Louisa (27 page)

And it
was
absurd, but it was also central and—ultimately—useful. President Monroe became involved. The Cabinet met to discuss the Adamses' visiting practices. But the matter would not die, and John Quincy and Louisa turned it to their advantage. John Quincy was asked to write an official memorandum. In it, he played the part of the simple republican, making it clear that he and his wife were acting in concert. They visited their friends and neighbors as private citizens, not as public figures, and they wanted to avoid making any invidious distinctions of rank among Americans. Their guiding principles, John Quincy added, were an abhorrence of hierarchies and a desire for a
quiet private life. Later, revealingly, he would leak his memorandum to the newspapers. (A supporter of one of his rivals would use the leak as evidence that he had no friends.)

“
The ettiquette question
has become of so much importance as to be an object of State,” Louisa wrote to her father-in-law, John Adams. She adopted the same line as her husband—that she was too humble, too unassuming, for all this nonsense—and, like him, protested too much. She had nothing to do with her husband's position in the government; she was only, she insisted, a “plain individual.”

This was the kind of declaration that John Adams, who was always quick to declaim the old principles of republican virtue, liked to hear. “
Mais
courage,
” John replied. He was not surprised. Everything Louisa and John Quincy did, he said, would be viewed as political. “Well done I say stand upon the defensive for your right and maintain it—your independence.”

In her letter to John Adams, she spoke properly and smartly but also, it takes not more than a glance to see, disingenuously. She insisted that refusing to make the first visit was an act of humility, when in fact it made other women come to her, granting her the dominant social role. (As an article in the
Boston Courier
about her practice later put it, those making the first visit would “signify their desire to form an acquaintance”—not the other way around.) She insisted that she was a woman who loved only quiet time at home, when in fact she was embarking on a series of parties that would make her Washington's primary hostess. She insisted that the whole thing was silly, but with steely determination, she waited out the women who refused to come. For a plain individual without claims to any station, she was awfully stubborn. “Mr A & myself,” Louisa wrote, “are determined not to give up the point.”

Her commitment to
returning visits underscores how seriously she took the practice. As it was, she spent her mornings in the carriage returning visits, traveling from door to door. In a loose but legible
hand, she carefully logged each name in her narrow book, with lists of visits received on the left-hand page and visits returned on the right. It was miserable, exhausting work. She had to go nine miles one way, then three miles in the opposite direction; she sometimes returned twenty-five visits in a single day. She once spent two hours on the rutted roads, dropping by nine or ten boardinghouses in search of two women.

Her critics saw
a woman who was trying to change the rules to her advantage—and in fact she was. Some ladies thought her “arrogant,” one visitor noted. Her confidence wavered. “The other Secretarys ladies do just as they please, and nobody takes any notice,” she wrote to Abigail. “Every hour adds to the conviction of my total inability to fill any station,” she fretted. She could not imagine “being of any sort of consequence.”

Her mother-in-law both encouraged and warned her. “I think you have a very circumspect and critical part to act,” she wrote to Louisa. “Every step you take will be more critically scrutinized than in any situation you have ever before held. These baneful passions of envy and jealousy, are wide awake, and will follow you in every direction—you may trace from the chair of the speaker to members from all quarters of the union. With some you will find ready and willing supporters. But an heir apparent is always enveyed.”

This was a very Adamsian way of looking at the political scene and the Adamses' place in it—watchful of conspiracy; sure of persecution; exceedingly proud. That does not mean that Abigail was wrong to call John Quincy “an heir apparent.” Before Monroe had been in office a full year, the jockeying to succeed him was under way. Two candidates were clear from the start. One was Georgia's William Crawford, the secretary of the treasury, who had lost to Monroe in the Republican congressional nominating caucus. He had powerful insider support—and used his patronage at the Treasury to increase it. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams was the other obvious candidate. Still, he
was a Yankee, and a chilly one. Besides, as a Northern man, he had a distinct disadvantage: the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution inflated the voting power of the slaveholding states by increasing representation of the Southern states in the House and electoral college, counting slaves (“all other people”)—who of course could not vote—as “three-fifths” of an inhabitant. Several men, most of them Southerners or Westerners, began to mount challenges to succeed Monroe, even though the next contested election would not be until 1824. (In 1820, Monroe was reelected more or less unopposed.)

Despite her anxieties, Louisa was becoming more confident in her relation to the Adamses. After her return from England, when John Quincy found himself too busy with his work at the State Department to send his usual lengthy letters to his parents, Louisa took over the job of writing to them. Her letters came in journal form, written first in a bound diary and then copied on loose pages that she would send to Quincy, occasionally with small changes. Those letters changed the elder Adamses' attitudes toward her. They also changed her.

Her relationship with Abigail
had warmed since her first years in the United States. They had consoled each other for the deaths they had both mourned while she was in Russia, understanding each other's losses as few others could. In their letters, “Mrs. Adams” gave way to “my dear daughter” and “my dear mother.” Louisa was never going to match the image of the frugal, enterprising New England woman that Abigail had wanted her son to marry, but they came to accept each other, and then appreciate each other. When Louisa returned to Quincy after eight years in Russia and England, the two women had a chance to lay bare past hurts and to forgive each other. Abigail told her “she was sorry she had not better understood my character,” Louisa recalled, and Louisa recognized that she had “misconstrue[d] acts intended to be kind.” Louisa never overcame her sense of inferiority toward the Adams matriarch, but at the end of Abigail's life, the two women came to respect each other. With Abigail, Louisa could discuss
Unitarianism, or write freely about John Calhoun's cool response at the dinner table to Henry Clay's intemperate bluster about independence movements in South America, or describe a scene at a party, all with equal interest. Her journal's high quality surprised Abigail. It “makes me a sharer with you in your various occupations, brings me acquainted with characters, and places me at your fireside,” Abigail told her. “One single letter conveys more information in this way, than I could obtain in a whole session of Congress.”

Abigail died of typhoid
fever at the end of 1818, just months before the dance party in February. Louisa's grief helped clarify for her what she had lost. Years later, while spending months reading Abigail's letters, Louisa would write a beautiful and self-revealing tribute—perhaps the best eulogy Abigail ever received: “We are struck by the vast and varied powers of her mind; the full benevolence of an excellent heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity. . . . We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved, performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power, which diffused a mild and glowing radiance over all who moved within the sphere of her fascinating attraction.”

The death of Abigail struck Louisa as well as John Quincy. Abigail's powerful example had made its impact. But if anything, Louisa went further than Abigail in wanting to play a role in her husband's public life. She was not content to be an adviser. She sought a public presence that Abigail avoided, and she chafed when she ran up against its limits. With bitter sarcasm, she wrote that she was “being continually told that I cannot by the Constitution have any share in the public honours of my husband.” She thought her husband should be president, and she thrived in the race, but by custom she had to deny it. Politics made her nervous; any misstep she made would be amplified by her husband's critics. Still, she came to crave the animation of the political scene. Abigail had always felt more comfortable in Quincy. Louisa immersed herself in the political scene of Washington. When
Congress was not meeting, she wrote in her journal, she experienced “a sort of waking vacancy something between life and death.”

 • • • 

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
'
S
work
at the State Department was all-consuming. Not only was he in charge of charting the foreign policy for the government; his brief included everything from the census to pensions. Meanwhile, there were lingering issues with Great Britain left over by the Treaty of Ghent; France was eager to protect its interests as the United States negotiated trade and territorial disputes with Spain; anti-Spanish interests in the United States were advocating South American independence at the same time that the United States was looking to expand farther south and west. On top of that, the Senate directed John Quincy to reproduce a report on weights and measurements—a topic that triggered his obsessive impulses and inquiries into standardization, and which would occupy him for the next four years. Despite all the challenges—and by cleverly seizing the advantage produced by turbulence in the territories—he managed by the start of 1819 to negotiate a treaty with Spain, known as the Adams-Onís (or Transcontinental) Treaty, that granted the United States Florida and set the western boundary between Louisiana and Texas, climbing to the forty-first parallel and then west all the way to the Pacific. It was a monumental moment in American history.

Louisa complained about
how work monopolized her husband. “Thank God we hear no more of Weights and Measures,” she wrote when he was almost done. But she took a growing interest in politics—if not as much in policy. Her observations about statecraft in those days tended toward vague, cynical expressions about politicians' true motivations. She cared less about what men said than about how they said it. She could see, both in her parlor and in the Capitol, how easily men were influenced by personal appeals, by flattery, by small attentions, as much as—or more than—by appeals to reason. When Louisa went to
watch the debates in Congress, she noticed the way Senator William Pinkney of Maryland had oiled his hair and perfumed his clothes. She observed how he preened before the throngs of ladies, pandered to his opponents, and basked in his own bad rhetoric as he argued for admitting Missouri as a state without restrictions on slavery. His speech was “copious, or at least he made it so; for there was neither figure, or trope spared, which art or nature could yield; and so heavy a tax was laid on poor common sense.” When her husband gave one of the most brilliant speeches of his career on July 4, 1821, the speech that would help lay the foundations for the nonintervention doctrine that would guide American foreign policy for almost a hundred years, she responded to “his energy, his pointed expression, and the profoundness of his feelings.” She watched people's faces. She saw the quick current of emotions running beneath the dry record of debates.

She knew there was
a danger in appearing to take too much of an interest in political debates. “The fear of being thought to interfere in the slightest degree in political affairs renders me careless to the proceedings of Congress and to the general measures of the administration,” she wrote to John Adams in January 1819. But she was paying more attention to politics than she admitted, and though she could not openly acknowledge it, she was playing a role.

During her second year
in Washington, she hosted weekly dinner parties for men only—that is, except for herself and whatever pretty young women happened to be staying or living with the Adamses at the time. Their female presence was crucial. When Louisa was too ill to attend these parties or dinners—because of her episodes of erysipelas or sharp headaches and fatigue—John Quincy was upset not to have her there. Louisa routinely denied being privy to any conversations about politics, but that was not true. At those dinners, frequented by senators and members of the House, not to mention the secretary of the navy or the vice president, the conversations turned on news. Her letters were filled with the reports.

Politics was still a dirty word—especially to John Quincy, raised under the strict influence of his father's views. Presidential hopefuls were not supposed to stump; they did not travel from town to town, promoting their platform and shaking strangers' hands; they admitted their ambitions only in private—and sometimes only obliquely. A woman, a wife, a hostess, could play an important subterfuge. She might help the pretense that no campaigning was happening, since politics were not permitted in mixed company. She could serve dinner with éclat, put people at ease, and spice the conversation with the wit that obscured the politics in political discussions.

That obfuscation that
she provided was important; it was the ruse that Washington depended on. A candidate was not supposed to appeal directly to the people for their votes—not even to the stratum of white men that counted in those days as “the people.” In some states, electors were still chosen by state legislatures. The House of Representatives, not the president, was considered the direct representative of the people. Presidential elections were intimate affairs and were intended by the nation's founders to be that way. The real power to pick a president in those days was understood to lie with the Republican congressional caucus. The Republicans were the only party in town; the Federalists had imploded by their active resistance to waging the War of 1812. Campaigning by a candidate—“electioneering,” as newspapers deprecated it—was considered venal. “I should do absolutely nothing,” John Quincy vowed, in pursuit of the presidency. The president was supposed to be a kind of tribune, a man who represented the people by upholding the Constitution, not by channeling their common spirit and voice—or even their votes. Until 1824, the popular vote was not even recorded, and in 1824, the first election for which there are some meaningful numbers, not all states tallied the individual numbers.