James Madison’s Nieces and Nephews

When James Madison died on June 28, 1836, he left behind no children of his own. In his will he left a bequest of $9,000 to be divided equally among his nieces and nephews, or, if they were dead, among their children according to family branch. In legal terminology, the inheritance was to be divided per stirpes.

By the summer of 1836 the extended Madison family had dispersed across the country. Some of his nieces and nephews had died, and James’s legatees now included children of the third generation. It fell to Dolley to locate all the living members of her husband’s family. She also had to raise the cash to finance the bequests, money that James had assumed would be earned by the sale of his papers. Dolley thus found herself burdened with the related tasks of selling James’s papers and paying off his bequests, and her correspondence during her first months of widowhood is filled with references to James’s nieces and nephews. It was a stressful time, and by the end of the summer her health had collapsed.

To follow this genealogical maze, we must start with James and his siblings. James Madison was the eldest child of James Madison, Sr., and Nelly Conway Madison. In addition to James, his parents had six other children who lived to adulthood: Francis, Ambrose, Nelly, William, Sarah, and Frances. They all had children—and grandchildren—of their own. In following Dolley’s attempt to fulfill the terms of her husband’s will, we must trace James’s family to the third generation.

Francis Madison

In Francis’s line, Dolley had to track down five nieces and nephews, and four great-nieces and great-nephews. Francis Madison married Susan Bell, and both died before James, but not before they had nine children: James F., William, Elizabeth, Nelly, Mary, Catlett, Reuben Conway (known as Conway), Catherine, and Frances. Of these, William, Elizabeth, Catlett, Catherine, and Frances were all still alive after their uncle’s death. James F. died before his uncle, but he was unmarried and had no children. Dolley had thus to locate the children of Nelly, Conway, and Mary. First, Nelly had married William Bell Wood, and the couple had six children, two of whom were still alive in 1836. There was a daughter, Margaret Wood, who married a man named Tappan. They lived in Tennessee. And there was a son, Joseph Wood, who also moved to Tennessee. Second, Conway was living in Illinois at the time of his death. He married a woman named Winna, with whom he had six children: Elizabeth, Eugenia, Francis, James, Mary, and William. Four of these were underage in 1836, and Winna Madison had power of attorney for them. She contacted Dolley in regard to her children’s inheritance soon after James’s death. Third, Mary married William H. Smith in 1804. She left behind her two surviving children: a son named Walton Smith who lived in Mississippi, and a daughter named Nancy, who married John Buck and lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Ambrose Madison

Ambrose married Mary Willis Lee Madison in 1779 and died in 1793. They produced only one surviving child, Nelly Conway Madison, whom Dolley knew and loved. Nelly married Dr. John Willis in 1804 and was widowed in 1811. In 1836 Nelly was at Montpelier when her uncle died. She passed away in 1862.

Nelly Conway Madison Hite

In Nelly’s line, Dolley had to trace the three children of Nelly Conway Madison or, if deceased, their children. Nelly Conway Madison married Isaac Hite in 1783. She died in 1802. She had three children who lived to adulthood: Nelly Conway Hite Baldwin, James Madison Hite, and Frances Madison Hite Ransom. The first of Nelly’s children, also named Nelly, had married Dr. Cornelius Baldwin in 1809. She died before her uncle. Dolley therefore had to find the Baldwin children: Eleanor Conway Baldwin Davison, Mary Briscoe Baldwin, Isaac Hite Baldwin, Ann Maury Baldwin Hay, James Madison Baldwin, and Robert Stuart Baldwin. The second of Nelly’s children, James Madison Hite, was still living, residing in Clarke County, Virginia, and had married Caroline Matilda Irvine in 1815. The third in the Nelly line was Frances Madison Hite. She married James Lackland around 1820.

William Madison

In William’s line, Dolley had to find two living nieces and nephews, and six of William’s grandchildren. William Madison was James’s youngest brother. He did not die until 1843. In 1783 he married Frances Throckmorton, and the couple had eleven children, but by the time James died only two were still living, Rebecca Conway Madison Chapman and Major Ambrose Madison. In addition, there were the living children of three of the deceased nieces and nephews. First, there was Robert Lewis Madison. He married Eliza Strachan in 1816, and died in 1828. They had three children: Thomas Cooper Madison, William Alexander Madison, and Robert Lewis Madison. Second, there was Elizabeth Madison, who in 1819 married Lewis Willis. She died in 1824. She had one surviving child, Frances Willis Lee. Third, there was Lititia Madison, who in 1825 married Daniel French Slaughter. She died in 1828. She had two surviving children, James Edwin Slaughter and Philip Madison Slaughter.

Sarah Catlett Madison Macon

In Sarah’s line, Dolley’s job was simple. Sarah (Sally) Catlett Madison married Thomas Macon in 1790, and the couple had seven surviving children: James Hartwell Madison Macon, Conway Catlett Macon, Lucy Hartwell Macon Conway, William Ambrose Macon, Edgar Macon, Henry Macon, and Reuben Macon. Edgar Macon died in 1829, having moved to Florida. The rest of the family remained in Virginia, mainly in Orange County.

Frances Taylor Madison Rose

Frances’s line proved particularly difficult to trace. Frances Taylor Madison married Robert Henry Rose in 1801. Having moved to Alabama, she died in 1823. Of the Rose children, seven were alive in 1836: Hugh Francis Rose, Ambrose James Rose, Henry Rose, Samuel Jordan Rose, Robert Henry Rose, Erasmus Taylor Rose, and Frances M. Rose. Another child, Nelly Conway Rose, married John Francis Newman in 1824. They had four children: Edward Woodyear Newman, Hollis Fryer Newman, Ellen Rose Newman Wheelock, and Mary Frances Newman Rose. But the family had moved to Alabama in 1822, and after Frances Madison Rose died in 1823, her husband, Robert Henry Rose, shifted to Tennessee. Their children spread over Alabama, Tennessee, and Illinois, and proved difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Thus, as Dolley struggled to carry out the terms of James’s will, she found herself not only paying her husband’s bequest to those members of his family who had remained in Virginia, but searching for great-nieces and nephews who had moved on without a forwarding address. Locating distant members of the Madison clan proved difficult and stressful. In the end, despite her best efforts she was unable to locate them all.

Dolley Madison’s Health

Soon after her husband’s death, Dolley Madison’s health collapsed. She had spent the last years of James’s life as his constant companion and caretaker, rarely leaving his bedside, and then it was over. “Mrs. Madison was broken hearted,” one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters recalled. “The House seemed utterly deserted.” Condolence calls were made, visitors came and went, but in the end she was left with her brother, John Coles Payne, and his daughter, Annie Payne, and the crew they assembled to finish editing the great man’s papers. And Dolley was burdened with the tasks JM had conferred on her: to finish editing his papers, to locate a publisher and sell the papers for as much money as possible, and to pay all the bequests he had made in his will.

It was a daunting prospect for a grieving widow who had never been responsible for paying the bills or dealing with legal matters. James had always seen to these things, up to the day of his death. Under the stress of these responsibilities, Dolley’s general health disintegrated and her eyes became severely inflamed and irritated, making it impossible for her to write her own correspondence. On October 23, 1836, writing to cousin Edward Coles about Dolley’s health, Annie described her suffering as “constant and of six or seven weeks duration, commencing with a painful inflammation of the eyes, which brought on chills and fevers, and her general health became so bad and so enfeebled that she could not walk alone.” And, Annie explained, “what has added greatly to her illness is the consciousness that the world has expected the publication of the works, and the fear that her friends would consider their appearance tardy.” A month later an old friend wrote his wife that Mrs. Madison’s “wasted form bore testimony that she had suffered much, probably in mind as well as body.”

The behavior of Dolley’s closest companions only exacerbated her stress. John Coles Payne was a recovering alcoholic, with no experience in the world of letters or business. He saw taking care of his sister as a burden, and itched to move west. Her brother’s impending departure pained Dolley. She wrote William Cabell and Judith Page Walker Rives on April 4, 1837, “He is about to leave us with his family for his long intended removal to the west—a circumstance which gives me great sorrow.” Payne also had little understanding of publishing and floundered in the effort. Most seriously, he took for granted that the papers were worth $100,000, as JM had projected before his death. The size of this estimate offended publishers, and later congressmen, who believed the papers to be worth substantially less.

Dolley’s son, John Payne Todd, was even more difficult. He was an alcoholic, a gambler, and utterly irresponsible. When he met with publishers in New York and Philadelphia, he simply offended them. Not only did his behavior alienate possible publishers, he rarely wrote home, leaving his mother wondering about the state of his progress, which only added to her level of strain. As John Coles Payne wrote Payne Todd on October 12, 1836, “I am not capable of judging the degree of seriousness attached to her indisposition, but mental agitation, I am convinced deeply adds to it. Whether your return would not cordially operate a beneficial effect in tranquillising her nervous agitation your own feelings will best determine.” John Coles Payne concluded: “I proffer no other guide.”

Dolley’s only constant source of support and comfort was her niece, Anna Coles Payne Causten. Anna was sweet and caring and remained by her aunt’s side throughout this difficult period. And when the remnant of Dolley’s family moved west, Anna stayed with her and remained a constant companion for the rest of Dolley’s life. But though Anna provided Dolley with emotional support, she could neither help get the papers published nor assist Dolley in the legal matters surrounding James’s will.

Dolley turned to contemporary medicine for help, but it did not offer her much relief. She called first on the services of two local doctors, Dr. Edmund Pendleton Taylor and Dr. Peyton Grymes. Dolley was apparently dissatisfied with their treatments, however, because she quickly turned to the advice and guidance of Dr. Philip Physick. Physick, a well-known Philadelphia doctor, had treated Dolley’s ulcerated knee in 1805. He was an ailing old man by the 1830s, firmly entrenched in the “heroic” medical practices of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Bleeding, blistering, leeching, and purging patients were all methods with which “regular” doctors of his generation believed “toxins could be extracted from a sick body via bodily fluids.” This is not to say that heroic methods were the only medical treatments available. Many doctors also turned to traditional domestic remedies that used plants and herbs. Doctors resorted to these solutions because they were often familiar and effective treatments for common afflictions. Still, as more “homeopathic” healers competed with traditional physicians of the early nineteenth century, “regular” physicians remained stubbornly dedicated to the harsh, often debilitating, methods taught in medical schools.

Dr. Physick prescribed a combination of heroic and homeopathic medicines. Edward Coles, living in Philadelphia, relayed the doctor’s instructions in letters to Dolley throughout this period. At first, Physick instructed Dolley to bathe her eyes in a wash made from pith of elder (although the doctor later corrected the instructions to pith of sassafras). Physick then sent her an ointment to apply to her eyes, which John Coles Payne described as “very painful.” By 1837 Physick believed more dramatic methods were necessary. Edward Coles wrote John Coles Payne on January 20, 1837, that Physick “said M^rs M. should be leeched—but if she cannot get leeches she must be bled—that depletion is necessary. He inquired how she bore blistering, & whether it produced much irritation, if it did not, blisters behind the ears would be of service.” But Dolley was not particularly inclined to be bled. John Coles Payne described bleeding as “the alternative to which her feelings are not friendly at present.” Though sassafras and milk washes provided Dolley’s eyes with momentary relief, she remained very ill. Her health had so deteriorated by February of 1837 that John Coles Payne wrote Edward Coles hoping to get Dr. Physick’s support for taking Dolley to White Sulpher Springs, in what is now West Virginia, for relief.

Finally, in March of 1837, Congress passed a resolution that authorized the purchase of James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. On March 30, 1837, John Forsyth wrote Dolley that Congress had agreed to purchase the papers and that she would soon be paid “$30,000, appropriated by Congress, at its recent Session.” A few days later, on April 4, 1837, Dolley wrote her friends Judith and William Cabell Rives that her health had finally improved, and that even her eyesight was better (although the stress of writing to her worrisome son had again injured it).

The letters from this period reflect how the strain of widowhood and the pressure of publishing her revered husband’s papers affected Dolley’s health. There is evidence throughout Dolley’s correspondence that her eyes weakened in periods of stress. The illness she experienced after her husband’s death, however, was the most severe ailment she had yet faced. But she recovered. With the weight of publication off her shoulders and the promise of remuneration, Dolley’s health improved, and she soon returned to Washington and the society she loved so much.

Dolley Madison and the Founding of the Washington Orphan Asylum

On December 18, 1815, three notable Washington women submitted to the Congress of the United States a petition containing two requests. First, they asked for an act to incorporate an orphan asylum. As a corporation it would be able to hold property and become a legal guardian to the girls at the orphanage. Second, they appealed to Congress to help fund its construction and donate city land on which to build their institution. The petition was signed by the charity’s first and second directresses and its secretary: Dolley Madison, Marcia Van Ness, and Margaret Bayard Smith, respectively.

The British army had razed much of Washington when it invaded and burned the city in August 1814. The White House had been destroyed, as had both Houses of Congress, and the office of The National Intelligencer. And there was collateral damage to businesses, hotels, and commercial sites. Homes of both the wealthy and poor had been ruined. Government departments had moved into private houses and Congress seriously debated shifting the national capital back to Philadelphia. The result was personal and economic dislocation throughout the city and a sense of malaise about its future. In January of 1815 a South Carolina congressman described Washington to his wife as a “city to which so many are willing to come to and all so anxious to leave.” But while the wealthy had the means to sustain this kind of blow, the poor did not.

If the postwar mood in Washington was despairing, there was also a resolve to improve the city. Talk of removing the capital to Philadelphia generated a determination to create a “phoenix on the Potomac.” In the autumn of 1816 a group of men founded the Columbia Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences, and a year later the Washington Botanical Society. The city was not only to remain the capital of the nation, but to become a center of learning.

The city’s leading women responded as well. Marcia Van Ness, wife of a former congressman from New York and local real estate developer, and Elizabeth Riley Brown, wife of the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Washington, conceived of the idea of creating a Protestant female orphan asylum, especially as the extant Catholic organizations, such as the Poor Clares and the Sisters of the Visitation in Georgetown, did not support orphanages. Widows and orphans of soldiers killed in battle could petition Congress for pensions, but there were no provisions to help the truly defenseless: the eight-year-old girl left on the street, or the three-year-old whose extended family could no longer feed her. As the author of the First Annual Report of the Washington Orphan Asylum stated, “Of all the various charities, which, as members of the human family, we are called upon to bestow, none appears so extensively useful as the support and education of the children of the poor. And among these children, none are so destitute and helpless as orphans.”

While the immediate roots of the Washington Orphan Asylum lay in the 1814 burning of Washington and the ravages of the War of 1812, it was also part of a movement to organize asylums by and for women (and girls), which had begun to appear in the late eighteenth century. Private women’s philanthropic institutions first sprang up after the American Revolution in urban areas like New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston. The Washington Orphan’s Asylum was thus part of a dual impulse: a movement to create organizations by women for women and girls, and a local determination to rebuild the city after the war.

We have no surviving correspondence between Dolley Madison and Marcia Van Ness during this period, but it is probable that Van Ness asked Dolley to become the first directress for several reasons. Any supporting legislation would have to go through the United States Congress, and as First Lady, Dolley had congressional connections and social standing. The Protestant reforming women of the era also keenly felt the need to act as “femininely” as possible. And Van Ness knew Dolley as canny and feminine. This generation of reforming women tried never to cross gendered lines of behavior, unlike the supporters of women’s rights and abolition during the Jacksonian era. As one historian has written, “ever cognizant of the precarious position they occupied, the women of the early associations exercised extreme caution that their activities provoked no unnecessary criticism.” As Dolley later wrote her niece, Mary E. E. Cutts, “our sex are ever loosers, when they stem the torrent of public opinion.”

From her side, Dolley understood personal devastation and financial injury. As a young woman, her family’s fortunes had plummeted when her father’s business failed. And when he died, her mother had been forced to open a boarding house until one of Dolley’s sisters, Lucy Payne, married the nephew of George Washington. At that point the family split up. Her sister Anna stayed with Dolley, while the two youngest children, Mary and John Coles, went with their mother to live with Lucy Payne Washington. By the time she became First Lady, Dolley had experienced not only economic decline, but the deaths of her first husband, her younger son, both of her parents, three of her brothers, and her youngest sister.

When the city of Washington burned, Dolley’s personal possessions went up in flames. As she wrote her sister on August 23, 1814, “our private property must be sacrificed, as it is impossible to procure wagons for its transportation.” In addition, there was the anger the citizens of Washington felt at the lack of military protection of their city, and their sense of abandonment as James rode off to Bladensburg. Dolley was keenly aware of this. As she wrote her cousin Edward Coles on May 13, 1813, “if I could, I would describe to you the fears & alarms, that circulate around me. For the last week all the City & G. Toun (except the Cabinet) have expected a visit from the Enimy, & ware not lacking in their expressions of terror & reproach.” Part of creating a postwar feeling of good will was finding ways to support the ordinary citizens of the national capital.

Dolley did more than lend her name. Whether or not she composed the petition to Congress, she wrote it out so that it would officially be in her handwriting. And she was the most generous contributor. She gave twenty dollars as her subscription fee, and an additional thirty-five dollars as a donation. By contrast, Marcia Van Ness gave ten dollars through her subscription, Juliana Gales contributed twenty dollars but was not a subscriber, and so it went. Most supporters either made a donation or became subscribers, but not both. We have no correspondence indicating why she (and James) were so generous and are simply left to speculate that James and Dolley used the occasion to defuse the anger the citizens of Washington had directed toward the president during the war.

The establishment of the Asylum was first broadcast in The Daily National Intelligencer on October 10, 1815, through an announcement for a meeting for “the Ladies of the county of Washington and neighborhood,” to join as “an association to provide for destitute orphans.” For, the article explained, “a nobler object cannot engage the sympathy of our females.” In a city where meeting space was scarce, they congregated in the chamber of the House of Representatives—which itself had only recently been repaired and rendered usable. On October 13, the paper announced that Dolley Madison had become the first directress, Marcia Van Ness the second directress, and Margaret Bayard Smith, wife of the founder of the newspaper, the secretary. And on November 27 the Intelligencer trumpeted that the ladies had found a house on the northwest corner of 10 Street NW, near Pennsylvania Avenue, and were ready for operation. “The children are to be educated, fed and clothed at the expense of the Society, and at the Asylum. They are to have moral example and religious instruction, and to be taught the habits of industry.” In sum, these “destitute orphans” were to be “trained in the paths of virtue and future usefulness.”

The first items on the agenda were to create a constitution and to incorporate. The first was straightforward, as they had only to agree among themselves. But the second proved more difficult. To secure incorporation, they had to petition Congress, which sat as the committee of the whole and read the bill three times. On March 16 the Senate then voted on it, and rejected the proposal by a vote of 17 to 16 (with three abstentions). In the House, the bill had been sent to the committee for the District of Columbia “to incorporate the subscribers to the Female Orphan Asylum of the City of Washington and to vest in them the fee simple title to four of the public Iota in the City of Washington, to promote the benevolent objects of the Institution.” On March 27, a week and a half after the Senate had voted no, the House committee simply voted not to report out the bill. The Senate vote did not divide along party or regional lines. A few votes were predictable. Nathaniel Macon (D-NC), who found almost any government action unacceptable, voted no. Christopher Gore (F-MA), a hard-core member of the opposition party, voted no. Jonathan Roberts (D-PA), a long-standing Democratic Republican, voted yes. But there were negative votes by Democratic Republicans and positive ones from Federalists, and no noticeable divide along the Mason-Dixon line.

The arguments for and against covered a wide swathe of opinion. Jeremiah Mason (F-NH), who had opposed the War of 1812 and was close to other Federalist conservatives such as Rufus King and Christopher Gore, wrote his wife about the vote. “Mrs. Madison,” he penned, “with other high court dames, lately petitioned Congress for an act of incorporation for a Female Asylum, of which Mrs. M. was to be the presidentress. The Senate most ungallantly rejected the petition.” And, he continued, in what reads today as having a rather mean-spirited and self-satisfied tone, “Being among the rebels on this occasion, I expect to experience no more smiles at the palace.” Robert Goodloe Harper (F-SC) spoke against the act in the Senate. He distrusted both women and corporations. The asylum was, he said, a praiseworthy goal, and he admired everyone associated with it, but “was this strange anomaly in law [a corporation], of a body politic composed of married women, at all necessary to the objects of the institution?” Jonathan Roberts (D-PA), on the other hand, presented a favorable argument to the Senate. Addressing Harper’s stated concerns, Roberts explained that incorporation was neither novel nor repugnant. “Similar acts were to be found on the statute books of some of the States. The charter would give no privilege nor sanction any abuse.” Rather, “it would enable the trustees of a praiseworthy institution to secure, in the most eligible and favorable manner, the application of such means as may be given by benevolent persons to the benevolent objects of the association.”

The “ladies” nevertheless moved forward with their orphan asylum. In 1828 Congress incorporated the Asylum. For Dolley, it was a short, and honorific, affiliation. In April of 1817 the Madisons retired to Montpelier. At that time Marcia Van Ness offered the position of first directress to First Lady Elizabeth Monroe. She refused it. Van Ness then took over the role and remained the asylum’s central figure until her death in 1832.

Purchase and Publication of the Papers of James Madison

When James Madison died on June 28, 1836, he left Dolley Madison a grieving and increasingly ill widow. She not only had to carry on with her daily life, but also fulfill the terms of James’s will, of which the most important was to sell his papers. James had spent his retirement editing them, and he believed they would fetch $100,000 from a trade publisher. Based on that conviction, he left $12,000 worth of legacies, including money for the University of Virginia, Princeton University, and the American Colonization Society, and bequests of $9,000 to his nieces and nephews, or their descendants. The money raised from the sale of his papers was also to be Dolley’s retirement fund.

From the moment James died, Dolley’s health collapsed, and continued to degrade. She was, therefore, from the beginning unable to handle any of the business at hand, whether it was finishing James’s manuscript or chasing down a publisher. Dolley did, however, have circles of friends and family to help, including her brother John Coles Payne, who lived on a farm carved out of Montpelier and helped her edit the manuscript. In July and August Dolley and John thought finishing the edition would be harder than selling it. By the end of August this had proved untrue. One hundred thousand dollars was not a price any publisher would pay up front, and Dolley did not have the money to agree to a jointly funded publication with the profits from sales to be divided between her and the publisher. In addition, Dolley’s son, John Payne Todd, decided that he would go to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia to meet and bargain with publishers. Todd was incapable of successfully completing this task. He was a gambler and an alcoholic, with neither business experience nor humility to soften his ignorance. As James Kirke Paulding wrote Jared Sparks on September 11, 1836, “if you are acquainted with him [Todd], you need not be told that he is the last man in the world to compass such a business. ”

It was Nicholas Trist, old friend of the family, devoted admirer of James, grandson by marriage of Thomas Jefferson, and a member of Andrew Jackson’s inner circle, who finally suggested that Dolley sell James’s papers to the federal government, and that this sale include only part of James’s writing, especially his notes from the debates on the Constitutional Convention. After October 1836 Dolley’s goal, following the advice of her friends, shifted from sale to a commercial publisher to sale to the federal government, with the price set at around $30,000. From this point on William Cabell Rives, Virginia senator, disciple of James, and nearby friend, took the lead in engineering this sale. He tried at first to shepherd through a bill in the second session of the Twenty-fourth Congress, but while it passed the Senate, the House never took it up. Finally, in a parliamentary move of some mastery, Rives simply inserted the motion as a line item into the federal budget, which was passed in a special session of Congress in March 1837. The American government acquired the papers, and Dolley received $30,000.

The story of Dolley and her husband’s manuscript did not end in March 1837. Dolley continued to worry about how Congress would publish her husband’s writings and would do so until they were issued in 1840. Neither did her financial burdens cease. The decades-long slump in Virginia agriculture, augmented by the five-year-long depression of 1837, made that impossible. But the sale marked the end of a critical chapter in her life as a widow. It allowed Dolley to fulfill the terms of her husband’s will and to make his most important texts available to the American people, to honor him as she believed he deserved, and to reclaim her health.

Madison v. Madison

In the fall of 1836, the newly widowed Dolley Madison brought a complaint known as Madison v. Madison to the Circuit Superior Court of Law and Chancery for Orange County, Virginia. She was the executrix of James Madison’s will, and in sorting out his legacies she had concluded that her husband had intended to provide equally for thirty-one of his collateral descendants (in addition to several specific legacies). A member of the Madison clan, almost assuredly William Madison, objected to her calculations.

Over the years William had become increasingly unhappy with the settlement of the Madison family estates. He set the pattern over James Madison, Sr.’s will. Tensions continued to mount between James and William. On June 15, 1829, James, who had been ill and was running a fever, drafted a letter to his brother arguing that “the delay [in settling their disputes] had become so very pressing on my situation that, unreasonable as it wd. be, I had rather sick as I am, undertake to visit you than that the distressing State of things shd. continue.”

After James’s death, William became a thorn in Dolley’s side. In 1836 he claimed $2,000 in services rendered in the disposition of James Sr.’s estate, and went on to press Dolley to promise to pay him—should he prove his case. William brought suit to recover this $2,000 against Dolley, and the argument simmered for years, continuing even after William’s death.

In response to William’s complaint, Dolley asked to place the case with the Circuit Superior Court, “to direct the distribution thereof according to the rights of the parties.” The County Court was likely to be a slower venue than the Circuit Court. While the County Court was run by justices of the peace who rarely had a law degree, the Circuit Court judges were lawyers. Virginia had evolved a system of many courts, and “having an alternative to the county courts, many Virginians carried their suits to the higher courts, staffed as they usually were by professional judges and convened on schedule at nearby county seats.”

James instructed in his will, “I devise to my Dear wife during her life the tract of land whereon I live.” It was he, of course, and not she, who owned the Montpelier estate and any other lands outside of the Montpelier boundaries, but as his widow she could inherit both personal and real property. “I devise to my Dear wife,” however, was a contingent statement. His testamentary disposition of land stated that her actions would determine the end result: whether or not the estate would go to Dolley in fee simple, or be sold after her death “for cash or on credit as may be decreed best for the interest of those entitled to the proceeds thereof.” If she wanted to own the property outright and leave it to her son, John Payne Todd (or anyone else) she would have to fulfill his terms: that nine thousand dollars be “equally divided between all my nephews and neices which shall at that time be living, and in case of any of them being dead leaving issue at that time living—then such issue shall take the place of its or their deceased parent” within three years. Dolley would have to find not only James’s nieces and nephews, but also their children.

Dolley employed the court to locate the dispersed members of the Madison family. The Court repeatedly summoned Madisons to appear in Court and give testimony, and at least some of them did so. In 1837 Dolley’s checks began to flow again. In April James Madison Hite began to help distribute James’s bequest to the Hite branch of the family, and by June Dolley had begun contacting Roses. The Fredericksburg, Virginia, newspaper, the Political Arena, ran notices—lists of Madisons who needed to be contacted. Slowly Dolley located them, some alive, some dead, some deceased with children. The Court agreed that the disposition of money would be per stirpes, helped sort out the financial arrangements, and appointed legal guardians for infant children. Some nephews simply took the money, while others were particular in their dealings with her and the bank. Dolley found it expedient to file petitions to complete the payments, presumably because of family feuding, but by the fall of 1837 the Court issued lists of legatees that indicated which ones had been notified. By mid 1838 the work had been done. The catalogue of names had been revised, eligibility fixed, decrees written, and the money paid. The processes of deciding who should inherit and of locating heirs had taken two years to accomplish.

Who Said Dolley Was a Heroine?

It was a hot August day in 1834 when Dolley Madison received a letter from her old Washington friend Margaret Bayard Smith. Smith had agreed to write a biographical sketch of Mrs. Madison for a new four-volume work, The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. Few women were to be found in any of the volumes, and few women were asked to write for the project. The third volume, scheduled for publication in 1836, was to include essays on both James and Dolley Madison. No other woman was to be included in that volume. It was an important assignment, even for so distinguished a writer as Smith. As Smith began researching her subject, she asked Dolley to jot down her memories, outline her family history, and lend Smith some copies of her letters. Who were her parents, where had she grown up, what kind of education had she received, when had she moved to Philadelphia, and who were her siblings? The former First Lady responded with a brief account of her early history: birth, parents, education, first and second marriages. But it was very slight information indeed, and despite repeated requests and promises, Dolley sent her biographer little more.

There were, of course, practical reasons for her reserve. She was busy caring for her increasingly ill husband and shouldering the burdens of housekeeping as well as receiving streams of visitors. Indeed, she explained to Smith that she would have to “plead also my constant engagements of different sorts at home.” But her reasons may have been both more complicated and more typical of her generation than her preoccupations as a housewife might indicate. Biographers during the Early Republic strove to proclaim America’s virtue and glory to their fellow Americans and to the world; they wanted to instill the values they saw in the founding fathers in the nation as a whole. In this environment the public side of great personages was important, but not their private lives. Public figures, including James Madison, destroyed their personal correspondence, and many of Dolley’s surviving letters instruct their recipients to burn them. As one contemporary biographer wrote, “Private character is much more an object of individual curiosity, than of general interest, or public importance. A representative of it may amuse and entertain; but it is rarely calculated to improve.” Thus Dolley told her niece Mary Cutts that she could not give Smith “anything of importance in my own Eyes,” adding that she found “egotism . . . so repugnant to my nature that I shrink from recording my own feelings, acts or doings.”

And yet while Dolley Madison stonewalled her biographer, she was careful to provide her with one particular letter. She wanted Smith to have the letter she had mailed her sister in August 1814 describing her own heroic actions during the British attack on Washington. She was insistent that Smith receive it, telling her nieces, “If you have lost it or omitted to give it to her, it will be much to my injury.” As a result, what stands out most in Smith’s short biography of Dolley is that single letter. The rest of the sketch Smith wrote largely from her own memory. She had, after all, resided in Washington since the beginning of the Jefferson administration and had been good friends with the Madisons for over three decades. She knew what social life was like in the early days of the city and how Dolley had conducted herself as First Lady. She remembered what the president’s mansion had looked like before it was burned, and she had visited Montpelier, the Madison plantation in Orange County, Virginia. Smith included no direct quotations in her work. But she did reprint this one letter.

We may never know the contents of the original letter. Dolley Madison sent Smith only a copy of it, not the original. She wrote Smith that her letters were with her sister Lucy Washington Todd in Kentucky, and that she was “unwilling to have them exposed to the Mail,” but she told Mary Cutts that “the original is nearly torn to bits by the mice” (although she gave no indication how she knew this if the letter was in Kentucky). We might expect that in a moment of such stress she would have written in a more dashed and hurried fashion than usual, and yet there is a more formal quality to this letter as it was printed than is evident in most of her writing. Moreover, there are details included that she would not have needed to tell her sister. And we know that Dolley was not committed to telling Smith the truth, for she had already written in a letter that she had been born in North Carolina “whilst my Parents were there on a visit of one year to an Uncle,” when in truth the Paynes had migrated to a Quaker community in central North Carolina and had remained there for three years before moving back to Virginia. Four years later she would write to an unknown correspondent that her husband had wanted her to read over his letters “and if any letter—or line—or word struck me as being calculated to injure the feelings of any one or wrong themselves that I would withdraw them or it.” As a consequence, she admitted, she had made “slight corrections,” as she felt these were “consonant to his wishes.”

But the letter of August 1814 is about courage and bravery. It is about one woman’s determination to prevail against the enemy and to champion American independence. Americans still carry the image of Dolley Madison saving the icons of the nation. When asked what they know about Dolley Madison, most Americans today recall her stand in Washington against the enemy, her courage, and her rescue of the portrait of the nation’s greatest leader and founding hero, George Washington.

She stamped her own legend. Her reticence, while appropriate for a woman of her time and station, served more than one purpose. Again and again she instructed her correspondents to burn her letters. She knowingly and carefully protected her personal and inner life. And she was careful about her public face.