ON A MAY MORNING in 1789, President Washington’s barge docked at the southern tip of Manhattan and a short, matronly woman stepped ashore. After thirty years of marriage to the tall general beside her, Martha Washington was accustomed to fitting her life to his, but the direction of that accommodation was no longer clear. His role in this new government remained undefined, falling somewhere between monarch and commoner; her part was even less clear. If George would not be king, then she could not be queen; yet the thirteen-gun salute and shouts of “Long Live Lady Washington” suggested some kind of special prominence.
To deal with many problems, including some of the questions about her role, George Washington had preceded Martha to the new nation’s temporary capital in New York,1 and when he went over to New Jersey that morning to escort his wife into the city, he supplied the answer to at least one of those questions. Rather than let Martha Washington travel in a private conveyance, he brought her over in the presidential barge. Thus the two of them, the president and Martha, arrived to fanfare, signaling the beginning of what would become an American tradition—the presidential spouse had a public role in the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the presidency.
The crowds that lined the streets as the Washingtons made their way from the Battery to their rented house on Cherry Street were not the first that Martha had faced. On her trips to join George each winter during the Revolution, she had already responded to cheers for “Lady Washington.” Those earlier outbursts had seemed almost part of the war mood and may have been directed as much to raising the morale of the spectators as to expressing tribute to the general’s wife. When the shouts continued after the war ended, their meaning was less clear.
Other kinds of uncertainty surrounded much of the new government’s activity in 1789. The Constitution writers, in their attempts to assign neither too much power to the chief executive nor too little, had debated the method of election of a president, the length of the term of office, the powers to be designated, and whether or not a single individual or a triumvirate might best serve the new nation’s needs in the chief executive role. Even after weeks of discussion, however, they had not worked out many of the details and in the end chose to rely on the checks of the other branches and the good will of those who served in the first years to make the limits clear. No easy answers presented themselves. Complaints that presidents, such as “King Andrew” (Jackson), assumed royal prerogatives occurred all through the nineteenth century, giving way to charges that they assumed dictatorial powers in the twentieth. Accusations that their wives took on royal airs persisted even longer—with a 1982 cartoon depicting Nancy Reagan wearing a crown.2
The form of address for the chief executive was one of those details that had not been established in the Constitution, and as soon as George Washington arrived in New York he turned to a committee of Congress for advice.3 The Senate had suggested “His Highness, the President of the United States and Protector of Liberties,” but the more democratic House of Representatives would hear of nothing other than “Mr. President.”4 One newspaper editor argued vehemently for “His Excellency,”5 and John Adams pointed out that a simple “Mr. President” showed too little deference and sounded like the officer of some local, insignificant association.6 Suggestions of titles for the president’s wife ranged all the way from “Marquise” and “Lady” down to a simple “Mrs.”7
Titles became the subject of heated debate because of the consensus prevailing in the United States in 1789 that an important experiment in government was underway. The presidential system was quite daring, in that it placed in one individual—the chief executive—duties that would often be separated in other government systems. The president had to juggle the largely ceremonial obligations of a head of state with the more substantive, onerous duties of a head of government who runs the country. His success in the ceremonial role depended not only on how well he comported himself while entertaining foreign dignitaries—indeed, given the distance separating the United States from the great nations of Europe such obligations might be slim at best—but also on how well he expressed the needs and feelings of the people he governed.
Physical accessibility to leaders was no insignificant matter in the infant republic. A genuinely democratic spirit called for the president to open his doors to any caller anytime, and, initially, George Washington appears to have done just that. But the folly of this arrangement became clear when people arrived at all hours, leaving the president little time for work and permitting his household almost no privacy.
George Washington canvassed widely for advice, going to personal friends, a Supreme Court justice, congressmen, and his own vice president for counsel on how to balance the need for accessibility with the other demands of his job. Alexander Hamilton, an outspoken advocate of a powerful executive, advised his mentor to keep social contacts to a minimum, in order to preserve the dignity of the office. A president might issue invitations, Hamilton suggested, but not more often than once a week, and when he met his guests, he should spend very little time with them. As for visits to other people’s homes, Hamilton thought these entirely inappropriate and he warned against them.8 John Adams, who had never gained a reputation for catering to the masses, came out on the more liberal side in this discussion when he ventured that the president might call on close personal friends and hold as many as two parties a week.9
Finally George Washington took space in the local newspaper to announce his general calling hours: persons simply paying their respects should limit themselves to Tuesday and Friday afternoons between two and three o’clock, while those on business could come any time except Sunday, when the president wanted to see no one at all.10
George also resolved that he would host a reception for men only, called a “levée,” each Tuesday afternoon and that Martha would preside on Friday evenings at another party, called a “drawing room” which both men and women could attend.11 To mark this latter occasion as official but slightly less formal than the first, the president would attend but he would carry neither sword nor hat.12
Martha Washington had not even arrived in the capital for these discussions, so she could hardly have been consulted as to her views, but George’s wide canvass for advice set the stage for his successors to admit that they included their wives in important presidential matters. Martha’s acquiescence in her role is confirmed by the fact that immediately upon her arrival in New York she began performing tasks that had devolved on her simply by virtue of her husband’s office. The first morning she awakened to face dozens of curious women who had directed their carriages to her Cherry Street house,13 and that afternoon she sat down to dinner with guests whom George had previously invited. No mere social event, the dinner represented one of the president’s first attempts at political brokerage, because although political parties had not yet developed, George had reasoned that congressmen from different parts of the country needed an opportunity to meet socially and work out possible differences.
The next day, a Friday, Martha held her first “drawing room,”14 described by those who attended as a particularly “thick” party because it brought out New York’s curious to evaluate the hostess’s efforts to entertain graciously without seeming to carve a superior niche for herself. Whether or not Martha satisfied these competing claims to everyone’s satisfaction remains unclear. But she certainly tried. While stewards “handed in” guests, she remained seated in queenly fashion and the president moved among those present, escorting them to the refreshment table and supplying introductions. When guests stood around uncertainly, not knowing how to end the party, Martha took control. Those present had wondered whether they should wait respectfully for the hostess to exit, as they would have done for royalty, or, in good democratic style, leave at whim. Martha’s solution could hardly have offended or been interpreted as taking on airs. “The General always retires at nine,” she stood and announced, “and I generally precede him.” Then she walked out.15
While serving as hostess would often turn out to be an onerous, sometimes overwhelming part of the responsibilities assumed by presidents’ wives, it is important to note that eighteenth-century America made fewer firm divisions than would the nineteenth century between men’s and women’s tasks.16 George Washington, not Martha, for instance, had advertised for their housekeepers in Virginia. When he arrived in New York, he continued in his normal pattern, hiring a staff and supervising the renovation of their rented house. Tobias Lear, the Harvard-educated secretary who had worked for the Washingtons at Mt. Vernon, assumed responsibility for many household details, issuing the invitations and keeping the accounts, while Sam Fraunces, the West Indian tavern keeper who had impressed General Washington during the war, managed the fourteen servants.17
Curiosity about the chief executive’s house continued to draw many callers to it, and despite the firm limits George set for himself, Martha reasoned that she should do otherwise. Custom dictated that a gracious lady, no matter what her husband’s title, returned the calls of all women who had come to her door and left their calling cards, so Martha resolved to return each visit, and to accomplish this within three days of the original call.18
Even the vice president’s wife, Abigail Adams, soon got caught up in this activity, noting in a letter that she had “returned 60 visits in 3 or 4 afternoons.”19 Following the Washingtons’ lead, the Adamses invited all the congressmen and their wives to dine with them: “Indeed I have been fully employd,” Abigail Adams wrote, “in entertaining company, in the first place all the Senators who had Ladies and families, then the remaining Senators, and this week we have begun with the House, and tho we have a room in which we dine 24 persons at a Time, I shall not get through them all, together with the publick Ministers for a month to come.”20
When the house on Cherry Street failed to accommodate the guest lists that Tobias Lear assembled, the presidential entourage moved to larger quarters on Broadway.21 But before settling completely into their new house, the Washingtons had to prepare to move again—this time to Philadelphia, where the nation’s capital was transferred in the fall of 1790. The change pleased Martha in some ways—she thought the Market Street address afforded more privacy than she had found in New York—and by Christmas day, she was ready to open her house to local residents. A week later, many of them returned for her New Year’s reception, a repeat performance of the party she had given the year before in New York. Her regular Friday drawing room occurred on January 1 in 1790, and George had postponed his Tuesday levée to coincide, thus beginning a tradition that the president and his wife would open their house on New Year’s to all who wanted to come. Except in wartime or periods of mourning, the event was a regular feature of the president’s schedule and eventually drew thousands, until it so taxed the energies of the hosts that the Hoovers stopped it in 1933.
By the time George Washington’s two terms had been completed, some aspects of the president’s role had been settled (although by no means all) and some of his wife’s responsibilities had taken shape (although they would change.) In meeting the obligations of the two roles he had assumed—as head of state and head of government—the president would enlist his spouse’s help openly in the first job but only covertly, if at all, in the second. Since the ceremonial side of the job required presenting a democratic image but also including enough formality to retain respect, a wife who was willing to do so could help maintain a balance. When her husband appeared pompous, she might stress humility; if he chose to move casually among guests, she could hold court in queenly fashion. Her calls at people’s homes substituted for contacts that her husband’s schedule did not permit.
George and Martha Washington thus set some precedents that would continue relatively undisturbed for more than a century, until gradually the job of president’s wife changed to involve her more openly in the substantive part of the office. Martha gave no evidence of playing anything other than the hostess role—and George gave no evidence of ever requesting that she do more—but the role she filled should not be dismissed lightly. When he was too ill to attend church services, her presence was duly recorded, as though people in a pretelevision age needed a glimpse of their leader for reassurance. When she made an appearance at the circus, she received the welcome of a special person.22 She even helped her husband circumvent the prohibition against a president accepting gifts. When Pennsylvania offered her a costly carriage, George decided she could keep it since it had not actually been bestowed on him.23 Had Martha Washington been less meek, and involved herself openly in the political debates of the day, or had she been more elitist and refused to call on everyone who called on her, she might have set a different tone for future presidents’ wives.
But the next in line, Abigail Smith Adams, brought very different ideas to marriage and women’s role in it—opinions that could not help but make themselves felt in how she handled the role of president’s wife. Speaking out had always come naturally to her, and John’s first admiring mention of her in his diary, when she was only fourteen, was as “a wit.”24 By the time she reached maturity, her sharp tongue and strong views had become more obviously part of her personality. When her husband ascended to the country’s highest office in 1797, rumors multiplied concerning her influence. Rather than Lady Adams, she was dubbed “Mrs. President.”
From very early in her husband’s administration, Abigail Adams was accused of playing politics. When she spoke out on the split developing between Jeffersonian Republicans and Federalists, she had, in the opinion of many political figures, stepped beyond the proper bounds for her sex. Albert Gallatin, an Adams opponent, described in a letter to his wife that a friend had been at “the court” [the Adams house] and had “heard her majesty [Abigail Adams] as she was asking the names of different members of Congress and then pointing out which were ‘our people’.” Such partisanship in a woman offended Gallatin: “She is Mrs. President not of the United States but of a faction…. It is not right.” More to his liking was his own apolitical spouse whom he saw as a model for all women as he assured her when he wrote: “Indeed my beloved, you are infinitely more lovely than politics.”25
Abigail’s two thousand extant letters leave no doubt that she held strong opinions on many matters and several leading political figures. In Alexander Hamilton’s eyes she saw “ … the very devil … lasciviousness itself.”26 She judged a Massachusetts congressman uninformed; Albert Gallatin was dangerous, “sly, artfull … insidious … [leading a party of men who had so openly favored France that] the French have boasted of having more influence in the United States than our own government.”27 Against her husband’s critics, she fought back, defending him against various charges, including that of giving preferential treatment to their son.
In seeking the reasons for Abigail’s strong voice, her husband’s support is not inconsequential. John’s biographers found clear evidence that he discussed many important problems with her, engaged her help in drafting semi-official letters, and, in the words of historian Page Smith, treated her as “minister without portfolio.”28 It comes as no surprise that people who sought the president’s approval sometimes went to his wife first. Nor did they hesitate to blame her when things went awry. After John Adams had made an unpopular appointment in his wife’s absence, he wrote to inform her: “O how they lament Mrs. A’s absence. … She is a good counsellor! If she had been here, Murray would never have been named or his mission instituted. This ought to gratify your vanity enough to cure you.”29
To the minority who approved of opinionated women, Abigail Adams became something of a heroine. Henrietta Liston, wife of the British minister, wrote her uncle in 1797 that she was “much pleased with Mrs. Adams, [and hoped] to acquire [her] sort of spirit in time but the thing is new to me yet.”30 Albert Gallatin’s kind of disapproval was the more common response, and Abigail found herself caricatured in both song and drawing. An English ballad of the time had popularized the story of an elderly married couple, “Darby and Joan,” who were devoted to each other but woefully out of touch with their times, and Abigail was distressed to see herself and her husband referred to in print as America’s “Darby and Joan.”31
None of the criticism deterred Abigail in her efforts to help John in whatever way she could. During the early years of their marriage, when he absented himself for long periods, she eased his rise in politics by her willingness and ability to raise their children, run the family farm, and keep the household solvent. After John achieved high office, she turned her managerial abilities to promoting his success, relieving him of family responsibilities and training a careful eye on expenses. She had missed his inauguration in 1797 because she was nursing his sick mother in Massachusetts, and when he complained that he needed her with him, she replied she would come as soon as she could—she would not wait for “courting.”
By the time Abigail arrived in Philadelphia in May 1797, inflation had so diminished the value of the chief executive’s salary that entertaining became a financial, as well as an emotional, burden. In her diary she noted that for the Fourth of July reception that the president traditionally gave for representatives and senators, she would have to supply “200 pounds of cake and two 1/4 casks of wine and rum.”32 True to form, she managed to save part of the president’s salary while still fulfilling what she perceived as social obligations. Few of her successors would be able to do so; her loud complaints indicate, however, that she had intended to save even more.33
Demands her husband’s job imposed on her time became nearly as objectionable as those on her purse. “I keep up my old Habit of rising at an early hour,” she wrote in May 1797, “[and] if I did not, I should have little command of my Time. At 5 I rise. From that time till 8 I have a few leisure hours. At 8 I breakfast, after which untill Eleven I attend to my Family arrangements.” The rest of the day was mostly First Lady work. “From 12 untill two I receive company, sometimes untill 3. We dine at that hour unless on company days which are tuesdays & thursdays. After dinner I usually ride out untill seven. I begin to feel a little more at Home and less anxiety about the ceremonious part of my duty tho by not having a drawing Room for the summer I am obliged every day to devote two Hours for the purpose of seeing company.”34
Near the end of John Adams’s single term, Abigail had to oversee the transfer of the President’s Palace, as it was still called by some people, to the new capital on the banks of the Potomac. In letters to her family she made little attempt to conceal her displeasure with the unformed city that she found in December 1800. Streets remained unfinished in Washington “which is [a city] only … in name,” Abigail wrote to her daughter, “[and as for neighboring Georgetown, it is] the very dirtyest Hole I ever saw for a place of any trade, or respectability of inhabitants … a quagmire after every rain.”35 Vacillating as usual between wanting the president to live in comfort and frowning on too much splendor, Congress had been stingy with appropriations for his new permanent residence, and the Adamses arrived to find the house unfinished. Not all the rooms had been plastered, “bells are wholly wanting,” Abigail complained, “and promises are all you can obtain.” When the time came for the requisite entertaining, Abigail herded her guests into the one fully furnished hall, but, understanding the political cost of appearing too critical of what had been provided, she alerted her daughter, “When asked how I like it, say that I wrote you the situation is beautiful.”36
Abigail hardly had time to settle into the Washington house before the results of the 1800 election signaled that she would have to move out. Political parties had slowly coalesced around several themes, including matters of both domestic and international concern. Federalists tended to champion a strong central government at home and the rightness of the British cause over that of the French in the European war. Democratic-Republicans talked more about protecting the rights of the individual states and about the need to stand up for the French. In nominating John Adams for a second term, the Federalists had not been unanimous, and some of them hoped that Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, whom they had chosen as candidate for vice president, would top John Adams’s votes and win the presidency, a possibility under a system that selected both officers on the same ballot. The opposition, zealously defending the common man and guarding states’ rights against encroachment from the central government, ran Thomas Jefferson under the Democratic-Republican banner and selected Aaron Burr for the second spot.
The election went on for weeks because a tie in the electoral college between Jefferson and Burr threw the decision into the House of Representatives. Abigail Adams understood that her husband was out of the running but she could not bring herself to leave Washington until the final balloting on February 11, 1801, less than a month before the inauguration. Deeply disappointed but philosophical about Jefferson’s victory which ended the administration she had frequently described as “ours,” she wrote to her son: “The consequences to us personally is that we retire from public life, [and] … If I did not rise with dignity, I can at least fall with ease, which is the more difficult task.”37
Nearly half a century would pass before Americans again voted into the presidency a man (James Polk) who appeared to hold such high regard for the counsel of his spouse as did John Adams. His, it should be noted, was respect resulting from experience. During their long marriage, Abigail showed both wisdom and strength, never permitting concern with domestic details to shut her off from important issues facing the country. When John was absent from Massachusetts, she kept him informed of political sentiment there, and she exchanged letters with many astute women, including Mercy Warren, the historian of the Revolution. Abigail’s voicing of strong opinions after her husband became president represented no change in her behavior—she had always spoken her mind—and she demonstrated that a president’s wife could, with her husband’s support, move beyond a merely ceremonial role to involve herself in substantive issues.
The Adams administration also demonstrated, however, that a president would be criticized by the Gallatins of the time who preferred the model left by Martha Washington. Very early in her husband’s career, Martha had set limits for herself well within the confines of domesticity. During visits to George at the front during the Revolution, she had darned the socks of other soldiers and carried them hot soup. Later, as the president’s wife, she continued in a docile, supportive role. Which of the two examples became the pattern would be determined by those who followed.
Thomas Jefferson’s two terms (1801–1809) offered an excellent opportunity to introduce different expectations for hostesses at the White House, as the president’s residence was occasionally being called. Both Jefferson and his second-in-command, Aaron Burr, were widowers, and the new president’s casual approach to etiquette suggested that little importance would be placed on entertaining. A staff could handle the mundane details, and Jefferson, extremely knowledgeable about food and wine, could evaluate their decisions. As for the ceremonial part of the office, the third president had quickly made clear that “pell mell” would prevail. He walked through the mud to his own inauguration and then returned to sit “far down” the boardinghouse table for his evening meal. Installed in the President’s House (as he quickly renamed the residence), he insisted that seating be a matter of chance rather than protocol, thus diminishing the importance of rank. If both Martha Washington and Abigail Adams had voluntarily or out of a sense of loyalty to their spouses accepted a portion of the president’s ceremonial tasks for themselves, Jefferson, by acting as the country’s head host and protocol chief, seemed on his way to challenging the absolute necessity that a spouse be there to assume those duties.
As so often happens, a rigorously observed custom interfered. Etiquette dictated the presence of a hostess if women guests were to attend a dinner party. Showing no interest in breaking that tradition, President Jefferson asked his good friend, Dolley Madison, to “take care of the female guests expected.”38 His choice of Dolley came naturally. Jefferson’s home, Monticello, was within a few miles of the Madisons’ Virginia estate and in the first years of her marriage, when her husband’s fame had drawn crowds of admirers, Dolley had frequently fled to the quiet of Jefferson’s house to avoid the confusion at her own. James Madison’s appointment as secretary of state in 1801 legitimatized her new prominence in Washington society, and she thoroughly enjoyed the elevation. She used Jefferson’s two terms to assure a central role for whoever served as the president’s hostess and to develop her own formidable reputation for adroitly mixing politics and parties. An older, less energetic, or more insecure woman in her place might have hesitated to assert herself, but Dolley Madison, at thirty-two, showed no reluctance.
Dolley Madison’s emergence as a superior hostess is somewhat ironic since she was raised in the Society of Friends where frivolity and extravagance had little place. From a childhood among the “plain people,” she grew to put great importance on what she wore and on having a good time, ordering her shawls and turbans from Paris and losing money at cards with considerable aplomb. Much of the change in her life can be attributed to her marriage, surely one of the most unusual unions in presidential history.
Dolley Payne Todd’s marriage to James Madison had not been her first. Like Martha Washington and Martha Jefferson, she had been a widow when she wed a future president. The third-born child of failed shopkeepers in Philadelphia, Dolley had first married a young lawyer from her family’s Quaker congregation. Within three years, both he and one of their young sons had died, leaving Dolley at age twenty-five to fend for herself and her remaining son. She moved back to her mother’s to help run a boardinghouse. Within months, Aaron Burr introduced her to one of the most famous men in America—James Madison—who had passed age forty without taking a wife.39 Because he was several inches shorter than she but of obvious intellect and even then of enormous reputation, she immediately dubbed him the “great little Madison.”40
Shy, even sourish in public, he could be a wit in private and evidently admired a woman who could take her gaiety everywhere. Within months of their meeting and less than a year after her first husband’s death, Dolley Payne Todd and James Madison were married. For the forty-odd years that they lived together, he complained if he had to be separated from his “Dolley” and she ran here and there in the service of the man she always called “Madison.”
The first woman to witness her husband’s swearing in, Dolley immediately indicated her intention to play a visible role by opening her Georgetown house for a reception following the inauguration ceremony. Perhaps because the event fell on a Saturday, larger than usual crowds had come to Washington and hundreds of people lined up to sample the Madisons’ punch and cake.41 The President’s House would have accommodated a larger crowd, but ex-presidents did not vacate speedily in those days and Jefferson took a week to get his things together for the trip back to Monticello.
At the first inaugural ball, planned by Washington’s Dancing Assembly for Long’s Hotel that evening, Dolley continued to hold center stage. Heavy demand for tickets (only 400 were issued)42 led to great confusion, and the room became so congested that someone had to break a window to provide ventilation. People stood on benches to catch a glimpse of the new president’s wife, who behaved, one woman wrote glowingly, “with perfect propriety … dignity, sweetness and grace.”43 John Quincy Adams, who rarely enjoyed social gatherings and never shone at them, stood in the minority when he pronounced this party “excessive … oppressive and bad.”44
The president’s official residence remained unfinished at the beginning of the Madison administration. One young visitor from New York described its exterior as appallingly grim, more suitable for a “State Prison” than anything else.45 Dolley insisted that improvements begin at once. When Congress appropriated $11,000, she spent almost one-quarter of the total on just the East Room (which Jefferson had neglected to furnish.)46 For help in her selections, she turned to Benjamin Latrobe, the English-born architect who had become President Jefferson’s surveyor of public buildings.47 Fewer than eight weeks after the inauguration she was ready to show off the results at her first drawing room.
With the public’s curiosity divided between the president and his wife, the weaknesses of one partner could be offset by the strengths of the other. James Madison, who could be appealing in private but appear disinterested around people he did not know, gained from Dolley’s ability to charm almost everyone. Washington Irving, who attended a Madison reception soon after he arrived in the capital in 1811, captured the difference when he described Dolley as “a fine, portly buxom dame who has a smile and pleasant word for everybody … but as to Jemmy Madison, ah poor Jemmy—he is but a withered little applejohn.”48 The president preferred an inconspicuous seat at the dinner table so he could avoid having to play the host, and his guests frequently went away thinking he had not even noticed them. “He had no leisure for the ladies,” one woman complained.49
With considerable skill, Dolley Madison could pick out guests who were uncomfortable and quickly put them at ease. One young man, so confused by the acrobatics of a president’s party that he dropped his saucer and then, in desperation, stuffed his cup in his pocket, looked up to see a smiling Dolley Madison coming toward him. “The crowd is so great,” she reassured him, “that no one can avoid being jostled.”50
But Dolley’s entertaining had its political side as well because she showed the skills of a candidate running for office, rarely forgetting a name or making an inappropriate comment. Aware of the criticism that had surrounded Abigail Adams, Dolley sought to avoid appearing an “active partisan,”51 and she showered her husband’s enemies with the same attention that she gave his friends. Frances Few, who visited the capital during Dolley’s first season, pointed to her inscrutability when she wrote: “It is impossible to know what Mrs. Madison is thinking because she tried to be all things to all men.”52 Some critics claimed that Dolley paid too much attention to other men; one White House visitor reported that the president’s wife had told an old bachelor that she was “no prude, and then held up her mouth for him to kiss.”53 A political opponent had hinted broadly during a campaign that James “had impaired” himself “by an unfortunate matrimonial connection,”54 but such attacks were rare. Dolley Madison achieved a popularity that her successors would envy for decades to come.
The reputation resulted from more than the style of her parties. In delicate political maneuvering, she could soften a cruel dismissal. After her husband eased Robert Smith, secretary of state, out of his cabinet in 1811, she gave a dinner in Smith’s honor. When Smith failed to appear, Dolley took her sister and “called twice,” Smith wrote, “with professions of great affection.”55
Dolley Madison’s task became more difficult as the presidential election of 1812 approached. James Madison’s first term had not been easy. Both the British and French had continued to interfere with American shipping on the Atlantic, and boundary disputes with Indians erupted frequently in the Great Lakes region. Yet James very much wanted another term and Dolley remained optimistic about his chances. As early as December 1811, she had observed that “the intrigues for President and Vice President [for the 1812 election] go on,” but she correctly predicted victory: “I think it may terminate as the last did.”56
In the summer of 1812, James Madison declared war on Great Britain, and the election a few months later became, in part, a referendum on the incumbent’s decision to fight. Opposition Federalists in New England termed this “Mr. Madison’s War” and prepared to ship their goods through Canada. In the election, they aligned with dissidents from the president’s own Democratic-Republicans in an attempt to defeat him, and they nearly succeeded. When the results came in, James Madison had won but not by much. Had he failed to take one large state, such as Pennsylvania, his opponent, DeWitt Clinton, would have moved into the White House.
Dolley well understood the importance of keeping discontented congressmen in line so that they would not be tempted to vote for the opponent. Six months before the election, she wrote her sister that a large number of legislators were, “all offended [with Madison] and refused to dine with him,” but a week later she had them there “in a large body.”57 James Blaine, who later tried for the presidency himself, credited Dolley with a large share in her husband’s 1812 victory. Her cheerful impartiality brought the disenchanted around, Blaine wrote, and she convinced them to stick with the incumbent.58
James Blaine may have overstated the case (he was, of course, not an observer of the events he described), but historians who have carefully studied the Madison administration tend to agree that Dolley proved a valuable asset to her husband. In the continuing debate between a democratic chief executive and a regal one, she played both sides; and for every critic who thought she went too far on one side, she acquired an admirer on the other. One woman described approvingly how the Madisons maintained a royal setting at their parties where custom dictated that each female guest “courtesy [sic ] to ‘His Highness’ [the President] and then find a seat,”59 but a senator from Massachusetts stressed the egalitarianism at the Madisons’ parties. For his tastes, Dolley went a bit too far in implementing democracy, mixing “all classes of people … from the Minister from Russia to under clerks of the post office and the printer of a paper—greasy boots and silk stockings … [with some of the women] giving the impression of ‘high life below the stairs.’ “60 Such contrasting evaluations of Dolley Madison led one historian to conclude that she was “brilliant in the things she did not say or do.”61
Moreover, the things she did do, even actions deemed inappropriate for her peers, merely earned her more accolades. Stained fingers left little doubt that she used snuff, not an acceptable habit for nineteenth-century ladies but one that was excused in her. “In her hands the snuffbox, seems only a gracious implement with which to charm,” one woman offered in Dolley’s defense,62 and another admirer described the snuffbox as a “perfect security from hostility as bread and salt [are] among many savage tribes.”63 Some of Dolley’s observers considered the possibility that she used cosmetics, with some deciding that she surely “painted,” while others offered evidence that her heightened color resulted from natural enthusiasm. “I do not think it true [that she uses cosmetics],” one contemporary wrote, “I saw her color come and go at the naval ball.”64
The desire to cultivate political support for her husband sent Dolley out visiting all the congressmen’s families who moved to Washington. The fact that she called first was important—it signaled humility in the president’s attitude toward legislators. But the number of congressmen and their aides had grown since the days of Martha Washington and Abigail Adams, and the congressional election of 1810 had brought to the capital a large, new group from the West.
The expectation that Dolley would not only call on each family but also invite them to the President’s House imposed a large burden even on someone who thrived on playing the hostess. “We have members in abundance with their wives and daughters,” Dolley wrote to friends in Paris, “[and] I have never felt the entertainment of company oppressive until now.”65 Although often perfunctory (with Dolley leaving her carriage only long enough to drop her card on the silver tray in the front hall), the calls took her from one end of Washington’s unpaved streets to the other, consuming entire days so that she had only Sundays for herself. Yet tampering with tradition carried political risks that she understood all too well, since any family slighted might take revenge on her husband.
Dolley’s successor, Elizabeth Monroe, was another story, however, and she acted to reduce dramatically the social obligations of all future First Ladies. The results of the 1816 election had hardly come in when it became clear that Elizabeth Monroe had no intention of allowing her daily schedule to be dictated by others, certainly not by the provincial wives of midwestern congressmen. Born to wealthy New Yorkers, she was acquainted with the courts of Europe, having accompanied her husband, James Monroe, when he held diplomatic posts in both Paris and London. She meant to guard her schedule against “democratic” encroachments.
If Dolley Madison was a First Lady of the people, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe was anything but. Extremely reticent, she preferred privacy and insisted on elegance. Parisians had dubbed her “la belle américaine” when she lived among them in the 1790s, and it was generally agreed that she had retained her spectacular beauty at age fifty-four when her husband became president. Portraits made of her at that time show a regal woman, dark and poised, flattered by the new fashions that exposed more arm and breast than had previously been considered proper. She preferred to order her dresses from France and reportedly paid $1,500 per costume for the privilege.66 Her exquisite clothing, remarkable both for its design and workmanship, later added interest to the popular Smithsonian exhibition on First Ladies, but it produced a great deal of envy among her contemporaries.
Elizabeth Monroe’s final indiscretion, in the eyes of many Washingtonians, was to appear much younger than her age. One indignant woman complained: “Mrs. Monroe [has] an appearance of youth which would induce a stranger to suppose her age to be 30, in lieu of which, she introduces them to her granddaughter 18 or 19 years old.”67 Fifty years old at the time, Elizabeth Monroe had one granddaughter, then age twelve. There was then some exaggeration in the statement, but it was generally agreed that she appeared much younger than her years. Since the use of cosmetics still carried the taint of wickedness, long debates ensued as to how much of her attractiveness resulted from nature and how much from “paint.”68
Even while her husband served as secretary of state (1809–1817), Elizabeth Monroe had made clear that she expected to have little to do with the wives of other department heads, and, after seven years in the capital, she and her husband remained “perfect strangers,” one social leader wrote, “not only to me but all citizens.”69 James’s elevation to the presidency caused no deviation in the Monroes’ custom. Some hope prevailed that invitations to the President’s House would flow more freely after the mansion, destroyed in the 1814 burning of Washington by the British, had been rebuilt. However, Elizabeth’s handling of her daughter’s wedding ended that speculation.
In a “first” for a president’s family, Maria, the younger of the two Monroe daughters, was married in 1820, and many Washingtonians expected to find their names on the wedding guest list. This was the chance, reasoned congressmen and diplomats, for the president to make them all one family, sharing the festivities associated with the nuptials. Dolley Madison would doubtless have complied, so dedicated she remained to maintaining political harmony, but Elizabeth Monroe had other ideas. She insisted that the wedding remain strictly private, and she invited only the family’s closest friends. Later presidents’ sons and especially their daughters, who chose to be married in small ceremonies even though their parents happened to reside at the White House, might well thank Elizabeth Monroe’s stubbornness. She resisted all requests that she increase the number of guests invited, and when the diplomatic corps persisted, she dispatched the secretary of state to set them straight.
Such open refusal on the part of a president’s wife to court public favor puzzled observers during the first Monroe administration; during her husband’s second term, when Elizabeth put even more distance between herself and everyone else, the public reaction became severe. She stayed away from Washington for months at a time visiting her two married daughters. Such absences might have caused little more than speculation about her marital felicity, as happened when Jackie Kennedy took long vacations from the White House in the 1960s, but Elizabeth Monroe’s behavior had more serious repercussions. The old rule still prevailed that no women guests came to the President’s House in the absence of a hostess. This meant that wives and daughters who had accompanied congressmen to Washington had to keep their party dresses put away until Elizabeth Monroe chose to make an appearance. Her absence caused, one Massachusetts senator wrote home, “no little mortification and disappointment [among the] ladies.”70 At the stag dinners of President Monroe, who had no reputation for conversational brilliance, long silences and early departures became the pattern.71
Left with much of the detail of running the White House, the president, rather than his wife, received the blame for mishandling furniture purchases. Just before James Monroe’s inauguration in 1817, Congress had appropriated $20,000 for furnishing the rebuilt mansion and then two years later, another $30,000. Deeming furniture selection an official responsibility, he assigned the job jointly to his commissioner of public buildings, Colonel Lane, and to the auditor of the Treasury, William Lee. While the president waited impatiently for the new furniture to arrive from Europe, he offered the loan of his own fine pieces, acquired during his years in France.
The money exchanges that followed became so confused that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams expressed unqualified dismay. President Monroe accepted money from the furniture account, paid it back, then took it again.72 When Colonel Lane died in 1823, his personal finances were so tangled, with so much public money missing, that Congressman John Cocke of Tennessee called for an investigation. In the end, stuffy John Quincy Adams concluded that the president had done nothing wrong but had, nevertheless, exposed himself to embarrassment “almost as incongruous to the station of a President of the United States as it would be to a blooming virgin to exhibit herself naked before a multitude.”73
John Quincy Adams had considerable interest in James Monroe’s behavior as president because he intended to claim the job for himself in the 1824 election. To that end he enlisted the aid of his wife, Louisa, who had already been caught up in the dispute over how accessible the wives of government leaders should be to other citizens. While John Quincy Adams served as James Monroe’s secretary of state, Louisa had refused to make the initial call on the families of all legislators who arrived in the capital, causing Elizabeth Monroe to summon her for a conference. As John Quincy Adams explained in his diary: “All the ladies arriving here as strangers, it seems, expect to be visited by the wives of [Cabinet members] and even by the President’s wife.” It was an expectation they did not meekly renounce. John Quincy continued that Elizabeth Monroe, who offered poor health as the reason for not making the calls herself, had informed Louisa that “the ladies had taken offence at [Louisa’s] not paying them the first visit….” “My wife returns all visits,” John Quincy Adams noted, “but [she] adopts the principle of not visiting first any stranger who arrives, and this is what the ladies have taken in dudgeon.”74
When Elizabeth Monroe refused to go running all over Washington to court the favor of congressmen’s wives, they retaliated by boycotting the few parties she did give. “The drawing room of the President was opened last night,” one woman wrote in December, 1819, “to a beggarly row of empty chairs…. Only five females attended, three of whom were foreigners.”75 Louisa Adams received an equally severe reprimand; on one occasion, after inviting “a large party … only three came.”76
Since offended congressmen figured in the results of the next election, this was no insignificant matter to John Quincy Adams, particularly when it spilled over into criticism of his own behavior. The wives’ reluctance to pay visits had called attention to how the cabinet members handled their own social responsibilities, and the observation was made that insufficient attention had been shown to legislators. President Monroe called John Quincy in to discuss the “etiquette of the visits” and to relay the displeasure of senators who had complained “that the Secretary of State refuses to pay them the first visit.” The President “mentioned it with much delicacy,” John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary, “but observed that it occasioned uneasiness, heart-burnings, and severe criticism.”77
A cabinet meeting on the subject followed a few days later and when no agreement could be reached, John Quincy Adams wrote letters to both the president and vice president to outline his own position. The secretary of state evidently wrote in his usual pedantic style: one Washington woman, who gained access to the letters, described them as the work of “a bookworm and abstracted student [rather] than a man of the world.”78 But the letters served their purpose and settled the matter. Wives of cabinet members would not be expected to act as the Welcome Wagon to every legislator’s family who moved to Washington, and the president’s wife would similarly be relieved of the responsibility to call.
Elizabeth Monroe had won her point, but her ally, Louisa Adams, stood in quite a different position. James Monroe was already president but John Quincy Adams still had to capture the office and he had to rely on a caucus of congressmen to nominate him. Louisa recognized that she could ill afford to assert her independence in the matter of visits. “It is understood,” she wrote sarcastically in her diary, “that a man who is ambitious to become President of the United States must make his wife visit the Ladies of the members of Congress first. Otherwise he is totally inefficient to fill so high an office.”79 Each morning her husband prepared a set of cards for her “as carefully as a commercial treaty,” and she started on her hated rounds, going sometimes to as many as twenty-five different houses in one day even though it meant traveling from one end of the city to the other. “Oh these visits have made me sick many times,” she wrote in her diary, “and I really sometimes think they will make me crazy.”80
Nor did the visits end her responsibilities, because each time Congress convened, a new round of callers came to her door—representatives, their wives, relatives, and aides—to pay their respects to her husband. John Quincy made a meticulous accounting of the time thus consumed: “I have received in the course of this month two hundred and thirty-five visitors, which is an average of about eight a day. A half hour to each visitor occupies four hours a day; but that is short of the average. The interruption to business thus incessantly repeated is distressing, but unavoidable,” he wrote in March 1824, as the date of the next presidential election approached.81
That John Quincy Adams performed so poorly on social occasions increased his dependence on his wife, who had a reputation for charming everyone. As part of the 1824 campaign, he decided that they should give a large party marking the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s great victory in 1815 at New Orleans. Though Louisa lacked enthusiasm for the idea, she bowed to her husband’s conclusion that such a party could help win votes. “It was agreed this day,” she wrote in December 1823, “that we should give a Ball to General Jackson on the 8th [of January]. I objected much to the plan but was overpowered by John’s argument and the thing was settled.”82 She had less than three weeks to prepare. In addition to sending invitations, which went out by the hundreds up until the day before the event, she had to arrange that beds be folded up and furniture moved so that their house could accommodate the crowd. While preparations continued, she maintained a full social schedule, even giving a small party on January sixth.
The ball became the season’s most spectacular social affair, singled out for years to come as the model of everything a party should be. Dolley Madison, then living in Montpelier, Virginia, could not attend but she received a glowing report from a good friend: “Mrs. Adams’ reception on the 8th … was really a very brilliant party and admirably arranged. The ladies climbed on chairs and benches to see General Jackson and Mrs. A[dams] very gracefully took his arm and walked through the apartments with him, which gratified the general curiosity. It is said 1,400 cards [were] issued and about 800 [guests] present.”83
From the hostess came a somewhat different report. She well understood the political implications of the evening, and when a lamp had fallen on her head and oil trickled down her back, she had joined in the joking about her “being anointed.” But after the last guests left at 1:30 she concluded she was just glad to “have got so well through this business.”84 Louisa Adams had frequently remarked that “friends grow warmer as … Mr. A[dams] rises in popularity,”85 and she saw the new attention focused on her as just one more example of the fickleness of politics.
In calling attention to the burdens of her ceremonial role in her husband’s politicking, Louisa Adams echoed preceding presidents’ wives, each of whom tackled the problem in a different way. Martha Washington had hardly arrived in New York when she informed her sister that she felt “more like a state prisoner than anything else. There [are] certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from and as I cannot do as I like I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”86 Later she confessed to her friend, the historian Mercy Warren, that a “younger, gayer woman” might have liked the job more. Only a stubbornness to make the best of things kept Martha trying, having “learned from experience,” she wrote, “that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.”87
Energetic Abigail Adams had risen at five in the morning to take care of “family arrangements” so she could have the afternoons for First Lady work. Dolley Madison, who thrived on being the center of attention, wore herself out with a rigorous schedule of visits. Elizabeth Monroe protected her time and her privacy by staying away from Washington a great deal.
Contemporaries frequently commented that the women’s health suffered from their heavy schedules. “Mrs. Monroe is in a very nervous way,”88 Louisa Adams wrote late in 1820, and James Monroe admitted “the burdens and cares of my long public service have borne too heavily [on Mrs. Monroe].”89 John Quincy Adams worried over his wife’s sleepless nights, while friends concurred that she overexerted herself. “[Mrs. Adams’ entertaining] keeps her ill half the time but she is a woman of great spirit and carries it through with a high hand,” one senator wrote.90 Louisa persisted in keeping social commitments even when she was ill. “Miserably sick,” she wrote in her diary on New Year’s, 1820, “but went to the President’s to pay my respects.”91 All through her husband’s administration, she made the President’s House a center for the arts by playing the harp for her guests and encouraging them to perform in amateur musical and theatrical productions.92
Hard as she worked at her job, Louisa Johnson Adams did not win unanimous approval. She had been born in England and, although her father came from Baltimore, seemed a bit too foreign to suit some Americans, including her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams. Louisa did not set eyes on her husband’s country until age twenty-six, when she arrived with John Quincy and their three-month-old son. The encounter was a disaster. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark, I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished,” she wrote, recognizing at once how unacceptable her husband’s family found her. “Do what I would there was a conviction on the part of others that I could not suit … I was literally without knowing it a fine Lady.”93
John Quincy offered little support to bolster his wife’s confidence, and although she followed him back and forth, from Berlin to Massachusetts, then from Washington to St. Petersburg and Paris, she never ceased to complain about his insensitivity. In Russia, she became depressed because she regretted having left her two young sons back in Massachusetts with their grandparents. Her condition worsened in 1813 when her infant daughter died. She blamed herself for the baby’s death, explaining in her diary, “Necessity alone induced me to wean her and in doing so I lost her.”94 Tutoring the one son who had come with her gave her some pleasure but she understood that her husband disdained her efforts. When time came to select a gift for her, he chose a book on “the diseases of the mind.”95 He refused to discuss anything relevant to his diplomatic work, although Louisa shrewdly pointed out that she could hardly remain ignorant of what went on around her. In commenting to her son many years later that the Adams men made poor husbands, she may well have had the St. Petersburg years in mind.
Louisa Adams’s diary and unpublished autobiography, which she titled “Adventures of a Nobody,” show evidence of a trained, inquisitive mind but one easily pushed into acquiescence. During the winter of 1812 to 1813 she noted that she had read more than twenty books, including many biographies and memoirs. The records of women, especially those attached to famous or powerful men, particularly interested her. After reading a biography of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of France’s King Henry II, Louisa pondered how Diane’s life had been shaped by others. “[This book] has convinced me,” Louisa wrote, “how little we can do of ourselves.”96 Louisa had hoped to study astronomy but bowed to advice that it was too difficult for her,97 and when warned away or kept ignorant of political intrigues, she showed a similar obeisance. “[I am] continuously told that I cannot by the Constitution have any share in the public honours of my husband,” she wrote later after she had returned to the United States; when a congressman broached a political subject, “[I] was again forced to repeat that I had nothing to do with affairs of State.”98
Politics formed the center of John Quincy Adams’s life, but Louisa understood that he had effectively relegated her to the domestic sphere. “[Politics] is absolutely essential to [my husband’s] existence,” she wrote, “[but as for myself] I have since the first year of my marriage entered upon my great honours with tears and I do not recollect ever having lost them with regret…. I have nothing to do with the disposal of affairs and have never but once been consulted.”99
At any public appearance, Louisa knew that she was carefully observed for some indication of her husband’s position. “Trifling occurrences are turned into political machinery—even my countenance was watched at the Senate during Mr. Pinckney’s speech as I was afterward informed by some of the gentlemen.”100 She had been among the first women to attend congressional debates during the Madison administration, but what had started out as a way to keep herself informed had turned into another opportunity to be scrutinized and evaluated.
In the early years of the republic, women shared their spouses’ workloads—but from behind the scenes so that they received little public recognition. Thus they enjoyed a measure of latitude in some areas of their lives but found their autonomy firmly curtailed in other areas. That division had been obvious during the independence movement when women contributed in many ways but then attained no voice in the new government. Some wives fought alongside their men or took over for them when they were wounded. Others transported water and supplies. Housewives occasionally struck back at merchants who gouged customers on prices, as Abigail Adams explained when she related to John how one coffee merchant had fared. “[The women] seized him by the neck and tossed him into the cart,” Abigail wrote. “[They] opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it on the trucks and drove off [while] a large concourse of men stood amazed, silent spectators of the whole transaction.”101 In Philadelphia, a group of women organized themselves to collect money for the colonial soldiers. The women originally planned to forward the collection to Martha Washington so that she could disperse it as they directed, but she had to return to Mount Vernon and they were forced to turn to George instead.102
Yet for all this hard work, women did not gain full political participation in the young American government. Abigail Adams had predicted as much. In 1776, when John was in Philadelphia helping to write the Declaration of Independence, she chided him: “I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the Ladies, for while you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives.”103
Historian Mary Beth Norton has pointed out that American women increased control over their lives in the decades following the Revolution despite their failure to achieve suffrage. Norton recommended looking at women’s private lives—their “familial organizations, personal aspirations, and self assessments.”104 The evidence showed, she wrote, new attitudes on courtship, spinsterhood, marriage, and bearing children.105 Because the home took on new importance as a place for training “virtuous” citizens, wives and mothers assumed greater power. That this new autonomy remained in the home did not mean that it did not exist.
One prescription for how women should limit their governing to their own households shows up in the writings of Judith Sargent Murray. Under the pen name “Constantia,” she achieved a reputation as a feminist in the 1790s because of her insistence that women deserved an education equal to that which men received. Yet she advised women to retain their “retiring sweetness” and “shun even the semblance of pedantry, rather question than assert,” look on their partners’ weaknesses “with pity’s softest eye [and] praise the men’s strengths.” Mothers’ role in government was confined to the home, where, she wrote, they would find pleasure in “viewing the smiles of their daughters and the sports of their sons.”106 “Constantia” would have approved of a popular magazine’s advice to readers in 1787: “A kind look, or even a smile, often conquered Alexander, subdued Caesar and decided the fate of empires and of kingdoms.”107
Not all American women accepted quietly the limitations placed on their participation in government. Some spoke out for a vote in both church and town.108 For example, one Connecticut matron, who took the pen name “Female Advocate,” suggested that the time had come to stop quoting St. Paul on how women should keep silence in the church and refrain from teaching men or preaching to them. “Female Advocate” pointed to other parts of the Bible that offered stronger models. The Old Testament’s Deborah, for example, served her people as judge and helped deliver Israel from King Jabin.109 If “Female Advocate’s” view that women deserved full political rights had prevailed, other states would no doubt have followed New Jersey’s lead and permitted women to vote along with “all free citizens.” But “Female Advocate” spoke for only a minority, and even New Jersey narrowed its franchise in 1808 to white males only.
Except for Abigail Adams, for whom controversy came as naturally as breathing, the first presidents’ wives fitted themselves into the contemporary model of womanliness. In public they were models of docility. Louisa Adams may have complained bitterly in private, and Dolley Madison confessed to great fatigue, but both maintained their sweet composure in front of others. Even Elizabeth Monroe, who contributed little to her husband’s political success, hewed to the accepted “feminine” reticence. Visitors who stopped at Mount Vernon, including the famous Marquis de Lafayette, frequently mentioned Martha Washington’s charming good nature,110 and a young Dutchman wrote his mother that at the Washingtons’ dinner table, George had ignored his guests but that Martha was so gracious she deserved an “exquisite” gift.111
Yet the records of all these women suggest a discrepancy between their public images and their private lives. Examination of each reveals how much spunk and courage lay behind the quiet voices and sweet smiles. Martha Washington provides an excellent example, although it is important to emphasize that the stories about her early years may be as apocryphal as those of George and the cherry tree. Accounts of her youth consistently describe her as a woman who had her own ideas. She slapped the face of an offensive suitor at a fashionable ball and rode her horse up the stairs of her uncle’s house.112 Later, after her first husband died, she found herself at twenty-six with two young children and one of the largest estates in Virginia. Writing to an English merchant, she outlined the conditions under which she would sell to him and her hopes that he would be fair. The many corrections in the manuscript draft indicate that she could not have found the task easy but the wording shows she could be firm: “It will be proper to continue this Account in the same manner as if [my husband] was living as most of the goods I shall send for will be for the good of the family.” She signed herself simply, “Martha Custis.”113
Martha showed fewer signs of that forcefulness in her later years. She managed her household well, and after George became famous and their home a mecca for visitors from all over the country, he commented to his mother that Martha ran Mount Vernon like a “well-resorted tavern.”114 Miniatures of her at midlife reveal stolid eyes, with no hint of either invention or merriment. They are the eyes of a woman unlikely to contradict her husband. Yet, in private, she continued to have a mind of her own. In a letter to her niece, written in 1794 while Martha was First Lady, she advised the younger woman to be “as independent as your circumstances will admit…; [because] dependence is, I think, a wrached [sic] state … ”115
Abigail Adams’s spunky vitality showed up throughout her life and is considered here only to emphasize that it was largely confined to the private sphere and best documented in letters to family members. During the years that John absented himself from home for first one patriotic duty and then another, she made the farm support the family, referring first to “your crops,” then shifting to “our” and finally to “my.”116 Left to make decisions on her own about harvesting crops and buying land, she tried to keep John informed but made it clear that she was in charge: “You made no perticular [sic] agreement with Isaac,” [the hired hand] so he insisted upon my paying him 13 [pounds], 6 [shillings] and 8 [pence]. I paid him 12, 18, and 8 and thought it sufficient.”117
Abigail occasionally complained of the weight of her responsibilities, but her family appreciated her contribution to the men’s careers. In 1776, nearly a century and a half before the publication of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Abigail lamented the lack of time and space for herself: “I always had a fancy for a closet with a window which I could more peculiarly call my own.”118 Abigail’s grandson may well have had her complaint in mind when he noted how her careful management had helped the Adamses escape the financial worries that plagued both Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe. In the introduction to his grandmother’s letters, Charles Francis Adams wrote: “[She was] a farmer cultivating the land and discussing the weather and the crops; a merchant reporting prices current and the rates of exchange and directing the making up of invoices, a politician speculating upon the probabilities of war, and a mother … and in all she appears equally well.”119
The active pen of Abigail and her descendants assured her a place in history, while Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, left few traces. She had died in 1782, well before her husband became president. It is significant, however, that the single extant document in her hand is a letter, written in 1780 when her husband was governor of Virginia. She had been asked by Martha Washington to assist her “sisters of Pennsylvania” in gathering money for the soldiers. “I undertake with chearfulness [sic] the duty of furnishing to my countrywomen an opportunity of proving that they also participate of those virtuous feelings which gave birth [to the independence movement],” Martha Jefferson wrote.120 In forwarding the “papers to be distributed” by women to women, she demonstrated once again how many matters of public concern were taken up in the domestic sphere.
Dolley Madison’s vivacious personality guaranteed her fame, but in her most celebrated act, she performed as a wife engineering the transfer of her house’s furnishings. That the item she arranged to save happened to be a portrait of George Washington rendered this a patriotic act. According to Dolley, British troops were approaching the capital in August 1814, and the president was out of town consulting with his military advisers. She had been warned that she should “be ready at a moment’s warning to enter my carriage and leave the city; that the enemy seemed stronger than had at first been reported, and it might happen that they would reach the city with the intention of destroying it.” Dolley insisted in a letter to her sister that she would not budge “until I see Mr. Madison safe so that he can accompany me.” When a friend came to “hasten” her departure, she consented to go “as soon as the large picture of General Washington is secured…. I have ordered the frame to be broken and the canvas taken out.”121
Elizabeth Monroe left very few records as First Lady, but her courage much earlier demonstrates another kind of “womanly” participation in public affairs. James Monroe had been named minister to France in 1794, not an easy assignment with France in the middle of a revolution. One of his first tasks required delicate negotiation. In the shifting of alliances that made factions of the French Revolution powerful one day and dead the next, America’s old Revolutionary War friend, Marquis de Lafayette, had gotten caught. After denouncing the Jacobins in 1792, he fled the country but was soon captured and imprisoned near Vienna. His wife was first placed under house arrest back in France, but by the spring of 1794 when the Monroes arrived in Paris, she was being held in one of the city’s prisons.122 The French capital had become the site of bloody chaos and more than 1,500 people—including Mme. Lafayette’s mother and other relatives—were led to the guillotine during a six-week period that summer.123 The new American minister wanted to assist the wife of his country’s old friend but understood the delicacy of the situation. Any foreign meddling in what was understood to be an internal matter could create a backlash and make the case against Marie-Adrienne Lafayette even worse.
The Monroes resolved to appeal to Parisians who might then convince the Committee on Public Safety, who decided such matters, to free the prisoner.124 First, the Americans needed to draw attention to Mme. Lafayette and stir up sympathy for her plight. Because no private carriages were available for hire, the Monroes bought one and painted it so it would draw the curious. Then Elizabeth Monroe rode alone through the crowds that pressed in around her and demanded to know where she was going. They followed her to the prison gates, where a frightened and surprised Marie-Adrienne Lafayette came out to meet the American, and the two women chatted and embraced in full view of the crowds. Mme. Lafayette, who had feared she was heading for the guillotine when she was summoned that morning, could hardly conceal her delight at seeing Elizabeth Monroe instead. The crowds appeared every bit as moved as she, and their cheers had the intended result, or as James Monroe rather dryly summed up in his diary his wife’s successful mission: “The sensibility of all the beholders was deeply excited” so that the Committee on Safety consented to Mme. Lafayette’s release.125
Louisa Adams also revealed considerable courage but again in the role of wife and mother. While her husband was stationed in St. Petersburg in 1814, he was called to Ghent to work out the details of the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812. With that assignment finished, he wrote to Louisa, instructing her to sell everything and join him in Paris. Although it was the middle of winter and she would have to go through war-damaged areas, if not through actual fighting, she disposed of their belongings and prepared in a matter of weeks to begin the journey. For company she had only her eight-year-old son and three servants whom she hired the day she set out.
The account of Louisa’s trip from St. Petersburg to Paris reads like a concocted adventure, filled with danger, intrigue, and murder. When her carriage sank into the snow she called “out the inhabitants … with pick axe and shovel to dig us out,” she later wrote.126 Warned that there had been a “dreadful murder” the night before on the “very road over which I was to pass,” she refused to stop. Told that one of her servants had the reputation of a “desperate villain of the worst character” she had little alternative but to continue with him. Her informant begged her not to fire the man on the spot for fear he might uncover the source of her information and retaliate. Because she feared her servants might try to rob her, she carefully hid the gold she carried and then waved letters of credit in front of them so they would be misled into thinking that she picked up small amounts in cities along the way. When her servants deserted her, she hired others, and when impertinent border officials treated her rudely, she threatened to report them to their superiors. Her health was “dreadful,” she later wrote, but she persevered, stopping to rest at houses where she knew no one. Sometimes she sat up all night because she feared for her life if she slept.
Although Louisa protested demurely that she could not attend the theater on a stopover in Königsberg, “unprotected by a gentleman,” she dealt calmly with threats on her life. When crowds loyal to Napoleon surrounded her carriage and screamed “Kill them. They are Russians,” she pulled out her American passport. Then when they cried “Viveles Américains,” she obligingly responded, “Vive Napoléon,” before moving on. Not far from Paris she learned that forty thousand men had gathered at the city’s gates for battle and although “this news startled me very much,” she resolved “on cool reflection … to persevere.”127
When Louisa arrived in Paris on March 21, after weeks of difficult and dangerous travel, her husband was waiting at the Hotel du Nord “perfectly astonished at [her] adventures.” His diary makes light of the whole trip, and he wrote matter-of-factly to his mother: “Mrs. A performed the journey from St. Petersburg in 40 days and it has been of essential service to her and Charles’ health. She entered France precisely at the time when the revolution was taking place.”128 Although her maid needed two months of bed rest to recover, Louisa Adams, whom her family and historians portrayed as frail and sickly all her life, immediately resumed her regular schedule.
Abigail Adams could never match her daughter-in-law in European experience, but by the time her husband became president the older woman had lived in both France and England and had recorded her trials and triumphs in many letters home. She had joined John first in 1784 when for a few months the family rented a house in Auteuil outside of Paris. Because she could not speak French, although she read it, Abigail found dealing with servants difficult; dinner parties with non-English speakers made her uncomfortable. She worried about her clothes in a country where style obviously mattered. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature,” she observed, “to which,” she added primly, “Parisians are not averse.”129 But her curiosity and genuine interest in French ways proved more powerful than her complaints; and her own letters, as well as those of her daughter and husband, indicate these were some of the family’s happiest times.
The French stay was cut short when John Adams was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1785. It was an extremely awkward post since his presence served as a reminder to Britons that they had recently lost thirteen of their American colonies. Abigail found her reception icy, and she informed her sister: “I own that I have never felt myself in a more contemptible situation, than when I stood four hours together for a gracious smile from majesty.”130 She could not wait to leave England. When the queen was later reported as having her own worries, Abigail showed little sympathy: “Humiliation for Charlotte is no sorrow for me,” she wrote her daughter, “[because she] richly deserves her full portion for the contempt and scorn which she took pains to discover.”131
After five years in Europe, Abigail could not hide her nostalgia for home. “I have lived long enough and seen enough of the world,” she wrote her friend Thomas Jefferson, “to bring my mind to my circumstances and retiring to our own little farm feeding my poultry and improving my garden has more charms for my fancy than residing at the Court of St. James where I seldom meet characters so inoffensive as my hens and chick[s] or minds so well improved as my garden. Heaven forgive me,” she added, “if I think too hardly of them. I wish they had deserved better at my hands.”132
In spite of their protests, the early First Ladies who lived for long periods in Europe profited from the experience—a preparation that few of their successors could boast. Not until a century later, during the Hoover administration of 1929 to 1933, would a First Lady’s travels rival those of Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Monroe, or Louisa Adams, who acquired the reputation of the most traveled woman of her time. The Constitution had set very few requirements for election to the country’s highest office and none at all in training or travel, but in the early years of the republic, when the psychological separation from Europe was not yet as complete as the physical one, international expertise rendered potential leaders more attractive. Four of the first six presidents (the two Adamses, Jefferson, and Monroe) spent several years in diplomatic service abroad and, except for the widowed Jefferson, had their families with them for at least part of the time, with their wives running large European households.
In one sense, the travel made up for the women’s lack of formal education. Abigail Adams frequently complained that she had not had a single day of schooling in her entire life. Rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation remained mysteries all her life, and in her letters, she made one mistake after another. Wide reading and long sessions with her Grandmother Quincy supplied her with her frequent references to the classics but did not prepare her, Abigail acknowledged, for knowing everything people expected her to know.
The other first presidents’ wives came no better equipped. Dolley Madison had very little schooling, and during her husband’s administration she admitted that she read infrequently. When a young man asked about the Don Quixote volume in her hand, she explained it was just a prop, carried to provide for awkward breaks in conversation. Martha Washington had so much difficulty with spelling that George finally took to writing out her letters for her and having her copy them; but even then she managed to botch the job, carelessly converting his “describe” to “discribe” and using her own quaint versions of “boath” and “occation.”133 Too little is known of Elizabeth Monroe to make a judgment on her education, but neither she nor any of the others made any move to improve women’s education. Abigail Adams’s one daughter had little more schooling than her mother, and Martha Washington raised her granddaughter much as she had been raised, putting more importance on the spinet than on spelling.
Small improvements in women’s schooling in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth did not result from the example or the cajoling of the presidents’ wives. Some Americans argued that their sisters deserved education—it would make them better wives and better people. But the central argument was a practical one. As the country expanded westward, more teachers were needed. When the first girls’ academies opened in the 1780s and 1790s, their founders claimed to offer instruction on the same level as boys’ schools so that the graduates would be prepared to teach. Benjamin Rush, then professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading advocate of better education for girls, explained in 1787 to the first class of the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia that they were there because of the country’s needs. Since American girls married earlier and assumed more responsibility for tutoring their children than did their European counterparts, they ought to go beyond basic math and reading, Rush said, to learn world history and geography.134 Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Adams, and Abigail Adams learned their European history and geography first hand.
In assessing how each of the early First Ladies handled the responsibilities imposed on them when their husbands became president, it is safe to conclude that they reacted differently. Only Abigail Adams appears to have shaped the job more than it shaped her. She refused to be silenced, and, with her husband’s encouragement, continued to air her opinions. Whether such activity constitutes “feminism” is beside the point—Abigail demonstrated very early in the republic that the opportunity existed for a substantive role (alongside the ceremonial role) for spouses who wanted it—provided, of course, they had the consent of the president. The others, despite objections and occasional rebellions, acquiesced in limiting themselves to a supportive role reflecting the predominant attitude about femininity.
In many ways, the early presidents’ wives, along with their husbands, form a distinct group. Unlike those who followed them after 1829, the early chief executives are notable for their close personal connections and for their exceptional training. The wives also stand apart from their successors. In attempting to define just what demands their husbands’ jobs imposed on them, they collectively built the foundation for those who followed, and they anticipated most of the problems. With one eye on the rules of protocol and another on their husbands’ popularity, they sought (some more diligently than others) to find the middle ground. They worked to improve the President’s House, which served as their home as well as a national monument, and they struggled with the publicity that focused on them as a result of their husbands’ jobs. In the evident and continuing debate over just how much distance a president should keep between himself and the people, wives took an important part, striking a balance between commoner and queen.