Anne “Nancy” Shippen Livingston Papers - Diaries

Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844) was a Washington novelist and the wife of Samuel Harrison Smith, editor of the Jeffersonian National Intelligencer, and later a banker and Treasury department official. The Smiths moved to Washington in 1800, during the city’s first decade as the nation’s capital, and remained there, at the heart of the city’s political and social circles, for the rest of their lives. Smith produced diaries, commonplace books, correspondence, and miscellany, all of which document her observations and participation in political and social circles in Washington, presidential elections, visits to Jefferson’s Monticello, and the British attack on Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812. 

Margaret Bayard Smith kept many of these commonplace books, and her relatives, Ann Smith and Susan B. Smith, created some of these books as well. Commonplace books were a way to collect notes, ideas, poetry, quotations, drawings, and other information.