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223  Prologue 1. John Quincy Adams, Diary, March 14, 1820. Microfilm, P-54, reel 34, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 2. Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 150. 3. Mrs. Phoebe Warren Tayloe, Benjamin Ogle Tayloe. In Memoriam (Washington, D.C.: privately printed, 1872), 161. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. General Solomon Van Renssalaer to Harriet Van Renssalaer, Washington, D.C., March 20, 1820, in Benson J. Lossing, The Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1868), 942n. 7. Georgetown National Messenger, March 24, 1820. 8. Essex Register (Salem, Mass.), March 29, 1820. 9. Salem (Mass.) Gazette, March 28, 1820 10. Louisa Catherine Adams to John Adams, March 23, 1820, Adams Papers, Letters Received and Other Loose Papers, reel 449. 11. John Adams to Louisa Catherine Adams, May 8, 1820, Letterbook, August 18, 1819–20 to February 1825, Adams Papers, reel 124. 12. Essex Register, March 29, 1820. 13. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 79–80. 14. Smith, First Forty Years, 150. 15. John Sergeant to his wife, Washington, D.C., March 24, 1820, Society Small Collection, Box 33, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 16. National Messenger, March 27, 1820 17. Essex Register, April 1, 1820. 18. Undated ms., Decatur Family Papers, folder 22, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 19. Josephine Seaton, William Winston Seaton of the National Intelligencer: A Biographical Sketch (1871; rpt. Arno Press and New York Times, 1970), p. 148. 20. Louisa Catherine Adams to John Adams, March 24, 1820, Adams Family Papers, reel 449. 21. John Quincy Adams, Diary, March 24, 1820, reel 54; Tayloe, In Memoriam, 163. 22. Essex Register, April 1, 1820. 23. Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, Life of Stephen Decatur, Commodore in the U.S. Navy (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846), 332n. 24. John Quincy Adams, Diary, March 22 and 24, 1820, reel 54. 25. Richard Rush to Charles Jared Ingersoll, London, June 4, 1820, Charles Jared Ingersoll Papers, Richard Rush Letters, Correspondence: March, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 26. Louisa Catherine Adams to John Adams, March 24, 1820. 224 notes to pages 9–18 Chapter 1 1. James N. Arnold, ed., Vital Records for Rhode Island, vol. 10, Town and Church (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Company, 1898), 445, 453, 496. The dates of Priscilla and Stephen’s wedding (September 26, 1751) and young Stephen’s baptism (June 6, 1752), suggest that Priscilla may have been pregnant at the time of the marriage, which was hardly unusual in this period. Most sources give the American-born Stephen’s birth year as 1751, which would indicate that he was born well before his baptism date, even granting that until 1753 the New Year was celebrated on March 25, not January 1. Perhaps his parents neglected to baptize him at birth; or perhaps they waited a respectable time to give the appearance of legitimacy. 2. Stephen Decatur Sr. to Joseph Cowperthwait, February 27, 1774, Decatur Family Papers, folder 00, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 3. Note of Priscilla Twiggs, niece, in Twiggs Family Notebook, folder 22, Decatur Family Papers. 4. Richard Rush to Susan Decatur, May 22, 1840, in Mackenzie, Decatur, 357. 5. Mackenzie, Decatur, 14. 6. Charles Lee Lewis, The Romantic Decatur (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1937), 17. 7. William M. P. Dunne makes the case that the Barron-Decatur feud stemmed from remarks Barron made later about Decatur breaking his engagement to Mary King, Rufus King’s granddaughter. Also during this time, Decatur may have had an altercation with a prostitute. According to a newspaper article in the Wilmington (Delaware) Daily Commercial of December 22, 1874, young Decatur argued with a prostitute and then killed her. His prosecution was prevented by two skillful lawyers, John Sergeant and a man identified only as Bedford, who also managed to keep word of this affair out of the newspapers, and indeed out of the historical record. Should it be believed? Neither Dunne, Decatur’s most scrupulous recent biographer , nor Charles Lee Lewis, his only authoritative twentieth-century biographer, has been able to find any more substantiation apart from the 1874 news clipping. See Lewis, Romantic Decatur, 271n5; William M. P. Dunne, “Pistols and Honor: The James Barron–Stephen Decatur Conflict, 1798–1807,” American Neptune 50 (Fall 1990), 245. I am indebted to Martin Zell, docent...

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