Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  With her instinct for the powerful force of personality, she could understand what her husband could or would not. Men were choosing their leaders from among men, whom they wanted to see as they saw themselves. They elected a representative of the people—not a list of accomplishments. “For this reason my best friend this controversy has placed you in a new light,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy; “not as a negotiator of treaties alone, but as an able man.” He took the side of reason, intellect, facts, public duty. She argued for emotion, feelings, style, relationships. The era’s stereotypes are impossible to ignore. Louisa considered herself a lady and wanted to be a lady. She preferred delicacy to strength, imagination to logic, modesty to confidence. She took her subjugation for granted, though it sometimes made her angry. “That sense of inferiority which by nature and by law we are compelled to feel, and to which we must submit, is worn by us with as much satisfaction as the badge of slavery generally,” she wrote to John Quincy. She was not, though, merely submissive. Writing from Philadelphia, humming with news and opinions, she converted what restricted her into a liberating force. Because she believed her emotions were legitimate, even if her thoughts were not, she said what she wanted and then excused what she said as the effusion of her feelings. She wrote daringly frank letters. Her words would not pause for a comma, for a break, for a breath; her thoughts and insights and observations would overtake one another in a great onrush, unruly and free. At the end, she would append a line that dismissed everything she’d said as nonsense, the meaningless ravings of a woman. She slipped into satire or hyperbole, or used metaphors to mock powerful men. On a blank page in the middle of her diary, following the entry for March 28, 1821, and preceding the entry for July 19, 1821, she had written a “Motto for 1820.” It was a quote from Molière, Le médecin malgré lui, Act I, scene v: “C’est une chose admirable que tous les grands / hommes onts toujour du caprice, quelque / petit grain de folie mélée à leur science”—It is a wonderful thing that the great men always have something of caprice, some small grain of folly, mixed with their learning. There was something of Molière in her, and it helped her to realize that there was something of a “woman’s weakness” even in the greatest men. Men, like women, were driven by emotions. They wanted warmth and attention; they could feel frustrated and ignored. Their feelings were inconsistent. They were attuned to style, and sensitive to what could seem like small superfluities. Their powers of reason, however strong, were at the will of their hearts. It was not that John Quincy entirely disagreed with her. He had grown up in an age that celebrated sensibility. He knew the power of pathos; he had watched emotional appeals move men to war or to tears. His parents had both been open about the depth of their feelings and the complicated motivations of men’s behaviors. He was interested in psychology, too. His diary was full of observations about human nature. He understood vanity, including his own, all too well. But he struggled with empathy. His son Charles once said he hid his feelings behind an “iron mask.” Louisa tried to get him to take it off. • • • BACK AND FORTH between Washington and Philadelphia their letters sped, keeping their conversation at a quick pace. The mail itself was one sign of how the political scene was changing. Gone were the days when men were isolated from one another—or their politicians. The webs were spun and expanded, the path of a daily mail tracing the shape of the net. The improvement in the mail system helped close the distance between husband and wife. The easy rhythm of their letters’ arrivals kept their correspondence warm. He addressed her as “my dearest Louisa,” “my dearest friend.” She often spoke to him without address—or even salutation, picking up midthought. Her letters, written in journal form (as had become her habit), had the effect of inviting him into her daily life. Despite their distance—perhaps because of their distance—Louisa and John Quincy were very close that summer.

  Their intimacy had another dimension. He began to write to her about his work in a new way. He wrote as if taking part in an exchange, not as if delivering a report. “At every step I take I want a friendly adviser; and have had none but you,” he wrote to her. He treated her as a partner, and she responded as one. “It is true that I talk or rather hear politics,” she had written to John Quincy in 1822 from Philadelphia. “People seem to look upon me in this instance as part of yourself, and in the matrimonial light think us one.” Their union was intense, cooperative, and at times erotic. “With the dawn of morning I awaked and ejaculated a blessing to Heaven upon the semi-jubilee of our marriage—more than half of your life, and nearly half of mine, have we traveled hand in hand in our pilgrimage through this valley, not alone of tears,” John Quincy wrote to her on July 26, their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. “We have enjoyed together great and manifold blessings, and for many of them I have been indebted to you.” A few days later, Louisa received a desert flower, a night-blooming cereus. There could hardly have been a more fitting symbol for herself: resilient and yet fragile, “delicately elegant,” blossoming in the dark. She wrote to John Quincy about it suggestively, describing the white globe of the bud and the small spiral of feathery yellowish green leaves that cupped it. “Like our sex,” she told him, “it only displays its charms to advantage by candle light.” When the subject turned to politics, though, their tempers were sometimes provoked. Louisa wanted her husband to come to Philadelphia to meet with his supporters. He would not. She tried to put the idea on others; she wrote that she was only communicating advice, and said she only wanted to see him herself. But he could easily see her intent. She wanted him to encourage his “friends”—the networks of politicians, local leaders, newspaper editors, and power brokers who trumpeted a candidate’s positions, defended him against opposition, and campaigned on his behalf. “Mr H[opkinson] Says you had better give up the point and come here,” she wrote in late June. “Do pray leave Washington soon and come to your affectionate, LCA,” she added in early July. “I have told you before that I cannot come to Philadelphia,” he responded sharply. He compared himself to Prometheus, chained to the rock of his work. “The spirit of martyrdom seems to come upon me, and I sometimes think it would be happy for me, if I could die at my post.” She was persistent and then spoke outright. It was a “critical time,” she wrote, and the people were in his favor. He should “seize the happy occasion” to appear in person. His reticence and reclusiveness were self-defeating. Then she almost begged him. “Do for once gratify me I implore you; and if harm comes of it I promise never to advise again.” His enemies presented his reserve in a bad light. “They must have a President that they dare speak to.” Just before she left Philadelphia, in October, he responded with a despairing, raw, and furious letter. “It is my situation that makes me a candidate, and you at least know that my present situation was neither of my own seeking nor of my choice.” He should be president because he deserved to be president. “Of the Public History of Mr Monroe’s Administration, all that will be worth telling to Posterity hitherto has been transacted through the Department of State,” he claimed. There were treaties with Great Britain, Spain, France, and Russia. There was “the whole course of policy with regard to South America”—what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine. The secretary of state had made possible the purchase of Florida and the expansion of American territory straight to the Pacific. The extension of borders “has been obtained, I might confidently say, by me.” What had his rivals done? He dismissed Crawford and Calhoun with undisguised contempt. “As to the Treasury or War Departments, what single incident has occurred in this Administration, which will tell with credit to future ages?” What Crawford and Calhoun had done instead, he wrote, was slander him. “So much for the Public History of Mr. Monroe’s Administration—Now for its Secret History.” The administration’s secret history was a litany of lies and intrigue. The Cabinet was filled with snakes, men more interested in poisoning one another than in the good of the country. He alone was virtuous. He had no allies, no one looking out for his interests. D
id his friends think “a week’s visit to Philadelphia” would change that? Adams wrote as if he were prey, not another viper, as if he could extricate himself from the administration, holding his list of achievements in his clean hands. The truth was different. He wrote ferocious rebuttals to his critics’ charges, usually in letters that somehow found their way into newspapers—or were printed at his own expense. He tried to discredit the other candidates or ship them out of the country altogether, proposing that Clay become minister to Colombia, or that Jackson be shipped off as a diplomat far away. These proposals were politely, pointedly, turned down. When his friend Joseph Hall—who had been a witness at his wedding in London and was now the editor of the Portfolio in Philadelphia—published an anonymous sketch of his life in 1819, John Quincy made no move to stop it. The sketch was expanded and republished in 1824 as a campaign biography, with traces of his own hand. One man who knew him wrote that he “had an instinct for the jugular and carotid artery as unerring as that of any carnivorous animal.” In his diary, where he spun the secret history, he called Crawford “a worm preying on the vitals of the Administration within its own body.” Clay was “only half educated.” Calhoun, he grudgingly respected. (He called Andrew Jackson, the man who would become his greatest threat, a hero—but Jackson was not a main candidate yet.) “There is hardly a passion in the human heart but that is arrayed against me . . . a single false step would ruin me,” he wrote in his diary on July 11, 1822, his fifty-fifth birthday. That was the story, the public history and the private one, that he told his wife. He mocked her pretended innocence. “You will tell me that I can’t understand a joke, and that you only wanted me to come to you, to fetch you home.” 5

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1823, Louisa and John Quincy beat their way through stormy weather to a party at the President’s House. She went with the future much on her mind. Weeks before, she had resumed her campaign, holding her tea parties now on alternate weeks. That evening, they hosted twenty men—governors, senators, representatives—for dinner at their house on F Street. Afterward, as rain tapped at the windows, she picked up her pen and opened her diary. She was pensive. “If the weather of today is ominous of the storms of the ensuing year we must not expect much quiet,” she wrote. “Let it come I will not flinch be the end what it may.”

  A few days later, Louisa received a letter from Joseph Hopkinson. A powerful lawyer, former representative of Pennsylvania in Congress, and a recent member of the New Jersey House of Assembly, Hopkinson began by reminding her of her warm and happy visits to Bordentown, New Jersey. “Let me beg you to consider, for a moment, that you and I are sitting, with or without a bright moon as you please, on the Piazza looking into the garden,” Hopkinson began. There, “one may say many things, which it would by no means be proper” for a man to say to a lady. The illicit romance was in fact an ongoing conversation about presidential politics; and the subject, their reciprocal desire, was the prospect of John Quincy’s presidency. John Quincy’s conduct, Hopkinson went on, seemed “calculated to chill and depress” those who advocated his cause. He and others felt actively discouraged by the man they were trying to promote. “Now, my dear Madam, all this won’t do. The Macbeth policy ‘if chance will make me king, why chance may crown me,’ will not answer where little is left to chance or merit, but kings are made by politicians and newspapers,” he wrote, “and he who sits down waiting to be crowned either by chance or just right will go bare-headed all his life.” Louisa did what Hopkinson no doubt expected her to do: she handed the letter to her husband. John Quincy’s own hand recorded the letter’s receipt at the edge of the envelope, and John Quincy wrote Hopkinson a stern and righteous reply, disavowing any activity that would seem grasping. In her own response, Louisa echoed John Quincy’s message. But she was not merely the messenger in this case. Hopkinson had meant for John Quincy to read the letter, but it was addressed to Louisa. If it were only for John Quincy, Hopkinson’s allusion to Macbeth would seem odd. Macbeth, torn between his virtue and his ambition, resists acting to fulfill a prophecy until he succumbs to the lure of power. He has the king murdered, sends Scotland into chaos, and then is killed. When Hopkinson criticized the secretary of state’s “Macbeth policy,” John Quincy was able to make the easiest of rejoinders: look what terrible things happened to Macbeth once he took events into his own hands! But the allusion was richer, because the letter was to John Quincy’s wife. If John Quincy was Macbeth, then Louisa was Lady Macbeth, who had pushed her husband to murder the king to gain the throne. The letter was also an appeal to Louisa, then. If John Quincy was hesitant, then she could not be. If he would not act, then she should. Lady Macbeth had to show her husband what to do, to push him down the path. Hopkinson was not subtle here. He addressed Louisa as “the second lady of the republick, that ‘shal’t be first hereafter’”—an echo of the prophecy that three witches deliver to Macbeth at the start of the play: “All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter!” Hopkinson was a lawyer. He was clever. He knew John Quincy; he knew Louisa. His approach to John Quincy had been rejected. Now he appealed to Louisa’s ambition instead. She would have recognized the reference to Shakespeare’s line, and she would not have missed its suggestion. She had read Macbeth and seen it performed on stage. Years later, she would meditate on the play at length and find its echoes in her own life. “Were we to look deeply and minutely into the secret histories of men; how constantly we should observe this same retributive justice,” she would write in 1839. “It is one of the most remarkable facts; and it has caused me deeply to reflect upon its repeated and continued recurrence.” Writing in 1839, Louisa may not have remembered her husband’s use of the phrase “secret history” in 1822, but the echo was still there. Even before she read Hopkinson’s letter during that tempestuous start to 1823, her mind was running along similar lines. She felt some temptation or threat that was strong enough for her, at the least, to feel the need to ward it off. “Let me be satisfied with my own conduct and I defy slander and the foul fiend,” Louisa wrote on January 1, the very same day that Hopkinson was writing her. Whether she would admit it or not, Louisa was electioneering. She met with men privately; she pushed her contacts to work on John Quincy’s behalf. She went to Maryland as well as Philadelphia, again for her health but also with an eye toward her husband’s presidential prospects. “As my connections in [Maryland] are of the most respectable and distinguished I am solicitous to secure them in his interest,” she wrote with pride. “Maryland it is said will be his.” Hurriedly, she continued: “For myself I have no ambition beyond my present situation.” When she resumed her diary in November at the start of the congressional session, she began with a epigraph: “In a righteous cause I dare both good and ill—” When she copied the entries onto loose-leaf sheets to send as a letter to John Adams and her son George, she turned the line into a rhyming couplet and softened it: “In a righteous cause I dare both good and ill— / Obey Gods Laws, and act with virtue still.” In her diary, though, the words remained in their stark original form. More than two hundred years had passed since Shakespeare wrote, and yet the suspicion that a woman violated her sex by involving herself in affairs of state—that she “unsexed” herself, as Lady Macbeth did—was persistent and deep rooted. If anything, Louisa’s situation was more perilous than it would have been even a short time before. Had Louisa lived where the Hopkinsons did, in Bordentown, fifteen years earlier, and had she had a little property to her name, she would have been able to vote. But New Jersey rewrote its suffrage laws in 1807 to expand the vote for white men by abolishing the property requirement, while excluding women and blacks. Other states likewise wrote into their constitutions new explicit language forbidding women and often blacks from direct participation in politics. Before then, in many places gender restrictions on the franchise had been a matter of custom, not enshrined in law. The widespread celebration of American virtue and its connection to daily domestic life after the Revolution had encouraged women to thi
nk of themselves as integral members of the republic. Now, women were being written out of the laws. “Kings are made by politicians and newspapers,” Hopkinson had written, which was half true. The tradition whereby a small group of men picked the president from an even smaller group of men—mostly Virginia-bred secretaries of state—was coming to an end, and with it the power of the capital’s social scene, where women might play an indirect part. The power of political insiders in Washington was waning. Networks of political supporters were becoming increasingly structured and institutionalized, and their centers were outside of Washington. The process was accelerated as new forms of communication and transportation arose, making it easier to speed information from one place to another, and as more men began to stake their claim in the federal government. Some of them were radicalized by a period of economic hardship known as the Panic of 1819, a downturn triggered by speculation in public lands with paper money and the postwar adjustments of Europe’s economy. The popular resentment against banks and businesses joined up with resentment against Washington. Political parties were forming, and the players in them were men. As the franchise expanded for white men, the roles allowed to white women were increasingly restricted. Politics were considered corrupt; the ideal American woman was pure. To keep “the fair sex” untainted, the two had to be kept apart. • • • A WOMAN was always on display, even in Congress. When Louisa went to watch the debates, the expression on her face was scrutinized. Shopkeepers asked her to model their clothes. A New York businessman sent her a new kind of bonnet, explaining that her patronage might spur sales. She knew what people thought, and she knew she had to deny that she did. When she fell sick, she wrote that it was assumed that she suffered “in consequence of hopes and fears during this tremendous struggle for the Presidential election for which in fact I care very little.”