Free Margaret Truman by The President's House: 1800 to the Present : The Secrets, History of the World's Most Famous Home Page A

second term in 1812. The warm atmosphere at her parties and her ability to make each guest feel important worked wonders on the congressmen and senators who could have blocked his nomination. By that time, if Dolley were mean-spirited (she wasn’t), she might well have asked: “By the way, whatever became of that guy with the silly ideas about women—Tom Jefferson?”
    III
    Dolley Madison singlehandedly transformed the White House into a public platform for womanpower. The next first lady to take advantage of this breakthrough was Louisa Catherine Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams. Beautiful, charming, a gifted musician and writer, Louisa had only one problem: her husband. John Quincy had political ambitions, intense ones, but no political abilities whatsoever.
    When Adams became secretary of state under James Monroe, Louisa decided she was his only hope of winning the White House. She plunged boldly into the swirling social stream and emerged as her husband’s campaign manager, or perhaps a better term would be party chairman.
    Louisa began giving a weekly dinner party and launched “Mrs. Adams’s Tuesday nights” in which men and women mingled in a convivial atmosphere reminiscent of Dolley Madison’s drawing rooms. In 1822, Louisa topped everyone, including herself, with a New Year’s Eve party for five hundred.
    Thanks to Louisa, John Quincy Adams won the presidency in 1824. I wish I could say the result was four years of triumphant happiness. Alas, the opposite was the case. John Quincy proved to be a poor president. A lot of his problems arose from the close election, which was decided in the House of Representatives. Louisa’s partying paid dividends there, but Andrew Jackson, who won the popular vote, accused Adams of making a “corrupt bargain” with another contender, Kentuckian Henry Clay, to win his votes by making him secretary of state. The accusation wrecked Adams’s relations with Congress.
    Still, no one could take away Louisa’s triumph; to this day she remains the only female campaign manager to put her candidate in the White House.
    IV
    The White House has empowered women other than presidents’ wives. Among the least recognized members of this group are the women who operated as substitute or stand-in first ladies for bachelor or widowed presidents or for those whose wives were ill or simply not interested in serving as White House hostesses.
    The first of these stand-in first ladies was Andrew Jackson’s niece, Emily Donelson, who was married to her cousin, the president’s private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson. Although Emily was only twenty-one when she came to Washington, she had been born on a Tennessee plantation, and was unintimidated by either the size of the White House or its social responsibilities.
    Despite her busy family life—three of her four children were born at the White House—Emily did a good job as hostess and household manager. In addition to being a model of tact, she was one of the few people who was not afraid to stand up to the notoriously fierce-tempered Jackson.
    The next president, Martin Van Buren, was also a widower. He spent his first two years in the White House without a hostess. Then his son Abraham married a twenty-two-year-old South Carolina belle named Angelica Singleton, who soon took over the social side of the White House.
    Angelica was a niece of Dolley Madison’s—it was Dolley, in fact, who had masterminded her match with Abraham Van Buren—but in at least one respect Angelica lacked her aunt’s political savvy. During her honeymoon in Europe, she picked up a somewhat dubious custom. Instead of standing in a receiving line, getting her pretty hand mashed, she posed on a platform at the south end of the Elliptical Saloon with flowers in her arms and hair. She wore a gorgeous white dress and surrounded herself with a half dozen women friends, also in glowing