Only weeks before John Todd’s death, Jemmy’s brother Ambrose had died back at Montpelier. Each summer after that, when Jemmy and Dolley had returned to the plantation, it had been to find more tasks undone, more bills unsettled, more finances entangled by debt and poor management as old Colonel Madison grew less and less able to ride his own acres daily the way he once had. Thus it was that when Virginians gathered to elect their representatives to the Fifth Congress, Jemmy stepped aside. For the first time since the Revolution, he returned to private life.

Watching the sunlight on the flanks of the carriage-team, on Payne’s gold hair as the boy galloped his pony into the green stillness of the wooded hills, Dolley was still hard-put to piece together how the country had come, so swiftly, from that point—that astonishingly peaceful handover of power from Washington to Adams—to the very verge of darkness that threatened to undo everything Jemmy, and Tom, and Mr. Adams himself had fought for.

Tyranny masquerading as the necessary actions of reasonable men, the way it now did in France.



Even as a permanent resident at Montpelier, of course, Jemmy was never completely detached from politics. He would always, Dolley reflected wryly, be a kingmaker at heart.