Drawing Rooms and Holding Court: Memory and Legacy of the Women of the Republican Court

On the eve of the Civil War, Daniel Huntington painted an idealized scene of Martha Washington holding court at the presidential home in New York (The Republican Court, Lady Washington’s Reception Day, 1861). The artist romanticized a seemingly harmonious political elite with a regal first lady greeting guests from a raised platform in front of marble columns and adoring devotees. While Martha Washington did indeed host salons at the presidential residence on Friday evenings, the ritualized salon gatherings were never as congruous or insouciant as Huntington’s large-scale painting suggests. Critics immediately condemned Washington’s salons as excessive, intense reverberations of European courts that undermined the purpose of an egalitarian republic. Like Washington, salonnières in the early republic used salons to create fixed social protocol exclusively for political elites—excluding any impertinent or unrefined sorts—to win a private moment with a Congressman, diplomat, judge, or the president himself.

Just six years before Huntington illustrated Washington’s evening salons, Rufus Griswold memorialized the women who were active in the political life of the new nation in The Republican Court, or American Society in the Days of Washington(1855). Both Griswold’s book and Huntington’s painting express a nostalgia for the post-Revolutionary War era amid fears of imminent civil war. However, these visions of a benign past portrayed the world of the women of the early republic as one of not only sophistication and grace but also one of power, authority, and political clout. This paper will analyze the deliberate legacy created by two men just before the Civil War of a cordial and amiable national founding heralded by politically active and prominent women.