Today, the Dolley Madison Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin remembers when Congress passed “An Act to provide for the Purchase of the Manuscript Papers of the late James Madison, former President of the United States” on May 31, 1848.
This appropriation applied to the final set of manuscript papers held by Mrs. Madison.
Some historians note that her son was a ne’er do well and had spent all of his mother’s money.
The Congressional Act specified the payment of $5000 directly to her and the remaining $20,000 to be held in investments and paid to her in installments to help protect Mrs. Madison’s finances in her latter days.
The introduction by Gaillard Hunt to The Writings of James Madison: 1769-1783,published in 1900, told part of the story of the various manuscripts:
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James Madison’s family traditions were wholly colonial and extended back to the first settlement of Virginia.
With the mother country he had no living connection, and only one member of the family, his second cousin, Rev. James Madison, received any part of his education there.
England was not, therefore, home to the Madisons as it was to many other Virginia families, and there were no divisions of the house and consequent heartburnings when the separation came, but all of them embraced the patriot cause in the beginning and without hesitation.
From the shores of Chesapeake Bay, where James Madison’s direct ancestor, John Madison, received a patent for lands in 1653, the family pushed its way inland towards the Blue Ridge mountains, and his grandfather, Ambrose, occupied the tract in Orange County where his father, James, and himself spent their entire lives.
He was thus completely a Virginian, and his life was well rooted, as George Eliot has expressed it, in a spot of his native land, where it received “the love of tender kinship for the face of earth.”
During the eighty-four years of his life he was never continuously absent from Montpelier for a twelvemonth.
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During the closing years of his life Madison occupied himself in arranging his papers and especially those relating to the framing of the Constitution.
He bequeathed them to his wife, intending that she should immediately publish the debates in the Congress of 1782, 1783, and 1787, the debates in the constitutional convention, the proceedings of the Congresses of 1776, and a limited number of letters, as he had arranged them.
Through St. George Tucker she offered the work to the Harpers and through her son to other publishers, but was unable to come to a satisfactory agreement with any of them.
Francis Preston Blair, the publisher of the Congressional Globe, offered to publish the work, but doubted whether much profit would accrue and suggested that her best plan would be to fix a sum to cover the profit she expected and offer the manuscript to Congress at that price.
He promised to assist her in securing the appropriation.
She had, however, already offered the papers to the government in her letter of November 15, 1836, to President Jackson.
A copy of this letter was laid before Congress in a special message dated December 6, 1836.
Madison’s neighbor and friend, James Barbour, acted as her agent and told her that $100,000, the sum she at first said she expected, was out of the question, but that she could get $30,000 for the papers.
This amount was appropriated by Act of March 3, 1837.
July 9, 1838, Congress authorized the publication of the papers.
Henry D. Gilpin, of Pennsylvania, then Solicitor of the Treasury, was selected as the editor, and the work was published in three volumes in Washington in 1840 under the title of The Madison Papers.
May 31, 1848, Mrs. Madison being then, through domestic misfortunes, in distressed circumstances, Congress appropriated $25,000 to purchase all the remaining manuscripts of Madison’s in her hands.
This, with the first purchase, forms the magnificent collection of Madison’s writings now deposited in the Department of State.
August 18, 1856, Congress authorized the printing of the papers of the second purchase, and a part of them appeared as The Works of James Madison, published in four volumes in Washington in 1865.
Mr. J. C. McGuire, of Washington, a family connection of the Madisons, who amassed in the course of his life an extraordinary collection of Madisoniana, printed in 1859 (Washington) “exclusively for private distribution ” a limited edition in one volume of Madison’s letters under the title Selections from the Private Correspondence of James Madison from 1812 to 1836.
It contained about one hundred letters.
The originals of a few of the letters printed in The Madison Papers have been withheld from the editor, and he has been obliged to reproduce them as they were printed, in the first volume of this edition, indicating their source as he has that of every other paper appearing in these volumes.
These sources are widely scattered and embrace various public, private, and official depositories, which have been generously opened to the editor.
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From the United States Statutes at Large:
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Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars be, and the same is hereby, appropriated, out of any money in the treasury not otherwise appropriated, to purchase of Mrs. D. P. Madison, widow of the late James Madison, formerly President of the United States, all the unpublished manuscript papers of the said James Madison now belonging to and in her possession; and upon delivery thereof to the Secretary of State, with a proper conveyance of title to the United States, the said sum of money, upon the certificate of the Secretary of State of the delivery and conveyance of said papers, shall be paid at the treasury, agreeably to the wishes of the said Mrs. Madison, and in the manner following, namely : five thousand dollars of said sum of twenty-five thousand dollars to be paid to her; and the residue of twenty thousand to James Buchanan, now Secretary of State, John Y. Mason, Secretary of the Navy, and Richard Smith, Esq., of Washington City, to be held, put out to interest, vested in stocks, or otherwise managed and disposed of by them, or the survivor or survivors of them, as trustees for the said Mrs. Madison, according to their best discretion and her best advantage—the interest or profit arising from the said principal sum to be paid over to her as the same accrues—the said principal sum to be and remain inalienable during her lifetime, as a permanent fund for her maintenance, but subject to be disposed of as she may please by her last will and testament. Approved, May 31, 1848.
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The Dolley Madison Commemorative Silver Dollar Coin shows with an image of James Madison.
