Episode 31: Season II, Episode II: James and Dolley Madison and The Burning of Washington

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

This week on The Past, The Promise, The Presidency: Presidential Crises we examine how James and Dolley Madison responded to The War of 1812, often referred to by both contemporaries and historians as the "Second War of Independence." 

As one of our guests said, this war was really a nothing war, except for a couple of days in August of 1814, when British forces routed the American defenses and marched on the nation's capital. To avoid capture, president James Madison and First Lady Dolley Madison, along with most other public officials, fled the city. Washington DC was left to the whims of British soldiers who were eager to inflict vengeance in retaliation for the American burning of York, which was the capital of Ontario, the year before.

Arriving at the White House, which Dolley Madison had decked out for a dinner party, the British troops thoroughly enjoyed the feast and fine wine before systematically setting fire to the building. They then turned their attention to the Capitol building, the Library of Congress, and every other public building in the city. Before long, most of the city was ablaze. It was only saved by the fateful intervention of a hurricane level storm that doused the flames.

By any definition, having your capital burned by foreign troops ranks as a crisis. So, how did the United States get into another war with Britain so soon after establishing its independence? 

How did President Madison, the third president and the first to lead the country during a full-fledged war, respond to this crisis?

How did the country and the world respond to the outcome of the crisis and the war?

And finally, what was First Lady Dolley Madison's role in the crisis? 

These are just some of the questions we tackled in this episode. To learn more about this crisis we spoke to two fantastic guests. 

First, we spoke with Dr. Troy Bickham, a professor of history at Texas A&M. He is an expert on Britain and its Atlantic empire. We then spoke with Dr. Catherine Allgor, a historian of gender, women, and political culture, as well as the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 

Explore all this and more in the second episode of Season II: James and Dolley Madison and the Burning of Washington.

Guests:

Dr. Troy Bickham is a Professor of History at Texas A&M University.

Troy Bickham is a Professor of History at Texas A&M.  Having joined Texas A&M in 2003, he served in various roles at the university’s campus in Qatar from 2009-19, before returning to the Department of History.  He teaches broadly in the histories of Britain and its empire, the Atlantic world, and British colonial North America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early-nineteenth centuries.  He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Bickham has written on a variety of topics and published in multiple leading journals, including Past & Past Present, Journal of British Studies, and the William and Mary Quarterly.  He is the author of four monographs: Savages within the Empire (2005), which explores how encounters with Native Americans affected British culture in the eighteenth century; Making Headlines (2008), which examines British engagement with the American Revolution via the British newspaper press; and The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire, and the War of 1812, which is a transatlantic study of the Anglo-American War of 1812.  His most recent book, Eating the Empire: Food and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, investigates how food from around the world shaped British culture in the eighteenth century.  He is currently working on a project that maps the movement of news in early modern Britain and its empire.

Dr. Catherine Allgor is the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Catherine Allgor is the president of the Massachusetts Historical Society.  Previously, she had been the Nadine and Robert Skotheim Director of Education at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, and a former Professor of History and UC Presidential Chair at the University of California, Riverside.  Allgor attended Mount Holyoke College as a Frances Perkins Scholar and received her Ph.D. with distinction from Yale University, where she also won the Yale Teaching Award.  Her dissertation received a prize as the best dissertation in American History at Yale and The Lerner-Scott Prize for the Best Dissertation in U.S. Women's History.  She began her teaching career at Simmons College and has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Visiting Professor of History at Harvard University. Her first book, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (University Press of Virginia, 2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Annual Book Award.  Her political biography, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Henry Holt, 2006), was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.  In 2012, she published Dolley Madison: The Problem of National Unity (Westview Press) and The Queen of America: Mary Cutts's Life of Dolley Madison (University of Virginia Press).  President Obama has appointed Allgor to a presidential commission, The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation.   Catherine Allgor also serves on the Board of Directors of the National Women’s History Museum, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, and is a member of the Gilder Lehrman Scholarly Advisory Board.