Audience reflects on first lady’s legacy

“Unquestionably the most important of the early first ladies.”

That was historian Edith P. Mayo’s assessment of the redoubtable Dolley Madison last week at Montpelier, the plantation home in Orange County that she shared with James Madison for nearly 40 years.

But it was her life at a different home — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — that concerned keynote speaker Mayo at the third annual Dolley Madison Legacy Luncheon on May 20.

George and Martha Washington had established the precedent of public access to the president of the brand new republic, including informally at social events. John and Abigail Adams had set a precedent as a political power couple.

Dolley Madison skillfully drew the two together. She promoted her husband’s agenda and wordlessly presented her own political statements through brilliant social events.

Those events served numerous purposes — smoothing political and diplomatic alliances, providing venues for lobbying, and sending overt messages about the power and prosperity of the young nation.

In fact, Dolley Madison may well be the reason that Washington remains the country’s capital today. After the city was burned in the War of 1812, said Mayo, there was congressional debate about returning the capital to Philadelphia.

The president’s wife pointedly arranged a series of lavish entertainment events at her temporary residences (the White House having been torched) as if to say: The Madisons — and by implication the rest of the city — can get along quite well, thank you, despite the damages of war.

Talk of moving the capital subsided.

Dolley Madison had a 50-year association with the White House. She played hostess there on occasion for the widowed Thomas Jefferson, as wife of his secretary of state before James Madison’s election as president. Madison served two terms as the nation’s chief executive. During that time, his wife earned patriotic appreciation for saving state papers and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington from the White House fire, in the face of the British advance. After Madison’s death in 1837, she moved back to Washington and was frequently an invited guest at the White House.

Dolley Madison was the first presidential wife to be called the “first lady,” an honorific description given at her eulogy.

The luncheon also featured a special presentation of a Bible that had been Dolley’s. The Bible had been given her on her 77th birthday — May 20, 1845 — by niece Annie Payne.

The Bible then descended to Sharon Sheahan of La Crescenta, Calif., who is a descendant of John Coles Payne, Dolley Madison’s younger brother.