Louisa (14 page)

No carriage was there to meet them on the far shore. They had no umbrella or roof to keep them dry. When they reached the house of John Quincy's sister Nabby in New York, Louisa collapsed. “More depressed in her spirits than really ill,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. As they traveled north, the rain turned to snow. They reached Boston on November 24, missing the day's last stagecoach to Quincy. After breakfast the following morning, in cold, clear weather, they took their final stage, traveling south along the edge of the steely bay, to the Adamses' house. In Louisa's eyes, everything was strange and grim.

2

“
Q
UINCY
!
What shall I
say of my impressions of Quincy!” Louisa wrote in “The Adventures of a Nobody.” “Had I stepped into Noah's Ark, I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished.” November in Quincy was a month of black bark, brambles, and dead leaves, of mossy weather and low, smoky skies. The day after their arrival was Thanksgiving. Everything about it was strange and astonishing—the holiday itself, the church, the congregation. With her Anglican sensibility, she found the place bleak, the singing plain, and the people appallingly “snuffling through the nose.” She remained quiet, feeling “so much depressed, and so ill,” which she'd later think a blessing, because otherwise she would “certainly have given mortal offense.”

Writing in 1840, she painted herself as naive. It was as if the United States were her first foreign land and not the fourth country in which she had lived. It was as if she had never met a stranger until she arrived in Quincy. It was as if she'd never submitted to an unfamiliar custom until she had to sit through church (or “meeting,” a term that sounded odd to her). It was as if no one had ever looked at her curiously until the relics of John Quincy's childhood peered at her. “Dr. Tufts!” she wrote
.
“Deacon French! Mr Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! and Capt Beale!!!” She
had already lived in three countries, but she had never felt herself as much a foreigner as she was in her husband's hometown.

The shock she felt
when she arrived at the Adamses' house was real, common, and comic: she was meeting her in-laws. She saw in them what she wanted to see, and they saw in her what they wanted too. Where another woman might have looked around the Adamses' clapboard mansion and seen the English cut-glass candelabras, Louis XV chairs, and a Chippendale-style sofa, Louisa saw a farm. Where another woman might have looked at Abigail and seen a woman who had lived in Paris and London, who had charmed generals and dignitaries, she saw a thin-lipped woman who boasted about waking at five to milk the cows. For her part, Abigail wasn't more charitable. The mother-in-law regarded the young woman with a critical eye. Quincy women didn't wear satin coats in the cold rain. Louisa saw the gaze, felt the judgment, and saw herself as someone who was set apart. John Adams took “a fancy to me,” she wrote pointedly in “Adventures,” but “he was the only one.”

The person who unsettled her most was Abigail Adams—the matriarch, the authority, the
real
Mrs. Adams. Abigail had planned a special welcome for Louisa. The newcomer was given a separate dish at dinner. “Every delicate preserve” was offered to her alone, every kind attention paid. Louisa responded to the attention mutely, which appeared to others as ingratitude, though it sprang from shame. She was too aware that the special treatment “appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness,” Louisa wrote.

No doubt Abigail
intended well. She was determined to accept her son's wife, as she had already accepted the others in the Johnson family—writing them often, inviting them to visit in Philadelphia, welcoming Louisa's brother Thomas for dinner when he was at Harvard, lobbying for Joshua to get a government job, and showing the whole family unstinting generosity. But she had also seen them in London, and had observed the way they lived: the servants, the paintings, the
harp. She damned Catherine with her praise, calling her “conspicuous” for her “taste of elegance.” Abigail had a hard time overcoming her early and instinctive aversion to Louisa. From the start, she had imagined Louisa as a flighty, spoiled, sickly, English child, a half-blood siren not made of the right stuff to be her son's wife. Even before seeing her, Abigail fretted about how caring for a “poor, weak and feeble wife and boy” would affect her John Quincy. Although she called Charles's widow “Sally” and the woman Thomas would marry “Nancy,” she called Louisa “Mrs. Adams”—except when she referred to her as “
Madam.
”

Abigail heard her daughter-in-law's hacking cough and looked at her thin pale frame, her delicate wrists, and her large, grief-worn eyes, and predicted to Thomas that Louisa would probably soon die: “I have many fears that she will be of short duration.” Then she added that John Quincy's “helpless family” was a terrible burden to him. “The constant state of anxiety which has harassed his mind upon her account,” she wrote, “has added a weight of years to his Brow, which time alone could not have effected in double the space.”

But this, as unfair
as it was, accounts for only half the story. Louisa did not make her acceptance easy. She was as determined not to adapt to Quincy as Abigail was to prove her unfitness. If Abigail was unsympathetic, then so was Louisa. Abigail, after all, was not as one-dimensional as Louisa made her out to be. The wife of John Adams had lived in Paris and London, had charmed every kind of statesman. She was proud, even aristocratic, a woman who had ordered the Quincy coat of arms painted on her carriage when she went to New York. Abigail was also, in the fall of 1801, suffering, which Louisa seems not to have seen. Louisa arrived in Quincy at a difficult time. John Adams had been humiliated during the presidential election of 1800, repudiated not only for his politics but—as a pamphlet by Alexander Hamilton too thoroughly spelled out—for his vanity, splenetic temper, jealousy, and incapacity. The Adamses had retreated to Quincy shamed by failure and furious with the country. Greater misfortunes, which
they could hardly bear to speak of, followed them home. Charles had died only the previous winter. His parents had watched his decline with anger and overwhelming anguish. To John Adams, Charles was “a mere rake, buck, blood and beast . . . I renounce him.” Abigail wrote to John Quincy about her eldest son with unreserved anguish. Charles wasn't the only source of deep grief. At just the moment Charles had died, Abigail had learned that her daughter Nabby's husband, William Smith, had abandoned her on a farm in upstate New York. Now her prized son, her hope for the nation, appeared with a wife as pale and fragile as porcelain.

So there was a chasm
between them, and neither of the women helped the other cross it—or made much of a meaningful attempt herself. “I longed for my home, with an impatience that made me completely disagreeable,” Louisa later wrote. “In short I was in every respect any thing but what I should have been.”

 • • • 

R
ELIEF
CAME
when John Quincy and Louisa left the elder Adamses' home, Peacefield, and moved into a house on Hanover Street in Boston just before Christmas 1801. But that relief was short-lived. No sooner had Louisa begun to settle in than she realized that she had no idea how to run a New England household.

Everything seemed to go
wrong all at once. She was expected by tradition to handle the household accounts, but she could not match John Quincy's exacting standards. He counted the cents in her purse, let her know that shopkeepers viewed her as an easy mark, and resumed control of the books himself. She was expected to manage the laundry, the stove, the huge copper pots, but her experience had been largely limited to baking cakes under the watchful eye of the Johnsons' cook and learning how to manage a team of servants. In America, she found that she was expected to “
work
as they call it”—not hiding well her disdain. Growing up, “work” had meant embroidery. A wife was
expected to pick up where a mother left off, but what had her mother taught her? Her mother had taught her how to instruct the maids, how to charm a parlor, how to dance. Where, Louisa wondered, was she supposed to have learned to milk a cow? On Tower Hill in London? At the whist table in the Prussian court? In Berlin, Louisa lived less luxuriously than those she socialized with, but she still had servants and a cook, and John Quincy and Whitcomb had controlled the accounts. “The qualifications necessary to form an accomplished Quincy Lady, were in direct opposition to the mode of life which I had led—and I soon felt, that even my husband would acknowledge my deficiency, and that I should lose most of my value in his eyes.”

She heard the way
other women talked, saw how they acted, and watched how they taught their daughters. Her self-assessment wasn't absurdly harsh. Running the household was considered to be not only a New England wife's responsibility but also her divinely ordained role. Even women who studied political debates, managed money under their control, and were not shy about speaking their minds were convinced that their domain was their household, and that their domestic role was intended that way by God. It was a matter, they thought, of biology and theology. Most women accepted it; they assumed that a flower does not wish to be a bee. Abigail herself succinctly and uncomplainingly described the dominant view: “I consider it as an indispensable requisite that every American wife should herself know how to order and regulate her family; how to govern her domestics, and train up her children,” Abigail wrote to her sister in 1809. “For this purpose, the all-wise Creator made woman an help-meet for man, and she who fails in these duties does not answer the end of her creation.”

For the most part
, New England women did not complain about their positions. They did not consider their work trivial or degrading. They may have found themselves, when circumstances required, with expanded responsibilities, but they did not argue for alternatives to their traditional positions; they did not push to become lawyers or
doctors or presidents. The role they played was important, not only within the family but in the republic. They were considered the protectors and promoters of virtue, the first educators, the paragons of the values on which the republic was based. So when Louisa bungled the accounts, or came home from shopping and was shown to have been cheated, or when she burned the cakes and spoiled the meat, her shame ran deep. She did not rebel against the conclusion that she was failing in the only role that she had been given the opportunity to fill. “Accommodation to her husband,” Catherine Johnson had written Louisa, “is the only basis on which we women ought to build.”

Louisa tried, but
she could not be “useful.” “I hourly betrayed my incapacity,” she later wrote. Abigail tried to teach her, but Louisa was an inept student, which only made her more insecure—and in turn more hopeless in her tasks. To Abigail, “equal to every occasion in life; I appeared like a maudlin hysterical fine lady, not to be the partner of a man, who was evidently to play a great part on the theatre of life.” Abigail was hardly sympathetic. When Louisa asked her to help find a cook, she responded, “I have not the least chance; we do not have any such persons”—drawing a pointed contrast with the serving class in London and the Prussian court. Perhaps, Abigail wrote, Louisa could find “a young girl of ten or eleven years old” to run after the baby George.

The atmosphere around
the house was tense. It grew worse when John Quincy, anxious about money, fired their servants. He may have regretted it when he found that he, not his wife, would have to do most of their work. “I find myself burdened with the minutest and vilest details of our domestic economy,” John Quincy complained to his brother Thomas. One can only imagine what he said to his wife. He not only kept careful note of how many cents she paid for every purchase, but for several weeks, he also kept a tab of how much cash she carried in her purse. For her part, she noted his “cold looks” and, in her insecurity, saw his every moment of annoyance as a reflection on her.

Louisa did not see much of her husband once they moved to Boston. Occasionally, they spent evenings at home together, reading aloud Shakespeare or works on pedagogy (John Quincy was, as Louisa sardonically noted, “in the fervour of a lately acquired parental duty; our son being eighteen months old”), but John Quincy went to Quincy most weekends to be with his parents. He left his wife, often ill, behind. “Constant faintings and violent attacks of illness short in their duration,” Louisa wrote in “Adventures,” were quite curiously timed: they “prevented my visits to Quincy.”