After the American Revolutionary War, she again took her place among the most prominent Philadelphian socialites, establishing a salon of the Republican Court of leading intellectuals and political figures.

She sold the Powel House and lived on Chestnut Street near Independence Hall for the last three decades of her life; she died on January 17, 1830, and was buried beside her husband at Christ Church.

Rumors in 1768 spoke of Elizabeth's supposed engagement to John Dickinson, a man ten years her senior and author of the widely circulated Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania.

On a piece of black bordered paper, Powel wrote of one of her sons:Beneath his Hillocks narrow bound A lovely Infant lies, Till the last Trumpet shakes the Ground And rolls away the Skies From all the Chequer'd Ills below Sammy secure shall sleep His little Heart no Pain shall know, His Eyes no more shall weep.

"[32] French nobleman François-Jean de Chastellux recalled that, "contrary to American custom," rather than her husband as the foremost political thinker of the house, "she plays the leading role in the family".

"[34] With her husband, Powel created events and gatherings in their Society Hill home that included discussions about important aspects of the founding of the United States government.

His diary records the dishes served to guests: "curds and creams, jellies, sweetmeats of all sorts, twenty kinds of tarts, truffles, floating-island, sylabubs, etc., in fact everything that could delight the eye or allure the taste.

[46] When British troops withdrew from the city, Elizabeth emerged among the most prominent Philadelphian socialites of the post-revolution period, establishing the Philadelphia salon of the Republican Court from the leading intellectual and political figures of colonial America.

[47][48] As the foundations of the new nation were established, the Republican Court played a key role in facilitating political affiliation and communication, in addition to cementing the social status and personal reputation of the aristocratic elite, as they adapted to the emerging democratic society.

To urge Washington to reconsider, she wrote a long letter using both her own words, and borrowed passages from The Secret History of the Court of Berlin, a political treatise written by the French nobleman Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau.

[31][58] Her letter reads in part: The Antifederalist would use [retirement] as an argument for dissolving the Union, and would urge that you, from experience, had found the present system a bad one, and had, artfully, withdrawn from it that you might not be crushed under its ruins ... For God's sake do not yield that empire to a love of ease, retirement, rural pursuits, or a false diffidence of abilities ...[58] After minor grammatical edits from her husband, Powel sent the letter on November 17, 1792, and Washington was reelected a month after.

[81] The property in Blockley Township included a Greek Revival country home, built by Elizabeth in the early 1800s, which John expanded in 1824–25 with designs from architect William Strickland.

[74] When the War of 1812 broke out, her love for her country and strong hatred for the British became clear as she wrote: Certainly the English are a proud, cruel sordid tyrannic selfish nation, as they have evinced by their brutal conduct in Asia, Africa, America, Ireland, Denmark, and in Scotland ...

Contrast what I have alledged as strictly true, with the real pretensions of the American Army, which is generally composed of the yeomanry of our country, respectable citizens, industrious well informed tradesmen who have families and property to protect, professional men of various descriptions, and some highminded generous gentlemen of independent fortune [who], although they are not designated by titular distinctions, have just claims to great personal nobility.

To her sister Mary, she wrote in December 1783 that Chesterfield "mistook appetite for love and regarded the object of his inclinations only as it could contribute to the gratification of his vicious desires."

[90] In a circa 1784 letter to Maria Page, Mary's recently married daughter, Powel warned of the dangers of men who, from personal opinion and unchecked adherence to custom, "do not love to find a competitor" in their spouse.

[Women] are quick at expedient, ready in the moment of sudden exigencies, excellent to suggest, but their imagination runs riot; it requires the vigor of mind alone possessed by men to digest and put in force a plan of any magnitude.

[92]However, although customary among salonnières and bluestockings to avoid politics as a subject, Powel did not restrain herself from expressing her opinions about the aptitude of the country's leaders and the direction of its progress.

She wrote to him on the subject of religion, saying at one time of David Hume and of deist philosophers generally, that they were like a person who would leave a family homeless by knocking down their house without providing shelter, arguing that the foundations of the home were not solid.

She later wrote of the incident: "I most solemnly assured him that the estate of the modest virtuous Protestant Powel should not by any agency of mine be transmitted to any descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton".

Upon her death in 1830, she left a 20-year annuity of $100[h] to the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, along with a message to be included in their minutes, reading in part: I abhor slavery under any modification and consider the practice of holding our fellow creatures in bondage alike inconsistent with the principles of humanity and the free republic institutions ...

I feel it to be the duty of every individual to cooperate by all honourable means in the abolition of slavery, and in the restoration of freedom to that important part of the family of mankind, which has so long groaned under oppression.

[3]The following month, the anecdote was reprinted in several Federalist newspapers, including the Middlebury Mercury in Vermont, The Spectator in New York, the Alexandria Advertiser in Virginia, and the Newburyport Herald in Massachusetts.

[52][104] McHenry's journal on the Constitutional Convention first appeared in print, in its entirety including the footnote mentioning Powel, in the April 1906 issue of The American Historical Review.

[30][109] Hilmar Baukhage, in his remarks at a 1940 alumni symposium at the University of Chicago, attributes the question to a woman who stuck her head out of a window as the delegates were coming out on to the streets of Philadelphia.

Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch's book, A Republic, If You Can Keep It, published in September 2019, did not mention Powel[30] and instead attributes the question to a "passerby" who posed it to Franklin as he exited the Constitutional Convention.

[113] The same month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while announcing the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, attributed the question to "Americans gathered on the steps of Independence Hall".

[31] In late 2016 or early 2017, a descendant of John Hare found a previously undiscovered cache of documents belonging to Powel in a false bottom trunk.

The essay concludes that the painting portrays her in a revealing invented yellow dress as a bereaved mother in the 1780s, rather than a grieving widow at the age of 50 as the date of its commissioning would suggest.

[127] When it was acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1912, the portrait was believed to be the work of John Singleton Copley, a claim that was refuted by Charles Henry Hart in 1915.