Dolley Madison Takes Command
Catherine Allgor 00:00
Perhaps we're both having a little glass of wine. Maybe there's music. I propose a little something to you. You don't like it, but you can just push it off, or you can actually put your heads together and work together. You need this unofficial sphere. That's what Dolley's drawing room became.
Colleen Shogan 00:17
After attending one of Dolley Madison's famous Wednesday nights at the White House in 1809, one congressman remarked that "by her deportment in her own house, you cannot discover who is her husband's friends or foes." The congressman's words were music to Dolley Madison's ears. When she became First Lady, that year Madison began hosting social events almost every Wednesday evening. Her drawing room was more than just a place where powerful politicians, foreign diplomats, and regular citizens alike gathered to sip wine and enjoy cake. It was a place to be seen, to be heard, and to conduct politics by other means, and as today's guest, Dr. Catherine Allgor tells us, in an era of intense partisanship, Dolley Madison created bipartisan possibilities under the glow of candlelight. So, what might we learn by attending one of Madison's famous soirees? I'm Colleen Shogan, and this is In Pursuit, a podcast that explores lessons from America's past to write the history of America's future. Episode five: Dolley Madison takes command. Catherine Allgor, welcome to In Pursuit.
Catherine Allgor 01:43
Ah, it's a pleasure to be pursuing with you, Colleen.
Colleen Shogan 01:46
Well, absolutely. And we're going to be talking about Dolly Madison today. Her origin story, her early years, is somewhat obscure. What do we know about her in the years before she became Dolley Madison?
Catherine Allgor 02:00
Yes, I like the word obscure. I would also say a little bit confusing and mysterious. We actually do know when she's born and where she's born, but late in her life she worked with one of her nieces on a memoir, and in discussing her early years, she basically lied. So the first thing she did, she lied about her birth year, shaved four years off, but you know, who can blame her,
Colleen Shogan 02:23
right?
Catherine Allgor 02:23
Not come on, we'd all.. if we could get away with it, we'd all do it, right. Um, then there's this part about her name. Now, her name is Dolley Madison. It's.. it's what's on the official documents, it's what's on, you know, her grave. It's Dolley, but in her memoir, she goes through this elaborate explanation, how she was born Dorothy after an illustrious Spotswood relative. Well, the relative she's talking to, when Dolley was born, was probably about 10 years old, so probably not really lustrous at all. But it is a very elaborate explanation to basically disavow that her real name is Dolley, and my theory about this is that Dolley is a very casual name, probably fine for the 18th century, but by the 19th century not really a dignified name. It also has a kind of like third tier slang reference to a woman of easy virtue, and at that point in her life, Dolley is an eminently respectable older woman, but when she was in the height of her political powers, there were a lot of stories in the newspaper that were pretty, like, very hurtful about sexuality. Thomas Jefferson pimping her out, you know, this kind of stuff. So she was very sensitive to that. So I think that she constructed this persona that she's Dorothy, because it was just classier, but the other lie that she tells is more significant, and I think it accounts for your, you know, this idea of like, where is she? She's definitely born in North Carolina, her family are Virginia gentry people, John Payne is a Virginia person, her mother is definitely Gentry, Mary Coles. So, Mary Coles Payne. The only thing different about the Coleses is that they're Quaker, and Dolley says she was then born on a visit to an uncle in North Carolina, so she's saying I'm definitely a Virginian, even though I was born in North Carolina, but the truth was her parents picked up and moved to North Carolina to a settlement in what was really at that point the frontier, and something happened. It wasn't good, Colleen, because after about a year they moved back and they lose money and they lose, you know, whatever land they had, and they basically moved back, move in with Mary's parents, and start over. So, I find it very poignant that North Carolina likes to claim Dolley. They should, as the first lady born on their soil, but for Dolley, it was really important to establish those Virginia roots.
Colleen Shogan 04:56
Sort of rewriting her story, her early story.
Catherine Allgor 04:59
Yes, absolutely. And then something happens when she's 15, and this is a dramatic moment in her life. So, as I mentioned, her mother was Quaker, her father married in, and you know all those jokes about converts. He becomes even more of a Quaker than anybody wanted, and in fact, his neighbors thought he was a fanatic, and so he adopted very early on what the Quakers were coming to understand about abolition. So he became an abolitionist, so he got rid of his enslaved people, he let them go, and sort of set them up for freedom, but that meant he really couldn't stay in Virginia, because you can't have an agricultural, you know, enterprise in Virginia without enslaved laborers. So he moved his family, which is known, Dolley, and her brothers and sisters, Dolley's about 15, to the heart of Quakerism, which is chilly northern Philadelphia. So this was a big shock to the whole Payne family, and while she's there for about the first five years, bad things happen to her family. Her father continues his, I think, slippery ways. He gets read out of Quaker meeting, he goes bankrupt, he dies early. Her mother's forced to, you know, run a boarding house, her brothers, one by one, either die or disappear. They lose a baby daughter named America, and she's somewhat.. I won't say forced, but to please her father, she marries a good Quaker, whose last name is Todd, and seems to settle down, you know, her father's dead, her mother's sort of struggling along, but she settles down her husband, she has John Todd, she has a son who she calls Payne, we historians call him Payne too, let me just say, because he is one.
Colleen Shogan 06:57
He was a challenging son, he was,
Catherine Allgor 06:59
He was a challenging son, yes, yes, we could talk about that too. She has a second baby, and then something dreadful happens, and that's the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.
Colleen Shogan 07:10
So, what happens that summer in Philadelphia?
Catherine Allgor 07:14
At this point, Philadelphia is the capital, right, of the United States. Everybody leaves, John Todd, who's a lawyer, sends his wife and child and new baby, you know, across the river to Grays Ferry, and he stays in town to help his clients, and what happens is he dies, so in this awful sort of mass event, which is so horrible, as we all know from our own experiences with the pandemic, she actually loses her husband and her baby dies as well. So when she comes back in the fall of 1793 she's a young widow, she's only about in her mid 20s with a young son, and she joins her mother in running the boarding house, and that's when fate, my friend, intervenes.
Colleen Shogan 08:02
So, how does she meet James Madison, and didn't they make sort of an odd match?
Catherine Allgor 08:08
Well, according to the family lore, James Madison sees her on the street, and he is smitten right away, which is entirely realistic. At in her mid 20s, she was a rather tall woman with, you know, dark hair, gorgeous blue eyes, beautiful skin, and was what we used to call shapely, so she was quite a striking figure. He asks Aaron Burr to introduce them, and, and the courtship begins, and you know, we don't have a lot of sources comment at that moment commenting on it, but they were definitely an odd pair. So, she was, as I said, a little bit of a tall woman for her age, and he was a very small man, five two or five three. He was a lifelong bachelor, was not, you know, successful with the ladies, and though in private he could be quite delightful, he was kind of quiet and reserved in public, very bookish, and she is this, you know, young, charismatic, sexually charismatic, vibrant, outgoing woman. So, yes, right from the start they were an odd pair.
Colleen Shogan 09:14
In your essay for In Pursuit, you described Dolley as a masterful politician, so we have to understand, I think, the political culture of the time in the United States to appreciate this. Can you tell us about what it was like, and what do you mean by the term republicanism, and how did that affect how politics operated?
Catherine Allgor 09:37
Well, it was crucial. So, when you mentioned republicanism, we like to call it small R,
Colleen Shogan 09:42
small
Catherine Allgor 09:43
R of Republicanism. Yes, though, of course, it's where Republicans, the Republican Party, got their name much later. Republicanism is a theory, it's a political theory with long roots, you know, hundreds of years, and one of the aspects of this theory was very appealing to the call. Who wanted to stage a rebellion against a king, because Republican theory held that the power should be in the people and not in the rulers, right, not in kings, and so it's against everything courtly, kingly, aristocratic, no titles, no shows, and pomp.
Colleen Shogan 10:18
And this is revolutionary, right, Catherine? I mean, this - these ideas did not exist in a large scale.
Catherine Allgor 10:24
There had been a few republics in the past, but they were tiny,
Colleen Shogan 10:27
sure.
Catherine Allgor 10:28
So, you know, the.. it has.. it's a long series of ideas, but again, I'm going to use the word.. it's a theory. Hold on to that for a second here. So, that was very useful, the whole idea of it being against the king and all that, and so that was the theory that informed the American Revolution. Now, after the revolution, they turned again to the republicanism and said, "Okay, we know what you're against this theory, but what are you for, which is sort of you know powers people. So this is their theory, right? In a republic, a good republic, the powers with the people, and the people, by the people, they mean a very small number of white wealthy men, and the theory is that it's the wealthy that have the most investment in a country, in a nation, and that the Republican rulers will be imbued with what they called republican virtue, and that virtue was the ability to put aside your personal interests in service to the common good. Can you see we're having a problem right now? The idea that people could put aside their personal interests and presupposes that there is one common good, and that you're not going to disagree about that. There's no disagreeing. In fact, if you do disagree, it's not that you're disagreeing, you're betraying, you're betraying the common good. You are corrupt. You do not have republican virtue. I think you're seeing right now the problems that this is going to present, because, of course, people don't put aside their personal interests, and there's more than one idea about the common good. So, what this means is that if you're not, it's quite the system kind of like broke down to two, if you're not with us, you're against us, and it sort of broke down into two. We now call them proto parties. They didn't think of it this way, they just thought one side is right and the rest of you are wrong, and what that meant was that you couldn't collaborate or cooperate or even be friendly to people on the other side, because they're traitors, they're betrayers, and so in the official glare of the spotlight in Congress, everybody's denouncing each other, and they're kind of like lone gunmen, so collaboration, cooperation, no. And this is the era, you know, we all know the stories where members of Congress are literally fighting to the death, they're beating each other with canes and shooting each other in the streets and in the halls of Congress sometimes, because you understand that they're fighting to the death against quote the enemy.
Colleen Shogan 13:04
But this time James Madison is a mover and a shaker, right? So he's entering the political sphere. But tell us about how Dolley, how does she become a political character in her own right? How does she hone these political instincts in this era of republicanism?
Catherine Allgor 13:21
There are really two aspects of it, and let me, because let me add one more other thing. So, it's all well and good to reject monarchy and kings and all that stuff, but actually, when you're starting a new government and a nation, those monarchical practices like patronage, social events, pomp, ceremony, it turns out that actually kind of useful in establishing a new nation that at that moment, at the, you know, in this 1780s and 90s, was not really legitimate, not only in the eyes of the world, but in its own citizens. No one was sure this thing was going to work, so you could actually use some of that stuff, and so what Dolley did, what she brought to the table was first this impulse to bring people together, in other words, to out of the glare of the official spotlight, to bring people together and have them interact, and she also adopted and adapted certain of these monarchical practices. Now, how did you get away with it? You may ask, and the answer was because these new Americans, while in theory don't want to have anything to do with, you know, England and the king, that was the only vocabulary of power they knew. So they were thrilled when George Washington is going through the streets in a beautiful carriage pulled by three pairs of horses, you know, they were thrilled when they saw Dolley Madison dressed not really like a real queen, but what you would imagine a queen would be like. They liked these imprimaturs of aristocracy, and she starts way before she's first lady, because she comes to brand new Washington. DC with James. James is going to be Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of State, and she comes in 1801 and immediately sets up housekeeping in a house on F Street, and it becomes the center for political and social life. And this is, of course, eight years before she becomes First Lady.
Colleen Shogan 15:18
When she becomes First Lady in 1809 then what practices does she put in place as the nation's hostess in order to try to change or affect this political culture that's growing in the United States that maybe isn't working to actually resolve differences?
Catherine Allgor 15:37
Yeah, it's not, it's not working, and it's going to get worse. So, so the first thing she does before James is even inaugurated in 1809 is she begins a practical project of bringing people together, so because of republican virtue and fear of corruption, the architecture on literally the landscape of DC, everything's kind of separated, and there's no real places for people to come together. In fact, the White House, which Thomas Jefferson deliberately, during, you know, his term, kept isolated from everybody, was like literally a lonely house on the hill, but there was, there was no place where people could, it could hold all members of Congress, let alone the other branches of government, let alone anybody else. So she took over the executive mansion. She got money from Congress, and she and Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a great architecture architect and designer, basically transformed the executive mansion to a place for entertaining, and it was the one space that could physically hold every member of Congress, members of their families, members of the other branches, visitors, the foreign legations, anybody. It was a place for parties. So that was the first thing she did, and then she started doing what she had done for years on the house on F Street, which is having teas, she calls on people, she has dinner parties, she has receptions, all of the stuff that again Thomas Jefferson didn't do because he was very afraid of that kind of activity, because he knows that that's how politics happens in those spaces and places and events, but then her genius innovation in doing this was she set about regularizing society, so she started holding quite quickly in the fall of 1809 a series of drawing rooms, they were known as "Mrs. Madison's Wednesday Nights," they happened every Wednesday through the congressional season, and they were, we would see them as kind of cocktail party receptions, where people would come, and they didn't sit around, they mixed, and they mingled, and they were incredibly popular, so popular that they also acquired the nickname of "squeezes," because people squeeze together, everybody squeezed together, and they proved to be a powerful tool of political unity and expansion of political power in Washington, because, yeah, everybody had to be there, they were regular, you could always count on them, so if you needed to float something by a senator, you know, you could see him there on Wednesday night, if you had a constituent in town, you want to take them somewhere special. You went on Wednesday night, and a variety of politics happened there, some of it witty, some of it unwitting, but it became a political center.
Colleen Shogan 18:33
Why was it so important that political leaders in Dolley's day could gather together on a Wednesday night under her watchful eye. What did they gain? So, you've kind of set the scene for us for these squeezes, you know, the number of members of Congress gathering together under the candlelight. But what would have been the result of these soirees that she hosted at the White House?
Catherine Allgor 18:57
There's a couple of goods that are important here. One is access. So, one of the things about the squeezes is that when you entered into the space, there was the President of the United States and the First Lady to greet you. And in no time in American history, before or since, has a President been accessible, so accessible, right? So, every week you could go see the President of the United States, and access, as you know, is the lifeblood of politics, and so is information gathering, and this is a place where people, you know, passed on information, we call it gossip, but it was also, you know, about whether the United States was going to go to war, because at that point the, you know, the situation was rather fraught, the foreign situation, and it would end up in the War of 1812, but I think if I could step back and be a political theorist for just one minute, that's all I could do.
Colleen Shogan 19:54
Sure, why not?
Catherine Allgor 19:55
Sure, look for politics to happen, you. Need two spheres of action, so one sphere is the official sphere, and that's a lot of some process, but a lot of product of politics. So the official sphere is the legislative session and the edict and the pieces of paper, and it's the official mechanism of government. You need it, but you also need what I call the unofficial sphere, and the unofficial sphere is the place of process. It's the place where, away from the official spotlight, you can negotiate, you can compromise, and the unofficial sphere works in social spaces, in informal settings, in homes around the presence of women, so as a legislator or a politician, you can do things that get covered under perhaps we're both having a little glass of wine, maybe there's music, I propose a little something to you, you don't like it, but you can just push it off, or you can actually put your heads together and work together, you need this unofficial sphere, that's what Dolley's drawing room became, and more than that, too. Remember, this is this very violent culture, very violent culture. She kind of demanded you behave, and because you had to behave because you were in a lovely party setting, and you know, there's this lovely woman here looking at you, and not brooking any contention. She was very famous for that. People said you could hear her high heels coming, and you've learned to shut up and no fighting. Something else happened that these people learned that the others across the aisle were humans. It's very hard to see your colleague as the embodiment of the devil and evil when you have actually smoked a cigar with him and his wife and your wife together are working for the orphan asylum and you share space together and you share food together and this is of course unwitting but what's happening then when these people are learning to see each other as human beings and learning to work together, they are building a ruling class, but they're also doing something very profound, and they don't know it yet. But this republic, as you alluded to, Colleen, is going to fall apart, and what they were building, without knowing it, was a two-party democracy, so democracy, meaning involving more people in the electorate, as it would by the 1820s but also the idea that there would be a dissent, that there might be two points of view that needed to be contained within a political system, and again, Dolley is not planning this, and they don't know they're doing it, but thank goodness they did, because republicanism, the theory was never going to work in practice, and that became clear by the 1820s.
Colleen Shogan 22:46
What you described there about the informal and the formal mechanisms of politics, and particularly in a democratic republic, and why those two spheres have to exist next to each other, it's very relevant to today. Do you think we've lost some of what Dolley Madison gave us? Have we lost it today in our nation's capital?
Catherine Allgor 23:11
yes, that's the answer to that. And let me share with you a little story. So I was so lucky to be friends with the late great Cokie Roberts. She was a Washington child, right, in the 50s and 60s. She came, her father, you know, served in Congress, and she would talk about how, you know, every fall the whole family would move to the Washington area and set up housekeeping, and the children would go to school, and the legislators would work together, and the women would work together on projects, and they would socialize, and the families would get together, and they'd have picnics and barbecues. They indeed use the unofficial sphere, and a lot of bipartisan across the aisle action against poverty and hunger took place at that time. That's exactly a wonderful illustration of how the unofficial sphere brings people together as humans.
Colleen Shogan 24:05
I've seen the change in Washington. The 20 years that I've been here, there was a lot of unofficial spheres when I first arrived, and I think that some of those opportunities are shrinking.
Catherine Allgor 24:16
Well, the other person I talked to about this was Chelsea Clinton. This be maybe right before you came, she talked about that, the fading of that too, and what happened was it has to do with airline deregulation. Suddenly, legislators didn't have to move their whole family, they could fly, and they'd fly in for Monday night, fly back on Thursday or Friday, their kids wouldn't have to change schools, but what that meant was that because these are gendered spheres, and you know, women were the ones who fostered these, the unofficial sphere. That's traditionally the case. It was the case then. And so it sounds simplistic, but if I were to fix Washington, we would just have a lot more dinner parties coming.
Colleen Shogan 24:57
Well, you know, we can't have a conversation about Dolley Madison, without talking about the burning of the White House in 1814 and of course, Dolley Madison - I know this because I worked at the White House Historical Association - is often publicly credited with saving the Gilbert Stuart painting of Washington, which still hangs in the White House today. So, tell us, is that credit deserved, and what's the full story here?
Catherine Allgor 25:25
Yes, it is deserved. I'm gonna, I'm happy to stand up, but there's a really interesting couple interesting twists, which I think you might be thinking about, or you're influenced by. It's August, it's, you know, the British are coming, they're really coming this time, and she's trying to stay as long as she can in the White House with packing up papers and sending people off, and she's there with her white servant, an enslaved man named Paul Jennings, and she determines that she needs to take the portrait down. Now, the interesting thing is, it wasn't even original, it was a copy, which she knew, so it's not intrinsically valuable, but she understood that she, she did not want this portrait to fall into the hands of the British. She didn't. Her fears were they would, they would parade it through the streets as a prize of war. So she said to her servants, "Let's get this down." So French John and Paul Jennings climb up, and they are trying to get it down, they can't get it off the wall, so they break the frame, and they take out the stretcher, and she gives the stretcher to two gentlemen from New York, and they basically take it away in a cart and hide it, so this becomes a story very quickly once the war is over, and you know, national, the rise of nationalism in America, but about 30 years later, she's now close to death. She's in her 1840s A member, the Carroll family, the very prominent family in Maryland, starts to claim in the newspaper that their ancestors saved that portrait. Now, what's interesting about Dolley? So, she has had decades of being like trashed in the newspapers, I mentioned before about the sex stuff. She would never dignify this with a response in the newspaper, but this one she did. She wrote to the newspaper, and she said, "No, Mr. Carroll actually had left me there, and I did this, and I did that." And you know, she was very modest. She called it her little contribution. She said, "You know, I did it out of respect for General Washington, not to, you know, wreak laurels upon myself, but if there are laurels to be had, they belong to me." So this is this one moment where she actually enters the newspaper sphere and says, no, we're shutting this down now. Interestingly enough, Paul Jennings, the young man who's there. He goes on, he's eventually freed by.. well, it's complicated, but he's eventually freed, and he goes on to serve in the government and have a family, and really be one of the first families of color in Washington to kind of, you know, build a real life there of free people. He writes in the 1840s a memoir called "The Reminiscence of a Colored Man," and it is the first White House memoir, and he talks about his time as the valet for James Madison, and James Madison comes off pretty well in this reminiscence, but what was different is that James Madison dies in 1836 he doesn't free his slaves, but there's a lot of rumors that he's going to, but he doesn't, but Dolley then becomes the focus of people's, the growing abolitionist movement's displeasure with the fact that she's keeps the slaves, she sells the slaves, you know, all of that famous Dolley charm is not, you know, about this enslaved people.
Colleen Shogan 28:42
She's in financial ruin, though. I mean, in part,
Catherine Allgor 28:44
She's in, she's totally in financial ruin, thanks to the aforementioned Payne Todd, in great part. But she becomes this kind of figure of animus, and so Paul Jennings actually writes against her anonymously in newspapers, but he cast doubt on that story, and in his reminiscences he gives himself all the credit. Now it's just not true, but you can see why he did it.
Colleen Shogan 29:09
Fascinating,
Catherine Allgor 29:09
He didn't want her to get the credit, he wanted to rob her of her like moment of glory. So it's interesting.
Colleen Shogan 29:16
Well, you know, if you visit the White House, even today, Dolley Madison's portrait is in the red room, and it's situated as such in the red room that it, it sort of looks over all the way across the White House, and she can still see the Gilbert Stewart in the East Room, and what I was explained to many times in the White House was that was on purpose, so that Dolley Madison can still watch over George Washington's portrait.
Catherine Allgor 29:47
That's, I did not know that story. That's adorable.
Colleen Shogan 29:49
Yes, so I'll every time I go in, if I'm fortunate to take a tour of the White House, I always check to make sure that Dolley Madison is still watching over George Washington. So Catherine,
Catherine Allgor 30:01
I love it.
Colleen Shogan 30:01
Yeah, I love it. It's great, Catherine. You know, one of the goals of In Pursuit is to recover lessons from our nation's past to inform our future. So, what is a lesson that we can learn from Dolley Madison?
Catherine Allgor 30:18
Well, I think there are two, and I think they overlap. One is the importance of the unofficial sphere. She makes visible that power of that. She set that up so that, and every first lady, almost every first lady, has to contend with the the office of the first lady as she set it up as a kind of powerful office. So I think just knowing the power of the unofficial sphere is a lesson, but I think it goes deeper than that. So she had this way of being in the world that offers us a model for a government or a political culture that's based in empathy and love. I attribute this to her Quaker background, you know, the part of the Quaker, you know, ideology that everybody has a light, a divine light within them, and over and over again, even as people described her dress or her manner, whatever, they talk about this incredible warmth and and compassion and empathy, which again I'm going to say does not include enslaved people, but there it is, and this was about coalitions, it was about building bridges instead of bunkers, and this pattern is important because we Americans, more than a lot of other, you know, governments look to our past for lessons, so you know we're the only, I think we're the only country in the world that has a constitution that's over 200 years old. We talk about original intentions. We look to the founders, and one of the things, when you look at the late 18th, 19th century, is you say, oh, politics was so violent, and it really was. It was very, very violent. It's very masculine, right? But if you know about Dolley, and it's not just her, she kind of built a female culture around this, you see. Another pattern, a pattern based on cooperation and on love, and just knowing that we had that in our past, I think should give us the courage to move forward with that pattern.
Colleen Shogan 32:16
Thank you, Catherine. As we've learned in our other conversations, these figures are endlessly complex and fascinating, and certainly Dolley Madison is no exception. Thank you for joining us on In Pursuit.
Catherine Allgor 32:31
It was such a pleasure.
Colleen Shogan 32:34
To read Catherine Allgor's essay on Dolley Madison, and to enjoy other great In Pursuit essays and podcasts, visit inpursuit.org. In Pursuit with Colleen Shogan is a podcast by More Perfect. The series is written and produced by Jim Ambuske. Production services provided by Stand Together. Our theme music is Kleos by Charlie Ryan. Audio mixing by Curt Dahl of CD Squared. Please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast app, and tell us which Americans inspire you.