Dolley Madison

The cabin stood in New Garden, a Quaker settlement in Guilford County, North Carolina, and the discipline inside it was strict enough that one biographer describes her chafing against it. Her father freed the people he had enslaved by 1783 and moved the family to Philadelphia, where his starch business collapsed in 1789 and the meeting expelled him for the failure. He was dead three years later. She had married John Todd, a Quaker lawyer, in January 1790. In August 1793 yellow fever killed 5,019 Philadelphians in four months, among them her husband, her infant son William, and both of Todd's parents. Aaron Burr introduced her to James Madison the following spring. Marrying him cost her the Society of Friends.

Eight years standing in as hostess for a widowed president taught her how the town worked before her husband ever took the office. Then 1809, and the Wednesday evenings at which men who despised each other had to stand in the same room and behave. Then August 24, 1814, and a canvas cut out of its frame while the British burned their way in from Bladensburg. BriefHistory has that day and what her invention of the role did to every woman who inherited it. This page is about the rest of the 81 years.

Her surviving son, Payne Todd, went to debtors' prison in Philadelphia in 1830, and the Madisons sold Kentucky land and mortgaged half of Montpelier to cover him. He drank, and the plantation failed under his management. In 1841 she wrote a will freeing Paul Jennings, the man who had been in the house in 1814 and who had been trying to negotiate the purchase of himself — freeing him at her death, and no one else she owned. In 1846 she sold him instead, to an insurance agent, for 200 dollars. Daniel Webster bought Jennings six months later and let him work the price off as a free man. She then sold Montpelier, the furnishings, and the people still on it, to clear her debts.

Congress bought the remaining Madison papers in 1848 for a figure the sources give as either 22,000 or 25,000 dollars, and she died the following July at 81, having spent her last years, by Jennings's account, receiving market baskets of food he carried over from Webster's house. They buried her at Congressional Cemetery in an airtight Fisk case with a glass plate set over the face, then moved her to Montpelier to lie beside Madison. The portrait story went on growing without her. Popular accounts made her the woman who pulled the canvas off the wall. Jennings's 1865 memoir said flatly that Sioussat and a gardener named McGraw did it.

Dolley Madison's life against the full span of the corpus.

• White House interiors with Benjamin Henry Latrobe building
  She furnished the first purpose-built presidential residence room by room 1809
• The Wednesday drawing rooms other
  Weekly receptions open to both parties, in a capital that still settled arguments by duel 1809
• Rescue of the Washington papers and portrait other
  She gave the order. Two other men carried it out. 1814
• The office of the president's wife other
  Not a title in her lifetime, and the job description every successor received 1817
• Sale of the Madison papers to Congress other
  The transaction that kept her fed and put her husband's record in public hands 1848

• January 7, 1790 aged 21 Marries the Quaker lawyer John Todd at a Philadelphia meeting house
• 1793 aged ~25 Yellow fever takes her husband, her infant son and both of Todd's parents The epidemic killed 5,019 people in Philadelphia in four months.
• September 15, 1794 aged 26 Marries James Madison and is expelled from the Society of Friends Aaron Burr had introduced them that May.
• August 24, 1814 aged 46 Orders the Washington portrait taken out of its frame as the British close in Her letter to her sister describes ordering the frame broken. Jennings's memoir names the men who did it.
• 1830 aged ~62 Payne Todd goes to debtors' prison and half of Montpelier is mortgaged
• 1837 aged ~69 Returns to Washington and takes a house on Lafayette Square She brought Paul Jennings with her as a butler, leaving his wife and children in Virginia.
• February 28, 1844 aged 75 Survives the Princeton gun explosion that kills two cabinet secretaries She was aboard with President Tyler when the Peacemaker cannon burst.
• 1846 aged ~78 Sells Paul Jennings to an insurance agent for 200 dollars Her 1841 will had promised him freedom at her death. Daniel Webster bought and freed him six months later.
• July 12, 1849 aged 81 Dies at her Washington house at 81

• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. married to
• Thomas Jefferson 1743–1826
  Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President who oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. hostess for
• Aaron Burr 1756–1836
  Third vice president who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was later tried for treason. introduced by
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. sold a man she owned to
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. inherited the role she made
• Martha Washington 1731–1802
  First First Lady who defined the role and spent every wartime winter in the Continental Army's camps. predecessor in the role