Presidential Families, Coverage of

Early Depictions

It was not until the mid-nineteenth-century birth of photography that likenesses of the President's wife and children, along with feature stories about their activities, became part of the accepted fare of the news media. Prior to that time presidential families received relatively little attention, although they were not exempt from accusations of misconduct by partisan newspapers. In general when wives of the first Presidents received press attention, opposition editors used them as surrogates for attacks on their husbands.

Martha Washington was berated for riding in an elegant coach more suited for a queen than for the wife of George Washington, the first President of a republic. Abigail Adams was pictured unflatteringly as the power behind her husband John. Even Dolley Madison, although almost universally praised for her skills as a hostess, did not escape newspaper criticism. She was falsely accused of having been the mistress of President Thomas Jefferson, to further the career of her husband James Madison, who followed Jefferson as President in 1809. Rachel Jackson, who died before Andrew Jackson was inaugurated as President in 1829, was maligned by Jackson's enemies in the press as an adulterer and bigamist because the couple had married by mistake before her divorce was final from her first husband.

In the decades immediately before the Civil War, some presidential spouses shrank from public view. When she died in 1841, Letitia Tyler, the invalid wife of President John Tyler, was mentioned only briefly in newspapers as a wife, mother, and Christian. By contrast her successor, the youthful Julia Gardiner Tyler, with whom Tyler eloped in 1844, determinedly cultivated a reporter for the New York Herald, a prime example of the new penny press that was supplanting partisan newspapers by printing human interest content. To her delight, the Herald called her the “Lovely Lady Presidentress” and claimed she was superior to Queen Victoria. But Margaret Taylor, the invalid wife of President Zachary Taylor, refused even to sit for her portrait. She was so little known to the public that when Taylor died in office in 1850 an engraver eager to sell depictions of the deathbed scene covered her face with a handkerchief because he had no idea what she looked like. Jane Pierce, the wife of President Franklin Pierce, stayed secluded in the White House in mourning for the death of her son in 1852. (Illustrating yet another link between White House families, Pierce was the great-great-great uncle of Barbara Pierce Bush, wife of George H. W. Bush and mother of George W. Bush.)

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