Louisa (35 page)

After Lafayette had left, Louisa and John Quincy went north to Quincy for their annual visit. John Adams was failing, mostly blind and toothless, his body looking melted like a snowman. John Quincy spent the autumn days at his desk, working on his first annual message, which he would deliver (in writing, as was the custom) to Congress in December. His plan was ambitious, with no concessions to the weakness of his support. “Liberty is power,” he wrote, and man's purpose is to act. He called for a Department of the Interior, an astronomy observatory, a national system of roads and canals, byways for trade and transportation. He misestimated his own power, and his own liberty. Congress ignored his recommendations, except to mock them.

He was thwarted, and thwarted, and thwarted. His proposal to send envoys to the Panama Congress to form relationships with the new nearby republics was blocked and held up until the mission became useless. His opponents suggested that his push for infrastructure projects, which had broad support before he took office—three
of the five major presidential candidates were enthusiastic proponents of internal improvements, as was President Monroe—were a sign of his plans for “usurpation” (though the same critics pushed individual projects that happened to be in their own constituents' backyards). By asserting federal powers, the administration, it was ominously threatened, was starting down a road that would end in the abolition of slavery. Democratic provocations and suffrage reform were expanding the franchise further. More people who had felt the pain of the Panic of 1819 were accruing power, and they were not inclined to let the government spend more money. The appearance of corruption in the appointment of Henry Clay as secretary of state continued to hang over the administration, hamstringing Clay's considerable political talents. By October 1825—with John Quincy's presidency only seven months old—the Tennessee legislature nominated Andrew Jackson for the presidency in 1828.

 • • • 

L
OUISA
WANTED
COMFORT
. She begged George and Charles in Boston to send her chocolate. She described her apathy, her dispiritedness. Always bad, her health grew worse. “Frequent and violent attacks of sickness” kept her in bed for days at a time. When she was well enough to rise, she felt no better. Lassitude and debility oppressed her. “Any exertion of thought,” she wrote to George at the beginning of May, brought on “disagreeable sensations in my head and eyes.”

A host of maladies
attacked her with increased frequency and intensity. She had fevers, “fainting fits,” bursts of pain in her chest, and nasty coughs that worried those around her. Often, more than one symptom would manifest at a time. She talked about her nerves as organs, and she described her imagination as feverish. She could not separate her mind from her body, her body from her mind. Her illnesses had always been integral to her sense of who she was. They were often the first thing others mentioned about her and the first thing she mentioned
about herself. Other people were frequently, even constantly, sick, and other people, especially other women, had similar patterns of intense headaches, fevers, and unaccountable debility, but Louisa was singled out for her delicate health. It was true that she lived at a time when doctors did guesswork, diets were bad, hygiene was wretched, and remedies were often more toxic than the sickness they were meant to cure. Her body had been squeezed and deformed by the equipment of formal dresses, polluted by coal and wood smoke, stretched and wracked by at least a dozen pregnancies. Still, she herself recognized a psychological component to her poor health. She connected traumatic thoughts to physical breakdowns, and being sick to being cared for.

She wasn't merely
seeking attention, not as a child and not in her fifties, but there is no doubt that when she was sick, she was noticed and treated more tenderly by her distracted husband and busy children than she was when she was well. Her sons would write her worried letters; Charles would race to Washington and sit by her bedside day after day; her husband would become anxious and even mention her in his diary, recording the status of her health along with great affairs of state. When she was ignored, her health would worsen. One night, for instance, in 1821, a headache caused her to stay in bed during one of her weekly tea parties, which went on without her while she remained in her room. No one bothered to see how she was. “The noise the sense of neglect and unkindness which this conduct indicated proved too much for me and I believe I was thrown into a state of delirium almost amounting to madness,” she wrote in her diary afterward, her onrushing words as agitated as her mind, “and Mr Adams found me in this state when the company retired for several days I continued very ill.”

She seems to have suffered more often, more suddenly, and more seriously when she felt lonely, stressed, useless, or excluded. It may have been, unconsciously, a way of striking back. Illness gave her body an outline in the world. It was, in a sense, a way of resistance. It stopped the day in its tracks.

3

O
N
THE
MORNING
OF
J
ULY
8, 1826,
three letters arrived from Quincy, each saying that John Adams was on his deathbed. John Quincy packed immediately and headed north the next day, along with their son John, who was working as his secretary. Louisa stayed behind. An hour after John Quincy and John had left, Louisa received another letter, dated July 4, saying that John Adams had just died.

His death was
not a surprise, but it was still a shock. In the White House, Louisa mourned. Her most cherished correspondent, the man she addressed as “father,” was gone. John Adams had been her great friend and champion, and she had loved and appreciated him. “Every thing in his mind was rich, racy, and true,” she would later say. Even in death, he seems to have inspired her. She wrote a poem in tribute to her old friend, which her brother-in-law Nathaniel Frye read aloud to a crowd at dinner without naming the author; the poem, to both her embarrassment and poorly concealed pleasure, was printed in the newspapers. John Adams's death also seems to have softened the harsh feelings toward John Quincy—and toward herself—that she had been expressing in letters and in “Record of a Life.” They had shared their love for the wry, humane old man, and she was sensitive to the
magnitude of her husband's loss. She found that she missed John Quincy after he had left. “Tell your father I feel sadly out of my element in this great palace without him,” she wrote to George.

To John Quincy
, John Adams's death was almost incomprehensible. His father had been his lodestar. When he reached Quincy, he clutched at what was left. His father's will, which made him executor, left the bulk of the estate to him: the mansion and 103 acres attached; his precious books and papers. But the costs of the terms were staggering. The will required that John Quincy pay $10,000 to Thomas for his share of the house, another $2,000 for two “rocky pastures,” and half the value of the books and manuscripts. The proceeds of the rest of the estate were divided among John's descendants, some parts held in trusts to be paid out by John Quincy. The land was, in John Adams's view, his great legacy; it was the symbol of the place he had protected and fought for and loved. The only time old John's father, Deacon John Adams, had sold any acreage at all was to send John Adams to college. John Quincy decided not only to buy out Thomas for the house and land but also to buy all the land that had also belonged to John Adams, land that was slated to be sold to pay for the other descendants' legacies. He, then, was burdened with paying those legacies himself. “It will bring me heavily in debt,” John Quincy acknowledged in a letter to Louisa soon after he arrived in Massachusetts, but “I cannot endure the thought of the sale of the place. Should I live through my term of service, my purpose is to come and close my days here, to be deposited with my father and mother.”

Louisa's grief turned
to disbelief when she saw John Adams's will. What it required from John Quincy astounded her. What had happened to his profound aversion to debt, which had been such a constant theme during their marriage? She begged her husband to reconsider his decision to buy out the others and keep the land, begged him not to go into debt for sentimental reasons, and begged him not to put himself in a position in which he would have to support Thomas,
his wife, and their five children. John Quincy's younger brother had been her friend, but in the years since she had known him in Berlin, alcoholism had ruined his optimistic, gentle temper. “He is one of the most unpleasant characters in this world, in his present degradation,” Charles had recently written about Thomas in his diary, “being a brute in his manners and a bully in his family.” Thomas had come to depend on the largess of his father, and now he would depend on his brother: John Quincy would inherit his father's house, but for as long as the Adamses were in Washington, the arrangement was that Thomas and his family would live in it. They would be supported by trusts that John Quincy would have to finance. Louisa's relationship with Thomas and his wife, already strained, snapped.

She knew too well
how debt could wreck a family. She did not even need to look at the fate of her own parents and siblings. The newspapers were full of reports that Thomas Jefferson—who, in a coincidence that some called providential, had died almost at the same moment as John Adams, fifty years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence—had left huge debts behind. His daughter Martha Randolph was destitute, and the legislatures of Virginia and South Carolina had to raise money to support her. The thought that John Quincy was willing to risk his own children's inheritance and leave them in a similar position made her blanch. She was so angry that it took two days for her to answer John Quincy's letter about his decision to purchase all his father's property, and three attempts before she managed to write a response that was cool enough not to offend. As it was, her tone was still bitter and hot. She knew, she wrote, that he would not listen to her advice, wishes, or warnings, “that neither my opinions or feelings will . . . avail.” But she had to speak out. “The trust is considering the situation of your brother and his family, and the relinquishment of Mr. Quincy, of so
essentially delicate a nature
, it is impossible,
utterly and decidedly impossible
, for you to do strict justice to them and to your own children,” she wrote. It was “natural” that he
wanted to own his father's house, but it could not be justified. She resented the fact that he thought it could be.

“For myself I care not a pin where I die,” she added, furious and forlorn. “I have never had a home since I left my father's house, and it is a matter of perfect indifference if I never do.”

 • • • 

A
FEW
DAYS
after
arriving in Quincy, John Quincy wrote to Louisa to ask her to join him. Immediately afterward, he sent another letter recalling the first, saying there was too much for him to do. By the time she received it, though, she was already preparing to head north, and she refused to unpack—even if she was no longer wanted in Quincy. She left Washington at the end of July, with Charles, Thomas Adams's daughter Elizabeth, her maid Jane Winnull, and two other servants. “I went very unwillingly, she went against the advice of all her friends,” Charles wrote in his diary. “Her motive was unaccountable.”

There was something
perverse about her journey. It was as if she were determined to act out her sense of restlessness, her sense of not belonging anywhere. After the group reached New York City, instead of hugging the coast toward Boston, they veered up the Hudson River. There were Adamses in upstate New York, and popular watering spots, but she drifted without any fixed destination: West Point, Fishkill, Hudson, Ballston Springs, Albany, Saratoga, toward the frontier. The area was by no means wild. Given a map of the United States, any decent politician could have closed his eyes and put his finger on Albany's spot. The towns lining the Hudson were settled and getting richer; the Erie Canal had opened the year before. Still, it was a landscape of mountains, dark forests, and bald eagles. It was a place where the light was rich but veiled, where the light's source seemed not to come from the single sun but from elsewhere. The mode of travel alone made it an arduous journey. Overland, the carriage moved through rough terrain. They went from public stagecoach to public stagecoach, most of them
crowded with strangers—or worse, prying “friends.” On the river, the steamboats they rode could be lethal: between 1825 and 1830 alone, 273 people were killed by exploding boilers.

Inside the small, enclosed spaces of a coach or ship, pressure and tension among passengers only increased. Louisa could never let her guard down. She encountered fair-weather friends and old rivals from Washington heading toward the spas. The reunions were as ominous as they were disingenuously happy. Both Louisa and Charles noted how families formerly divided between the Jackson and Crawford camps (and opposed to Adams) were now socializing as a single group. They smiled and fawned over her. “You would suppose to see them that they were my most devoted friends,” she wrote caustically to John Quincy.

Everyone was miserable
. Charles was especially desperate to get back to Washington. “But my Mother was inflexible,” he wrote in his diary. “She was fixed upon wandering about the country with no fixed purpose and with no intent.”

Finally, he wrote in his diary, “I had prevailed upon my Mother to return home.” He wrote too soon. When the party reached New York City, Charles continued south toward Washington, but Louisa turned toward Quincy.

“
This morning my wife
quite unexpectedly arrived here,” John Quincy wrote in his diary on August 28. It's hard to imagine that he greeted her warmly; her arrival was not really welcome. John Quincy was busy keeping pace with his official business while superintending the auction of his father's furniture, the execution of the will, and a massive survey and inventory of the land he was inheriting. The unacknowledged purpose of the survey was to reconnect himself to the land. He marked the progress of the trees he had climbed as a boy, slopes of the hillocks and boulders, the limits of pastures of wildflowers, the warp of the roots, sprawl of the shrubs. It was a way of grieving, no doubt, since the land was so intimately connected with his
father, since his father had described it and redescribed it with unceasing fascination, and since his father had tended to it with his own hands. John Quincy heard the calls of the birds that his father had described with so much pleasure, the “long whoop of the nighthawk and the lofty clarion of all the game cocks in the neightbourhood. The robbins by dozens soon followed with their animating carrols. The woodpuckers, the larks, the bob olincotus, the goldfinches, the thrushes, the catbirds the Virginia nightingales, the blue birds, the springbirds, the swallows, the sparrows the yellow birds and the wrens.” John Quincy was coming home as he never had before, after crisscrossing oceans and whole continents, after logging tens of thousands of miles in carriages, after achieving every possible success. As president, he had fulfilled his father's dream for him. Yet what he wanted most now was what the Adamses had always wanted: this patch of land in Massachusetts, set between the mountains and the bay, so close to the saltwater that a good breeze could carry the smell of it.

Louisa did not fit easily into his vision of the future—or the past. It is hard to imagine her hacking through brambles. To John Quincy's dismay, his two older sons turned out to be just as ill suited to the job. George, now twenty-five and living in Boston, working as a lawyer, and John, now twenty-three, who served as John Quincy's secretary in the White House, trudged after their father with dread. The young men were different in many ways. George was passionate and talented but undisciplined and highly sensitive; John was more calculating and more confident. But both had inherited their family's propensities for fathomless darkness. They had grown up largely without their parents, half raised by their grandparents. John Adams's death was hard on both of them, but on George especially, who had been there to witness it. They were totally unprepared for what their father was asking them to do.

“
We have been
out three days, two of them driven back by the rain, and the third surfeited by the heat,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa
shortly before she arrived. “George after one half-day found he had business in Boston, and I relieved him by sending him to you. John has discovered that he is of no use in the survey and takes a dispensation of attendance for the future. We march over tangled brakes and rattlesnakes, and have everything of heroic fatigue but the glory.” He was half joking, but she did not find the situation funny when she arrived. George had broken down.