MONTICELLO, VIRGINIA, DECEMBER 1800
The news caught the Madisons at Monticello, twenty miles and a day’s span from their own Montpelier. A post rider galloping from Charlottesville bearing a flyer from Richmond, hoofbeats coming up the hill. Tom led them out to the veranda with its towering columns and there was Sint Robertson, skinny as a rail, mustaches drooping to his chin, sliding off his horse and shouting, “How do, Mr. J.—I mean, that is, Mr. President!” Immediately he pulled off his battered hat, but then elation defeated deference and he shouted, “You done won, Mr. J.! Last return just come in. South Carolina swung to you and you’re in!”
Dolley wanted to whoop and yell and dance there on the veranda that glowed with sunlight. They had lived in suspense for days, the election of 1800 tied and hanging on a single state. Sixty-five electoral votes for John Adams, all of New England, New Jersey, Delaware, and split votes in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Sixty-five for Jefferson, other halves of the split votes plus Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the great Democratic coup in New York. Aaron Burr had stolen its twelve votes right out from under Alexander Hamilton’s nose!
Only South Carolina’s eight votes had remained in doubt.
She thought Tom took the news with remarkable calm. “Thank you,” he said, taking the packet of papers that Sint dug from his saddlebags. “Put your horse away and we’ll get you dinner and a pint of grog. It was a hard ride … you’re a good man.”
“T’wasn’t nothing, Mr. J.,” Sint said, obviously pleased. “And yes, sir, a bit of grog would sure cut the road dust.”
As Sint led the horse around the house, Tom turned to them with a huge smile. Dolley felt suddenly abashed. Thomas Jefferson, their old friend, an odd and wonderful man given to lovely flights of rhetoric and intricate ideas that seemed to her to scurry about sometimes like mice running for their holes, was the new president! In an instant everything seemed different … so what was she supposed to call him now?
Jimmy put out his hand. “Congratulations, Mr. President.”
Tom—the president, she’d have to get used to that—took the outstretched hand and drew Jimmy into a hard embrace. He stood nearly a foot taller than her darling little husband, but she never noticed it until they were side by side.
“
We
did it,” he said. She heard the emphasis on the plural and was pleased, for surely the victory was as much Jimmy’s as Tom’s. Tom. Maybe she’d get used to calling him Mr. President, but she decided to take her time about it. For now, she put her arms around him and kissed his cheek.
It was a crisp day in early December and they would dine on the veranda. Tom laughed and cried, “This calls for champagne.” He filled their flutes from a bottle chilled in the well.
Jimmy raised his glass. “To the new president.”
Tom smiled and they drank. “And,” Jimmy said, “to General Washington: It’s precisely a year since he died.”
“Hear, hear,” she said.
Tom raised his glass but didn’t answer. Then, as they seated themselves, he said, “It is symbolically interesting, you know. The general, representing the past, the old, dying as the century ended, our birth of a new way coming with the birth of the new century. May what we stand for live on
through this century and the next and the next.”
“Amen,” Dolley said. But she noticed the distinction he made between himself and the man whose wisdom, in her view, had put the nation on track. And in a moment, his mouth twisting curiously, he said, “Though the general might not have welcomed this day, were he here.”
She knew enough to keep her mouth shut at that. Jimmy said, “I think he might have been pleased. He was sensible.”
Tom’s smile was thin. Over his glass he said, “Perhaps. But he didn’t much like me—I always felt that. He was in Alex’s camp.”
“Now, sir,” Jimmy said, rather sharply, she thought, “that’s much too strong.”
She bit her lip to keep from adding anything. The old gentleman had tried so very hard for balance. He’d never sounded a Federalist to her. Balanced, steady, reserved—he wasn’t a man to tell you what was in his heart. It had been a raw blow when he’d died so suddenly. She and Jimmy had gone to three separate memorial services, and she still grieved that she hadn’t seen him again before he went. Life can be cruel that way.
“You’re right, Jimmy.” Tom smiled, his charm infectious. “I withdraw the remark. But there’s a certain residual pain left over from those days, you know. He never got over his fear that Democrats, meaning especially me, would lead us into French anarchy if not aim to make the United States a satellite of France.” He shrugged. “That’s close enough to a treason charge for me to … well, remember it, anyway.”
Dinner was served by Sally Hemings, Tom’s housekeeper, an extraordinarily pretty young woman whom Dolley could see combined the best features of ancestry, both black and white. Confident of her own beauty, Dolley could afford to be generous. She noticed, as she had before, that Sally was profoundly self-assured; beautiful women had reason to be confident.
The quality of excitement still charged the air as they talked over the election, and she listened quietly, luxuriating
in new success. First, there was Aaron’s coup in New York, organizing the boys of Tammany Hall into a political force that gave him the weight to swing New York. She’d known Aaron for years and was very fond of him; he’d been a real friend when she needed a friend. His coup had thrilled Democrats and earned him a place on the ticket, running for vice president with Tom. He too had been elected, though they’d scarcely noticed in their excitement.
Aside from the importance of New York, it was clear that their narrow victory had turned on the French crisis and on the Alien and Sedition Acts. Both were excesses that she thought had doomed the Federalists. Their insistence that unleashed Democrats must run amok was so strange. Doubtless the guillotine’s clatter did make some of the American gentry uncomfortable, but take Sint Robertson—he and common folk like him weren’t likely to go ravening about stringing up leading citizens. That fear seemed ridiculous. American colonists had lived in essentially self-governing communities for two hundred years with no disintegration. And no matter what Tom said, she thought General Washington had understood that basic truth perfectly well.
The talk droned on and as a cat is drawn to catnip her mind slid off to the delicious dream that had been an indulgence and now would be reality. They would be moving and life would be starting over, moving from Montpelier to the new village on the Potomac to which the government had officially transferred two months ago. Her old friend Danny Mobry, whose husband had shifted his shipping business there from Philadelphia, told her the place was all joy because everything was new, handsome red brick homes springing up around new federal buildings. Of course the secretary of state must have a house—she could see it already, brick, white window framing and black shutters, three stories, porte cochere, kitchen separate for fire safety, stables in the rear …
And it would have the great advantage of not being Montpelier. Fine as the mansion was with its vast surrounding acreage and warmly as old Colonel and Mrs. Madison had
welcomed her, life still was slow and far distant from the lovely bustle of Philadelphia. It was six years since she and Jimmy had married, and they’d spent the last four here, since he’d given up his seat in Congress. These years had given her ample time to explore the nuances of living in a home of which you are not the mistress. My goodness, yes, she was ready for the hustle and bustle sure to be found in a throbbing new capital!
She heard Tom saying the president and Mrs. Adams had moved into the new President’s House, said to be gorgeous with its yellow sandstone walls painted a glowing white. “Poor John,” Tom said, “I did want to beat him, but I know how hard he’ll take this.” Dolley bent an ear; this was more interesting. She knew Mr. Adams well and liked him, while his idiosyncrasies amused her. He was incorruptible, really an extraordinarily decent man, but he was fussy, prickly, usually in a huff, and able to find a slight in almost anything. Tom chuckled. “He’ll be giving poor Abigail fits. He’ll feel rejected, repudiated, feel nobody loves him when its so obvious that everyone should; he’ll fall into one of his depressions, and she’ll spend months jollying him out of it. Once I told her a boot in the backside might help on such occasions, and she didn’t speak to me for three months. Loves him like a mother hen.”
He poured a dessert wine and added, “Absolute antithesis of Alex. Something cruel in Alex, you know. I like to think I hate no man; but if I ever yielded to hate, Alex would head the list. Miserable man. Strange, too—and getting stranger.”
Alex is strange, she thought. Undoubtedly brilliant, so everyone said, but too aloof, too remote, too proud. Liked women though. She remembered the first time she’d met him, when Jimmy was first squiring her about. She and Alex had danced together, and he had looked at her as a man looks at a woman. That was perfectly all right; but then he’d murmured something she didn’t understand and flashed a look toward Jimmy in which she’d read contempt, and she realized he was suggesting he could serve her better. She’d come close to slapping him—
that
would have made a pretty
incident!—and he’d read her expression. He stepped back, gave her a rueful acknowledging smile, and from that day to this had been charming but not familiar, and over the years she had come to like him.
But he’d ridden his hobbyhorse—the French are coming, the French are coming!—until the poor beast was collapsing. Driven by their fear of democracy in the hands of the common man and their hunger for a British connection, the Federalists had brought the nation to the brink of war with France essentially because France wasn’t nice to us. Even now that sounded strangely in her ears, but how else to put it? The gentlemen in Paris were infuriatingly nasty, no question about that; but really, declaring war over irritations? At home in Virginia, out of the Congress since ninety-six, Jimmy watched in dismay as we titted for tats with the French and worked ourselves up to a frenzy.
The French finally realized we were taking all this seriously so they sent diplomatic word suggesting we talk it over. Defying his own party, Mr. Adams had dispatched a new commission and that had settled that. No war after all. But Alex still wanted his army! What could people conclude but that he intended to use it against them to support unpopular policies?
Then the Alien and Sedition Acts making disagreement with the government a crime, blowing the Bill of Rights apart, jailing editors, seizing orators off the street … Criticism equals treason? The Terror in France had executed thousands on just that basis.
Poor Alex, he just didn’t understand plain Americans. Couldn’t see that nothing would so energize the common man as the realization that he could be imprisoned indefinitely for sounding off in a tavern. And that was why Thomas Jefferson would be the next president … .
Tom was talking and laughing, freer than she could remember having seen him before. Sally brought a fresh bottle of champagne and he opened it, firing the cork off the verandah
into a rhododendron. He was chortling over a turn in the election in Pennsylvania, and he was looking at Jimmy as he leaned across the table to fill her glass.
In one of those frozen slow-motion moments she saw the bottle tilting to pour and the mouth sliding away from the glass by several inches. Before she could move or speak, Sally leaned forward and deftly slid the glass under the bottle. As the glass filled, Tom looked at it and her for the first time, then moved to fill Jimmy’s glass. The rescue was so smooth, neither man even aware that disaster had been averted, talk flowing unbroken, that Dolley was delighted. She glanced at Sally, their eyes met, and each had to suppress a mutual bubbling chuckle, as much at shared feminine complicity as at the situation. There was reassuring competence and authority in this young woman; she was profoundly confident of her position.
Dolley turned back to the talk, well pleased. As Sally cleared the dessert plates, Tom was saying, let’s watch our wild eyes—arch-Democrats like John Randolph and Giles who were sure to take victory as license to throw out everything of the old and sweep the country leftward, to use the new French term.
Jimmy smiled. “The extremes of Federalism drove the voter to us; great pity if our extremes should drive him back.”
What’s more the victory had a disturbingly sectional tone. All New England to Adams. New York won only by maneuver. Middle states split. Only the South and the West holding to the proper course. She knew Jimmy considered this the supreme threat, much more dangerous than France or England. The North-South split over slavery had come close to shattering the Constitution before they finished writing it.
The talk slid to another favored theme—the West as site of the country’s future. Her mind wandered. New England, New York, a way down the seaboard, represented the old and threatened, the West the young and new. Which raised the Mississippi, trade lifeline of everything west of the Appalachians and held in a death grip by Spain.
Old talk … but suddenly she remembered that everything had changed. They were no longer talking theory; the weight and responsibility for the nation had fallen squarely to them. The talk at this table would become national policy. She’d better pay attention.