John Quincy’s one and only hope of becoming President was Louisa. By now, she had been reunited with her two older boys and was more kindly disposed toward her husband. She went to work on his behalf in Washington, D.C., entertaining congressmen and their wives by the dozen, fascinating them with her tales of foreign lands. One of her guests called her “the most accomplished American lady I have seen.”
In 1820 Louisa and John Quincy put almost every cent they had into an imposing three-story home on F Street, where they could entertain even more lavishly, as he launched his stretch run for the presidency. They added a twenty-eight-by twenty-nine-foot ballroom, in which guests could dance cotillions “with ease.” Louisa also made numerous forays into nearby Maryland, where her relatives were “most respectable and distinguished,” and succeeded in putting her home state firmly in John Quincy’s column.
It soon became apparent, as the year 1824 dawned and President Monroe entered his final months in the White House, that the two men most likely to succeed him were John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. At this point, Louisa pulled off the social coup that made her husband President. She decided to give a ball honoring Jackson on the tenth anniversary of his great victory at New Orleans in the War of 1812.
Louisa sent out nine hundred invitations, and not one was turned down. The only conspicuous nonattenders were President Monroe and his wife, who never went to private parties. Louisa, in a gleaming gown ornamented with cut steel, greeted General Jackson at the door, utterly dazzling him. He stayed at her side like a devoted suitor for the entire evening. The ball was the party of the decade in Washington and automatically elevated John Quincy to the same prominence as the hero of New Orleans.
The 1824 presidential campaign was a mess. With four major contenders, Jackson received a plurality of the popular vote—forty-two percent; John Quincy was second with thirty-two percent. But the General did not carry enough states to win a majority of the electoral votes, and the decision was thrown into the House of Representatives. There, with the help of another candidate, Henry Clay of Kentucky, who switched his support to Adams, John Quincy became the only son of a President to reach 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He had achieved his dream, but it rapidly turned into a nightmare. Adams rewarded Clay by making him his secretary of state. Jackson’s infuriated supporters—and a lot of other people—accused the President of making a “corrupt bargain” and coalesced against Adams’s leadership. John Quincy and Louisa found themselves marooned in a virtually ostracized White House.
After having worked so hard to get there, Louisa soon came to hate the Executive Mansion. As First Lady, she was reduced to a mere ornament, and a pointless one at that, since her husband’s administration was stranded. Moreover, the place lacked the comforts of “any private mechanics family.” She told her son George it was impossible for her to feel at home in the house, “or to feel I have a home anywhere.”
Not surprisingly, John Quincy was no help. When he relaxed and talked about literature or the arts, Adams could be interesting. (Henry Fielding’s racy novel Tom Jones was one of his favorite books.) But most of the time he was a bore, prone to doze off in the middle of dinner. Louisa made no secret of the fact that she did not particularly enjoy her husband’s company. One day she copied into her diary a bit of doggerel that had gotten into a capital newspaper:
Asked by the Nation’s chief to take my tea
I hastened to him in surprising glee,
But when I got there, all my treat, by God
Was to watch his Excellency’s Nod.
Before long the First Lady was deeply depressed. Her only relief was chocolate, which she devoured by the pound, without gaining an ounce of weight. Perhaps she was trying to cram herself with the sweetness that was so abysmally missing from her life. In 1825 Louisa decided to write her autobiography, which she titled “Adventures of a Nobody.” Under the pseudonym Rachel Barb she also wrote a play about an aristocratic couple living in a great mansion. The main character, Lord Sharply, was “full of good qualities,” but ambition “absorbed every thought of his soul.” His wife, Lady Sharply, was, of course, miserable.
Inevitably, the frustrated President and his gloomy First Lady fell to quarreling. Their main bone of contention was the children. John Quincy was always demanding impossible performances from his sons. Louisa was far more easygoing; she put happiness ahead of achievement. Hardly surprising, when she looked at her dour husband and saw the way a lifetime of parental pressure and superhuman striving had turned him into a virtual misanthrope.
John Quincy’s presidency continued sinking into political oblivion. His party lost control of Congress, which went about their business as if the White House did not exist. Worse, his son John, who acted as his secretary, was a dilettante who spent most of his time chasing beautiful girls. In an inventory of presidential expenses, young John accidentally included the cost of a billiard table, which John Quincy had installed in the White House, mostly for his sons’ amusement. The President’s enemies leaped on this mistake, which was hastily corrected, as proof of his “aristocratic tastes” and indifference to setting a good example to the young men of the nation. In those days billiard playing was synonymous with strong drink, fast women, and sin.
The President vented his frustrations on Louisa and their oldest son, George Washington Adams. More Johnson than Adams, George was a dreamy, sensitive young man who wrote poetry and lived a vaguely bohemian life in Boston, trying to ignore the stream of angry letters his father sent him. Louisa defended George against the presidential wrath, thereby bringing not a little of it on herself.
By the summer of 1828, the President and his wife were barely speaking. Louisa spent as much time away from the White House as possible. When John Quincy wrote to her, he addressed her as “Mrs. Louisa C. Adams,” as if they were divorced. He could not bring himself to write “Dear Louisa,” any more than she could write “Dear John.” Instead, she addressed him simply as “The President.”
In Boston, George Washington Adams, struggling fitfully to live up to his Adams inheritance and his father’s ferocious lectures, had gotten himself elected to the Massachusetts legislature and opened a law office. But he was defeated for reelection and few clients sought his legal services. He slowly sank into debt and squalor. Worse, he had an affair with a servant girl that produced an illegitimate daughter—a fall from grace which he managed to conceal from his parents.
Louisa made periodic trips to Boston to see George, who suffered from a variety of illnesses, some real, some imaginary. In 1827, on one of these journeys, she revealed once more that she, not her husband, was the politician in the family. She held a reception in Philadelphia at which the city’s leading citizens all but threw themselves at her feet. Louisa promptly fired off a letter to John Quincy, urging him to visit Pennsylvania and other states if he wanted to get reelected. Too angry at her to take this excellent advice, Adams announced that when he began his summer vacation, he was going home to Massachusetts “as straight and quick as possible.”
In a kind of counterpoint to John Quincy’s presidency, George’s fortunes continued to sink. He was forced to borrow a thousand dollars from a local tomb maker, and then had to reveal it to his father when he could not repay the debt. This triggered another spate of furious presidential letters, which did nothing but deepen George’s overwhelming sense of failure. Meanwhile, as we have seen, Adams’s political backers were fighting for his presidency by smearing Andrew Jackson’s wife as a fallen woman. The filthy campaign could only have further convinced this emotional, despairing young man that he wanted no part of the world of ruthless ambition and raw power into which he had been born.
The year 1828 ended in total disaster for John Quincy and Louisa Adams. The President was routed at the polls by Andrew Jackson. For George Washington Adams, this only meant more trouble. Now a lame duck, John Quincy proceeded to concentrate all his fury on his eldest son, demanding this, condemning that, in another volle
y of letters that ended with a command to come to Washington at once.
George dreaded the thought of confessing his derelictions to his dour father face to face. As he prepared for the journey, he showed unmistakable signs of a mental collapse. He heard birds speaking to him from nearby trees, and his sleep was repeatedly broken by a conviction that burglars were prowling around his squalid furnished room. His younger brother Charles, who was in Boston setting up his own law practice, grew deeply alarmed at his conduct. Not knowing what else to do, Charles hoped for the best and helped George pack for his trip to Washington.
In Providence, George boarded a steamboat that would take him down the Rhode Island coast and through Long Island Sound to New York. All he could see as he gazed out at the water was his father’s frowning face. Soon he began hearing a voice in the pounding steam engines, whispering, “Let it be, let it be.” At 3:00 A.M. he rushed to the bridge to tell the captain he wanted to be put ashore immediately because the other passengers were conspiring to kill him. The captain assured him there was no danger on his boat, and George retreated to the open deck.
A few minutes later, a passenger heard a splash. He rushed to the railing in time to see George vanishing in the steamboat’s foaming wake. “Man overboard!” the Good Samaritan shouted. The aghast captain stopped the ship; he probably knew he had just lost a President’s son. He lowered a rescue boat, but all the sailors found were George’s hat and cloak.
Two days later, the news reached John Quincy and Louisa Adams in Washington. Both realized that George had been sacrificed to John Quincy’s ambition, in which Louisa had acquiesced. John Quincy was totally devastated—until he saw that Louisa was in even worse condition. For the first time in decades, they reached out to each other with sympathy and at least an approximation of love in their hearts.
John Quincy became “a ministering angel, always at my side,” Louisa told one of her friends. She successfully stifled any impulse to blame him for the tragedy. They read comforting passages in their Bibles to each other. “We are in great distress,” the ex-President wrote his son Charles. “But the first Shock of this heavy dispensation of Providence is past, and your Mother and myself, relying on him who chastiseth in Mercy, still look for consolation in the affectionate kindness of our remaining Sons.”
When the family gathered to offer their sympathy, John Quincy asked Louisa to read the service for the dead from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. After decades of differences, he was finally trying to acknowledge her importance in their troubled partnership.Their reconciliation deepened steadily in succeeding weeks. If they were apart even for a few days, he wrote letters to his “Dearest Louisa.”
A few months later, an ex-President now, John Quincy walked through Washington’s Rock Creek woods. He was still deeply depressed; he could not stop thinking of George. A rain shower forced him to take shelter under a tree. The downpour left the grass gleaming and filled the warm air with the scent of growing things. Life, hope, stirred in the dry husk that John Quincy’s soul had become. Moments later, a magnificent rainbow arched above Washington, D.C. He told Louisa he felt it was a sign of God’s mercy.
A few days later, Louisa picked up a copy of the National Journal of Washington and received an even more mystical surprise. The paper had printed a poem that George had sent the editor a few weeks before his death:
There is a little spark at sea,
Which grows ’mid darkness brilliantly,
But when the moon looks clear and bright
Emits a pale and feeble light,
And when the tempest shakes the wave,
It glimmers o’er the seaman’s grave.
Such friendship’s beaming light appears
Through the long line of coming years.
In sorrow’s cloud it shines afar
A feeble but a constant star,
And like that little spark at sea
Burns brightest in adversity.
Louisa wept and showed the poem to John Quincy. She felt it was George’s last message, telling them that in spite of the mistakes they had made as parents—especially the decision to abandon him for those eight long years of his boyhood—his love for them had remained alive in his troubled heart.
If readers require further proof that this ex-President and his First Lady had learned a profound spiritual lesson, they need only to look at the rest of their long lives. In 1830 John Quincy decided to return to Washington as a humble congressman. Louisa went with him and wholeheartedly supported the cause he soon embraced—the right of citizens to present protests against slavery to Congress. Dominated by southerners, Congress had passed a “gag rule” which enabled them to ignore the nation’s mounting disgust with this blot on America’s moral reputation. John Quincy soon won the title “Old Man Eloquent” for his struggle on behalf of this basic civil right.
One of their grandsons, Henry Adams, who would achieve his own kind of fame, remembered visiting John Quincy and Louisa in Washington as a boy. To him Louisa seemed “singularly peaceful, a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President and her Queen Anne mahogany… an object of deference to everyone.” Unlike Grace Coolidge, who was blessed with serenity from the start, Louisa Johnson Adams took several decades of turmoil to achieve it. In the end this star-crossed First Lady gave her driven husband a measure of inner peace in the bargain.
Chapter 21
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THE GLAMOUR
GIRLS
THE WHITE HOUSE HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN DRENCHED IN TRAGEDY. Some First Ladies have been lucky enough—or clever enough—to escape—or at least transcend—tears. One is a relative of sorts, Julia Gardiner Tyler. The Trumans have long claimed her husband, President John Tyler, as kin. Another, Frances Folsom Cleveland, I had the pleasure of meeting when she was an elderly lady. She was as uncannily self-possessed in old age as she was when she married a bachelor President with an illegitimate child in his past and became the youngest First Lady so far.
When men praised Dolley Madison, they were complimenting her charm more than her looks. When they purred over Julia Tyler, they were complimenting both—with the emphasis, as the song from the musical Damn Yankees puts it, “on the latter.” Many students of First Ladies consider Julia the most beautiful woman to have strolled the White House halls. Like Edith Wilson, she married a President who had lost his wife after he was elected. But that was only part of the role the Grim Reaper played in Julia’s ascension to First Lady.
In one of those odd historical coincidences that give you the shivers, John Tyler, Harry Truman’s putative kin, was the first vice president to move into the White House by virtue of a President’s death. He succeeded a hero of the War of 1812, William Henry Harrison, when the old warrior died after only a month in office. Tyler was the first to encounter the animus that seems to greet every accidental President. Some critics even called him “His Accidency.”
Tyler was a member of the new Whig Party, which had sprouted from the grave of the Federalists. But he was more interested in being President of all the people and declined to cooperate with the Whig congressmen and senators who had broken the power of the Democratic Party in 1840 with the first modern political campaign. The Whigs added Tyler to the ticket to help carry the South. He had been governor of Virginia, as well as a congressman and senator. They did not bother to check out his political opinions, beyond noting that he was not a Democrat.
The Whigs should have noticed that Tyler had independent opinions about everything and never hesitated to swim against the political tide. As President, he proved to be so independent, virtually his entire cabinet soon resigned and the Whigs formally expelled him from the party. Ignoring mobs of angry Whigs who threatened to burn down the White House and even talked of assassinating him, Tyler rejected so many bills from the Whig-controlled Congress he soon acquired another nickname: “014 Veto.”
The President brought an invalid wife, Letitia, to the White House. Crippled by a stroke in 1839, she descended
from the second floor’s family quarters only once, to attend a daughter’s wedding in 1842. A few months later, she died at the age of fifty-one. Early in 1843, when the official period of mourning for his wife had barely expired, President Tyler resumed entertaining at the White House, with a daughter-in-law as hostess. At one of the first parties, he met and was mesmerized by Julia Gardiner.
A smashingly attractive twenty-two-year-old brunette from Long Island, Julia was the daughter of one of New York’s senators, David Gardiner. The President managed to kiss her on her second visit to the White House and proposed to her two weeks later at a Washington’s Birthday ball—ignoring her repeated murmurs of “No, no no!”
Such denials were de rigueur for young ladies in those early Victorian days. Julia was clearly entranced with Tyler—and with the White House. Born to wealth, she had displayed a fondness for the limelight at an early age. In 1839 proper New Yorkers had been shocked to open their newspapers and discover an illustration of nineteen-year-old Julia in a sunbonnet, urging readers to shop at a popular department store on Ninth Avenue. She told her mortified parents she had posed for the ad “for the fun of it.”
The enthralled President bombarded Julia with flowery love letters, praising her raven tresses and snow white skin. She kept her fifty-three-year-old suitor at arm’s length, though she was a frequent White House visitor—with her indulgent father as chaperon. At the same time she carried on serious romances with a congressman from South Carolina and a justice of the Supreme Court, using the timeless principle that nothing whets a man’s ardor more than competition.
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