Margaret Bayard Smith Papers - Commonplace Books

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, and correspondence, 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.

 Smith’s diaries document her everyday life and observations from 1804 to 1807 and from 1829 to 1831.