For more than a year she had struggled with her divided loyalties: her husband and her abstract sense of the injustice of slavery on one side; her sisters and relatives, her prejudices against blacks, and her fear of violence on the other. “Every friend is turned into an enemy; and now the prospect terminates with the fear of losing the love, the friendship and the society of my own nearest and dearest connections,” she wrote when John Quincy first spoke out publicly against slavery. Her sisters’ husbands were slaveholders, and her brother had a morbidly paranoid “fear of blacks.” Her niece Mary may have set Rachel Clark free in 1828—and Rachel may have been on good enough terms with the family to continue working for the Adamses as a domestic servant, as it appears she did—but Mary remained openly proslavery. Louisa wasn’t afraid to let the Johnson side of her family know that she disagreed with them. “John Randolph’s exit was attended with one good act at least the emancipation of his slaves,” she had written to Mary after Randolph died. “You will not approve of this act nevertheless it is a good and an honourable one which will give more real fame to his memory than all the éclat his talents ever produced.” In her diary, though, Louisa was more conflicted and anguished. Her compassion was limited. As she had during the Missouri debates, she wanted politicians to remain silent on the subject, even at the cost of perpetuating an injustice. “The awful question of slavery is before the publick and the question is of so fearfully exciting a nature it keeps me in a state of perpetual alarm—God has said blessed are the peace makers! then why should we to promote the ends of a few factious politicians endanger the lives of thousands? or occasion panics and alarms almost worse than death?” She could imagine the real battles too clearly—the scenes of wreckage, the rubble, the blood. She knew what war looked like; she had driven across battlefields herself. In fact, while writing her “Narrative of a Journey,” she had just been thinking of those weeks of passing through an exhausted, war-torn Europe on her way from St. Petersburg to Paris. There were border wars already taking place in the United States, in Florida and Texas, wars that disturbed her. She connected them to the desire of slaveholders to expand and strengthen their hold, deploring “the injustice and oppression so wantonly shown; not only to the poor miserable Indians, who fight in a just cause to protect their families, their property and their rights,” she wrote, but also the injustice and maltreatment shown to the soldiers. She had nephews fighting on the borders, and she was mad with worry. When one of them died, she considered the loss of his life to be theft. “Our frontiers,” she wrote, “will weep tears of blood.” Slavery would only end in war, and before that war, she imagined bloodshed of another kind. She shared the widespread fear that slaves would rebel and unleash a wave of violence against whites, murdering them in their beds. For this imagined threat, abolitionists came in for nearly as much blame in her mind as militant slavocracy. If the moment had come for “the calamity which sooner or later must end the strife,” she did not want her husband to be the agent, “the scourge through which this great event is to be atchieved.” Like all but a small number of white Americans, she was too blind and prejudiced to see that slavery itself was predicated on and perpetuated by violence and brutality. She could not see that there was already a kind of civil war under way. Americans were fighting Americans—sometimes even their own relatives, though the white paternity of many slaves was never acknowledged. That unacknowledged civil war was waged on fields and inside houses throughout the South and West, fought against bodies and minds, with nooses and lashes—only the violence was almost all on one side. Unlike most white Americans in the 1830s, though, she tried to face and understand her fears. In the weeks after witnessing the ferocious scene in the House, she repeatedly wrote about slavery in her diary. “Stray thoughts,” she wrote the following Sunday—her sixty-second birthday. “It is often said that Scripture encourages and authorizes slavery!” But, she wrote, referencing Moses, Cain, Jacob, Ishmael, and Jesus’s ministry, “the basis on which the principles of Christianity are founded, militate so strongly against the system of slavery, that it was utterly unnecessary” for Jesus to have preached against it. And then she would backpedal, repeating the racist cant of the day. “Death is the end destined to all; and even in our day we are forced to realize the sad truth; that there are races of men still existing on the earth, whom we can in no way civilise.” Progress, she wrote, was a matter better left to God. Her racism was not unusual, but it ran deep. She made crude claims about the pernicious tendencies of blacks. When she heard of a crime, she was quick to spread reports that a black person was suspected, even where there was no evidence. She treated blacks with suspicion and contempt. Her reaction to the plight of a woman in Washington named Dorcas Allen is illustrative. After having lived as free, Allen was about to be sold at auction—likely to work the deadly cotton or sugar fields of the Deep South—and committed infanticide rather than let her children also be sold. Louisa was sympathetic at first; she saw Dorcas primarily as a mother. She supported John Quincy’s efforts to help untangle the complicated chain of ownership that finally allowed Allen’s husband, a free black, to raise the funds to buy her (John Quincy himself gave fifty dollars). But when Allen called on Louisa, wearing her finest clothing—no doubt meaning a show of respect—Louisa was appalled and had her sent away. She had expected Allen to be wearing mourning attire, to look pitiful and grieving for her children, and had a bigoted response when Allen did not. Even as John Quincy was leading the antislavery movement in the House, speaking out in ever more forceful terms, the Adamses remained, as ever, complicit in the District’s complex economy of slavery. They followed a common practice in hiring a slave named Julia from her owner as an occasional servant. Even if part—or all—of the wages went to Julia herself, allowing her to save money with the hope of buying her freedom, the fact remained that Julia was a slave, subject to the whims of her owners. Louisa liked Julia, but her sympathy had short limits. When Julia, “an excellent servant,” was about to be sold by her owner to “a brute, a Virginia slave holder,” Louisa wrote that she wished she “could raise the sum wanted to release her from her bondage. . . . If I could be put into a way of raising a subscription for this purpose; I should be very happy.” But Louisa was quick to add that she would only give a little money. “I could not appear in the business in any way, but by contributing.” As he had for years, Louisa’s husband had more courage than she. He reached the pinnacle of his career, the presidency of the United States, only to find himself in the valley of his own despair. But instead of staying there, he found the higher challenge. Others fought to preserve the Union for the sake of its preservation. He fought to fulfill the promises that it had made. It took a rare imagination. It required traveling beyond, and sometimes against, the boundaries of Washington’s polite society. (And even in this, his moral vision was limited. Though his antislavery credentials were beyond dispute, he believed that sexual relations between whites and blacks was, as he wrote in an essay about Shakespeare’s Othello, “unnatural.”) It may be that he came to oppose slavery rationally, through his reading and thinking, as historians usually assume. Or it may be that he came to it more emotionally, and more personally. In January 1843, after John Quincy had established himself as an antislavery crusader, Adelaide Hellen’s former slave Jane Clark—by then, Jane Davis—appealed to John Quincy for help after her son, Joseph, whom Adelaide had owned and sold to a man who took him to Arkansas, was wrongfully resold after being promised his freedom. “Can I not possibly do something for this man?” John Quincy wrote in his diary after learning of the crime. The note of anguish in John Quincy’s voice is clear; there may also be a note of regret. Jane Clark, Rachel Clark, and perhaps Joseph himself had lived with him for years. But he had not done anything when Adelaide sold Joseph in the first place, and so divided the Clark family. He had not done anything, and now it seemed he could do nothing. He had not worked to end slavery as president, and now there was a slaveholder, John Tyler, in th
e White House, willing to go to war to fight for Texas, wanting to go to war to expand the slave land. He could do something, at least, to counter that. If Louisa learned of the Clark family’s plight, she did not mention it in the few extant letters she wrote from that time. She sometimes did empathize with slaves—especially with women. But she was afraid of slave revolts, and also of the violence that defenders of slavery were willing to use. She felt threatened. She thought those who were organizing a grassroots network for the immediate abolition of slavery were irresponsible. She thought that the evangelical Christians who channeled their tremendous energy toward inflaming moral outrage against slavery were reckless. She considered her husband’s stand—even as tentative as it was at first—dangerous to his country and to his family. As a moral question, she had once said, slavery was a clear evil. As a political and practical one, it made her shudder. “I am absolutely sick of politicks and would give anything almost for peace,” she wrote Charles in February 1843. John Quincy’s position was dangerous. There were real threats against his life. He was isolated as the congressman to whom the abolitionists consistently turned, even if they were frustrated that he did not fight for more. The scholar William Lee Miller tried to count the antislavery petitions submitted by the Twenty-fifth Congress, 1838–39, still in the archives of the House. John Quincy Adams submitted 693. The next, William Slade of Vermont, submitted 450. After that, the falloff was severe and instructive. Joshua Giddings presented 42, and eleven others had 15 or more. Even Charles, who would soon enter Massachusetts politics on an explicitly antislavery platform, thought his father was making a long series of big mistakes by insisting on pushing the issue. Louisa was furious with her husband for exposing himself (and her) to contempt and attacks, and feared for his safety, although she was fiercely proud of him. At times, she saw a greater and nobler role for herself. Like her husband, it came late in her life. But she had a more conflicted sense of it than he did. She was not, on this subject, a heroine. But her struggle was a start. 2
AT TIMES, she was galvanized. The fight over the right to petition—however conflicted it made her feel—gave Louisa a goal and a grievance. A few weeks after witnessing her husband challenge Congress—a sight she had initially described with dismay—she was in a jesting, daring mood. Recalling the scene now exhilarated her. She now made herself out as a soldier. “The platoons came so swift and thick while I was present,” she wrote at the end of February. “Instead of damping my spirit they seemed to produce a contrary effect, and inspired a degree of ardor to my hotspur head, fully equal in force and energy to their own.” She delighted in her scorn for John Quincy’s adversaries. “If you have ever seen a puppy in fits it will give you some idea of the foaming violence of the scene,” she wrote. The proslavery faction “at last . . . sneaked away under the lash, which they had so well merited to receive.”
It was lucky, she added, for the Southerners that she was not allowed to take part in the debate. Had she had “the privilege of speech, the ne plus ultra of woman’s right,” she continued, she would have “overmastered them by dint of words, notwithstanding the miserable deficiency of ideas which they so handsomely displayed.” The ne plus ultra of woman’s right! It was a radical thing to say. Louisa put it playfully—but in a way that suggested something serious underneath. How to address the evils of slavery tore at her, but she connected it—as a small number of people, especially women, did—to the injustice of women’s exclusion from politics. A woman’s rights were supposed to be nonpolitical; they concerned her duties to her family and her family’s duties to her. Even female reformers in the 1830s were not sure what to make of the interjection of female voices into the men’s debates in Congress. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who would go on to write the seminal antislavery sentimental novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, criticized women who signed petitions. A woman, Stowe wrote, “takes a subordinate station” in civil and political decisions. Her interests were “entrusted to the other sex.” She was emphatic and plain. “IN ALL CASES,” Stowe wrote, petitions to Congress “fall entirely without the sphere of female duty.” Despite her battle cry about free speech and women’s rights, Louisa did not quite know what to think of the petitions from women flooding her husband’s office. She watched John Quincy disappear behind the tall stacks on his desk. He rose at three in the morning to file petitions before eating stewed peaches with a little warm milk and heading to the House. The petitions were a nuisance, and she was resentful that her husband fielded the lion’s share of them—from all over the country, not just from his own constituents. “O these hosts of petitions!!! They will kill your father! and those milk and water Members!!! Would it not be possible to get a law passed in the Massachusetts Legislature compelling the members of each district to present the petitions of their own constituents,” she wrote to Charles. “Start petitions to them on this subject and relieve us from this oppression.” She tried her own lobbying, too. “My proposition did not take with the Massachusetts Members because they neither like the trouble nor the responsibility, and they like a two-sided game better,” she wrote. “Women and Quakers are pretty helpers in such a cause. If this persecution lasts much longer who knows but what I may join the Grimkies and lecture too!” That was another joke—but a loaded one. Sarah and Angelina Grimké, sisters born in South Carolina, had become leading abolitionists. Their tour of New England, in which they vividly described the evils of slavery, had made them famous. In February 1838, Angelina testified on behalf of the abolitionists before the Massachusetts legislature, making her the first woman in history to address an American legislative body. She and Sarah Grimké were also among the first to demand political rights for women. “Men and women were CREATED EQUAL; they are both moral and accountable beings, and whatever is right for man to do is right for women,” Sarah wrote in an article, “On the Province of Women,” part of a series that the Grimkés published as a pamphlet called The Equality of Sexes and the Condition of Women. These were incendiary ideas. Even the newspaper that published “On the Province of Women” tried to distance itself from the content of the essays. Angelina was widely known as “Devilina.” Postmasters burned the Grimkés’ pamphlets. But when Louisa read “On the Province of Women” in the winter of 1837–38, she was impressed. It was saturated in the language of Scripture, language that spoke to Louisa. It addressed issues that were already on her mind. Louisa had been writing “Narrative of a Journey,” meditating on the capabilities of women. That summer in Quincy, she had also read Abigail Adams’s letters, and was “struck,” she wrote, “by the vast and varied powers of her mind; the full benevolence of an excellent heart and the strength of her reasoning.” She added, “I cannot refrain from wishing that they were published.” To read them, she wrote—using words that anticipated the Grimkés’—might help “many a timid female whose rays too feebly shine, not for want of merit but for want of confidence.” She wrote to Charles, “I cannot believe that there is any inferiority in the sexes, as far as mind and intellect are concerned.” “On the Province of Women” impressed Louisa so much, in fact, that she wrote Sarah Grimké a letter. • • • “ALTHOUGH I have not the happiness of a personal acquaintance with you,” Louisa wrote, “the pleasure which I derived from the perusal of your two letters on the Province of Women, induces me to address you.” Grimké responded, and a correspondence between them began—an exchange rooted in ideas. Equal rights for women was a familiar, if embattled, arena for the Grimkés. For Louisa, the exchange was more extraordinary. She took a risk in pursuing it. But there was something about Grimké’s seriousness that may have awakened the memories of the strong-willed educated women to whom Louisa had been drawn throughout her life—a lineage that included her teacher Miss Young, Elizabeth Carysfort, and others. She sometimes felt timid in their presence, not sure if she was up to understanding, but she admired them, and she longed to be engaged.
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