Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  “Nothing but compulsion would have induced me to leave them,” Louisa responded. Her husband or her children; her children or her husband. Having her children meant no husband, but having no children meant, it seems, the chance to grow closer to him. During the winter they spent together without George and John, 1805–6, they were moody—at times short with each other, and at times more tender and affectionate. She was pregnant, and its effects were violent. “My health was particularly delicate and my spirits worse,” she would remember. Yet she was able to write to Abigail, “I have enjoyed almost perfect happiness.” The following summer, 1806, he left her in Washington, pregnant. His departure left her bereft. “The loss of Mr. Adams’s society is to me irreparable,” she wrote to Abigail. “I already look forward to his return with the most anxious impatience.” John Quincy had been in the habit of measuring the temperature each morning; in his absence, she rose at sunrise to do it. In his letters to her, he was intimate. She was “dearest Louisa”; she was sent kisses “de l’amour.” She was sweetly teased. “George appears to have lost none of his sensibility, but has a placidness and ease of temper, which must have come to him I think from some of his remote ancestors,” John Quincy quipped after he was reunited with his sons. “He resembles you more than formerly. Not however so much as John, who seems a little miniature of yourself.” “I can believe that George grows like me but Johns round face and deep dimples must I think be infinitely more like his father,” Louisa responded, “who has ever been celebrated for this to me fascinating beauty.” Their separation was the more difficult because of the complications from pregnancy. She was confined to her room in the suffocating heat, suffering from abscesses in the throat and ears, her legs badly swollen. She could hardly stand. Even so, when she learned that her sister Harriet’s son was dying, she made the hot mile-long walk to her sister’s house. That night, with the temperature at 100 degrees, she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn child. The tragedy, for a while, seemed to make them realize their closeness. When John Quincy heard the news from her, he staggered. “Her letter affected me deeply in its tenderness, its resignation, and its fortitude,” he wrote in his diary. In his room, by himself, he “yielded to the weakness, which I had so long struggled to conceal and restrain,” and he cried. For his part, his response was balm to her. “My heart swelled with gratitude and love,” she wrote to him, “and I almost ceased to think the strike so bitter which proved to me how dear I am to your heart.” It was never that simple, though. They loved at a distance; proximity was harder. So was the long separation from her children. She was furious when she learned that John Quincy had taken a room for himself in Cambridge instead of spending time with the boys. By the time she reached Massachusetts in August 1806, she had not seen them for nine months. When Louisa arrived in Quincy, her children “recieved me as a stranger,” and little John cried that he wanted to return to his grandmother. John Quincy was almost as fractious. The solicitude and tenderness he’d shown toward his wife in her absence evaporated. Louisa was overwhelmed; the little saltbox cottage was as crowded as ever. When they tried to have company at the house, Louisa burned her cakes and greeted guests with soot on her face. John Quincy retreated into his irritation. “This is no longer the studious life of the two former months,” he wrote in his diary soon after Louisa arrived. “I have wasted the past week, and fear I shall waste the next. Nothing can be more fatal to study than petty avocations continually recurring.” The following winter, 1806–7, she stayed in Boston with the children in a boardinghouse on the outskirts of the city, a lodging so grim that even Abigail thought it “cold and bleak.” Louisa would remember John Quincy’s decision with bitterness. “Everything as usual was fixed without a word of consultation with the family,” she later wrote. The pattern in which she was excluded from major decisions about her children’s life and in fact her own was growing stronger; when she looked back, she could see it too clearly. At the time, though, it was something she could neither accept nor refuse. Contradictions animated her marriage. “I already long for your return,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy in Washington. “But so it is, I can neither live with you or without you.” “The last paragraph of your letter I do not fully understand—I will not say I can neither live with you or without you,” John Quincy responded, then dismissed it with a joke, thinking of his empty bed: “but in this cold weather I should be very glad to live with you.” He was not shy about his sexual ardor for her—nor simply his sexual ardor. After observing at a party, with wry appreciation, how little women’s fashion left to the imagination, he sent his wife a poem that did the same. “When the Serpent’s subtle head / Had brought her to disgrace; / When Innocence and Bliss were fled— / The fig-leaf took their place,” he wrote, before calling on “Dear Sally” to “Fling the last fig-leaf to the wind, / And snatch me to thy arms!” “My heart throbs to behold you,” she wrote to him a few days later. As it happens, Louisa was pregnant again. In August 1807, after yet another trying summer in the small cottage on Penn’s Hill, the Adamses moved into a house in Boston on the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, bought by John Quincy as an investment (and perhaps with an eye toward the end of his political career). Only two weeks later, Louisa gave birth to another son, Charles Francis. It was, as usual, a brutally difficult labor—Charles was born breech and seemed at first not to breathe. She had hardly recovered before making the trip back to Washington that fall, this time with her newborn. In yet another disappointment, the older children were to stay behind in Massachusetts. Six-year-old George would board with Abigail’s sister Elizabeth Peabody in New Hampshire; four-year-old John would live with Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch. Louisa never reconciled herself to these separations. Perhaps because she did not know her own grandparents, she never accepted Abigail Adams’s insistence on the primary right of grandparents. Louisa did not share the Adamses’ view of communal child rearing. She believed that “incessant love” was as important as the “advantages of education, of accomplishment, of morals, and of virtue.” She herself had attended boarding schools at young ages, but she had never been more than a few miles from home—and even then, it seems to have been an unhappy experience; many of the memories she would most cherish were of periods of sickness, when she’d been brought home or to the Hewletts’. To a degree that was unusual for her time, she thought that parents had an “absolutely essential” role to play in their children’s development. But Louisa did submit. She wrote sad, beseeching letters. “Kiss my darling children for me over and over again,” she would write, “and remind them constantly of their mother whose every wish on this earth centres in them.” She worried over their little illnesses and scrapes, writing anxiously with instructions and prescriptions—“five drops of spirit of Turpentine upon a lump of sugar every other morning”—and advice on what to feed them. Partly, no doubt, her intense affection and interest in her children came from the difficulties of having them; they were triumphs hard won. “With what ardent love I regarded this my first born child,” she later wrote about George, “and with what earnest anxiety I watched his growth.” She “traced each little thought or expression” with inexpressible joy. She sometimes wondered whether she had the qualities that she needed to be a good mother. Later, she would wonder whether the worst mistake she ever made was not demanding the chance to be with them as they grew up. • • • WHEN SHE reached Washington in the late fall of 1807, she could tell that something had changed—in the political climate, and in the Adamses’ own situation. All the talk in the city was of war. For years the United States had been caught in the struggle between France and England, provoked and carelessly insulted, its sovereign rights disregarded. Now the conflict threatened to escalate. But there was no army, hardly a navy, and not much of a national will. Louisa did not pay much attention to the back-and-forth; she was unconcerned with Napoleon’s illegal closure of continental Europe to British ships, and with Britain’s retaliation by blocking com
merce with French-controlled countries except by ships that passed through British ports and paid a license fee and a toll—which was more or less robbery from American ships. Nor did she care about the details of England’s practice of essentially kidnapping thousands of American sailors suspected of being British deserters in order to man its ships during the Napoleonic wars. In 1803, the peace following the treaty of Amiens—the brief cessation of fighting in Europe sparked by the French Revolutionary wars and Napoleon’s successful coup—had ended, Britain and France were once again at war, and the reverberations were felt even across the vast Atlantic. But Louisa was more worried about whether her son John, up in Massachusetts, had hives.

  “Mr. Adams was so deeply engrossed with business that he had scarcely time to speak to the family; and we had but little conversation on any subject,” she remembered. That was harsh—it’s unlikely she had wanted to know the details of his work, the way his mother did. But it was impossible to ignore the larger situation, not least because of how it affected her. British ships routinely lurked off the shores of the east coast in order to stop and search vessels. Crisis was only a trigger-pull away. On June 22, 1807, the British warship Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake after its commander refused to hand over alleged British deserters. Three of the Chesapeake’s crew were killed (another died later in Norfolk), eighteen wounded, and four were captured by the British and tried as deserters. Three of them were American-born free black sailors who had escaped impressment, having been seized and forced into the British navy. One was an actual deserter; the British hanged him. In response to the incredible affront to American rights, Jefferson tried an experiment. With anti-British feeling high on one side and a stubborn pro-British faction on the other, Jefferson had no good options. He was absolutely opposed to going to war, but he could not afford to let the crisis pass. He proposed a shipping embargo, which he hoped would be war by pacific means, and he turned to John Quincy to help him. The senator from Massachusetts was an improbable ally for Jefferson. The animosity between John Adams and Jefferson had grown so deep that they were not speaking, and the Federalists in Boston were rabidly pro-British; the economy of New England depended on British trade. John Quincy’s constituents would bear the burden of a commercial retaliation disproportionately. Indeed, his fellow Massachusetts Federalist senator, Timothy Pickering, was plotting disunion and scheming to undermine John Quincy specifically. But John Quincy was offended by the affronts from Britain. The scenes of the Revolution he had witnessed as a child remained, always, fresh in his mind. He was determined to prove that he was no one’s man, and he was willing to risk his own comfort at a chance to prove his patriotism. It did not escape Jefferson that John Quincy was trying to distance himself from his supposed allies, nor that John Quincy could be counted on to act as he felt right, even if—or especially if—the action was wrong for his career. John Quincy knew he had more or less deserted his supporters altogether when he agreed to consider Jefferson’s proposal. Jefferson appointed John Quincy and four Republican senators to a committee to consider his confidential recommendation for a general embargo. John Quincy was cynical about the measure’s efficacy. But with reluctance, and while proposing terms to amend it, he gave it his support. So the embargo passed Congress, and John Quincy’s Senate term was sunk. He may not have minded, anyway, losing his seat. He was frustrated by his work, and he probably gambled that his help for the other side might lead to new opportunities. In fact, he may have cannily taken a longer view: there was little future for him among Federalists anyway. His move meant political suicide in the short term, but it was politically expedient in the long. He was sending signals to the Republicans that although he would not ask for one, he might be interested in some plum post as a reward. The feud between John Quincy and Pickering spilled into the newspapers. In Washington, Federalists considered him a turncoat, while Republicans distrusted him but called upon him constantly. “Since the Commencement of the present Session I have been placed upon every Committee of national importance, and made the reporter of several,” John Quincy wrote to his father. “Without having the weight of a single vote besides my own, in point of personal influence, I find myself charged with the duty of originating—and conducting measures of the highest interest—I am made a leader without followers.” There was frustration in this—but also some peculiar note of pleasure. His wife was less pleased. She was also isolated in Washington, not by her choice. “Our situation here this winter is not very pleasant as it is universally believed your son has changed his party and the F[ederalists] are extremely bitter,” Louisa wrote to Abigail. He shut the door to his room and worked in silence. She was aware of the anger and distrust that her husband aroused. “In private,” Louisa wrote to Abigail, his opponents “circulate reports very much to his disadvantage.” For the sake of a president who had humiliated his father, and for a measure he did not believe would really work, John Quincy defended the embargo. He signaled his break with the Federalists altogether when he attended the meeting of the Republican caucus that nominated James Madison for president in January 1808. At the end of May, the Massachusetts legislature voted him out of office ten months early, effective when his term expired, and the state senate issued instructions that he must vote for the embargo’s repeal. It was a vote of no confidence. He resigned his Senate seat immediately. So Louisa packed up her trunks again, and the Adamses returned north—this time, she thought, for good. • • • WHEN THEY reached Boston, where they planned to live permanently, John Quincy and Louisa found themselves ostracized. Even John and Abigail were upset; in caucusing with the Republicans, John Quincy hadn’t simply turned against his own party, but allied himself with the one that had so savaged his father’s reputation. Papers accused John Quincy of being a “party scavenger.” Anonymous letters called him Lucifer. Some Federalists were openly encouraging merchants to break the embargo; some were secretly corresponding with the British. Louisa, loyal to her husband, was disgusted. “With all their boasted independence [they] hang on the skirts of Great Britain, as child clings to its nurse,” she wrote. But she could console herself that she was unpacking her bags once and for all, that her husband was done with public life.

  Perhaps anticipating the premature end of his Senate term, John Quincy had bought a house on Nassau Street and Frog Lane the year before, and they had already partly moved in. The house was hard to heat and drafty in winter, and smoke filled the rooms when it snowed, but it was theirs—it was home. Louisa quickly embraced it. She had her sister Catherine (“Kitty”) for company, and began to entertain once more, learning that not everyone planned to stay away. “The mere commonplace routine of every day life suits me very well,” she wrote in November. She was pregnant again but complained less frequently of illness. She had her husband home and her children back. “Once again,” she later remembered, “we were a family.” And then, once again, he was gone. He would make only a short visit to Washington, he reassured her. In January 1809, with James Madison set to be sworn into office in March, John Quincy accepted three cases before the Supreme Court—cases he was confident he would lose—and went to Washington until the court adjourned. He claimed he needed the money. Though he would never admit it, those who knew him suspected that he wanted to be in Washington when Madison was making federal appointments. John Quincy had risked and lost his political career to support the Republicans Jefferson and Madison. There might be a reward. Louisa and John Quincy fought just before he left. The immediate cause isn’t clear, but the arc of their correspondence suggests that she knew he was positioning himself for more than a trip to argue a case before the Supreme Court. “I forgive you though you did part with me very cavalierly,” she wrote. “I do not know whether I have yet forgiven you—” he responded. “I am sure I have not yet got over it.” A few weeks later she slipped on some ice, struck her back on a street curb, and miscarried. John Quincy, normally so attentive to her when she suffered a miscarriage, resp
onded coolly, even cruelly. “As to the disappointment which we suffer from it,” he wrote, “I certainly can bear it without complaint, and you must reconcile yourself to it by the reflection how much of pain and suffering it may relieve you from.” She was caustic in her own letters. “It is here said you are nominated for the War Department and have accepted to walk in the steps of the God of War I make no comments,” she wrote. A week later, she told him that if he planned on staying in Washington for any longer, he should consider himself too busy to write to her again. On February 26, John Quincy told Louisa to ignore “the ridiculous reports” that he was to be offered a federal appointment. “There is not the slightest foundation for any one of them.” Hardly a week later, James Madison summoned John Quincy to his office and offered him the position of minister plenipotentiary to Russia. “How long will the mission probably continue?” John Quincy asked. “Indefinitely,” Madison answered. John Quincy immediately accepted. But the following day, the Senate rejected the nomination, saying it was “inexpedient” to send a minister to Russia. John Quincy waited two more days, until March 9, to tell Louisa of the nomination and its rejection. “I believe you will not be much disappointed, at the failure of a proposition to go to Russia.” It took no imagination to believe so. She might, then, have considered herself out of danger and settled. But on July 4, while listening to the Fourth of July oration at the Old South Church in Boston, John Quincy was informed that Congress had reversed course and accepted his nomination. He was the new minister plenipotentiary to Russia. • • • HE MIGHT HAVE LEFT his wife behind, as his father had done when he crossed the Atlantic, and as many diplomats did when they were posted abroad. The journey to Russia would be long and extremely dangerous. St. Petersburg would be cold, dark, expensive. He could not be certain of how the United States would be received; after all, when he had made the trip to Russia as a boy, accompanying the envoy Francis Dana, Dana had been entirely ignored. And there was, of course, the matter of their three young boys.