Smith, Margaret Bayard

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SMITH, Margaret Bayard

Born 20 February 1778, near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 7 June 1844, Washington, D.C.

Daughter of John B. and Margaret Hodge Bayard; married Samuel H. Smith, 1800

Margaret Bayard Smith married the editor of the Jeffersonian newspaper the National Intelligencer and brought with her to Washington in 1800 a lively curiosity, a warm understanding of human relationships, and an openness to experience.

During her early life in Washington, Smith wrote privately, chiefly letters and notebooks. Her public career as a writer began in the 1820s. She published two novels based on Washington life, A Winter in Washington (1824) and What is Gentility? (1828). She also wrote short stories, essays, and verse for such publications as Godey's Lady's Book, the National Intelligencer, and the Southern Literary Messenger. In addition, Smith wrote several biographical accounts for James Herring and John B. Longacre's National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans.

Smith's reputation as a writer rests primarily on the collection of her letters and notebook entries edited by Gaillard Hunt in 1906 and published under the title The First Forty Years of Washington Society. This miscellany revealed Smith as a person of wit, insight, and affection and as a discerning observer of the society of her time.

Smith's Jeffersonian sympathies are evident in her work, but her circle of friends far transcended party lines. She found the transition from Jeffersonian republicanism to Jacksonian democracy a difficult one. Though flexible by nature, Smith belonged to an earlier age of gentility and ordered society. Her writing about the pre-Jacksonian period combined the personal world and public political concern; in the latter period, her focus was more on the private side of Washington life.

Smith was a novelist whose primary concern was the changing ways and values of society. A Winter in Washington had its elements of suspense and mystery, including an abducted child and a murder. But the central theme of this book and of What is Gentility? is the clash of moral values and cultural ways. Smith saw the Jeffersonian era as a kind of republican golden age, and she sought to convey the values of that period to a later generation.

Smith portrayed the political scene as women saw it—as outsiders. For her novels, she drew on some of the sketches of real-life events she had recorded previously in her notebooks as historical memoirs. On the whole, Smith held traditional views about women and their role in society. In A Winter in Washington she did voice, through Mrs. Mortimer, perhaps the most original and nonconformist of her female characters, some of the discontent experienced by women of the day. An incipient feminist, Mrs. Mortimer thinks it folly for women to talk of government when they are "slaves to all" or "mill horses" or "captive birds." But Smith herself affirmed the theory of separate spheres and home as the "place of highest duties…and most enduring pleasures."

As a novelist Smith is on soundest ground in depicting the social and political world of which she had been a part. Her private papers have proved a storehouse of information about this society. As a letter writer, Smith has charm and liveliness. She clearly enjoyed people, and her portraits of the personalities of her age are drawn with an affectionate yet keen-eyed view. It is both the quality of the person Smith is and the perceptive insight she brings to bear on her society that give her work its vitality and durability.

Bibliography:

Green, C. M. Washington: Village and Capital, 1800-1878 (1962). van der Linden, F., The Turning Point: Jefferson's Battle for the Presidency (1962).