Maria Monroe

The first White House wedding of a presidents' child.

Maria Monroe

Maria Hester Monroe and William N. Waller

March 9, 1820
A wedding marred by murder

The first White House wedding was a glittering candlelit affair of elegance and grace.  On March 9, 1820, James Monroe, the fifth American president, and First Lady Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, gave away their accomplished, seventeen-year-old daughter, Maria Hester, to Samuel Lawrence Gouverneur, her own first cousin and one of her father’s “junior” White House secretaries.  But if the event inside was glowing in warm candlelight, a cold, Washington rain lashed violently against the windows outside, a harbinger of the dark events that would soon taint what should have been one of the nation’s early, triumphal social events.  It is a tale of diplomatic intrigue, petty arrogance and murder.

There is still some question over exactly which room hosted the marriage ceremony, but most historians have settled comfortably on what was called “the Elliptical Saloon,” today’s “Blue Room,” with its grand view of the ellipse and the towering Washington Monument. The Rev. William Hawley, pastor of St. John’s Episcopal Church, located just across from the White House at the opposite corner of Lafayette Square, officiated at the ceremony.  Hawley, a controversial religious figure in his day with access to presidents that the nation would not again see until the Dr. Billy Graham, was a friend of John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler.

Following the ceremony, the company of forty-two close friends and relatives retired to the State Dining Room for a feast.  Only six years before, at the height of the War of 1812, British soldiers had burned the White House to the ground, so the furniture, much of it designed by the president himself, was made to order by Pierre-Antoine Bellange`, “the finest cabinet maker in Paris.”  Either by French law or at the insistence of the craftsman, the imposing crown of Louis XVIII had marked each handmade piece and had to be “carefully removed and replaced with an American eagle, at considerable expense.” The new magnificent gold French clocks, with their pendulums of nude ladies, had been refitted to better reflect sensitive, puritan American values.  Imported crimson silk, with a 50% surcharge for the color, was used in a new design covering the chairs and draping some of the windows. Special French lamps lit the Dining Room, where new golden urns overflowed with fresh fruit.  And of course, opposition members on Capitol Hill expressed outrage at the expense.

Congress however, had to wait in line to complain about the wedding of Maria Hester Monroe, for the event had somehow stirred resentment across the whole spectrum of Washington society, and especially within the international diplomatic community.  Supposedly, the great puppet master behind this turmoil was one of the most controversial and sometimes unfairly reviled of presidential children, Eliza Kortright Monroe Hay, Maria’s older sister.

History does not have an exact birth date for Eliza Monroe.  Their father’s diary, which bravely labors on about hundreds of irrelevant subjects, only tells us that she was born in Virginia, sometime in December, 1786.  She was seven years old when her father was appointed Minister to France.  It was in Paris that she would experience the defining moment of her forty-nine years, for Eliza would be enrolled in Madame Campan’s prestigious seminary for women, Montagne de Bon-Air in St. Germain and, for the rest of her days, the press would never let the public forget it.  When her father was returned to Paris on a second mission, namely to help negotiate the Louisiana Purchase,  Eliza was sent once again to Madame Campan’s, this time gaining a lifelong friend, Hortense Beauharnais, the daughter of Josephine Bonaparte and a step-daughter of the emperor Napoleon.  Eventually, Hortense would become the Queen of Holland and the mother to the enigmatic French emperor of the Third Republic, Napoleon III.  The friendships and experiences of continental Europe were to have a profound impact on James Monroe’s wife and Eliza, her eldest daughter.

In 1816, James Monroe, was elected president, succeeding James Madison. By that time, Eliza was a thirty-year-old woman, married to George Hay, a socially prominent New York attorney, and her little sister, Maria Hester, was a precocious fourteen-year-old. Their mother, Elizabeth Monroe, claiming poor health, virtually opted out of her role as First Lady, the awesome duties falling to Eliza, who was deemed eminently qualified, her Madame Campan’s imprimatur finally finding its purpose.  But there was a context to these events.  Monroe was succeeding James Madison, whose wife, Dolley, was arguably the most popular and successful First Lady in American history.  Not only was she the bon vivant of Washington society and its temperamental diplomatic corps, she had captured the hearts of the nation as well.  Dolley Madison, one must remember, introduced that tasty French novelty, the ice cream cone, to the nation, as a dessert at a State Dinner.  She was a hard act to follow.  And then, the city of Washington already had a picture of what life might be like under the Monroe’s, and it was not pretty.  They had lived in town for seven years and hardly entertained once.  Said an observer, “Both Mr. and Mrs. Monroe are perfect strangers, not only to me but to all of Washington.”

First Lady Elizabeth Monroe and her elder daughter, Eliza, closeted themselves to hammer out an arrangement for running the White House.  The practice of a First Lady calling on members of the diplomatic corps and Washington society was thrown out.  Elizabeth was an invalid and would not have her daughter running all over town, trolling for social engagements.  If someone had business with the White House they could call and, depending on the validity of the social inquiry, the White House would respond, just as would any court in Europe.  Diplomats posted to America who loved to complain about their trials, living in such a backwater?  Well, the Monroe White House would make them feel at home. Social informality was out.

What followed was a major war between Washington society and the Monroe White House. The First Lady’s receptions, hosted by the proper Eliza Monroe Hay, were boycotted by the Washington matrons, whose husbands stuttered disingenuous excuses for their suddenly “ill” wives. But the more serious problem was the outraged diplomatic corps.  So troublesome did the issue become that it was often raised in cabinet meetings, with gentle, tentative feelers put out to the President to rein in his two stubborn women.  But such approaches went nowhere.

And so, the scene was set for the wedding of an innocent, plain, big-boned, seventeen-year-old Maria Hester Monroe (her name was pronounced “Mariah,” the old Welsh pronunciation,)  and the dashing, twenty-one-year-old White House staffer, Samuel Gouverneur.  When older sister, Eliza Monroe Hay, learned that the young lovers were busily making plans and that a Russian diplomat had actually inquired when diplomats might “pay their respects,” Eliza was roused to action.  Claiming that affairs of state and protocol trumped any of the young couple’s wedding ideas she successfully took charge of the event. By the time Eliza was finished, “not even the cabinet was invited.” Samuel Gouverneur would deeply resent this wound to his young bride.  Shouldn’t she be allowed to make her own decisions and invite whom she wished?  But with the reclusive First Lady approving each move, Eliza prevailed.  The wedding of Maria Hester Monroe became yet another casualty in their ongoing war with Washington.

Eventually, with the likely interference of the President himself, arrangements were finally made for two wedding receptions the week following the ceremony, but the senior Monroe women gleefully succeeded in bumping the despised diplomatic corps out of these as well.  Louisa Adams, the cultured wife of then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, would confide to her diary in frustration and sadness that Eliza Monroe, the relentless older sister, was “so proud and so mean I scarcely ever met such a compound.”

Maria and Samuel’s best chance at escaping the Washington social war and asserting their own personalities, putting their own stamp on their wedding, lay in a series of private celebrations that would occur after the White House events had run their course.  Here, they could encourage their respective hosts to invite whomever they wished and, thus, all of American society and even some of “the hated” diplomats would be touched and welcomed.  

Read the whole story: All the Presidents' Children