James and Dolley Madison (53 page)

All was not over when Dolley finally received her $30,000 from Congress. Her friends in Washington were terrified that Payne Todd, who had her power
of attorney, would abscond with the money and leave her penniless. “Her son Todd is here playing the fool in high style as far as I can hear. It will never do to let him get hold of this money, or to have anything to do with it. The man is deranged if he ever had any sense…what orders she has given her son I know not, but if she has given him any to pay her debts with it [money] will certainly be squandered,” John Campbell, the treasurer of the United States, wrote. Another public official, George Featherstonhaugh, was absolutely convinced that Payne Todd would loot Dolley's accounts. “It is, however, too well known that his intimates are the Blacklegs and Gamblers of Washington. Their gigs and flasks stand at his door and he appears to be in their hands. Mr. Todd's habits and facilities of temper will probably make him their victim and this money will in all likelihood be lost to Mrs. Madison,” he said. To prevent that, Congress authorized payment of the $30,000 over several years.
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All of this stress often made Dolley sick. Her eye problems returned. Payne sent her books written by oculists and doctors applied leeches and blisters to the backs of her ears and even bled her several times. She bathed her eyes with milk and water plus sassafras tea. Dr. Physick, who treated her for her knee thirty years earlier, sent a lotion to be applied to her eyes. Local doctors visited her and gave her herbal medicines. All of this did little good. “My general health has suffered much,” she said in the autumn of 1836.
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She looked and felt terrible. Her brother said that “the inflammation around the eyes is a little abated, but not so the soreness and rawness, and the discharge is unchanged in consistence, and perhaps increased in quantity, and the white balls are slightly inflamed; one more so than the other. The itching and burning sensations of the lids the same.”
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Her illnesses often caused her to cancel visits to friends, such as one in the spring of 1838. “I feel too dull and dismal to appear before you this evening,” she wrote her host.
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Her relatives advised her to sell all of Montpelier and move to Richard Cutts's home, a two-story brick house on Lafayette Square, in Washington, that she and her husband owned and lent to Cutts and his family and which was now occupied by the family of Senator William Preston. The Prestons could move elsewhere, and she would be independent and back in Washington with her lifelong collection of friends. The house was a handsome, two-story brick home with dormer windows on the third floor. It overlooked a square full of trees that was populated by birds. Washingtonians enjoyed walking there. In Washington, she would also be free of the burdens of running and paying for Montpelier.

Before he died, Dolley and her husband had been following events in Washington, particularly the social whirl, at a distance at Montpelier. Dolley
could never completely detach herself from the social life of the capital. “I hope you will soon be at the parties and will give me a detail of what is going forward, amidst the various characters in Washington,” she wrote her niece in 1831. A friend wrote Dolley breathlessly that 2,800 people were invited to a party President Adams gave at the White House for Andrew Jackson. “It was really a very brilliant party & admirably well arranged. The ladies climbed the chairs & benches to see General Jackson and Mrs. Adams with him, which gratified the general curiosity.”
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Dolley's friend Judith Walker Rives went to a wedding in the capital and joined over one thousand other guests. “Everybody appeared in fine humor and finer dress, but, alas, such crushing of flowers, feathers, silks, satins, crape never was witnessed before. I am sure the rooms after the route was over must have resembled a [mess].” Rives added, a glint in her eye, that “the spirit of dissipation appears now to be reviving.”
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It was not just the parties that the Madisons longed to hear about from friends but also the city itself, which had grown so quickly during their sixteen years there and continued to expand. Friend Judith Walker Rives wrote in 1829 of “the broad bosom of the Potomac, sparkling in the sun and covered with little vessels with their white sails swelling in the breeze. Beneath our feet as it were lies the whole city, sometimes blazing in the beams of the rising or setting sun and sometimes so completely enveloped in mist that the few stately looking buildings on the opposite heights appear like castles in the air.”
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Edward Coles, Madison's former secretary, who was carving out a nice life for himself in Illinois, filled his letters with hot rumors he had heard out of Washington, such as one that a bank in London had forgiven James Monroe a large debt because of some secret services Monroe rendered to them to help in business with the French government. He told her of government officials in New York who were fired for taking city money and spending it on themselves, of boarding-school heads forced out of town by rising housing costs. He thrived on news of secret organizations, such as “The Club,” a group of powerful Washingtonians who met at each other's homes every Friday night. The Madisons devoured the news and gossip while in retirement at Montpelier.

And, as always, Coles would slash people whom he did not like. In a letter to Dolley in 1832, he slammed the Gallatins, Hannah and Albert. “She has become very fleshy & he much changed in his appearance by wearing an ugly wig,” he wrote.
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Mrs. Madison moved back to Washington on a part-time basis, in the fall and winter of 1837, the flowers in full bloom, forests deep green, and the creeks gurgling throughout Orange County. Dolley Madison had lived at Montpelier
since she was a new bride in 1794, forty-two years earlier, and now she was leaving for half the year. It was a big step in her life.
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She had always enjoyed the house on Lafayette Square. Her son had the walls painted a soft color so that a loud color would not disturb her eyes. “I like it, of course,” she said of the color. The house was large but not too large and centrally located for visiting friends and getting around in the ever-growing town. “My house in Washington will do very well, no doubt,” she told all.
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Dolley's health was not good. Her eyes continued to bother her. They were either inflamed or did not enable her to read well, except when she wore glasses. She bathed them in different solutions and was often bedridden for days at a time. In 1836, to get some rest and to seek a cure for her eyes, she took the advice of friends and spent several weeks on vacation at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, not far from her home and a favorite vacation spot for the elite in Virginia that featured special waters that all believed had medicinal benefits. She went there, she wrote a friend, with a “sad, impatient spirit” but enjoyed the visit. “[I was] drinking moderately at the waters and bathing my poor eyes a dozen times a day. The effect was excellent. My health was strengthened to its former standing and my eyes grew white again,” she wrote Anthony Morris.
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By 1842, as the Industrial Revolution took hold in the North, the former First Lady realized that her enhanced farming business, co-run with her by Payne, had failed. Revenues were low and there were no profits. “Produce of every kind is down to the lowest ebb…. Crops are tolerably good yet the farmer realizes nothing from them,” Dolley wrote her niece Lucy Todd that October. Bad crops and low prices were nothing new. The Madisons had dismal crops for years. In 1832, Dolley told her son that “the last tobacco both of Mr. Madison and John's was a failure.” They had expected $17 per hogshead and received only $7.
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She had to juggle high costs for her extra slaves, loans to her son, and upkeep at the mansion. She, like all the other homeowners in the South in that era, were part of a “hosting system” in which travelers, many complete strangers, stayed at her house for days at a time, at her cost. She welcomed all and had hundreds of visitors each year. In addition to that, Dolley could never give up her crown as America's queen and continued to spend lavishly on parties for relatives and friends at Montpelier.

Everybody who knew her assumed that her husband had left her an extraordinary amount of money to pay for her plantation, enlarged workforce, and extravagant lifestyle. After all, he was the president, wasn't he? And the couple had lived lavishly in Washington and in Montpelier for nearly fifty years. They must be rich. Dolley never told anyone except her inner family that she was broke and could not continue at Montpelier. Her brother-in-law Richard Cutts
wanted her to pay back a $1,500 loan, and she could not. She was considered a credit risk in Orange County and told Cutts that she could not borrow money from anyone, adding that she was now spending more than she had with no financial answer in sight. “I stay at home in waiting…here is property in both land and Negroes but they cannot command one hundred [dollars] at this time, and I fear that I have not sufficient in the bank to pay my discount there.” Family members were shocked.
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They were also surprised at her new attitude toward slavery. She had been against the practice all of her life and had vowed, with her husband, never to sell her slaves because the Madisons took good care of them and did not want to sell them to unscrupulous planters who might make their lives miserable. Her need for money changed her view. In 1836, she sold a number of her slaves to the slave buyers that wandered throughout Virginia, looking for good property at reasonable prices. Edward Coles was with her one day in November 1836, when she permitted slave buyers to examine her slaves for possible purchase. “The poor creatures would run to the house & protest against being sold & say their old master had said in his will that they were not to be sold but with their consent,” said Coles.

He watched Dolley sell a woman and her two children to nephew Ambrose Madison, leaving the woman's husband at Montpelier. Coles said that Mrs. Madison did not want to sell the slaves, or break up families, “a most painful task,” but felt she had to do so to earn money to pay her bills.
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Dolley was extremely worried, yet never let anyone outside the immediate family know about her problems. She continued to charm the world. Noted artist J. Eastman Johnson was one of those enamored of her when he painted her portrait. “She comes in every morning at 10 o'clock in full dress for the occasion, and, as she has much taste she looks quite imposing with her white satin turban, black velvet dress and a countenance full of benignity and gentleness. She talks a great deal and in such quick, beautiful tones. So polished and elegant are her manners that it is a pleasure to be in her company,” he said.
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The only way she could stay solvent, friends and lawyers told her, was to sell Montpelier and live off the money in Washington. She found a buyer for the entire plantation in 1842, Henry Moncure, who bought it in increments over several years. Payne remained at his farm with a small staff of slaves. Moncure, who did not care for Payne, bought everything, including Mrs. Madison's slaves. She moved to Washington on a permanent basis, leaving behind Montpelier, but not Payne's problems and his never-ending requests for money.

What she also left behind was a dangerous, new life for her slaves. They were all to go with the property to Moncure, and she paid no further attention
to them, even though, in the summer of 1844, they were still hers. She received a frantic letter from one of the slaves, Sarah, that stunned her. “The sheriff has taken all of us and said he will sell us at next court unless something is done before to prevent it. We are afraid we will be bought by what are called Negro buyers and sent away from our husbands and wives. If we are obliged to be sold perhaps you could get neighbors to buy us that have husbands and wives so as to save us some misery which will in a greater or less degree be sure to fall upon us at being separate from you as well as from one another. The sale is only a fortnight [away].”

Mrs. Madison was shaken. She did not know that William Madison, determined to get his $2,000, was working with the sheriff to seize the slaves and hold them as payment on Madison's debt. Dolley also did not know that a full month before the threatened seizure William Madison had gone to her son, Payne, and convinced him that what he wanted to do was proper. Payne went along with it and, worse, never told his mother about it. When Dolly did hear about it, she immediately signed all the papers to sell Montpelier to Moncure, so that the slaves all went to him and not to William Madison. “The beautiful place was sold and the colored population with it, far below value, to prevent separation from their homes,” wrote Lucia Cutts.
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Dolly had always wanted Payne to inherit Montpelier, but now that was not possible. He remained at his shabby dwelling nearby at Toddsberth, with his eccentric habits and odd businesses, and Moncure moved into Montpelier.

An era ended.

In the end, it was Payne's recklessness and general incompetence that drove Dolley to sell her beloved Montpelier. She had trusted Payne to run it with her, hoping, as always, that he could succeed at something in his life. She was wrong, of course. Payne could not succeed at anything. She waved off attacks on Payne's catastrophic handling of the farms, but friends and relatives were cutting in their denunciation of Payne. Her niece Lucy wrote scathingly that Dolley's “extravagant, idle son” ran the farms so badly that his ineptitude “obliged her to sell the dearly loved Montpelier, together with the slaves, to Mr. Moncure.” A friend, Septima Meikleham, said that Payne “had run through the fortune her husband left her, $100,000 and Montpelier.”
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Whenever friends or relatives questioned Dolly about Payne and his strange ideas, Dolly always smiled and said “my poor boy, forgive his eccentricities—his heart is in the right place.”
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