Margaret Bayard Smith’s 1809 Journey to Monticello and Montpelier: The Politics of Performance in the Early Republic

Abstract

Historians have long valued Margaret Bayard Smith’s famed 1809 account of her trip to Monticello and Montpelier for its descriptions of the houses and of Thomas Jefferson and James and Dolley Madison. This essay argues that the descriptions function as what Cynthia A. Kierner calls “a domestic performance”—a performance by a woman or women that showcases private virtues for public uses. Such an analytic lens reveals the less-than-obvious political meanings of the travel account. In each setting, Margaret also encountered domestic performances to match her own. Understanding Margaret’s narrative as a domestic performance also highlights the use of a particularly feminine vernacular of domesticity and emotion, the development of which most historians place later in the century. Long before the advent of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” she and other Washington women used this vernacular for political reasons. With this language of domesticity, Margaret provided an evaluation of Jefferson’s political legacy that was a message of reassurance to an uncertain citizenry. Her subsequent portrait of Dolley Madison at home at Montpelier signaled that though a new family was ascending to power, the “house” of the government was safe.