In the dress, as in the manners of the social leaders of that day there was but little of "republican simplicity." Everything was perforce imported from Europe, as America had no manufactures of dress stuffs, or anything else; and European fashions therefore avenged the defeat of English arms by their arbitrary rule, though they were a trifle late in their appearance after they had been set in their native countries. The words of Mrs. Stoddert upon her _coiffure_ are of interest in this connection:
"Instead of a wig," writes the lady in question, "I have a bando, which suits me much better. I had it in contemplation to get a wig, but I have got what I like much better for myself. It is called a bando. I think the former best for those who dress in a different style from myself, but the latter suits me best. I heard the ladies with whom I was in company last night say that the fashionable manner of dressing the hair was more like the Indians the hair without powder and looked sleek and hung down the forehead in strings. Mine will do that to a nicety. I observe powder is scarcely worn, only, I believe, by those who are gray--too much so to go without powder, I mean. How those ladies in the Indian fashion dress their hair behind I cannot say; but those out of that fashion that I have seen, and who do not wear wigs, have six or eight curls on their neck, and turn up the rest and curl the ends, which I think looks very pretty when well done."
John Adams, as all readers of our history know, believed, or affected to believe, that Washington possessed dangerously aristocratic tendencies which threatened to overthrow the most cherished of the new democratic ideals; and Senator Maclay, who was also inimical to the president, presumed on one occasion to go to a New Year's reception at the government house "in top boots and my worst clothes." "Anti-republican and dangerous precedents" were the epithets applied by Mr. Adams to the "birthnight ball" offered by the people of Philadelphia to General Washington, and declined as a personal compliment by the president of the United States,--the distinction may seem somewhat fine but was thus made at the time,--and so the social warfare went on. That the adherents of the more primitive methods were doomed to defeat it needed no extraordinary powers of vaticination to discern; but, though there was much talk of "the precedent of court manners at the Capital," no one seems to have understood the very evident fact that the centralization of society necessarily effected by the location of the government was sure to bring about the court atmosphere.