She asked him questions about the differences between religious sects, wondering openly about her bias against Unitarians. “You will be surprized at my writing you on this subject,” she wrote, “but I thoroughly despise a mean and narrow prejudice and am desirous of being convinced by reason of my error.” She used her letters to him to map not only her activities but also her inner life—her confusion, frustration, triumphs, and ambivalence about her husband’s presidential hopes. She could hardly talk to her husband about such things. “These are subjects which I never or very very rarely venture on with him,” she confessed to John. Even if husband and wife had been able to be open emotionally with each other, John Quincy was too busy. He spent his time “pouring over his papers from morning till night,” Louisa wrote, “and we do not often hear the sound of his voice.” She needed a friend, someone who knew what was at stake and what were the risks, someone who knew her husband’s character and her own. She needed the old president. She would often say that no one else—including her husband—understood her so well. At the end of his life, John Adams taught her and encouraged her, and she wrote to him like a flower opening toward the sun. She sometimes wrote to John about books, and writing seems to have prompted her to read more. Soon, she was also writing her boys, away at grade school and then Harvard, about the books that passed through her hands—as if she were a student just as they were. She read constantly. Her diaries are strewn with quotations and allusions, and letters to her sons are filled with references to books. “I believe you have never read Johnson’s Lives of the Poets . . . and the Life of Savage is as interesting as any novel,” she wrote to her son John. She also told him to read Milton, Pope, Dryden, Gray—“not to say anything of Shakespeare, whose works like an everlasting spring pour forth new beauties on every perusal.” To George, who, she worried, was developing intemperate habits, she recommended The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which was rife with instruction in common sense and self-discipline. She read Voltaire and Molière in French. She read newspapers and literary journals—the North American Review, the Edinburgh Review, and Blackwood’s Magazine. She was not afraid to say what she thought of them, though she would habitually apologize for having any opinions at all. “It is the consciousness of my own nothingness that causes the liberty,” she wrote to her father-in-law. She tended to read for moral instruction, as many of her contemporaries did (including her husband), and she preferred clarity to ambiguity. “The principal objection I have to W Scott’s novels are that his heroes and heroines are almost always vicious and that he still paints them in so interesting a light that it is difficult even while you are aware of their great defects to restrain your admiration of their few good qualities,” she wrote to Charles. Humphry Clinker, by Tobias Smollett, she could admire, but she disapproved of the author’s own character. She cautioned her sons against novels, disapproving of their “mawkish sensibility.” Yet she also had a strong preference for naturalness over artifice, and found herself bewitched even by books she might not have liked to approve of. One night, she became so engrossed in Ivanhoe that she forgot to get ready to go to dinner at the French minister’s. Her reading was as voracious as it was undisciplined. It included all kinds of texts, even political philosophy. In 1819, John Adams told her to read ancient and modern philosophy. In fact, she responded, she already had. Her reply was playful, apologetic, and winning. Political philosophy? Her mind was not “sufficiently strong, or capacious, to understand, or even to comprehend” it. “You certainly forgot when you recommended it, that you were addressing one of the weaker sex, to whom Stoicism would be both unamiable and unnatural, and who would be very liable in avoiding Scylla, to strike upon Charybdis—or to speak without metaphor, to rush into skepticism.” But almost as if to prove herself wrong, she went on: “The systems of the Ancients have been quite out of my reach, excepting the Dialogues of Plato which Mr A. recommended to me last year, and which I read attentively. With the modern philosophers, I have become more intimate. . . . Locke has puzzled me, Berkley amused me, Reid astonished me, Hume disgusted me, and Tucker either diverted me or set me to sleep.” In the end, she wrote, “I have never seen anything that could satisfy my mind, or that could compare with the direct and exquisitely simple doctrines of Christianity.” She would go on reading in this manner for the rest of her life: Hogarth, Plutarch, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Dickens, travelogues, trashy fare, histories of the English Revolution. She would meditate upon genius. She would write of “instances of instability” that set ideas spreading like fires. Motherhood was her excuse to study books. What she did, she would justify herself, she did for her sons. It was socially acceptable, even virtuous, for a mother to concern herself with her children’s educations, though not her own. So when she translated Plato’s Apology from the French, it was so that she and her boys could be “occupied in some measure in the same studies.” When she asked Charles to teach her Latin, she excused the unfeminine behavior by claiming it might teach him humility to have such a poor student. She may have believed these things; certainly, she had no choice but to say them. Even John Adams, who did more than anyone to encourage her, expressed his “curiosity, astonishment, and excuse me when I say risibility” when he received her translation of Alcibiades. She was by no means a feminist (a word that did not yet even exist), but she was curious about those who fought for women’s rights, and perhaps even a little tempted toward radicalism. She read Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had caused a sensation—and an extraordinary backlash in the United States when it had appeared more than twenty years before—and she admired it. She urged it on her son Charles. “I hope you benefited from your study of the rights of women,” she told Charles, “which [in] spite of the prejudices existing against Miss Woolstoncroft [sic] are undeniable.” Her writing strengthened as she read and wrote more. She started to write all the time. “It is singular that I who have always had such a decided dislike to writing should all of a sudden have to launch out quite on a large scale,” she told George. Her voice sharpened, becoming more particular and vivid. “Your style in writing is known to be that of the most animated conversation; but in this instance it seems to obliterate the ideas of time and distance and to bring me near to you,” George responded to one thoughtful and honest letter, “not in the mood of mortified affection and extinguished expectation, but in that of gratified feeling arising from a sensible confidence imparted by a superior.” While her sons were in Boston, letters gave her a way to remain close, while their absence gave her mind the space to roam. She did worry about them. No doubt the lectures about smoking and eating vegetables she sent them could grow tiresome. She was anxious about Charles’s confidence, especially after he entered Harvard at the young age of fourteen in 1821, and she worried about George’s diligence and romantic sensibility as he approached and passed twenty years old. She would caution John, who was prone to finding trouble, against his quick temper—a characteristic, she was quick to say, she shared. But she also encouraged them, and she learned along with them. Through them, she entered into a more rigorous intellectual environment. As they grew, with her guidance, she grew along with them. The eldest, George, especially seems to have cherished her letters. So did her father-in-law. He needed her as much as she needed him. Abigail’s death had undone him. His best friend was gone. “The dear partner of my life for fifty four years and for many years more as a lover, now lyes in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” he wrote to Jefferson in 1818. Louisa was not Abigail, but she was a smart woman with whom he could exchange warm and wandering letters. Louisa brought out the best in John, as he did in her—the full force of his intellect, his humor, and his charm. “Your last three journals are three pearls,” he wrote to her in 1819. “I have not been able to thank you for either untill now, they bear the form and impression of the age. They let me into the characters of statesmen, politicians, orators, poets, courtiers, convivialists, dancers, d
andys and above all, of ladies, of whom I should know nothing, without your kind assistance. I am a little surprised at the depth of your speculations—upon oratory, phylosophy, and policy. But I need not be, when I recollect, who you are, where you have been, and who is your husband.” Four years later, he wrote to her, “Your journal is a kind of necessary of life to me. I long for it the whole week.” “Write without fear and put down on your paper what you think, without thinking of what you must say,” Louisa told her niece Mary Hellen, drawing firm lines beneath her words, “and your letters will be most acceptable.” It was true of herself. More and more, the woman who had been afraid to write for so long had begun to write without fear. “What is the reason I am no longer afraid to write all that passes in my head or in my heart to use,” she wrote to her husband when she was traveling without him. “Time was when my pen refused to mark the dictates of my fancy and I dreaded a censure where I claimed a friend.” Back in Washington with their eldest son, George, he responded with the same language his father had used to describe what her letters meant to him. They had, he wrote, “become a sort of necessary of life to George and me.” These exchanges turned out to be a necessary of life for her as well. She was like John Adams in some ways. She was neurotic and proud, but she had some self-awareness. She could be caustic, but was also generous. She mocked others but also herself. She wrote wildly, freely—with ritual disclaimers about her poor intellect and lack of interest. Perhaps it was easier for her to write to John Adams, because she always had the sense, from the moment she had met him, that he cared for her and understood her. And perhaps he sensed in her a need to be acknowledged, and a fear of being overlooked. Perhaps he saw that in her because he saw it in himself—and in all men. Decades before, in his Discourses on Davila, John Adams had written that what really makes a poor man so poor is obscurity. He is a nobody: “He is only not seen. This total inattention to him is mortifying, painful, and cruel.” There were times when Louisa felt that way. But in her journal letters, she stepped into the light, saw, and was seen. 3
THERE WAS ONE subject about which Louisa wrote to John Adams with particular delicacy—although the subject itself was anything but subtle. “Hear much of the Missouri question,” she wrote to him in December 1819, at the start of the debate over whether Missouri would be admitted as a slave state. “Should like to know your opinion upon the right of Congress to stop the progress of slavery as this is a strongly disputed point—We shall hear much of this, this winter.”
She was right about that. There was no avoiding the subject of slavery any longer, however much the members of Congress—and Louisa herself—might have wanted to avert their attention. For years, slavery had been a subject rarely broached inside the walls of the Capitol—a building dedicated to freedom and the rights of men but built by chattel labor. During those long years of silence, slavery had become only more entrenched in the Southern economy, and the slavocracy amassed wealth and power. Now, as the country expanded, the debate over slavery—would new land be slave or free?—was a wedge that was driving the country apart. “The Missouri question . . . hangs like a cloud over my imagination,” John replied to Louisa. And it hung over hers. Louisa followed the debates with fascination and fear. She went to the Capitol to watch the arguments, read the newspapers, and struggled with her own assumptions—influenced by her London upbringing, her Southern father, her New England husband, her religion, her compassion, and her reflexive conventional racism. She used crude language to describe slaves. When their characters were called into question—usually through fearmongering by whites—she was always ready to assume the worst. She interacted with slaves all the time. In 1820, about 20 percent of Washington’s population was made up of slaves. Slavery was everywhere. Slaves served Louisa hot chocolate in Elizabeth Monroe’s Drawing Rooms at the President’s House. They delivered purchases from stores and drove hired hacks. They brought her groceries. They cleared her plate when she was done with dinner at the Calhouns’. Directly across from their F Street home lived their friends the Thorntons—slave owners. A few doors away from the Adamses’ house stood Lafayette Tavern, the hotel “most frequented” by slave traders. A few doors in the other direction stood Miller’s Tavern, where, in 1815—only a few years before—a slave had jumped from the third floor to avoid being sold into the killing fields of the Deep South. She broke her back and arms but survived, sentenced to be still a slave. Even antislavery congressmen often lived in boardinghouses that used slaves, and along with room and board, sometimes a “boy” was dedicated to each boarder for the length of his stay. “At day light my boy Lewis comes to my room and builds my fire puts a tin cup of water on, to heat and takes out my clothes to brush,” wrote a New York congressman to his wife. (New York, of course, didn’t abolish slavery until 1827.) Some of these “boys” (who could have been men of any age) may have been paid wages, but some were certainly slaves. “We were waited upon by a slave, appointed for the exclusive service of our party during our stay,” wrote the antislavery advocate Harriet Martineau when she stayed at a Washington boardinghouse a decade later. There were pens where people were chained and held captive in view of government buildings. Almost everyone in Washington was complicit. Not everyone who came to the city remained quiet about the evils of slavery, of course. After an educational reformer named Jesse Torrey saw a group of slaves chained together on the road near the Capitol, he wrote one of the first widely read and sensational antislavery tracts, A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States. It included accounts of free blacks who were kidnapped in Washington and sold to planters in Louisiana and South Carolina. Some congressmen—including slaveholders—declared their discomfort with slave pens so close to the Capitol. But their scruples were superficial. There was still no prominent advocate for ending slavery in Congress. Most white Americans at the time, slave owners and antislavery advocates alike, were racist. There were a few who were starting to see the issue in light of the old Revolutionary ideals, who could see that the existence of slavery not only was something that the country would fight over, but that perhaps it was something it should fight over. John Quincy was one of those. • • • IN THIS, he was braver than Louisa and becoming more so—though during the Missouri debates only to a point, and only privately. Years later, John Quincy would devote himself to arresting the spread of slavery and beginning the work toward emancipation. But not yet. As the two sides lurched toward a series of compromises, John Quincy began to reflect on slavery and the fate of the Union in his diary—repeatedly, passionately, and at length. At a Cabinet meeting, he expressed his qualified, reluctant support for the first Missouri compromise, brokered by Henry Clay, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, to preserve the balance of slave and nonslave states, and forbade slavery in the territories north of 36°30′ north latitude.
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