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1  “The navy has lost its mainmast” T he peach blossoms were early in 1820. Just three days after spring began, Friday, March 24, the buds opened, weeks before their usual time. Washington sorely needed spring. January had been the coldest in eight years. February brought snow. March had been cold, rainy, and raw. Emotionally and politically it had also been a hard winter. The economy staggered under an economic depression, while Congress considered the fate of the nation itself. The question of Missouri— should it be admitted as a slave state, or could Congress prohibit slavery in this new member of the Union?—had exploded into a question of the country ’s future. Anxious men and women, black and white, crowded the galleries to hear Congress debate their future. A Virginia senator, representing the home state of George Washington and James Madison, proposed to senators from Massachusetts, home of John Adams, that the states begin discussing ways to dissolve the Union. It was a union that had lasted forty-four years, though its life seemed to be ebbing. Its past was slipping away. On March 14, receiving the news that George III had died at the end of January, John Quincy Adams reflected that the old king had reigned for sixty years, and that perhaps half a million Americans, including himself, had once been his subjects. Of the fifty-six men who had signed the Declaration of Independence, “only four are at this day numbered among the living. John Adams of Massachusetts, my father. Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, William Floyd of New York and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland.”1 With these patriarchs would go the memory of the past; America’s future seemed very much in doubt. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President James Monroe found himself at the center of an etiquette war, which had erupted over the question of whether his wife and daughters should call on the wives of ambassadors. Not as explosive as the prospect of the Union shattering, this social impasse at the White House nevertheless prevented the personal social encounters that enabled the political process to work smoothly. Even his daughter Maria ’s wedding, to her cousin Samuel Gouverneur of New York, had escalated the tension. Monroe’s eldest daughter, Eliza Monroe Hay, had forbidden the ambassadors’ wives to call on her younger sister, as they had not previously called on her. So the first White House wedding, on March 9, of these two cousins separated, north and south, by geography, was a private affair. 2 prologue Washington came together that month not in celebration but in sorrow when illness struck the Calhoun household. Floride and John Calhoun’s young daughter, Elizabeth, took sick in March, and the Washington ladies, still feuding over etiquette, joined together to nurse the girl and give her anxious parents a rest. President Monroe called every day, and his imperious daughter Eliza Hay sat up night after night with little Elizabeth. Even on the Saturday evening when Commodore and Mrs. Stephen Decatur were holding an elegant ball in honor of her sister’s wedding, Eliza sat up with the Calhouns . Floride protested that Eliza’s place was with her sister, but she was rebuffed. President Monroe himself insisted that Eliza, “the best nurse in the world,” should spend the evening by Elizabeth’s bedside. Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of the secretary of state, and other Washington women faithfully ministered at the Calhoun home, not because the brilliant and handsome John Calhoun was secretary of war, and possibly a future president, but because he and Floride were “really beloved.”2 To relieve the atmosphere of gloom, Commodore and Mrs. Decatur planned an elegant ball at their mansion on Lafayette Square. With the White House no longer Washington’s social center, the Decaturs had made their home, designed by Benjamin Latrobe and built with Decatur’s prize money won by capturing the British frigate Macedonian in 1812, the heart of Washington society. None who had been in the capital eight years earlier could forget the night that the navy secretary’s son, Lieutenant Archibald Hamilton , had arrived with the captured Macedonian’s flag at a Washington party at Tomlinson’s Hotel in honor of other naval heroes: Isaac Hull of the Constitution , Charles Stewart of the Constellation, Jacob Jones of the Wasp. At nine the doors had opened suddenly, and in came young Hamilton, who had ridden nonstop from Connecticut, carrying the trophy. His father and...

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