Husband of Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1792-1868)
Born in Buckfield, Maine in 1792, Seba Smith attended Bowdoin College and began a career in journalism in the 1820s, and would eventually become nationally famous for his Letters of Jack Downing, a satire on contemporary politics. The illustrated image of Downing appears in the 1820s as the figure we know today as "Uncle Sam."
While his marriage to Elizabeth Oakes Prince in 1823 seems to have been arranged somewhat by her mother and step-father, the Smiths, as a couple, were successful both in domestic and professional senses. Elizabeth Oakes Smith's point of view of her husband varies considerably from the early letters she wrote to him in Boston as he arranged the publication of one of the early editions of the Jack Downing letters to later reminiscences of their marriage recorded in her unpublished autobiography.
Image courtesy of Ed Gilman and Louise Barker.