Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  When she did pick up her pen, she repeatedly tried to persuade John Quincy to stop his antislavery activities, however “just” his cause. Her warnings and fears had no effect. When he took on the case of thirty-six Africans from the Mende tribe who had been kidnapped into slavery and rebelled aboard the ship Amistad, she tried to talk him out of it, believing it would bring the family more distress. Charles agreed. After John Quincy successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court, he rebuked his son. “The agony of soul that I suffered from the day when I pledged my faith, to argue the cause of the Africans, before the Supreme Court, till that when I heard Judge Story deliver the opinion and decree of the Court, was chiefly occasioned by the reprobation of my own family, both of my opinions and my conduct, and their terror at the calamities which they anticipated they would bring upon them,” John Quincy wrote. But his ancestor, Saer de Quincy, had been one of the men who signed the Magna Carta, the Charter of Liberties, six hundred years before; John Quincy had seen the signature on the document in the British Museum himself. There was more to life than personal comfort, he told his son. Freedom was worth fighting for. He must have said something along the same lines about Saer de Quincy to Louisa, because that month she signed a letter “Louisa Catherine De Quincy Adams.” It was a joke, but perhaps it hid a sting. Who, after all, was she, with her terror at calamities, set against the great Saer de Quincy, with his petition against the king? She kept to her room, returning no visits. On New Year’s Day, 1840, 240 visitors came to pay their respects to the ex-president and his wife, but Louisa stayed upstairs. She left the house only three times that winter. Her granddaughter Fanny, Mary’s daughter, died in November, only nine years old. When Mary Louisa fell sick soon after, Louisa was desperate with worry. Her granddaughter’s life, she wrote, was almost a part of her own. She had no one to talk to, she wrote, because she was “imbued . . . with strange and singular opinions.” Time passed slowly and heavily. Her correspondence, at least that which survives, trailed off, and she wrote only occasionally in her diary—her thoughts dwelling on religion, Plutarch, Shakespeare. She partly absolved Lady Macbeth from Macbeth’s crimes; it was his ambition and guilty conscience that motivated his actions and warped his mind, before he had even seen his wife. Her husband had once used the phrase “secret history” in a letter to her to describe the backstabbing and double-dealings of the Monroe administration. She used the phrase now. “Were we to look deeply and minutely into the secret histories of men; how constantly we should observe this same retributive justice—It is one of the most remarkable facts; and it has caused me deeply to reflect upon its repeated and continued recurrence.” Even as she struggled with her sense that her family had sacrificed so much for her husband’s ambitions, she defended him. She worried about him, too, and not only because of the threats against his life; he was becoming more frail. In May he tripped in the House and dislocated his shoulder. The way he handled himself made her see too clearly her own lack of grace. She resented him and admired him at the same time. Not for the first time, she described him as Socrates and herself as Socrates’s nagging wife. John Quincy tolerated her “with the patience of Socrates; but . . . like Socrates glides smoothly on in the course which he has laid out for himself enjoying the turmoil,” she wrote to Charles. When she thought about “all his fine qualities, his easy temper, his quiet home habits, and his indefatigable powers of application,” she added, she was “ashamed” by her cravings for “some social comforts; some soothing influence to fill up the lagging hours.” She turned, as she did in times of sadness, to her memories. • • • ON JULY 1, 1840, at the age of sixty-five, she started her most ambitious project. Begun as a letter to Charles, it grew to seventy pages and two drafts. She called it “The Adventures of a Nobody.”

  It was, in part, a record of pain, starting with the events that she described as disillusionment: the coincidence of her marriage, her father’s failure, and her first miscarriage, all within a few months. But it was also an extraordinary account of a long, complicated, and deeply felt life—a life, indeed, of adventures. She wrote about catching sight of Queen Luise, like seeing the first flower of spring, and about the shivers that Pauline Neale’s Polish and Bohemian ghost stories had sent rippling down her spine. She described her anguish on seeing her father when she returned to Washington, a broken man. She wrote about reaching Quincy for the first time, how utterly strange it had been—stranger than stepping onto Noah’s ark. She wrote about meeting Aaron Burr, eating canvasback ducks at Thomas Jefferson’s dining table, and burning cakes in the little saltbox cottage on Penn’s Hill. And, with the knowledge of all that had happened since, she wrote of being taken by surprise, forced to leave her two older sons when she, John Quincy, and Charles had left for Russia—the two sons who would die before her. She wrote about Russia, the tsar and the ice and the sad splendor. The story ended in September 1815, with the death of her daughter. The last line was, “My Child gone to heaven.” Possibly, she could not bring herself to go on. Many historians and biographers who study John Quincy have read “Adventures” and taken her self-pity at face value. “Sickly and delicate, [Louisa] lacked the mental toughness, the resourcefulness, the strict standards of thrift, and the zest for life that made her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams, the measure of womanly excellence in New England,” wrote one of John Quincy’s biographers. Another described Louisa with clichés about Victorian womanhood: “Louisa Adams accompanied [John Quincy] in his subsequent diplomatic wanderings, was the tender and affectionate mother of their three sons, faithful companion of all his later political adventures and vicissitudes. To her the Adams family owes its continuance in direct descent from the Presidents; it also inherited from her a gentle mother’s kindness—and fortitude—if character can be inherited.” Louisa’s voice in “The Adventures of a Nobody,” though, is not the voice of a woman who was sickly and delicate, nor very gentle. It is vivid and propulsive. Her story cannot be completely trusted, of course. (She appears to have used old diaries and John Quincy’s diary as an aid for facts.) She was writing about events long past, and her view was colored by her feelings as she wrote. She said so herself. “Thus you find,” she once wrote a friend, telling a story about Berlin, “that I am the Heroine of History (or the present, remembering the history of the past only as a ‘tale that is told’).” Still, “The Adventures of a Nobody” is a rich historical text. It offers glimpses into Berlin and St. Petersburg during the Napoleonic Wars and into New England and Washington during the early republic. It reveals undercurrents of anxiety about the massive transformations taking place. It features memorable portraits of some of the most significant personalities and politicians of her day. It is also, more important, the story of something more peculiar: the adventures of someone who called herself a nobody. In an obvious sense, that “nobody” is self-effacing. She was describing herself as inconsequential, almost nonexistent. But there is also another way to read that word. “The Adventures of a Nobody” describes the extraordinary experiences of a woman whose body constantly kept her aware of her frailty and limitations. Her body miscarried, fainted, fell. It kept her down. The words on the page, though, needed no body. She left for us a voice. 3

  IN 1844, Louisa sent her daughter-in-law Abby, Charles’s wife, a washbasin that had been in the Johnson family for generations. The basin looked like nothing special, she cautioned Abby. It was cracked. It was ordinary. It was the kind of thing often ignored and unvalued. But perhaps it was a mistake to think of it that way. After all, she wrote, it had a hidden history.

  “Among the many and constant changes which have befallen my family in the last fifty years; it is truly wonderful that a thing so brittle should have nearly out lived a third generation of human beings; who have ‘struted their little brief hour’ to give place to the fashionable fame of a wash basin,” Louisa wrote to Abby. “Could it speak of times past, what mysteries it might disclose; what sorrows and what happiness it might reveal.
” She was writing as a woman to a woman, and in any woman’s life, there were things kept hidden. “But as every day furnishes its quota; we must rejoice that these silent witnesses can tell no tales of the past; which they must have seen so frequently washed away; while they have probably assisted to embellish many a face, and to dry many a tear which has graced the cheek of a suffering maiden whose grief was (perhaps) not even suspected. Yet [it] may have added beauty to many a beaming smile sweetly reflected in the transparent waters which it contained.” Unlike the washbasin, which could never whisper what it saw, she was a participant and interpreter of history—on the most intimate and epic scale. She witnessed a world in transformation and a country inventing itself, and she played a role in that invention. But her inner life was just as important and loomed just as large. She traced the narrative of her secret history sometimes when alone. Her journal and her letters were, to the end of her life, a place where she could dwell in her memory and study her thoughts. But there were things she alluded to that she never made explicit, and doubtless there were things she left out. Sometimes she would find herself lost in memory’s labyrinth. She had seen so much in her life—tremendous success, inconsolable pain. • • • IT AMAZED HER to think sometimes of how much she had experienced, how far she had come. When Charles told her that he had been nominated for president on the Free Soil ticket, she had to laugh. “I little I stood alone in this great nation, as the daughter of a President the wife of a President, and the mother of a nominated President,” Louisa told John Quincy and Mary. With typical pride and self-deprecation, she joked about it with a smile and a shrug. She was at once proud, and yet knew how fleeting the fame was. “And after all what is it? The worms will feed as well and no better than if I had died Miss Johnson.”

  Her eyes and voice had sharpened in her final years, even as her body continued to let her down. With little to lose personally, she could be witty and scathing, taking delight in a good story or even a turn of phrase. Politics was theater, and she no longer had the burden of being a player. She remained transfixed by the “mixture of meanness and extravagance; of vacillating folly and perplexed talent; of ludicrous incident and profound disappointment. . . . A treasury without a dollar; a Cabinet without authority; a vane to guide us,” as she once wrote. Her tone, though, was softer than it had been—more amused than depressed. “Nothing my dear Charles but the pencil of a Hogarth can do justice to the scenes passing here before our eyes every day . . . in the great metropolis of this anything but Union.” But despite all the caustic things she had to say, she encouraged her son. She had “strong faith” in his principles, she told him, and she trusted him to pursue his own goals and form his own views. She was mellowing toward John Quincy, too. She was proud of her husband. In her complicated way, of course, she had always been proud of him, but now it was easier for her to say it. She was no longer so quick to compare her powerlessness with his power, nor to resent him for it. “The only thing that distresses me is that he expends much of the strength of his great mind upon the butterfly race,” she wrote to Charles. Men flew around him “as the moth round the candle and consume themselves if he would let them alone.” At the same time, she found some satisfaction that those butterflies now clustered near him. It was easier for her to be comfortable with his antislavery stand partly because she had spent years thinking through her own position, but partly because it wasn’t so lonely anymore. A generation of men who had been inspired by him was coming into power. (And, in fact, some younger women were beginning to take their own influential antislavery stand.) After John Quincy survived another desperate attempt to muzzle him after Congress tightened the gag rule and pushed another resolution to censure him, he became a legendary figure. Even his fiercest opponents had come to respect his stubbornness and rectitude. Every New Year’s Day, all of Washington descended on Louisa and John Quincy’s house to pay their respects—abolitionists and Southern congressmen, men of “every political creed.” He was considered by nearly all as a great man, and by some as a hero. And she was, in a different way, seen as a monument. • • • SHE LIKED to joke that she was a relic. There was a grimness to her humor sometimes, and it was understandable. The greatest equalizing force, death, was all around her: the death of her grandson, Charles’s son Arthur; the deaths of nephews; the deaths of old friends. There were reminders everywhere, of course, of the deaths of her children. She continued to claim that her own death was imminent—even though she had long since proven herself to be one of those women who looks breakable but endures and endures.

  In 1843, Louisa’s brother, Thomas, died following a long decline after a stroke. In his will, he left her $10,000. Just how rare—and legal—this was is unclear. (Abigail Adams, for one, had drawn up a will.) Few records concerning the legitimacy of married women’s property exist. It is difficult for legal historians to know how often married women controlled their own assets. Coverture laws generally diverted the possession of a wife’s property to her husband. Louisa, though, left no doubt that this money was hers and hers alone. One of the first things she did after receiving it was draft her own will. She had, she wrote at the top, “in my own right . . . the possession in my own name of a Legacy of Ten Thousand Dollars.” Before a statute was passed in 1842, a woman in Massachusetts was not allowed to draft a will; even afterward, writing a will required the permission of the husband. But whether by coincidence or design, John Quincy Adams was not one of the witnesses of her will. When she needed cash, she had access to it herself. It brought her pleasure to be able to buy Charles a carriage and to discuss her accounts with him. The money was liberating. She had always felt poor. The loss of her dowry had, she had so repeatedly written, deprived her of her “standing” in her marriage. It had been the source of so much regret. There was a measure of redemption, then, when she wrote: In my own right . . . in my own name. By that time, she spent most of her days quietly, a figure at once distant and admired. The family referred to her as “the Madam.” In his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, Louisa’s grandson Henry wrote about visiting the Madam in Quincy during summers when he was a child. He would find her by her mahogany writing desk, looking out the window at the flowers and yellowwood tree inside the garden’s box walk. She was, Henry wrote, elegant and different, a “vision of silver gray.” She fascinated the child, and she would continue to fascinate him for his whole life. Some sympathy flashed between the old woman and young boy. “He might even then have felt some vague instinctive suspicion that he was to inherit from her the seeds of the primal sin,” Henry wrote in The Education, “the fall from grace, the curse of Abel, that he was not of pure New England stock, but half exotic.” By the time he wrote his memoir, he had read her memoirs, diaries, and letters. Henry thought, in fact, of publishing them; he copied and edited some two hundred pages before abandoning the project. He would go on to become the great historian of the early nineteenth century instead, writing the magisterial nine-volume History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—a history, not incidentally, in which his great-grandfather John Adams, and his grandfather John Quincy, played a great part. Louisa is absent in his account of men’s deeds. But when Henry wrote fiction and his own history, The Education—the story of a life, an exploration of thoughts, feelings, and perceptions—he looked to Louisa. Henry saw in her what he needed, a genealogy for his own vague sense of not belonging. But he also saw in her what was there: “some of those doubts and self-questionings, those hesitations, those rebellions against law and discipline, which marked more than one of her descendants.” • • • ON JULY 11, 1847, John Quincy turned eighty. Two weeks later, at the old house in Quincy, he and Louisa celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. He gave her a bracelet. Inside the medallion, she put snippets of hair from Charles, his wife Abby, and her grandson Arthur, who had recently died.