#1541 Ten Things About Dolley Madison

Was maybe embellished in some way, but it turns out that the story is more interesting than the cliché. The war comes to America, the war of 1812. Madison gets us through it, let's put it that way, but he doesn't handle it with great, heroic style. There's nothing of the hero in James Madison. He's never going to be a man on horseback. Even Jefferson is closer to a man on horseback than James Madison. But he, you know, he gets us through it. And our Navy really did wonderfully on the Great Lakes, and Andrew Jackson sort of mopped up after it was formally over in New Orleans. And we wind up feeling pretty good about ourselves, as you would if you survived the juggernaut of the world's most powerful army and navy. But luckily, on our home turf, we know that. During this conflict, the British came into the Upper Chesapeake to the Potomac, and they invaded Washington, D.C. and Washington, D.C. fled away. As you might expect. And Madison was off in Maryland, meeting with his own army officers and trying to spur them on to protect the district of Columbia.

It didn't happen, so the British get off their boats and they come up onto the mall. And they sacked the Capitol, and they sacked the Treasury Department, and they sacked the White House. And, of course, we know that the White House was burned and an enormous loss of furniture and a lot of rebuilding had to occur, and it was a near total loss. And the madisons had had to leave so quickly that they weren't able to take many things with them. But she did make sure some important papers were packed in a wagon, which is extraordinarily important. She got some of her own effects, but not an enormous number. She sacrificed her own private property for the more important task of doing what she could to save the government. And she was up on the roof of the White House. She had a spyglass, a telescope, and she was watching the troop movements, and she saw them coming. And people kept saying, you gotta go, you gotta go, you're running out of time here.

And so she was late in getting out, but she wanted to stay just as long as she could. And then she saw the painting. She thought, No way, no way are the British gonna wreck that, or take that, or use that as a war trophy of some sort? And so she wanted to take it with her, and people really were pressing her. You know, this is a luxury. We do not actually have time to engage in Mrs. Madison, but, she insisted. And it wasn't easy. It's not like you lift something that's on a hook and just take it. It was huge for one thing, but also it was screwed to the wall as anything that you value would be in such a place.

And so they couldn't really remove it very quickly. They used an Ax, they broke up the frame and then there was kind of an interior frame. And that's too bulky to carry and too vulnerable. So she used knives, probably not she, but she had it done and cut out the painting from its smaller frame. So some loss of the canvas at the perimeters. And then she was going to roll it up, and she did roll it after a fashion. But she didn't want to roll it tightly because that would crack the paint and maybe ruin it. But anyway, she finds a way to make it portable, and then it's taken in a wagon to Georgetown and spirited away to New York. I think so, this is true. This is one of those American mythological stories that turns out to be true and even more interesting in the truth. She was really the first great first lady.

She really invented what it is to be the first lady. Of course, Jefferson had not had a wife when he was president because he was a widower. And so she. Just as Washington sort of invents what it is to be a president within the confines of the Constitution, so Dolly Madison invents what it is to be a first lady. In Washington, D..C. Abigail Adams was a different character altogether, and so was Martha Washington. So suddenly we get the idea of the first lady. Capital F, Capital L with Dolly Madison. And so all these are things that I've learned in preparing for this series 10 things.

It's really been wonderful, you know how it is, you know things like my Lai in Vietnam, or Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Or Lincoln's Gettysburg address, or the massacre at Wounded Knee, or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or John Steinbeck's epic journey in a truck. Camper travels with Charlie. We know these things, this is what's called basic cultural literacy, we know some stuff.

If you go any farther than just those kind of headlines and actually ask yourself, well, what really happened? In this instance? What are the actual conditions under which Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence? Where was he staying? how did he get his portable writing desk? what books was he consulting?

Was he really playing the violin in between? Was he really agonizing about not being in contact with his wife Martha, who was ill at Monticello? Did he really write it in a single afternoon? These are all American narratives, American myths, and then you go in and you explore them using the best evidence we have.

And that means more recent books, because there was a lot of myth writing up until the cultural revolution in the United States in the 1960s. And then, you know more. And this series has really enabled me to do that, and I've learned a great deal from Lindsay. She's been a terrific breath of new fresh air in the Jefferson hour and has agreed to take on an even larger role as time goes on.

We're thrilled because at some point, she'll be drawn into the academic world, or be drawn into a more hectic world. In which she won't probably have time to give to this program the way she has in the last couple of years, for which I am just immensely grateful. So if you could help us, especially by donating money or property, your ranch, your airstream. You know you're not using your airstream trailer, you don't want to get rid of it because nobody does, but you know you're not using it. You could lease it to me, you could sell it to me, because my travels around the country for listening to America are going to necessitate that.

And this would be the greatest enabling gift ever. I mean, I'll mention you every day for the rest of my life, but I need to do that. I've got to find some way to airstream my wanderings, which are beginning this spring, by the way, they're beginning right now. This is mid-march and I'm about to leave for Utah, Arizona, Colorado at least, and maybe Nevada to look at water in the west.

So if you can help us, do? We need money, we need support, we need your thoughts, we need your comments.

We need your criticisms, we need your suggestions of themes that we should pursue, or places that we should visit under the guise of listening to America. It's an exciting, really exciting new era in my career, and I think in the career of which becomes listening to America coming in May. But don't worry, Jefferson will always be with us.

Jefferson will always be the center of what we do. Because if I'm anything, I'm not an Augustinian, I'm not a Calvinist, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican, I'm not a Libertarian, although I have certain Libertarian fascinations.

What am I? I'm a child of the Great Plains, I'm a public humanities scholar, I'm a dilettante and amateur, you know, I'm in the old sense of amateur as a lover of knowledge.

Of a young woman that I think the world of, and who has made my life a thousand times more than it could have been in any other way. But fundamentally, in outlook, I'm a Jeffersonian, by which, I mean, I do believe that we're up to it. I do believe in the perfectibility of man. I do believe that people can rise to the occasion of governing themselves. I do believe we can be our best selves more often than we think.

I do believe we can be rational. That we should see the world through books, that we should put into nature, that we should have gardens, but we should also camp and hike and go on wilderness journeys. I believe that America is an exceptional nation that to say otherwise is just simply not true. I believe that we should shake up our government from time to time, but not in the January 6th way, but in the sort of revising our Constitution. And if I could get anything in the next few years, besides the airstream, besides the airstream and the ranch, if I could get anything, it would be that. The U.S. celebrates the 250th birthday of its founding with maybe a non-binding new national constitutional convention. Because I'm absolutely certain that Jefferson was right, that you may as well wear the coat that fitted you when you were eight. As to try to fit the Constitution of 1787 to the of our time, its opportunities, its challenges, its problems. That he was right, that you need periodic formal restructuring, rewriting, rebooting of your basic way of doing business in a free society.

And I think he's been vindicated by the collapse, the effective collapse of our Constitution. So let's go to the show. But thanks for being part of this, I am so delighted that you are. I can't wait to see what listening to America can do as part of the discourse of a country that's in real disarray.

Thanks for listening.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour 10 things about Dolly Madison. And with me across the country is my friend Dr. Lindsay Trevinsky Lindsay. Welcome back to the Jefferson Hour. You're much acclaimed by our listeners.

Born in 1768, died in 1849.

Give us just the quickest little biographical sketch of her.

She ended up retiring to Washington, D.

C.

Where she was sort of the senior madam is not the right word, but, you know, like the senior sort of woman in town. Where everyone had to go and get her approval and meet her. And had a pretty extraordinary life, saw a lot of things, lived a lot of places, and, by all accounts, was wildly remarkable in how she presented herself to the world.

He's in debtor's prison, he's gambling debts, he's lost everything, and she keeps bailing him out. No tough love in that relationship.

And so she comes back to Washington, D.

C.

And lives her last five years in sort of genital poverty.

That's disputed, but she met her, certainly at Monticello, and she may or may not have known that Sally Hemings was Jefferson's mistress, his sexual partner. But probably, you know, the madisons are not idiots. The house isn't that big.

And she?

Apparently, according to family traditions, and Sally Hemings indirectly, the gift was never forthcoming. This really makes my skin crawl. I don't know about you.

And instead, it seems that her childhood was incredibly disrupted. There was no stability, it seemed like her father failed at business time and time and time again. Seems like he was a pretty volatile character. It seems like she really developed this need to try and have some stability, but also then hated conflict in her life.

So worked really hard to avoid it and intentionally chose among many suitors. Because when she was a widow and was choosing her second husband, there were a lot of very wealthy men asking.

Someone who would provide a plantation lifestyle. Because that was what she remembered as the most stable moment in her childhood. And, interestingly, all of her sisters did the same. Which I think is a very interesting note about what the women in that family were prioritizing. And this is a part of slavery that we often don't talk about because it does make your skin crawl. Which is that it was convenient to have someone wait on you hand and foot, it was convenient to have someone do all of your laundry and all of your cooking. And fetch a beverage or food. Whenever you needed anything to do your hair, to take care of your clothes, and she liked being pampered.

She liked being waited on, and it seems there's another incident where she had a one of her ladies maids. Her name was Suki, or they called her Suki. And she was apparently great at doing Dolly's hair. And at one point, Dolly felt like maybe Suki was stealing from her and so wanted to banish her as punishment. But gave up after a week because she liked how she did her hair so much and couldn't fathom why someone who was enslaved would be disgruntled with that position or would want to steal.

And so I think that does really show the mindset of the willingness to try and convince someone to name their child after your husband and then go back on it. Or to be just totally befuddled that someone wouldn't be pleased with the status where you're ripped from your family is callous and cruel. And it's hard, I think, to sometimes put ourself in that particular perspective.

Lindsay Jefferson is famous for his dinner parties late afternoon dinner parties at the White House. But the Madison's entertained on a much more lavish scale, in much larger numbers. And I read yesterday that she occasionally would assign to every guest an African-American temporary valet. So when you come in for dinner, each of these white couples or people are assigned an enslaved person for the evening to. If you need something, if your fork needs to be washed, if your wine glass is broken, whatever this might. If there's an errand to be run, to check on the carriage and the horses. And when you see that, you think, well, she didn't really imbibe her father's full sense of the incompatibility of slavery with the republic.

In terms of the trajectory of her life, is that she is married early. That husband dies in the yellow fever epidemic, a cataclysm. She soon connects with this rising young man, James Madison, obviously a deeply brilliant person, but shy and awkward. And wears black and is small. She's large, tall, beautiful, elegant, wears great clothes, vivacious, some would even say flamboyant.

Picture almost of this diminutive man who, I heard someone say the other day, was the shortest president in American history, if that means anything. And she's 5'8 at least, and wears turbans and Ostrich feathers and so on, so she towers over her little husband.

The social scene in Washington, D.

C.

And a very intentional choice. So perhaps we should talk about her, her hostess skills, because they were legendary and a huge asset to Madison.

Today we're talking 10 things about Dolly Madison. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. We'll be back in just a minute.

Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour. I'm Clay Jenkinson, I'm talking with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky. 10 things about Dolly Madison. In the first section, we talked a little bit about her complicated relationship with slavery and some of the less desirable manifestations of that.

In her long and interesting life, she married a man 17 years her senior. You suggested she was like her sisters, looking for social status and stability? Above all, Madison certainly provided that.

They made for one of the great couples in American history. And she, in some respects, is the first real first lady. In a way that Martha Washington wasn't and Abigail Adams wasn't. She took this role very seriously. But talk a little bit, Lindsay, about the relationship between James Madison and Dolly.

He adored her, he clearly adored her. He fell hard and fast and was actually fairly romantic at a time when romance wasn't always a consideration in marriage. And he knew a lot of the same people she did, especially from their time in Virginia. People could attest to his decent and kind character, he was not a cruel man, and I think that those attributes were things she was looking for.

He also was interesting, and from what we can tell, because she was a vivacious person and she valued other people in conversation. I think we often dismiss that, but who really? And so I think we shouldn't discount that as one of the things she probably was thinking about. And then, over time, from everything we can tell, it really did blossom into a really lovely, warm, loving marriage. And they wrote to each other when they were separate, and they're very nice letters, they're very sweet.

She often called him your Jimmy, so I think it grew to be a very affectionate relationship in a way that was not always a guarantee.

Now, most first ladies these days have a special interest in the Special Olympics, or, you know, adoption or something. And Dolly Madison took up the cause of an orphanage in Washington, D..C. and gave some of her energy as first lady to that. I find that really interesting.

In a way as if she were a consort in the old tradition. That's certainly not. Abigail Adams Abigail Adams is a brilliant but somewhat formidable person. It's hard to imagine her in a social setting being equal to Dolly Madison, but Dolly Madison comes along. This is a theme that I come back to all the time.

These women in this time did not have the opportunities that are just freely available to people like you. They had to confine their mighty energies into a handful of socially acceptable channels. What a terrible thing. And I think of Alice Roosevelt, Roosevelt's daughter, who was every bit as brilliant as he was and had nowhere to put her mighty energies. And so she became a kind of a problem instead of an asset.

And here's Dolly Madison, who clearly has a huge engine of energy. Not only handling all this social life and being a real advisor to her husband behind the scenes, but also.

Runs, but even more so then.

Appointments and nominations and secretaries were also often secured by women in these places. And then the second piece is men weren't supposed to campaign, and so Dolly and Louisa, Catherine Adams and the other wives at the time. They essentially were the campaign managers, often for their husbands, because they could put on the right social events that would draw support for their husbands, campaigns or their causes, or whatever. It was smooth over battles in the cabinet, or smooth over tiffs with diplomatic individuals who were diplomatic envoys who were in town.

And so she actually had a much larger political role than we sometimes think. Because it's very easy to dismiss it as just throwing parties. And that was absolutely not what it was. It was very much this social code behind the scenes that made Washington work the way it did.

They almost have a special staff when they come, so that it's like a very tight relationship. So Jefferson would not have been able to do it with Abigail Adams, I don't think he just wouldn't. She's too abrasive for him to direct, she's too pointed.

You know, Dolly Madison must have had exquisite manners.

And yet he's the junior partner, and Jefferson is the great philosopher, the author. It had to bugger, no matter how much you respect Jefferson. It had to bugger that Jefferson was this kind of already international philosophical celebrity. And her husband was this kind of more grounded sort of individual with less charisma.

And you know, there were two very. There were two big relationships in his life, and it was Jefferson and it was Dolly. But she also says that Dolly. Someone once said to Dolly, everyone loves Mrs Madison, and she replied, That's because Mrs Madison loves everyone.

And one of her sisters said that after a social event one day, she was describing it. And she says that everyone feels better about themselves when they're with Dolly. So she was the master at making sure there wasn't conflict, which I am sure Jefferson appreciated, because he hated conflict. And so I'm sure that even if she sometimes was annoyed by him, she just figured out how to ignore it. Or to get around it, or to just make it work, because it was so important.

Two marriages, as you know, we often say, well, you're real wife, and you're, and you're work wife. So his work wife, to use a stupid gender term, was Thomas Jefferson. And we, you know, as a historian, that there have been few, if any, partnerships of that capacity in American history.

And so, yes, I do think it was a very unique pairing. OK, next on our list, well, since we're talking about their time in the White House, let's talk about their time in the White House. You, we both have we, we both have on our list, we put together sort of separate lists and are smooshing them together. But we both, of course, had. The famous incident of the Gilbert Stewart painting of George Washington in the White House, which we should note, is actually a copy of the original portrait.

So, the original portrait?

To rally the troops in Maryland, which is in itself a strange thing to imagine. But she's up on the roof looking, and then she's advised again and again, you've got to go, you've got to go, you've got to go. So she leaves most of her personal effects behind.

She packs up a trunk or two, but she gathers up important government documents and gets them onto a wagon to be taken to Georgetown. And then everyone's like, we've got to go now, and she says, No, we're not going without Gilbert Stuart painting, so pick up the story from there.

The symbolic value of what would happen if this painting was destroyed. And by the time she realized that they needed to get out and that she needed to get this painting. There was no time to unscrew the frame from the wall. And so she instructed several of the enslaved men who were in the house, including Paul Jennings, to basically break the frame. Take out the canvas, roll it up. And then she sent it with one of the men who was there to sort of escort her. And I think he was going to New York and she sent it with him for safekeeping.

But she, and, of course, Paul Jennings and the other individuals who were there, were responsible for ensuring that this painting was not destroyed. And it is, in fact, back in the White House now, it is one of the few paintings with a permanent location in the White House. In the East Room, which is the large reception room on one side of the State floor and on the other side of the East Room. Well, there's George, and there's Martha, and then there's Theodore Roosevelt.

And that Madison is not there, and that she really did do heroic work to try to save state papers. We attach all the symbolism to the painting, but the state papers were equally important. Because when the British came well, a couple of things happened when they finally abandoned it, there was looting, whenever there's a situation like this, there are looters.

And these weren't British, these were Americans that were looting the Capitol, the Treasury Department and the White House, and taking whatever they could get their hands on. And so her work at this was really extraordinary. And I want to get your opinion about this. Madison and she were exchanging all these notes.

Where should we meet? where are you safe? how can we get back together? And so he encouraged her to come to this tavern on the Virginia side, which she does, but when she gets there, she's browbeaten by some of the people there.

They're like, you and your husband have really screwed this up, he's a terrible president. The war look at, the Capitol's been burned. And so, instead of embracing her and saying, Thank goodness, you're alive, which some of them, I'm sure, did, they're like criticizing the Madison administration. And when he came back into the city, he got it too.

He's on horseback and people are like, you call yourself the president of the United States, so I didn't know that, did you?

But they did burn all of the government buildings. And I'm sure did. Some of the things that an army does when it marches through territory, including seizing things and eating things and violence, and you name it. They were not particularly happy to have this armed force in their town, although they did leave pretty quickly. But it is interesting that there was no sort of rally around the flag, so to speak.

After the town was incinerated, not the entire town, the government buildings were incinerated, they elected not to go anywhere else. They were both committed to remaining in D..C. And there was at this time still some pressure from congressmen and various people to move the Capitol. Because it was still a relative potent town compared to a Philadelphia, Charleston, New York, you name it. And so they worked quickly to do one of two things. They set up residence in the Octagon House, which is just a block away from the White House and still stands today.

You can go see it, it's very cool. And she continued to host her events and her drawing rooms, her Wednesday evening drawing rooms to try and retain the social scene in Washington, D.C. And Madison really kept under wraps how bad the damage was to the White House. It basically was just a shell of a wall.

Everything else was destroyed in it, and the plaster had to be completely redone because it had been fractured by. The house was on fire and then there was a rain and so it split all plaster. And he kept that under wraps and convinced Congress to rebuild. But moved very quickly so that none of the sentiment about moving the city could be could catch fire.

Oh, I shouldn't say that that was, that was a very unintentional pun.

Everything's burned. Let's just go back to Philadelphia, where there are amenities, where there's urban protection. But the Madison's worked tirelessly to prevent that from happening. And that that would have greatly pleased the old man of Monticello to know that. They were going to keep the Capitol in the Upper South on the Potomac, which was one of Jefferson's deep desires. We're talking with Dr.

Lindsay Chervinsky 10 things about Dolly Madison When we come back, in a moment, I want to ask you about her relationship with her son. You're listening to the Thomas Jefferson?

Welcome back to this special edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I'm Clay Jenkinson with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky across from me. Well, across the country. That is, we're talking about Dolly Madison. We've talked a little bit about her upbringing and her marriage to a man, 17 years, her senior.

And really harmonious marriage. That it was her work as a as not just a society hostess, but almost as a as a political. How should I put it?

That's the least of it. It's what she does in those situations to make people feel comfortable, to help them reconcile themselves. To Madison's politics and his policies, and so on, you know, she's doing active political work on behalf of the Madison administration. But the thing that she could never get tough about Lindsay is the son of hers, John Payne Todd. She and Madison had no children, so who knows what that means, but she had children from previous.

One of them had died in the old fever epidemic in 1793.

And now the other son lives, and she does everything in her power to help him through life. He's just one of those wastrels who could never get it together. What do you make of this?

There's no indication that Dolly had these addictions, but to go to her son, and it seems like he had some of these addictive issues. He was an alcoholic, he ran up enormous debts. And so there's the hereditary piece of it, which I think we can be sympathetic, that they didn't have the same understanding about how some of these things work.

And there wasn't the same sort of treatment options for these types of addictions. But then there's also the social factors, and I think there are a couple that come into play here. One, she was raised that women are submissive, Women are not supposed to dominate men.

Women are not supposed to tell men what to do. That was the both how she was raised as a daughter. But also Virginia aristocratic society, very much prized submissive women, unlike, let's say, in Abigail Adams, who was a little bit less submissive. New England culture prioritized that less so. It would have been very out of character for her to try and be a strict disciplinarian with her son because that was not how she was raised. To deal with boys or men.

The second piece, I think, is there was a certain cultural element that young men, especially young aristocratic men, the sort of boys will be boys. Concept. And the idea that they were going to do some crazy things in their youth. They were going to have some indiscretions, they were probably going to get in trouble while they were at college, they were going to spend too much money. They, hopefully, if they had sexual indiscretions, would do so with enslaved individuals.

So there weren't ramifications for marriage, which sounds terrible, but was definitely the way that it was thought about. And they would grow out of it, they would mature out of it, and some men just didn't. And I think that John Payne Todd was an example where he just never developed a sense of that sort of responsibility and seriousness that was expected of him.

And this must have caused some tension in the marriage, too. And you've got some information about that from, of course, Washington.

Never easy. Washington's wife, Martha, had her own previous progeny, and George Washington had to deal with that, in addition to everything else that he had to deal with.

But even then, Washington failed, sometimes to rein in these more out of control young.

That wasn't the worst of it. He tried to marry Kitty Floyd, the daughter of a New York congressman, and Kitty Floyd. It's an impasse.

It's absolutely not going to work out. And she ponied him along for a while, and then she sent him a Dear John. Apparently it was a very cruel, Dear John letter. And she married a medical student.

Meanwhile, and Jefferson writes this lovely condolence letter to Madison, basically saying, There are lots of fish in the sea, kind of the letter anyway. She was even younger. So what do you make of this habit? That continued in some southern states up until almost our own time. Of these middle-aged men and older marrying girls, I mean, truly girls, not yet women.

And for women who didn't pick wisely, they often ended up in very poor circumstances. On the flip side, men married women for the social benefit that Dolly provided, for the political benefit, but also to have an heir. And so, if you are an older man, there is a certain mathematical equation that goes along with trying to maximize your potential children. Which sounds callous, but nonetheless was one of the factors. Now, to Madison and Dolly's credit, she was 17 years younger, but she was not 15, she had already been married once.

She was experienced in the ways of the world and had been running a boarding house before they got married. So, and I think that the difference between, you know, like 23 and 40 is different, especially if the 23 year old woman has married before and had children, is different than, let's say, 15. And you know, whatever. So I, I'm not as creeped out by by that one story, Um, and you know, I think also. In particular, this is at a time when men often didn't inherit their plantation estates until their father had passed away. Or, or they be, they became the caretaker of the estate as their father was older. Or, in the case of Like John Adams, John Adams waited to marry Abigail until his legal practice was established because he had to make sure that he could provide for a family.

So that's. Those are some of the factors that I think explain this age difference.

He's the one who got the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty through a reluctant house of delegates in Virginia. He's amazing, but he isn't very immediately attractive. And the age difference is going to mean more. Second thing about the age difference. May be worth saying is that if you look at the mortality, infant mortality and the mortality of women who give birth to children, it's huge. And so, marrying a young woman, she may not be a woman in our sense of the maturity of a woman, but biologically, she's in the prime of her childbearing years, between, say, 14 and 30.

And these are people that had lots of children, a no birth control to speak of, and B they wanted lots of children because of the infant mortality rate. It makes it a little less icky.

How about just higher necklines?

You had a series of under layers and you had a girdle, but you weren't closed in like you would be today.

It's a straight down silhouette, so it's not like the big hoop skirts we would think of when we think of like Mary Lincoln or the Civil War era.

The larger skirt that you saw, the slightly larger skirt that you saw earlier in the colonial period. So, depending on how much fabric you use on a dress, for an Empire style dress, it can be very clingy. And especially the type of fabric, how many layers you have. And so some of the more spectacularly scandalous individuals at the time would wear very thin, like, almost like Muslin style dresses, with very few layers underneath. Which leaves not a whole lot to the imagination, not in terms of like see-through, but in terms of shape. And so there was definitely a little bit of, you know, scandal involved with this. However, I would say their version of like a woman being, you know, the descriptions of someone being like, almost naked in public.

If we saw this dress, we would not consider it to be naked.

She's the first of the great first ladies in American history. She had great compassion. Seemed to really have strong sentiments for the have-nots, although it ended in the race line, perhaps.

We kind of lock her into this myth of the first lady.

It was often read in the Capitol, but it wasn't like a very integral part of society. I think the overwhelming characteristic that would have come out if you met her is that she was wildly charismatic. She was a powerful force, not in a domineering sort of way. But that you couldn't help but notice her, you couldn't help but be impressed by her, you couldn't help but feel the strength of her vibrancy as a person.

From what we can tell, she actually was towards most people. Was very warm. Was interested in helping people, wanted to make their lives better, wanted to help them with whatever it was that was troubling them. Whether it was a family member or a relationship or work. She went out of her way to make connections, to help people with positions, to facilitate agreements to, I mean, you name it, she was constantly trying to help people and make their lives better, and she was adored for it. And, you know, she was often called the Queen of hearts during her reign as first lady. And it wasn't sarcastic, it was really intentional and well-meant.

And so I think that as long as you were white and you met her, you would have liked her, because almost everyone did. She has a glaring hole when it comes to race and slavery. In that kindness and that warmth and that help stopped. And it's hard to explain how someone who noticed everything and noticed everyone and went out of her way, she apparently never forgot a face.

She never forgot a name she was incredibly observant, could be so totally blind to how cruel that part of her life was.

Lindsay Chervinsky This special edition of 10 things about Dolly Madison. Thanks to all of you. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Jenkinson. This program is also available online at jeffersonhour..com and on Apple Podcasts. If you'd like to correspond with President Jefferson or submit a question for him to answer on the program, please visit the website at jeffersonhour..com. Boccello Suite No. 3 in C Major by Stephen Swinford.

Thank you for listening. Please tune in again next week for another thought-provoking, historically accurate program.