Louisa (16 page)

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L
OUISA
WAS
in
a difficult spot, then: a city where protocol was never clear. Women were supposed to remain innocent and ignorant of the affairs of men, and yet, as Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington social doyenne noted, “the house of representatives is the lounging place of both sexes, where acquaintance is as easily made as at public amusements.” Women were supposed to stay away from public life, and yet, as one who saw the treatment of Elizabeth Merry—or, for that matter, anyone who saw the senators and officers pay deference to Dolley Madison, who was quickly establishing herself as the leading hostess—could see, politics and socializing were closely intertwined. Women were present and absent at once.

Louisa claimed to
have nothing to do with her husband's career. “I knew nothing of politics, and of course was without ambition: and domestic life seemed to be the only life for which nature had intended me,” Louisa wrote in “The Adventures of a Nobody.” The “of course”
is telling: this is what a woman was supposed to say. It does not completely describe Louisa's attitude. She listened to her husband practice his speeches and gave him advice; she was especially good, the prolix orator told her, at knowing what to cut. She took note of politicians' rifts and alliances. When they were apart, she made John Quincy promise to write her about politics. “I have not forgotten,” he later replied. When he suggested that he might resign from public office and find contentment in focusing on his private life, she urged him not to. But when John Adams expressed his displeasure at John Quincy's votes, Louisa made a point of reporting to her husband that she had disclaimed any influence or, for that matter, awareness at all. And she viewed his public position as an unbearable burden on them both.

It was hard
for any woman to find her way, acknowledging one conviction and acting according to another. (Even Smith wrote candidly of her struggles in revealing letters and diaries.) It was perhaps even harder for Louisa than most. There were few women to whom she could turn to find out the correct way to behave, no Pauline Neale to sweep in and whisper when to curtsy. She had her sisters, of course, but she found even those relationships fraught with unspoken difficulties. At the Hellens', she watched her own family watching her, discerning the fine gradations and distinctions that marked her as a boarder versus those that marked her as a senator's wife. With no carriage, she had no mobility to seek out friends of her own. With her husband determined to keep to himself and demonstrate his independence, she had little opportunity or excuse to establish herself well in the social scene. With a Federalist for a husband and the Republicans in power, she was of the wrong party, anyway. She was of the wrong birth, and perhaps the wrong temperament. Dolley Madison, society's reigning queen, always regarded her a little suspiciously. She was no longer an object of curiosity; she was no longer the delightful republican in a royal court, so pretty, so “
jolie.
” This may have been how she wanted it—she claimed to prefer the small and intimate gatherings
in the Hellens' parlor, with one sister at the piano and another at the harp, with a few guests and a little cake and tea—but it was one more reminder that her range was limited. Georgetown was not her home.

Quincy was not
her home either. That had been painfully apparent. So she was startled when John Quincy told her that spring, 1804, as they prepared to head north for the summer break between sessions of Congress, that he would be returning to Washington for the next congressional session without her, leaving her and the children in Quincy with his parents. That arrangement was typical; senators tended to live and work in boardinghouse blocks, without their wives. But she was horrified by his pronouncement and refused to head north. If she could not travel back and forth with him, she told him, then she would stay in Washington. If she had to choose between “five dreary winters in Quincy” and Washington, between her family or his, she chose her own family. She was still furious when he left her with their two small sons, charging him with “coldness or unkindness.”

“
Our separation
was very much against my inclination, but it was your own choice,” he responded. She replied that given the options, it was no choice at all.

He explained that he could not support the great expense—not to mention the miserable trials—of traveling back and forth with a wife of fragile health and two small boys. The appeals to his poverty hurt her, as they always did; reflexively, she would bring up the lost dowry. “I brought you nothing and therefore have no claim on you whatever,” she wrote in cringing response. “My life ever has been and ever must remain a life of painful obligation.”

He was the one
who seemed to suffer, though, at least at first, from the costs of their separation. “I feel already to use a vulgar phrase, like a fish out of water, without you and my children,” John Quincy wrote to her, “but I will not complain.” He spent the summer punishing himself. He studied the U.S. Code and all U.S. Supreme Court decisions. He berated himself for accomplishing nothing during the Senate
session except alienating everyone. He had been the only Federalist to support the acquisition of Louisiana, but he had failed in his efforts to pass a constitutional amendment in support of it. He had given long speeches, but he was not happy with his performances. His days lacked purpose. “Irregular and indolent,” he summarized the month of August in his diary. The dark maw of feeling that he struggled against his whole life threatened to overwhelm him. There was an inherited component to this; compulsive disorders and depressive tendencies ran in his family, on both sides. Thomas, his younger brother, also had trouble fighting off punishing self-doubt, and Charles, of course, had helped hasten his own death by drinking. John Quincy's self-analysis was constant, and his diary became at times a record of pain and self-loathing. “My self-examination this night gave rise to many mortifying reflections. . . . Pride and self-conceit and presumption lie so deep in my natural character,” John Quincy wrote, “that, when their deformity betrays them, they run through all the changes of Proteus, to disguise themselves to my own heart.”

He was also lonely. He was lonely anywhere, but being apart from Louisa appears to have made the loneliness worse. He missed her. “Good Night my best beloved.
Je t'envoye les plus tendres baisers de l'amour
,” he wrote.

But her anger
with him burned a little longer. She could not, she wrote, understand why he missed her in Quincy, because they were so rarely together in Quincy. She wanted him to return to Washington early, “before
Congress
takes you from me.” Some of her letters were short, perfunctory, and passive-aggressive. “George is very angry with you. He says you are very naughty to go away and leave him.” As for herself, she reported, “I never was so well in my life.”

Her sisters, her mother
, a stream of visitors, and her children kept her busy. John fussed at teething, and George was a precocious troublemaker. “He destroys all Mrs. Hellens chickens, drives the ducks to death, gets down to the wharf and plays such pranks I am obliged
to keep a person constantly running after him,” Louisa wrote to her husband. “In fact he is one of the finest children I ever saw but much too clever or wise for his age.” She told John Quincy that she was “studying” the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Elizabeth Hamilton's work on education, which argued for the equal capacity of the female intellect and the importance of its instruction to cultivate the mind, imagination, and heart. “I admire her more than any author I have yet seen,” Louisa wrote. “Had I a daughter it is the only system I would wish to adopt.” Then, typically, she retreated: “but it requires a mother of a superior cast to be able to undertake it and do it justice.”

She had her arias
, her gossip, her health, and her books in Washington. Still, her days became “interminable.” The river moved slowly around Georgetown's gentle bend, and restless storms swept through each afternoon. The air turned hot, Southern hot, and Louisa's letters turned pensive. Her irritation with John Quincy sometimes flared, but her frustration with him became something more complex. Her letters with John Quincy reflect a marriage far more multifaceted and dynamic than any glimpse of it from his coolly dispassionate diary or from her forlorn memoir sketches, written much later, ever could. Their words were inflected with concern, anger, boredom, irritation, desire, humor, and intimacy. They give us a glimpse at how they communicated, perhaps also in conversation in person. They were, then, as many husbands and wives are, married in heart and mind through their contradictions, not only in spite of them.

“I shall know neither happiness or peace till you return,” Louisa wrote him. Yet divorce, in fact, was also on her mind. That summer, she brought up the subject cautiously to John Quincy. She mentioned it in order to reject it emphatically—but she did mention it. She had read Madame de Staël's book of letters, in which de Staël makes an argument in favor of divorce if a husband and wife “find that their dispositions do not accord,” Louisa wrote to her husband, and asked him to read it himself. “This letter is I am told very much admired. I
think I must have misunderstood it very much for it appears to me calculated to destroy every moral principal, to destroy every tie which binds society together.” She wanted to know what he thought.

He responded caustically
—“After having sacrificed all decency as well as all virtue in her own conduct, it is natural enough to find her torturing her ingenuity to give infamy itself a wash of plausibility”—and then blamed the French Revolution for de Staël's argument. Louisa was not going to divorce her husband—there was no question, even though it was becoming clear that their dispositions did not in fact accord. Divorces happened, but only in extreme cases and attended by scandal. She thought about it with a tentative kind of curiosity mixed with apprehension. That summer, Louisa learned that her acquaintances the Laws were separating. “This is setting the opinion of the world at defiance,” she wrote. “I never wish to court it but I should dread it too much ever to set it at defiance.”

Still, she described her inner life as like a battlefield. “Formed for domestic life my whole soul devoted to you and my children yet ambitious to excess,” she wrote to John Quincy in August, “my heart and head are constantly at war.”

“
It grieves me to see
him sacrificing the best years of his life in so painful and unprofitable a way,” she wrote to Abigail soon after he arrived back in Washington. “It would however cause me infinite pain to see him give it up.”

4

I
N
THE
SUMMER
OF
1805,
Louisa and the boys came to Quincy with her sister Eliza, moving into the small saltbox cottage where John Quincy had been born near Penn's Hill, two miles away from the elder Adamses' mansion. Washington may have seemed remote from cosmopolitan life, but Penn's Hill was set in farmland and woods. When they arrived, Louisa and Eliza had to milk the cow themselves, laughing “heartily” at their failure.

But her good humor quickly soured. Although she liked rambling in the fields and forest with George and John and occasionally John Quincy, who would try to teach his “unfruitful scholars” to distinguish the blooming peach trees from the plum, she disliked living in the woods after a life spent in cities. She felt at once claustrophobic and exposed, worried about “two or three insane persons” at loose in the area, and trapped in the tiny farmhouse—four rooms downstairs and three small rooms above, too small for three adults, a few young servants, a toddler always up to mischief, and a baby just learning to run. When she had more space, though, after John Quincy began to spend more time at his parents' and Eliza went to Boston for parties,
she felt no better; she felt alone. It was hard for them to be together, hard for them to be apart.

It would have been
hard to be around John Quincy, in any event, that summer. He lashed himself in his diary for his “mental imbecility.” “My prospects are again blasted, and I have nothing left before me but resignation,” he wrote. Abigail wrote to Hannah Quincy that she was worried about John Quincy's “depression of spirits,” but did not know what to do. “There are some malidies so deep rooted,” Abigail wrote to Eliza Susan Quincy, “that the most delicate hand dare not probe. The attempt might fix an incurable wound.” She took him to Dr. Cotton Tufts, in hopes that he could prescribe a pill.

An offer from Harvard
to be the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric partly boosted his spirits, but it produced new tension with his wife. Louisa didn't like Harvard; she thought that the school was more concerned with its own wealth and power than with its students. But it was not her decision. He took the job, teaching during summers when Congress was not in session. His spirits rose—but hers dropped as he became even more preoccupied with Cicero. He spent his days preparing his lectures and had no time for anything but teaching—certainly not for her. She found the whole thing “odious.” “Having relinquished almost all claim to [your presence] in the winter . . . I am the less willing to give it up in the summer,” she wrote to John Quincy. But what she was willing to tolerate didn't much matter.

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S
O
THEY
TRIED
different arrangements. They split up, shuttled back and forth, and made unhappy compromises. When Louisa and John Quincy returned to Washington in the fall of 1805, they left George, now four years old, and John, now two, behind at John Quincy's insistence and by Abigail's arrangement. Louisa protested, which the other Adamses considered unreasonable. It was common for members of the extended Adams family to share in the education and care of one
another's children. Abigail grew tired of Louisa's self-pitying, forlorn letters about missing her children: “I believe they are much better off than they could have been at any boarding house in Washington, where they must have been confined to some degree, or have mixd with improper persons”—harsh words, since the “boarding house” in question was the home of Louisa's own sister.

“Nothing but compulsion would have induced me to leave them,” Louisa responded.

Her husband or her children; her children or her husband. Having her children meant no husband, but having no children meant, it seems, the chance to grow closer to him. During the winter they spent together without George and John, 1805–6, they were moody—at times short with each other, and at times more tender and affectionate. She was pregnant, and its effects were violent. “My health was particularly delicate and my spirits worse,” she would remember. Yet she was able to write to Abigail, “I have enjoyed almost perfect happiness.”

The following summer
, 1806, he left her in Washington, pregnant. His departure left her bereft. “The loss of Mr. Adams's society is to me irreparable,” she wrote to Abigail. “I already look forward to his return with the most anxious impatience.” John Quincy had been in the habit of measuring the temperature each morning; in his absence, she rose at sunrise to do it. In his letters to her, he was intimate. She was “dearest Louisa”; she was sent kisses “
de l'amour.
” She was sweetly teased. “George appears to have lost none of his sensibility, but has a placidness and ease of temper, which must have come to him I think from some of his
remote
ancestors,” John Quincy quipped after he was reunited with his sons. “He resembles you more than formerly. Not however so much as John, who seems a little miniature of yourself.”

“I can believe that George grows like me but Johns round face and deep dimples must I think be infinitely more like his father,” Louisa responded, “who has ever been celebrated for this to
me
fascinating beauty.”

Their separation was the more difficult because of the complications from pregnancy. She was confined to her room in the suffocating heat, suffering from abscesses in the throat and ears, her legs badly swollen. She could hardly stand. Even so, when she learned that her sister Harriet's son was dying, she made the hot mile-long walk to her sister's house. That night, with the temperature at 100 degrees, she went into labor and gave birth to a stillborn child.

The tragedy, for a while
, seemed to make them realize their closeness. When John Quincy heard the news from her, he staggered. “Her letter affected me deeply in its tenderness, its resignation, and its fortitude,” he wrote in his diary. In his room, by himself, he “yielded to the weakness, which I had so long struggled to conceal and restrain,” and he cried. For his part, his response was balm to her. “My heart swelled with gratitude and love,” she wrote to him, “and I almost ceased to think the strike so bitter which proved to me how dear I am to your heart.”

It was never
that simple, though. They loved at a distance; proximity was harder. So was the long separation from her children. She was furious when she learned that John Quincy had taken a room for himself in Cambridge instead of spending time with the boys. By the time she reached Massachusetts in August 1806, she had not seen them for nine months. When Louisa arrived in Quincy, her children “recieved me as a stranger,” and little John cried that he wanted to return to his grandmother. John Quincy was almost as fractious. The solicitude and tenderness he'd shown toward his wife in her absence evaporated. Louisa was overwhelmed; the little saltbox cottage was as crowded as ever. When they tried to have company at the house, Louisa burned her cakes and greeted guests with soot on her face. John Quincy retreated into his irritation. “This is no longer the studious life of the two former months,” he wrote in his diary soon after Louisa arrived. “I have wasted the past week, and fear I shall waste the next. Nothing can be more fatal to study than petty avocations continually recurring.”

The following winter
, 1806–7, she stayed in Boston with the children in a boardinghouse on the outskirts of the city, a lodging so grim that even Abigail thought it “cold and bleak.” Louisa would remember John Quincy's decision with bitterness. “Everything as usual was fixed without a word of consultation with the family,” she later wrote. The pattern in which she was excluded from major decisions about her children's life and in fact her own was growing stronger; when she looked back, she could see it too clearly. At the time, though, it was something she could neither accept nor refuse. Contradictions animated her marriage. “I already long for your return,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy in Washington. “But so it is, I can neither live with you or without you.”

“
The last paragraph
of your letter I do not fully understand—I will not say I can neither live with you or without you,” John Quincy responded, then dismissed it with a joke, thinking of his empty bed: “but in this cold weather I should be very glad to live with you.” He was not shy about his sexual ardor for her—nor simply his sexual ardor. After observing at a party, with wry appreciation, how little women's fashion left to the imagination, he sent his wife a poem that did the same. “When the Serpent's subtle head / Had brought her to disgrace; / When Innocence and Bliss were fled— / The fig-leaf took their place,” he wrote, before calling on “Dear Sally” to “Fling the
last
fig-leaf to the wind, / And snatch me to thy arms!” “My heart throbs to behold you,” she wrote to him a few days later.

As it happens
, Louisa was pregnant again. In August 1807, after yet another trying summer in the small cottage on Penn's Hill, the Adamses moved into a house in Boston on the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, bought by John Quincy as an investment (and perhaps with an eye toward the end of his political career). Only two weeks later, Louisa gave birth to another son, Charles Francis. It was, as usual, a brutally difficult labor—Charles was born breech and seemed at first not to breathe. She had hardly recovered before making the trip back to Washington that fall, this time with her newborn.
In yet another disappointment, the older children were to stay behind in Massachusetts. Six-year-old George would board with Abigail's sister Elizabeth Peabody in New Hampshire; four-year-old John would live with Abigail's sister Mary Cranch. Louisa never reconciled herself to these separations. Perhaps because she did not know her own grandparents, she never accepted Abigail Adams's insistence on the primary right of grandparents.

Louisa did not share the Adamses' view of communal child rearing. She believed that “incessant love” was as important as the “advantages of education, of accomplishment, of morals, and of virtue.” She herself had attended boarding schools at young ages, but she had never been more than a few miles from home—and even then, it seems to have been an unhappy experience; many of the memories she would most cherish were of periods of sickness, when she'd been brought home or to the Hewletts'. To a degree that was unusual for her time, she thought that parents had an “absolutely essential” role to play in their children's development. But Louisa did submit. She wrote sad, beseeching letters. “Kiss my darling children for me over and over again,” she would write, “and remind them constantly of their mother whose every wish on this earth centres in them.” She worried over their little illnesses and scrapes, writing anxiously with instructions and prescriptions—“five drops of spirit of Turpentine upon a lump of sugar every other morning”—and advice on what to feed them.

Partly, no doubt, her intense affection and interest in her children came from the difficulties of having them; they were triumphs hard won. “With what ardent love I regarded this my first born child,” she later wrote about George, “and with what earnest anxiety I watched his growth.” She “traced each little thought or expression” with inexpressible joy. She sometimes wondered whether she had the qualities that she needed to be a good mother. Later, she would wonder whether the worst mistake she ever made was not demanding the chance to be with them as they grew up.

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W
HEN
SHE
reached
Washington in the late fall of 1807, she could tell that something had changed—in the political climate, and in the Adamses' own situation. All the talk in the city was of war. For years the United States had been caught in the struggle between France and England, provoked and carelessly insulted, its sovereign rights disregarded. Now the conflict threatened to escalate. But there was no army, hardly a navy, and not much of a national will. Louisa did not pay much attention to the back-and-forth; she was unconcerned with Napoleon's illegal closure of continental Europe to British ships, and with Britain's retaliation by blocking commerce with French-controlled countries except by ships that passed through British ports and paid a license fee and a toll—which was more or less robbery from American ships. Nor did she care about the details of England's practice of essentially kidnapping thousands of American sailors suspected of being British deserters in order to man its ships during the Napoleonic wars. In 1803, the peace following the treaty of Amiens—the brief cessation of fighting in Europe sparked by the French Revolutionary wars and Napoleon's successful coup—had ended, Britain and France were once again at war, and the reverberations were felt even across the vast Atlantic. But Louisa was more worried about whether her son John, up in Massachusetts, had hives.