And John Adams writes to Abigail and says, “If it gets really dangerous, take our children and fly to the woods.” Thank you, John. Hope you’re having a nice dinner in Philadelphia.
John Quincy Adams did write later, “My mother for the space of twelve months, with her infant children, was in danger of being killed or taken hostage into Boston by the British.” Because patriot women were taken hostage, and some were killed.
She is realizing that, finally, they’re going to declare independence. And so she writes to John and says, “If we’re going to become a country, we’re going to have to have a code of laws. And in your new code of laws I want you to remember the ladies because all men would be tyrants if they could.”
And he laughed at her. He just laughed at her.
DR: He didn’t take seriously the idea of women being educated or having any political rights?
CR: No. In terms of education, it was very interesting that she did make sure that their only daughter learned Greek and Latin. And he said, “It’s fine as long as you don’t tell anybody.”
DR: Let’s talk about another woman who was very famous at the time, Martha Washington. The image people have of her is that she was hanging out at Mount Vernon. George Washington spends eight years running the war. But it turns out in your book that she was actually with him much of the time.
During the fight for women’s suffrage in the early twentieth century, the Equal Franchise Society saluted Abigail Adams’s famous “Remember the ladies” letter to John Adams.
CR: All the time. I think Martha Washington has done herself a disservice by wearing that cap in the famous Rembrandt Peale portrait of her. We see her as elderly. Of course, “elderly” then was a lot younger than I am. That’s one of the reasons when you talk about getting married young, you died young, and some of these men did have several wives.
But Martha was called upon by her husband, the general, to come to camp every winter of the war. When I was growing up—actually, when I started writing this book—the only things I knew were Martha Washington at Valley Forge, Dolley Madison saving George Washington’s portrait [when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812], and then, as a grown-up, I learned about “Remember the ladies” during the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s.
Valley Forge was one winter of the eight long winters of the Revolution—eight years. And she went to camp every winter.
The reason she went—she hated going—first of all, she was leaving behind what she considered duty at Mount Vernon. Second, she was having to go over terrifying roads. She was very much a prime target for hostage-taking. There had already been threats that she would be kidnapped and taken. And camp wasn’t so pleasant once you got there. But the general would call and she would answer.
“Lady Washington is here!” Martha Washington boosted the morale of her husband’s troops, bringing them clothes and food in camp and organizing other officers’ wives to help cook for and nurse soldiers.
Over the summer, the enslaved people at Mount Vernon would work with her, making cloth and preserving foodstuffs and all that. She would then come to camp, and she was cheered. The troops adored her. She was cheered into camp—“Lady Washington is here!”—and bring all of these things from Mount Vernon, one of the many contributions of African Americans to the Revolutionary cause.
She would then organize the other officers’ wives to cook for the soldiers, sew for the soldiers, nurse the soldiers, pray with the soldiers. That was key, because they were threatening to desert by regiment at various times since they were unpaid, unhoused, all that.
Then they’d put on great entertainments, all to keep up troop morale. Washington thought she was absolutely essential. It’s also good that she was there because he could be a little indiscreet, and there was the one time that he danced for three hours straight with the very pretty and flirty Catharine Littlefield Greene, the wife of Nathanael Greene. So it was good that Martha was on hand to keep an eye on the situation.
DR: She was watching him as well as helping him.
CR: Watching him. She also had a sense of humor. She named her tomcat Hamilton—
DR: Because Alexander Hamilton was such a—
CR: Tomcat.
DR: We have a thousand letters from John Adams and Abigail Adams. We have no letters between George Washington and Martha Washington. Why is that?
CR: Well, we have two that George wrote to Martha, which were found stuffed in a desk drawer of a house of a descendant. We believe that she burned all their correspondence. And that did happen then.
In her case, I think it’s for two reasons. One, she was embarrassed that her punctuation and grammar were not perfect. But also the letters were personal, and she didn’t much want them published.
The other two Founding Mothers whose letters we don’t have are Martha Jefferson and Elizabeth Monroe. In each of those cases, their husbands burned their letters.
In the case of Martha Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson said that he was burning her letters because he was heartbroken. Now, that’s his story and he’s sticking to it, but I don’t think that’s what you do when you’re heartbroken.
DR: So let’s talk about Martha Washington as the first lady. We have no tradition of first ladies, so are you supposed to be a queen? Are you supposed to be something else? How did she figure out how a first lady was supposed to act?
CR: She had to do it on the job. She was in a good position to do it. Abigail Adams would have been a terrible first first lady. She would have been telling everybody what she thought all the time. Martha Washington was a well-bred southern lady and understood indirection. But she was very political. She understood politics quite well.
When George Washington goes to New York to become president, he arrives on a barge—this big, elaborate barge from New Jersey. So then she goes up. They’ve got two little children—their grandchildren, who lived with them, had just turned eight and just turned ten when she occupies the equivalent of the executive mansion in New York. And she’s got these little kids.
She has sort of a grand procession up from Mount Vernon to New York and is called upon to stop in places and make speeches and all that. When she gets on the barge to come across from New Jersey, she wears homespun [meaning cloth made from homespun yarn]. Now, this is a woman who loved her silks. But she had a PR sense that’s the equivalent of Pat Nixon’s good cloth coat. [During his famous Checkers speech in 1952, made while he was running for vice president, Richard M. Nixon celebrated his wife, Pat’s, “respectable” cloth coat.]
Martha wore homespun to come across the river. But the minute they get across the river, the little boy, George Washington Parke Custis, gets lost in the crowd and she’s got to find him, get them in school, and, within something like two days, do the first levee, as the formal reception ceremonies were called, where she has to be courtly enough and formal enough to satisfy the courts of Europe.
Think of it. This is this little tiny upstart country along the Atlantic coast of America, and you’re talking about France and England and Prussia and all of that. You have to create some sort of sense that we’re regal enough that they will pay attention. But we’ve also just fought a war knocking off a monarch. So you have to be republican enough to satisfy the voters. It was a very tough balancing act.
She did write at one point that people called her the “First Lady of the Land,” which was surprising to see because the term first lady was not officially applied until the Buchanan administration. But she said, “I really think of myself as the chief state prisoner.” I think a lot of first ladies have felt that way since.
DR: So she came up with a tradition of entertaining. They entertained a lot, but they would not go visit anybody else, because they didn’t want to pick and choose.
CR: Also—you all can relate to this—if you went to somebody’s house to dinner, were you beholden to them? So George and Martha Washington had everybody in. The dinners sound just grim.
DR: The capit
al was initially in New York, then they moved it to Philadelphia, so she had to move from New York to Philadelphia. Then they moved back to Mount Vernon after eight years. How long does it actually take to go from Philadelphia to Mount Vernon by carriage or whatever they used?
CR: A lot of the travel was by boat. We used the ocean and the rivers to get everywhere. But it would take about a week.
DR: A week. You mention in one of your books how long it took to go from Georgetown to Capitol Hill in those days.
CR: It was a mess. It was all muddy and horrible. And when they started building Washington, they just willy-nilly chopped down trees, so there were tree stumps everywhere. That made it very hard to get around.
DR: Like a pothole.
CR: But a pothole you could trip over. So the trip took a couple of hours.
Let’s talk about Mount Vernon for a second. Between the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional Convention, they’re at Mount Vernon. This is between 1783 and 1787. Everybody comes to Mount Vernon. The whole world comes to Mount Vernon.
On Monday I gave the first Martha Washington Lecture at Mount Vernon. I have been bugging them for years, because everything there says “George Washington’s Mount Vernon.” And I keep saying, “Really? He did this all by himself?”
First of all, it was all her money. But secondly, she had to do all of this.
The one person he didn’t want to come to Mount Vernon was his mother. He was terrified that his mother was going to move in.
He had worked it out that she was going to move in with a brother, and then the brother had the bad grace to die, and so he writes his mother this letter that’s just a riot where he says, “You know, this is like a well-resorted tavern—everyone going from north to south or from south to north stops here. And if you came, you would have three choices. You would either have to get up every day and get dressed for all the visitors, which you wouldn’t like, or you would be around in dishabille, which I wouldn’t like, or you would be confined to your room, which neither one of us would like.”
Isn’t this a nice letter? And so she didn’t come. But Martha is having to do this entertaining.
Then he leaves the presidency after two terms—which is an interesting story all in itself—in 1797. They get back to Mount Vernon. He dies at the end of 1799, and she still has all these people coming through.
Any politician who wanted to prove his bona fides, you know, to show what a great patriot he was—things have not changed—goes to visit Mount Vernon to represent himself to Mrs. Washington. She would take them all in, even though she thought Thomas Jefferson was “the most despicable of all mankind.” That was a quotation.
DR: In your book you point out how many guests they had one year—four or five hundred guests who came for dinner or wanted to stay over.
CR: And you don’t think George was doing that, do you?
DR: George Washington never lived in the White House. It’s finally built at the time that John Adams is the president, and he and Abigail move down here from Philadelphia. They’re here for about a year or so.
CR: It’s really kind of November till March.
DR: Did Abigail Adams come down and serve as first lady?
CR: Yes. The White House famously was unfinished, and Mrs. Adams was hanging the laundry and all that. But she did write a letter to her daughter saying that Georgetown is a filthy hole. But still the ladies all expected her to entertain and came by. She said to her daughter, “Tell people that I say it has a very nice view, because that’s true.”
DR: They leave, and the next president is Thomas Jefferson, but he’s not married. His wife had died. What did he do for entertaining? Did he have a hostess?
CR: He had various ways of entertaining. You all will respond to this. He had the Democratic-Republicans over one night and the Federalists another night. He did not have them together to dinner. It was really dangerous for him to do that because the country was not in a position where it could survive the kind of partisanship and regionalism that was fierce at the time. It was way too young and fragile a country.
But fortunately, Dolley Madison was on the scene. And she did do some hostessing at the White House, but what she mainly did was set up a completely separate power center at the secretary of state’s house on F Street. She had Federalists and Republicans come together and break bread together, have some wine together and behave.
Every so often—and this continued when she went to the White House—the Federalists would say, “We’re going to boycott it.” Then they’d discover they couldn’t because those evenings were where all the trading, all the deals got made, all the information got exchanged.
A power player in Washington even before she became first lady, Dolley Madison hosted must-attend parties for politicians in search of the latest inside information.
DR: What about the famous story that while the War of 1812 is happening, and we’re being invaded by the British, Dolley Madison is getting ready to cook a dinner, and all of a sudden, she decides she should leave. She writes a letter while she’s getting ready to leave and then takes the painting of George Washington down. Is that all true?
CR: It’s sort of true. It’s true enough. She is in the White House by herself—well, not by herself. She’s got servants and her wonderful enslaved man Paul Jennings. Madison has gone out to Bladensburg, where the war is being fought, and she expects him to come back to the White House with the generals and the cabinet and have dinner.
She’s not cooking, but she’s planning it. And she goes up to the roof and she starts to see the British are coming. People start saying to her, “You’ve got to go. It’s getting dangerous.”
She’s hoping that Madison will get home before she goes, but finally she is convinced that she has to go. She packed up not just the portrait but government papers and whatever she could get out that she wanted to get out.
But she did insist that the portrait be secured. She didn’t roll it up and take it out, but she insisted that it be secured. It was cut out of the frame, and a gentleman traveling to New York took it with him on his carriage.
DR: And that’s the Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington that’s now back in the White House.
CR: That’s right. What was significant about that when you think, well, it was a painting? Think of all the images we’ve seen of Saddam Hussein’s statue coming down or Lenin’s statue coming down.
If Washington’s portrait had been in the hands of the British, they could have desecrated it, which would have been very demoralizing. What Dolley did was make sure that that did not happen. What they did instead was desecrate her portrait, and then they sat down and ate her meal. It’s like Goldilocks. One of the soldiers actually wrote about it—about eating her meal and feeling a little bit guilty but liking it.
DR: In those days, how big was Washington? How many people lived in Washington in the Revolutionary War period?
CR: Oh, in the Revolutionary War period, nobody was here. The government was “removed” to Washington in 1800. Georgetown was a town. Alexandria was a town. But there was no Washington. There were some farms. And when they bought the property here where we are and started building a capital, a few little boardinghouses and liquor stores opened up around here.
DR: And the members of Congress tended to live in—
CR: Boardinghouses. They tended to live in boardinghouses with people either from their delegations or like-minded people.
In fact, Albert Gallatin wrote to his wife—he was later secretary of the treasury, that was his most famous role—but he was a congressman from New York at the time. He wrote to his wife and said, “You know, we all think alike. We don’t talk about anything but politics.” It’s not exactly likely to bring about moderation.
DR: Did they bring their wives down here?
CR: No. Very few wives were here. There was no place for them to stay. But some of the cabinet brought their wives, and the wives played a very key role, because they were the peo
ple that brought everybody together.
Dolley Madison, by the way, was not here just in that period. Dolley Madison reigned over this city basically from 1801 to 1848–49. She had a brief period where she went back to Montpelier with James during which she would write these letters saying, “What’s going on?”
But she then came back as a widow. Every head of state from all over the world would come to call on her, every president relied on her. She was absolutely the unifying force. Daniel Webster once said, “There’s no permanent power in Washington but Dolley Madison.”
DR: She was succeeded as first lady by Liza Monroe and then later Louisa Adams. Did they change very much what the first lady did?
CR: Liza Monroe was nowhere near as warm and loving as Dolley. Dolley Madison was just this unbelievably effusive person. Everybody loved her. Henry Clay said to her once, “Everybody loves Mrs. Madison,” and she said, “That’s because Mrs. Madison loves everybody.”
Now, I have read her mail. It’s not true, but that was how she portrayed herself. In his inaugural address Jefferson had said, “We’re all Federalists, we’re all Republicans,” which he didn’t mean for a minute. When Dolley left, the newspapers wrote that she gave meaning to that statement because no one could tell how she felt about things, she was so welcoming and so generous. But she was all the time working for her husband and for his reelection.
And if you think things are bad now in terms of press, when Jefferson was running for reelection, the newspapers wrote that he had pimped Dolley Madison and her sisters in exchange for votes in Congress. It was nasty stuff. And they wrote that she had unsexed Madison because she was so sexy. John Randolph, who was crazy as a coot, kept threatening to “reveal the men in her life” on the floor of the Senate, things like that.
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