Dolley Payne was born on May
20, 1768, in the Quaker
In January 1790, Dolley Payne married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer
in Philadelphia. They quickly had two sons, John Payne (called Payne) and William Temple (born July 4, 1793]). After
Mary Payne left Philadelphia in 1793, Dolley'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. Dolley
was hit particularly hard, losing her husband, son William, mother-in-law, and
father-in-law.
While undergoing the loss of much of her family, she also had to
take care of her surviving son without financial support. While her husband had
left her money in his will, the executor, her brother-in-law, withheld the
funds and she had to sue him for what she was owed.
In May 1794, Burr made the
formal introduction between the young widow and Madison, who at 43 was a
longstanding bachelor 17 years her senior. A brisk courtship followed and, by
August, Dolley accepted his marriage proposal.
When Thomas Jefferson was elected as the third president of the
United States in 1800, he asked Madison to serve as his Secretary of State. Madison
accepted and moved Dolley, her son Payne, her sister Anna, and their domestic
slaves to Washington on F Street. They took a large house, as Dolley believed
that entertaining would be important in the new capital
Dolley worked with the
architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe to
furnish the White
House, the first official residence built for the
president of the United States. She sometimes served as widower Jefferson's
hostess for official ceremonial functions
In the approach to the 1808
presidential election, with Thomas Jefferson ready to retire, the Democratic-Republican
caucus nominated James Madison to succeed him. He was elected President, serving two terms from 1809 to
1817, and Dolley became the official White House hostess. Thel first “first” lady to live in the White
House. Dolley helped to define the official functions, decorated the
Executive Mansion, and welcomed visitors in her drawing room. She was renowned
for her social graces and hospitality and contributed to her husband's
popularity as president. She was the only First Lady given an honorary seat on
the floor of Congress, and the first American to respond to a telegraph
message. In 1812, James was re-elected. This was the year that the War of 1812 began with Great Britain
After the United States declared war in 1812 and attempted to
invade Canada in 1813, a British force attacked Washington in 1814. As it
approached and the White House staff hurriedly prepared to flee, Dolley ordered
the Stuart painting, a copy of the famous
George Washington portrait
to
be saved, as she wrote in a letter to her sister at 3 o'clock in the afternoon
of August 23:
Our kind friend Mr. Carroll has
come to hasten my departure, and in a very bad humor with me, because I insist
on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it
requires to be unscrewed from the wall. The 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 from New York for safe keeping. On handing the canvas to the
gentlemen in question, Messrs. Barker and Depeyster, Mr. Sioussat cautioned
them against rolling it up, saying that it would destroy the portrait. He was
moved to this because Mr. Barker started to roll it up for greater convenience
for carrying.
Popular accounts during and after the war years tended to
portray Dolley as the one who removed the painting, and she became a national
heroine. Early twentieth-century historians noted that Jean Pierre Sioussat had
directed the servants, many of whom were slaves, in the crisis, and that house
slaves were the ones who actually preserved the painting.
Dolley Madison hurried away in her waiting carriage, along with
other families fleeing the city. They went to Georgetown and the next day they
crossed over the Potomac into Virginia. When
the danger receded after the British left Washington a few days later, she
returned to the capital to meet her husband. However, the rampant pillaging and
systematic destruction had desolated much of the new city. As Congress began
discussions over the construction of a new capital, Dolley and James moved
into The Octagon House.
On April 6, 1817, a month after his retirement from the
presidency, Dolley and James Madison returned to the Montpelier plantation in
Orange County, Virginia.
In 1830, Dolley's son Payne Todd, who had never found a career,
went to debtors' prison in Philadelphia and the Madisons sold land in Kentucky
and mortgaged half of the Montpelier plantation to pay his debts.
James died at Montpelier on June 28, 1836.
Dolley remained at Montpelier for a year. Her niece Anna Payne
moved in with her, and Todd came for a lengthy stay. During this time, Dolley
organized and copied her husband's papers. Congress authorized $55,000 as
payment for editing and publishing seven volumes of the Madison papers,
including his unique notes on the 1787 convention.
In the fall of 1837, Dolley returned to Washington, charging
Todd with the care of the plantation. She and her sister Anna moved into a
house, bought by Anna and her husband Richard Cutts, on Lafayette Square. Madison took Paul Jennings with her as a butler, and he was
forced to leave his family in Virginia.
While Dolley Madison was living in Washington, Payne Todd was
unable to manage the plantation, due to alcoholism and related illness. She tried to raise money by selling
the rest of the president's papers. She agreed to sell Jennings to Daniel
Webster, who allowed him to gain his freedom by paying him through work.
Unable to find a buyer for the papers, she sold Montpelier, its
remaining slaves, and the furnishings to pay off outstanding debts.
Paul Jennings, the former slave of the Madisons, later recalled in his
memoir,
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.
In 1848, Congress agreed to buy the rest of James Madison's
papers for the sum of $22,000 or $25,000.
In 1842, Dolley Madison joined St.
John's Episcopal Church, Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. This church was
attended by other members of the Madison and Payne families.
On February 28, 1844, Madison was with President John
Tyler while aboard
the USS Princeton when a "Peacemaker" cannon
exploded in the process of being fired. While Secretaries of State and
Navy 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 escaped unharmed.
She died at her home in Washington in 1849, at the age of 81.
She was first buried in the Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C., but later was re-interred
at Montpelier next to her husband.
