James Madison was a little man, the guide said in the parlor of Montpelier, and he was "well-known for his risque antidotes." Malapropisms aside, the Madison tour was the most informative and energetic of the weekend's tours--an acknowledgment of or compensation for Montpelier's odd status: while Mount Vernon and Monticello have been shrines to their illustrious owners for more than a century, Montpelier was a private DuPont mansion till the 1980s.
It was 2003 before the Montpelier Foundation decided to restore the building to the way it had been when Madison owned it, which meant getting rid of all subsequent additions. When the work was finished in 2008, the house was half the size it had been, the exterior had been stripped of a 150-year-old coat of stucco, and the inside was bare.
Touring the new-old building feels less like stepping back in time (or stepping into a museum exhibit) than like walking through a real-estate open house--less retrospective than prospective. This air of absence makes the fourth president seem more mythic than his taller, more thoroughly enshrined fellow Virginians.
The walls in the parlor are plain splotchy plaster; a new batch of wallpaper, the flocked red-velvet chosen by Dolley Madison, is supposed to be manufactured in France this coming summer. Paintings or reproductions of paintings fill some of the wall space, among them a bare-breasted Mary Magdalene recognizable from the parlor at Monticello. The Magdalene now at Jefferson's house, the guide said, is Madison's original, while Madison's house has to make do with a copy.
A near-empty room upstairs, on the front of the house, has a corner fireplace and a single bookcase with adjustable shelves, built by slave carpenters. This was Madison's father's library, where the younger Madison drafted up a plan for a government with three branches and a bicameral legislature.
Like Washington and Jefferson, Madison married a widow. He had no children of his own; over the course of his life, he secretly spent $40,000 to pay off the gambling debts of his alcoholic stepson.
Downstairs is Madison's study, where he spent his final year, too crippled by arthritis to go up to his bedchamber. A life-cast of the elderly Madison, rendered as a bust in Roman garb, stands by the window, frowning over the room. When he was dying in the summer of 1836, the guide said, doctors offered to prolong things so he could die on a Fourth of July, as Jefferson, John Adams, and James Monroe had died. He declined the opportunity and stopped breathing on June 28, with a smile on his face.
Madison's final scene was witnessed by Paul Jennings, an enslaved servant, who recounted it in a memoir published in 1865. (All three presidential-estate tours favored the adjectival "enslaved" construction, as in "his enslaved butler," over the noun "slave.") After James Madison's death, Dolley Madison sold Jennings. He was then bought for $120 by Daniel Webster and freed, after which Jennings worked for Webster and paid back the sale price in installments over the course of 15 months.
Later in life, Jennings wrote, he often visited Dolley Madison--living by then in a "state of absolute poverty"--and "occasionally gave her small sums from my own pocket."
