Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  In his diary, John Quincy raised a personal challenge. He called slavery “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union” and raised the question of its “total abolition.” “A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would be certainly necessary. . . . The Union then might be reorganized upon the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed.” He may have been echoing, faintly, a pair of widely circulated articles in the Edinburgh Review about Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. “Every American who loves his country, should dedicate his whole life and every faculty of his soul, to efface this foul stain [of slavery] from its character,” the reviewer wrote. But John Quincy was not merely aping someone else’s opinion. He sometimes could have difficulty empathizing with the troubles of those in his immediate family, yet he was often the only one among them who stopped to consider the humanity of blacks. He saw how they were punished for crimes they did not commit and subject to injustice without recourse. He keenly felt the inhuman treatment of slaves, who were forbidden the most basic human rights—“from the bed, from the table, and from all the social comforts of domestic life.” Still, John Quincy was only beginning to connect the inheritance of Revolutionary ideals to the project of emancipation. For the moment, he had to consider politics, including his own future. He was “a servant of the whole Union,” he told Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois, for whom “there was neither East, West, North, or South to my duty or my feelings,” whatever his views on the immorality of slavery. He remained aloof, not wanting to jeopardize the passage of his Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, already rabidly denounced by Henry Clay (not incidentally, a slaveholder) for setting the western boundary without including slaveholding Texas. Nor did he want to antagonize slaveholders who might support him in the 1824 election. He instructed Louisa to write a message to his talkative, frank, impolitic father, asking him to decline answering any questions on the subject from others, “as he does not think the time has arrived in which he can with propriety take a part in the business.” She was relieved at his cautious position. Really, she wanted to avoid the whole issue. At a party at the French minister’s on the night of March 4, 1820, the day after the compromise bill granting Missouri statehood was passed by Congress, she found herself on the spot. “[T]here was an odd sort of crowing tone among some of the members of Congress which seemed to aim at my husband, and some queer questions were asked me concerning his opinion on the Missouri business which I could not understand,” she wrote to the old president John Adams. “I have never pretended to understand the question in all its bearings as a political one; in a moral and religious point of view and even as a gross political inconsistency with all our boasted institutions, liberty, and so forth, it is so palpable a stain that the veryest dunce can see it and understand it. . . .” She excused herself, but she, no dunce, knew better. • • • HER DISCOMFORT may have been complicated by more personal reasons. The Johnson family—her family, the name she so fiercely protected—was a slaveholding family. Louisa’s father had owned slaves. So did her sisters’ husbands and, most likely, her brother in New Orleans. There may also have been at least one slave living in her own house. The 1820 census showed a female slave under the age of fourteen living in the Adams residence. In light of his antislavery views and his statement later that he never owned slaves, John Quincy almost certainly did not own the person himself; he may have rented her from her owners and paid her (and, likely, her owner) wages—a common practice in Washington at the time. Or she may have been owned by a member of the extended family who was living with them at the time.

  The most likely possibility is that the slave belonged not directly to Louisa and John Quincy but to Louisa’s young niece Mary, the daughter of her older sister Nancy. Mary’s father, Walter, had been a slaveholder, and in 1816, the executor of Walter Hellen’s will allotted Mary approximately $7,600 from stock and “cash, furniture and negroes.” Mary may have brought a slave, a child, with her when she moved in with the Adamses. In the South, it was common for a wealthy white girl to be “given” a domestic slave about her age; it was thought to cultivate the slave’s loyalty. Mary would later manumit a slave named Rachel Clark—but not until 1828, a decade after she moved in with Louisa and John Quincy. In 1834, Louisa’s younger sister Adelaide, who married Walter Hellen after Nancy’s death, freed a slave named Jane Clark, whom the Adamses called Jenny, and who “lived sometimes with us,” John Quincy later wrote. Jane also had a son named Joseph, whom Adelaide sold, and who was taken by his new owner to Arkansas. John Quincy later insisted that he did not tolerate having slavery in his family, but it seems that he did tolerate having slaves in his house—and, considering that he would consider Mary a kind of daughter, his claim was only technically true. He was like most whites living in Washington, making tortured distinctions between principle and practice. This would become harder; he would become braver—but not until later. Louisa was even less troubled by these compromises than he. She was opposed to slavery as an idea; she openly referred to it as an injustice. But she did not want to fight slavery herself. She wanted to close her eyes and have the debate disappear. She avoided using even the word “slavery.” “It is really a pity that the Southern interest should have renewed a subject altogether so inimical to the peace and quiet of the country,” she wrote to John Adams. “It is calculated to rouse a spirit which will prove more difficult to exorcise than all the ghosts who have been doomed to the Red Sea.” Like many others, she would prefer the perpetuation of one of the worst atrocities in modern history for the sake of peace and quiet—peace for whites, that is, since there was no such thing as peace for those under the threat of the lash. There may have been a psychic cost. The subject exhausted her to talk about; it also exhausted her to avoid it. As she wrote to John Adams that night after the French minister’s party, the Missouri Compromise still on her mind, “Returned home very weary tired of myself and all the world.” 4

  BECAUSE MARCH 4, 1821, Monroe’s second inauguration day, fell on a Sunday, the swearing-in ceremony was pushed to Monday. Rain and snow further moved it from outdoors to inside the House chamber. Despite the grim weather, an immense crowd converged on the Capitol. Monroe had to struggle through the crush of people on his way to his chair on the platform. His black broadcloth suit was tugged at, his hat almost lost. People noticed the silver buckles at his knees and on his shoes. Already, he was out of style; he would be the last president to wear the clothing of the Revolutionary era. Monroe had taken part in the crossing of the Delaware River in 1776. By 1821, his “antiquated” clothing had become a legible symbol: one era was ending, another was coming. The next president would wear a suit with long pants.

  There were strong signs of other changes. Monroe had been reelected almost unanimously. “Discord does not belong to our system,” he once said. But the era of unity, such as it was, would be fleeting. Even then—even that very day—the fragility of the good feelings was apparent. The din of voices in the hall, the “disorder of loud talking and agitation in the Gallery,” John Quincy noted, never wholly subsided, not even as the president took the oath and delivered his speech. The House galleries’ attention was distracted by the members of the Cabinet, including John Quincy, who sat to Monroe’s right. Speculation about who would take Monroe’s place was rampant and noisy. The rivals for the next election were as much a part of the spectacle as the Marine Band. That night, the Adamses went to the inaugural ball at Brown’s Hotel. Louisa paid attention to Elizabeth Monroe moving amid the crowd, “more beautiful than I ever saw her.” She thought of what the room would look like four years from that moment, and imagined herself in that place. Louisa could only hope, she wrote, that if fate gave her the role, she would perform it as well as Elizabeth Monroe. As Louisa watched the incumbent, she could sense that people were a
lso watching her. Heads were turning in her direction. “The eye of the public,” she wrote, “is already on me.” • • • LOUISA WATCHED Elizabeth Monroe with as much dread as admiration. She was a cautionary example, denigrated for being too haughty, too aristocratic, even too beautiful. There would be a price for success. “Can anyone see the miserable woman who now fills that seat and not shrink with fear and disgust from a situation so wretched?” Louisa wrote to her brother, Thomas, who was living in New Orleans. “To be slandered, vilified, and condemned . . . Oh defend me from such a situation.”

  That winter, 1821–22, was a hard one. Frequently sick—and believing she was pregnant—Louisa suspended her weekly parties. (She did hold one massive ball that winter; hundreds of curious denizens turned out to see the forty-seven-year-old hostess who was, as Louis McLane of Delaware put it, “as ladies who love their lords like to be.” If she was in fact pregnant and not going through menopause, then at some point that winter she miscarried for the final time.) She began to withdraw. She worried about her sons and worried more about their father’s high expectations. George, now twenty years old, was sensitive. Her oldest son “magnifies his joys and sorrows,” Louisa wrote, “until the real world in which he moves vanishes from his sight.” He loved poetry and the natural world, and, like his mother, was liable to fall ill during times of stress. “His nature is kind and amiable, and his heart is excellent,” Louisa wrote to her son John about his older brother. “Little oddities sometimes worry us but we should reflect on ourselves and remember that we are none of us exempt from peculiarities of which we are not aware.” John Quincy was appalled to learn that George was ranked in the middle of his class when he graduated from Harvard that summer. John Quincy ordered him to Washington, where he might keep a watchful eye on his son, to work as his private secretary, and to study for the law. The prospects of his two younger sons, John and Charles, upset John Quincy even more. He was so unhappy to learn that John’s rank at Harvard sat even lower than his older brother’s and that Charles, who had just turned fourteen years old, had performed badly on his entrance exams. He declared that both John and Charles would not be allowed to come to Washington for Harvard’s Christmas break. “I could feel nothing but sorrow and shame in your presence,” he wrote. Their mother, who delighted in their company, could not sway him. After her sons’—and her—last desperate plea, she wrote in her diary, “This day has blasted my hopes and I am absolutely refused the sight of my children—I must submit because I have no resources but it grieves me to the soul.” In her characteristically melodramatic fashion, she guessed that she would probably die before she saw them again. She was in fact ill, plagued by attacks of “my old friend” erysipelas, the painful bacterial infection she had contracted in St. Petersburg. Now her health went from bad to worse. It may have been, as she herself believed, related to her state of mind. Yet again, her husband was making decisions regarding their sons without her. She was reminded of what little standing she could claim for herself in her own family. For months at a time, she stopped writing her letters to John Adams. Without her parties, she felt her status as the city’s doyenne slipping. Her “constellation,” she wrote, was “in eclipse.” What drew her from the shadow, ironically enough, was illness. That June, 1822, Louisa took her chronically ill brother Thomas, who had returned to Washington from New Orleans, where he had been postmaster general, to Philadelphia. There, she sought the services of Dr. Philip Syng Physick, who recommended hemorrhoid surgery (the famous doctor’s almost universal prescription). Louisa and Thomas settled into a hotel at 62 South Sixth Street, between Chestnut and Walnut streets and across from the State House Gardens, run by a warmhearted spinster prone to malapropisms. Weeks turned into months, until Thomas was well enough for surgery and the heat had abated. The health problems that plagued her brother (and—as ever—her) were significant and debilitating. But soon, she began to enjoy herself. The distance from Washington, the service for her brother, and the warmth of the attention from her friends and acquaintances in Philadelphia revived her. She was never so happy as when she visited the house of her closest friends, Elizabeth and Joseph Hopkinson, in Bordentown, New Jersey. On one trip, a group of young women, “as wild as unbroken colts,” was also visiting. “Shouts and laughter resounded through the house,” Louisa told John Quincy. There were fishing trips and long walks; visits with Napoleon’s brother Joseph, who had escaped to the United States just before Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo and now had an estate nearby, and who tried to charm Louisa especially; and games of whist. On one rainy day Louisa pulled out a pack of cards and told the girls’ fortunes. “This week has been one in which I have lived a year,” she wrote to her husband. Play turned to politics; her “friends,” including the Hopkinsons, had powerful political connections. Even in Bordentown, along with the gallivanting and card games, there was “familiar chat” on the piazza with Joseph—pretense for discussions about politics. Back on Sixth Street in Philadelphia, Louisa had use of the parlor, and she turned it into a kind of political salon. Her parlor in the little hotel became a kind of campaign headquarters. Nearly every day, men came to see her—not just any men, but some of the leading political figures in Philadelphia, men with a reach beyond Pennsylvania. Newspaper editors, generals, senators came to give her news, pass along messages, and discuss the race. They were electioneering. Philadelphia was no longer the site of the nation’s capital, but it was still the second-largest city in the Union, more populous than Boston, and five times more so than Washington. Its significance was reflected in its beauty, with its Palladian windows and pleasant squares, oil lamps that glowed at night, brick walks, shops stocked with elegant dresses and delicate shoes imported from Paris. Some of the shops kept Louisa’s measurements on file. Politically, John Quincy was not the front-runner in Pennsylvania, but Philadelphia was still strategically important; the middle states were especially crucial for John Quincy’s prospects. New England, John Quincy could safely assume, would be united behind him—though grudgingly, perhaps. (“He has few personal friends, and no very strong hold on their public feelings,” wrote New Hampshire senator Jeremiah Mason to Rufus King. “A tremor in the popular pulse is often perceptible.”) The South was already lost. The West, at this point in the race, was Henry Clay’s territory. But the middle states were fiercely contested, with every man able to make a claim, and was home to newspapers with national reaches, both in circulation and through reprinting. It had a tradition of political engagement, the greatest tradition in the country. Its influence could be far-reaching. Louisa’s letters to John Quincy started to include roll calls of her visitors. Major Jackson, Mr. Ewing, Mr. Cook, Mr. Sergeant, Mr. Ingersoll, Mr. Walsh . . . It quickly became understood by all—including John Quincy—that his wife could send and deliver messages. She was not just a point of contact, though. She helped shape what was said. In her parlor, she would discuss resignations, appointments, the latest report from the Louisville newspapers. General Jacob Brown, commanding general of the U.S. Army, would come by to brief her on the state of support in Pennsylvania for Secretary of War John Calhoun, the tumultuous state of politics in New York, the prospects of a two-man race between Secretary of Treasury William Crawford and Adams. Invariably, she would close her letters reporting conversations to John Quincy with a demurral. Those self-abasements were so automatic that they couldn’t have been entirely disingenuous; her insecurity and belief in a woman’s subordinate place ran too deep. She cringed at her husband’s praise of her political acumen. “I hate the word advice when you apply it as given from me to you,” she wrote. But her ambivalence about her capacity didn’t stop her or dampen her enthusiasm in Philadelphia. When she sat at her table and set her pen to paper, her accounts tumbled across the page, and her counsel was mixed in with them. Her tone swung between operatic and cynical. “My courage will not fail me. . . . The object of competition is a noble one,” she would write one day. Then another, she would joke about “a g
ood receipt for a Presidential candidate”: “Take a good deal of small talk; a very little light literature; just sufficient attention to dress to avoid the appellation of a dandy; an undesirable affectation of social affability; with as much suavity as will induce the fawners who surround him.” She had heard rumors about the slovenliness of his dress. “I was asked if you really went to church without shoes or stockings. I replied that I had once heard you rode to your office with your head to your horse’s tail, and that the one fact was as likely as the other.” But it wasn’t all comic. There was a consistent thrust to her letters. She urged her husband to show his feelings, to let the public know that he was human. Her most eloquent appeal to him came while he was unmasking the duplicity of Jonathan Russell in a controversy over John Quincy’s actions at Ghent in negotiating the treaty that ended the War of 1812. Russell, a representative from Massachusetts and a colleague at Ghent, had produced copies of correspondence that seemed to show that Adams, alone among the commissioners, had been willing to trade the right of New Englanders to fish off the Canadian coast for navigation rights on the Mississippi. The implication was that John Quincy was willing to sell out the West to protect eastern interests. But the documents were doctored. John Quincy easily showed that the copies did not match the originals, and in two articles published in the National Intelligencer that summer, he demolished Russell’s integrity. At first, Louisa was elated. “Poor Jonathan! He has proved himself a flat fish, and seems to be killed as ‘dead as a flounder.’” When John Quincy refused to stop hammering Russell, long after he had won his point, however, she tried to warn him against beating the dead fish. The way she did it is instructive. She began by telling him that Robert Walsh, an influential Philadelphia newspaper editor who had printed both Russell’s and the secretary of state’s correspondence, was urging John Quincy to end his attack. She was only delivering someone else’s message, she implied. Then she moved into her own language and advice. You are under a great error as it regards the interest of the late correspondence; the personal part of it has been the only part which has really occupied the publick mind, and it has placed you before the world in the character of a private individual, suffering under an unjust and ungenerous persecuted—in this light alone it is viewed and in this light it is powerfully felt, because every man can understand it and make the case his own. Persons long inured to public life accustomed to objects of great magnitude, thinking for a world and ever dwelling not on man individually but on the welfare of mankind at large, are apt to overlook the little passions, and the little every day feelings which contribute so largely to create the strong impulse of civil society.