The first White House wedding for a presidents’ child 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.
Only nine days after the wedding ceremony, the first ball in their honor was sponsored by Commodore Stephen Decatur, a choleric, hugely popular American naval hero whose home fronted the prestigious Lafayette Square, just across from the White House. On the night of the event, horse-drawn carriages backed up the street while inside, eager guests moved from room to room, twisting their heads to get a look at the now famous newlyweds. Some later remarked that Commodore Decatur was curiously preoccupied that night, and well he should have been. He had rashly accepted a duel with a navy rival whom he had been disparaging for years as a coward. His opponent, he believed had avoided the War of 1812 by hiding in Europe. The following Wednesday, the two men lay on the ground next to each other, both wounded. A story made the rounds declaring that the rival had finally explained he could not afford passage home to fight in the war and that the whole feud had been a great misunderstanding.
The mortally-wounded body of Stephen Decatur would be carried back to that very drawing room where the newlyweds celebrated and within hours he would die. The “murder” of Stephen Decatur shocked the country. Congress was adjourned, flags were lowered to half-mast, and all receptions and celebrations in honor of the newlyweds were duly cancelled, thus ending abruptly the story of the first White House wedding. With no private occasions left to redress the hurt feelings of Washington, the exclusive nature of the original White House ceremony grew in infamy.
Ironically, the Administration of President James Monroe would become distinctly famous and retain a resilient relevance even to our present generation by its declaration of “the Monroe Doctrine,” which warned that any European or outside power interfering in the Western Hemisphere represented a threat to the United States itself. This doctrine has been continually and usefully invoked by presidencies in each succeeding generation. Still, one wonders if First Lady Elizabeth Monroe and first daughter, Eliza, the obdurate twins in the social battle of Washington, relentlessly lobbying the president about the conniving diplomats, unintentionally played their part in helping it along.
After being in the White House for eight years, the reclusive, invalid First Lady Elizabeth Monroe would live another five, finally dying at age sixty-two. President James Monroe would die the following year on the fourth of July, maintaining the tradition set by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who also passed away on the nation’s birthday. After the White House, George Hay and first daughter Eliza Monroe Hay would retire to Virginia. Only after the death of her father and husband did she again feel free to visit her royal friend, Hortense, in Europe. If Eliza was impressed with Hortense and needed the friendship for her own validation, Hortense apparently reveled in the admiration. The two ladies, each intoxicated by the presence of the other, journeyed to Rome and, in a private ceremony with Pope Gregory XVI, Eliza officially converted to the Catholic faith. In the deadly pattern of many other presidential children before and after, Eliza did not last long after the passing of her father. Still a young woman, she entered a convent and soon died, only three and a half years after the death of the President. She was buried in Paris, France, not far from the Montagne de Bon-Air, the prestigious seminary for women, which had so profoundly marked her life and made her such an advocate for its own narrow and pompous version of social propriety.
There is a macabre footnote to this story. The famous Madame Campan who headed the seminary was none other than the lady in waiting for Marie Antoinette who, along with her husband, King Louis XVI, was beheaded during the French Revolution. The citizens of France were apparently no more impressed with this court’s sense of propriety than were the American citizens who had been given only a small taste of it during the Monroe Administration.
Finally, the newlyweds, Samuel and Maria Gouvenuer, lived comfortably in New York City, thanks to President John Quincy Adams who, as a consummate politician and gentleman, repaid any political debt owed to the family by giving them all secure and lucrative government jobs. The controversial wedding, which for weeks galvanized the attention of Washington society and a number of European courts, would never quite be eclipsed. Maria spent the last years of her life as a plantation mistress, “safeguarding her family property in Virginia.” Her first child was born in the White House and lived less than a year. Her second child, also born in the White House was named after her father. She had two more children after her move to New York. She died at forty-seven.
(Text excepts from Doug Wead's New York Times best seller, All The President's Children.)
Doug Wead is a respected presidential historian and New York Times bestselling author. He has been an advisor to two presidents and served on senior staff at the White House of George Herbert Walker Bush. Recent titles include The Raising of a President: the Mothers and Fathers of Our Nation’s Leaders.
