philadelphia in 1793, though, and he fled the metropolis with his wife, Martha, and his servants to Mount Vernon, on the banks of the Potomac River in Virginia, hundreds of miles away.

American doctors did not know how Yellow Fever arrived, and they did not know how to treat it. They assumed, as doctors all over the world did, that it grew in contaminated water in overly hot weather and that anyone who drank the tainted water was susceptible to it. They also believed that it had been brought into Philadelphia from the Caribbean by sailors who had caught it there. They were also certain that it was contagious, that anyone could catch it, even those not in contact with someone sickened from it. The doctors offered rest periods and odd diets to fight it, but had no real cure. If anyone in a family came down with it, people in contact with them might be afflicted by it, too. There was no way to contain it, either; at least smallpox could be fought with quarantine. The fever had struck again and again in the United States throughout the eighteenth century, usually in warm-weather states. It killed a large percentage of those who contracted it and made another high percentage of people very ill. The Yellow Fever spread, and spread quickly. In the summer of 1793, it rolled through the streets of Philadelphia toward Dolley Todd, her husband, and her family.

Yellow Fever brings about an awful death. It causes high fever; chills; aching joints; intense stomach pains; jaundiced, yellow skin; liver failure; and black vomit. People struck by it can die within a day; some linger for a few days before succumbing, and some lucky victims survive it. Parents who were afflicted by the fever transmitted it to their children, who transmitted it to their friends, who then transmitted it to
their
parents.

Nearly half the population of Philadelphia fled along with the president, including Dolley. Entire families fled together, packing supplies and clothing into any carts, wagons, or carriages they could find and, horses struggling to pull the oversized loads of people and supplies, left town as fast as they could. It was a flight that took place in a near panic. Dolley's husband, John, sent her and the two children, one just a baby, to a community called Gray's Ferry, on the banks of the Schuykill River just southeast of Philadelphia, where he hoped they would be safe. Dolley was carried down the roads to Gray's on a litter amid what appeared to be a thick army of refugees, of all shapes and sizes, professions, ages, colors, and religions, seeking safe shelter from the disease. Dolley's two children went with her.
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Her husband did not. John returned to Yellow Fever–ravaged Philadelphia, a ghost town now with so many residents gone, dead, or dying, to take care of his parents, who had come down with the fever. He put himself to work trying to organize the care for neighbors stricken with the sickness, a bold but dangerous thing to do. He also helped others take care of business in the city, left unattended since so many clerks had left. He rode out of town on horseback every week or so to visit Dolley, who begged him not to go back. She was terrified that he would catch the fever, too. This went on for several months. He often wrote her affectionate letters. “I hope my dear Dolley is well & my sweet little Payne can lisp mama in a stronger voice than when his papa left him. I wish he was here to run after Mr. Withy's ducks. He would have fine sport,” he wrote in July.
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Each time his visit with her and the children was over, Dolley would beg her husband to remain with them and be safe. She even tried to get her brother-in-law, James, to intercede to get John to join her permanently at Gray's Ferry.

“Oh, my dear brother, what a dread prospect has thy last letter presented to me,” she wrote, adding that “love'd husband in perpetual danger.” She told her brother-in-law that she had “repeatedly entreated John to leave home…but alas he cannot leave his father…. Is it too late for their removal? Or can no interferance of the earthly friends rescue them from the too general fate?”
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Her husband, John, and her son William both died from the fever on October 14, 1794. Dolley, who had been ill for weeks prior to their deaths, although not from the fever, was crushed. It was a dual tragedy, though, that would show her inner strength, a strength that would later save a nation.

Those who knew her felt badly that she had lost both her husband and her baby on the same day. They could see that she was not only staggering along physically but was emotionally distraught. As if to add insult to injury, right after the double burial, she was stunned by the reluctance of the Todd family to give her the inheritance that her husband had left her.

“My poor dear Dolley,” wrote her mother, “what does she and will she suffer…the same day consigned her dear husband and her little babe to the silent grave,” Mary Payne told Dolley's nurse. She added that with John Todd dead, her daughter had a grand total of only nineteen dollars to her name, and she owed that money for her husband's and child's funeral and other debts.

Mary Payne, fed up with Philadelphia, the Yellow Fever, and the Todds, left and traveled to Virginia, where she moved in with her daughter Lucy. Lucy had married George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of the president, and lived in grand style on a large plantation with servants. Dolley was left all alone in Philadelphia, sick, grief stricken, and penniless.

But she was determined. She wrote her brother-in-law, James, and demanded that he give her all of her husband's estate, money as well as property. Her brother-in-law refused. America in 1794 was a man's world, and a widow had little standing in the courts to sue. In most states, a widow could not sue; she had to hire a man to sue on her behalf. Much to her disappointment, her husband had thought too highly of her. John Todd knew that the men one usually hired to help a grieving widow were not needed for his wife. No man was as smart, competent, resourceful, and capable as she was, in or out of court. So, in his will, in which he clearly left her everything, he did not name any executors or aides to help her. She was left all alone to battle in court for an estate that clearly should have been hers. James knew all of this but did not know his feisty sister-in-law as well as he should have. She was relentless. Dolley started a nearly daily letter-writing campaign to James to get the estate. He refused.

Then, fed up with her letters and growing angrier by the day, James wrote her that he would agree to selling off parts of the estate, month by month, and sending whatever money came in from the sale to her. He would start by selling the books in John's library. Dolley was furious. “I was hurt my dear Jamy that the idea of his library should occur as a proper source for raising money. Books from which he wished his child improved shall remain sacred and I would feel the pinching hand of poverty before I disposed of them,” she wrote.
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He was adamant in his plan to sell off the books and then the rest of the estate, piece by piece. She wrote him again. “I am constrained once more for request and if a request is not sufficient—to demand that they may be delivered this day,” she said of the estate papers. “I cannot wait…without material injury to my affairs.”

Her brother-in-law, probably with a smug look on his face, still refused. Then Dolley startled him; she retained a lawyer. She hired a friend of her late husband's, William Wilkins, to sue James Todd to get all of the property, house, and monies in her husband's estate. She meant business. Her brother-in-law, taken aback by the suit, the boldness of Dolley, and the angry demeanor of his sister-in-law and her lawyer, gave in. Dolley received everything from her husband's estate, and immediately. James did not get anything; nor did anyone else on her husband's side of the family.

The receipt of the house, property, and monies made Dolley a comfortable widow. She was twenty-five, in the prime of life, with a home. She would now slowly get back on her feet and try to make a life for herself and her baby, Payne. She took off her black grieving clothes and settled into her house again, and felt a very long way from her log-cabin beginnings in the thick forests of the Piedmont plateau in North Carolina.

The new and very lovely widow Todd was considered quite a prize for the men of Philadelphia, who could not resist looking at her every time she strolled down a city street. Distinguished merchants, lawyers, and bankers gawked at her as she walked by, a thin smile always on her lips. She was a very tall woman, nearly 5'8” in height, well proportioned, with a large bust and wide hips, and she possessed a beautiful and expressive face. She dressed well, attended Quaker meetings when she could, spent time shopping in the slowly reviving Philadelphia business district, went to plays and concerts, and met hundreds of men, many smitten with her good looks and vivacious personality. By this time, she had already made the acquaintances of many congressmen and government workers in Philadelphia, the nation's capital, through visits to her mother's inn, where many of them lived. Her lawyer, William Wilkins, was one, and another was Aaron Burr, the congressman from New York. Both had resided at her mother's inn in downtown Philadelphia for long periods of time and met Dolley there whenever she visited. She had become so close to Burr that she made him guardian for her son.
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One day, Burr, who would later become one of the most infamous figures in US history, took her aside. He told Dolley that a congressman who was a friend of his, James Madison of Virginia, one of the country's most renowned bachelors, would like to meet her. The two had never met, but Madison apparently knew a great deal about her. He had been investigating her, checking up on her family and talking to people who knew her to find out what she was like. She was reluctant to go. Some people had said admirable things about Madison, but others had criticized him. Many felt about Madison the way Washington Irving of New York did; Irving later wrote that Madison was “a withered little applejohn.” A Washington socialite later said of Madison that he was “mute, cold and repressive.”
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Dolley was charming and outgoing. She was, friends and relatives said, a person who could get along with anyone, regardless of their station in life. Madison, she knew, based on what she had read about him and what everybody said, was shy and low-key. She was twenty-five years old, and he was forty-three, an age considered quite old in that era. She was a flamboyant dresser, and he dressed in black, head to toe, nearly every day. She loved loud and raucous parties; he loved quiet moments in front of a fireplace. She was a Quaker, and he was an Episcopalian. She hated slavery, and his family owned dozens of slaves. She was a relatively uneducated girl from the woods of North Carolina; he was one of the most brilliant men in the world. She was an unknown, unaccomplished
widow; he was the author of the US Constitution, a close friend of both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and one of the most important congressmen in America. She was one of the tallest women in America at 5'8” and had a shapely, buxom figure. He was one of the shortest men in America, at 5'4” and weighed only about one hundred pounds.