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residence nearby in an elegant brick mansion, Octagon House. The story of her White House heroics, particularly her rescue of Washington’s portrait, swept the country, inspiring an outburst of patriotic fervor.
    In Maryland a local orator proclaimed: “The spirit of the nation is aroused.” Men rushed to volunteer for the Army, and when the British fleet tried to capture Baltimore, a furious nightlong cannonade from Fort McHenry beat them off. The battle inspired a vociferous antiwar critic of the Madisons, Francis Scott Key, to write a song called “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Labeled appeasers, the Federalist Party virtually went out of business.
    Three months later, a shattering victory over another British invasion fleet on Lake Champlain convinced the King’s men to talk peace. Wearing her trademarks, the feathered satin turban and the gold chains, Dolley presided over a reunited nation. Even the new British minister, invited to one of her Octagon House galas, was forced to admit: “She looked every inch a queen.”
    The sheer dimensions of Dolley’s mastery introduced a new problem into the First Ladies’ story—how to follow such a performance. Her successor, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, made a mistake which we will see repeated in our own time: she reacted
against
Dolley’s democratic style and became the first example of a First Lady who set the wrong tone for her husband’s administration.
    A New York beauty, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Elizabeth and her presidential husband were in charge of rebuilding and refurbishing the incinerated White House. As a result of her years spent in Paris when James Monroe was American ambassador there, she loved things French. (The French had reciprocated, worshipfully calling her
La belle Américaine)
In private, she often spoke French to her husband and daughters. She and the President filled the mansion with French furniture, some of it their own, in the restrained style of the 1780s and 1790s, the rest in the more flamboyant Empire style of Napoleon’s era.
    Although the Monroes began their administration with a magnificent and popular reception in the restored White House on NewYear’s Day, 1818, their entertaining slid swiftly downhill. Elizabeth found Washington dismally provincial—which it almost certainly was in 1818 and to some extent still is. Here is a glimpse of what she had to contend with at a typical White House reception, as seen by a contemporary newspaperman: “The secretaries, senators, foreign ministers, consuls, auditors, accountants, officers of the army and navy of every grade, farmers, merchants, parsons, priests, lawyers, judges, auctioneers and nothingarians crowd to the President’s house every Wednesday evening, some in shoes, most in boots and many in spurs… some with powdered heads, some frizzled and oiled; some whose heads a comb has never touched, half hid by dirty collars, reaching far above their ears, stiff as pasteboard.”
    Elizabeth found this assortment hard to take and entertained as little as possible. She spent months away from the White House, visiting her married daughters—which meant no women could come to the Executive Mansion while it lacked a lady chaperone. Fuming congressional wives and daughters never had a chance to unpack much less display their party dresses. When and if they finally received an invitation from the First Lady, they were intimidated by her fifteen-hundred-dollar Paris ensembles. All her clothes came from France.
    The dark-haired, queenly Elizabeth was forty-eight when she became First Lady but looked thirty-something. One woman visitor became positively indignant when she was introduced to the First Lady’s twelve-year-old granddaughter (who looked, she said, eighteen or nineteen). There was only one explanation, the already outraged ladies of Washington concluded: the First Lady was using “paint”—a shocking accusation in 1818, when cosmetics had an aura of immorality. Although