The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple

4. “The Last of the Great Lights of the Revolution Has Sunk Below the Horizon”

4 “The Last of the Great Lights of the Revolution Has Sunk below the Horizon” Through 1835 and 1836, in madison’s own metaphor, the candle of life in the old man at Montpelier sputtered toward its socket. Dolley Madison wrote that “my days are devoted to nursing and comforting my sick patient,” while a visitor observed that “her devotion to Mr. Madison is incessant, and he needs all her constant attention.” In February 1835, in a visit that found both James and Dolley in a period of better health and experiencing a winter respite from the sometimes burdensome parade of company, Harriet Martineau, the English novelist and writer already well-known at Montpelier, came for three days, much enjoyed by all. Martineau was on the carefully planned visit to the United States that resulted in her three-volume Retrospect of Western Travel, published in London and New York in 1838. Excepting only Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, it is the fullest and best known of the many accounts by Europeans of what they saw as a perhaps hopeful and beckoning, perhaps less civilized and retrograde new society unlike any other in the world. After a beautiful fall trip across New York State on the Erie Canal to Niagara Falls, she went via Pennsylvania to Washington where she spent a month observing Congress, meeting President Jackson, and socializing with government officials and their wives, many of whom, of course, were friends of the Madisons, through whom she received an invitation to Montpelier. Before leaving Washington, Martineau had visits not only with Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and other Jackson-era leaders, but also with former president and now congressman John Quincy Adams and Chief Justice John Marshall, each a veteran of half a century or more in public life and, “the last of the great lights” 147 like Madison, stalwart but embattled defenders of the Constitution and the Union against the forces of nullification, secession, sectionalism, party strife, and slavocracy. She heard and saw Calhoun and others defend these forces in Congress and in Washington newspapers and drawing rooms, all of which had reverberated at Montpelier through the reports of visitors and the packets of papers and pamphlets Madison received regularly through the post. Martineau found Adams embodied “the subordination of glory to goodness, of showy objects to moral ones,” and “the pure, simple morals which are assumed to prevail in the thriving young republic .” She fully grasped, as Adams had noted in his eulogy of James Monroe , that “the Declaration of Independence . . . [was] a proclamation of Union already formed, by the whole people of the United States,” to which Chief Justice Marshall agreed, asserting to Adams that “the independence of the states is a graft on the stock of . . . a previously existing Union.” Eighty years old and in office as chief justice for thirty-four years when Martineau met him in Washington, Marshall struck her as “a tall, majestic , bright-eyed old man” zealous in his defense of the moral and indivisible Union to which he and Adams (and Madison) were devoted. She also found him possessed of a “reverence for woman” that left him “convinced of their intellectual equality with men, . . . [and with] a deep sense of their social injuries.” She was pleased at Marshall’s contempt for religious establishment, “so monstrous in principle, and so injurious to true religion in practice, that he could not imagine it could be upheld for anything but political purposes.” Martineau also talked with the two old Revolutionary veterans about Adams’s Oration on the Life and Character of Gilbert Motier de Lafayette, delivered to both houses of Congress a month before. When Marshall received his copy of the oration a day or two before his visit with Martineau, he commended the Frenchman for “the worth and services of one of the most extraordinary personages of the extraordinary and eventful age in which he lived.” If Martineau then delivered a copy of the oration to the Madisons, she would have heard further agreement. With these fervent endorsements from veterans with Madison of the founding of the American republic, Martineau’s parting comment could have been no surprise: “The most animated moment of our conversation was when I told him [Marshall] I was going to visit Mr. Madison on leaving Washington. He instantly sat upright in his chair, and with beaming eyes began to praise 148 the madisons...