Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  Louisa complained about how work monopolized her husband. “Thank God we hear no more of Weights and Measures,” she wrote when he was almost done. But she took a growing interest in politics—if not as much in policy. Her observations about statecraft in those days tended toward vague, cynical expressions about politicians’ true motivations. She cared less about what men said than about how they said it. She could see, both in her parlor and in the Capitol, how easily men were influenced by personal appeals, by flattery, by small attentions, as much as—or more than—by appeals to reason. When Louisa went to watch the debates in Congress, she noticed the way Senator William Pinkney of Maryland had oiled his hair and perfumed his clothes. She observed how he preened before the throngs of ladies, pandered to his opponents, and basked in his own bad rhetoric as he argued for admitting Missouri as a state without restrictions on slavery. His speech was “copious, or at least he made it so; for there was neither figure, or trope spared, which art or nature could yield; and so heavy a tax was laid on poor common sense.” When her husband gave one of the most brilliant speeches of his career on July 4, 1821, the speech that would help lay the foundations for the nonintervention doctrine that would guide American foreign policy for almost a hundred years, she responded to “his energy, his pointed expression, and the profoundness of his feelings.” She watched people’s faces. She saw the quick current of emotions running beneath the dry record of debates. She knew there was a danger in appearing to take too much of an interest in political debates. “The fear of being thought to interfere in the slightest degree in political affairs renders me careless to the proceedings of Congress and to the general measures of the administration,” she wrote to John Adams in January 1819. But she was paying more attention to politics than she admitted, and though she could not openly acknowledge it, she was playing a role. During her second year in Washington, she hosted weekly dinner parties for men only—that is, except for herself and whatever pretty young women happened to be staying or living with the Adamses at the time. Their female presence was crucial. When Louisa was too ill to attend these parties or dinners—because of her episodes of erysipelas or sharp headaches and fatigue—John Quincy was upset not to have her there. Louisa routinely denied being privy to any conversations about politics, but that was not true. At those dinners, frequented by senators and members of the House, not to mention the secretary of the navy or the vice president, the conversations turned on news. Her letters were filled with the reports. Politics was still a dirty word—especially to John Quincy, raised under the strict influence of his father’s views. Presidential hopefuls were not supposed to stump; they did not travel from town to town, promoting their platform and shaking strangers’ hands; they admitted their ambitions only in private—and sometimes only obliquely. A woman, a wife, a hostess, could play an important subterfuge. She might help the pretense that no campaigning was happening, since politics were not permitted in mixed company. She could serve dinner with éclat, put people at ease, and spice the conversation with the wit that obscured the politics in political discussions. That obfuscation that she provided was important; it was the ruse that Washington depended on. A candidate was not supposed to appeal directly to the people for their votes—not even to the stratum of white men that counted in those days as “the people.” In some states, electors were still chosen by state legislatures. The House of Representatives, not the president, was considered the direct representative of the people. Presidential elections were intimate affairs and were intended by the nation’s founders to be that way. The real power to pick a president in those days was understood to lie with the Republican congressional caucus. The Republicans were the only party in town; the Federalists had imploded by their active resistance to waging the War of 1812. Campaigning by a candidate—“electioneering,” as newspapers deprecated it—was considered venal. “I should do absolutely nothing,” John Quincy vowed, in pursuit of the presidency. The president was supposed to be a kind of tribune, a man who represented the people by upholding the Constitution, not by channeling their common spirit and voice—or even their votes. Until 1824, the popular vote was not even recorded, and in 1824, the first election for which there are some meaningful numbers, not all states tallied the individual numbers. So politics happened undercover, in small conversations and coded letters and at the dinner table, sometimes with a glance or a nod. The men who wanted to succeed Monroe relied on their supporters. At a time when proto-political parties were called “intrigues” and “cabals,” social meetings provided a convenient excuse. A supporter might drop a bit of gossip in the parlor and ask if he could call the following day. A candidate might say much by loudly saying little. He might have a dinner party with a few choice friends, pour a good glass of Madeira, and casually comment on his rivals. He might field visits and return them, paying special attention to newspaper editors, sympathetic congressmen, and their wives. John Quincy was content not to be liked. The “preponderating motive for every electorial vote,” he told a representative from all-important New York, must “be fitness for the place, rather than friendship for the man.” It was a way of maintaining the fiction promulgated by his father’s generation, that a republic’s leaders must be disinterested, and the highest office would be awarded to the man whose record, not his smile, proved his talents. Let the cabals choose their man, he would say; let the demagogue warp the will of the people. To other politicians, John Quincy declared that he would not want the presidency if he had to ask for it. It had to be a reward for his long service, an acknowledgment of the superiority of his merit and not his charm. To himself (and to his wife), he admitted that he would not be able to get the presidency if he had to ask for it, because he was not very good at asking nicely. While the other candidates were notable for their charisma and appealing manners, John Quincy’s habitual aloofness seems to have gotten more pronounced when he reached Washington after the ten-year stint away. He had a reputation for receiving visitors in “a cold and mute way,” wrote a traveler to Washington. He was “cold and reserved to excess,” complained one member of Congress. His self-evaluation, typically, was the most damning of all. “I am a man of reserved, cold, austere, and forbidding manners; my political adversaries say, a gloomy misanthropist, and my personal enemies, an unsocial savage,” John Quincy told his diary in June 1819, after receiving one particularly tiresome visitor with polite silence but obvious contempt. “With a knowledge of the actual defect in my character, I have not the pliability to reform it.” It was possible to turn the defect into a virtue, nonetheless. As his father, the old revolutionary, so much loved to put it, he could make it evidence of his “independence.” That was only possible because of his wife. John Quincy was helped by being able to present another public face, one very different from his own. Louisa had learned a thing or two in Berlin, Boston, St. Petersburg, and London. She would do what John Quincy could not: if he could not be popular, then she could be. Had she truly kept herself distant, she never would have succeeded. But she was drawn to people, and people were drawn to her. Wrote one visitor, “She held us spell-bound.” As useless as her upbringing and her experience as a diplomat’s wife had seemed to her when she arrived in Quincy as a twenty-six-year-old, able to dance a polonaise but without a clue about how to milk a cow, they had prepared her perfectly for this moment. Louisa had always been sociable, however shy she sometimes felt. She brightened under the lamp of attention. And she was canny; she may have sensed that her initial defiance would make her more alluring. And so, slowly at first but then increasingly, she began to succeed as a social presence in Washington. She would come home to find a small, creamy calling card atop the tray: another senator’s wife had conceded and called. Or she would happen to be in her parlor when another lady arrived, her face arranged in a bright smile. Of course, there were never any hard feelings, Louisa would suggest. She was only a plain individual, after all, seeking nothing but a simple life. Then she would extend an invitation
to her next party—insisting that the invitation had always been waiting. Anyone, she liked to say, was welcome to come to her house. It took years, but by the end of 1822 she was triumphant: every single senator’s wife had paid her a visit except for one, and that one’s husband was “an inflexible enemy of Mr A.” Louisa, of course, kept track. She knew just how serious the business was—even if she was only permitted to treat it as a joke. Every morning, she reported to her father-in-law, John Quincy prepared a stack of calling cards for Louisa for the day. “You would laugh could you see Mr. A.,” she wrote to John Adams. He performed the task “with as much formality as if he was drawing up some very important article, to negotiate in a Commercial Treaty—but thus it is; and he has been brought to it by absolute necessity.” Louisa once wrote to Abigail, “In this most scandal loving place, . . . I have made up my mind to go on my own way and set it at defiance.” She went her own way to end up right where she wanted: at the center of Washington’s social scene, working to promote her husband’s chances for the presidency, waging her “campaigne.” 2

  IT WAS HER CAMPAIGN for his presidency—and in some ways, the campaign really was hers more than it was his. Her entertainments made “our Congress less dependent on the foreign ministers for their amusement,” Louisa wrote in her diary. The unspoken implication was that they made Congress more dependent on the secretary of state.

  While Congress was in session in 1819–20, Louisa began holding her “tea parties” every Tuesday evening, in addition to occasional large balls. She began a diary before that session with her take on Shakespeare’s famous lines: All the world’s a stage and all the Men

  and women in it players &ce &ce. She broke the line after “men” instead of after “stage,” as Shakespeare had. Perhaps this was not merely happenstance. Women had a place on this stage, but where? It was said to be forbidden for men to discuss politics around women, but that was a rule rarely followed. In daily practice, the distinction between a woman’s private self and her husband’s public position quickly broke down. Louisa went where the government went: the floor of the Senate, the galleries of the House, the Supreme Court, the drawing rooms of the President’s House. Margaret Bayard Smith, the author and doyenne, captured how Washington’s political scene merged the house with the House: The women here are taking a station in society which is not known elsewhere. On every public occasion, a launch, an oration, an inauguration, in the court, and in the representative hall, as well as the drawing room, they are treated with marked distinction. . . . At the drawing room, at our parties . . . the ladies and gentlemen stand and walk about the rooms, in mingled groups, which certainly produces more ease, freedom, and equality than in those rooms where the ladies sit and wait for gentlemen to approach to converse.

  Ease, freedom, and equality, of course, only went so far. The presence of women helped the men define themselves in opposition; they were what the women were not. Little gallantries helped build walls between the sexes, even as conversations broke them down. But it was a dynamic; the social and political worlds were interdependent. John Quincy needed her parties to go well. “Mr. A. who is apt to take alarm, began to be uneasy and anxious,” Louisa wrote after one. “The rooms were nearly full of Gentlemen, most of them Members 80 of whom attended, besides 13 Senators; when the young Ladies began to assemble so fast I could scarcely have time to make my salutations . . . all my guests were apparently satisfied, but what was best of all, Mr. A was so pleased with my success, that he joined in a Reel with the boys and myself.” As usual, beneath the breezy tone was a keen and purposeful awareness. Louisa was not just concerned with whether her guests were enjoying themselves; she was counting the members of Congress. Others, implicitly or not, began to make the connection too. Just before the start of Monroe’s second term, Harrison Gray Otis wrote to his wife that Mrs. Adams was “advancing in public favor.” He added, “I think too on the whole that John’s chance for the Presidency brightens, but it is yet too early to begin our calculations.” Her weekly parties continued during the 1820–21 congressional session. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of guests would come to her house. “The fashionable world of Washington was all there,” wrote a House member to his wife after one of Louisa’s parties. She followed the grand style of entertaining established by Dolley Madison when she had been in the President’s House, and by the diplomatic corps. But while the tradition was for a hostess to stand in one spot, where a servant would lead guests to greet her, and for the women to sit in chairs around the edge while men clustered in the center, Louisa went from room to room herself, seeming at ease, smiling, graceful, gracious, encouraging the guests to move fluidly about. Young women from Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston who were in town for the social season might come to Louisa’s parties, showcasing the new fashions—“if that can be called a dress which exposes the neck from the chin to the pit of the stomach before, and to the small of the back behind,” wrote one shocked congressman after attending a ball at the French minister’s home. Louisa rivaled the richest households for her spreads of cold meats, jellies, ice creams, oranges, and almonds. Roaming servants offered liqueurs, hot chocolate, champagne, and coffee. There were hired musicians or young women on hand to play Louisa’s piano or golden harp. Sometimes she sang too. When she was not denying her skill or claiming to desire only domesticity, she thought about the role she played and about how to play it well. “How much practice or what the French call usage du monde is required to receive company well,” she wrote to John Adams. It took small, considered attentions—generous questions, guileless glances, and little flatteries—to put a guest at ease. Without them, she wrote, even “the greatest talents”—like those of her husband—“are obscured.” She knew what she did was an art. She compared parties to kilns that hardened clay and set glaze, making something fragile into something durable. “By insensible degrees,” she wrote, a good party warmed company “into brilliancy and solidity. This is one of those arts that every body feels, but few understand, and is altogether inexplicable.” It took work, this indescribable effortlessness. Louisa took the dresses she had bought in Paris in 1815 and recut them. (She remained tiny as she grew older; in 1822, she weighed only 102 pounds.) She bought needles, ribbons, and silk. She took tawny silk and trimmed it with black. She set off an empire waist with an iridescent silver sash. She ran ribbons through the eyelets of her satin slippers. She raided old worn-out dresses for their trimmings. Ornamental rope threaded around a skirt; tulle framed a neckline; glittering tinsel fringed the flounces along a hem. She was once so proud of the reconstruction of an old dress that she actually boasted of it to John Adams, who replied with a characteristic warning against extravagance. It took the help of servants, too, of course, though they went largely unacknowledged. There was the usual rotating cast, usually working for five dollars a month; a coachman; a woman to whom the washing was sent. For large parties, extra servants were sometimes hired. Another three maids might be on hand to cook and clean in the kitchen, and six extra servants to wait on the table. She made do with what she had, drawing on her playful sense of style, but sometimes she sought more. Having shown she could manage by herself in Russia, she had become less shy about asking for money. These events were an investment. The lectures from John Quincy about thrift subsided. No longer needing to support an unsupportable St. Petersburg lifestyle, and with a $6,000 government salary and sound investments, including income from Boston properties, his finances were finally in decent shape. In April 1820, John Quincy bought Dolley and James Madison’s old house at 244 F Street, a half-mile walk from the President’s House. She complained about the purchase, then was annoyed when John Quincy insisted it was for her—but she quickly turned it to her purpose. Before the family moved from a rented place on Capitol Hill, Louisa hired a mason to build a large and expensive addition to the new house, and she “superintend[ed]” the construction herself. (In his diary, John Quincy grumbled that he had permitted it insofar a
s he had not stopped it.) The central feature was a room measuring twenty-eight by twenty-nine feet: a ballroom. Both Louisa and John Quincy complained about the demands of their socializing, as they did more of it. Their roles were defined and obvious to see. Mr. Adams “moves silently about and seems to have but little conversation with anyone,” noticed Representative Thomas Hubbard, but Mrs. Adams “receives company very elegantly.” John Quincy could afford to be off-putting because she was welcoming; he could be awkward because she was graceful. While he would be criticized for acting aloof, she would come away from a dinner and ball saying she had “never laughed so much in my life.” She could host the dinners and balls, and her husband would be almost a guest. He “had an extremely absent, preoccupied air,” wrote one woman, but Louisa was “talkative and lively,” and her parties “always pleasant and gay.” Not everyone admired Mrs. Adams. Her stubbornness during the visiting controversy had not endeared her to some. Those who saw her as too foreign—tainted by her years in Europe and her English birth—repeated a rumor that the British prince regent had asked Mr. and Mrs. Adams to stand in for him at the christening of the British minister’s wife; Monroe even asked John Quincy if the story was true. (It was not.) Her parties made her even more of a target. Although Monroe had tried to put the nation on a “European footing” after the War of 1812—even as soot and char still scarred the city after the British sacking, and as the white paint still dried on the reconstructed walls of the President’s House—it remained popular to bemoan luxury and extravagance. Monroe’s wife, Elizabeth, was criticized for being too aloof and aristocratic; women complained that she ignored them, and men studied the bright color of her cheeks for signs of makeup. Louisa felt sympathy and admiration for Elizabeth and nothing but scorn for those who accused her of being too courtly. Louisa was defensive for a reason. Western members referred to her “diplomatic tricks.” She had to pretend to be less sophisticated than she was. “One of the greatest taxes I have to pay is that of concealing that I am a traveled lady,” she wrote drily to her father-in-law. “I find myself an object of continual suspicion and mistrust,” she wrote to John, adding a little disingenuously, “though I never intrigued in my life but on the contrary have made many enemies in consequence of my proud independence.” She was not as sweet or conciliating as the last great hostess, Dolley Madison, who had been universally loved. Dolley herself took a shot at her when she wrote of Louisa’s “keep[ing] up the fashion for dissipation”—as if Dolley had not established the fashion herself. Louisa had set herself apart partly by breaking the accepted rules. Some chafed about having to pay their respects to her at her parties, after she had made such a point of refusing to do so first. And some suspected she liked the attention a little too much—that her smile was a little too beseeching to be real. “Mrs. Adams told somebody that Mrs. Munroe had been inclined to dejection of spirits and retirement, and that the ceremonials of her station were irksome to her. This is probably true,” one senator wrote to his wife, and then pointedly added, “and so would they not be to Mrs. [Adams] herself.” She had to expect criticism. It was the price paid for being “‘esteemed the most brilliant lady at Washington by all odds,’” Abigail had written to her. “This is the report of a gentleman of New York who attended your ball.” But for the most part, her parties were admired, and so was their hostess. “I am a very good diplomate,” she wrote to John Adams. “You may laugh but it is so.” • • • JOHN ADAMS WOULD LAUGH, but usually with delight. Six weeks after Abigail’s death, in mid-December 1818, Louisa received a letter from John asking her to send him her journal, as she had done with his wife. His encouragement, like Abigail’s, drew out her suppressed intelligence, the thoughts that she had kept huddled and hidden. She talked to him as she talked to no one else; he talked to her as he had once talked to Abigail.