Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  She wanted to fight for the presidency, too, however miserable she was in the White House. She and John Quincy had their same old fight over “electioneering,” after she encouraged him to meet with his supporters. “My journeys and my visits wherever they may be shall have no connection with the Presidency,” he chided her. “I am sincerely sorry for it,” she replied—with more iciness than sympathy. He was, she reminded him, not the only one who would be affected by his reelection; his supporters had something at stake too. Yet he refused to do much himself to help them or his own cause. He did not give speeches or encourage coordination, unlike Jackson, whose campaign was once again—and now more strongly—running on the strength of the candidate’s magnetic personality. John Quincy’s supporters were more inclined to disclaim their “personal predilections” for Adams, though they supported his general course. Daniel Webster’s brother Ezekiel confessed that he supported Adams “from a cold sense of duty.” He wrote to Daniel, “We do not entertain for him one personal kind feeling.” John Quincy made it hard. Unlike Jackson, who for the most part followed the conventions of not campaigning too openly in public but welcomed any political operatives who came to see him in Tennessee, John Quincy refused to talk politics with hungry men who showed up at his door. A young Thurlow Weed—who would later become one of the greatest and most instrumental political advisers of the nineteenth century, and who had helped orchestrate John Quincy’s 1824 win in New York—came to talk to John Quincy intending to work on behalf of the administration, only to be smoothly rebuffed. Later, Weed would bitterly write that President Adams, “with the great power he possessed,” not only failed to recognize those who supported him but failed to make “a single influential friend.” He had trouble sleeping, only four or five hours “of not good repose,” and was bothered by indigestion. His hand trembled, his pen wavered, his skin sagged, and his eyes watered. When he took his morning swims, he was shaking his fist at the incoming tide of time. Sometimes he wondered whether life had any point. For his whole life, John Quincy had struggled with dark moods, apathy, and sometimes severe depression. He never suffered so much, though, as he did when president of the United States. He labored under “uncontrolable dejection of spirits,” he wrote in his diary at the end of July 1827, “insensibility to the almost unparalleled blessings with which I have been favoured; a sluggish carelessness of life, and in wish that it were terminated with a clinging to it as close as it ever was in the days of most animated hopes.” As his cares compounded, his depressed moods grew worse. John Quincy’s doctor recommended a vacation, telling him “to doff the world aside and bid it pass; to cast off as much as possible all cares, public and private, and vegetate myself into a healthier condition.” That ran counter to all of John Quincy’s instincts. What he felt he needed was “a habit of useful industry.” He had imagined difficulties, controversies, and what his father had liked to call stormy seas, to be sure, but not this drifting. He looked forward to the day when he could exit the President’s House, but he made no move to pull his name from the running. He distrusted Jackson’s views and vision for the country, and it was humiliating to lose. Only one president had ever been expelled from the office after only one term; that man, of course, was John Quincy’s own father. It was difficult for him to see, with his reflexive aversion to campaigning, that the new reality he couldn’t accept in the election was the same reality that stymied his ambitious agenda. Politics were undergoing a fundamental realignment. Sectionalism deepened during a crisis regarding a fraudulent Native American treaty in Georgia, where the governor declared the federal government had no right to intervene. A fall in the price of cotton led to growing resistance to John Quincy’s tariff reform efforts—and an explosion of anger toward the administration after the so-called Tariff of Abominations was passed in 1828. The solidarity among the slaveholding South that had begun to take shape during the Missouri debates was hardening. John Quincy’s ambitious national economic program, Southerners especially felt, was only a prelude to the federal government’s usurpation of states’ rights. To some slaveholders, the implications were dire. If the federal government could exercise such power, who was to say it would not use it to interfere with slavery? Adams’s own vice president, Calhoun, was working openly against the president. Outside of the obstructionist Congress, John Quincy’s economic program had some support, but distrust of Washington was growing. Populist appeals gained traction. Farsighted politicians like Martin Van Buren built populist coalitions held together by little other than their dislike of the political elite—and John Quincy in particular. In the 1828 election, every state but Delaware and South Carolina would choose their electors by popular vote. It was a contest between visions of a country, one that appealed to betterment through national policy versus one that appealed to the virtue of common men. John Quincy held white-knuckled on to the idea that the election was a referendum on his economic program and not on the candidates’ organizations or personalities. But the old ideal of disinterestedness, the one John Quincy had inherited from his father’s generation, was dead. John Quincy was actually a cannier political animal than he allowed himself to be, which tore at him. He may have done nothing overt to promote his campaign, but he did nothing to stop it, either, and that became one more thing that oppressed him. It could be, though, that while he couldn’t see the full scope of the transformation of American politics, he could see one aspect far too well: the increasing sectionalism of the country, undergirded by the awful existence of slavery. Disinterested or not, he faced an uphill battle: the three-fifths compromise put him, as a Northerner (and a Yankee at that) and as an antislavery figure, at a huge disadvantage. “I fell, and with me fell, I fear never to rise again the system of internal improvement by national means and national energies,” he would write a decade later. In his place, as he came to see it, would be a series of presidents who would “rivet into perpetuity the clanking chain of the slave.” • • • PERHAPS THE SUBJECT of slavery was more personal, perhaps it hit closer to home, than he ever dared admit to himself or anyone. At the Adamses’ house on F Street, and later in John Quincy’s White House, there may have been a slave or two, although he or she was probably not owned by John Quincy. “I abhorred slavery and did not suffer it in my family,” John Quincy would tell an abolitionist in 1832, and John Quincy was not one to lie. But this distinction may have been semantic.

  On February 23, 1828, John Quincy wrote in his diary, “Holzey, the black boy belonging to Johnson Hellen and who has been several years with us, died about five o’clock this afternoon. He has been sinking several months in a consumption.” It is possible that “belonging” might have meant that he was Johnson’s hired servant, but there is evidence to believe he was a slave. Johnson Hellen, who frequently lived with the Adamses, was a slaveholder; according to the 1830 census, he had two slaves. The day after, February 24, Holzey was buried. John Quincy marked the occasion with a quiet note of grief. In memoriam, he added lines from Horace about how death strikes all men equally: “Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / Regumque turres. / Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam.” Pale death beats with an impartial foot the inns of paupers and the towers of kings. The sum of brief life forbids us to begin a long hope. The president’s mourning, such as it was, occurred privately. So did his thoughts about slavery. He was known to oppose the institution, but he did nothing to help the antislavery cause as president. He even ignored letters on the subject. He may not have felt he could address it. He considered himself the tribune of the whole country, including the slaveholding South. He also needed the support of some slaveholding states and some slaveholders (Henry Clay, for one). Southerners and proslavery advocates already viewed him suspiciously, accusing him of claiming powers that would lead to the abolition of slavery. John Quincy was also remarkably good at compartmentalizing and rationalizing. He lived, after all, in Washington, where slaves were everywhere—in pens, in the shops, running erra
nds on the Capitol floor, and working at places like Gadsby’s Hotel, which hosted John Quincy’s inauguration ball. John Quincy, though, may have helped set free at least one slave while president, a slave who may have lived at least for a time in the White House. Two days after Holzey died, on February 25, 1828, Mary Catherine Hellen and John Adams were married. That same day, her wedding day, Mary filed papers liberating a slave named Rachel Clark. Rachel may have been the young girl who was listed as living in the Adams household on F Street in 1820. It’s possible that Rachel did not live in the White House; perhaps she lived with one of Louisa’s sisters (most likely Adelaide Hellen, whose slaves included Jenny and Joseph Clark). But it is also possible that when John Quincy later told an abolitionist that he “did not suffer” slavery in his family, he was thinking of Mary’s emancipation of Rachel. Perhaps, though it can only be speculated, he made the manumission of Mary’s slave a precondition for her marrying his son. He never mentioned Rachel Clark’s manumission in any extant diary or letter. Nor did anyone else, except the clerk who recorded it. In his diary, John Quincy recorded in great detail what else had happened that day of the wedding: his walk at daybreak, his sitting for a portrait, his visitors, his tasks, and the names of the twenty or so friends and family who gathered at the President’s House to witness the marriage. “The servants of the family were likewise all present,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. Whether “the servants” included Rachel Clark is not known. John Quincy had strongly opposed John and Mary’s marriage. But for whatever reason, John Quincy seems to have been particularly happy the day of their wedding. “May the blessings of God Almighty rest upon the Union!” he wrote in his diary. To the astonishment of all, he danced a reel. Might Louisa have also pressured Mary to emancipate Rachel? Possibly. Louisa was opposed to slavery in the abstract. But her feelings were more anxious and conflicted than her husband’s. Before she was an Adams, she was a Johnson, after all—and while she lived in the White House, she was obsessed with defending the Johnsons. The Johnsons owned slaves. Louisa did try to whitewash the extent of their connection to slavery. In “Record of a Life,” she mentioned being horrified and uncomprehending at seeing how young Kitty Carroll of Maryland treated her slave, “as we had always been severely punished for improper conduct to Servants this matter produced many unpleasant scenes while [Kitty Carroll] staid between us young people.” She recorded the names of prominent British abolitionists who were friends with her father. But the fact was, in 1800, after returning to Washington, Joshua Johnson owned four slaves. Unless they were sold to offset his financial troubles, Louisa would have seen them when she was reunited when her family in 1801. The 1820 and 1830 census records show that, like most Washington families, the families of Louisa’s sisters mixed one or two slaves with hired white and black servants. So, it seems, did her nieces and nephews. The day after John and Mary’s wedding at the President’s House, Louisa’s sister Caroline and her husband Nathaniel Frye threw a party for the newlyweds. It is possible that at least one slave was on hand, greeting guests or carrying bowls of ice cream; the 1820 census shows that Nathaniel Frye owned a male slave between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, and in 1830, Nathaniel owned a female slave between ten and twenty-three. Nathaniel himself was not originally a Southerner; he came from a prominent family in Maine. But in Washington, practices were local. Aside from a tiny but increasingly vocal abolitionist presence in Washington, few had the courage or inclination to publicly protest slavery. It touched everyone, and to varying degrees almost everyone, not only Southerners but Northerners, Easterners, and Westerners, the Jacksons and the Adamses, lived with it. 6

  EVEN MORE THAN her husband, Louisa withdrew in the White House, often pleading sickness and confining herself to her bedroom. For stretches of time, she was almost alienated from John Quincy. “You know how little he communicates with me on any subject at any time and now we only meet at table,” she wrote to Charles. She, who had played such a central role in John Quincy’s election, was now living in the White House, as close to the center of power as a woman could be. But she felt herself an exile.

  For company, she had music: Mozart, Handel, Vincenzo Pucitta, Thomas Campbell. Sometimes she copied out their scores herself, onto page after page of blank stanzas. She had her sisters and her sons, though worrying about them could bring her pain. And she had her journals, their pages blank, their marble covers stamped with her name. She had, too, her sadness. She sometimes tended its flames as if they could keep her warm. Her self-pity could be outrageous; she lashed out almost with rage against her sense of isolation. She begged Charles to send her something to translate from French, “as I cannot bear the loneliness of my life and you know that my mind is easily absorbed by any pursuit to which it devotes itself.” She wrote prolifically and began to experiment with forms. She wrote farces and poetry, which she would send to George. She sometimes set her poems at sea. Thou art gone thou art gone away love