Louisa (40 page)

To Charles, she
wrote of John Quincy's consoling devotion. “To me he is a ministering angel always at my side and lavishing on the most soothing tenderness. To me! alas how unworthy.”

Husband and wife prayed together. Always religious, Louisa had become increasingly so during her time in the President's House, and though her religion was idiosyncratic, it always tended toward the High Church ceremony of her youth—the colors of her Catholic nursery school, the Anglican services she had attended as a child. Now, at her request, John Quincy, though a Unitarian himself, read aloud the Episcopalian service for the dead.

On May 21, John Quincy picked up the
National Journal
and saw a poem by George Washington Adams, reprinted from the
New Bedford Mercury.

There is a little spark at sea

Which grows 'mid darkness brilliantly,

But when the moon looks clear and bright,

Emits a pale and feeble light,

And when the tempest shakes the wave

It glimmers o'er the seaman's grave.

 • • • 

Such friendship's beaming light appears

Through the long line of coming years

In sorrow's cloud it shines afar,

A feeble but a constant star

And like that little spark at sea

Burns brightest in adversity.

Louisa copied it into her album, alongside some of the poems that she had written and sent to George.
Thou art gone thou art gone away love / Across the briny sea. . . .
Despite the commonness of the romantic tropes, it would be hard to blame her if she read it as a message to herself sent from a distant place.

What story she constructed
for herself about his death is unknown. She abhorred suicide. “I think suicide is the most contemptible crime a human being can commit,” she had once written to her nephew, in unsympathetic horror, when he had confessed to thoughts of taking his own life. “The memory of a man who thus dies, is a constant reproach in this world; and what has he to hope in the next?” But this was her son, and she never could curse him.

She worried that she had provoked his death by persuading him to come to Washington when he was unwell: “My heart tells me that perhaps I urged your unfortunate brother beyond his strength to exertion foreign to his nature,” she wrote to Charles. “If so may God Almighty forgive the mistaken zeal of an offending mortal.” She would blame her husband's ambition, and she would blame herself too. When he was a child and needed her, she had been in Washington, then in Russia, gone.

 • • • 

L
OUISA
REMAINED
ALONE
with Mary, her granddaughter, and the servants at Meridian Hill while John Quincy and John were in
Massachusetts, tying up George's affairs. Bereft, she confessed to Charles, “Every bleeding vein in my beating heart tells me that I am not mistress of myself.”

And yet the world began to draw her back in. She started to report snippets of news: “Mr. Walsh it is said is to purchase the
National Intelligencer
and to reside here.” Trouble was brewing between the New Yorker Van Buren and the South Carolinian Calhoun, who had remained vice president for Jackson; “Carolina is up in arms.” She kept the ex-president abreast of appointments and removals, and of who had Jackson's ear. It was better to keep her mind on the world than on herself. She considered herself weak, but she was always stronger when she faced adversity.

Her focus turned
to the Columbia Mill, which John Quincy had rashly and disastrously purchased in 1824 from her cousin George Johnson. Now John was taking over the mill, in its sorry state, and running it on behalf of his father. She went to visit the mill herself, at the foot of a hill by Rock Creek. She examined the grist and flour, discussed the business with the new manager, and watched the great wheels turn. She followed the cost of corn and the price of meal, and she worried when it rained, because the rain swelled the creek and flooded the mill. The sky was inexhaustible. She had never seen such rain.

She missed her husband
. “As soon as ever you wish me to come on only write me and I will set off immediately after the arrival of John as I cannot leave Mary alone,” she wrote to John Quincy in mid-June. “I cannot much longer bear my absence from you,” she wrote three weeks later. Another pull was drawing her toward Massachusetts. Charles was to marry Abby Brooks in September, and he begged her to be there. “Should you be absent from my wedding,” he wrote, “it would lose half it's pleasure.”

She had wanted to accompany
her husband north from the start, but she had been dissuaded. John Quincy had his reasons for wanting to keep her from Quincy for some time. There was, for starters, the matter
of the Old House, as broken as its owner. The shambling house was in a “helpless, shattered, antiquated state,” Charles told Louisa. Thomas Adams, who would soon die from the effects of alcoholism, had not kept it in good repair. Water had breached the mansard roof and ceilings; mold stains spread across the walls. Sooty drafts raced through the rooms from the massive fireplaces. The floors were uncarpeted; there was hardly a bed to sleep in. Scraggly saplings stood wretched in the seedling nursery, strangled by vines. John Quincy set about repairs. “It seems like beginning the world anew,” he wrote to his wife.

He probably also
wanted to keep her away from George's affairs. He paid George's debts, totaling about a thousand dollars. Whether he knew where some of George's money had gone is unclear. There was a child. The infant's mother, Eliza Dolph, had been a chambermaid at Dr. Thomas Welsh's, where George had boarded. After the baby was born in December 1828, George had asked the doctor who had delivered it to find the baby and its mother a place to live. The doctor had persuaded Miles Farmer to take them in. The problem was that George had continued to see Eliza and the child, and people started to wonder why the president's son was such a frequent visitor to an ex-chambermaid and her illegitimate child. George had paid Farmer off, but now the supply of money was gone, and Farmer was threatening to blackmail Charles. Later Farmer would press the doctor who had delivered the baby for payment, and there would be a trial. Charles was determined to keep the existence of Eliza and the child from John Quincy. Louisa, it seems, was never told.

Whatever John Quincy
did or didn't know, however, there was now no trace of the judgmental nature he had once been so quick to show. “My father looks pretty well,” Charles wrote in his diary when he saw him, “but he has a manner which I never before saw in him of quiet sadness, in itself really affecting.”

Louisa finally set out for Quincy, with John, Mary, the baby, and several servants in the middle of August. Charles met them in New
York, at the City Hotel, in order to accompany them the rest of the way. He was sobered when he saw his mother. Though he knew her to be “fond of show and ornament,” she wore a black dress of “utmost plainness.” She looked worn and ill. She had not combed her hair.

He dreaded telling
her that he had arrived from Providence aboard the
Benjamin Franklin
, the ship that George had gone overboard from, and that the
Benjamin Franklin
was to carry them back to Providence in two days. She was “affected” when she learned. By the following evening, it was “so evident” to Charles that she would not be able to board the ship that he did not even mention their departure the next day. Mary tore into his hotel room that night, just after the clock had struck midnight, and shook him awake, telling him that his mother had been struck terribly ill. He found everyone—Mary, John, the servants—trying to help her. The attack was “violent”; she was crying of a coldness in her breast. “It will be useless to detail the two hours which passed,” Charles wrote in his diary afterward. “Suffering was dreadfully stamped on them in my memory forever. I had never seen anything like this before, and it affected me to the soul.”

She was somewhat better the next day, though she still flinched at every sound. Charles reluctantly urged her to return to Washington. From his tone in his diary, it seems he half hoped she would say no. But John's baby was ill, teething, and she was in no state to board the steamboat. The next day Charles reached Quincy alone. He found John Quincy waiting for Louisa. “My father came out with a smiling face to meet disappointment,” Charles wrote, “deep and severe.”

Back in Washington
, the sky was gray and everything soaked. The rain continued unabated. “Nothing looks as it used to,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy. Meridian Hill was sold that summer, and so Louisa found herself once more packing and unpacking, this time in John and Mary's new house on Sixteenth and I Streets—just two blocks north of the President's House.

She could not ignore the stories emerging from the Jackson
administration even if she tried. At her tea table, she could hear the servants gossip about the latest controversy between the president and his Cabinet involving the secretary of war's wife. Once again, there were warring camps of women, and Louisa commented in her wry manner on the power play between Calhoun and Van Buren behind it. She was, she declared, sick of Washington.

 • • • 

I
N
M
AY
1830
, Louisa, John Quincy, Mary (pregnant again), and Mary Louisa left the capital for Quincy. It took a week to reach New York by carriage and stage, moving inland to avoid the boats for as long as they could. In New York they boarded the steamship
Providence.
The sky was overcast and the sea steely. That night, as the boat rocked in the swells rounding Long Island, she became extremely seasick. At sunrise, the thick fog dissipated, and the
Benjamin Franklin
, the boat that George had been lost from, came steaming into view. By the time the
Providence
reached Rhode Island, Louisa had fainted. Soon after she arrived in Quincy, she was seized by a chill and fever, and was in “agonies of pain.” The doctor was called; she was bled. The diagnosis was erysipelas; and so the pattern continued.

When she recovered, though, she began to seem well. Charles, who lived with his new wife in Boston but frequently visited Quincy, thought her changed for the better. He had sensed that being in Washington oppressed her; now she seemed “more cheerful than I have known her for years.” She had some independence. She listened to the sound of her granddaughter's laughter in the hallway. That summer, another granddaughter, Georgeanna Frances (Fanny for short), was born.

She had never taken
to Quincy, but now it was, as Charles wrote in his diary, “a house of her own.” She went out riding. The air was hot with the scent of pine trees, hay, saltwater, and horses, and from the hills she could see the bright blue bay. The house was filled with the furniture they had brought from Russia and England in 1817. She could
look around and see her Sèvres porcelain, her sketches from Silesia, her leather-bound books the size of a hand. In a small alcove in the corner, she had her own desk: a secretary built of rich, polished mahogany inlaid with lighter wood. A small bookshelf with glazed cabinet drawers was perched above a writing surface, lined with green felt, which slid open like a drawer.

When she sat at her desk and looked out the window, she could see a newly planted yellowwood tree among the perennials in the garden, its tiny teardrop flowers trembling when it blossomed. The tree stood out from the oaks and walnuts and fruit trees on the property. It was not native to Massachusetts. Future generations of the Adams family would say that the tree was planted for her, and for George. According to one version of the story, she planted it herself.

2

S
HE
STARTED
A
NEW
LIFE
,
calm and quiet. A trip to the milliner in Weymouth, an afternoon of gathering elderberries, the christening of her granddaughter Fanny. The fall's first night fires, cool mornings, and the sunshine's warmth at noon. She was fifty-five years old now, in 1830, and the next stage of her life was beginning. John Quincy and Louisa planned to return to Washington at the end of fall to live with John and Mary and their grandchildren over the winter, but their trip south would be only temporary. The old mansion that John Quincy had inherited was still in bad need of repairs, with faulty chimneys and a roof that leaked when it rained. Nor was Louisa up for the snow and harsh cold of a New England winter. But she accepted, with relief, that Quincy was now her home.

She may have read
the small anonymous notice that ran in the
Boston Courier
on September 6, 1830, nominating John Quincy Adams for Congress from the Plymouth district. If she did, she may have taken it to be a hoax; the
Courier
was known to be unfriendly to John Quincy, and he was obviously out of public life, spending his mornings counting walnut seeds and planting apples, cherries, and plum stones in his nursery. She also may have seen Joseph Richardson, the incumbent
member from Plymouth, come up the drive to her house on Saturday, September 18, to ask the ex-president whether he would serve if elected. She probably did not, however, hear what the men discussed in his white-painted wood-paneled study, or see that John Quincy offered no promises but gave the proposal a wink and a nod. After all, he did not want to admit that a coordinated movement was under way. If the people wanted to send him back to Washington—as he desperately desired them to do—then he thought their votes should be “spontaneous.” It appears he did not tell Louisa anything. He probably knew what his wife would say.

Still, she could not have remained in the dark for long. The stream of prominent visitors to the house was small but persistent, and the local newspapers started to announce their support. By Friday, September 24, at the latest, she knew what was going on. And she was furious.

She wanted nothing
to do with this election. She did not even want to go to Washington if he won—not even for the winter as they had previously planned. (His term would not begin until the following winter, 1831.) “Many circumstances are arising here which may induce me to remain in Quincy through the winter,” she wrote to John. She was done with political life. That resolution, she wrote, “I fully and conscientiously believe ought to have been taken long ago.”

The election took place
November 1. On November 6, the evening newspaper reported the final returns: John Quincy Adams 1,817 votes; Arad Thompson 373; William Baylies 279. “I am a member-elect of the Twenty-Second Congress,” John Quincy wrote that night in his diary. The next day, he opened his diary again and this time expressed his private feelings of relief and joy. He had taken the loss of the presidential election to be a repudiation of his entire life's work, a judgment against his merit. “No one knows, and few conceive the agony of mind that I have suffered,” he wrote, since the moment that “circumstances” had made him a candidate for president fifteen years earlier. “They were feelings to be suppressed, and they were suppressed.” Then, to
have had his son die—that was the worst tragedy of all, “far heavier than any political disappointment or disaster can possibly be.” He had felt, he wrote, “deserted by mankind.” This election was redemption. To those who said the office was beneath a president, he said no call from his countrymen was too small and no service too humble. To himself, he admitted that it was the people's approbation that he craved. He had not been forgotten; he was needed.

But he was alone in his feelings. “No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure,” he confided to himself. “I say this to record my sentiments; but no stranger intermeddleth with my joys, and the dearest of my friends have no sympathy with my sensations.”

His wife made
no effort to hide her unhappiness. When her sons, alarmed by her refusal to come to Washington, urged her to reconsider, she lashed out. What was being asked of her was not fair. She appealed to her rights. A republican marriage was taken to be egalitarian, modeled on friendship and reciprocity. But Louisa took it further. Didn't a wife, after all, have
rights
—even if those rights were not acknowledged, not protected, and not invoked? “In the marriage compact there are as in every other two parties, each of which have rights strictly defined by law and by the usages of society. In that compact the parties agree before the face of heaven to promote as far as in their power the welfare and happiness of each other,” she wrote. “The woman being the weaker of the two is expected and does nine times out of ten make great sacrifices for her husband”—but enough was enough. What did she have to show for her sacrifices? Poor health? Comfort? “The grave of my lost child?” She railed against “the grasping ambition which is an insatiable passion swallowing and consuming all in its ever devouring maw.”

Her rage, though
, was impotent. In the end, she gave in. She would come south, she wrote to John, because of money. John Quincy's finances were under stress. It would be expensive to keep Louisa in
Quincy over the winter. The house was derelict, and it would cost too much to make it comfortable for her to live in over the winter. The chimneys were faulty, the windows leaked, and the mansard roof needed replacing. After buying his father's land, John Quincy was land rich but in debt. His $25,000 presidential salary—which had also had to support the expenses of living and entertaining in the White House—was gone. He was helping to support not only his children but his extended family. The Columbia Mill, which he had bought in haste before the 1824 election, saddled him with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. In 1832, he calculated that he owed $42,000. She knew the details well enough. “He does not know where to turn at this moment for a dollar,” she would later tell John. In Washington, they would be able to live at John and Mary's house, at 1601 I Street, along with their granddaughters Mary Louisa and Fanny, and so save rent.

“I have no right to encumber the family with expenses because I brought poverty into it,” she wrote, her pen a knife nicking the never-healed wound her father's bankruptcy had left. She slashed at her husband as well. “To pretend that I make this sacrifice willingly would be ridiculous and false.”

 • • • 

S
HE
REACHED
Washington
just before Christmas and found the place cold and drenched. “The city is more gloomy than you can imagine,” she wrote to Charles, with more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice. “Rain! Rain! Rain!” Water streamed down the walls and the ground sank beneath feet. When the rain finally stopped, the temperature dropped and the river froze.

At first, Louisa was as miserable as the weather. “All the troubles I foresaw are breaking around us,” she wrote to Charles in early January. On New Year's Day, between three and four hundred people had come to the house to pay their respects, leaving her “utterly exhausted.” Andrew Jackson's lieutenants Martin Van Buren and Edward Livingston
had come to visit as if they were old friends, but she avoided them. Had she spoken to them, “my feelings might have got the better of my judgment.” She saw herself doing wrong at every turn: insulting Thomas Jefferson's daughter Martha Randolph; offending Mary and her sisters; antagonizing John Quincy. Less than a quarter of a mile south, in the White House, her nemesis, Andrew Jackson, now seemed to run the country as if he were a king in a farce. “I only mention it to show you how correct I was in my gloomy forebodings.”

Her thoughts often
slipped into deep, well-worn grooves of despondency. Her self-reprobations were constant, her tone self-pitying. She was a burden, she claimed; she was “the cause of disunion” in the family. She was sick of the craven habits and selfish ambitions of politicians. Democracy, she wrote, turned governance to politics and politics into perpetual campaigns. “In an elective government where the fame is never allowed to expire: but, like the vestal are, is forever renewed and kept alive by the most combustible materials: even the hearts of the most honest must at last be kindled into rage; by the constant unshrinking malevolence of party spirit; and the judgment obscured by the rankling and ever accumulating thorns, that like the venemous bites of paltry musketoes wound by the perpetual itteration of the sting, until the whole mass of the blood is enflamed and corrupted,” she wrote, her diary becoming a screed. Sometimes, she talked about George.

Her mood, though
, was always up and down, and as the weeks passed it was more often improved. By the end of January she was waving off her complaints as “a silly feeling of pique.” The political machinations exhausted her, but they also exhilarated her, as they had when John Quincy was secretary of state—perhaps even more so now that she had less at stake. She tunneled her way out of her depressions with the sharp spade of her sardonic humor, making hilarious what might have been intolerable. As a congressman's wife, with no ambition to speak of (or deny), and with some—however short—distance
from the President's House, she had more freedom. As an observer, she had no one to please but herself and her correspondents. “My experience has taught me; that Shakespeare thoroughly read mankind when he blended the ridiculous among the most distressing of his tragic scenes,” she once wrote to a friend. “In my career such have I found human nature.” Her voice flashed with laughter, and she gained a reputation for her skewering wit. She was a master at
lusus politica,
as Benjamin Waterhouse, one of the cofounders of Harvard Medical School, described her jokes about Washington.

Her sharp edge
was sharper, though, because her anger was undiminished. If anything, her fury at Jackson and his supporters had intensified after George's death. Like something wounded, she took wild swipes at the administration. Jackson was a lion, or half horse and half alligator; his administration was one of foxes and grubs. After Martin Van Buren was elected president, she heard that his grandmother's name, Goes, was pronounced “goose” by the Dutch, and she quipped:

For the King of the Beasts we find no further use

And the choice of the Nation now falls on a—Goose—

As usual, she disclaimed
any interest in or knowledge of what was happening in government. “Of politics I can write but little,” she would write to Charles or his wife, Abby, before launching into news. “We have no news,” she would say, and then go on to report all the news: “Mr. Webster took tea here last evening. You will have heard that Justice Baldwin has gone crazy. It is announced that Mr. Buchanan is to be recalled from St. Petersburg and to take his place. Mr. Smith the Register is to be P.M. in N.Y. in the place of Governor, and it is whispered that Noah is to come here to edit the official.” She was like her husband in some way. “Your father is in high spirits dabbling as
usual in public affairs while
fancying he has nothing
to do with them,” she wrote to her son John.

She set herself up
as a truth teller, a kind of Greek chorus in a tragedy—someone who would step back and comment upon the action, who would say what others would not. She tracked everything—bills, appointments, scandals; who was in, who was out. “
Swartout
is
here
, and it is rumoured has
frightened
the P. into the recent measures,” she would write. “Amons holds his head as high as ever, but rumour says he
totters
.” Her pen flew across the page, speeding through news and gossip, updates about the Panic of 1837, the Seminole War in Florida, or presidential elections. “We are so inundated with
newspapers
from every corner of the country, that I expect like Dr. Valpy's hero to go off some day in a blazing idea. It is true there is a good deal of fire in some of them but many contain only bitter ashes that make the reader sick. I wish some means could be taken to put a stop to this paper currency or we shall surely
stop payment
!!!”