First Ladies (8 page)

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