Dolley Madison: Life Before the White House

Dolley Payne was born on May 20, 1768, in Guilford County, North Carolina. Her parents were John Payne and Mary Coles Payne. Both her parents were Quakers, her father becoming so three years after marrying her mother in 1761. Dolley had four brothers and was the first of four girls. She grew up at her parents plantation in rural eastern Virginia after they moved there in 1769, and became close to her mother's family while she was there until her father moved them to Philadelphia when she was 15. There he started a laundry starch-making business that failed by 1791. He died a year later, and her mother started a boardinghouse, but by the next year she moved to her daughter Lucy's house in western Virginia along with her two youngest children, Mary and John.

Previously Dolley had married John Todd, who was a Quaker lawyer, in the January of 1790. They lived in a three-story brick house in Philadelphia, where they had two boys (John Payne and William Temple) over the course of three years. Tragedy struck in August of 1793 when a yellow fever epidemic broke out in Philadelphia that killed 5,019 people in four months, including Dolley's husband and youngest son in the same day.

Afterwards Dolley faced many financial difficulties due to the effects of coverture law. Under the coverture system females could not be the executors of inherited money, therefore her brother-in-law was made executor. She needed the money to pay for funeral expenses, and to support her and her surviving son, but he refused to give her the $19 she was owed, so she ended up having to sue him for the money.

According to several sources it was Aaron Burr, who was a long time friend of James Madison and who roomed in the same house as Dolley, that introduced the two. The meeting happened sometime in the May of 1794. At that time James Madison was representing Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives, and was 17 years older than Dolley. By August she had already accepted his marriage proposal and they were married September 15th of that year. Since Madison was not a Quaker, Dolley was expelled from the Society of Friends, and she began attending Episcopal services.

They lived in Philadelphia for three years before Madison retired from politics, and they moved to his family's plantation, Montpelier. The family then moved to Washington in 1800 after Madison accepted Thomas Jefferson's offer to become his Secretary of State. While her husband helped Jefferson out with political matters, Dolley sometimes served as hostess for the widowed president during official-ceremonial functions where she made some influential friends. She also helped furnish the White House.

In 1809 she became the First Lady when James Madison was elected president. She was also given a honorary seat on the floor of Congress, and was the only First Lady to ever have one.