Patriot Hearts (52 page)

“Mrs.
Hallam
? Art
thou
the Mrs. Hallam whose needlework Lady Washington doth praise so highly? She hath said she knew thee as a child—”

“And so she did. My father consulted with her on her own health and her daughter Patcy’s, when she’d bring her into Williamsburg. I owe Lady Washington a good deal.”

And Dolley thought, as Aaron Burr turned aside to bow over Maria Morris’s hand, that the diminutive Senator gave Sophie a curious, speculative look.

After years of wondering, Dolley had learned almost by chance from Tom Jefferson that her friend had made it to Cornwallis’s camp at Yorktown, and that she had done nursing for a Yorktown doctor in the final year of the War. Later, Patsy Jefferson Randolph had spoken of meeting Sophie again in Paris. Dolley learned that Sophie and her mother had taken ship with the departing British troops in 1783, and that her mother had died on the voyage. Hence, Sophie remarked with brittle lightness, her stint as a paid companion to an Englishwoman in Paris when all Hell was about to break loose. But how she had gotten out of Paris, who Mr. Hallam had been, and how and why Sophie had returned to Philadelphia to take up life as a seamstress, she would not say.

Because of her friendship with Martha Washington, and because of her undeniable good breeding and wit as well as her skill at cutting a gown, Sophie Hallam rapidly made herself a fixture in Philadelphia society. She knew everyone and everything, and was welcome in both Federalist and Republican circles. For she had early issued her own Proclamation of Neutrality, she claimed, in imitation of the President’s: listening to any gossip and never passing a word of it along.

Which was odd, Dolley thought, in a woman whom she recalled as being sharply outspoken in her loyalty, long ago, to the Crown.

Certainly Sophie’s letters had enlivened the next few years.

Only weeks before John Todd’s death, Jemmy’s brother Ambrose had died back at Montpelier. Each summer after that, when Jemmy and Dolley had returned to the plantation, it had been to find more tasks undone, more bills unsettled, more finances entangled by debt and poor management as old Colonel Madison grew less and less able to ride his own acres daily the way he once had. Thus it was that when Virginians gathered to elect their representatives to the Fifth Congress, Jemmy stepped aside. For the first time since the Revolution, he returned to private life.

Watching the sunlight on the flanks of the carriage-team, on Payne’s gold hair as the boy galloped his pony into the green stillness of the wooded hills, Dolley was still hard-put to piece together how the country had come, so swiftly, from that point—that astonishingly peaceful handover of power from Washington to Adams—to the very verge of darkness that threatened to undo everything Jemmy, and Tom, and Mr. Adams himself had fought for.

Tyranny masquerading as the necessary actions of reasonable men, the way it now did in France.

Even as a permanent resident at Montpelier, of course, Jemmy was never completely detached from politics. He would always, Dolley reflected wryly, be a kingmaker at heart.

Sophie, and Lizzie Collins, and Aaron Burr kept them up on the gossip of the capital, sending them clippings from newspapers and, as Sophie phrased it, reports on the gales in various tea-pots around town. It was Sophie who sent them the tracts published by James Callendar entitled
The History of the United States for the Year 1796,
which detailed Alexander Hamilton’s 1792 affair with a certain Mrs. Maria Reynolds, whose husband was involved in speculation with Hamilton’s Treasury funds to the tune of thirty thousand dollars.
So much correspondence could not refer exclusively to wenching,
Callendar wrote of the letters which he claimed Hamilton had helped Mrs. Reynolds forge.
No man of sense can believe that it did.

Hamilton, livid, had challenged Jim Monroe to a duel on the grounds that Monroe, to whom Mrs. Reynolds’s husband had sent proof of the affair in an effort at blackmail back in ’92, had, after four years, passed along the details to Callendar. After words like “liar” and “scoundrel” had been exchanged, the two opponents had been talked out of bloodshed by Aaron Burr. Instead, Hamilton published a confession in the
Gazette of the United States: The charge against me is a connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper pecuniary speculation,
he wrote.
My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife.

Alexander Hamilton, who had already retired as Secretary of the Treasury, never held public office again, which as far as Dolley was concerned was just as well. Sophie noted—goodness knew what her sources were—that when Hamilton’s books were examined, his assistant (a cousin of his wife) was found to be $238,000 short.

Sophie related all this with a kind of relish, as if profoundly entertained by the murderous infighting of men who had begun their careers as traitors to the King. “The Constitution gives your friend every right to laugh at us to our faces,” sighed Jemmy, as he laid down the letter that contained the
Gazette
confession. “God help this country, if she could not say of us whatever she wished.”

But Jefferson’s letters were first disquieting, and then frightening. In May of 1797, in response to the treaty Washington had negotiated with England, France started seizing American ships and cargoes. The new President Adams sent a delegation to Paris to iron things out, and mortally offended his Vice President and half the Congress by requesting “measures of defense.”

Adams’s Cabinet consisted mainly of men hand-picked by Hamilton, and the second President found himself surrounded by pro-British New England merchants and bankers. No doubt remembering Jefferson’s championship of Citizen Genêt, Adams shut his Vice President out of nearly every aspect of the government. By November of that year, with Bonaparte preparing, it was said, to conquer Switzerland and then invade England, anti-French hysteria had reached dangerous proportions.

By January of ’98 feelings in Congress were running so high that the Honorable Representative of Vermont (Republican) crossed the floor of the House chamber to spit in the face of the Honorable Representative of Connecticut (Federalist). This in turn led to a brawl on the floor with a cane and some fire-tongs as weapons. (“Not,” wrote Sophie, who’d been in the gallery, “the Congress’s finest hour.”)

By the following April, when word came to Philadelphia that French Foreign Minister Tallyrand had refused to receive the American envoys unless they lent France twelve million dollars and gave the Foreign Minister himself a further quarter million as a “sweetener,” anti-French mobs were storming the streets of Philadelphia, and the country was clamoring for war.

In June, a Naturalization Act was passed. Effectively blocking the citizenship of émigrés from both France and Ireland, it was followed, a week later, by the Aliens Act, which permitted the President to summarily banish any foreigner he personally deemed a threat (for instance, Jefferson’s staunch supporter Albert Gallatin).

And in the blazing heat of July, the Sedition Act was passed, forbidding any newspaper to print attacks on the President—in direct disregard of the Constitution.

“It is a reign of witches,” declared Jefferson softly, as he paced the darkness of Montpelier’s pillared porch in the heat of a July night in 1798. He’d arrived after a day of blistering sun; Dolley, sitting at Jemmy’s side, had heard in the throb of the cicadas, smelled in the damp thick air, the coming of storm. “Because one Frenchman is dishonest, and another is greedy, they seek to go to war with the only nation strong enough to counterbalance England’s desire to swallow us up, to transform us back into her colonies again. To hold us not in chains of iron this time but of gold. It is enough to give you a fever.”

July 2, 1798. Twenty-two years to the day, Dolley remembered, since the Congress had voted to declare independence.

Bitter years. Since taking up his office again, Jefferson had been spending as little time in Philadelphia as he could manage, coming home from the capital in early July and not returning until December. During those long summers and falls he was in and out of Montpelier, and Jemmy and Dolley would go to stay with him at Monticello, where the older man seemed to take refuge from his savage frustration in the remodeling of the Big House: Dolley hoped by the time they went for their next stay there would at least be a roof.

So preoccupied had their friend been with what was happening in Philadelphia, she wasn’t certain he’d notice whether he was sleeping under the stars or not.

“Now Adams has called for an army, to fight the French—Does he
really
believe that Bonaparte will invade our shores? They’ve even got Washington to come out of retirement to lead it—”

Dolley had wondered what Martha had had to say to that.

“—which of course he is too old to do. So he’s demanded that Hamilton
—Hamilton!—
be his second in command: in effect, the generalissimo in the field.”

She asked, “
Can
the President ask the Congress to set aside the Constitution?”

“He certainly has,” replied Jemmy, grimly.

And Jefferson whispered fiercely, “Who’s to stop him? With a standing army in the field, they’ve made the President into a sort of elective King, and the State Representatives his subjects, not his partners in rule. Adams tells them what he wishes, and they do it—which I understood was the entire reason we fought in ’76.”

In the dark that followed the lightning, Dolley could sense his eyes meeting Jemmy’s. “I think it is for the States, don’t you, to tell Adams that he’s overstepped his bounds? It is
we
who made the Constitution,
we—
the
States—
who agreed to give up our individual liberties and enter into the Union. It is up to us, to abrogate the laws which violate it.”

More silence followed, broken only by the rumble of thunder on the mountains, and, some minutes later, the patter of the rain. The house behind them was dark, that long house of yellow brick whose southern half—completely separated from the north end where Jemmy, Dolley, Payne, and Anna lived—still housed the Old Colonel and Mother Madison, Jemmy’s sister Fanny, and, since March, his brother Ambrose’s orphaned daughter Nell.