by James Traub
During Adams’ tenure, Congress appropriated funds for dozens of projects to repair and extend the Cumberland Road, to improve harbors and breakwaters, and to build or repair docks. In some cases the government provided public land for new work, and in others it subscribed to stock offerings by private companies. In 1828, Secretary Rush reported that the federal government had spent $14 million on public works, a record of improvement that would not be reached again for a generation. Nevertheless, Adams’ vision of a systematic national program employing tens or even hundreds of thousands of men never materialized during his presidency.
It is tempting to speculate what would have happened had Henry Clay slipped into contention in the House and then dealt himself, rather than Adams, the winning hand. Clay shared Adams’ convictions about the central role of the state in refashioning America, but he knew better than Adams how to make himself understood. He not only knew but cared about what the political market would bear. And he knew men: he knew who to befriend and who to fight. In short, Clay accepted politics for the fallen endeavor that it is. He might have made a much better president than Adams did. He probably thought as much. But to his great credit, he appears never to have said so to anyone.
CHAPTER 24
An Arrow to the Heart
(1825–1827)
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS AWOKE IN DARKNESS ALMOST EVERY DAY of his tenure in the White House. He rose as early as four in the summer and perhaps an hour later in the winter. He would dress and then leave the White House for a long, solitary walk—a habit he had cultivated for many years. At the far end of the President’s Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue and soon to be renamed Lafayette Park, lay a number of fine buildings, including St. John’s Episcopal Church and the splendid brick mansion built by Commodore Stephen Decatur, at one time the finest private home in Washington. From there, Adams would either turn left, for Georgetown, or right to the Capitol. The first route took him along the broad but still unpaved path of Pennsylvania Avenue, lined with rooming houses, taverns, shops, and warehouses, until he crossed the Potomac to the elegant village of Georgetown, with its long blocks of brownstones. The path in the opposite direction was more desolate. He would walk all the way around the Capitol, whose interior the architect Bulfinch was still finishing.
The president would have seen few people, if any, on these journeys through the darkened city. That suited Adams perfectly well. He was a solitary man who was most comfortable in his own company, brooding over his own thoughts, reflecting on his own destiny, reminding himself of his failures, praying for success in his ventures. He was a short man, balding and stubby, indifferently dressed, and he would have passed unnoticed as he moved swiftly along the streets of the nation’s capital. Returning to the White House, Adams would stand before the great window of the East Room to watch the sunrise. Louisa was asleep upstairs. Often she spent the whole day confined to her bedroom. She was frequently ill, almost always melancholy. Even a less self-absorbed man than Adams would have been pierced by such pervasive gloom. Yet Louisa’s name rarely even appears in his journal during his presidential years. His mind was on his work.
Adams had no staff. His son John acted as his secretary, running errands and occasionally copying letters or documents. There was no one to screen visitors; Adams believed that as chief executive of a republic he was obliged to meet with any citizen who took the trouble to reach his doorstep. On one not atypical day in late 1826, when he was hoping to finish his annual message to Congress, he received a visit from a Mrs. Weeden, who said that if she couldn’t pay her rent, her landlord would seize her furniture. “Of such visitors I have many,” Adams sighed. Then Dr. Glendy, a Presbyterian minister, came to ask for the post of House chaplain, which was then filled. Dr. Glendy offered an interminable account of his personal history, which the president did not interrupt. Then General Brown, the army chief of staff, came by to introduce a new infantry commander. Secretary Barbour brought over a copy of the War Department’s budget and raised various personnel issues—the assistant surgeon who had been cashiered and reinstated, the lieutenant who had gone absent without leave. Nothing, it seems, was too small for the president’s attention.
Adams had a back-breaking reading load, for he received newspapers, letters from around the country, reports from the various cabinet departments, “memorials, petitions, solicitations for office,” requests for personal loans or subscriptions. He had to approve every court-martial and appoint military officers and postmasters. If a message to Congress was to be written, there was no one to write it but him. And of course he had to keep up his journal and his personal correspondence. After dinner at around five, he might play some billiards and then go back to his papers. It was often midnight before he extinguished his candle. He had so little time for himself that on three separate occasions he simply stopped keeping his journal, leaving gaps of nine months in his presidency.
Adams was then fifty-seven years old, but his stamina was undiminished. He had worked a killing pace his whole life; he thought of himself as a man whose greatest gift was his capacity for “drudgery.” His cabinet members, most of whom considered themselves quite hardworking, sometimes cursed the fate that had brought them to labor alongside this relentless taskmaster. Treasury Secretary Rush called Adams, only half-jokingly, “our worthy little master,” and soon found that he was working himself to the bone. Rush begged to be sent back to London for the far less demanding job of minister. The boisterous Henry Clay wrote to a friend that he had begun to rise early, “but not so early as the President.” The work load took such a toll on Clay’s health that he ultimately asked the president to let him step down.
And yet the men worked together with nothing like the rancor that divided Monroe’s cabinet, at least in the second term. Cabinet members disagreed openly but without bitterness. Even as Virginia’s leaders grew openly hostile to the Adams administration, Wirt and Barbour, the two Virginians in the cabinet, remained completely loyal. And Clay discovered that he enjoyed working for a man he had long viewed as an ill-tempered puritan. Adams was not a micromanager; he let Clay’s diplomatic messages go out with far less editing than Monroe had imposed on Adams himself. After only a month on the job, a slightly amazed Clay wrote to a friend, “There is entire coincidence between Mr. Adams and me on public affairs.”
Clay came to accept the fact that the president could not be budged on matters of principle, including Adams’ contempt for patronage. And Adams, who had so few confidantes, came to depend on Clay for advice. Adams had long viewed Clay as a rogue, and Clay had thought of Adams as a prig, but working together every day let them see beyond their preconceptions. There was nothing grudging in the respect they bore one another; they shared the same vision for the country and felt equally embattled as they tried to advance it.
Adams had very little to do save work. He had decided to follow Monroe’s example of accepting no social invitations, lest he give offense to whomever he refused. Nor did he attend political events or even harmless functions. Declining an invitation by the Maryland Department of Agriculture to attend a cattle show, Adams reflected that he ought not “set a precedent for being claimed as an article of exhibit for all the cattle-shows throughout the nation.” Occasionally he attended lectures, such as one on “the organ of amativeness”—the penis—which he found “more indelicate than philosophical.” But Adams’ life was confined almost entirely to the White House; his daily round was much more dull and routine than it had been when he was secretary of state.
Adams remained in Washington even when it emptied out for the summer. President Monroe had passed much of the summer in his home in Loudon, Virginia. Adams, however, was loath to take vacation. That first year in office he left for Quincy only on September 21. The heat quite literally made him sick. He described “a fermentation of the blood bordering upon insanity” and suffered from “a debility, nervous irritation and dejection of spirits far beyond anything I had ever experienced.” Adams’ friends ascribed his
nervous depression to the hours he spent swimming, but Adams viewed his predawn hours in the Potomac as his only source of relief, as well as the summer equivalent of his long, solitary walks.
Louisa worried incessantly that her husband would drown, and indeed Adams’ most dangerous moment in office came in mid-June. He, his servant Antoine, and his son John decided to take a canoe across the Tiber, as the spur of the Potomac nearest the White House was known, and then swim back. John, convinced that the boat was unsafe, got out and sat on a rock. As the president and his servant continued, the boat began to fill up with water. They jumped out, Antoine fully naked and Adams still wearing his pants and a cotton shirt with puffed sleeves. The sleeves quickly filled up with water, threatening to drag the president of the United States to a death that would have been as mortifying as it would have been agonizing. He finally reached shore gasping for breath and fully aware of his stupidity. Antoine found some scraps of clothing, walked back over a footbridge, and instructed what must have been a very startled stranger to send to the White House for a carriage. Adams and John, who had joined him, spent three hours swimming and basking on the shore. It is instructive about the rhythms of White House life in 1825 that when Adams returned home at 8:45, hours late, his absence apparently had not been noticed.
Louisa never grew accustomed to her new life. She loved the kind of cozy, cosseted household in which she had grown up; the White House spurned her every effort to recreate that atmosphere. Louisa hated the vast, drafty structure, where only a few of the rooms had been fully furnished and decorated. The Monroes had taken much of their furniture, silver, and dishes with them. “A thing of rubbish and rags,” she scornfully called it, “a half-finished barn, like everything else in this desolate city.” The White House was freezing cold in the winter, and the fumes from the coal-fired grates in her bedroom kept her coughing for months—she joked about her “Lehigh Coal Cattarh.” In a letter to George she wrote, “There is something in this great ? house which depresses my spirits beyond expression, and makes it impossible for me to feel at home.”
Louisa was only forty-seven, a decade younger than her husband, when she became First Lady. An extremely romanticized portrait of her from that time by Charles Bird King shows her at the harpsichord, wearing a soft Persian-style hat, a dreamy look in her dark eyes. Gilbert Stuart painted her in the same period as a woman still attractive in a delicate lace veil, but weary and questioning. Louisa feared that the picture revealed “too much of inward suffering and a broken heart,” but acknowledged its psychological truth. She thought of herself as a spent force. Louisa passed long days in her room, her gloom gathering in on itself. She ate a great deal of chocolate, which she adored, and which by some quirk of metabolism she could consume without ever gaining weight. She had few friends beyond the family circle. Louisa had followed Mrs. Monroe’s example, as her husband had followed the president’s, of not initiating visits. But unlike her husband, she needed companionship, and the First Lady languished in her solitude. She was, she wrote to George, “unpleasant to myself and to everyone else.”
Louisa was preoccupied with death. She wrote to George about a young girl who had committed suicide when her illicit love had been discovered. Why, she wondered, are we so attached to life when children meet death so calmly? She wrote a long poem about the girl; she seemed to identify not with the girl’s transgression, but with her ready embrace of death. She wrote other poems, also melancholy; one contrasted a mother’s hour of bliss when a newborn slept on her breast to the agony when the baby died. Her husband viewed the writing of poetry as a delightful technical exercise and an opportunity to express the ardor he had dammed up in himself; Louisa slipped into verse as if it were a luxurious bath of sadness.
Louisa was hardly alone in that big house; she was surrounded by family members. John lived at the White House. Charles came after graduating from Harvard in July 1825 and stayed until the summer of 1827, when he went to pursue his studies in the Boston law office of Daniel Webster. Nancy Hellen’s children had moved from the F Street house into the White House. On balance, they did a great deal more to deepen than to mitigate Louisa’s griefs. Johnson, a boon companion to Charles, ran off with one of the housemaids. Thomas, a drunk and a hell-raiser, got himself kicked out of Harvard. In 1827 he wrote to Louisa to say that he was contemplating suicide over a young woman who had spurned him. Furious, she informed her nephew that he possessed “a mind deeply diseased both physically and morally.” He would die in 1833, at age twenty-four.
Mary was a natterer who got on Louisa’s nerves. Louisa regarded her, with good reason, as a Jezebel. In 1827 she shocked the Adamses by announcing that she and John planned to marry; apparently they had managed to carry on an affair undetected. Louisa considered neither one suitable for marriage, while her husband, who had only the most minimal expectations of his middle son, appears to have left the problem to her. There was nothing to be done; on February 25, 1828, John and Mary became the first couple to be married in the White House. Over time, Louisa would come to regard Mary, for all her faults, as a surrogate daughter.
Louisa had long tolerated her husband’s condescension, so different from the high intellectual regard in which John Adams had held Abigail. But she chafed against her ill treatment, and not just from the president. John, she felt, argued with her all the time, while Charles despised her weakness. She once told Charles of a warning she had delivered to his fiancé: “It is a painful thing to state but it is nevertheless a fact that as regards women the Adams family are one and all peculiarly harsh in their characters. There seems to be no sympathy no tenderness for the weakness of the sex.” With no one prepared to listen to her woes, Louisa was left to lavish pity on herself.
Passing like a ghost through the half-finished parlors of a home not her own, often weak from illness, fearful of distracting her husband from affairs of state, Louisa felt bored and restless. Despite the posed portrait at the harpsichord, she no longer played music and rarely sang. But in writing she found an outlet for the deep feelings she otherwise hid from the world. She took up her own memoir on July 23, 1825, a day she described as so blazingly hot that “reading is wearisome, work is tiresome, and all the common employments are insipid.” The memoir, she wrote, would serve as an apologia to her children, though it was also very much a vindication of her father’s life. Louisa wrote prayers in verse form. In addition to her melancholy poems, she wrote a romantic song, a kind of dirge for the Louisa that was—“For thee the rosy wreath I twin’d / And wove it with a silken knot.” She asked Charles to send her French literature to translate.
Louisa also wrote plays. Most of them are undated and so may come from later periods, but in the spring of 1826 she told George that she had written a “melodrama.” It could have been Suspicion or Persecuted Innocence: A Tragedy, a fragment of high-flown Jacobean stagecraft about jealousy and thwarted love. Or perhaps it was one of her “farces”: Juvenile Indiscretions or Grand Papa or The Wag or Just from College.
Louisa wrote one piece that is remarkable not because it is any better than any of the others, but because it is so baldly revelatory about her feelings about her husband and the rest of her family. Metropolitan Kaleidoscope or Varieties of Winter: Etchings by Rachel Daub, subtitled A Romance, is a kind of family processional very lightly dressed as a play about a party given by Lord and Lady Sharply. The play is dated December 1827 and so was written after three very unhappy years in the White House. There can be no doubt about the identity of the main characters:
Lord Sharply was a man of extraordinary talents, and great requirements. He was the creature of Art rather than nature. He had filled many high stations most honourably and with great satisfaction to the Nation and government he represented. His knowledge of mankind was vast formed however more from books than from the actual and enlarged study of man; which led him often to shock their prejudices and wound their feelings. . . . His mind was stuffed with classical and polite literature, and his every thoug
ht might be said to teem with learning. . . . Perseveringly laborious, there were few things too difficult for him to achieve; and the natural coldness and reserve of his manner defied the penetration of the most indefatigably prying curiosity, to discover his thoughts, or to perceive his motives of action. . . . Only those who dwelt constantly in his society could sometimes observe the flashing of his eye, and the tremulous motion of his lip, conveying some faint idea of the volcano that burnt within but which seldom found vent. . . . The good of his country was his constant aim; but he sometimes staggered the nation by the means he used to obtain his ends. . . . He was full of good qualities, but ambition absorbed every thought of his soul, and all minor objects had ceased to interest.
Louisa was more generous to herself but hardly flattering. Lady Sharply, she wrote, “was a singular compound of strong affections and cold dislike; of discretion and caprice; of pride and gentleness; of playfulness and hauteur.” She suffered from “the impulse of a too warm heart not understood by the cold and calculating world in the midst of which she lived. . . . With a temper soured, bad health and an almost total indifference to life or death, she was seldom roused to exertion, and knew little of enjoyment.” Miss Manners—that is, Mary—whiled away her time in trifles and was “something of a belle.” The eldest son—George—was a poet with “the imagination of a german sophist living in the ideal world, with a heart as amiable and as simple as a child.” The middle son—John—“mistook spleen for wit” and so appeared “haughty and overbearing.” The third—Charles Francis—was cultivated, gifted, laborious, as passionate as his father, but as yet unformed.