Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  Their old quarrels faded into half-stubborn, half-indulgent routines. She would brew tea for him every day in her large old silver tea service, a wedding present; he would drink only hot water. He refused to wear anything but an old brown coat, “which I cannot get off his back long enough to get the buttons covered,” she complained. He would cover caterpillars with her fancy tumblers in order to watch them turn into butterflies, only to forget them on the closet shelf. She tolerated this “with fortitude,” their grandson Henry would remember, “but she made protest when he carried off her best cut-glass bowls to plant with acorns or peachstones that he might see the roots grow, but which she said, he commonly forgot like the caterpillars.” Both of them had at times privately regretted their marriage. There had been periods in which they had hardly spoken to each other, months and years in which they had lived more or less apart. Even late in his life, John Quincy could not forget that he had loved someone else first and had fallen for that woman more intensely. In 1838, he was walking through Mount Auburn Cemetery when he came across the headstone of Maria Sargent, the daughter of Mary Frazier, the young woman he had loved before meeting Louisa, and his mind turned again toward Mary. She had been, he wrote in his diary afterward, “to me the most beautiful and the most beloved of her sex.” He had done his duty in ending the relationship, but nearly half a century later, he still felt the pain. “Dearly!—how dearly did the sacrifice of her cost me, voluntary as it was.” If Louisa ever desired to be with any particular person but her husband, she did not leave any evidence. She had felt that he had not understood her, been sympathetic toward her, taken her feelings, needs, wishes, and capacities into account. And she was right. In Louisa’s retrospective accounts of her first years of marriage, “Record of a Life” and “The Adventures of a Nobody,” her protracted illnesses, her insecurities, and John Quincy’s slights stand out: he left her at events to fend for herself, he made their relative poverty pointedly clear, his anxiety for her health made her feel guilty, and she was not the woman he wanted her to be. “Happy indeed would it have been for Mr. Adams if he had broken his engagement, and not harassed himself with a wife altogether so unsuited to his own peculiar character, and still more peculiar prospects,” she wrote self-pityingly in 1840. But this was unfair. There had also been moments of real tenderness, companionship, support, and joy. They had needed and depended on each other, sometimes in ways they could not admit to each other. They had loved each other over many years. Together, they had endured many things that could have shattered them both. Of the four children to whom Louisa had given birth—and the ones whom she had lost before bearing—only one would outlive Louisa and John Quincy. It is impossible to say whether they would have done better apart than they did together. But together, they did survive, and together they grew. • • • THE PREVIOUS NOVEMBER, 1846, after their annual journey to Quincy, Louisa had returned to Washington with Mary and her granddaughter ahead of John Quincy, traveling south before the New England winter set in. Soon after she arrived, she learned that John Quincy had collapsed on a walk. Immediately she turned around and rushed north. Traveling unattended, by steamboat and railroad, she made the trip in thirty-six hours. When she had arrived in the United States thirty-five years before, that journey had taken three weeks.

  She found John Quincy looking better than she had hoped but far from well. He had suffered a stroke, temporarily losing use of his right arm and his right leg below the knee. There was a gash on his head. When he regained a little feeling in his leg, he unwisely rose from his bed and tried to walk; Charles’s wife, Abby, found him on the floor. Louisa sat with him, reading French verses aloud and watching him sleep. He slept like a child. “His complexion looks uncommonly clear pure and fine,” she wrote to Mary, “and although his face sharper and thinner he is handsomer than ever.” As the weeks passed and the new year began, he slowly grew stronger. By January, he was talking of returning to Washington, and by the beginning of February, the doctor proclaimed him well enough to make the trip. He planned on going to his desk at the House of Representatives as soon as he reached the city. “He is already full of fire and fury threatening sense / But signifying nothing . . . As he cannot be heard across a room at present,” Louisa wrote. They arrived in Washington on February 12, her seventy-second birthday. The next morning, he did go to the House. All the members rose to honor him when he walked in. John Quincy knew that he would not have long to live. When he had finally recovered enough use in his hand to pick up his pen, in March, he opened his diary and, in faint, shaky letters, wrote that from now on, he was writing “posthumous memoir.” Louisa also knew better than to hope that he would fully recover from the stroke. She knew better, too, than to imagine that he would give up the work that might hasten his death. Retirement would mean “risking a total extinction of life,” she had written, “or perhaps of those powers even more valuable than life, for the want of a suitable sphere of action.” At the thought of his death, she was stricken. “Never, never has it entered my imagination that he could leave me in this world alone and widowed,” she wrote to Mary, “and the very thought seems to paralyze my soul.” • • • THE ADAMS HOUSE on F Street, where John Quincy, Louisa, and their extended family had returned a decade earlier, was not quiet the following winter, 1848. Their granddaughter Mary Louisa was twenty years old and fully a part of Washington’s social life. Nieces, nephews, and guests regularly passed through the house. Young men and women were drawn to Louisa, as they had always been. “Few, were as talented accomplished and witty as Mrs. Adams,” wrote Mary Cutts, Dolley Madison’s niece, who had become Louisa’s frequent companion. “A keen sense of the ridiculous tempered by extreme goodness of heart, would make her pause abruptly in uttering a sally of wit or brilliant repartee, which might give pain, but the merry twinkle of her eye was infectious, even were the cause unknown.”

  Louisa had lost what little weight she could spare. Every day, she wore plain black dresses and little lace caps that framed her delicate face. She looked frail, but her voice remained strong. She even resumed her practice of writing a daily diary letter to Charles, launching from her typical disclaimers into the latest political news: what was happening in Albany, who was set for vice president, and the maneuvering between James Polk, Zachary Taylor, and Winfield Scott. Threaded through the news were descriptions of the dandy who had come to her party wearing a lace-edged cravat, the color of the roses pinned in a young beauty’s hair, and any visitor who amused her. Unsuspecting men who met her at a party and saw her as a fragile relic were sometimes startled to hear her banter with them. John Quincy, though, was struggling. His mind suffered as much as his body. The pain was worse, she thought, because shortly after the new year, he had become unable to write. Writing “was the occupation of his life,” she wrote to Abby and Charles. Now his active mind had no release. When he was unwell she would urge him to stay home from the House of Representatives and rest. He would reply that if he did, he would die. • • • ON FEBRUARY 21, Louisa received a message that John Quincy had collapsed on the floor of the House. She had the impression that he had only fainted.

  When she arrived at the Capitol, attended by her young friend Mary Cutts, she found him close to death. He had fallen shortly after voting against a proposal to suspend rules so that Congress might consider resolutions for thanks and awards for “gallantry” in the Mexico campaigns—a war, of course, which was bound up in the expansion of slavery, and which he opposed. He had been carried to the area in front of the Speaker and placed on a sofa, then carried into the Rotunda, then the east portico, and then, finally, into the Speaker’s room. He called for Henry Clay. By the time Louisa arrived, he was mostly incoherent. He did not recognize his wife. The room was full of men, most of whom she did not know. They stood between her and him. The following day, while he lay in a coma, his breath shallow, the family was allowed to spend a few hours with him in the Speaker’s room. Then the member
s and attendants returned, and it was once again crowded. The following day, February 23, he appeared to be fading. It was decided that the women should not be present. “I was forced to leave him,” she bitterly wrote her sister Harriet in Wisconsin. But she was surrounded by strangers, “without even the privilege of indulging the feelings; which all hold sacred at such moments. My senses almost gave way and it seemed as if I had become callus to suffering while my heart seemed breaking.” She acquiesced and left. Most of the Massachusetts delegation, along with attendants and officers of the House, were in the room when he was pronounced dead. It was a public death for a public man. Louisa was at home, where she had been sent. She was bereft, she wrote to Harriet, that she had not had the chance to receive his last look and to close his eyes. She was not well enough to attend the funeral, but from her room she would have heard the guns that went off to bid John Quincy Adams farewell. The cannons began their salute at daybreak that Saturday morning, and there was gunfire until noon, minute by minute. The funeral procession marched close to her house, down Pennsylvania Avenue. His body was taken to the crypt in the congressional burying ground. A week later, his coffin was taken by train, in a black-draped car, to Quincy. Flags flew at half-mast along the route. Strangers lined the train’s path. Louisa spent the next months quietly, in the company of her family. She wrote that she was broken by grief. A year later, on March 18, 1849, she wrote her last diary entry. “I am left a helpless widow to mourn his loss which nothing on this dreary earth can supply—Les Soupirs étouffe le Chagrin! Les larmes soulage le coer!!!” Sighs smother grief! Tears soothe the heart!!! Three weeks later, she had a stroke. • • • SHE WOULD LIVE for another three years, regaining enough of her strength to hobble across the room without assistance and—for her, more pressingly—enough strength to write. Her handwriting was loose and labored but legible. On New Year’s Day, 1852, she was well enough to receive about forty guests in her room upstairs at F Street. President Millard Fillmore came, along with General Winfield Scott and his aides, Charles Sumner, and several other members of Congress. “She was delighted, and the fatigue of the day did her no harm,” her grandson wrote to Charles’s wife, Abby.

  But she looked “as if a breath would kill her,” Abby thought when she saw her mother-in-law in February. Louisa had contracted influenza, which she could not shake. She lay in bed for eleven weeks. The side affected by her stroke began to swell. By May, she was unable to sleep except when given opiates. “She is constantly in an alternate excited or low state and very nervous,” her niece Elizabeth Adams wrote to Charles. On Friday, May 14, she was so restless that she demanded to be taken from bed and allowed to sit. Mary tried to dissuade her—her legs were badly swollen—but finally she yelled, “For God’s sake take me out of this bed or I will get out.” She was able to sit for three minutes before asking to be put back in bed, and became so distressed that more opiate was called for. • • • ON MAY 15, Charles left Quincy for Washington, anxiously hoping to reach the city in time to say goodbye to his mother. His train pulled into Washington at half past six the next morning, May 16, under a clear sun. No one was waiting for him at the station. When he reached the door at F Street, he found a small black ribbon attached to the bell.

  Louisa’s funeral was held two days later. Both houses of Congress adjourned as a mark of respect. “This is a thing unexampled in our history thus far,” Charles wrote in his diary. Charles planned on having only pallbearers who had meant something to his mother during her life, but after more reflection, he added a few others, including the president of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. His mother had lived a public as well as a private life. A westerly breeze brightened the light of the sun that morning, and the grass and the leaves were a fresh spring green. A huge number of citizens, “official and unofficial,” came to the church, reported the National Intelligencer. Rev. Smith Pyne read the Episcopal service, as Louisa had wanted. The coffin was covered in black velvet and lined with silver lace. Afterward, according to the Intelligencer, “the body was followed to the grave by one of the longest funeral processions ever witnessed in this city.” Charles was later told that the president of the United States, the heads of the departments, and the naval and army officers were all there. He noticed almost no one at the burial. He was overcome, he wrote afterward, with loneliness. He was the only child who outlived her. He was the only child who was never taken from her. There was no one, he had said more than once, to whom he was closer. “I never questioned her kindness or her love,” he wrote in his diary after the funeral, “and her going leaves a blank which nothing can replace.” That December, her body was reinterred in Quincy. Charles did for his parents what John Quincy had done for his own: he had their bodies placed in a crypt in the United First Parish Church, which was built with granite from the Adamses’ own quarry. Louisa was not a member of that church and had never quite felt at home there, but she was the one who made the choice to be buried next to her husband. “My mother’s religious feeling was always much greater than her attachment to any forms,” Charles reflected a week after her death. His father’s beliefs, too, “conformed exactly to no church.” The crypt still sits below the square church. It is plain and small, with rough-hewn stone walls, and nearly filled by the massive sarcophagi of John, Abigail, John Quincy, and Louisa Catherine Adams. The sarcophagi are plain and granite; they sit side by side. They are identical, except for the names etched deep in the stone. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The thousands of letters, diaries, poems, plays, account books, memoranda, wills, and other family artifacts housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society comprise as rich a resource as a biographer could dream of. For the past half century, the MHS and the Adams Papers Editorial Project have made a remarkable commitment to making those materials accessible. I am grateful to Judith Graham, Beth Luey, Sara Martin, Jim Taylor, Sara Sikes, Mary Claffey, and the other editors and staff for their generosity, assistance, thoughtful suggestions on the manuscript, and own scholarship, which mine builds upon. I am also grateful to the staffs and archivists at the Library of Congress, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the New-York Historical Society, the Maryland State Archives, the Historical Society of Washington, the Wisconsin Historical Society, Butler Library at Columbia University, Universitätsbibliothek at Freie Universität, the National Archives at Kew, the Cumbria Archive Centre Carlisle, the American Antiquarian Society, the Morgan Library, the Huntington Library, the New York Public Library, Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, Houghton Library at Harvard University, Manuscripts and Archives at Yale, the Boston Athanaeum, the Merton Historical Society, Bodleian Library at Oxford, and Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University. The Adamses wrote (and wrote, and wrote), but they left behind more than words. At the Adams National Historical Park, Kelly Cobble, Caroline Keinath, Patty Smith, and Karen Yourell showed me buildings, paintings, furniture, jewelry, and the slant of November light in Quincy. At the Smithsonian, Sara Murphy let me turn over the pages of Louisa’s songbook and produced a pale petite dress and a small pair of silk slippers. Rev. Dave Johnson led me into the crypt at the United First Parish Church in Quincy, where Louisa’s body rests. Catherine Allgor, James Traub, Ed Papenfuse, and Joan Challinor shared and discussed with me their work on Louisa and John Quincy Adams. Michael O’Brien’s reconstruction of Louisa’s journey across Europe, Mrs. Adams in Winter, and Margery Heffron’s incomplete but graceful biography, Louisa Catherine, were valuable resources. This book was written with the support of a fellowship from the New America Foundation. It also benefited, in indescribable but indisputable ways, from the now-extinct sports and pop-culture site Grantland. In London, Kristina Bedford helped me reconstruct Louisa’s genealogy and untangle Joshua Johnson’s complex affairs. At the Massachusetts Historical Society, Jim Connolly and Amanda Norton verified transcriptions. Jessica Gallagher deciphered difficult handwriting and chased down details in the earliest stages.
Louisa Hall, Jamie Johnston, and Jesse Ruddock transcribed letters, checked facts, read drafts, and helped me see what the project could be. Sarah Chalfant, at the Wylie Agency, believed in this project from the start, made it possible, and then helped make it better. I am also grateful to Matthew Boyd, Darren Haggar, William Heyward, Brooke Parsons, Caitlin O’Shaughnessy, Casey Rasch, Claire Vaccaro, and the rest of the team at Penguin Press—and especially to Ann Godoff, my masterful editor. Less formally, a few friends and my family were excellent editors and advisers, giving me faith in the book when I most needed it. I am grateful to them most of all. NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  “Have a beautiful plan”: Louisa Catherine Adams (hereafter LCA), “Diary,” in Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, ed. Judith S. Graham et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 2:680–88 (hereafter DLCA); Charles Francis Adams (hereafter CFA), Diary of Charles Francis Adams, online edition, in Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/apde2/, 2015, 1: January 5, 6, 8, 1824 (hereafter DCFA); Richmond Enquirer, January 13, 1824; New York Spectator, January 16, 1824; New York Statesman, January 16, 1824. Louisa and John Quincy were: “Diary,” DLCA 2:444. I have taken the liberty of silently correcting capitalizations for ease of reading. Spelling and syntax, unless unclear, are for the most part left as they appear in the original. The United States were turning: John Quincy Adams (hereafter JQA) to LCA, June 2, 1796, microfilm edition of the Adams family papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter AFP); The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries, February 3, 1819 (hereafter DJQA). The Adams family correspondence through April 1798 has been published. For letters between July 1795 and April 1798, see Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 11, edited by Margaret A. Hogan et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), and Adams Family Correspondence, Vol. 12, edited by Sara Martin et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). The United States is now considered singular, but before the Civil War the noun was plural. Benjamin Zinner, “Life in These, Uh, This United States,” http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002663.html (accessed May 1, 2015). This book follows: LCA to Abigail Brooks Adams, November 27, 1840, AFP. “But she did something”: LCA to JQA, May 14, 1845, AFP. “In the entire span”: L. H. Butterfield, “Tending a Dragon-Killer: Notes for the Biographer of Mrs. John Quincy Adams,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 118, no. 2 (1974): 165–78. PART ONE: FRAUGHT WITH BLISS