The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple

1. Return to “Books and Farm, to Tranquility and Independence”

1 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 institu- 2 the madisons at montpelier James Madison, by Joseph Wood, 1817. (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond) The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted return to “books, farm, tranquility” 3 Dolley Madison, by Joseph Wood, 1817. (Virginia Historical Society, Richmond) The image placed here in the print version has been intentionally omitted 4 the madisons at montpelier tions revered. . . . His name will descend to posterity with that of the illustrious Washington. One achieved our independence, and the other sustained it.” 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...