Dolley Madison's Quaker Birth

On May twentieth, seventeen sixty-eight, Dolley Payne was born in the New Garden Quaker community in Guilford County. The community had been settled by Friends from Pennsylvania and Virginia a generation earlier. It was a world organized around plainness, conscience, and the refusal of the world's hierarchies, including, more than anywhere else in the colonial South, the hierarchy of race.

The Payne family did not stay long. Within months of Dolley's birth, they returned to Virginia. Her father eventually freed the enslaved people his family had held, as Quaker testimony required, moved the family to Philadelphia, and died in poverty. Dolley married a lawyer named John Todd, who died in the yellow fever epidemic of seventeen ninety-three. She then married James Madison, who would become the fourth President of the United States.

As the wife of the Secretary of State and then as First Lady, Dolley Madison became the most influential social hostess in the early republic. She shaped the culture of the White House as a political space, opened the President's House to the public, and, when the British burned Washington in eighteen fourteen, is said to have saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington before fleeing. That story may have some embellishment in it, but the woman who rescued things from burning buildings had learned something early about the cost of not acting.

She was born a Quaker in Guilford County, in a community where conscience was not a private matter but a public obligation.