Jefferson and Hamilton

by Claude G. Bowers

It was after their return from Europe that Mrs. Bingham moved into the imposing mansion on Third Street built on the ample grounds of her childhood home. All the arts of the architect, landscape gardener, and interior decorator had been drawn upon to make a fit setting for the mistress. The garden, with its flowers and rare shrubbery, its lemon, orange, and citron trees, its aloes and exotics, was shut off from the view of the curious, only mighty oaks and the Lombardy poplars visible above the wall—‘a magnificent house and gardens in the best English style.’[511] The furnishings were in keeping with the promise of the exterior. ‘The chairs in the drawing-room were from Seddon’s in London of the newest taste, the back in the form of a lyre, with festoons, of yellow and crimson silk,’ according to the description of an English tourist. ‘The curtains of the room a festoon of the same. The carpet, one of Moore’s most expensive patterns. The room papered in the French taste, after the style of the Vatican in Rome.’[512] The halls, hung with pictures selected with fine discrimination in Italy, gave a promise not disappointed in the elegance of the drawing-rooms, the library, the ballroom, card-rooms, and observatory.[513] To some this extravagant display of luxury was depressing, and Brissot de Warville, who was to return to Paris to die on the guillotine as a leader of the ill-fated party of the Gironde, held the

mistress of the mansion responsible for the aristocratic spirit of the town. It was a pity, he thought, that a man so sensible and amiable as Bingham should have permitted a vain wife to lead him to ‘a pomp which ought forever have been a stranger to Philadelphia.’ And all this display ‘to draw around him the gaudy prigs and parasites of Europe,’ and lead ‘to the reproach of his fellow citizens and the ridicule of strangers.’[514] But if the French republican was shocked, even so robust a democrat as Maclay was so little offended that he was able to write after dining at the mansion that ‘there is a propriety, a neatness, a cleanliness that adds to the splendor of his costly furniture and elegant apartments.’[515]

And ‘the dazzling Mrs. Bingham,’ as the conservative Abigail described her,[516] what of her? The elegance and beauty which has come down to us on canvas prepares us for the glowing descriptions of contemporaries. Hers was the type of patrician beauty that shimmered. She was above the medium height and well-formed, and in her carriage there was sprightliness, dignity, elegance, and distinction. Sparkling with wit, bubbling with vivacity, she had the knack of convincing the most hopeless yokel introduced into her drawing-room by the exigencies of politics that she found his personality peculiarly appealing. Daring at the card-table, graceful in the dance, witty in conversation even though sometimes too adept with the naughty devices of a Congreve dialogue, inordinately fond of all the dissipations prescribed by fashion, tactful in the selection and placing of her guests at table, she richly earned the scepter she waved so authoritatively over society.[517] What though she did sometimes stain her pretty lips with wicked oaths, she swore as daintily as the Duchess of Devonshire, and if she did seem to relish anecdotes a bit too spicy for a puritanic atmosphere, she craved not the privilege of breathing such air.[518]

Hers the consuming ambition to be the great lady and to introduce into American society the ideas and ideals of Paris and London. Did Jefferson gently chide her for her admiration of French women? Well—was she not justified? Did they not ‘possess the happy art of making us pleased with ourselves?’ In their conversation could they not ‘please both the fop and the philosopher?’ And despite their seeming frivolity, did not these ‘women of France interfere with the politics of the country, and often give a decided turn to the fate of empires?’ In this letter to the man she admired and liked, while loathing his politics, we have the nearest insight into the soul of the woman.[519]

But these graver ambitions were not revealed to many who observed her mode of life, her constant round of dissipations, her putting aside the responsibilities of a mother, leaving her daughters to their French governesses until the tragic elopement of Marie with a dissipated nobleman, and the apprehension of the pair after their marriage at the home of a milliner in the early morning. Hers were not the prim notions of the average American of her time. It was Otis, not she, who was shocked to find Marie so thinly dressed in mid-winter that he was ‘regaled at the sight of her whole legs for five minutes together,’ and wondered ‘to what height the fashion would be carried.’[520] Swearing, relating risqué stories, indulging in dissipations night after night, shaming her motherhood by her affected indifference or neglect, the fact remains that the breath of scandal never touched her until the final scene when in her early thirties they bore her on a stretcher from the home of her triumphs in the vain hope of prolonging her life in the soft air of the Bermudas.

And so to her dinners, dances, parties, the clever men of the Federalist Party flocked, with only a sprinkling of Jeffersonians, for, though Jefferson himself could always count on a gracious reception from the hostess, he was not comfortable among the other guests. Always the best was to be had there—and the newest. Did she not introduce the foreign custom of having servants announce the arriving guests, to the discomfiture of Monroe?

‘Senator Monroe,’ called the flunky.

‘Coming,’ cried the Senator.