Dolley Madison Takes Command

In your essay for In Pursuit, you describe Dolley as a masterful politician.

So we have to understand, I think, the political culture of the time in the United States to appreciate this.

Can you tell us about what it was like, and what do you mean by the term republicanism, and how did that affect how politics operated?

It was crucial.

When you mention republicanism, we like to call it small R.

Small R republicanism.

Lowercase R republicanism.

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Though, of course, it's where the Republican Party got their name much later.

Republicanism is a theory.

It's a political theory with long roots, you know, hundreds of years, and one of the aspects of this theory was very appealing to the colonists who wanted to stage a rebellion against a king, because republican theory held that the power should be in the people and not in the rulers, right? Not in kings.

And so it's against everything courtly, kingly, aristocratic, no titles, no shows and pomp.

And this is revolutionary, right, Catherine? I mean, these ideas did not exist in a large scale.

There had been a few republics in the past, but they were tiny.

So it's a long series of ideas, but again, I'm gonna use the word it's a theory.

Hold on to that for a second here.

So that was very useful, the whole idea of it being against the king and all that, and so that was the theory that informed the American Revolution.

Now, after the Revolution, the republicanism then said, "Okay, we know what you're against, this theory, but what are you for?" Which is sort of, you know, powers to the people.

So this is their theory.In a republic, a good republic, power's with the people, and the people, by the people they mean a very small number of white wealthy men.

And the theory is that it's the wealthy that have the most investment in a country, in a nation.

And that the republican rulers will be imbued with what they called republican virtue, and that virtue was the ability to put aside your personal interests in service to the common good.

Can you see we're having a problem right now? The idea that people could put aside their personal interests and presupposes that there is one common good.

And that you're not gonna disagree about that.

There's no disagreeing.