On their return, the President and Mrs. Madison occupied a private house on Pennsylvania avenue till the White House was repaired. After it was rebuilt and the treaty of peace signed, the levées given in the East Room, in the winter of 1816, are said to have been the most resplendent ever witnessed in Washington. At these, congregated the Justices of the Supreme Court in their gowns, the Diplomatic Corps in glittering regalia, the Peace Commissioners and the officers of the late war in full dress, and the queen of the occasion in gorgeous robes and turban and bird of paradise plumes.
At one of these Presidential banquets Mrs. Madison offered Mr. Clay a pinch of snuff from her beautiful box, taking one herself. She then put her hand in her pocket, took out a bandanna handkerchief, applied it to her nose and said: “Mr. Clay, this is for rough work,” and this, touching the few remaining grains of snuff with a fine lace handkerchief, “is my polisher.” This anecdote is an emphatic comment on the change of customs, even in the most polished society. If Mrs. Grant, to-day, were to perpetrate such an act at one of her levées, the fact that it stands recorded against the graceful, gracious and glorious Dolly Madison would not save her from the taunt of being “underbred” and suggestive of the land of “snuff dippers.”
Another story of Mrs. Madison illustrates the real kindness of her heart. Two plain old ladies from the West, halting in Washington for a single night, yet most anxious to behold the President’s famous and popular wife before their departure, meeting an old gentleman on the street, timidly asked him to show them the way to the President’s house. Happening to be an acquaintance of Mrs. Madison, he conducted them to the White House. The President’s family were at breakfast, but Mrs. Madison good-naturedly came out to them wearing a dark gray dress with a white apron, and a linen handkerchief pinned around her neck. Not overcome by her plumage, and set at ease by her welcome, when they rose to depart one said: “P’rhaps you wouldn’t mind if I jest kissed you, to tell my gals about.”
Mrs. Madison, not to be outdone, kissed each of her guests, who planted their spectacles on their noses with delight, and then departed.
Poverty compelled Martha Jefferson to part with Monticello after her father’s death, and the same cruel foe forced Mrs. Madison to sell Montpelier in her widowhood.
A special message of President Jackson to Congress, concerning the contents of a letter from Mrs. Madison, offering to the government her husband’s manuscript record of the debates in Congress of the convention during the years 1782-1787, caused Congress to purchase it of her, as a national work, for the sum of thirty thousand dollars. In a subsequent act Congress gave to Mrs. Madison the honorary privilege of copyright in foreign countries. The degree of veneration in which she was held may be judged by the fact that Congress conferred upon Mrs. Madison the franking privilege and unanimously voted her a seat upon the Senate floor whenever she honored it with her presence; two privileges never conferred upon any other American woman.
The last twelve years of her life were spent in Washington, in a house still standing on Lafayette square. Here, on New Year’s day and Fourth of July, she held public receptions, the dignitaries of the nation, after paying their respects at the White House, passing directly to the abode of the venerable widow of the fourth President of the United States—a woman who had honored her high station by her high qualities more than it could possibly honor her.
She died at her home, Lafayette square, Washington, July, 1849, holding her mental faculties unimpaired to the last. In her later days, while suffering from great debility, she took extreme delight in having old letters read to her, whose associations were so remote that they were unknown to all about, but yet which brought back to her her own beloved past. She delighted, also, in listening to the reading of the Bible—and it was while hearing a portion of the gospel of St. John that she passed in peace into her last sleep.
Mrs. Madison was not the last President’s wife whom the dangers of war exalted to heroism. Yet, with a few exceptions, she has been followed by a line of ladies of average gifts and graces, whose domestic virtues and negative characters are seen but dimly through the reflected glory of their President husbands’ administrations. The faint outline which we catch of Mrs. Monroe is that of a serene and aristocratic woman, too well bred ever to be visibly moved by anything—at least in public. She was Elizabeth Kortright, of New York—an ex-British officer’s daughter, a belle who was ridiculed by her gay friends for having refused more brilliant adorers to accept a plain member of Congress.
During Mr. Monroe’s ministry to Paris, she was called “la belle Americaine,” and entertained the most stately society of the old régime with great elegance. The only individual act which has survived her career, as the wife of the American minister to France, is her visit to Madame Lafayette in prison. The indignities heaped on this grand and truly great woman, were hard to be borne by an American, to whom the very name of Lafayette was endeared. The carriage of the American minister appeared at the jail. Mrs. Monroe was at last conducted to the cell of the emaciated prisoner. The Marchioness, beholding the stranger sister woman, sank at her feet, too weak to utter her joy. That very afternoon she was to have been beheaded. Instead of the messenger commanding her to prepare for the guillotine, she beheld a woman and a friend! From the first moment of its existence the American Republic had prestige in France. The visit of the American ambassadress changed the minds of the blood-thirsty tyrants. Madame Lafayette was liberated the next morning,—she gladly accepted her own freedom, that she might go and share the dungeon of her husband.