BIOGRAPHY:

Dolley Todd Madison (née Payne; May 20, 1768 – July 12, 1849) was the wife of James Madison, President of the United States from 1809 to 1817. for performing social functions in Washington, to which she invited members of both political parties, essentially spearheading the concept of bipartisan cooperation, although before the term came into use in the United States. While earlier founders such as Thomas Jefferson only met with members of one party at a time, and politics could often involve violence leading to physical altercations and even duels, Madison helped create the idea that members of each party could communicate amicably , communicate and negotiate with each other without resorting to violence. In innovating political institutions as the wife of James Madison, Dolley Madison did much to define the role of presidential wife, known only much later as the First Lady, a function she had sometimes performed previously for widowed people. Thomas Jefferson.

Dolly also helped furnish the newly built White House. When the British set it on fire in 1814, she was credited with saving the classic portrait of George Washington; she dispatched her personal slave, Paul Jennings, to rescue him. During her widowhood she often lived in poverty, relieved in part by the sale of her late husband’s papers.

Early life and first marriage:

The family’s first girl, Dolly Payne, was born on May 20, 1768, at the Quaker settlement of “New Garden” in Guilford County (present-day Greensboro), North Carolina, to Mary Coles and John Payne Jr., both from Virginia, who moved to North Carolina in 1765 year. Mary Coles 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, where Coles’ parents lived. He became a devout follower and they raised their children in the Quaker faith.

In 1769, the Paynes returned to Virginia, and young Dolly grew up on her parents’ plantation in rural eastern Virginia and became deeply attached to her mother’s family. After all, she had three sisters (Lucy, Anne and Mary) and four brothers (Walter, William Temple, Isaac and John).

In 1783, after the American Revolutionary War, John Payne freed his slaves, as did numerous slave owners in the Upper South. Some, like Paine, were Quakers who had long encouraged emancipation; others were inspired by revolutionary ideals. From 1782 to 1810, the share of free blacks in Virginia’s total black population increased from less than one percent to 7.2 percent, and more than 30,000 blacks were free.

When Dolly was 15, Payne moved in with his family. to Philadelphia, where he went into business as a starch merchant, but by 1791 the business failed. This was seen as “weakness” in Quaker meetings and he was expelled. He died in October 1792, and Mary Payne initially made ends meet by opening a boarding house, but the following year she took her two youngest children, Mary and John, and moved to western Virginia to live with her daughter Lucy and her new husband , George Steptoe Washington, nephew of George Washington.

Marriage and family:

In January 1790, Dolly Payne married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer from Philadelphia. They quickly had two sons, John Payne (named Payne) and William Temple (born July 4, 1793). After Mary Payne left Philadelphia in 1793, Dolly’s sister, Anna Payne, moved in with them to help with the children.

In August 1793, a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia, killing 5,019 people in four months. Dolly suffered particularly hard, losing her husband, son William, mother-in-law and father-in-law.

Having displaced most of her family, she also had to take care of herself. surviving son without financial support. While her husband left her money in his will, the executor, her brother-in-law, withheld it and she had to sue him for what she was owed.

Second marriage:

Despite Dolly’s weakened position after the death of most of her male relatives, she was still considered a beautiful woman and lived in the temporary capital of the United States, Philadelphia. While her mother went to live with another married daughter, Dolly came to the attention of James Madison, who then represented Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives. Although remarriage would have been critical for her since it would have been difficult to support herself and her child on the income a woman could have earned, she reportedly seemed to genuinely care about James.

Some sources claim that Aaron Burr, a longtime friend of Madison’s from their days at the College of New Jersey (now called Princeton University), was staying at the boarding house where Dolly also resided, and it was Aaron’s idea to introduce the two. In May 1794, Burr formally introduced the young widow to Madison, who at 43 was a longtime bachelor 17 years her senior. A lively courtship followed, and by August Dolly accepted his marriage proposal. Because he was not a Quaker, she was expelled from the Society of Friends for marrying outside her faith, after which Dolly began attending Episcopalian services. Despite her Quaker upbringing, there is no evidence that she disapproved of James as a slave owner. 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 returned with his family to Montpelier, the Madison family plantation in Orange County, Virginia. There they expanded the house and settled in it. When Thomas Jefferson was elected the third President of the United States in 1800, he asked Madison to become his Secretary of State. Madison accepted and moved Dolley, her son Payne, sister Anne, and their house slaves to Washington on F Street. They took a large house as Dolley believed entertainment would be important in the new capital.

In Washington 1801–1817:

Dolley worked with architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to furnish the White House, the first official residence built for a President of the United States. She sometimes served as widower Jefferson’s hostess at official ceremonies. Dolly would become an important part of the Washington social circle, befriending the wives of numerous diplomats such as Sara Martinez de Yurujo, wife of the Spanish Ambassador, and Marie-Angelique Turro, wife of the French Ambassador. Her charm sparked a diplomatic crisis called the Merry Affair after Jefferson escorted Dolly to the dining room instead of the wife of Anthony Merry, the English diplomat to the United States, making a serious mistake.

Ahead of the 1808 presidential election, when Thomas Jefferson was ready to resign, the Democratic and Republican factions appointed James Madison to replace him. He was elected president, serving two terms from 1809 to 1817, and Dolly became the official hostess of the White House. Dolly helped define official functions, decorated the executive mansion, and welcomed visitors into her living room. She was known for her kindness and hospitality and contributed to her husband’s popularity as president. She was the only First Lady to receive an honorary seat in Congress and the first American woman to answer a telegraph message. In 1812 James was re-elected. This year the War of 1812 with Great Britain began. After sending diplomat and poet Joel Barlow to Europe to discuss the Berlin Decree and the controversial Orders in council, James Madison would deliver his war request to Congress.

Burning of Washington, 1814:

After the United States declared war in 1812 and attempted to invade Canada in 1813, British troops attacked Washington in 1814. As they approached, White House staff hastily prepared to flee, Dolly ordered the rescue of Stuart’s painting, a copy of Lansdowne’s portrait, as she wrote in a letter to her sister at 3 pm on August 23:

Our good friend Mr. Carroll has arrived to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad mood towards me because I insist on waiting until the large photograph of General Washington is secured and must be unscrewed from the wall. The process proved too tedious for these dangerous moments; I ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas removed… The job was done, and the precious portrait was handed over to two gentlemen from New York for safekeeping. Handing over the canvas to the said gentlemen, Messrs. Barker and Depeyster, Mr. Soussat warned them against rolling the canvas, saying that this would destroy the portrait. It was moved to this because Mr. Barker began to roll it up to make it easier to carry.

Popular accounts during and after the war tended to portray Dolly as the one who removed the painting, and she became a national heroine. Historians of the early twentieth century noted that Jean-Pierre Siussat supervised servants, many of whom were slaves, in a crisis, and that the house slaves were the ones who truly preserved the painting.

Dolley Madison hurried into her waiting carriage with other families fleeing the city. They went to Georgetown and the next day crossed the Potomac into Virginia. When the danger subsided a few days after the British left Washington, she returned to the capital to meet her husband. However, rampant looting and systematic destruction devastated much of the new city. When Congress began discussing the construction of a new capital, Dolly and James moved into The Octagon House.

Montpellier 1817–1837:

Dolly at the end of her tenure as First Lady in 1817
On April 6, 1817, a month after he left the presidency, Dolley and James Madison returned to Montpelier Plantation in Orange County, Virginia.

In 1830, Dolly Payne’s son Todd, who never made it as a career, went to debtor’s prison in Philadelphia, and the Madisons sold land in Kentucky and mortgaged half of the Montpelier plantation to pay their debts.

James died in Montpelier on June 28, 1836. Dolly remained in Montpelier for a year. Her niece Anna Payne moved in with her, and Todd came for a long stay. During this time, Dolly organized and copied her husband’s papers. Congress authorized the payment of $55,000 for the editing and publication of seven volumes of Madison’s newspapers, including his unique notes on the 1787 convention.

In the fall of 1837, Dolley returned to Washington, entrusting Todd with the care of the plantation. She and her sister Anna moved into the house purchased by Anna and her husband Richard Cutts in Lafayette Square. Madison took Paul Jennings with her as her butler, and he was forced to leave his family in Virginia.

In Washington 1837–1849:

A daguerreotype of Dolly in 1848 by Matthew Brady
While Dolley Madison lived in Washington, Payne Todd was unable to manage the plantation due to alcoholism and related illness. She tried to raise money by selling the remaining presidential papers. She agreed to sell Jennings to Daniel Webster, who allowed him to gain his freedom by paying him for his work.

Unable to find a buyer for the papers, she sold Montpelier, its remaining slaves and furniture to pay off outstanding debts.

Paul Jennings, a former slave of the Madisons, whom he later recalled in his memoirs,

In the last days of her life, before Congress acquired her husband’s papers, she was in a state of absolute poverty and I think she sometimes suffered from the necessities of life. While I was Mr. Webster’s servant, he often sent me to her with a basket full of provisions, and asked me, when I saw something in the house that I thought she wanted, to carry it to her. I often did this and sometimes gave her small sums from my own pocket, although I had purchased her freedom several years before.

In 1848, Congress agreed to purchase the remaining papers of James Madison for the sum of $22,000 or $25,000.

In 1842, Dolley Madison joined St. John’s Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, DC. Other members of the Madison and Payne families were present at this church.

On February 28, 1844, Madison was with President John Tyler aboard the USS Princeton when the Peacemaker’s cannon exploded while being fired. While Secretary of State and Navy men Abel P. Upshur and Thomas Walker Gilmer, Tyler’s future father-in-law David Gardiner, and three others were killed, President Tyler and Dolley Madison were unharmed.

She died at her home in Washington in 1849 at the age of 81. She was initially buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C., but was later reinterred in Montpelier. to my husband.

Honors:

During World War II, the Liberty ship SS Dolly Madison was built in Panama City, Florida, and named in her honor.

Madison was a member of the first class of women in Virginia history in 2000.

Spelling of Her Name In the past, biographers and others have argued that her name was Dorothea, after her aunt, or Dorothy, and that Dolly was a nickname. But her birth was registered at the New Garden Friends Meeting as Dolly, and her 1841 will reads, “I, Dolly P. Madison.” Based on handwritten evidence and research by recent biographers, Dolly, spelled “ie,” appears to have been her birth name. On the other hand, the printed press, especially newspapers, tended to write the word “Dolly”: for example, Hallowell (Maine) Gazette, February 8, 1815, p. 4 refers to how Congress allowed “Madame Dolley Madison” a $14,000 subsidy to purchase new furniture; and New Bedford (Massachusetts), March 3, 1837, page 2, referred to a number of important documents from her late husband and said that “Mrs. Dolley Madison” would be paid by the Senate for these historical manuscripts. Several magazines of the time also used the spelling “Dolly”, such as The Knickerbocker, February 1837, page 165; as were many popular magazines from the 1860s to 1890s. An essay in Munsey’s Magazine in 1896 referred to her as “Mistress Dolly.” Her great-niece Lucia Beverly Cutts, in her memoirs and letters to Dolley Madison: Wife of James Madison, President of the United States (1896), constantly uses the word “Dolly” throughout.