Margaret Bayard Smith Papers
From the Library of Congress, the papers of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), author and leader in Washington, D.C., social and political circles during the first decades of the nineteenth century, span the years 1789-1874, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1796-1840. They include family and general correspondence, diaries, journals, and commonplace books. Most of the papers consist of family correspondence between Smith and her sisters Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick and Maria Bayard Boyd, and her husband, Samuel Harrison Smith (1772-1845), editor of the Jeffersonian National Intelligencer, a banker, and Treasury Department official. The Smiths moved to Washington, D.C., shortly after their marriage in 1800, and they remained there for the rest of their lives. Other correspondents in the collection include Mary Hering Middleton, A. Emilie Pichon, and Eliza Susan Morton Quincy. Topics covered include Washington, D.C., social life, presidential elections, the British occupation of Washington in 1814, and visits to the Virginia homes of Thomas Jefferson and James and Dolley Madison.
