James and Dolley Madison (6 page)

The only career James Madison had when he left Congress in March 1797 was that of a farmer. He had plunged into politics and the revolution as a young man and never looked back. The years flew by, some swift and some slow. He spent very little time at his family home at Montpelier, run efficiently and profitably by his aging father and over one hundred slaves. His father had built the plantation on 5,400 acres. From 1786 to 1793, Madison spent only seven months at Montpelier. From 1793 to 1796, though, he spent more than twenty months there, returning home whenever he could as his father's health declined and he was needed to run the plantation.

There were dozens of Madisons in Orange County, Virginia, all related to each other. James Madison had three brothers and three sisters living and residing nearby; his father, James Sr., had been a tireless patriarch of the Madison brood and, over the years, served as a pillar of Orange County, holding several offices, including sheriff. As he aged and became ill, he turned over more and more responsibility for the sprawling plantation to his son James, who enjoyed the work.

Madison's decision to retire from politics coincided with substantial change back in Orange County and at Montpelier. His brother Ambrose had died in 1793 and Ambrose's wife in 1798. Their teenaged daughter became Madison's ward, and she asked him to oversee the running of her family farm. Madison's brother Francis died in 1800, and his sister Nelly fell sick. His sister Fanny married Dr. Robert Rose. His father's health continued to decline. Madison, still working in Philadelphia, took on more responsibilities for the family as the years went by until he finally returned, for good, it appeared, in the winter of 1797.

He had started making business decisions for the plantation in 1793 and made more of them until he returned in 1797 to take over fulltime management. In 1794, with his father's blessing, he built a gristmill at Montpelier and
made improvements on the lands and the family home. The gristmill was “particularly favorable to the interest of my brothers as well as myself,” he wrote.
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He studied scientific farming, read farm journals, and corresponded with Jefferson about crops and harvesting improvements. He agreed with other Virginia farmers that the sharp increase in the grain market in Europe made it more profitable to grow wheat instead of tobacco, which had been Virginia's main crop for a hundred years. Madison not only ordered a general shift to wheat at Montpelier but also had slave workers plow his lands in different patterns to avoid soil erosion. He ordered slaves to ride horses less frequently and to take better care of them, fearful of illnesses and the early deaths of his steeds.
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He gave more responsibility to black slave Sawney, who could read, put him in charge of large sections of the plantation, and gave him the power to order food, machines, and supplies. He gave orders to Sawney and other, white, overseers to treat the slaves as well as they could. “Treat the Negroes with all the humanity and kindness consistent with their necessary subordination and work,” he wrote, and added that they had to make certain the slaves ate well and enjoyed good living conditions.
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Madison and his wife enjoyed an extensive social life in Orange County. They traveled to the homes of all of Madison's many relatives and friends for daylong visits and dinners and then invited all of them to visit Montpelier. Dolley spent much of her time running the domestic slave staff of twenty-three people that worked inside the mansion and assisting her new husband in running the plantation. She, like her husband, was the recipient of numerous letters from Thomas Jefferson and others on home-and-grounds construction and repair.

People in Orange County raised their eyebrows when they met Madison. He seemed a very changed man, changed for the better. He smiled more, seemed friendlier, and was more pleasant to be with. Now, unlike before, he was genuinely happy to meet people. They all attributed the substantial changes in his personality, which had seemed so set in its ways at the age of forty-three, to his new bride, Dolley. Everybody in Philadelphia had applauded the “new” Madison, too, and said it was all due to Dolley. “Mr. Madison has been married in the course of the last summer—which event or some other has relieved him of much bile—and rendered him much more open and conversant than I have seen him before,” marveled Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut.
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One thing that took up much of Madison's time was the reconstruction and expansion of the large mansion itself. He and his wife, plus her sister, and their young son, Payne, now lived in the house with his mother and father and occasional relatives. They all needed more room. Madison sought advice from
his father, who had not only designed and built the mansion but had built large homes for several of his friends in Orange County over the years. Madison also received advice from Jefferson, whose Monticello was already being acknowledged as one of the finest homes in the United States. To increase the size of the mansion and create more living space, Madison decided on radical reconstruction. He built a large wing on the north side of the house, leaving the original building as it was, with its center hallway. He added an elegant, white-columned portico with new front doors that took visitors to a small lobby inside the house (Jefferson's suggestion), with more doors that led into a large parlor. The windows on the parlor rose from the floor to the ceiling and could easily be opened at the top and bottom (another Jefferson idea). To the left of that, he built the new rooms and connected the downstairs and upstairs with a new staircase that had short steps to accommodate his wife's problems with her bad knees. There were several bedrooms upstairs.

From their upstairs rooms, the Madisons enjoyed one of the most sweeping, beautiful views in all of Virginia. The house was nestled into the Blue Ridge Mountains, which rose and fell gently round them and gave them an estate of rolling land with few level meadows. The house sat on a gentle ridge in the middle of thick forests full of trees that were hundreds of years old and meadows that were full of high, green grass. In the spring and summer mornings, large, white billows of thick fog that looked like high ocean waves rolled through the Madison farms, giving them an eerie and haunting look. “It is a wild & romantic country,” wrote Anna Thornton, who visited Montpelier several times.
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“[It is] very generally covered with fine flourishing timber and forest trees.” The house, she said, had a “handsome portico of the Tuscan order, plain but grand appearance.” Mrs. Thornton added, triumphantly, that when the Madisons were finally finished with the home, “It will be a handsome place & approach very much similar to some of the elegant seats in England.”

Mrs. Mary Bagot, wife of a British diplomat, who seemed to detest everything about America, fell in love with Montpelier. “The house is more comfortable and better furnished than any other I have been in in this horrid country. It is wildly situated—surrounded by forest & with the Blue Ridge.” Some visitors to Montpelier said they liked it more than the much more renowned Monticello. “Mrs. Sam[uel] Smith is might delighted with her excursion [to Montpelier],” wrote Anna Thornton in 1809. “She seems to admire your situation more than Mr. Jefferson's & indeed, I think myself it is capable of much greater embellishment.”
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A lengthy row of slave huts sat within one hundred yards of the mansion at the bottom of a gently rolling hill and one of the larger tobacco fields. Between
the slave quarters and the mansion was the narrow roadway that visitors used to arrive in their carriages or on horseback. The Madisons stood on their front porch and used a spyglass to discover who was arriving at the gate. Sometimes, for fun, the Madisons would conduct foot races against each other, and against guests, on the front porch of their home. A white-columned “temple,” or large gazebo, was built a hundred yards from the mansion; Madison spent much time reading there in the summer months. The family cemetery was several hundred yards northwest of the home.

Montpelier was connected to the nearest town, Orange Court House, by a dirt highway that meandered through rolling meadows or tobacco and corn and thick forests of trees that in some places completely blanketed the mountainsides along the highway.

Madison had all of his furniture sent down from Philadelphia in wagons when he moved out of his home on Spruce Street. This included a dozen handsome Windsor chairs, mahogany chairs, and numerous boxes and trunks full of small items. The furniture did little to fill up the spacious rooms at Montpelier, though. When he arrived back home, he wrote his friend James Monroe in Paris and asked him to buy furniture for Madison and Dolley there. Madison was intent on breaking from the tradition of large landowners in Virginia to model their homes on Great Britain. He and his wife had started to use French furniture in Philadelphia and now ordered massive pieces of it.
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Monroe was happy to help. When he first arrived in France, he wrote Madison that “there are many things here which I think would suit you. I beg you to give me a list of what you want, such as clocks, carpets, glass, furniture and table linen—they are cheaper infinitely than with you considering I have advantage of the exchange.”
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Through Monroe, the Madisons ordered a huge bed trimmed in crimson damask, a bedstead and mattress, silk curtains, two Persian carpets, and a chimney clock. They were happy to purchase beautiful furniture, curtains, and rugs directly from Paris, thanks to Monroe, and happier to buy them at prices, even including shipping, that were cheaper than it would cost to buy the exquisite French items at American stores.
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Friends gave the Madisons small pieces of furniture and other goods. The Monroes, as an example, sent two eighteen-foot-long table cloths, dozens of napkins, and two large mattresses. Jefferson sent goods from Monticello. They had farming and gardening advice from many friends and neighbors. Madison collected busts of famous Americans, including Jefferson, and had them on display in the parlor, the main room in the house. There was an electrical machine in the parlor, too, that Madison thought was great fun. He had guests
stand around it in a circle, holding hands, and then used the machine to give them a jolt. Upstairs, in addition to the bedrooms, Madison created a large library with a window that overlooked the front fields of the plantation and the hills of the Blue Ridge in the distance. The library was stuffed with books. Tomes packed the shelves, filled extra shelves, and were piled high on the floor. He had close to four thousand volumes in the library. It was there, in 1786 and 1787, that Madison read hundreds of history and political books to prepare for the writing of the Constitution.
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Madison plunged into the renovations of the mansion. He wrote Jefferson and others for advice but was careful to redesign his home in his own way, ignoring numerous suggestions by Jefferson to make it look too much like Monticello. Madison either built or rebuilt the large front porch with its four white, wide columns and added a full-service kitchen, a large dining room, and a two-story addition to the main building. He personally supervised all of the construction and selected all the materials used, right down to the tiniest of nails.
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Visitors to Montpelier in those years saw a still-unfinished home and plantation grounds that were under construction and reconstruction. Some were annoyed by the slow progress. British foreign minister Sir Augustus John Foster wrote that the grounds were underdeveloped. There are “some very fine woods about Montpelier but no pleasure grounds, though Mr. Madison talks of some day laying out space for an English park, which he might render very beautiful from the easy graceful descent of his hills into the plains below.” Other visitors felt the Madisons needed more time to finish the large job of renovating the home and farms. They all agreed on one thing, though. They all knew that the dour, sour public James Madison was, in private, a very friendly and animated man. Wrote Foster, “no man had a higher reputation among his acquaintance for probity and a good honourable feeling, while he was allowed on all sides to be a gentleman in his manners as well as a man of public virtue.”
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Madison was consumed by the desire to fix up his home and grounds, but he did not spend all of his time at Montpelier. He traveled back and forth to Richmond, sixty miles away, by wagon and by carriage on shopping expeditions and visits to friends who lived in the state capital. Dolley often went with him. For example, in early January 1798, in the middle of winter, he spent two entire weeks in Richmond.
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And, as always, he was frequently ill. He had bouts of numerous ailments that laid him low for days and weeks on end. He wrote in 1799 of a weeklong confinement in bed from dysentery, which “left me in a state of debility not yet thoroughly removed.”
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