Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  She went to Congress or the Supreme Court occasionally, because it was theater. One visitor called it “as good as going to a play.” She wasn’t interested in the politics, but she was interested in the people. Her vision was stereoscopic; she saw the good and bad in people, and merged the contradictions into a single character. Eccentrics fascinated her. John Randolph of Roanoke “was to Congress what Shakespeare’s Fools were to a Court”—brilliant, mercurial, impulsive, uncontrollable. She was wary of—but quite susceptible to—the charismatic. She watched Aaron Burr control the noisy spectators at the Senate with awe. “The little hammer in his graceful little hand,” Louisa wrote, “would startle them into silence.” Other men repulsed her. The French minister, General Turreau, was famous in France for his brutality on the battlefield and famous in Washington for beating his wife. As she watched him one night at the President’s House as he amused himself by galloping back and forth across the room, she wasn’t charmed; she didn’t forget the abuse. She came to think that what she saw during those first few years in Washington reflected a fundamental truth of human nature, the grasping for special privilege in a society that only pretended to award none. She found the suggestion that there were no classes in Washington to be ridiculous. She saw how men inevitably generated distinctions. The pretense of equality made relationships unpredictable, capricious, or confused. In England and in Berlin, the protocol was clear. Each person knew what to do. Mistakes were pointed out, corrected, more easily fixed. In Washington, men formed little tribes and suspected one another of conspiracies. Hierarchies sprang up like weeds, were flattened, sprang up again. Slights were not misdemeanors but personal affronts: a man, distracted, might fail to return another man’s bow, and for this he would be blackballed. There was a code of honor, loosely codified, but it could be stupid—leading to challenges, duels, and sometimes deaths. She was more meritocratic than she might have seemed to some; she had an idea of a true aristocracy. She was drawn to “kind friendly excellent people” who had risen to high station, people like Secretary of War Henry Dearborn and his wife, Dorcas, with their “real genuine pattern of unsophisticated democracy,” and their “social virtues of benevolence, sincerity, and natural goodness of heart.” What she hated were the “affected blandishments” of those who made grand claims for the equality of Americans. The worst offender, to her mind, was President Thomas Jefferson. She disliked President Jefferson with a special animosity. He was “the ruling Demagogue of the hour,” a man of “peering restlessness,” so adept at “drawing out others and at the same time attracting attention to himself.” She was prepared to dislike him. It was personal. The Jefferson name had not only become a dirty word among the Adamses after the mudslinging of the 1800 presidential campaign, but because Jefferson had also stripped Joshua of his post, she also seems to have partly blamed him for her father’s death. She even disliked the way Jefferson looked: tall and ungainly, with a habit of wearing old red britches while uniformed French servants (and slaves) staffed his house. She distrusted his self-fashioning as one of the people, a common man. She saw him as canny, always superior, calculating. His egalitarianism struck Louisa as a show, and not an earnest one. She had occasion at a few dinners to appreciate that his table—the food, the wine, the servants (though slaves)—would not have been out of place at any European court. She probably would have liked the courtliness had it been matched with sincere politeness. Instead, she found him disingenuous and sometimes rude. She was immune, it seems, to his famous charm—though of course, he may have purposefully tamped it down. After dinner one night he led his guests into a cold room, where a tiny fire licked a few coals; Louisa’s teeth chattered; another guest joked that he could have entertained himself by spitting out the flame. Jefferson leaned back in his chair, not hiding his impatience for them to leave. She may have felt personally dismissed. Louisa was stained by her British birth and her time in a royal court—cardinal sins in Jefferson’s view. Jefferson so hated the idea of courts that he had made a point of insulting the British minister, Anthony Merry, and especially his wife, Elizabeth, who Jefferson sneered was too aristocratic to have a place in the United States. It wasn’t only her diamond jewelry that Jefferson objected to; it was her presumption of some power, her force of character, and her obvious assumption that the social sphere was also a sphere of power politics—as it was in Europe, and in fact as it was in Washington, but only in a tacit and taboo way. Jefferson called Elizabeth Merry a “virago”—a mannish woman, a woman who was a threat to the purity of the republic. Of course, when it was in his interest to flatter a British minister and his wife, he would do that too. His dining table might have been round—in the republic of equality, there would be no head—but when Louisa sat at his left hand, he kept himself turned toward his right. His interests at that moment, in 1807, determined that the British minister’s wife next to him was worth his attention, and the Massachusetts senator’s wife was not. • • • LOUISA WAS in a difficult spot, then: a city where protocol was never clear. Women were supposed to remain innocent and ignorant of the affairs of men, and yet, as Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington social doyenne noted, “the house of representatives is the lounging place of both sexes, where acquaintance is as easily made as at public amusements.” Women were supposed to stay away from public life, and yet, as one who saw the treatment of Elizabeth Merry—or, for that matter, anyone who saw the senators and officers pay deference to Dolley Madison, who was quickly establishing herself as the leading hostess—could see, politics and socializing were closely intertwined. Women were present and absent at once.

  Louisa claimed to have nothing to do with her husband’s career. “I knew nothing of politics, and of course was without ambition: and domestic life seemed to be the only life for which nature had intended me,” Louisa wrote in “The Adventures of a Nobody.” The “of course” is telling: this is what a woman was supposed to say. It does not completely describe Louisa’s attitude. She listened to her husband practice his speeches and gave him advice; she was especially good, the prolix orator told her, at knowing what to cut. She took note of politicians’ rifts and alliances. When they were apart, she made John Quincy promise to write her about politics. “I have not forgotten,” he later replied. When he suggested that he might resign from public office and find contentment in focusing on his private life, she urged him not to. But when John Adams expressed his displeasure at John Quincy’s votes, Louisa made a point of reporting to her husband that she had disclaimed any influence or, for that matter, awareness at all. And she viewed his public position as an unbearable burden on them both. It was hard for any woman to find her way, acknowledging one conviction and acting according to another. (Even Smith wrote candidly of her struggles in revealing letters and diaries.) It was perhaps even harder for Louisa than most. There were few women to whom she could turn to find out the correct way to behave, no Pauline Neale to sweep in and whisper when to curtsy. She had her sisters, of course, but she found even those relationships fraught with unspoken difficulties. At the Hellens’, she watched her own family watching her, discerning the fine gradations and distinctions that marked her as a boarder versus those that marked her as a senator’s wife. With no carriage, she had no mobility to seek out friends of her own. With her husband determined to keep to himself and demonstrate his independence, she had little opportunity or excuse to establish herself well in the social scene. With a Federalist for a husband and the Republicans in power, she was of the wrong party, anyway. She was of the wrong birth, and perhaps the wrong temperament. Dolley Madison, society’s reigning queen, always regarded her a little suspiciously. She was no longer an object of curiosity; she was no longer the delightful republican in a royal court, so pretty, so “jolie.” This may have been how she wanted it—she claimed to prefer the small and intimate gatherings in the Hellens’ parlor, with one sister at the piano and another at the harp, with a few guests and a little cake and tea—but it was one more reminder tha
t her range was limited. Georgetown was not her home. Quincy was not her home either. That had been painfully apparent. So she was startled when John Quincy told her that spring, 1804, as they prepared to head north for the summer break between sessions of Congress, that he would be returning to Washington for the next congressional session without her, leaving her and the children in Quincy with his parents. That arrangement was typical; senators tended to live and work in boardinghouse blocks, without their wives. But she was horrified by his pronouncement and refused to head north. If she could not travel back and forth with him, she told him, then she would stay in Washington. If she had to choose between “five dreary winters in Quincy” and Washington, between her family or his, she chose her own family. She was still furious when he left her with their two small sons, charging him with “coldness or unkindness.” “Our separation was very much against my inclination, but it was your own choice,” he responded. She replied that given the options, it was no choice at all. He explained that he could not support the great expense—not to mention the miserable trials—of traveling back and forth with a wife of fragile health and two small boys. The appeals to his poverty hurt her, as they always did; reflexively, she would bring up the lost dowry. “I brought you nothing and therefore have no claim on you whatever,” she wrote in cringing response. “My life ever has been and ever must remain a life of painful obligation.” He was the one who seemed to suffer, though, at least at first, from the costs of their separation. “I feel already to use a vulgar phrase, like a fish out of water, without you and my children,” John Quincy wrote to her, “but I will not complain.” He spent the summer punishing himself. He studied the U.S. Code and all U.S. Supreme Court decisions. He berated himself for accomplishing nothing during the Senate session except alienating everyone. He had been the only Federalist to support the acquisition of Louisiana, but he had failed in his efforts to pass a constitutional amendment in support of it. He had given long speeches, but he was not happy with his performances. His days lacked purpose. “Irregular and indolent,” he summarized the month of August in his diary. The dark maw of feeling that he struggled against his whole life threatened to overwhelm him. There was an inherited component to this; compulsive disorders and depressive tendencies ran in his family, on both sides. Thomas, his younger brother, also had trouble fighting off punishing self-doubt, and Charles, of course, had helped hasten his own death by drinking. John Quincy’s self-analysis was constant, and his diary became at times a record of pain and self-loathing. “My self-examination this night gave rise to many mortifying reflections. . . . Pride and self-conceit and presumption lie so deep in my natural character,” John Quincy wrote, “that, when their deformity betrays them, they run through all the changes of Proteus, to disguise themselves to my own heart.” He was also lonely. He was lonely anywhere, but being apart from Louisa appears to have made the loneliness worse. He missed her. “Good Night my best beloved. Je t’envoye les plus tendres baisers de l’amour,” he wrote. But her anger with him burned a little longer. She could not, she wrote, understand why he missed her in Quincy, because they were so rarely together in Quincy. She wanted him to return to Washington early, “before Congress takes you from me.” Some of her letters were short, perfunctory, and passive-aggressive. “George is very angry with you. He says you are very naughty to go away and leave him.” As for herself, she reported, “I never was so well in my life.” Her sisters, her mother, a stream of visitors, and her children kept her busy. John fussed at teething, and George was a precocious troublemaker. “He destroys all Mrs. Hellens chickens, drives the ducks to death, gets down to the wharf and plays such pranks I am obliged to keep a person constantly running after him,” Louisa wrote to her husband. “In fact he is one of the finest children I ever saw but much too clever or wise for his age.” She told John Quincy that she was “studying” the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Elizabeth Hamilton’s work on education, which argued for the equal capacity of the female intellect and the importance of its instruction to cultivate the mind, imagination, and heart. “I admire her more than any author I have yet seen,” Louisa wrote. “Had I a daughter it is the only system I would wish to adopt.” Then, typically, she retreated: “but it requires a mother of a superior cast to be able to undertake it and do it justice.” She had her arias, her gossip, her health, and her books in Washington. Still, her days became “interminable.” The river moved slowly around Georgetown’s gentle bend, and restless storms swept through each afternoon. The air turned hot, Southern hot, and Louisa’s letters turned pensive. Her irritation with John Quincy sometimes flared, but her frustration with him became something more complex. Her letters with John Quincy reflect a marriage far more multifaceted and dynamic than any glimpse of it from his coolly dispassionate diary or from her forlorn memoir sketches, written much later, ever could. Their words were inflected with concern, anger, boredom, irritation, desire, humor, and intimacy. They give us a glimpse at how they communicated, perhaps also in conversation in person. They were, then, as many husbands and wives are, married in heart and mind through their contradictions, not only in spite of them. “I shall know neither happiness or peace till you return,” Louisa wrote him. Yet divorce, in fact, was also on her mind. That summer, she brought up the subject cautiously to John Quincy. She mentioned it in order to reject it emphatically—but she did mention it. She had read Madame de Staël’s book of letters, in which de Staël makes an argument in favor of divorce if a husband and wife “find that their dispositions do not accord,” Louisa wrote to her husband, and asked him to read it himself. “This letter is I am told very much admired. I think I must have misunderstood it very much for it appears to me calculated to destroy every moral principal, to destroy every tie which binds society together.” She wanted to know what he thought. He responded caustically—“After having sacrificed all decency as well as all virtue in her own conduct, it is natural enough to find her torturing her ingenuity to give infamy itself a wash of plausibility”—and then blamed the French Revolution for de Staël’s argument. Louisa was not going to divorce her husband—there was no question, even though it was becoming clear that their dispositions did not in fact accord. Divorces happened, but only in extreme cases and attended by scandal. She thought about it with a tentative kind of curiosity mixed with apprehension. That summer, Louisa learned that her acquaintances the Laws were separating. “This is setting the opinion of the world at defiance,” she wrote. “I never wish to court it but I should dread it too much ever to set it at defiance.” Still, she described her inner life as like a battlefield. “Formed for domestic life my whole soul devoted to you and my children yet ambitious to excess,” she wrote to John Quincy in August, “my heart and head are constantly at war.” “It grieves me to see him sacrificing the best years of his life in so painful and unprofitable a way,” she wrote to Abigail soon after he arrived back in Washington. “It would however cause me infinite pain to see him give it up.” 4

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1805, Louisa and the boys came to Quincy with her sister Eliza, moving into the small saltbox cottage where John Quincy had been born near Penn’s Hill, two miles away from the elder Adamses’ mansion. Washington may have seemed remote from cosmopolitan life, but Penn’s Hill was set in farmland and woods. When they arrived, Louisa and Eliza had to milk the cow themselves, laughing “heartily” at their failure.

  But her good humor quickly soured. Although she liked rambling in the fields and forest with George and John and occasionally John Quincy, who would try to teach his “unfruitful scholars” to distinguish the blooming peach trees from the plum, she disliked living in the woods after a life spent in cities. She felt at once claustrophobic and exposed, worried about “two or three insane persons” at loose in the area, and trapped in the tiny farmhouse—four rooms downstairs and three small rooms above, too small for three adults, a few young servants, a toddler always up to mischief, and a baby just learning to run. When she had
more space, though, after John Quincy began to spend more time at his parents’ and Eliza went to Boston for parties, she felt no better; she felt alone. It was hard for them to be together, hard for them to be apart. It would have been hard to be around John Quincy, in any event, that summer. He lashed himself in his diary for his “mental imbecility.” “My prospects are again blasted, and I have nothing left before me but resignation,” he wrote. Abigail wrote to Hannah Quincy that she was worried about John Quincy’s “depression of spirits,” but did not know what to do. “There are some malidies so deep rooted,” Abigail wrote to Eliza Susan Quincy, “that the most delicate hand dare not probe. The attempt might fix an incurable wound.” She took him to Dr. Cotton Tufts, in hopes that he could prescribe a pill. An offer from Harvard to be the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric partly boosted his spirits, but it produced new tension with his wife. Louisa didn’t like Harvard; she thought that the school was more concerned with its own wealth and power than with its students. But it was not her decision. He took the job, teaching during summers when Congress was not in session. His spirits rose—but hers dropped as he became even more preoccupied with Cicero. He spent his days preparing his lectures and had no time for anything but teaching—certainly not for her. She found the whole thing “odious.” “Having relinquished almost all claim to [your presence] in the winter . . . I am the less willing to give it up in the summer,” she wrote to John Quincy. But what she was willing to tolerate didn’t much matter. • • • SO THEY TRIED different arrangements. They split up, shuttled back and forth, and made unhappy compromises. When Louisa and John Quincy returned to Washington in the fall of 1805, they left George, now four years old, and John, now two, behind at John Quincy’s insistence and by Abigail’s arrangement. Louisa protested, which the other Adamses considered unreasonable. It was common for members of the extended Adams family to share in the education and care of one another’s children. Abigail grew tired of Louisa’s self-pitying, forlorn letters about missing her children: “I believe they are much better off than they could have been at any boarding house in Washington, where they must have been confined to some degree, or have mixd with improper persons”—harsh words, since the “boarding house” in question was the home of Louisa’s own sister.