The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple

By Ralph Ketcham

Restored to its original splendor, Montpelier is now a national shrine, but before Montpelier became a place of study and tribute, it was a home. Often kept from it by the business of the young nation, James and Dolley Madison could finally take up permanent residence when they retired from Washington in 1817. Their lifelong friend Thomas Jefferson predicted that, at Montpelier, the retiring Madison could return to his "books and farm, to tranquility, and independence," that he would be released "from incessant labors, corroding anxieties, active enemies, and interested friends."

As the celebrated historian Ralph Ketcham shows, this would turn out to be only partly true. Although the Madisons were no longer in Washington, Dolley continued to take part in its social scene from afar, dominating it just as she had during Jefferson’s and her husband’s administrations, commenting on people and events there and advising the multitude of young people who thought of her as the creator of society life in the young republic. James maintained a steady correspondence about public questions ranging from Native American affairs, slavery, and utopian reform to religion and education. He also took an active role at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829-30, in the defeat of nullification, and in the establishment of the University of Virginia, of which he was the rector for eight years after Jefferson’s death. Exploring Madison’s role in these post-presidential issues reveals a man of extraordinary intellectual vitality and helps us to better understand Madison’s political thought. His friendships with figures such as Jefferson, James Monroe, and the Marquis de Lafayette--as well as his assessment of them (he outlived them all)--shed valuable light on the nature of the republic they had all helped found.

In their last years, James and Dolley Madison personified the republican institutions and culture of the new nation--James as the father of the Constitution and its chief propounder for nearly half a century, and Dolley as the creator of the role of "First Lady." Anything but uneventful, the retirement period at Montpelier should be seen as a crucial element in our understanding of this remarkable couple.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2009
• ISBN: 9780813930473

Ralph Ketcham

Ralph Ketcham is professor of American studies at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs of Syracuse University.

Book preview

Preface

The immediate opportunity and impulse for writing this book come from the spectacular restoration of the Montpelier mansion to its appearance as it was during the years of the Madisons’ retirement there, 1817–36. In the hands of several owners from the time of Dolley Madison’s sale of Montpelier in 1844 through the long DuPont ownership of 1901–84, the mansion underwent drastic remodeling and substantial enlargement. The Madison house, though, remained essentially there under the changes and enlargement, so it was possible to remove the additions and restore the mansion as it had been in the 1820s. Originally built by President Madison’s father in the early 1760s and enlarged by his son in two stages in 1797 and 1809, it was, by the time of Madison’s retirement from the presidency, an elegant home for the nation’s most famous and respected couple. James Madison was revered as the preeminent founder of the nation’s political institutions and its fourth president, while Dolley was the widely beloved creator of the office of First Lady, suited to the republican political culture her husband had helped found. The completed restoration of their home was celebrated on Constitution Day 2008.

Irving Brant, Drew McCoy, Catherine Allgor, and others have written fully and with insight about this before, and I have depended as well in this account on the last chapter of my biography of Madison, first published thirty-seven years ago and republished by the University of Virginia Press in 1990. I hope now, though, that what we have learned about the Madisons and their era in the meantime and the vivid setting now furnished by the restored mansion and the enlarged understanding we have of its free and enslaved occupants will make possible a fuller and more compelling account of those retirement years.

I am grateful for the help and support of many people at Montpelier: John Jeannes for his knowledge of the mansion itself, Matt Reeves for his archaeological discoveries in the house and on the grounds, Tom Chapman for his genealogical research, and Beth Taylor, the educational director, for her historical understanding of the house and its occupants. I am especially grateful for her careful and exceedingly helpful reading of an early draft of the manuscript. Many others on the Montpelier staff and board of directors—Mike Quinn, Joe Grills, Bill Lewis, Bill Remington, Peggy Boeker, Hunter Rawlings, Lee Langston-Harrison, Pat Mahanes, Allison Deeds, Susan Borchardt, Will Harris, Andy Washburn, Michael Taylor, and others—have helped and supported in many ways. Ann Miller was an invaluable source of information about Orange County history, as she has been for decades. Penny Kaiserlain, Dick Holway, Ellen Satrom, and Raennah Mitchell at the University of Virginia Press have been expertly and congenially helpful. Fran Bockus has, as usual, provided efficient and cordial word-processing help. Erik Chaput’s work in producing the index has been prompt, skillful, learned, and cheerful. My wife Julia has been a highly skilled editor and virtual coauthor for the entire project; in fact, it would not exist without her deep and loving participation. I record in the dedication the joy and stimulus that comes from my two grandchildren (and twins to come, probably before this book arrives!).

The Madisons at Montpelier

Return to Books and Farm, to Tranquility and Independence

James Madison, with Dolley at his side, Left Washington for the last time on April 17, 1817. He was sixty-six; she was forty-nine, and they had been married twenty-three years. Their retirement began when, with all their trunks of belongings, they stepped on board an early version of a steamboat docked at Potomac Wharf. As the boat pulled away from the Federal City and made the forty-nine-mile voyage down Chesapeake Bay, one passenger said that James was as playful as a child, talking and jesting with everyone on board. He was like a School Boy on a long vacation. His old friend Thomas Jefferson would, as usual, capture the moment best, congratulating Madison on his release from incessant labors, corroding anxieties, active enemies, and interested friends. The ship docked at Aquia Creek where the Madisons transferred to a carriage for the rest of the ninety-mile trip home to Montpelier. Now, said Jefferson, would come return to your books and farm, to tranquility and independence.

Acclaim had accompanied the Madisons’ last days in Washington, continued the whole way to Montpelier, and lingered long after. In the parties and tributes celebrating Madison’s public service, the semiofficial National Intelligencer had pronounced that no statesman could have a more honorable, a more grateful termination of his public life than that which crowned the administration of James Madison. The city of Washington was thankful for his wisdom and firmness that had rescued it from the tempest of war … without the sacrifice of civil or political liberty. Another Washington orator proclaimed that during the War of 1812 under Madison’s leadership our Republic had taken her stand among the nations. Her character established—her power respected, and her institutions revered.… His name will descend to posterity with that of the illustrious Washington. One achieved our independence, and the other sustained it.

James Madison, by Joseph Wood, 1817. (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond)

Dolley Madison, by Joseph Wood, 1817. (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond)

Dolley’s lifelong friend Eliza Collins Lee wrote of the gratitude and thanks of the community bestowed on her for having so splendidly filled the highest station our country can bestow on a woman. Talents such as yours, Eliza added, were never intended to remain inactive on retiring from public life.… You will [display and] cherish them … in a more native soil, that will constitute the chief felicity of your dear and venerated husband. Supreme Court justice William Johnson wrote Dolley that all who have ever enjoyed the honor of your acquaintance, will long remember, the polite condescension which never failed to encourage the diffident, that suavity of manners which tempted the morose or thoughtful to be cheerful, or that benevolence of aspect which suffered no one to turn from you without an emotion of gratitude. John Adams, not given to unearned praise, told Jefferson that notwithstanding a thousand Faults and blunders, Madison’s presidency acquired more glory, and established more Union, than all his three Predecessors, Washington, Adams, and Jefferson put together. One can imagine the contentment and eager anticipation of James and Dolley as, between Fredericksburg and Orange Court House, the Blue Ridge Mountains came into view.

Montpelier: The Mansion in 1817

Montpelier in 1817 was very different from the house to which James Madison as a ten-year-old boy had carried small furnishings. First built by his father in 1760–64, this two-story, brick Georgian house of 3,600 square feet, four rooms down and five rooms up, was where James and his three sisters and three brothers grew up (at least four other children died in infancy), and where James lived until the 1790s. After his marriage to Dolley Payne Todd in 1794 and his retirement from Congress in 1797, he built a two-story, 2,000-square-foot addition on the north end of the mansion and, with design suggestions from Jefferson, added a four-column portico in front. James and Dolley, with her sister Anna and son Payne Todd, had separate quarters in this addition, while the senior Madisons (and only James’s mother Nelly Madison after she was widowed in 1801) occupied the first floor of the original house. Finally, after Madison became president in 1809, one-story wings were added to each end of the mansion, and the central portion was remodeled to afford a main entrance and drawing room for the whole house.

Montpelier, restored as it was ca. 1820. (The Montpelier Foundation)

The space and graciousness of the building were complemented by what twenty years of care, prosperity, and understanding of Age of Reason landscaping could do for the surrounding grounds. A telescope on the west-facing front portico was used to explore the Blue Ridge and to spy the road where carriages and large parties were seen almost daily coming to Montpelier. To the north stood a columned icehouse, the Temple, a frequent conversation piece as well as a place to store ice for making ice cream and cold drinks in the summer months. Nearby was an immense mulberry tree, and beyond, silver poplars and weeping willows, which hid a mill and other farm buildings along a stream running down to the Rapidan River. In front, at a gate in a semicircular picket fence, where a gravel path led toward the mansion, was a large tin cup used to measure the amount of rainfall at every shower. On one side of the house was a well of pure, cool water, in use since Madison’s grandfather first developed the land nearly a century before. Oak, cedars of Lebanon, boxwood, and willows completed the foreground of the scene across the downward-sloping lawn. Beyond that, rolling fields of grain and tobacco reached toward the Rapidan River and the Blue Ridge twenty miles beyond. Behind the house a columned porch, entwined with roses and white jasmine, faced on a leveled, sunny yard with two large tulip trees in the center, surrounded by groves of oak, walnut, and pine shielding a ravine and farm buildings. The steep slope of the Southwest Mountains behind enclosed the scene. To the south were clustered slave cabins, an outside kitchen, smokehouses, the kitchen garden, and orchards of pears, figs, grapes, and other fruit. To the southeast was a formal garden laid out by the French gardener, M. Bizet, in which some visitors saw the horseshoe pattern of the seats in the House of Representatives. The Madisons strolled there with their guests, and we may imagine the always plentiful young people at Montpelier using it for courting, as Jefferson had the formal gardens of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg a half century before.

Montpelier, 1764, 1797, and 1812. (The Montpelier Foundation and Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects, Albany, NY)

Inside, from the vestibule with its semicircular window, visitors entered a large central drawing room. This was sometimes called the hall of notables, for the many portraits and busts of the Madisons’ friends, including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, Monroe, Lafayette, Baron von Humboldt, and others. Portraits of James and Dolley Madison hung among the likenesses. Two other large paintings were Supper at Emmaus and Pan-Youths and Nymphs. A Persian rug, sofas covered with crimson damask, and bright drapes lent color. Tall, triple-tiered French windows opened on the back lawn, which brought sunlight during the morning and early afternoon into the cheerful, elegant room.

To the right of this central room and a hallway, also hung with works of art, were the rooms of Madison’s eighty-five-year-old mother, Nelly Conway Madison. Still alert and active, she lived there separately, attended by her own enslaved servants. One was the octogenarian Sawney, who had accompanied James Madison on his first trip to Princeton nearly fifty years earlier. To the left of the drawing room was a front-to-back passage with stairways and entrance into the dining room. In this hallway, apparently, was the perch for Dolley’s pet macaw, Polly, brought from Washington. This splendid bird seemed happy and proud when it spread its wings and screamed out French phrases, but it frightened the children of the household when it sometimes swooped down on them. The hallway was also the entrance to what came to be called Mr. Madison’s room. At first, after the 1809 renovation, it was a study and visiting room; but as he grew more feeble, it also became his sitting room and bedroom. It contained an iron-posted bed covered with a heavy canopy of crimson damask, brought by Monroe from the dismantled palace of the Tuileries, easy chairs, and a study table piled high with books and papers.

Montpelier plantation, ca. 1820. (The Montpelier Foundation)

In the dining room next door hung portraits of Napoleon in ermine robes, Louis XIV, Confucius, and others gathered by Payne Todd in Europe in 1816. Looking at the portrait of Napoleon with Dolley nearby, a British visitor once observed that they both had black hair and blue eyes but the eyes of the Corsican bespeak the ferocity of his heart; the look of the American indicates the tenderness, generosity, and sensibility of her noble mind. He observed further that it was not enough that Americans elect a Brutus for their chief [James Madison], they must also be convinced that his partner possesses the soul of a sister of Cato [Portia]—the sentiments of the wife of a Brutus. Family portraits and a watercolor of Jefferson looked down on a large mahogany table and two sideboards covered with family silver. The new one-story wing on the north end of the house contained Dolley’s chamber, a smaller chamber, and a scullery, while a similar wing on the south end added to the separate quarters of Mother Madison.

Upstairs Madison’s library of four thousand or more volumes was shelved around the sides and on stacks filling the large central room looking out over the portico toward the Blue Ridge. Books and pamphlets, some gathered by Madison and others sent unsolicited to him in a steady stream, were heaped on every chair and table. Six other rooms housed transient guests, longer-term residents such as Payne Todd and the Cutts family, and perhaps play and study space for children. The low-ceiling cellar under the whole house contained a kitchen for Dolley under the new north wing and another for Nelly Madison under the south wing. A wine cellar, other storage and work rooms, and probably some living space for slave servants filled the rest of the bottom floor. Many windows, grade entries, a hard floor, and perhaps five fireplaces or kitchen hearths contributed to the livability of the cellar.

John Payne Todd

Though by 1817 this large, comfortable house had only three permanent residents, the former president, his wife, and his aged mother, others lived there for months at a time, and multitudes, it sometimes seemed to Dolley, came to stay for weeks or days. One member of the next generation often came and went through the ups and downs of his troubled life. Payne Todd was Dolley’s son by her first marriage, to John Todd, a Philadelphia Quaker lawyer. Todd himself, his father and mother, and Dolley’s infant second son all died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Of the young family only Dolley and her one-year-old child survived. This son, Payne Todd, twenty-six-years old when the Madisons retired, tried fitfully for a few months now and then to learn the life of a Virginia planter at Montpelier, but he seemed never to feel at ease or at home there, perhaps because it was so uniquely and utterly his stepfather’s house. In his youth he had not really been a Virginian but had been popular and attended to over most of the Western world by his parents’ well-placed friends.

Montpelier first floor, ca. 1812. (The Montpelier Foundation and Mesick Cohen Wilson Baker Architects, Albany, NY)

He had been no more than an ordinary student at the Roman Catholic boarding school in Baltimore to which he had been sent while his stepfather was secretary of state and living mostly in Washington. Dolley had written proudly to her sister that he was much-admired and respected and invited to all the great houses, including that of the famed and beautiful Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the former wife of Napoleon’s brother Jerome, made king of Westphalia. Payne’s other excitement was two visits to the Baltimore palace of the Spanish diplomat the marquis de Casa Yrujo and his wife, Sally McKean Yrujo, the close friend of Dolley, Anna, and Lucy Payne from their days as dazzling belles in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Payne was already becoming dazzled himself by titled Europeans, courtly society, and wealthy American connections. He failed to fulfill his parents’ plan to enter his stepfather’s alma mater, Princeton, and instead spent social seasons during the War of 1812 in Washington enjoying Dolley’s parties and meeting the important people there. His mother played Cupid ceaselessly but unsuccessfully; her letters to her sisters remained full of hints of hoped-for connections. He then spent two years as secretary to Albert Gallatin while he was traveling about Europe seeking a peace treaty with Great Britain. John Quincy Adams recorded that treated as the American Prince, he spent more time carousing and playing cards all night with Henry Clay and collecting works of art for Montpelier than attending to business. He returned to Washington at the end of the war uneducated, unwed, and unemployed, but much impressed with his own social standing.

After that, Todd went through the years when he ordinarily would have married and found an occupation without doing either. Instead he drifted restlessly from Boston to New York to Philadelphia to Washington to Richmond and back to Montpelier. He sometimes showed his old charm that caused happy reports of him to reach Montpelier, but more often he was making drinking, card-playing, and gambling rounds of hotels and taverns, always professing support and goodwill toward his parents but always troubling and failing them.

John Payne Todd, attributed to Joseph Wood, miniature, watercolor on ivory. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Miss Mary Madison McGuire, 1936 [36.73]; Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

During one spree in 1824 and 1825, while his mother sent him money as fast as she could and also cleared $200 of his local debts, his stepfather paid a $500 debt at a Washington lottery house and received unforeseen board bills from Philadelphia. Postmaster Richard Bache, out of friendship for the former president who had got him his office, covered a worthless $300 draft of Todd’s to keep him out of prison. This proved to be a small part of over $20,000 in debts Madison struggled to pay—without his wife’s knowledge—to save her grief and embarrassment. Madison wrote painfully to the thirty-three-year-old adolescent: What shall I say to you?… Weeks have passed without even a line … soothing the anxieties of the tenderest of mothers, wound up to the highest pitch.… Whatever the causes of [your long absence and debts,] you owe it to yourself as well as to us, to withhold them no longer. Let the worst be known that the best may be made of it.… You cannot be too quick in affording relief to [your mother’s] present feelings.

Two years later, again only heroic, sacrificial efforts by Madison and his friends kept Todd out of prison. James reimbursed John Jacob Astor $600 loaned to Todd during a New York binge. Madison covered $1,600 in Georgetown and Philadelphia debts, but calamity threatened when Todd diverted $1,300 sent him to pay old debts to make another round of the gambling tables. The defaulted obligation of $1,300 reached Richmond providentially just as tobacco prices rose for one of the few times during these years, and Madison’s agent there was able to pay the bill. Sales of Kentucky lands and mortgaging of nearly half of Madison’s Orange County estate met other heavy drafts, while in another emergency Edward Coles loaned Madison $2,000 on Todd’s behalf. His career, Madison wrote the loyal Coles, must soon be fatal to everything dear to him in life.… With all the concealments and alleviations I have been able to effect, his mother has known enough to make her wretched the whole time of his strange absence and mysterious silence. In 1829 Dolley Madison, longing for news from or of my dear child, heard the worst: he was boarding within prison bounds! He was soon released, but a year later Dolley’s faithful friend Anthony Morris wrote that Todd was again in prison and that his creditors would release him for $600, which James promptly furnished. Characteristically, when Todd was in Virginia for a few months in 1832, he searched for gold unsuccessfully and talked of getting rich quarrying marble. He began to build an eccentric residence, Toddsberth, over the Southwest Mountains from Montpelier and to take all-night drunken rambles with his kinsman Colonel John Willis, long legendary in Orange County. Todd resolved repeatedly to reform himself, and his mother maintained her faith in him, writing, Love shown to my son would be the highest gratification the world could bestow upon me. Yet he remained, as he confessed on his deathbed in 1852, my own worst enemy.

Shortly before his own death, Madison bundled vouchers for $20,000 and gave them to Dolley’s brother John C. Payne, suggesting that he might give them eventually to his sister as an evidence of the sacrifice he [Madison] had made to insure her tranquility by concealing from her the ruinous extravagance of her son. Payne apparently never did this, because he wrote after his sister’s death, in passing the vouchers on to his nephew, that Mr. Madison assured me these payments were exclusive of those he made with her knowledge and of the remittances he had made and furnished her the means of making. The sum thus appropriated probably equaled the same amount. Madison spent, then, at least $40,000 between 1813 and 1836 on gambling debts and other expenses of his wayward stepson, a huge amount under any circumstances but ruinous to a farmer during years of agricultural depression. This financial drain, together with the psychic pain inflicted on Dolley by her son’s dissipation, caused Edward Coles, reflecting on the wasted life of his handsome cousin, to declare Payne Todd at Montpelier a veritable serpent in the Garden of Eden. Another cousin, Mary Cutts, who was very close to her Aunt Dolley, summarized her relationship with her son: "Mrs. Madison’s life was not exempt from trials. Her son, J. P. Todd, whom she loved so devotedly—and who returned her affection with the same ardor was frequently a drawback to her happiness.… On his return to America [in 1815] his mother continued her indulgences; he had no profession, was a favorite in society