Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  At first, Louisa was as miserable as the weather. “All the troubles I foresaw are breaking around us,” she wrote to Charles in early January. On New Year’s Day, between three and four hundred people had come to the house to pay their respects, leaving her “utterly exhausted.” Andrew Jackson’s lieutenants Martin Van Buren and Edward Livingston had come to visit as if they were old friends, but she avoided them. Had she spoken to them, “my feelings might have got the better of my judgment.” She saw herself doing wrong at every turn: insulting Thomas Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph; offending Mary and her sisters; antagonizing John Quincy. Less than a quarter of a mile south, in the White House, her nemesis, Andrew Jackson, now seemed to run the country as if he were a king in a farce. “I only mention it to show you how correct I was in my gloomy forebodings.” Her thoughts often slipped into deep, well-worn grooves of despondency. Her self-reprobations were constant, her tone self-pitying. She was a burden, she claimed; she was “the cause of disunion” in the family. She was sick of the craven habits and selfish ambitions of politicians. Democracy, she wrote, turned governance to politics and politics into perpetual campaigns. “In an elective government where the fame is never allowed to expire: but, like the vestal are, is forever renewed and kept alive by the most combustible materials: even the hearts of the most honest must at last be kindled into rage; by the constant unshrinking malevolence of party spirit; and the judgment obscured by the rankling and ever accumulating thorns, that like the venemous bites of paltry musketoes wound by the perpetual itteration of the sting, until the whole mass of the blood is enflamed and corrupted,” she wrote, her diary becoming a screed. Sometimes, she talked about George. Her mood, though, was always up and down, and as the weeks passed it was more often improved. By the end of January she was waving off her complaints as “a silly feeling of pique.” The political machinations exhausted her, but they also exhilarated her, as they had when John Quincy was secretary of state—perhaps even more so now that she had less at stake. She tunneled her way out of her depressions with the sharp spade of her sardonic humor, making hilarious what might have been intolerable. As a congressman’s wife, with no ambition to speak of (or deny), and with some—however short—distance from the President’s House, she had more freedom. As an observer, she had no one to please but herself and her correspondents. “My experience has taught me; that Shakespeare thoroughly read mankind when he blended the ridiculous among the most distressing of his tragic scenes,” she once wrote to a friend. “In my career such have I found human nature.” Her voice flashed with laughter, and she gained a reputation for her skewering wit. She was a master at lusus politica, as Benjamin Waterhouse, one of the cofounders of Harvard Medical School, described her jokes about Washington. Her sharp edge was sharper, though, because her anger was undiminished. If anything, her fury at Jackson and his supporters had intensified after George’s death. Like something wounded, she took wild swipes at the administration. Jackson was a lion, or half horse and half alligator; his administration was one of foxes and grubs. After Martin Van Buren was elected president, she heard that his grandmother’s name, Goes, was pronounced “goose” by the Dutch, and she quipped: For the King of the Beasts we find no further use

  And the choice of the Nation now falls on a—Goose— As usual, she disclaimed any interest in or knowledge of what was happening in government. “Of politics I can write but little,” she would write to Charles or his wife, Abby, before launching into news. “We have no news,” she would say, and then go on to report all the news: “Mr. Webster took tea here last evening. You will have heard that Justice Baldwin has gone crazy. It is announced that Mr. Buchanan is to be recalled from St. Petersburg and to take his place. Mr. Smith the Register is to be P.M. in N.Y. in the place of Governor, and it is whispered that Noah is to come here to edit the official.” She was like her husband in some way. “Your father is in high spirits dabbling as usual in public affairs while fancying he has nothing to do with them,” she wrote to her son John. She set herself up as a truth teller, a kind of Greek chorus in a tragedy—someone who would step back and comment upon the action, who would say what others would not. She tracked everything—bills, appointments, scandals; who was in, who was out. “Swartout is here, and it is rumoured has frightened the P. into the recent measures,” she would write. “Amons holds his head as high as ever, but rumour says he totters.” Her pen flew across the page, speeding through news and gossip, updates about the Panic of 1837, the Seminole War in Florida, or presidential elections. “We are so inundated with newspapers from every corner of the country, that I expect like Dr. Valpy’s hero to go off some day in a blazing idea. It is true there is a good deal of fire in some of them but many contain only bitter ashes that make the reader sick. I wish some means could be taken to put a stop to this paper currency or we shall surely stop payment!!!” Politics, she finally admitted to Charles, were her “bread meat and desert.” But family was her real sustenance. To her surprise, living with John and Mary was a good arrangement. Parenthood had changed the two of them, she thought—made Mary softer, John more generous, and both more tender and attentive. Her grandchildren astonished her. “Louisa is a lovely child with an intellect that almost frightens me,” the girl’s grandmother wrote, “wild” but also “everything that can be wished. As to Fanny she is one of those gifted things that seem to have been formed in an existence prior to her birth.” Within a year, Charles and Abby were having children of their own; they named their first, a daughter, Louisa Catherine Adams. “When I venture to anticipate what the rising generation are to produce,” Louisa wrote to Abby, watching her grandchildren grow, “I am lost in ecstasy of wonder, and entirely deny Solomon’s assertion that there is nothing new under the sun.” • • • THE BIBLICAL ALLUSION was not unusual. More and more often, her lines would curve into the familiar phrases or parables of Scripture, sometimes spiraling tighter and tighter, until the train of her thought was diverted altogether. Louisa had always had a strong religious impulse, ever since her childhood in Nantes, when she’d fallen to her knees on the stone floor to worship the wretched figure of Jesus on the cross. During her time in the President’s House and especially after George’s death, her religiosity had become more reflexive. Almost anything—any little provocation, stray comment, or beautiful sight—could trigger her reflections. More and more often, as she grew older, her letters ended in homilies. She would say: only in Christ could she find comfort, only in God forgiveness. Her words would veer toward the formulaic. In contrast to the originality of her own language, her prayers sounded genuine but rote. This was not a bad thing to her. She wanted the strength of inherited tradition, the sense of submitting what she could not understand to the wisdom of something she could never know. Sounding new was not her aim.

  No one blinked when she spoke of God and the superiority of Christianity to all other philosophies and modes of faith. Her fervor, after all, was no hotter than that of many at the time, and not as intense as that of some. An evangelical spirit was sweeping through the country. Men—and some women—were riding from town to town preaching salvation, and calling for people to receive the spirit and to be born again. Revivals crowded town greens; denominations fissured; sects built new communities. Not far from Quincy, people—some of whom she knew—were talking about the inherent goodness of men instead of their natural depravity, about the divine spark in nature, and about the purity of the individual uncorrupted by the corrosions of conventions. It was in this far-flung and fertile religious climate, the Second Great Awakening, that she turned and turned again toward Christianity. That atmosphere affected her, but only indirectly, as the weather does. She kept a careful distance. Twice, she went to see the Shakers in New York, and was at once fascinated, admiring, and repelled. She read about Unitarianism and Swedenborgianism, which appalled her; if doctrines undermining the divinity of Christ were adopted, she trembled to think where the subversion would end. Transcende
ntalism perplexed her; she thought it left “nothing but shadows behind a mass of ideal and imaginative confusion.” But she was hardly a traditionalist herself. She often skipped church and had no special love for ministers of any kind. Her faith had always been idiosyncratic, out of line with almost everyone around her. Raised an Anglican, and with early exposure to the Catholic Church in Nantes, she was inclined toward the aesthetic pleasures of Episcopalianism, the way the forms and language spoke to the heart. In 1837, her confirmation in Rock Creek Church, near the graves of her mother and her sister Nancy, gave her more of a “melancholy satisfaction” than an actual commitment to the Episcopal Church. Living abroad, she had attended whatever service was nearby, if any at all, and her confirmation did not change her flexibility. God was too much of a mystery for men to assume their own answers were true. She was, she wrote, “bigoted to no creed.” She was sure, though, that she did not like Puritanism, which she thought too cold and stony, or transcendentalism, which was complacent and naive. Once, on a trip by herself north, she found herself seated with a “very pretty transcendental companion,” eighteen years old, just graduated from college and about to study in Heidelberg. He “hopes shortly to compete with his great friend Carlysle; his protoype Emerson . . . he is to supersede Kant etc. etc., to correct the errors which have crept in to our religious faith, and to produce a revelation far exceeding any yet discovered by the Christian World,” she wrote, bemused. “We are to be entirely independent of everything but the divinity within ourselves.” He was, she continued, pointedly, “a Virginia aristocrat and a slave holder; and thinks our sex very well calculated to write pretty familiar letters; and to live in modest seclusion, taking care of their husbands and children and superintending their servants.” One can easily picture her cocked head and bemused smile. But there was poignancy, too, in her portrait. His simplicity, sensitivity, and sweetness she found “really attractive and winning: and it recalled to my mind too forcibly the past, where I had so often witnessed the same ambitious yearnings, hoping so much, only to be blasted by death and disappointment.” Her mind, it seems, was turning to another young man with a poetic soul—to her son, whom she had loved and lost. Her traveling companion “seems to me to be one of those beautiful visionaries, whose vitality is to be extinguished in the too great brightness of its own blaze, which while it illumines the mind, consumes the body which contains it, and leaves no trace behind.” She had watched her children die and mourned the loss of those who had not been born; she had been blasted by death and disappointment. She had seen too much corruption to believe in the perfectibility of man, and she knew too much of her own darkness to believe in the untrammeled divinity within herself. She had experienced worldly success through her husband’s career, and had played a real and unmistakable part in it, but that had not brought her real and lasting happiness. She often felt lonely. Her body was forever breaking down. Sicknesses scared her—even though she declared herself, often with a maudlin flourish, ready for death. She was never ready for the deaths of those around her, and terror at the idea consumed her. In 1832, when Louisa was in Quincy, a cholera outbreak killed thousands along the East Coast and gripped the population in terror. In her letters, she returned to the threat of cholera again and again. Other serious ailments threatened the family: scarlet fever, influenza, undiagnosable maladies. John could “scarcely crawl.” Mary was losing weight. “Their suffering is real,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy, “ours only imaginary.” When Louisa was anxious or sad, her religious beliefs became a lens that she turned on herself. She used religion like a magnifying glass, not only to study her own sins but as a tool to start a fire. She would catch a ray of truth and use herself as tinder, as if her soul were like withered grass. It might burn, but from the scorched earth would come new growth. 3

  SHE HAD OUTBURSTS of shame. They came unprompted, at any time. But they had special intensity in the summer of 1834. Instead of returning to Quincy for the summer with her husband, she had stayed behind in Washington to take care of her brother, Thomas, who was sick, and her son John, who was also unwell. The stress of the situation seems to have affected her and provoked, with a vengeance, her self-doubt. When John Quincy wrote to praise her kindness to those around her, she turned against herself, and her response streamed out in a rush of uninterrupted anguish and regret for her “rash acts uncharitable constructions mistakes never properly elucidated and false impressions.” She lamented “the most unhappy effects” that her mistakes had upon herself. Her temper, she wrote, was “wildly irascible and rendered by mortification disappointment and misfortune I fear vindictive.”

  John Quincy was gentle in his response. “There is nothing vindictive—nothing unkind—nothing ungenerous in your natural disposition—nor after all that you have suffered in the world or by the world, or even by those whom you loved, and from whom you had the right to expect love in return, after all there is nothing but full and overflowing kindness and affection in your nature now,” he wrote. His grammar was contorted, as hers had been in her lament, but the thought was clear. Everyone surrounding her knew the goodness of her heart, he wrote—most of all himself. But she replied that she did not deserve his kindness, and she could not accept it. Only the grace of God could offer comfort, and only by his standards could she be judged. “Truth therefore must be severe: and the leniency that hoodwinks it, is decidedly vicious.” With a wrenched, wrenching tone of submission, she asked for John Quincy’s forgiveness for subjecting his temper to so many trials. Her severity was extreme, but so was the situation she then faced. If she felt the hand of God pressing against her, plunging her down, it is no wonder. Her second son, John, was dying, and she was watching it happen in front of her. • • • JOHN WAS ONLY twenty-nine years old when his body began to shut down. For several years, his illnesses—periods of blindness and weakness, symptoms that his parents, at least, flinched from describing—were hard for doctors to diagnose, but one thing was not a mystery. He was an alcoholic. “I do not know whether vices are hereditary in families,” Charles wrote in his diary the following summer, 1833, while John was visiting Quincy, “but it would almost seem so from the number of examples which one meets with. The Smith blood”—his grandmother Abigail’s family—“seems to have had the scourge of intemperance dreadfully applied to it.”

  Living with him, Louisa and John Quincy saw his decline too clearly. Their alarm turned to panic as his health grew worse. John, Louisa wrote to Charles in 1833, was “seldom able to get out of his bed until twelve o’clock and then shuffles about the house wrapt up in his wadded coat.” She and John Quincy tried to help, tried to bolster him as they never had before. They were clearly scared and desperate. Louisa praised his talents and urged him to try writing fiction, perhaps hoping that he would find the outlet in writing that she had found for herself. John Quincy’s hectoring about John’s management of the Columbia Mill ceased, even though the mill faltered. Instead, he and Louisa praised John’s effort and diligence. In July 1834, it became clear that their encouragement was not enough. John was giving up and letting go. Louisa asked John Quincy to help her persuade John to leave Washington altogether. “The convenience resulting from the residence of our children in this place for political purposes has blinded us to the truth of its difficulties in so far as it regards any possibility of promoting their personal interests,” she wrote to John Quincy. Her reference to their residence “for political purposes” was as accusatory as it was desperate, of course, and even then she could not resist a jab about the sacrifices the family had made for John Quincy’s ambitions. “In no way as you know have I ever been consulted or have I ever participated in the settlement of my children”—a pointed reminder of those many years of separation, against her will, long ago—“but it is impossible for me any longer to remain a silent spectator when I think timely and judicious exertion might save them from years of misery.” John Quincy listened. He urged John to leave the District and move to Quincy
. “I say it with a heart full of affection and of anxiety,” he wrote on July 23. Three days later, he coaxed his son again. “Nothing could be more easy. . . . Come and stay here the remainder of this unparalleled summer, recruit your health, recruit your spirits, and take time to consider what you shall determine upon for your future prospects. . . . Washington is no place for enterprize. Here so long as I live and have a house over my head, it shall be yours and your children’s.” Faced with few alternatives, John started to make arrangements to move. But the plans moved slowly, because John’s body, mind, and will were failing. Louisa left for Quincy without him on July 31, bringing her young granddaughter Mary Louisa with her. She brought the child reluctantly; she was having premonitions of her own death. But her conviction that her son would die first was stronger, and she begged John to hurry his departure from Washington, hoping that it might save him. “I shall be perfectly miserable until I hear that you have left the city as the health of yourself your wife and Fanny’s make it essential and the season leaves no time for deliberation,” she wrote from Philadelphia. If he needed money, she added, then he should sell her silver breadbasket and waiter and take the money for himself. “Do not hesitate to take this step as they are my own and if they can prove serviceable they will yield me more pleasure and more solid wealth than they ever have since I have owned them.” To his wife, Mary, she wrote, “Language cannot express the affection I bear him.” It was too late. On Monday, October 6, a letter arrived from Caroline saying that both Mary and John were very sick. Twelve days later, on Saturday afternoon, October 18, Charles received a letter from Mary’s brother Walter saying that John’s situation was critical. Charles rode out to Quincy immediately, arriving just after dinner, and gave the letter to his father. “Then came the most trying part of it, the disclosure to my Mother,” Charles wrote in his diary afterward. Her suffering, John Quincy recorded, was “agonizing” to watch. She had been ill herself since the beginning of September and was still unable to walk across the room. Still, she insisted that she would go to Washington, changing her mind only when the doctor arrived to convince her that the trip would kill her. John Quincy left the next morning, traveling by a succession of steamboats—including the Benjamin Franklin, the boat from which his George was lost—and stages and railway. The trip that had once taken weeks of fast travel now took, though at a punishing pace, three days. Even that was not fast enough. He arrived at his son’s house on October 22 at ten at night. John was already unconscious. John Quincy bent down and kissed his son’s smooth, warm brow. He found Mary upstairs, “emaciated.” When she saw him, she began to cry. “I promised her,” he wrote, “that I would be a father to her and her children.” Around two in the morning, John Quincy went to sleep. At half past four, he woke up and went to John’s room. Caroline’s husband Nathaniel Frye was there, closing John’s eyes. John was thirty-one years old. “My dearest, best beloved friend,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa later that day. “Your message to our dear departed child, was faithfully retained by me, to be delivered in all its tenderness and affection, so far as a father’s lips can speak the words of a mother’s heart.” He had not been able to give it to John in time, but had John been able to speak, “he would repeat to you the same message in almost your words.” By the time his letter reached her, she knew what it would say. On October 26, Kitty and William Smith had appeared at the house in Quincy. Charles greeted them. They came from New York, where they had received a letter from Thomas Johnson saying that John was dead. They had traveled to Quincy straightaway. Charles went upstairs to his mother’s room. When she asked who had come to the door, he told her that it was Kitty. He did not need to say anything else; she knew why her sister had come. “She lay in a state of almost stupor for some time,” he wrote in his diary, “followed by a violent and indefinite emotion.” • • • A YEAR LATER, on Sunday, November 6, 1835, she began another diary. On the first page of the book, she wrote: