Hello, Dolley is a Draw at Indian King Tavern

Dolley Madison, wife of the fourth U.S. President, came back to the neighborhood Saturday. 

Stopping for an hour or so at the Indian King Tavern on Kings Highway, a spot she reportedly visited when it was owned by her uncle, Madison chatted up those attending an open house at the restored tavern and inn.

 The assembly room on the second floor was standing room only, and it wasn’t only the slowly circulating air that was hot. Madison, in a crimson wool dress and turban hat with a black feather plume, was pretty hot herself. She whispered in a Southern drawl  to those attending that political opponents of her husband, James Madison, sometimes referred to her as “over-sexed.”  It was one of several comments that provoked laughs from both men and women at the event.

She told tales of life in the White House, which she took credit for decorating when it was built in Washington, “the federal city.” Portrayed by Philadelphia actress Cynthia Janzen who was booked through the American Historical Theatre, Madison charmed the crowd.

Docents trained in the history of the building revealed some of its background.  Terrie Murphy, a docent assigned to the second floor bedroom of the innkeeper in the late 1700s, said its canopy bed, with a curved top, is believed to be a bed used by Dolley Madison when she visited relatives in Haddonfield. Furniture from the 1700s, including a Queen Anne highboy, decorates the room.

History says the young girl, like children today, would peek at guests as they danced.  A Quaker herself, Madison said, she never danced, not even at her husband’s inaugural ball.

Madison described herself as a 25-year-old widow who was “rather popular.  Throngs of men would meet me, but I knew I had to marry again.”  Madison’s first husband, lawyer John Todd and their infant son died of yellow fever on the same day in 1793. An older son survived the epidemic. 

One of those pursuing her, Madison said, was Aaron Burr, whom she considered inappropriate because he had a wife and children in New York. Madison, 17 years older than Dolley, a four-term Congressman who was Secretary of State to Thomas Jefferson, also fancied the young widow. He  suggested Burr fill a diplomatic assignment in England. Within four months, James and Dolley Madison were married.

Dolley said she saw in Madison “a man whose star was rising.”  Before accepting him as a suitor, she said, she met with Martha Washington, who found him a good match. Madison also was one willing to treat her as an equal, including her in social events at the White House and talking to her of events in the new nation.

“Jefferson wanted only men to dinner and only men of the same political fraction,” she said of her role as hostess for Jefferson’s state dinners. “Housing in Philadelphia was dreadful. There was no theater, no taverns, no places of common meeting,” she said. At the time, the Madisons were living on Spruce Street in Philadelphia where, she said, “there was no established society.”

She began to make calls on other women, setting up dinner parties and Wednesday night “parlors.”

The Wednesday night event became known as a “squeeze," she said, where guests played cards and ate cake and ice cream.

 Jefferson, she said, had opened his presidential house to visitors only on July 4 and New Year’s Day, but when the Madisons moved into the new residence in Washington, they treated it like the house of the people.  “We wanted something that wasn’t palatial.  The season for society before I moved in was January to spring. I extended it to December.” 

Madison said she adopted the habit of wearing a plumed turban “so people would know exactly where I was.”

She also said she’d like people in Haddonfield to remember her as a “young girl running down the street to catch the mail coach.”

 The Indian King Tavern usually is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m.  Private tours can be arranged. The three-floor building, the first building purchased by the state as a historic site in 1903, was the host site for three meetings of the N.J. Legislature between January and September 1777.

 It was in the tavern and inn that legislatures adopted the Great Seal of the state and where New Jersey first was referred to as a state.