One thing I did not know about Dolley Madison before reading Côté's biography is that she was born and raised a Quaker. Dolley's mother, Mary Coles Payne, was raised Quaker but was disowned by her Meeting when she married a non-Quaker. Dolley's father, John Payne, converted to Quakerism to marry Mary Coles, and both Mary and John were officially accepted into the Cedar Creek Monthly Meeting eight months after their wedding. Both Dolley's parents were devout Quakers who were active in whatever Meeting of which they were members (they moved around a few times during Dolley's youth), and Dolley and her siblings were birthright Quakers.
But Dolley and her family had a complicated relationship with the Quaker faith. Because Quakers believe all people to be equal in the eyes of God, they, as a group, were famously anti-slavery. Yet the Payne family owned slaves. Côté mentions this fact many times but frustratingly does not explain why or how they owned slaves and remained in good standing with the Society of Friends until several dozen pages into the biography. Finally, he tells us that the slaves were inheritance and that it was illegal to emancipate slaves in colonial Virginia. In testament to his devotion to the Quaker faith and principles, however, John Payne freed his slaves soon after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He was a leader in this regard, but it cost him dearly. Giving up the free labor of his slaves meant that John Payne struggled to remain solvent as a farmer. He eventually gave up his farm to try to make it as a starch manufacturer in Philadelphia, but he failed to build a stable business. Indeed, when his business went bankrupt John Payne was disowned by the Friends for insolvency.
Moving to Philadelphia had a definite influence on Dolley Payne's character and Quaker ideals as she came of age. While Philadelphia was the center of American Quakerism, it was also early America's most cosmopolitan and worldly city. Dolley continued to follow the Society of Friends' custom of plain dress, but she learned to appreciate, even love the more fashionable attire she saw on the streets. While her first marriage was to a fellow Quaker – John Todd, who died a few years later in Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic – Dolley had seen enough of her Quaker friends disowned by the Friends in order to marry outside the faith that she also chose disownment to marry the Episcopalian James Madison.
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| source: http://ushistoryimages.com/colonial-fashion.shtm |
Dolley would have grown up wearing the modest fashions of the Quaker tradition, but after marrying James Madison began wearing the more fashionably low-cut attire of the time with impunity.
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| http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-newnation/5302 |
With her marriage to James Madison, Dolley quickly adapted to the more worldly duties and expectations of her new position while making use of those traits of her Quaker upbringing that proved most useful. She embraced fashionable and glamorous attire while in public but continued to dress modestly in private. She called upon the Quaker tradition of and equal and classless society to gain social self-confidence and become the easy and welcoming hostess she became known as. And while she would have learned as a young Quaker farm girl to treat workers kindly and became noted for that as a hostess, she chose not to embrace her father's bravery and leadership on the anti-slavery front. Dolley had seemingly no problem keeping slaves at Montpelier.
Dolley Madison's Quaker background was a key building block of the life that would make her one of America's most well-loved first ladies. As Richard N. Côté states, "During her farm girl days, [Dolley Madison] learned the solid, practical, virtuous things that became the core of her character. In later years, her high-fashion clothes and sophisticated social life attracted great attention, but it was her unpretentious, unaffected country values, not her elegant dresses, that saw her through the hard times, inspired her to great courage, and endeared her to the nation" (49).
