Louisa (15 page)

 • • • 

J
OSHUA
DIED
that spring, having lingered for six months after Louisa and John Quincy left him ill in Maryland. It was a painful time, and she withdrew further from the Adamses into her private mourning. Her mother and siblings were destitute. Joshua's assets were in orphan's court, his suits were still in chancery, Catherine was without a cent. Now completely reliant on the support of others, Catherine and Louisa's younger sister Caroline came to Boston for an extended stay.

Despite their sad
circumstances, they brightened Louisa's mood. Catherine was still sharp and defiant, and Caroline, now twenty-five years old, was spirited and happy, a universal favorite. Caroline had her own preparation to be a “fine lady” on Tower Hill in London, but she was much more capable with housework than her older sister, and her assistance put the house in good order. Able to relax in their familiar company, Louisa started to like Boston. The city had an unstrained elegance that appealed to her, a shinier gloss than Quincy; the men still wore waistcoats and long boots, ruffled shirts and wristbands. Its residents found her appealing, too. Her time in London and Berlin had given her a patina that was considered aristocratic in the Adamses' small town but admired in Boston. In the state capital, her British upbringing hardly hurt her; in fact, it probably helped. She was young, only twenty-seven, polished, and pretty. Invitations to parties and
dinners started to arrive. “I met with the most decidedly flattering reception,” she later recalled. She found herself in a position she was used to: dressing for dinners and dances. In January, she hosted her first ball. It lasted until one in the morning. “I danced myself the whole evening,” John Quincy wrote afterward. There was more to her days than dinners and dances, though. She made friends, as she always had, easily, and some of them were among the more educated and literary women in the United States—women who would talk of writers like Rousseau in “rapt effusion.” Louisa found these women intimidating and wasn't sure such subjects were appropriate for women, but she enjoyed these visits and these conversations, and was proud of her participation almost despite herself.

As Louisa spent more
time with her mother, sister, and friends, pulled back into the life of the Johnsons, John Quincy was retreating into the world of his parents. But he was restless. He filled his time as if time were a larger void. Strange to say, he had a harder time adjusting to life in the United States even than she. After seven years away from the bar, he had opened a law practice with dread and felt himself sinking beneath it. At one point he proposed to Thomas, who was working at a magazine in Philadelphia, that they move to the frontier in New York, in search of “independence, thrift and sport.” With bravado, he wrote, “Why should we wither away our best days, and sneak through life, pinched by penury and yawning off existence?” The plan, such as it was, went nowhere. Without a sense of greater purpose—a sense of being instrumental to his country—he wondered what in his life was worthwhile. “I enter this day upon my thirty-seventh year with sorrow to think how long I have lived, and to how little purpose,” he wrote in his diary on his birthday.

He was drawn to politics, which seemed now forbidden. His father's adversary Jefferson was in power and the Adams name was impugned. Abigail and John had adopted the habit of referring to the political arena as a den of thieves or snakes, of party intrigues and venal men;
John swore it would have been better to have been an honest shoemaker, like his own father, than president. John Quincy swore off politics in his diary, declaring that he wanted to serve his whole country, and politicians now served only their own narrow interests. Yet his whole life had been oriented toward public service. Politics gripped his attention, no matter his claims otherwise. As a boy he had lived through the Revolution and witnessed the political machinations that had led to the founding of the United States; as a young man in Europe, he had traced the titanic struggles, the movements of armies, the shocks of revolutions, the compromises and betrayals of statesmen, the seismic vibrations of regimes forming, power shifting everywhere—while having enough leisure to translate German poetry on the side. Now back in Boston, he was more of an exile from the center of power than ever. One winter evening, before heading home for the night, John Quincy walked through the cold grass in the park half a mile from his house. Above him in the dark towered the great dome of the statehouse, which had been built while he was gone. He was pensive. “I feel strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy,” he wrote in his diary afterward. “But I hope to preserve myself from it, by the considerations which have led me to the resolutions of renouncing.” His resolution would not last. That spring, his name was put forward for the state senate. He did nothing to swat it back. At the end of May, he was sworn into office as a representative of Suffolk County, which included Boston.

But even that was not enough. His diary groaned with activity. By the end of 1801, he was also on Harvard's Board of Overseers, in various clubs and societies, and was the corresponding secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences—to name only a few extra activities. In a letter to his brother he enumerated the obligations that swallowed up his days: his law work, his science club, his work as a state senator, his responsibilities as Massachusetts bankruptcy commissioner (until President Jefferson eliminated the position—an act
the Adams family, probably mistakenly, would always take personally), speeches on civic issues, “unavoidable encroachment of dissipation” (those dinners and balls with Louisa), weekly trips to “the paternal mansion.” He promised to give Thomas the remnant of his time, telling him that he would write essays for the
Portfolio
, a publication that Thomas was involved with. He mentioned his wife and son nowhere in his letter about his commitments, except perhaps obliquely, when he referred to the unavoidable encroachment of dissipation.

“
Of course with so much
business,” Louisa simply noted, her husband “was not much at home.”

That fall, 1802, John Quincy's name was put forward to represent his district in Congress, and again he did nothing to stop the movement. When he lost the race, he consoled himself by saying that he had not wanted to win—even though he recorded the tallies of ballots in his diaries and privately scorned his allies for letting rain showers keep them from the polls. But on February 8, 1803, a divided Massachusetts state legislature appointed him to the United States Senate. It had required a deal cut between his supporters and the high Federalists. John Quincy, kept apprised of the maneuvering, remained demure and circumspect. In his diary he recorded the event but without his own reaction at the election, as if his name belonged to someone else.

When Louisa heard
that she would be moving to Washington, she was furious. She had begun to imagine herself at home in Boston, and it was “painful” for her to leave it. “I surely did not behave with either the fortitude or the patience, which might have been expected,” she would recall. What was more, she was pregnant again. “She is very well for so feeble a body as she is,” Abigail wrote to Thomas, not bothering to disguise her point. “When you take a wife, it must be for better or for worse, but a healthy and good constitution is an object with those who consider, maturely.”

Louisa was stronger than her mother-in-law gave her credit for. Louisa's water broke on July 3, while she was having tea with friends.
Fluttering about their delicacy, the women scattered, leaving her and her sister alone. John Quincy was out at Peacefield visiting his parents. The doctor could not be found; even George's nurse was out. She and Caroline managed, and finally the doctor was located. On July 4, John Quincy came home to find that he had another boy. This one they dutifully named John Adams. As soon as she could rise from her bed, she lifted the lids of her empty trunks and opened her packing cases to prepare to leave for Washington. She was “a wanderer” again.

3

T
HEY
DROVE
THROUGH
the woods into Washington on October 20, 1803, through the descending dusk. The coach clattered past unfinished federal buildings. The sandstone was already beginning to crumble, and the young city looked like it was in ruins. Where roads should have been, there was a vast web of sight lines. Where carriages were promised, there were cows and fowl. The carriage passed the huddled boardinghouses where most senators and congressmen lived, the mess halls where rough allegiances and enmities were formed, and drove on. It passed the Capitol, which was still hardly more than an idea, bare without its columns and flat without its dome. Tree stumps studded the rutted way. The area was “a scene,” Louisa wrote, “of utter desolation.”

They were exhausted from the journey. Louisa, John Quincy, two-year-old George, three-month-old John, the children's nurse Patty Walin, and Louisa's sister Caroline had been on the road for twenty days—three miserable weeks. On the ship to Newark, George had thrown the keys of all their trunks into the sea, along with his shoes. They had to take a creeping route around New York and Philadelphia due to outbreaks of yellow fever. In New Jersey, the group was forced
to stop because Louisa fell ill. When the doctor came to take her pulse, he told her to stretch out her arm; he thought she had yellow fever and was too afraid to come close.

Now, because they
had waited for her to recover, they were late. The Senate had convened early in a special session to consider the ratification of the Louisiana Purchase, an acquisition that would add 828,000 square miles to the United States. But Louisa's illness and the long route had slowed them too much, and the opening of the special Senate was over. As their coach lurched over Pennsylvania Avenue, another carriage came into view, coming from the direction of the President's House. Inside sat Samuel Allyne Otis, the secretary of the Senate, a Federalist, and an old Bostonian. The two carriages stopped. Otis had a bit of news for John Quincy: he had just delivered to President Jefferson the Senate's ratification of the treaty that brought the United States the Louisiana Purchase. The treaty had passed 24 yeas to 7 nays. Those friendly toward the French—Jacobins, the Federalists called them—were “caballing,” Otis wrote to John Quincy later that night, “and I expect will attack me tomorrow when I shall want the aid of all my friends. I hope you will not be too fatigued to attend.” He did not suspect that John Quincy, nominally a Federalist, was not on his side; John Quincy wanted Louisiana, wanted France out of a position to meddle, and wanted passage to the west. He also wanted the chance to prove that he was no party loyalist, no man's friend.

He planned on keeping
himself apart. To economize, the family was to live in Georgetown with Louisa's brother-in-law, Walter Hellen, who also housed the rest of the Johnson family. They didn't have much choice; they needed to save money. In April, a London banking house that John Quincy had advised his father to use had failed, just at the moment when John Adams needed the funds after buying more family land. John Quincy had stepped in to cover the loss. Now, with his law practice suspended, he would be relying on a senator's per diem: $6 a day while Congress was in session. The decision to live in
Georgetown was financial, then, but the distance from the other members of Congress suited John Quincy's sense of independence. Most senators and representatives left their families at home and lodged at boardinghouses on Capitol Hill, often blocking with regional and ideological friends. John Quincy, meanwhile, would make the long walk from the Capitol, eat his meal, and then shut himself in his room with his books, his diary, and his pen.

The arrangement should have suited Louisa, too; it was almost a return to the house on Cooper's Row. She would be able to live with her mother and six sisters—Nancy, Caroline, Harriet, Catherine (Kitty), Eliza, and Adelaide. But at the start, it was strange. Her sisters were adults now, and almost strangers. It startled her to see them “with all the pretensions of belles, fond of society, without means to keep up the appearance to which they had been accustomed; and without the protection of
father
or
guardian.
” The absence of her father was ever-present. Her mother, Catherine, was forced to rely entirely on the largess of Walter Hellen, and was keenly aware of her diminished station, struggling to reconcile herself to life in the southern United States.

Louisa, too, had to adjust to the strangeness of a city under construction in almost every way. For the first time in her life, she was also not only confronted by the reality of slavery but party to it. She arrived in Washington “with English feelings,” which is to say, antislavery beliefs. Louisa had a “dislike of a system, to give it no harsher name harassing, distressing, and degrading to all the finer feelings of the heart,” she wrote years later. But her beloved father was a slaveholder before he died, and Louisa was silent about the presence of the slaves who served her in Walter Hellen's house and the slaves who surrounded her in Washington. She was not, of course, alone in that; her husband, who would become an antislavery crusader, didn't mention them either. (In theory, John Quincy was already against slavery. But his antislavery convictions did not stop him from living with the Hellens, or even from voting against a measure that would have gradually
abolished slavery in the Louisiana territories.) In 1801, Washington was a southern town, a slave city, inhabited by roughly 2,500 whites, 120 free blacks, and 600 slaves; slaves built the federal offices, staffed the boardinghouses, drove the carriages, served the dinners, performed every manner of task. Often called servants, they were rarely remarked upon, even by those who opposed slavery; it was as if they couldn't see the presence of six hundred people in their midst.

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S
O
LIFE
WAS
DIFFERENT
at the Hellens' from what it had been on Tower Hill. Louisa was an Adams now. Still, she was a Johnson again, pulled back into her old family's orbit, just as her husband was in Massachusetts. In Washington, she had her family for company, and John Quincy had his work. John Quincy walked the five-mile route from Georgetown to the Capitol each day. Sometimes he read “to the ladies” in the evening, but mostly he stayed at his desk or in his room. He spent his time making an index for his diary, keeping the household accounts, writing a list of people in power:
President of the United States Thomas Jefferson. . . . Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith. . . . Senator from New Hampshire William Plummer. . . .
He studied laws, worked on his speeches, read Herodotus. He was on special committees to deal with revising the articles of war, appropriating money for roads, New Orleans territorial legislation, revision of Senate rules, the Library of Congress, Georgia land claims, the impressment of seamen—and so on. The kind of closeness he and Louisa had enjoyed in Berlin was a distant thought. Louisa grew half accustomed to his absence. “Mr. Adams is so much engaged he scarcely allows himself time to eat, drink or sleep,” Louisa wrote to Abigail in the spring. Sometimes, she went to parties without him. “He stays at home and sends me out to make his apology.”

She went to Congress
or the Supreme Court occasionally, because it was theater. One visitor called it “as good as going to a play.” She
wasn't interested in the politics, but she was interested in the people. Her vision was stereoscopic; she saw the good and bad in people, and merged the contradictions into a single character. Eccentrics fascinated her. John Randolph of Roanoke “was to Congress what Shakespeare's
Fools
were to a Court”—brilliant, mercurial, impulsive, uncontrollable. She was wary of—but quite susceptible to—the charismatic. She watched Aaron Burr control the noisy spectators at the Senate with awe. “The little hammer in his graceful little hand,” Louisa wrote, “would startle them into silence.” Other men repulsed her. The French minister, General Turreau, was famous in France for his brutality on the battlefield and famous in Washington for beating his wife. As she watched him one night at the President's House as he amused himself by galloping back and forth across the room, she wasn't charmed; she didn't forget the abuse.

She came to think that what she saw during those first few years in Washington reflected a fundamental truth of human nature, the grasping for special privilege in a society that only pretended to award none. She found the suggestion that there were no classes in Washington to be ridiculous. She saw how men inevitably generated distinctions. The pretense of equality made relationships unpredictable, capricious, or confused. In England and in Berlin, the protocol was clear. Each person knew what to do. Mistakes were pointed out, corrected, more easily fixed. In Washington, men formed little tribes and suspected one another of conspiracies. Hierarchies sprang up like weeds, were flattened, sprang up again. Slights were not misdemeanors but personal affronts: a man, distracted, might fail to return another man's bow, and for this he would be blackballed. There was a code of honor, loosely codified, but it could be stupid—leading to challenges, duels, and sometimes deaths. She was more meritocratic than she might have seemed to some; she had an idea of a true aristocracy. She was drawn to “kind friendly excellent people” who had risen to high station, people like Secretary of War Henry Dearborn and his wife,
Dorcas, with their “real genuine pattern of unsophisticated democracy,” and their “social virtues of benevolence, sincerity, and natural goodness of heart.” What she hated were the “affected blandishments” of those who made grand claims for the equality of Americans. The worst offender, to her mind, was President Thomas Jefferson.

She disliked President Jefferson with a special animosity. He was “the ruling Demagogue of the hour,” a man of “peering restlessness,” so adept at “drawing out
others
and at the same time attracting attention to himself.” She was prepared to dislike him. It was personal. The Jefferson name had not only become a dirty word among the Adamses after the mudslinging of the 1800 presidential campaign, but because Jefferson had also stripped Joshua of his post, she also seems to have partly blamed him for her father's death.

She even disliked the way Jefferson looked: tall and ungainly, with a habit of wearing old red britches while uniformed French servants (and slaves) staffed his house. She distrusted his self-fashioning as one of the people, a common man. She saw him as canny, always superior, calculating. His egalitarianism struck Louisa as a show, and not an earnest one. She had occasion at a few dinners to appreciate that his table—the food, the wine, the servants (though slaves)—would not have been out of place at any European court. She probably would have liked the courtliness had it been matched with sincere politeness. Instead, she found him disingenuous and sometimes rude. She was immune, it seems, to his famous charm—though of course, he may have purposefully tamped it down. After dinner one night he led his guests into a cold room, where a tiny fire licked a few coals; Louisa's teeth chattered; another guest joked that he could have entertained himself by spitting out the flame. Jefferson leaned back in his chair, not hiding his impatience for them to leave.

She may have felt
personally dismissed. Louisa was stained by her British birth and her time in a royal court—cardinal sins in Jefferson's view. Jefferson so hated the idea of courts that he had made a point
of insulting the British minister, Anthony Merry, and especially his wife, Elizabeth, who Jefferson sneered was too aristocratic to have a place in the United States. It wasn't only her diamond jewelry that Jefferson objected to; it was her presumption of some power, her force of character, and her obvious assumption that the social sphere was also a sphere of power politics—as it was in Europe, and in fact as it was in Washington, but only in a tacit and taboo way. Jefferson called Elizabeth Merry a “virago”—a mannish woman, a woman who was a threat to the purity of the republic. Of course, when it was in his interest to flatter a British minister and his wife, he would do that too. His dining table might have been round—in the republic of equality, there would be no head—but when Louisa sat at his left hand, he kept himself turned toward his right. His interests at that moment, in 1807, determined that the British minister's wife next to him was worth his attention, and the Massachusetts senator's wife was not.