Note 72 — II SALONA AND THE MAFFITTS

Irving Brant, James Madison: Commander in Chief, 1812-1836, pp. 306-8. Brant's error regarding Maffitt's first name has been picked up by Walter Lord, Dawn's Early Light, p. 171: "James Madison ... and the rest of the presidential party rode to Salona, the home of the Reverend John Maffitt where Madison now expected to meet his wife," and by Alan Lloyd, The Scorching of Washington, p. 170: "Madison crossed the Potomac by ferry-boat, trekking into the adjacent hills toward the emergency rendezvous he had fixed with Carroll: Salona, the home of an ecclesiastical friend named John Maffitt." When Alexandria historian Jean Elliot called Brant's attention to his error in Maffitt's first name, Brant replied to her on July 12, 1973:

My research cards are all in the Library of Congress, so I have no way of knowing whether I was misled by some earlier writing or went wrong on my own, but the matter of accuracy can be settled by the law of probability. There is no chance whatever that two preachers named John and William Maffitt co-existed in the same little community, at precisely the same time, with abundant evidence of William's existence and none of John's, in the records you cite.