Lawmakers’ Letters to Go on Display : History: The Library of Congress will exhibit mail between members of Congress and their spouses over the last 200 years.

Forget Gary Hart and Donna Rice--you don’t always need a politician and the other woman to titillate the imagination. Sometimes what goes on between a lawmaker and his wife is just as interesting.

And no less than the Library of Congress is offering a peep through the keyhole.

From September to March, the library will display some of the most personal mail that ever traveled between members of Congress and their wives over the last 200 years.

Yes, there was sex in Washington in the nation’s formative years. It’s described by Rep. Job Pierson (D-N.Y.) to his wife, Clarissa, on Dec. 17, 1834.

It seems Mrs. Pierson’s brother, a U.S. senator, seduced a maid the first week of her employment and “co-habitated with her during the whole session.”

“The other boarders were angry at this monopoly,” Pierson wrote. “They enticed some four or five girls from a house of ill-fame . . . who came there every night” until the landladies “ordered the servants to bar the doors against their admission.”

Other letters radiate laughter, sadness, courage, love, poignancy, fear and that old bromide that a gal stands by her man. There is only one woman--the late Rep. Clare Booth Luce (R-Conn.)--among the lawmakers featured in the exhibit, which is part of the library’s bicentennial celebration of Congress.

The letters discuss:

* The role of women. “Always be sunshine and flowers,” Pierson counseled Clarissa on Feb. 12, 1833, but never worry about “the price of wheat” because “such matters should be provided and regulated by the other sex.”

* Spousal wit. “Mark my magnanimity,” Elizabeth Woodbury wrote her Jacksonian Democrat husband, Sen. Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, on Jan. 3, 1830. “I here invest you with a carte-blanche, to bow to, to smile upon, or to flatter any lady you please, without doing penance for it on paper. . . . “

* Spousal support. “You have rendered the world the greatest service . . . you have used the power and opportunity . . . for humanity and democracy,” Belle Case La Follette wrote Sen. Robert M. La Follette (R-Wis.) on March 5, 1917. It was the eve of America’s entry into World War I and La Follette had just fought bitterly, under tremendous pressure, against President Woodrow Wilson’s proposal to arm U.S. merchant ships.

* Society ladies. Sen. Woodbury writing to Elizabeth on Dec. 19, 1829, that Miss Silsbee was “flat as a pancake.” Mrs. Munroe resembled “the elephant--her step an earthquake and her breath a storm.” And Mrs. Polk? “Thin as a hatchet and grown almost positively ugly.”

* The congressional pay raise of 1873. It was “pushed through the Senate during the final night using all sorts of parliamentary tricks,” according to Sen. Carl Schurz (R-Mo.). He wrote his wife, Margarethe, on March 5, 1873, “The entire operation was so shameless. . . . “

Unflattering views of Congress by those who served. “We dayly go to the Capitol at about eleven o’clock, do little or nothing and return at about three o’clock to dine,” Sen. Simeon Olcott wrote wife Tryphena, back in New Hampshire, on New Year’s Day 1802. Twenty-two years later Andrew Jackson, then a Democratic senator from Tennessee, wrote his wife, Rachel, “I am truly wearied with lounging here; doing nothing, but feeding on the public funds.”

John J. McDonough, a manuscript historian at the library, said the exhibit will attempt to “bring in the personal, more intimate aspect” of lawmakers’ lives into public view.

Most of the letters were written when members “didn’t bring their wives to Washington,” said Marvin Kranz, an American history specialist.

As the Civil War approached on Dec. 7, 1860, Whig Rep. Justin Smith Morrill informed his wife, Ruth, “I am put on the great committee to save the Union but I do not think it can be saved and I shall on Monday decline to serve. . . . “

The war was under way when Electa Dawes wrote Rep. Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts, on July 25, 1861, that “right will prevail” and “the colored man will have rights which will be recognized and respected.”

Four years later, on April 16, 1865, Dawes wrote his wife that he had attempted to call on President Abraham Lincoln two nights earlier, but “found he had gone to the theater.”

The news of the assassination arrived just as Dawes arrived home and he wrote, sadly, “I am at a funeral and the nation are mourners.”

The exhibit opens Sept. 13 in the foyer of the Library of Congress in Washington. It will run through March 17, 1991.