But there was no undoing anything, not by mother or son. There was no arresting the pattern that had begun. The following summer, events almost replayed themselves. In June 1827, a letter arrived from George saying that he had suffered “a succession of colds and rhumatisms” and had fallen and hurt his hip. Louisa burst into tears when she read it; by evening, she was packing for Boston. When she arrived, she found George weak, “miserably wan and pale and his debility is excessive. This is not imaginary,” she wrote to John Quincy. The opium he was taking, as the doctor ordered, could not have helped. A month later, with George doing better, John Quincy wrote to say that he was planning to head north for his annual summer vacation in Quincy. “Perhaps we will meet on the way,” he said. She responded sharply in a letter written on their anniversary that made no mention of the occasion. Likewise, he did not acknowledge the anniversary in his diary. She left Massachusetts before he arrived, overlapping with him for one night in New York, at the City Hotel near Trinity Church. It was not an intimate reunion. The group included not only Louisa but Thomas Adams’s daughter Abby, her nephew Johnson Hellen, John Quincy’s valet Anthony Giusta, their servants John Kirkland and Jane Winnull, and all three sons: George, Charles, and John. It was the first time the family had been all together in more than a year and a half, since John Quincy’s inauguration in March 1825. Most of John Quincy’s time in the city that evening and the next day was spent visiting with prominent New Yorkers. That afternoon, the family broke up again. With a sinking feeling, Charles saw how his parents barely interacted. “My mother does not appear either in good health or spirits,” he wrote in his diary. “My own feelings inclined to great melancholy on seeing what I think to be the future prospects of our family. My father seemed excessively depressed.” With her son John, Louisa set out on yet another aimless trip around upstate New York spas. It was even more miserable than the previous summer’s journey. Louisa found her son John to be peremptory, harsh, and calculating where his own interests were involved. “John is a tyrant who will have everything his own way and the eternal fighting every inch of ground upon every question so utterly destroys my health it induces me to be entirely passive and submissive,” Louisa wrote to Mary back in Washington—adding that she was merely warning her, because John and Mary planned to wed. Her venting turned to a rant, an explosion of frustration and self-pity: However like the butterfly I appear to be wandering from place to place in search of pleasure, my thoughts turn only on that little home where sorrow and treachery are no more. . . . Like a bird in a cage struggle as I will there is an overbearing and preponderating influence which I cannot shake off in both my husband and my children that only make my exertions futile and destructive to my peace of mind and to my health. . . . Thus sickness passes for ill temper and suffering for unwillingness and I am deemed an encumbrance unless I am required for any special purpose for a show or for some political maneuver. . . .
To her husband, now up in Quincy, she was curt: “As your time is very precious I do not expect or wish that you should waste it in writing to me. The boy can occasionally send me a line and save you the trouble.” 5
BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE, John Quincy would wake up without her, at a quarter past four in the morning or sometimes a quarter before. After rising, he took a long walk or a swim or a bath in the river, and after watching the sun rise from the long east window, he went out to the garden. There was a full-time gardener, but the president often tended the seedlings himself. He plucked leaves of balm and hyssop, mint, rue, sage, wormwood, and marjoram. He looked for signs of spring: the unfolding of fresh shoots on horse chestnut trees, the explosion of peach blossoms, the jonquils in bloom, the lamiums, the gloss of the holly leaves, the snowballs of petals on plum trees. He studied botany and kept track of his experiments: “Apples, apricots, ash, catalpa, wild and red cherry, chestnut, grape, white rock chestnut, and willow oak, palm, plum, peach, tamarind, orange, black, English, and shellbark walnut, all from the seed and growing in pots or in my nursery,” he wrote to Charles. He planted oaks around the border and watched them anxiously. Some would not survive the first sharp frost, or the hailstorms that wrecked their tender leaves. His interest was first scientific, but he was not unaware of the anxious symbolism of his seedlings. He was concerned with his legacy. He should like to take for a motto, he told his son John, “Alteri seculo.” It came from a line of Cicero: Serit arbores quae alteri seculo prosint. He plants trees to benefit another generation.
Louisa was there in the margins: painting a detailed botanical illustration of a white oak leaf that John Quincy had collected on a morning walk; watering the tamarinds; caring for silkworms, as he tried to encourage a domestic silk industry. There were moments of affection between them. At one point, she gave him the present of a seal, a picture of a rooster and the motto “WATCH.” John Quincy had a gold ring made with the seal on it, and he always wore it. The bird was, he wrote to Charles, “the emblem of vigilance, of generous tenderness, of unconquerable courage.” But the generous tenderness was hard for her to see sometimes, and in his work she was not even really a helpmeet, let alone a partner. What they did share, even when most estranged, was their anxiety for their oldest son. John Quincy was as worried as she. For the first time, perhaps, since the death of his baby Louisa, his concern for his family rivaled his concern for the country. Traveling back from Quincy to Washington, about to face a hostile Congress, his thoughts were not on his work but on George. His oldest son’s “self-distrust” was “painfully predominant, and my own anticipations at this crisis of my earthly destiny full of apprehension and of anguish,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. “I commence my return to Washington with an aching heart. But why art thou cast down my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in him.” Meanwhile, by the winter of 1827, it was clear that the ambitious program that President Adams had proposed for the country was stymied. He had no close allies in Congress that he could consistently rely on, which was largely his own fault. He was suspicious of those whom he might have relied on to carry out his program. He kept his distance from Webster, remained wary of Clay. His own vice president, Calhoun, was using his contacts and powers as Senate president to work against the president. The 1826 congressional elections had swept in a group determined to block him. “The Twentieth Congress,” the historian Sean Wilentz has written, “organized itself into a virtual committee for the defeat of the president.” John Quincy saw it too clearly. It was “a phenomenon entirely new,” he wrote to Charles: “a majority of both houses of congress, composed of every factious opposition existing in the country, melted by a common disappointment into one mass, and invenomed by one spirit of bitter, unrelenting persecuting malice against me individually and against the administration, which they conspired to overthrow, assumed assuredly the control of the affairs of the nation.” Their eyes were on the White House in 1828. Andrew Jackson’s supporters had slush funds paying “bullies and assassins, to insult me, and everyone connected with me.” “Assassins” went too far (though an army surgeon, blaming the president for his court-martial for embezzlement, did show up at John Quincy’s office to threaten him; John Quincy calmly sent him on his way). But there were real fights. One included his own son John, who, after a show of rudeness toward one of Jackson’s supporters at one of Louisa’s Drawing Rooms, was assaulted in the Capitol and provoked to duel. The two men were pulled apart; after a congressional investigation, the matter died away. But Louisa, who felt her son was defending her honor, never forgot the insults. Nor was John Quincy wrong about the slander spread by a coordinated network of opposition newspapers—funded by politicians and mailed with the use of congressional members’ free postage. He was called a gambler, an aristocrat, and a corrupt monarchist. Of course, his own (less organized) supporters did just the same, calling Jackson a demagogue, a despot, and a murderer. And for the first time in American history, the candidates’ wives were drawn in. For this, Jackson’s camp blamed Mrs.
Adams. She provoked the feud, Jackson’s supporters said. It’s easy to see why. In February 1827, Louisa apparently wrote a kind of campaign biography for the Philadelphia Evening Post that was reprinted widely. It was not about her husband; it was about herself. The essay was written anonymously, but there was little question about the identity of the author (“manifestly written by Mrs. Adams herself,” said the United States Telegraph). The author’s only goal, Louisa wrote, was to put an end to rumors that the president’s wife was British. Her father, she declared, had acted daringly during the Revolution, risking his life to help his countrymen, making great sacrifices. As if unable to help herself, she described in high color his betrayal by his partners, his move to America, and his death as a broken man. The second half of the piece briefly and unwisely sketched her time in Berlin and St. Petersburg (calling attention to the flattering reception she’d been given by royal families) and then quickly recounted her journey to Paris. It is a very strange text. It is extraordinary that she most likely wrote it at all. Never before had the wife of a candidate, much less the wife of a president, made a public statement about her own character. Never before had the wife of the president of the United States written something like that intended for print. Perhaps its existence can be explained simply; writing is what she did during those days in the White House to alleviate her boredom, provide an outlet for her anxieties, and give herself a sense of purpose. She may, naively, also have hoped that writing anonymously would protect her identity. The article did her no favors. It is clear that she wrote it to absolve herself of accusations that she was hampering John Quincy’s campaign—and perhaps his life. And it was true, she was the target of some of the attacks against him. She was smeared as British, as aristocratic. After a rare visit to her Johnson relatives in Maryland, she wrote asking for anything in her uncle Thomas Johnson’s papers that might help establish her American lineage. “The electioneering canvas calls forth questions which make this a question of high importance to me,” she wrote. But instead of helping, she indicted herself. Her article underscored her guilt over being a political liability to her husband, her sense that she was not an American, and her conviction that people thought she had “palmed” herself—her phrase—on John Quincy before her father had gone bankrupt. She put her situation in the worst possible light: “She lost the little property forever which she expected to bring to her husband, and became a beggar, with the appearance, of what was infinitely worse to her proud spirit, of having palmed herself upon a family under the most odious circumstances.” The president is almost absent from the piece. The hero of the first half of the piece is her father, and the hero of the second half is herself. The piece culminates with her dangerous trip across Europe, which she did without her husband. The tone of the document is almost a little deranged. Louisa was wound so tight that it seems she could not foresee the consequences of its publication—or, possibly, was less concerned with helping her husband’s presidential chances than with presenting the Johnson family in a better light. Either way, it was misguided. Nothing like it would have been written by Rachel Jackson, the opposition press was quick to point out. As if to underscore the point, soon after, a pro-Adams paper called Jackson an adulterer and a bigamist, claiming that Rachel Jackson had been married but not divorced before living with Jackson. The Jackson forces read the two articles about the candidates’ wives as a coordinated, malicious attack on Andrew Jackson’s wife. Louisa’s biography was written, said the leading opposition paper, the United States Telegraph, “to contrast her courtly education with that of Mrs. Jackson, and to demonstrate how much better qualified she was to discharge the duties of the drawing room than the unassuming, plain, old house-wife of the Tennessee Farmer.” In retaliation, the Telegraph attacked Louisa, mocking her for trying to appear “unambitious,” and for claiming to have “retiring manners” and “republican virtues and connections.” Day after day, it derided her attempt to appear as an “unassuming” woman “detesting politics.” It called attention to her sympathetic reception by monarchs and scorned her “hair-breadth escape from St. Petersburg” (accomplished, it added, with taxpayer money). Then Jackson’s supporters struck back with an even more damaging attack. The Telegraph claimed to know the real “truths” about Louisa’s background—“what is known to the boys in the streets of this City.” The editorialist declared that he had no desire to print what everyone knew, information about Louisa’s “mother’s family,” which had vices that, “though found in the higher circles of Europe, are confined in this country to the most degraded and abandoned.” In another editorial, the Telegraph was more explicit. The paper had no intention “to trace the love adventures of the Chief Magistrate, nor to disclose the manner, nor the time, at which he, his brother-in-law, and his father-in-law before him, led their blushing brides to the hymenial alter.” It seems likely that someone in Jackson’s camp heard that Joshua and Catherine had not been married before having children. It was, after all, not a secret in the Maryland branch of the Johnson family; he had been writing letters home protesting that he wasn’t married at the time Nancy was born. There seems to have been salacious gossip about one of Louisa’s sisters, too. (Perhaps it was another rumor that was contorted. Adelaide, who had married Nancy’s widower, Walter Hellen, gave birth to a son long after Walter died. Whether out of charity or tacit responsibility, Harriet’s husband, George Boyd, who was notorious for womanizing and had several children out of wedlock, registered the infant as his son.) The president was then impugned by the suggestion of premarital sex with Louisa. The insult was driven home. Before the 1824 election, she had been integral to the campaign effort. But now she found that her attempt to help would cost her—and the cost was high. Duff Green, the Telegraph’s editor, was ecstatic at the Adams camp’s response. “The effect here was like electricity,” Green wrote to Jackson. “The whole Adams corps were thrown into consternation.” No doubt he was right. Whether or not Louisa knew that her parents had not been married before she was born, she was highly sensitive about her modesty and about her parents’ reputation. It’s possible that she never read the Telegraph’s attacks, but she had a habit of picking up rumors. She certainly heard something damaging; a year later, she wrote that had her parents not protected her, she might have become “a very vicious woman and deserving the obloquy cast upon my fair fame.” It may help explain why she was already in an agitated state before she learned that George was ill a few days later. When she rushed to Boston, Charles told his fiancée, Abby, that he was especially worried for his mother for reasons independent of her health and George, reasons “which it is impossible at this time to mention in detail.” Jackson told Duff Green to leave Mrs. Adams—and women generally—out of his attacks. But of course in politics there is no stopping anything once started. A year later, Edward Everett gave a speech on the House floor refuting, while at the same time airing, charges that Louisa had presented her maid, Martha Godfrey, for the pleasure of the tsar. • • • IT WAS the more frustrating, because it could seem to her that she was defending herself and her husband’s presidency without her husband’s help. Her sense of grievance became clear when her son John got into the scuffle in the Capitol with the lead editorial writer of the pro-Jackson Telegraph after the two had traded insults at one of her levees. Louisa was nearly undone by the incident, but she was also proud of her son for, as she saw it, defending her honor. The thin, sickly, doe-eyed woman was at heart a fighter.
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