Margaret Hodge, Mrs. John B. Bayard (1780). Charles Willson Peale (American, 1741-1827). Oil on canvas. Milwaukee Art Museum.
Margaret was the mother of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778-1844), an American author of novels, short stories, and articles. Her literary reputation, however, comes primarily from a collection of her letters and notebooks written from 1800 to 1841 and published in 1906 by Gaillard Hunt as The First Forty Years of Washington Society.