Frances Few was a niece of Hannah Nicholson Gallatin, wife of Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. Born in 1789, Frances was raised in elite New York City society, well-educated, and long-lived. She died in Hastings-on-Hudson at 95, the widow of Albert A. Chrystie, an attorney with interests in commerce and agriculture. During the winter of 1808-1809, a nineteen-year-old Frances spent the winter in Washington with her aunt and uncle. The diary she kept during that visit was later transcribed by Noble E. Cunningham and published in the Journal of Southern History (1963). It is a frank and insightful recounting of her time in the capital, and it includes observations on the two dinners she attended with the Gallatins at the President’s House. The second dinner, held on 13 February 1809, included among its 18 guests, the four cabinet families. Of that dinner, Frances wrote only one line and that was about Dolley Madison’s sister, fellow diner Anna Payne Cutts, whom she considered “the most disgusting low-bred I ever saw.”
Of the first dinner, Frances wrote more extensively. That one was held on 19 October 1808 before Congress opened and, as with the second dinner, was most likely preceded by a printed invitation sent to the Gallatin home on Capitol Hill a few days earlier. Among the 12 guests who dined that day were Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith, his wife, Margaret Smith, architect William Thornton of the patent office, his wife, Anna Brodeau Thornton, and the family of Franklin Wharton of the Navy Yard.
Frances wrote that they were invited to dine with Jefferson at half past three. “We arrived and were shewn by a servant into a room and received by Mr. Jeffersons secretary Mr. Coles an agreeable and genteel young man. After a while the President made his appearance he bowed and the strangers present were named to him—he then took a seat himself and his example was followed by the gentlemen who since his entrance had all been standing—he joined in the conversation but did not monopolize it—in about half an hour dinner was announced and we were handed into another room.” The room was either the Public Dining Room, now the Family Dining Room, west of the north entrance, and used for larger and more stately dinners, or the Common Dining Room, now the Green Room, on the east side of the South Portico. “Without the least ceremony,” wrote Frances of the president, “he seated himself at the head of the table and immediately began to help himself and those around him.”
The menu at the President’s House typified fashionable upper-class Southern society in the early 1800s, as did the time for dining. Dinners of that day were extensive, those of the elite, even more so. A formal table might include nine or ten large dishes, with several smaller ones scattered on the cloth among them. Foreign visitors, impressed by American abundance, reported soups, several types of meat, assorted vegetables, tarts, stewed fruit, and decanters of wine. Catharine Akerly Mitchill, a guest on 29 March 1806, wrote to her sister that “there was not a profusion of Dishes on the table. He gives, however, plenty of food, well cook’d, and served up in elegant stile. All the vegetables were in silver Basons or Dishes with covers. The rest was on China Dishes.” Frances did not record the food served on 19 October, but Mannasah Cutler wrote in 1802 of a menu that included rice soup, “a round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, loin of veal, cutlets of mutton or veal, fried eggs, fried beef” and “a pie called macaroni.” “When the desert appear’d,” wrote Mitchill of her dinner, “the baked ice cream attracted my attention” The tablecloth was then removed followed by a third course consisting of “dried fruit of all kinds, Oranges and Olives.”
According to Frances, the man at the head of the table was distinguished from his guests only by “the shabbiness of his dress.” Jefferson’s presidential wardrobe caused many a rough comment from Federalists and foreign diplomats, but indications are that his apparel was never otherwise. Years before, Thomas Shippen of Philadelphia, while visiting Paris, attended court with Jefferson, noting that he was “the plainest man in the room, and the most destitute of ribbands crosses and other insignia of rank.” But Jefferson’s informality in dress and manner contributed to the success of the dinners, as did its lack of affectation. Dinner was served family style at a large mahogany table (not a circular one as sometimes written). There were no place cards. Guests sat where they might. No blessings were said. No toasts given. This was Jefferson in his element and the dinners he held three or four times a week for a dozen or so guests were models of gracious hosting. As Mitchill wrote about her evening with the president, “Every person appear’d perfectly at their ease, and conversed with as much freedom as they would have done in their own houses.”
After dessert, Frances and the other female guests retired to another room, leaving the men to linger at the table before joining the women for tea and coffee. Such a separation of the sexes after dessert was common practice, and one that lingered in the capital until the 1950s, but according to Louisa Catherine Adams, at least some of Jefferson’s dinners concluded with everyone retiring to the drawing room “in the french fashion, Ladies and Gentlemen together.” In either case, tea and coffee signaled an end to the evening, carriages were called for, and guests made their way home.
Frances Few stayed with the Gallatins long enough to attend the inauguration of James Madison on 4 March 1809, where “Mr Jefferson appeared one of the most happy among this concourse of people.” She left the capital on 8 March, and although her Uncle Albert went on to serve in the Madison cabinet, Frances did not return for another visit. Despite opportunities to dine with the president and mingle with the political elite of Washington, she decided during her visit that there was no place like home. “I am not fitted to scuffle through the world,” Frances wrote the month before leaving and it appears that it was a learned view of herself from which she did not waver.
Further Reading
Noble E. Cunningham, ed., Jr., “Diary of Frances Few, 1808-1809,” Journal of Southern History (1963), 345-361.
Catherine Akerly Cock Mitchill Family Papers, 1806-1936, manuscript division, Library of Congress.
William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL.D., 2 vols. (Cincinnati, 1888; repr. Athens, Ohio, 1987).
Katharine Graham, Katharine Graham’s Washington (New York, 2002).
Judith S. Graham and others, eds., Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, 2 vols. [Cambridge, Mass., 2013].
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Appendix II: Dinner Guest Records, Volume 44 through 49 (to continue through the run of volumes).
