Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  John Quincy dropped his pose of disinterest and indifference to the election. He knew how this kind of politics worked, and with the game so close he was finally willing to play. No, he would not object to placing Federalists in plum jobs, he reassured one visitor. Yes, such a man might make a fine judge, he reassured another. He was available for meetings; he was at every dinner; he was at the theater, with his wife by his side. “You must know society is now divided into separate batallions as it were,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote to her sister. “Mrs. Adams collected a large party and went one night [to the theater], Mrs. Calhoun another, so it was thought by our friends that Mrs. Crawford should go too, to show our strength.” The Marquis de Lafayette, the old French general who had become a Revolutionary War hero, was in Washington that winter as part of his triumphal tour of the United States in commemoration of his service during the Revolution. His presence brought the candidates and congressmen into contact for dinners. They were civil on the surface, maneuvering beneath. Louisa did her part, hosting her tea and dinner parties, going to the theater, fixing a bright smile and holding it even when Jackson appeared and cheers rose from the crowd. Even a Crawford supporter had to admit that “both the wine and the company were unusually good” at one of her dinners that December. “Mrs A. is most assiduous in her part of the campaign and she is by far the most successful,” Delaware representative Louis McLane wrote to his wife. A month later, he added snidely, “I am half provoked, that you are not here, to play the politician with Mrs. Adams.” She waited, feeling unwell. If she kept a diary, it has not been found. She did not write many letters. “The times are such,” she wrote to George at the end of November, “that it is hazard to note even the events of the hour.” • • • AT SIX O’CLOCK on Sunday, January 9, 1825, Henry Clay stepped out of the frosty darkness into the Adamses’ house on F Street. Perhaps Louisa was there to greet him, or perhaps not. “Harry of the West” did fascinate her. “There is something about Mr. Clay; that pleases me in spite of reason,” she once wrote, speaking of both his good, open heart and “vicious habits”—his notorious gambling and philandering. When she saw him at a party, loose and jaunty, with his flashing eyes and curling mouth, she would engage with him, against her better judgment. The two of them did not speak so much as spar. “We meet but to war and each of us are ready with a jest on all occasions,” she wrote after one encounter. She did not trust him—not at all. “Mr. Clay almost overpowered me with compliments,” she observed suspiciously after one party. “Mr. Clay is playing a new game,” she wrote after another. “I always mistrust these sudden changes and though I do not interfere in politics it is difficult for me to avoid knowing transactions which are talked of by every one and which places a man in the light of a decided enemy to my husband.”

  That January night, the decided enemy became the best friend. As a particularly capable Speaker of the House, Clay had wielded significant influence (and claimed probably more than he could actually offer). Denied the possibility of becoming president, he enjoyed the prospect of playing kingmaker. On January 12, at a dinner hosted by the members of the House of Representatives to celebrate the Marquis de Lafayette, Jackson and John Quincy were among the guests. Someone had the perversity to seat Jackson next to John Quincy with a vacant chair between them. Clay sauntered over and slid into the empty spot. “Well gentlemen,” Clay said, “since you are both too near the chair, but neither can occupy it, I will slip in between you, and take it myself.” Everyone laughed, except John Quincy. So when Clay called on John Quincy that evening, he came aware of his power and purpose. It may be that some understanding passed between them—that in exchange for Clay’s support, John Quincy would give him a plum post in the administration. Something seems to have happened of note, because John Quincy left half the page of his diary describing his meeting with Clay blank. His diary was, he told his oldest son, a “second conscience.” In this case, it appears he wanted to hide something from himself. He never did say exactly what had passed between him and his old rival. Whatever it was, though, didn’t matter. No laws were broken. Clay was never going to throw his support behind Jackson, whom he hated personally and considered a despotic threat to the republic. Clay’s outlook, foreign and domestic—especially his ambition for an extensive system of internal improvements—was far more in line with John Quincy’s agenda than Jackson’s. Clay had already privately said that he would be supporting Adams before he arrived at F Street that Sunday night. The process played out as the Constitution mandated. But that meeting would come to haunt them. Jackson’s supporters were crying foul even before the ballots in the House were counted. The appearance of collusion between John Quincy and Clay, the suggestion of backroom dealing, seemed to taint the election. Did his wife know what really happened in that meeting? No one defended John Quincy’s integrity more fiercely than Louisa. Yet she knew that he would use men as means to his ends, that he would make compromises that he was unwilling to admit. She once wrote about a character she based on him that he saw other men as “the medium through which the great plans he formed for the welfare of his country were to be matured.” He was not above making deals. John Quincy was pushing Maryland and Louisiana. He had Clay and Daniel Webster working on Stephen Van Rensselaer, who had the vote for New York and who sometimes played the fool but was shrewder than he looked. And he was in conversation with Daniel Pope Cook, who had the sole vote for Illinois and who would switch it from Jackson to Adams. As it happened, Cook was a frequent guest at the Adamses’ house and a favorite of Louisa’s—someone who responded to her charm. Cook also happened to be the nephew of Louisa’s sister Eliza’s husband. Louisa held her last tea party on the evening of Tuesday, February 8, 1825—the night before the House vote. Sixty-seven members of the House came to F Street, and “at least four hundred citizens and strangers,” John Quincy noted in his diary. The next day the ballots were cast and counted. The family stayed at home, waiting for news. That afternoon, Alexander Everett came through the snow from the Capitol to the Adams house to tell John Quincy that he was the next president of the United States. Exactly what Louisa said, thought, or did when she heard the news is unrecorded. She wrote no letters that survive; she kept no diary that day. “Your journal which has become a necessary of life to me has failed me for a long time,” John Adams gently chided her at the end of March. In his own diary, John Quincy hardly mentioned her. “Congratulations from several of the officers of the Department of State ensued—from D. Brent, G. Ironside, W. Slade, and Josias W. King—Those of my wife, children, and family were cordial, and affecting, and I received an affectionate note from Mr. Rufus King of New York, written from the Senate chamber after the event.” That night, she accompanied him to the President’s Drawing Room. Andrew Jackson was there, and Andrew Jackson was still the main attraction. From the start, there were signs of trouble, indications of the high price of success. The public’s support—even in Washington—was clearly for the Old Hero. A few days later, she and John Quincy attended the theater. The applause that greeted them was smattering. But when the orchestra played “The Hunters of Kentucky”—a song celebrating Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans—the crowd cheered wildly and clapped in time with the song. On Thursday, March 3, the night before John Quincy was inaugurated as president of the United States, Louisa was “seized with a violent fever,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. The doctor was summoned and she was bled. She was ill all night, and before daybreak had “a long and alarming fainting fit.” It seems that she was not in the audience at the Capitol the next morning to watch John Quincy take the oath of office. If she had been able to watch him speak, dressed in his plain black suit, or if she heard him practice his delivery the night before, perhaps while she lay ill in bed, she would have heard some quiet, perhaps unintended, acknowledgment of her own important role. “The harmony of the nation is promoted and the whole Union is knit together by the sentiments of mutual respect, the habits of social
intercourse, and the ties of personal friendship formed between the representatives of its several parts . . . at this metropolis,” John Quincy said. Those were the kinds of ties that were knit by his wife. When the inauguration was over, John Quincy returned to F Street and the crowd followed him there. Louisa roused herself, fastened the hooks of her dress, and went downstairs. Her campaign was over. They had won—but what? After dinner, while the rest of the family went to a celebratory ball, Louisa went to bed. PART EIGHT

  A BIRD in a

  CAGE Washington, 1825–1829

  1

  ONE DAY IN LATE APRIL 1825, Louisa sat with blank paper in front of her. She had not written to her son Charles for weeks, not since his return to Boston after the inauguration more than a month before. “Even now I have no subject on which to occupy your attention,” she wrote.

  The “perpetual trouble” of the move to the President’s House had consumed her. She disliked her new home, and that day she had put herself in a spot where she might dislike it even more. Instead of facing south, overlooking the gardens and the fields sloping toward the wind-shirred river, she looked north, out over the scrubby grass, the tall iron fence, and the locked gate. Instead of going to her own room, she sat in her son John’s. It had been a stormy day and the wind was still violent. The loose glass panes made such a noise, she wrote to Charles, that her headache was “fit to split and I am obliged to close with a wish that you had seen our splendid misery.” She had been astonished to find that the Monroes had left the White House in disrepair. She wandered through the vacant rooms, aghast. The furniture, bought by James Monroe with public funds, was scuffed and threadbare. Walls were naked plaster. Finishing touches were unfinished. “I believe it would be difficult to find such unassortments of rags and rubbish even in an alms house,” she told Charles. Vagrant drafts blew in and swirled around her. Twenty-five years after the President’s House was first occupied, and a decade after the British had burned it, reconstruction was incomplete. Some parts were still closed off. “Like everything else in this desolate city,” she wrote, it was “but a half-finished barn.” It galled her to think that the public perception of the President’s House was so wrong. Closed doors had hidden the dereliction; in fact, the complaint was that the mansion was too magnificent. Louisa decided to have a public viewing, to let the people see the cracks in the walls, the bare fixtures, and derelict furniture—and to shame Congress into appropriating money for repairs. Instead, her open house was called unseemly. “Some people pretend I have done wrong,” she wrote, “but as we are pretty much in the situation of the man and his ass in the fable”—the man who was criticized whether he rode his ass or walked it—“I do not care at all who likes or dislikes.” The fable was apt; she was in an impossible position. She and John Quincy could be neither close to the people nor distant. Whatever she did, she would be criticized. Almost any stranger could call on President Adams, almost any morning—and almost every morning, strangers did. The president and his wife were not supposed to consider themselves superior, and yet they were socially superior, in a class by themselves. Admiration for the presidency was rivaled by distrust of authority. Everything they did was scrutinized; nothing could satisfy. There was little precedent to follow, no book to govern their behavior, and no one charged with codifying and insisting upon the rules. John Quincy, like President Monroe before him, at least could sometimes refer questions of protocol to his Cabinet. Louisa had no such body to advise her. So, when it came to etiquette, she followed her own course, as she had when she had been the wife of the secretary of state. Only now, her independence was more defensive than calculating; her campaign was over. Dignity mattered to Louisa, and she wouldn’t apologize for it. She always said that her great sin was pride. She did not call the President’s House by its informal name, the White House, as others increasingly did; she was more likely to call it the “Palace.” With the help of her nephew Johnson Hellen, who was among the extended Adams-Johnson clan living with Louisa and John Quincy for a time, she oversaw the arrangements and furnishing, and she had high standards. When her friend Joseph Hopkinson, who was in Philadelphia—where one could find the best of everything—offered to help, she sent long lists. She wanted tables, vases, consoles, and “one handsome sopha table.” She needed a ground glass lamp and a gilded chain so that she could suspend it in the circular summer sitting room. She asked for alabaster ornaments and silk that might match the room’s pale green walls. She requested a carriage light in color and “not too small.” She needed a good French cook from Philadelphia for “25 dollars a month but that is the very utmost.” She tried to preserve some of the formality the Monroes had established. She followed Elizabeth Monroe’s custom of holding Drawing Rooms every two weeks when Congress was in session. These were open to the public (or at least what passed for the public—not free blacks, servants, or slaves), and it was easy to get an invitation or to come without one. The parties were impressive. A staff of servants would wait on guests, carrying trays of ice cream, hot chocolate, champagne. The crowds would number among the hundreds or even thousands. The crush of people was oppressive. There were no dances, no recitals, and little of the joie de vivre that had characterized her Tuesday tea parties. Margaret Bayard Smith, who had once been so enthusiastic about the spirited, lovely Mrs. Adams, was not alone in objecting to her “silent, repulsive, haughty reserve” at the President’s Drawing Rooms. Louisa herself seems not to have enjoyed these evenings much. Her job was to turn her head from one guest to the next. “Mrs. Adams I could scarcely see, the crowd around her was so great,” recorded a visitor to one of her Drawing Rooms. It was tiresome, and perhaps it was harder to see the point of these parties than it had once been. Louisa could never acknowledge it, but there was no prize to work for anymore. Sometimes, she would come down for only an hour, excusing herself on account of illness. She had been instrumental to her husband’s election. It may have been difficult, then, to become merely ornamental. And it must have been hard to be criticized for being too visible, to be told to stay in the background. A pattern had already developed, and now it held. When exertion was called for, she was confident and capable. But when she was no longer needed, she no longer flourished. She could actually feel herself wilt. “I am utterly weary of the thankless task of wasting my life and strength for those who neither care whether I live or die provided their purpose is accomplished and I have arrived at that period of life when I believe women mostly meet with the same fate,” she wrote to Charles. She had lost her sense of purpose. She was surrounded by people but felt alone. “Isolation is an evil,” she added. “There is something in this great unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression,” she wrote to George, “and makes it impossible for me to feel at home or to fancy that I have a house any where.” • • • SUMMER BROUGHT HEAT, which grew worse as the weeks passed. It was too hot to move, too hot to think. Even John Quincy avoided his writing desk. His diary was reduced to shorthand scratches and scattered notes. His days were overwhelmed by drudgery. Petitioners and office seekers appeared at his door.