Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  A host of maladies attacked her with increased frequency and intensity. She had fevers, “fainting fits,” bursts of pain in her chest, and nasty coughs that worried those around her. Often, more than one symptom would manifest at a time. She talked about her nerves as organs, and she described her imagination as feverish. She could not separate her mind from her body, her body from her mind. Her illnesses had always been integral to her sense of who she was. They were often the first thing others mentioned about her and the first thing she mentioned about herself. Other people were frequently, even constantly, sick, and other people, especially other women, had similar patterns of intense headaches, fevers, and unaccountable debility, but Louisa was singled out for her delicate health. It was true that she lived at a time when doctors did guesswork, diets were bad, hygiene was wretched, and remedies were often more toxic than the sickness they were meant to cure. Her body had been squeezed and deformed by the equipment of formal dresses, polluted by coal and wood smoke, stretched and wracked by at least a dozen pregnancies. Still, she herself recognized a psychological component to her poor health. She connected traumatic thoughts to physical breakdowns, and being sick to being cared for. She wasn’t merely seeking attention, not as a child and not in her fifties, but there is no doubt that when she was sick, she was noticed and treated more tenderly by her distracted husband and busy children than she was when she was well. Her sons would write her worried letters; Charles would race to Washington and sit by her bedside day after day; her husband would become anxious and even mention her in his diary, recording the status of her health along with great affairs of state. When she was ignored, her health would worsen. One night, for instance, in 1821, a headache caused her to stay in bed during one of her weekly tea parties, which went on without her while she remained in her room. No one bothered to see how she was. “The noise the sense of neglect and unkindness which this conduct indicated proved too much for me and I believe I was thrown into a state of delirium almost amounting to madness,” she wrote in her diary afterward, her onrushing words as agitated as her mind, “and Mr Adams found me in this state when the company retired for several days I continued very ill.” She seems to have suffered more often, more suddenly, and more seriously when she felt lonely, stressed, useless, or excluded. It may have been, unconsciously, a way of striking back. Illness gave her body an outline in the world. It was, in a sense, a way of resistance. It stopped the day in its tracks. 3

  ON THE MORNING OF JULY 8, 1826, three letters arrived from Quincy, each saying that John Adams was on his deathbed. John Quincy packed immediately and headed north the next day, along with their son John, who was working as his secretary. Louisa stayed behind. An hour after John Quincy and John had left, Louisa received another letter, dated July 4, saying that John Adams had just died.

  His death was not a surprise, but it was still a shock. In the White House, Louisa mourned. Her most cherished correspondent, the man she addressed as “father,” was gone. John Adams had been her great friend and champion, and she had loved and appreciated him. “Every thing in his mind was rich, racy, and true,” she would later say. Even in death, he seems to have inspired her. She wrote a poem in tribute to her old friend, which her brother-in-law Nathaniel Frye read aloud to a crowd at dinner without naming the author; the poem, to both her embarrassment and poorly concealed pleasure, was printed in the newspapers. John Adams’s death also seems to have softened the harsh feelings toward John Quincy—and toward herself—that she had been expressing in letters and in “Record of a Life.” They had shared their love for the wry, humane old man, and she was sensitive to the magnitude of her husband’s loss. She found that she missed John Quincy after he had left. “Tell your father I feel sadly out of my element in this great palace without him,” she wrote to George. To John Quincy, John Adams’s death was almost incomprehensible. His father had been his lodestar. When he reached Quincy, he clutched at what was left. His father’s will, which made him executor, left the bulk of the estate to him: the mansion and 103 acres attached; his precious books and papers. But the costs of the terms were staggering. The will required that John Quincy pay $10,000 to Thomas for his share of the house, another $2,000 for two “rocky pastures,” and half the value of the books and manuscripts. The proceeds of the rest of the estate were divided among John’s descendants, some parts held in trusts to be paid out by John Quincy. The land was, in John Adams’s view, his great legacy; it was the symbol of the place he had protected and fought for and loved. The only time old John’s father, Deacon John Adams, had sold any acreage at all was to send John Adams to college. John Quincy decided not only to buy out Thomas for the house and land but also to buy all the land that had also belonged to John Adams, land that was slated to be sold to pay for the other descendants’ legacies. He, then, was burdened with paying those legacies himself. “It will bring me heavily in debt,” John Quincy acknowledged in a letter to Louisa soon after he arrived in Massachusetts, but “I cannot endure the thought of the sale of the place. Should I live through my term of service, my purpose is to come and close my days here, to be deposited with my father and mother.” Louisa’s grief turned to disbelief when she saw John Adams’s will. What it required from John Quincy astounded her. What had happened to his profound aversion to debt, which had been such a constant theme during their marriage? She begged her husband to reconsider his decision to buy out the others and keep the land, begged him not to go into debt for sentimental reasons, and begged him not to put himself in a position in which he would have to support Thomas, his wife, and their five children. John Quincy’s younger brother had been her friend, but in the years since she had known him in Berlin, alcoholism had ruined his optimistic, gentle temper. “He is one of the most unpleasant characters in this world, in his present degradation,” Charles had recently written about Thomas in his diary, “being a brute in his manners and a bully in his family.” Thomas had come to depend on the largess of his father, and now he would depend on his brother: John Quincy would inherit his father’s house, but for as long as the Adamses were in Washington, the arrangement was that Thomas and his family would live in it. They would be supported by trusts that John Quincy would have to finance. Louisa’s relationship with Thomas and his wife, already strained, snapped. She knew too well how debt could wreck a family. She did not even need to look at the fate of her own parents and siblings. The newspapers were full of reports that Thomas Jefferson—who, in a coincidence that some called providential, had died almost at the same moment as John Adams, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—had left huge debts behind. His daughter Martha Randolph was destitute, and the legislatures of Virginia and South Carolina had to raise money to support her. The thought that John Quincy was willing to risk his own children’s inheritance and leave them in a similar position made her blanch. She was so angry that it took two days for her to answer John Quincy’s letter about his decision to purchase all his father’s property, and three attempts before she managed to write a response that was cool enough not to offend. As it was, her tone was still bitter and hot. She knew, she wrote, that he would not listen to her advice, wishes, or warnings, “that neither my opinions or feelings will . . . avail.” But she had to speak out. “The trust is considering the situation of your brother and his family, and the relinquishment of Mr. Quincy, of so essentially delicate a nature, it is impossible, utterly and decidedly impossible, for you to do strict justice to them and to your own children,” she wrote. It was “natural” that he wanted to own his father’s house, but it could not be justified. She resented the fact that he thought it could be. “For myself I care not a pin where I die,” she added, furious and forlorn. “I have never had a home since I left my father’s house, and it is a matter of perfect indifference if I never do.” • • • A FEW DAYS after arriving in Quincy, John Quincy wrote to Louisa to ask her to join him. Immediately afterward, he sent another letter recalling the fi
rst, saying there was too much for him to do. By the time she received it, though, she was already preparing to head north, and she refused to unpack—even if she was no longer wanted in Quincy. She left Washington at the end of July, with Charles, Thomas Adams’s daughter Elizabeth, her maid Jane Winnull, and two other servants. “I went very unwillingly, she went against the advice of all her friends,” Charles wrote in his diary. “Her motive was unaccountable.”

  There was something perverse about her journey. It was as if she were determined to act out her sense of restlessness, her sense of not belonging anywhere. After the group reached New York City, instead of hugging the coast toward Boston, they veered up the Hudson River. There were Adamses in upstate New York, and popular watering spots, but she drifted without any fixed destination: West Point, Fishkill, Hudson, Ballston Springs, Albany, Saratoga, toward the frontier. The area was by no means wild. Given a map of the United States, any decent politician could have closed his eyes and put his finger on Albany’s spot. The towns lining the Hudson were settled and getting richer; the Erie Canal had opened the year before. Still, it was a landscape of mountains, dark forests, and bald eagles. It was a place where the light was rich but veiled, where the light’s source seemed not to come from the single sun but from elsewhere. The mode of travel alone made it an arduous journey. Overland, the carriage moved through rough terrain. They went from public stagecoach to public stagecoach, most of them crowded with strangers—or worse, prying “friends.” On the river, the steamboats they rode could be lethal: between 1825 and 1830 alone, 273 people were killed by exploding boilers. Inside the small, enclosed spaces of a coach or ship, pressure and tension among passengers only increased. Louisa could never let her guard down. She encountered fair-weather friends and old rivals from Washington heading toward the spas. The reunions were as ominous as they were disingenuously happy. Both Louisa and Charles noted how families formerly divided between the Jackson and Crawford camps (and opposed to Adams) were now socializing as a single group. They smiled and fawned over her. “You would suppose to see them that they were my most devoted friends,” she wrote caustically to John Quincy. Everyone was miserable. Charles was especially desperate to get back to Washington. “But my Mother was inflexible,” he wrote in his diary. “She was fixed upon wandering about the country with no fixed purpose and with no intent.” Finally, he wrote in his diary, “I had prevailed upon my Mother to return home.” He wrote too soon. When the party reached New York City, Charles continued south toward Washington, but Louisa turned toward Quincy. “This morning my wife quite unexpectedly arrived here,” John Quincy wrote in his diary on August 28. It’s hard to imagine that he greeted her warmly; her arrival was not really welcome. John Quincy was busy keeping pace with his official business while superintending the auction of his father’s furniture, the execution of the will, and a massive survey and inventory of the land he was inheriting. The unacknowledged purpose of the survey was to reconnect himself to the land. He marked the progress of the trees he had climbed as a boy, slopes of the hillocks and boulders, the limits of pastures of wildflowers, the warp of the roots, sprawl of the shrubs. It was a way of grieving, no doubt, since the land was so intimately connected with his father, since his father had described it and redescribed it with unceasing fascination, and since his father had tended to it with his own hands. John Quincy heard the calls of the birds that his father had described with so much pleasure, the “long whoop of the nighthawk and the lofty clarion of all the game cocks in the neightbourhood. The robbins by dozens soon followed with their animating carrols. The woodpuckers, the larks, the bob olincotus, the goldfinches, the thrushes, the catbirds the Virginia nightingales, the blue birds, the springbirds, the swallows, the sparrows the yellow birds and the wrens.” John Quincy was coming home as he never had before, after crisscrossing oceans and whole continents, after logging tens of thousands of miles in carriages, after achieving every possible success. As president, he had fulfilled his father’s dream for him. Yet what he wanted most now was what the Adamses had always wanted: this patch of land in Massachusetts, set between the mountains and the bay, so close to the saltwater that a good breeze could carry the smell of it. Louisa did not fit easily into his vision of the future—or the past. It is hard to imagine her hacking through brambles. To John Quincy’s dismay, his two older sons turned out to be just as ill suited to the job. George, now twenty-five and living in Boston, working as a lawyer, and John, now twenty-three, who served as John Quincy’s secretary in the White House, trudged after their father with dread. The young men were different in many ways. George was passionate and talented but undisciplined and highly sensitive; John was more calculating and more confident. But both had inherited their family’s propensities for fathomless darkness. They had grown up largely without their parents, half raised by their grandparents. John Adams’s death was hard on both of them, but on George especially, who had been there to witness it. They were totally unprepared for what their father was asking them to do. “We have been out three days, two of them driven back by the rain, and the third surfeited by the heat,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa shortly before she arrived. “George after one half-day found he had business in Boston, and I relieved him by sending him to you. John has discovered that he is of no use in the survey and takes a dispensation of attendance for the future. We march over tangled brakes and rattlesnakes, and have everything of heroic fatigue but the glory.” He was half joking, but she did not find the situation funny when she arrived. George had broken down. 4

  THE HEALTH OF George’s body and mind, the eccentricity of his manners, and his erratic, passionate approach to life had worried Louisa and John Quincy for years. Neither knew quite what to do or how to help him. John Quincy was watchful, demanding, and stern with his sons. He saw them in his own image and expected them to mold themselves to him, as he had molded himself to the model of his father. From Russia, he had written his young children long pedagogical letters about how to be moral and great. They were expected to be industrious and irreproachable. When George struggled, John Quincy instructed him to keep a diary and to send him pages; he sent George pages of his own as examples. He told George to study a letter written by his grandfather John Adams at the age of twenty, hoping “to stimulate you to perseverence in the cause of virtue, by reminding you of the blood from which you came.” The reminders were oppressive. As a freshman at Harvard, at the age of sixteen, George once described a dream in which the face of his father appeared behind the image of an attractive girl. “Remember, George,” John Quincy’s voice said in the dream, “who you are, what you are doing!”

  Louisa was more forgiving and more overtly encouraging (although she also had a tendency to lecture). In a novella she later wrote, she described a character she based on George as a “poet and enthusiast” with the “imagination of a German sophist and a heart as simple as a child.” To some extent, she saw herself in her oldest son. She was closer to him perhaps than she was to anyone else; she felt they understood each other—which made her worry. She cautioned him more than once against his romantic tendencies, his habit of “soaring into the regions of poetry and fiction while idolizing a shadow of your own creating.” She knew of what she spoke. “You will smile my dear son and say my mother is a fine theoretical preacher, but miserable in practice it is too true.” In his response to that letter, George laid his character bare on the page. “If there be pain in ‘a too sensitive mind’ there is also pleasure,” he wrote, gentle but grave. “It enjoys as richly its peculiar treasure as it suffers deeply its appointed sorrows; and I have always thought that imagination which was formed in early youth . . . a blessing rather than a curse; but life is supposed to begin to wane at twenty-five and the effervescence of youthful blood to be diminished from that time; this imagination must therefore be repressed and life regarded as it is. What mine may be it is impossible to tell; that I must form an artificial character or be forever nobody, is clear.” He wa
s trying not to be “nobody.” But he was failing, and he was haunted by his failure. “Dr. Huntt says he looks sick and worried,” Louisa reported to John Quincy soon after John Adams’s death. They did not know just how sick and worried he was. George, now twenty-five years old, was living in Boston. He had moved there to study law with Daniel Webster in 1823 and was admitted to the bar a year later. In August 1825, he had begun a diary, trying to take his father’s instructions and admonitions to heart. He began with a “Table of Duty”: VI. Rise—analysis of Blackstone VIII. Office—Journal IX. Law I. Various compositions III. Literature till X. What he loved was literature—but also cigars, friends, and women of whom his parents would not approve. He was in debt, which his parents did not know (but would soon find out). Following his father’s habit, he began each diary entry with the time of his rising—which was never six in the morning. “Arose late this morning in consequence of retiring late last night. . . . Accustomed to smoke after breakfast I shall employ that time in reading Raithbys Letters on the Study of the Law,” he wrote on day two. That diary lasted for all of three weeks. On December 31, 1825, George started the diary again. “The necessity of a return to a more satisfactory path of life is so evident that I consider the coming year as a crisis in my life requiring vigilance severe and uncomplying over those vices the germ of which has been planted by past irresolution and has recently alarmed me by its gradual expansion,” he wrote. “I close the year in melancholy feeling: its course cannot meet approval from a strict and scrutinizing conscience.” This time his diary began with a look back to his childhood, at the years of being shuttled throughout New England while Louisa and John Quincy were in Russia. “Could my life have been passed with [my parents] its present results would have been probably very different but it was not to be; my Father’s public employments imposed duties which compelled him to be often absent from his children and left him when with them little time for their instruction,” he wrote. He looked back on his life with disappointment—not unlike his mother. He had so much promise. Everyone said it. He was handsome, with dark curling hair, full sideburns, a strong chin, and his mother’s deep brown eyes. In 1825, only twenty-four years old, he had been asked by the town of Quincy to deliver the annual Fourth of July oration. That year, 1826, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, expected to follow in the footsteps of his father. But his moods were volatile, and his emotions ran hot. He had become engaged to Mary Hellen against the family’s wishes, and while he was living in Boston he had written her beautiful love letters, but only rarely. Her subsequent break from him and attachment to his brother John had affected him in ways that his family could only guess at. They tried to measure the difference between the equanimity of his conversation and the feverish glint in his eye. Louisa complained of his addiction to cigars but made no mention of his heavy drinking. There were other stresses, which his mother cautioned him against; she worried over the character of the company he kept and was desperate for him to marry a woman in his social class. She sensed he was looking for women outside of it. He hid so much. He could not hide, though, how much his father unnerved him. The cumulation of his grandfather’s death, his father’s arrival, the public pressure upon him, and his private worries overwhelmed him. By early September he was sick, confined to his room in Boston. The immediate complaint was a toothache, but Louisa blamed John Quincy for their oldest son’s trouble. George “was not treated with the kindness and consideration which his exertions merited,” she wrote in a chaotic letter to Charles, “and laughed and sneered at because he was not able to bear the exposure to rain, and every species of bad weather as well as those who fortunately for them are more strongly constituted.” Her scrawling handwriting was a mess upon the page, betraying her own agitated mind. George’s dejected spirits, she said, “have impressed him with an idea that he is unfit for the society of the duties, for which other men are born.” Charles knew she wasn’t exaggerating, and he knew she was right about the effect of his father on his older brother. “George knows nothing of the character of my father,” Charles had written in his diary in 1824, two years earlier. “He does not appreciate it and can not look upon him with any thing but fear. This is the true fault of his character, he is always afraid of men of a certain decided cast of character, he cannot associate their images with pleasure, he has an indescribable and involuntary awe of them.” When George fell ill, some sharp words must have passed between Louisa and her husband, because she moved out of the big house in Quincy and into Hamilton’s Hotel in Boston—perhaps to be closer to her son, but also, it seems, to avoid the paternal mansion. On September 13, she took George to Nantasket beach, on a long spit in Massachusetts Bay, for three days. John Quincy remained behind in Quincy. She and George, not yet fully recovered, returned to Quincy, but a day later, John Quincy walked in and found her packing to leave for Washington. Accompanied by their son John, she made it only as far as Boston before abruptly sending John back to Quincy to give her husband a message. In that letter, she asked him to tell her where she should go. It may be possible to guess at the answer she wanted: she wanted him to tell her that he wanted her to come back; he wanted them to be together. Instead, John Quincy told John to tell Louisa “that I wished her to go wherever she thought it would most conduce to her health and comfort, and if she would let me know anything she wished me to do, I would do it.” She immediately became too ill to go anywhere at all. The doctor who attended her in Boston went to Quincy the next day. “I enquired of him, what he thought of the state of my wife’s health,” John Quincy wrote in his diary the next day. “He said he believed there was disease in the right ovarum that it was irremediable and would occasionally be very troublesome; but he did not consider it as dangerous to life. . . . It was the occasion of great nervous irritability and excitement, but transient in its paroxisms. I took this opinion of him, because she herself thinks the disease mortal.” While she thought she was dying, the doctor’s diagnosis, more or less, was that she was a woman. So she remained in a hotel in Boston, confined to her bed. John Quincy came to see her the following day. “She conversed with me on family subjects of painful interest,” he wrote in his diary. He left her at the hotel, returning to Quincy—as she wished, he wrote in his diary, to take care of George. A week later, he returned to Boston and spent the morning by Louisa’s bedside. He spoke openly with her about the future. “I told her my dispositions for the future, after my seclusion from public life,” he wrote in his diary. His plans had “the approbation of my own heart, and upon which I must hope for aid and encouragement, which the world will not give.” No doubt, he wanted her aid and encouragement. She was supposed to give it without his needing to ask. Everything in their history and culture suggested that as his wife, he had a right to her support. It angered her that his right was greater than hers. • • • BY LATE OCTOBER, Louisa and John Quincy were together back in Washington. (It was not unusual for the sitting president in those days to spend the summer and early fall months away from Washington.) Louisa’s health was better, more or less, and she was a little chastened. “Let us mutually obliterate this summer from our memory,” Louisa wrote to George, “or rather let it be stamped on our minds as a warning for the future, to lead to good. With energy of character, fixed principles, and faith in the mercy of divine Providence, there is nothing too difficult for the mind of man to achieve, and we are called upon to act, not to debate for the latter begets a habit of irresolution which leads to imbecility if not to ruin.” George would have recognized her reference to Hamlet.