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Dolley Madison

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This article is about a U.S. First Lady (the wife of James Madison). For the article on the baked goods brand, see Dolly Madison.
Dolley Madison
4th First Lady of the United States
In office
March 4, 1809 – March 3, 1817
Preceded byMartha Jefferson Randolph
Succeeded byElizabeth Monroe
Personal details
BornGuilford County, NC
DiedJuly 12, 1849(1849-07-12) (aged 81)
Washington DC
Spouse(s)John Todd (1790-1793)
James Madison (1794-1836)
ChildrenJohn Payne Todd
William Temple Todd
OccupationFirst Lady of the United States of America
Signature

Dolley Payne Todd Madison (May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the spouse of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison, and was First Lady of the United States from 1809 to 1817. She also occasionally acted as First Lady during the administration of Thomas Jefferson, fulfilling the ceremonial functions more usually associated with the President's wife, since Jefferson was a widower.[1]

Spelling of name

In the past, biographers and others stated that her real name was Dorothea after her Aunt, or Dorothy and Dolley was a nickname. However, the registry of her birth with the New Garden Friends Meeting lists her name as Dolley and her will of 1841 states "I, Dolley p. Madison"[2]. Based on manuscript evidence and the scholarship of her recent biographers, Dolley, spelled with an E, appears to have been her given name.[3][clarification needed]

Early life and first marriage

Miniature of Dolley, painted by James Peale, 1794.

Dolley Payne was born on May 20, 1768, in the Quaker settlement of New Garden, North Carolina, in Guilford County. [4] Her parents, both Virginians, had moved there in 1765. Her mother, Mary Cole, a Quaker, married John Payne, a non-Quaker, in 1761. Three years later, he applied and was admitted to the Quaker Monthly Meeting in Hanover County, Virginia, and Dolley Payne was raised in the Quaker faith.

Dolley was one of 8 children, four boys (Walter, William Temple, Isaac, and John) and four girls (Dolley, Lucy, Anna, and Mary). In 1769, the family returned to Virginia.[5] As a young girl, she grew up in comfort in rural eastern Virginia, deeply attached to her mother's family.

In 1783, John Payne emancipated his slaves and moved his family to Philadelphia, where he went into business as a starch merchant. By 1789, however, his business had failed. He died in 1792. Dolley's mother initially made ends meet by opening a boarding house. A year later she moved to western Virginia to live with her daughter Lucy, who had married George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of George Washington. Mary Coles Payne took her two youngest children, Mary and John, with her. By then, Dolley Payne had married Quaker lawyer John Todd in January 1790. Their son, John Payne Todd, was born in 1792 and William Temple Todd in 1793. Her sister Anna lived with the Todds as well.

In the fall of 1793, yellow fever struck Philadelphia. Her husband and younger son, William Temple, both died in the epidemic, and Dolley Todd was left a widow at the age of twenty-five.

Second marriage

In May, 1794, James Madison asked his friend Aaron Burr to introduce him to Dolley Todd. Madison was seventeen years her senior and, at the age of forty-three, a long-standing bachelor.

The encounter apparently went smoothly for a brisk courtship followed, and by August she had accepted his proposal of marriage. For marrying Madison, a non-Quaker, she was expelled from the Society of Friends. They were married on September 15, 1794 and lived in Philadelphia for the next three years.

In 1797, after eight years in the House of Representatives, James Madison retired from politics. He took his family to Montpelier, the Madison family estate in Orange County, Virginia. There they expanded the house and settled in. They expected to remain as planters living quietly in the country but when Thomas Jefferson became the third president of the United States, in 1801, he asked James Madison to serve as his Secretary of State. James Madison accepted, and the Madison family, consisting now of James, Dolley, her son Payne, and her sister Anna, moved to Washington, D.C.. They moved to an extremely large house for the amount of their savings.

In Washington 1801-1817

Sketch of Dolley, c. 1800
A woodcut

Madison worked with the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to furnish the White House.

In the approach to the 1808 presidential election, with Thomas Jefferson ready to retire, the Democratic-Republican caucus nominated James Madison to succeed him. James Madison was elected President, serving two terms from 1809 to 1817, with Dolley becoming official First Lady.

As the invading British army approached Washington during the War of 1812, Madison's slaves collected valuables like silver, Gilbert Stuart's famous portrait of George Washington, an original draft of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

"It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House, she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment."[6]

However, in her own letter to her sister the day before Washington was burned Dolly says she ordered that the painting be removed: " I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvas taken out. It is done! and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York, for safe keeping". [7]

Paul Jennings identifies the men who removed the painting:

"John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President's gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of."[8]

In Montpelier 1817-1837

Dolley at the end of her tenure as First Lady in 1817

On April 6 1817, Dolley and James Madison returned to their estate in Orange County, Virginia.

Dolley Madison by Rembrandt Peale, c. 1817

In 1830, Dolley Madison's son by her first marriage, Payne Todd, who had never found a career, went to debtors prison in Philadelphia. The Madisons sold land in Kentucky and mortgaged half of the Montpelier estate to pay Todd's debts.

James Madison died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836. Dolley remained at Montpelier for a year. One of her nieces, Anna Payne, came to live with her. Payne Todd also came for a stay, and Mrs. Madison organized and copied her husband's papers. In 1837, Congress authorized $30,000 as payment for the first installment of the Madison papers.

In the fall of 1837, Dolley Payne Madison decided to leave Montpelier for Washington, D.C., charging Payne Todd with the care of the plantation. She moved with Anna Payne into a house her sister Anna and her husband Richard Cutts had bought, located on Lafayette Square.


In Washington 1837-1849

A daguerreotype of Dolley in 1848, by Mathew B. Brady

While Madison was living in Washington, Payne Todd was unable to manage the plantation successfully due to alcoholism and resulting illness. Madison tried to raise money by selling the rest of James' papers. Unable to find a buyer for the papers, she sold the whole estate to pay off outstanding debts. Paul Jennings later recalled, "In the last days of her life, before Congress purchased her husband's papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty, and I think sometimes suffered for the necessaries of life. While I was a servant to Mr. Webster, he often sent me to her with a market-basket full of provisions, and told me whenever I saw anything in the house that I thought she was in need of, to take it to her. I often did this, and occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket, though I had years before bought my freedom of her."[9] In 1848, Congress agreed to buy the rest of James Madison's papers for the sum of $25,000.

References

  1. ^ Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York: Henry Holy & Co., 2006), 43
  2. ^ Will of Dolley Payne Todd Madison, February 1, 1841, Papers of Notable Virginia Families, MS 2988, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, char lotte you'll save a lot Virginia, United States.
  3. ^ Allgor, 415-416; Richard N. Cote, Strength and Honor: the Life of Dolley Madison (Mount Pleasant, S.C.: Corinthian Books, 2005), 36-37
  4. ^ http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/madison/overview/chronology.html
  5. ^ http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/madison/overview/chronology.html
  6. ^ http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html
  7. ^ http://www.nationalcenter.org/WashingtonBurning1814.html
  8. ^ http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html
  9. ^ http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html

Further reading

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dolley Madison.

Jennings, Paul. A Colored Man's Reminiscenes of James Madison, Brooklyn, George C. Beadle, 1865 pgs 12, 13, 15. http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html

Honorary titles
Preceded by First Lady of the United States
1809–1817 		Succeeded by
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