Presidential House Visit: The Other Springfield

Zachary Taylor looks like a man born to live a rough life in photographs, but looks can be deceiving. Taylor was born in Virginia to a prominent family somewhat distantly related to James Madison. His father moved the family to Kentucky when young Zachary was only 8 months old. But Springfield, the plantation house where Zachary Taylor spent his boyhood is a far cry from the cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born a few decades later. It is a surprisingly large brick house that would have been quite the anomaly on the Kentucky frontier. Indeed, Zachary Taylor made an excellent living throughout his life. He owned multiple plantations and was our last president to own slaves. 


All this could make it seem like the "Old Rough and Ready" was a persona cooked up to win votes, but that is also not the truth. Taylor chose to live the life of a soldier. In it he found his calling, and although he did not have to live in the same conditions as his men, he did. This earned him the respect of his subordinates, and helped make him a successful general. 

Zachary Taylor Monument

Springfield is privately owned and therefore not open to the public, but I don't think it really reflects the man Taylor became. The nearby cemetery that bears his name, and also happens to be where he is buried, tells a lot more about our twelfth president than his boyhood home. It contains two gravesites: one slipshod and temporary, the other permanent and certainly better to look at. There is also a monument that looks over the rest of the military cemetery, which is beautiful in its simplicity. Taylor could have been buried in the capital, but was instead buried on the land that belonged to his family outside Louisville, Kentucky. Taylor was first and foremost a military man, and having his final resting place be among the fallen soldiers of his nation is both fitting and what he would have wanted. His chosen career became his chosen lifestyle, and finally his lasting legacy. 

Original Gravesite of Zachary Taylor

Zachary Taylor's Final Gravesite

Presidential Free Association: James Garfield

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Ambidextrous


Best known as the first president to be assassinated, James Garfield had a strange, but admittedly cool, talent. In addition to being ambidextrous, he was also multilingual. He reportedly could write in Latin in one hand and Greek in the other simultaneously, which is all the more impressive considering they are written in two different alphabets. 

Pictures!

I finally uploaded the pictures from my last trip on to my computer, so they have been added to their respective posts. I thought I would share a few here as well.

The house where Ulysses S. Grant first went to school

The entire Aesop's Fables fireplace in the Taft birthplace

Expensive piano in the Taft birthplace 

Gravesite of Nancy Hanks Lincoln, mother of
Abraham Lincoln, in southern Indiana

Boyhood Home of Mark Twain
Hannibal, Missouri

The Mississippi River in Hannibal

Statue of Ronald Reagan on the Rock River
Dixon, Illinois

The Gerald Ford Presidential Museum
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Presidential Free Association: Rutherford B. Hayes

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Sober


Rutherford B. Hayes served wine at his inaugural ball, but was upset by the drunken behavior of the guests. He and his wife Lucy, who was a strong proponent of the prohibition movement, forbade alcohol at White House parties. They used the savings gained by not purchasing alcohol to throw even more lavish parties, but mostly people just missed the drinking.

Update on Commenting

Hello everyone!

It has come to my attention that the commenting on this blog hasn't been working. I looked into it, and the problem seems to be within blogger itself. I switched a few of the settings around so it isn't as pretty, but the comments will be posted.

This is also a good opportunity for me to thank everyone for their comments. I want these posts to be discussion starters, so if you have any thoughts, corrections, or just think I'm totally missing the point, please comment! I love getting them and they help me when I write new posts. 

Thanks again, and hopefully everything is working properly!

Presidential House Visit: John F. Kennedy Birthplace

Although it does not bear her name, the John F. Kennedy National Historic Site in Brookline, Massachusetts is more of a tribute to Rose Kennedy and her young family than it is to our 35th president. The Kennedys lived in the house for only six years, during which time John was born, but they sold it in 1920. The house had changed hands several times when Rose bought it back in 1966 after her son had been assassinated. She restored it herself according to her memories and gave it to the park service fully decorated and renovated to the way it was in 1917.

Or at least the way she wanted it to be. The house is beautiful, surprisingly modest, and happy, but it’s hard to not feel a sense of looming tragedy. By the time Rose repurchased the house, everyone who had lived in it was either dead or unable to help her with the project: Joe Jr. had died in the war in 1944, Rosemary was incapacitated due to a botched lobotomy, Joe Sr. had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1961, and John had been assassinated in 1963. Rose was the only one left, so the house acts as a memorial to her family in a simpler, happier time.

For all the effort that went into presenting the house as a cozy, cheerful home, there are still signs of the dysfunction the Kennedys became infamous for. For example, the master bedroom contained two twin beds, which I initially thought could not have been the true state of things, except the park ranger told me they really did sleep in separate beds. Given the number of children they had, it seems it didn’t make much difference, but it still seemed slightly odd to me. The park ranger told a story about how after Jean, their eighth child, was born, Joe gave Rose her choice of three diamond bracelets as a gift. When a friend asked what he would give her to top himself if they had another child, he replied with “a sock in the eye.” Charming.

Another park ranger story involved Rose leaving on a trip when the future president was about seven years old. As Rose was saying goodbye to her children, Jack turned to her and said, “A fine mother you are to leave us!” His mother, racked with guilt, returned several minutes later to check on her children, who were playing happily despite her absence. Apparently, little Jack knew exactly where to strike to create the most damage.

Edward Kennedy described the atmosphere as one of “spirited competitiveness,” but I would describe it more as “ruthless ambition.” The kind of success the Kennedys had would not have been possible if they were not ambitious and willing to use almost any means necessary to achieve their goals. Perhaps the greatest rivalry in the family was between Joe and John; Joe was always physically stronger than his younger brother, but John used his cunning to outwit his older brother. Perhaps it’s just because I have an usually good older brother, but I found their relationship appalling. My brother would never have purposefully hurt me, physically or emotionally, so the constant fighting between the two oldest Kennedy brothers disturbed me more than it should have, since they were most likely acting like normal little boys.

I think the trouble I have with Kennedy is that I view him less as a president and more as a celebrity. Bits of family gossip are more memorable to me than John Kennedy’s political record, so I find it hard to separate him from his glamorous family. This was partially intentional; the Kennedys had strong ties to Hollywood and Rose raised them to live public lives, just as she had as the daughter of the mayor of Boston. Seeing the Kennedy Birthplace, untainted as it is by the later tragedies and scandals the family faced, made me wonder how their life would I have been different if the “spirited competitiveness” had been toned down a bit. Fame and power are heady things, but they can take away as much as they can give.

I got the sense that Rose understood that when she returned to her modest starter home. The house has an aura of bittersweet nostalgia, helplessly aware of the troubles to come, but hopeful for a better future. “We were very happy here,” the voice of Rose Kennedy says in a recording played at the end of the tour of the house, and you get the sense they were never quite so happy again. 

Presidential Free Association: Ulysses S. Grant

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Horses

Grant loved horses. He worked with them when he ran his father’s taxi service, he drew pictures of them, and he encouraged his men to look after their horses after a battle before taking care of their own needs. Reportedly, the only time his men saw him lose his temper was when he saw a man beating a horse. 

Presidential Free Association: Andrew Johnson

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Tailor

Andrew Johnson was our only president to also be a trained tailor. He sewed his own suits and dressed neatly and fashionably. If his skills with a needle had allowed him to sew the Union back together, perhaps he wouldn't have been impeached. 

Presidential House Visit: Hail to the Victor

Other than Abraham Lincoln, no president came into the office at a more chaotic time than Gerald R. Ford. Watergate and the ensuing Nixon resignation plunged the nation into turmoil and made people distrustful of the government and the presidency in particular.

It says a lot about Gerald Ford that in three years he restored confidence in the government and the presidency. Known for his honesty and integrity, President Ford cleared the White House of bugs, swept away the pall of Nixon’s paranoia, and started afresh while still maintaining a sense of stability. I have always thought of Ford as a blandly likeable president, notable only for his lack of scandal, but now I can appreciate what that meant at the time. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Gerald Ford led our nation back from the brink of ruin.

It could have been otherwise. Born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. in Omaha, his mother left his abusive father shortly after he was born. The young mother eventually made her way to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she remarried a painter named Gerald Ford and had three more sons. Gerald Ford, Sr. welcomed his young stepson into his family, giving him his own name. The family had three rules: tell the truth, work hard, and come to dinner on time.  

Although he was mocked on Saturday Night Live after stumbling while getting off a plane, Gerald Ford was one of our most athletic presidents. He played football at the University of Michigan and was offered a position on the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers. He turned them both down, opting to attend Yale Law instead. He ran for Congress in 1949, and eventually reached his goal of becoming the Speaker of the House before being appointed Vice President in 1973. He is still the only president not to be elected into his office. Because of this, he never played “Hail to the Chief,” but instead had the band play the University of Michigan fight song “Hail to the Victors.” You could take the man out of Michigan, but you couldn’t take the Michigan out of the man.

“Jerry” Ford, as he was known back home in Grand Rapids, moved around a lot as a child, and many of the houses still stand, although they are all privately owned. This led to some difficulties as it was harder to get a good sense of the man; there’s really only so much you can tell from the outside of a house. Visiting the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum helped, but I still wanted a more personal connection.

Luckily, I had a Michigan connection. My uncle is from Grand Rapids, and his family members had the opportunity to meet with Jerry Ford several times. They declared him to be a “very nice man,” far too nice to be in politics today. There is a photograph of my uncle with his parents and siblings at Congressman Ford’s office in Washington, DC. Apparently they made the trip down from Grand Rapids to the capital to see all the sights, but they left home just as the news of President Eisenhower’s death broke. The capital was entirely closed down for the funeral, and Ford felt bad that they couldn’t see anything, so he handed them a few passes to the ropeline at Eisenhower’s funeral. Instead of seeing the usual Washington tourist sites, they witnessed a state funeral and all the pomp and circumstance that accompanied it.

But that was just Jerry Ford for you. As an honorary Michigander, I recognized a lot of qualities in President Ford that I see in a lot of people from Michigan: approachability, lack of pretentiousness, and plain old kindness. There was also integrity. When people questioned whether Ford pardoned Nixon as part of a deal to become president, he went to Congress and made himself available to answer all questions that could be asked of him; he could do that because he had nothing to hide. I think that speaks volumes about his character at a time when the country so desperately needed a leader free of the taint of dishonesty.

But that was just Jerry Ford from Grand Rapids, the unlikely, but sorely needed, president.

Presidential House Visit: The Taft Birthplace

I consider myself a trivia collector. I like picking up a quick fact here and there, broadening my knowledge base, but not necessarily deepening it. Visiting the Taft Birthplace in Cincinnati clearly illustrated the drawbacks of that kind of thinking.

If you’re anything like me, when you think of William Howard Taft, you think of bathtubs. Specifically, you think of the incident in which the over 300 pound Taft got stuck in the White House Tub and had to be lifted out. I never cared to learn much more about Taft, which is a shame because he is so much more than That Guy I Heard Was Too Fat For the Tub.

Namely, he held more government positions than I would have thought humanly possible. He was an Internal Revenue Collector, Solicitor General, Governor General of the Phillippines, Secretary of War, Vice President, President, Professor of Law at Yale, and finally, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  

Taft may not have been able to accomplish all this had he not been superbly politically connected. His father, Alphonso Taft (who was added to my list of people with awesome names), was the founder of the Ohio Republican Party and a Yale graduate. He sent his son William to his alma mater, and his connections helped his son obtain his first political positions. But the park ranger who gave our tour was quick to point out Taft earned his way up to the top of American politics. He was an extremely capable administrator who worked diligently at his many posts. He took his duties very seriously, and approached everything with careful competence.

But there’s no denying that Taft grew up in a wealthy household. Alphonso moved his first family into a new house in an attempt to save his wife and son from disease, but to no avail. Later, he added on to the house while commuting back and forth from Boston. By the time he finished the addition on the house, he felt ready to propose to a young lady he met in Boston, Delia Torrey. She flatly refused him, saying she was not ready to marry, but he did not want to return to Cincinnati wifeless. So he proposed marriage to her older sister Louisa, who accepted him. This strange arrangement apparently worked well, since Delia came to Ohio to birth all of Louisa’s children.

Louisa decorated her new mansion with a mixture of opulence and frugality. Her house was designed to impress with large drapes and a gorgeous piano, but the prized pieces were the marble fireplaces which apparently made her neighbors green with envy. Little did they know the fireplaces weren’t marble at all, but painted metal.

Another fireplace in the house gave the greatest insight into Taft’s character. Alphonso’s parents lived in the house with the family, and Taft’s grandfather took a great interest in the boy’s development. He would read to him from Aesop’s Fables, and after every fable he would have a tile made illustrating the lesson, then use the tiles to decorate the fireplace. Taft’s favorite fable was “The Tortoise and the Hare” with its moral of “slow and steady wins the race.” Taft lived that way, steadily working his way to his dream job, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Much as it bothers me that people only remember Taft and the bathtub, I don’t think he would have minded. He was a big enough person that it wouldn’t bother him.

Presidential House Retrospective: A Pennsylvania Yankee in King Andrew's Court

If James Monroe is Bill Pullman in Sleepless in Seattle, then Andrew Jackson is Clint Eastwood, specifically Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. He’s mean, he’s tough, he doesn’t suffer fools, he’s really unstable, and yet you kind of like him. Intellectually, I realize that Andrew Jackson had a lot of unsavory qualities and made many damaging decisions, but I can’t help but admire many aspects of his personality.

By the age of fourteen he was already orphaned and in the militia during the Revolutionary War. He was captured by the British and ordered to clean a British commander’s boots, and his refusal won him a saber slash to the forehead. Thus began Andrew Jackson’s intense hatred of the British, which would spur him on to major victories against the British during the War of 1812. His campaigns during the war also demonstrated his undeniable leadership ability. During the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson led a ragtag group of militia men and pirates to victory against superior British forces. Getting this group of misfits not to kill each other would have been impressive; leading them to victory is almost miraculous.

Andrew Jackson continued to live a miraculous life-- miraculous in that it was a miracle he survived it. In a time when a toothache could kill you, Jackson survived a slew of incidents that would have easily ended in death for almost anyone else. Many of these near death experiences stemmed from problems in his love-life. When Jackson fell in love with and married a young divorcee named Rachel Robards, it later turned out she wasn’t quite as divorced as she had thought. At the time, only a man could petition for divorce, so Rachel had to rely on her estranged, jealous husband to grant her a divorce. Everything eventually got sorted out, but the damage was done. When a man named Charles Dickinson published some unsavory comments about Mrs. Jackson in a newspaper and finished his statement with a challenge to a duel, Jackson accepted, despite knowing Dickinson was a deadly shot. Jackson let Dickinson shoot first, and took a bullet to the chest that could never be removed because it was too close to his heart. He then raised his pistol, aimed, and fired, shooting Dickinson dead. All told, Jackson engaged in as many as 44 duels over his lifetime. In his old age, he quipped that he “rattled like a bag of marbles.”

I can’t help but admire that sort of toughness, so I was excited to visit The Hermitage, his home for over 40 years. We arrived in Nashville on a sweltering midsummer day. Even with the almost unbearable heat the visitor center was crawling with people. Walking into his stately plantation, I expected to enter an inner sanctum of machismo. Surely the house would positively reek of the tough life of our illustrious seventh president.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. The walls were covered in narrative wallpaper based on classical myths which the tour guides assured us was authentic multiple times. While I can appreciate this as a feat of historic preservation, the Hermitage was home to the second most horrifying wallpaper I have ever seen (first place goes to a home in historic Deerfield, MA that depicted the death of Captain Cook at the hands of Hawaiian cannibals. Seriously.) A vast majority of the items in the house were original, which the tour guides are very proud of, as well they should be.

The house was large, spacious, and quite feminine. This was no doubt the influence of his daughter-in-law, whose tastes ran towards the expensive. Jackson and his wife adopted three children: Andrew Jackson, Jr., the the son of her sister (his twin stayed with his birth parents), a Native American boy named Theodore about whom little is known, and an orphaned Creek boy with the best name ever, Lyncoya Jackson. He also served as the guardian to eight other children. I never thought of Jackson as a family man, but standing in the Hermitage, you can imagine the laughter of children sailing in from the backyard.

The most affecting part of the tour was Rachel Jackson’s grave, which is located in the garden next to the house. She died a short time before Jackson’s inauguration, and he believed she was killed by the stress of a messy campaign which prominently featured her checkered past. On her tombstone is a epitaph written by Jackson: "Her face was fair, her person pleasing, her temper amiable, and her heart kind. She delighted in relieving the wants of her fellow-creatures,and cultivated that divine pleasure by the most liberal and unpretending methods. To the poor she was a benefactress; to the rich she was an example; to the wretched a comforter; to the prosperous an ornament. Her pity went hand in hand with her benevolence; and she thanked her Creator for being able to do good. A being so gentle and so virtuous, slander might wound but could not dishonor. Even death, when he tore her from the arms of her husband, could but transplant her to the bosom of her God.”

I tend to think of Andrew Jackson as a wild man who lived a rough and tumble life, but The Hermitage showed his gentler side. Jackson may have been capable of extreme violence, but he was also capable of deep love. He may have been known as a dominating presidential personality, but when it came to decorating his home, he deferred to the judgment of the women in his life. Still, I wonder sometimes whether he was tempted to shoot the wallpaper right off the walls. 

Presidential House Visit: A Grant Odyssey

Henry Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, wrote: “That, two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant should be called-- and should actually and truly be-- the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous....The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin....Grant should have lived in a cave and worn skins.”

This quote neatly sums up how I used to feel about Grant. I thought of him as a none-too-intelligent military man in over his head in the White House. During his tenure as president, numerous scandals rocked the White House, and Grant seemed powerless to stop them. Grant appeared a weak-willed and simple man who shouldn’t have been president.

Driving through Grant country in southern Ohio, I got a completely different idea of the man. The area even now is extremely rural. Large, beautiful farms dominate the landscape with small towns peppered here and there. You could imagine how isolated the young Grant would have been living there during the 1820s when it was even less populated.

Staying in Georgetown, home of the Grant Boyhood Home, we stopped by a local restaurant to get some dinner after a 9 hour drive. We chatted with the waitress and asked her if they studied Grant in school. She answered with a resounding yes, and informed us the town has a yearly festival that involves dressing up in period costumes and having a ball at a huge barn. When asked what three words she would use to describe Grant, she said iconic (fitting since he is on the 50 dollar bill), heroic, and intelligent.

The last one took me aback, but our tour guide at the boyhood home also picked it as one of her three. Grant apparently excelled at mathematics, and was encouraged by his parents to get a better education than they did. He attended a local school founded by an engineer who inexplicably stopped in the region to found a school for children, despite the fact that he had no known connection to the town and had never taught before. Of the children under his tutelage in the small town of Georgetown, four went on to become generals and three went on to become admirals during the Civil War.

Grant’s parents were not so educated. His mother was virtually illiterate and his father was a tanner. The cottage where Grant was born consisted of one room, with the bare minimum of possessions. The future president’s father Jesse worked hard, and a year after his first son was born, he had saved up $1500, enough money to buy his own land and start his own tannery in Georgetown. He built the home where Grant grew up as well as the tannery building across the street, allowing his family to live in simple comfort. By the time he died, he had amassed a small fortune.

Grant never had his father’s business success. He could have taken over the tannery, except he was a known animal lover who hated the sight of the animal carcasses outside the tannery that were visible from his bedroom window. Instead of helping his father at the tannery, he ran a taxi service for his father which allowed him to work with horses. Grant was an expert horseman and true horse lover; during the war, he would order his officers to take care of their horses after a battle before seeing to their own needs.

Seeing where Grant grew up, a different picture of him emerges. The inept president fades, and a sensitive man and brilliant general comes into focus. Everyone we asked about Grant talked about him warmly and with surprising feeling, as though he was still a neighborhood fixture. That a man who has been dead for over 125 year can still inspire that kind of devotion is remarkable and heartwarming.

So with all due respect to Mr. Adams, I have to disagree. Grant may not have been our best president, but he was something better: a decent human being. 

Update: Feel the Illinoise

The western leg of the trip is almost complete. I have one more visit scheduled until a week long break. I thought I would be sick of the car by now, but I still find myself excited to move on to the next place. I apparently like road trips more than I thought. 


 The total tally of houses is now at ten for the trip, with 17 presidents down. Over the past two days I visited the Herbert Hoover birthplace, the Ronald Reagan Boyhood Home, and the Lincoln Home in Springfield. It was fun to be back somewhere I visited as a child, and I will post a longer entry about my visit soon. 


 There's more to come so stay tuned!

Update: Across the Fruited Plain

The trip has been going amazingly well so far. I honestly didn’t think I would be able to stick to the schedule I had made for myself, but I’ve kept to it almost exactly. So far, the tally of presidential house visits on the trip has come to seven. We’ve visited the Grant Boyhood Home, the Grant Birthplace, the Taft birthplace, Zachary Taylor Boyhood Home, the Abraham Lincoln Boyhood Log Cabin, the William Henry Harrison House, and the Truman House, with a quick pit stop at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal, MO.

I’ve visited three new states, and gotten a different view of the country as we’ve traveled almost exactly through the middle of the United States. People have been incredibly responsive to my mission. I would like to give a special shout out to a group of women in Missouri who have the most awesome book club selections I’ve ever heard of, and were kind enough to share their enthusiasm.

I still have quite a ways to go on the trip, so I will keep you posted!

Presidential Free Association: Abraham Lincoln

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the president's name along with a brief explanation.

Strong

As a young man, Lincoln earned a reputation as a rail splitter of considerable physical strength. Later, he became known as a lawyer of good-humored intelligence and a politician with unusual moral fiber. He survived the loss of his son during his presidency and battled what modern scholars diagnose as clinical depression. He held a nation together through its most difficult period, and it was his strength that helped him do it.

Presidential Free Association: James Buchanan

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I think of a president along with a brief explanation.

Disgraceful

James Buchanan is the only president from my home state of Pennsylvania and also the only president to remain a lifelong bachelor. He is also widely considered the worst president of all time. His presidency coincided with increasing partisan fervor, fatal violence in Kansas, the Panic of 1857, the Dred Scott decision, and the secession of the southern states from the union after the 1860 election. His infamy can most fairly be chalked up to the inability to be Abraham Lincoln, but it doesn’t change the fact that his presidency was pretty disgraceful.

Presidential Free Association: Franklin Pierce

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Photogenic

Franklin Pierce was elected in 1852 basically for being inoffensive. He was a northerner who was pro-slavery and generally unknown. Perhaps most importantly, he was a good-looking man. He is still considered one of our most handsome presidents, which is impressive given that he lived in a time without modern standards of hygiene. However, his dashing good looks couldn’t help him repair an increasingly divided nation, and he is generally considered to be one of our worst presidents. Handsome is as handsome does. 

Go Big or Go Home

Rather than slowly working my way into my presidential house visits, I've decided to swing for the fences instead. I am beginning a week long odyssey across the country in an attempt to visit 11 presidential homes. The trip will be a ground total of about 2700 miles and will take me as far as Independence, MO. The schedule is tight and the hours will be long, but I'm really excited to dive headfirst into the project. 


I'm going to try to write up some of the posts while I'm on the road, so stay tuned for some more house visits!

Presidential Free Association: Millard Fillmore

This is the part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Education

Millard Fillmore was apprenticed to a clothmaker at the age of fourteen. Five years later, he started attending school to improve on his frontier education. At nineteen, he sold his apprenticeship and joined a law office as a clerk, beginning his path to the presidency. If not for Fillmore's determination and desire for education, our thirteenth president could have wound up a clothmaker instead. 

Presidential House Retrospective: The Visit of Good Feelings

In which the author reminisces on previous presidential house visits. This post chronicles my third presidential house visit in 2008.

James Monroe is a difficult man to dislike.

The last of the presidents who was also a Founding Father, his presidency coincided with a time of relative peace in the United States. After the breakdown of the Federalist Party, Monroe ran unopposed in 1816. The only reason his election was not unanimous was because one elector abstained in order to ensure that only George Washington had that honor. His time in office was dubbed “The Era of Good Feelings.” Even a financial crisis couldn’t put Monroe out of office. He is the only president to have been re-elected after presiding over a panic. The only memorable controversy of his tenure, The Monroe Doctrine, was actually written by his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams (who could have used some of his boss’s charm).

Monroe was perhaps too likable. His genial popularity now seems like plain old mediocrity. I prefer to think of it as competency, a trait that seems to have all but disappeared from modern government. Still, James Monroe is like the safe boyfriend the protagonist of a romantic comedy leaves at the last moment for the exciting, romantic male lead (for our purposes, Andrew Jackson).

For this reason, I am pre-disposed to like James Monroe even more. I am the kind of person who thinks Sleepless in Seattle would have been improved if Meg Ryan had forgotten about Tom Hanks and stuck with Bill Pullman (this may have something to do with my love of Bill Pullman, but I digress). Sure James Monroe’s presidency wasn’t that exciting, but excitement is often overrated. The man led a politically unified America the likes of which was never seen again. He was an amazing diplomat and an excellent administrator.

So I was a little disappointed by my visit to Ash Lawn-Highland, his country estate that is only a few miles outside of Charlottesville, VA. After the beautiful dysfunction of Monticello, Ash Lawn-Highland is a bit of a letdown. It looks like a country manor house from a mid-90s BBC period drama. Normally, this would thrill me, but I had hoped to learn more about what made Monroe tick. I wanted insight into the man beyond that he was likable.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much to be had. The entire house oozed with an air of pleasant domesticity. It was easy to imagine a family living there comfortably. The house is full of elegant decorations and portraits of friends Monroe had made while in public service. They seem for the most part like polite, impersonal gifts from important people that were put on display so as not to offend the gift givers, and also to remind the viewer that Monroe knew some exceptional people.

However, one of these friendly reminders rises above the rest and makes for a great story, or at least a great Tour Guide Story. There is a bust of Napoleon in the drawing room that is little too large for the room. The face is modeled less on the general himself and more on classical Roman sculpture. It is also a physical representation of one of those surprising connections that crop up quite a bit when you study history.

James Monroe was serving as Minister to France in Paris when the French Revolution broke out. He and his wife were well-regarded in French society, even when the monarchy fell. After Napoleon’s rise to power, the Monroe’s sent their eldest daughter Eliza to a prestigious girl’s school in France that was founded by a down-on-her-luck aristocrat. Another one of her pupils was Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Empress Josephine and step-daughter to Napoleon himself. Eliza Monroe and Hortense became friends at school and maintained their friendship throughout their lives, even though their paths diverged quite dramatically.

While Eliza Monroe returned to America, got married, and started a family, Hortense was contracted in a political marriage to Napoleon’s brother/her step-uncle Louis who was the King of Holland. The marriage was apparently quite miserable; according to Wikipedia, “she was much liked by the public, which annoyed her husband.” Despite this documented dislike, the couple managed to have three sons, one of whom became Napoleon III.

Eliza Monroe had an inconsequential life in comparison to her friend, but given the choice, I would choose her life over Hortense’s. Excitement and misery often go hand in hand, and Hortense was often depressed. She may have been a queen, but she felt like a prisoner. Similarly, reading about Napoleon and his exploits is a lot more interesting than reading about James Monroe, but Monroe was the man you would want to have as your leader. Political upheaval and war make for riveting history books, but is less pleasant to actually live through.

So maybe I’m being too hard on James Monroe. Sometimes good is for the best. 

Presidential Free Association: Zachary Taylor

This is part of a series called Presidential Free Association. I post the first word that comes to mind when I hear the name of the president, along with a brief explanation.

Tobacco

Zachary Taylor was a military man not known for his refinement. Nicknamed "Old Rough and Ready" he famously used chew tobacco and had excellent aim when spitting. The fact that someone thought to mention this as a gift to posterity makes me ridiculously happy. 

Presidential Home Retrospective: duPont v. Madison

In which the author reminisces on previous presidential house visits. This post chronicles my third presidential house visit in 2008.

I have always felt a special kinship with James Madison. When I was in fourth grade and stuffing my brain with presidential trivia, he was one of the most memorable presidential superlatives-- the smallest president at 5’4” and 100 pounds. At the time, 5’4” seemed tall. I was just about 4’7” at the time, completely average, and hating it. I wanted to be as tall as a president. During the next year, I hit a massive growth spurt and started inching toward the magic number. Finally, in the middle of fifth grade I hit 5’4”; I was the same height as James Madison, and I was officially tall. Nine years and four inches later, I still don’t picture James Madison as a small man. He is forever linked in my mind to the moment I no longer felt average.

After visiting Monticello, my mom and I were looking at those town maps for kids to scope out other things to do in the area. I noticed Montpelier, home of James Madison, was quite close to Monticello. Even factoring in the weird scale of those maps, it couldn’t be more than ten minutes away, so we decided to pay it a quick visit.

After a half hour winding through the Virginia countryside, I took a closer look at the map and noticed there was a small note on the road leading to Montpelier that said 30 miles of road had been cut out (I later found out this same journey took Thomas Jefferson eight hours by carriage). By that time, we were almost there anyway, so we decided to just keep going. We arrived at Montpelier just in time for the last tour of the day. We watched a short instructional video detailing the history of the Madison family and the various alterations made to the house over the years.

Then it was on to the house itself, which turned out to be completely void of furniture and decorations. After Madison’s death, his wife Dolley could no longer afford the house, so she sold it to a Richmond merchant named Henry W. Moncure. The house exchanged hands several times until it was eventually bought by the duPont family in 1901. Its final owner, Marion duPont Scott, lived in the house until 1983. She re-landscaped, redecorated, and rebuilt Montpelier to suit her tastes. This included adding a racetrack to the grounds, completely changing the facade, and decorating the house in a gaudy art deco style. When she died in 1983, she willed the house to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the long restoration process began.

Standing in the middle of the dining room at Montpelier, I could feel my righteous anger rise in full force. I couldn’t help but feel it was a form of sacrilege. The home of someone as important to our nation’s founding as James Madison should have been carefully preserved and cared for, not changed utterly as Montpelier was. To the Marion duPont Scott’s credit, she too felt that Montpelier ought to be a “historic shrine” to James Madison, and put such a stipulation in her will. Still, I couldn’t help but feel something sacred had been violated. 

Because of the unfinished nature of Montpelier, on the tour of the house we got a crash course in historic preservation. We were shown how they peeled back layers of paint until they determined which layer was from the Madison time period. The tour guide shared with us how they used letters and diary entries to determine door and furniture placement.


Stripped down to its barest elements, the house felt spacious and light. Even though it was undecorated, Montpelier still gave a visitor the sense of the Madison hospitality. You could imagine Dolley giving lively dinner parties in the large dining room and picture James writing at his desk in his office, trying to formulate a plan for a new government. No matter how many hands Montpelier has passed through, it still maintains the spirit of the Madisons.

Outside on the grounds was a small temple where Madison would take breaks and think about various republics and democracies of the past. Standing there, James Madison was not a small man; he was an intellectual giant, quietly contemplating how to create a more perfect union.