1818

 

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“When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.”

 

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, March 3, 1818

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January 1: The First Lady, Mrs. Monroe, begins holding fortnightly “drawing rooms,” which attracted Washington D.C.’s leading lights. These parties were open to all who were “suitably dressed,” in Ammon’s words,  including diplomats, members of Congress, public officials, and private citizens. The first was held on New Year’s Day, beginning at 11:30 in the morning. 

According to Ammon, many “informally dressed citizens with spurs and muddy boots made their way into the President’s House.” He also notes that, “Since there was no White House staff – not even a watchman to look after the grounds when the president was absent – the servants were probably from either the Albemarle or the Loudon plantations.” 

He does not say “slaves,” but we must assume they were. 

As for Mrs. Hay, the president’s daughter, John Quincy Adams’s wife (pictured above) noted that other women came to fear her. She was a lady so full of “agreeableness and disagreeableness, so accomplished and ill bred, so proud and so mean,” who had such a “love for scandal that no reputation is safe in her hands.” (24/406)

 

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January 6: General Jackson suggests that the U.S. occupy Amelia Island and East Florida. This could be done without implicating the government. “Let it be signified to me through any channel, (say Mr. J. Rhea) that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” (24/415)

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Thomas Jefferson expresses the hope that coming generations will be wiser than those who came before. (See quote to start.)

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August 25: The steamboat Walk-in-the-Water begins its crossing of Lake Erie, from Buffalo to Detroit, which takes nine days. When it docked at Cleveland, then a village, nearly the entire population turned out for a look.

 

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October 5: Van Loon notes, that in Indiana, a “boy of nine whittled the wooden pegs for his mother’s coffin and looked on wonderingly when they took her away and buried her together with her secret.” 

Lincoln, of course. (124/368) 

(Nuts, I forgot to note what the secret was!)

Lincoln as a boy.