Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  Across the briny sea Sure, long thou wilt not stay love And I away from thee? . . . In the blooming month of May love Thy bark shall homeward turn My throbbing heart will pray love To speed thy blest return The winds shall swiftly waft thee love To me and to thy home And thou no more wilt leave me love Across the seas to roam. She was more social than she claimed to be; her letters are full of references to parties, dinners, and levees. But when she drew on them for her writing, she had the critical distance of an observer. She wrote a work of fiction called “The Metropolitan Kaleidoscope / or / Winter Varieties,” featuring Lady Sharply and her husband, Lord Sharply, a man of “high station” in Parliament. The Sharplys’ guests, whom she depicted as British courtiers, were easily recognized public figures—drawn dazzingly with texture, colors, and firm lines. She sketched a parade of politicians, generals, dandies, ambassadors, and wives. She captured the mighty aspect of Lord Leadall (Daniel Webster), whose dark brow and dark eyes communicated something stormy and brooding, “something vast and powerful; of thought even to madness,” but whose mouth could twitch into a smile like the sun cutting through the clouds. Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel, arrived as “Lord and Lady Playfair.” She captured what made them so appealing to so many—and so appalling to others. “Her Ladyship was an unaffected unpolished friendly woman. . . . Her mind was strong and untutored,” Louisa wrote. “His Lordship was one of those gifted children of nature that as Shakespeare says were born great. He was rude and rugged in feature; art had done little to fashion him into order, loose in his morals, above the shackels of fixed principles, daring in his projects, with a deep and profound knowledge of mankind acquired by an enlarged experience and acquaintance with human nature in all its moods and tenses; he was a perfect master of their passions, tho’ he took little trouble to control his own. His mind was of the strongest and boldest cast; full of energy, enterprise, and activity, he scorned personal danger.” Life itself was his school, she wrote, and “man was the book from which he drew all his knowledge, all his views.” Louisa’s portrait of Martin Van Buren, or “Lord Vandyke Maneuvre,” is as revealing as any account of his political cunning. “His Lordship was one of those singular beings who gain a prodigious and unaccountable influence with mankind, without apparently possessing any of those great or shining qualities which we naturally look for,” she wrote. Lady Sharply recognized—rightly—that he was positioning himself to join forces with Lord Playfair (Jackson). Yet it was “impossible” for even an enemy to speak to Lord Maneuvre without liking him. “He possessed that greatest and perhaps most subtle of all arts, that, of so naturally addressing himself to the capacity, the taste, and the style of those with whom he talked, that they forgot that he was a Star.” Much went unobserved in her sketch, as was polite. She left out the servants. Off the page, in the real White House, she counted sixteen of them: a steward, a housekeeper, a butler, housemaids, cooks, coachman, scullion, two “boys” who carried wood and waited on the table, a porter who answered the door and lit the fires. The servants lived in the west end of the attic and in the basement, off a vaulted passage, in little rooms with walls washed white or yellow. The floor of the basement’s long hallway, where Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had kept their slaves, was slick and covered with sand or sawdust grit. The kitchen was a furnace; its fire never went out. The servants began flowing through the house before dawn, knocking on doors to rouse the sleeping, carrying basins of fresh water, ready to light the morning fires. They brushed out the day’s clothes, cleaned the night’s messes. They cooked and carried dinner, trays, plates. A system of bells would summon them to respond to some request. They rode on the outside of the carriage, in snow and in rain, over dangerous roads, brought inside the vehicle only when injured in an accident. They were half invisible, noticed only when there was a problem. Some of the servants were black, members of Washington’s sizable free black population—though their freedom was limited at best. In 1827, Washington’s corporation passed laws requiring free blacks to register with the mayor and get a permit to live and work within the city. There was a citywide ten p.m. curfew for blacks, and a permit was required for free blacks to assemble. They were routinely fingered as suspects in crimes, even when there was no evidence. They were regarded with suspicion and degraded daily. In this, Louisa was no better than most. Her set of instructions for her servants made her prejudices plain. “The coloured females to apply to Housekeeper for permission to go out and to be sent away if they are not at home at ten o’clock at night,” she wrote. This was in accord with the local law—but then she added “or for imprudence or disrespect to any of the White people in the family.” (If there were in fact any slaves, of course, in the White House, they went unacknowledged altogether.) She had that blindness. But she was clear-eyed in other ways, as sharp as the name she gave herself in “The Metropolitan Kaleidoscope.” In her fiction, she described herself as Lady Sharply, capturing her character only by contradictions. “She was the oddest compound of strong affections and cold dislikes; of discretion and caprice; of pride and gentleness; of playfulness and hauteur; that I ever met with—irritable one moment, laughing the next, there was nothing tangible in her character on which you could rest, to censure or approve.” She also described Lord Sharply, and in doing so, perhaps captured John Quincy better than he has ever been described, then or since. Lord Sharply was a man of extraordinary talents. . . . His natural disposition was ardent and impetuous, but a perpetual watchfulness over these natural defects, had taught him to master them completely, and it was only those who were the most constantly with him, who were aware that occasions could arise in which the internal volcano would sometimes produce an eruption that was short but violent in its explosion. A fond father, a negligent and half indulgent husband, and utterly indifferent to almost all the other branches of his family, he often appeared to forget or not to know, that others had found obstacles in their path which he had never dreamt of, and deemed things must be so, without considering how or why they were so. He was full of good qualities but ambition had ever been the first object of his soul to attain that object no sacrifice would have been deemed too great.

  This was incisive. But it wasn’t quite fair. She rejected sympathy; she refused to see, too, how high the stakes were, and how terrible his powerlessness was. She was angry with him. During those years in the White House, he may have been only a half-indulgent husband, but it’s safe to say that she was only a half-indulgent wife. • • • AS THE 1828 CAMPAIGN moved toward its conclusion, Louisa watched, at once wanting to win and wanting release from her miserable situation. Her mood swung back and forth as the year progressed. One day she could be cheerful, and the next listless and depressed. In September, with the election entering its final pitch, she suffered a “severe attack,” “inflammation of the head pressing on the brain, and also on the heart.” Charles rushed to Washington from Boston and, though he was relieved to find the expression in her eyes as tender and intelligent as ever, she was so weak that she could not sit up. She “was recovered by being most purposely bled, by being almost rolled in mustard and cayenne and by blisters,” Charles wrote to his fiancée, Abby Brooks, who came from a wealthy Boston family. While in Washington, Charles also noticed that his father was making preparations to leave the capital, two months before any votes were counted.

  The president’s loss seemed a foregone conclusion. When the ballots were finally counted, no one was surprised. Jackson had won 68 percent of the electoral vote and 56 percent of the popular tally. More than a million men voted—about four times as many as in 1824. John Quincy was, at times, morose and morbid. His life had been oriented toward one ambition, and now it was gone. When the first day of 1829 dawned overcast, John Quincy saw omens. When he began the morning’s writing, his lamp had gone out, “self-extinguished.” But he could not totally hide his relief. Nor could his wife. “Although we have lost our main mast and have come in
a wreck we are all well in very good spirits and that your father grows so fat he could no longer wear your pantaloons,” Louisa cheerfully reported a week after the election. She began the year with a sleepless night, sick and in pain. But she began to emerge from her long darkness. Life continued, as life does. On December 2, John and Mary had a daughter, and Louisa and John Quincy became grandparents. Louisa’s mood was elated. She was once again her husband’s greatest champion and advocate. “Your father is well and growing very fat. It is impossible to behave with more real dignity than he does amidst trials which are sufficient to shake the nerves of a Pallas,” she wrote in December. At one of their last Drawing Rooms, in late December, they were so cheerful that the guests could not believe it. “Mr. and Mrs. Adams have gone a little too far in this assumed gaiety,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, noting their “social, gay, frank and cordial manners. What a change.” The doors to the East Room, never before used, were thrown open. A band was hired and there was, for the first time during one of Louisa’s White House Drawing Rooms, dancing. The ladies of the Cabinet showed up “in new dresses just arrived from Paris.” Margaret, for one, was suspicious. “Every thing in fact was done to conceal the natural feelings excited by disappointment and to assume the appearance not only of indifference, but of satisfaction.” But it was not affectation. The weather that winter was unusually freezing and wet, but they were finally able to tell themselves that spring would come. PART NINE

  BEGINNING the

  WORLD ANEW Washington and Quincy, 1829–1836

  1

  WINTER WAS STUBBORN. Storms came in quick succession, and wet snow still covered the ground in mid-March. For weeks, thin traces of ice lay in the shade. But by the end of March 1829, Louisa could write to Charles, who was up in Boston, that it was “almost summer,” describing the chirrups of hidden frogs and the reviving hum of insects. By the beginning of April, the fields were patched with color, fresh with the green scent of new grass. Spring blossoms broke from dead branches. Cascades of white flowers tumbled from the horse chestnuts. Strong shoots pushed out of the mud, and yellow forsythia erupted like laughter. Louisa shook off the cold that had numbed her. “Like a grasshopper,” she had once written of herself, “I sing my hour according to the degree of heat.”

  At the beginning of March, she and John Quincy, along with John and Mary, their daughter Mary Louisa (whom they called Louisa), and a few servants had moved into a mansion on Meridian Hill, located on the original centerline of the District of Columbia. The very stone that marked the longitude stood on the house’s land. Louisa could have walked due south from its central door to the iron gate of the White House. From the crest of the hill she could look south and see the White House’s boxy shape a mile and a half away. But that was the last place she wanted to go. She had no desire to get any closer. She heard stories of how a crowd of people overwhelmed the reception at the President’s House after Andrew Jackson’s inauguration. Office seekers, shopkeepers, farmers, senators, and children had pushed past one another into the parlors. Men had climbed in and out of the reception through open windows. With mud and slush clinging to their boots, they stood atop the damask chairs, the very chairs she had so carefully chosen. The drapes were torn, and when the waiters appeared with tubs of spiked orange punch, the surge of the crowd had knocked over her cut glass—now the new president’s cut glass—and the glass had shattered on the floor. She had heard, too, that Jackson was removing federal appointees and replacing them with supporters of his campaign. “Rumor has again set forth her hundred tongues and each tongue announces a dismissal,” Louisa wrote to George. Jackson had even fired her servants and brought in his slaves. Only the Giustas, who had come with the Adamses from Europe, remained, and they were permitted to keep their jobs only on the condition that they not speak to their former employers. “We are in a state of banishment,” Louisa wrote. The Adamses were being blamed for the death of Andrew Jackson’s wife, Rachel; Jackson’s supporters said that she had died from the strain of the slander against her. Louisa, though, mourned the woman’s death. “I learnt the pangs the malignity of slander can inflict not to pity one so severely oppressed,” she wrote to Charles. She kept all of this in the distance, though still in view. She made no visits to anyone in the city. Though the Adamses had once socialized with friends and opponents alike, no one from the new administration, except for Martin Van Buren, now secretary of state, came to visit them. Meridian Hill seemed a kind of exile—which Louisa liked. It was like Little Boston had been in Ealing, a kind of oasis—a place to be a family once more. Though the house was only rented, she wrote that the family was “forming a home of real domestic comfort.” It had been a long time since she worried about “good housewifery,” she admitted, years since she superintended the meals, the laundry, and the small trials of daily life. There was a time—she could remember it too well—when her incompetence caused her husband annoyance and herself great pain. Now, though, “we laugh at my blunders,” she said, and the laughter was cheerful. She was delighted with the place and confident enough to call herself its mistress. The house was large and tasteful, with separate wings for John’s family and her own, connected by large sliding doors that separated two elegant parlors on the south side. There were “very pretty” bed chambers, a long gallery, good closets, and a large room in a garret, where she had placed “the offensive billiard table” that John Quincy had bought for the White House, which the opposition press had pointed to as evidence that the president was gambling and abusing public funds after John, as secretary, had mislabeled the account. She could joke about that now. Spread out over the estate were cellars, stables, a dairy, an icehouse, servants’ chambers, a laundry, a washhouse, a kitchen garden, flower beds, a nursery for new trees. Yellowwood trees lined a long graceful drive to the estate. There was a farmhouse and woods, and more than a hundred acres of land. John Quincy’s study overlooked a little flower garden and the plant nursery. “The ex-President I think enjoys himself in his little study . . . infinitely more than I ever remember him to have done since I have been married,” Louisa wrote to Charles. Since leaving the glare of the President’s House, her husband had grown brighter and bigger in her eyes. “Your father leaves them all far behind and displays that real yet true dignity that seeks no occasions for ostentatious display but commands the respect of all who approach him,” she wrote. “Conscious rectitude is a shield which no arms are powerful enough to destroy.” Charles reminded her that she had been furious with him, despairing about his plans for Quincy. She half pretended not to know what her son was talking about. “I have totally forgotten,” she responded, adding, “Your father is as kind as possible and appears desirous of doing everything in his power to make me comfortable.” Her granddaughter, Mary Louisa, was often in her arms. She was amazed at the change that marriage and fatherhood had produced in her son John. “He is active steadily industrious and much more cheerful than for years,” Louisa told Charles. As for herself, she knew that she was also in a new state. She was rarely sick anymore. “I am always busy about nothing and have no time to think of my health which certainly is no worse if it does not improve.” She knew that eventually she and John Quincy would have to head north to the Old House, but she did not dwell on when. John Quincy began to talk about buying Meridian Hill. She did not, it seems, object. She wrote to George, “You have no conception how happily we live here.” • • • A LETTER ARRIVED from Charles in the first week of April. It was about George. George was not doing well, Charles said. He had withdrawn from his friends; he was languishing; he needed some sort of excitement, some spur for his career and his spirits. This came as no surprise to Louisa. She had been feeling distant from her oldest son for a year. Their correspondence had fallen off. They were like “floating icebergs,” she wrote. She had already tried to thaw the freeze, but she recognized it would take time. She couldn’t say whether the fault was hers or his, but it no longer mattered. “One of th
e pleasures most earnestly anticipated by me is the renewed and affectionate intercourse of my sons,” she had written to him on April 1. Her concern for him was an unceasing current in her mind—sometimes fast, sometimes slow. She had always had great hopes for her firstborn, but most of all she just wanted George to be well.

  “With all his nonsense he is a glorious creature,” she told her son John the year before, “and should he fail to get over the singular waywardness of his nature he will still be all I wish and desire.” On April 8, after receiving Charles’s letter, she wrote to George again and urged him to come to Washington. In her letter, she was gentle and kind. She gave no hint that she had been prompted by Charles, no echo of Charles’s concern. She simply said that she and John Quincy would need his help in moving to Massachusetts, and before that time came, they wanted him with them in Washington. She offered many inducements. “[O]ur little ménage goes on so quietly and modestly and I think I never saw your father so mild and so pleasant and take such a general interest in what is going on among us as he does now,” she wrote. If he came, he could save money on rent. He could have a comfortable room. He would have freedom. “Your father will probably keep a horse and gig and you will always command the use of it,” she wrote. After she signed her name, she added, “If you come you will see our pretty baby.” George agreed immediately, and Louisa was relieved. She was seriously worried, but she imagined that at Meridian Hill he might find, as she had found, some hope for the future. “It is probable,” she wrote to Charles, that George will “begin a new life when with us.” She expected him to reach the house on Saturday, May 2. But at around one o’clock that same afternoon, Louisa’s brother-in-law Nathaniel Frye appeared at the door instead. He asked whether John Quincy had received any letters. That morning Nathaniel had read an announcement in the Baltimore American that somewhere between Providence and New York, before sunrise on Thursday morning, George Adams had gone overboard the steamboat the Benjamin Franklin. About half an hour later John Quincy’s cousin Judge William Cranch arrived with three letters confirming the death. John Quincy was the one who told Louisa. Her condition, he wrote in his diary afterward, “is not to be described.” The doctor was summoned to see her, “but there was no medicine for this wound.” • • • OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, John Quincy read the newspaper accounts of the death and spoke with another passenger. He pieced together a story of what had happened, a story that he could accept, a story about his son’s death that would let him live on. “I see the causes of it distinctly,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. George was seasick. The jostling of the boat “had produced a fever with a rushing of blood to the brain.” He had asked the captain to be put on shore so that he might be bled. George was cheerful with other passengers. He gave a missionary a little money. But he was under a great strain, John Quincy wrote in his diary, and his mind snapped. George’s fellow passenger told John Quincy that George imagined that the other passengers were laughing at him. He imagined that the birds were speaking to him. He imagined that the steamboat engine was speaking to him, saying “Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.” In the middle of the night, George again asked the captain to put him ashore, saying that the other passengers were conspiring against him. Not long afterward, his hat was found on deck, and then his coat.