The Madisons at Montpelier: Reflections on the Founding Couple
Ralph Ketcham, the dean of James Madison biographers, provides an engaging, vivid, and even moving account of James and Dolley's long years of retirement at Montpelier. As much as possible, Ketcham allows both members of this famous first couple to speak for themselves, quoting extensively from their papers and the impressions they made on their numerous visitors. His book provides a warm and touching portrait of their life at Montpelier, just the book that readers would want now that their home has been so wonderfully renovated.(Jack Rakove, Stanford University, author ofJames Madison and the Creation of the American Republic)There is, perhaps, no one better-suited to write about the closing years of James Madison and his wife, Dolley, than Ralph Ketcham, a scholar who has dedicated his professional life to this subject... The reader takes away from Ketcham's text a sense of the emerging nation and a "first couple" that fostered its growth.The Madisons at Montpelierprovides a valuable and alternative approach that narrates the course of a nation in transition.(Marthaa Pallante, Youngstown State UniversityWest Virginia History)