40 Fun Facts About Dolley Madison

Which artist painted the George Washington portrait that Dolley Madison refused to abandon in 1814?

Gilbert Stuart's canvas was screwed to the wall, so she had the frame broken and the picture carried off by two New Yorkers. It hangs in the White House again today.

Which inventor asked Dolley Madison in 1844 to send the first personal message over his new line to Baltimore?

Samuel Morse had just demonstrated his telegraph in the Capitol when he turned to her for a message of her own. She sent her love to a friend in Baltimore.

Dolley Madison's elder son, John Payne Todd, was born in 1792 on which notable day of the calendar?

Leap Day, February 29, gave him a true birthday only once every four years. Known as Payne, he was two when his mother married James Madison.

Which New York senator, an old college friend of James Madison, introduced him to the widowed Dolley Todd in 1794?

Aaron Burr had boarded at her mother's house, and that spring she named him guardian of her small son in her will. The couple married four months after the introduction.

Which pet did Dolley Madison send to the French consulate for safekeeping as she fled the capital in 1814?

A parrot named Polly, a macaw that spoke French, was a favorite family pet. Her niece later wrote that a night hawk killed the bird when it was left off its perch one night.

Dolly Madison snack cakes, named after Dolley Madison, were long advertised by characters from which comic strip?

Peanuts characters appeared on the packages and in TV commercials from the 1960s into the 1980s. The brand, started in 1937, dropped the 'e' from her first name.

Which religious group expelled Dolley Madison in 1794 for marrying James Madison, who was not a member?

The Quakers had raised her in plain dress under strict rules. Once read out of meeting, she began attending Episcopal services and took up the latest city fashions.

What struck Washington within a day of British troops burning the White House that Dolley Madison had fled?

A violent storm, complete with a tornado that tossed cannons, put out the fires. It became known as the storm that saved the city, though it wrecked more buildings too.

Which disease killed Dolley Madison's first husband, John Todd, and their baby son during a 1793 epidemic?

Yellow fever also took both of her in-laws that autumn. At 25 she was left a widow with one surviving son, and had to sue her brother-in-law for her inheritance.

Dolley Madison sometimes stepped in as White House hostess for which widowed president, a close friend of her husband?

Thomas Jefferson usually relied on his daughters, so she filled in only when they were away. Her own house on F Street became the capital's real social hub.

British troops forced Dolley Madison to flee the White House during which conflict, later ended by the Treaty of Ghent?

The War of 1812 reached her door in August 1814. Her husband approved the peace treaty the following winter in a private house nearby, the mansion being a burned-out shell.

Which exotic style of headwear became Dolley Madison's fashion trademark, worn with the high-waisted gowns of her day?

A turban was her calling card for decades. She was still wearing a white one when she sat for photographs in her last years, long after the style had passed.

Dolley Madison's family moved when she was 15 to which city, where she later met James Madison?

Philadelphia became the national capital in 1790, which is how a Virginia congressman came to be living in the same city as the young widow.

James Madison held which cabinet post from 1801 to 1809, the years Dolley Madison became the capital's leading hostess?

Secretary of State was the senior cabinet seat, which put his wife first in rank among the capital's hostesses for eight years before she ever lived in the White House.

Legend credits Dolley Madison with starting which annual White House tradition for children, supposedly in 1814?

The Easter Egg Roll is on firmer ground from 1878, when Rutherford and Lucy Hayes welcomed children who had just been banned from rolling eggs on the Capitol lawn.

Dolley Madison hosted which Washington first at Long's Hotel in March 1809, with 400 tickets sold at $4 each?

An inaugural ball had been thrown for George Washington in New York in 1789, but hers was the first in the new federal city, held the evening her husband was sworn in.

Which Virginia plantation, the Madison family home, did the widowed Dolley Madison sell in 1844 to pay debts?

Montpelier passed to a new owner that August. She wrote that no one could appreciate her grief and dismay at handing a beloved home to someone else.

Dolley Madison liked to call herself a Virginian but was actually born in a log cabin in which present-day state?

North Carolina was home for less than a year. Her parents had joined the New Garden settlement, now part of Greensboro, and were back in Virginia by early 1769.

Dolley Madison raised money for the Washington Monument alongside the elderly widow of which Founding Father?

Alexander Hamilton's widow, Eliza, was by then in her nineties. She, Dolley Madison and Louisa Adams lent their famous names to the fundraising drive.

Dolley Madison escaped unharmed in 1844 when a giant cannon burst aboard a Navy warship carrying which president?

John Tyler was below decks when the gun called the Peacemaker blew apart on the Potomac, killing two members of his cabinet and four other people.

Which man enslaved by Dolley Madison's family later published the first memoir of life in the White House?

Paul Jennings was about 15 during the 1814 evacuation. His 1865 book says servants, not the first lady herself, took the famous portrait off the wall.

Which famous senator often sent market baskets of food to the impoverished Dolley Madison in her last years?

Daniel Webster sent the market baskets after learning how short of money she was. Her son's gambling debts had swallowed the family fortune.

Dolley Madison bonded with the War Hawk congressman Henry Clay by sharing which tobacco habit with him?

Taking snuff together gave her a way to reach a man her husband could not approach directly. A friend said her little box had a magic influence.

After the 1814 invasion, Dolley Madison became first directress of a Washington society that cared for which group?

Orphans became her cause once the fighting ended: she gave time and money and urged other women to join. It made her the first president's wife tied to a public charity.

What did the widowed Dolley Madison sell to Congress in two lots, in 1837 and 1848, to ease her debts?

Her husband's papers included his own notes on the 1787 convention. The second payment was placed in a trust so her spendthrift son could not get at it.

The earliest known photograph of any U.S. first lady shows Dolley Madison around 1846 in which early process?

Daguerreotype was the process, and the sitter was nearly 80. The National Portrait Gallery acquired the picture in 2024.

Which Hollywood star played Dolley Madison opposite Burgess Meredith's James Madison in the 1946 film Magnificent Doll?

Ginger Rogers took the role in a drama that invents a love triangle with a scheming rival suitor. RC Cola ran ads showing her in costume as the first lady.

Which famous group was introduced to the press in 1959 at Dolley Madison's former home in Washington?

The Mercury Seven astronauts faced reporters there because NASA was using the yellow house at the time. It is now occupied by a federal appeals court.

Dolley Madison's sister Lucy married a man holding which office at the first White House wedding, in 1812?

Supreme Court justice Thomas Todd of Kentucky was the groom. The bride was the widow of a nephew of George Washington.

After the White House burned, Dolley Madison and her husband lived for six months in which Washington mansion?

The Octagon belonged to John Tayloe, a Federalist with little love for the war. The Madisons paid $500 in rent, and the peace treaty was approved in its upstairs study.

Dolley Madison's crowded Wednesday evening receptions at the White House earned which nickname in Washington society?

Squeezes drew politicians from both sides, and she ran them so evenly that one congressman said you could not tell her husband's friends from his foes.

Dolley Madison played matchmaker in 1838, introducing her relative Angelica Singleton to the son of which president?

Martin Van Buren was a widower, so once Angelica married his son Abraham that November she became White House hostess at just 20.

Dolley Madison spent her final years in a house beside which Washington park, facing the White House?

Lafayette Square put her a short walk from the president. Her New Year's Day open house there drew crowds as large as the one at the White House itself.

Before her reburial beside James Madison in 1858, Dolley Madison first lay in which Washington, D.C., burial ground?

Congressional Cemetery kept her in its public vault for two years, the longest stay on record, while money was raised to move her to Virginia.

Dolley Madison hired which architect, then at work on the U.S. Capitol, to help furnish the White House in 1809?

Benjamin Latrobe and his wife Mary chose Greek-style furniture and a yellow drawing room with matching damask curtains. All of it burned five years later.

Dolley Madison gathered the wives of Washington officials to talk over current events at meetings known by which name?

Dove parties looked purely social, but they had political overtones: she used them to gather information for her husband.

Dolley Payne Todd married James Madison in 1794 at which estate, the home of her sister Lucy?

Harewood belonged to Lucy's husband, George Steptoe Washington, a nephew of the first president. The house stands near Charles Town in what is now West Virginia.

Which photographer, later famous for his Civil War images, made a portrait of the elderly Dolley Madison around 1848?

Mathew Brady was still a young man making his name. His picture shows her in the old-fashioned black dress of an earlier age.

Through her mother's Winston relatives, Dolley Madison was kin to which Revolutionary-era Virginia statesman?

Patrick Henry was a distant relative, and she remembered his Scotchtown house from her childhood, though she may only have visited it.

Popular belief holds that which president called Dolley Madison the first lady in a eulogy at her 1849 funeral?

Zachary Taylor did attend the funeral, the largest the capital had yet seen, but no written record of such a eulogy survives.