Louisa (26 page)

“He laughs at me and says, I do not understand his interest,” Louisa said to Abigail. “You my dear Madam must judge between us, understanding as you do every particular that the situation demands.”

John Quincy waited for a letter from Monroe, anxious that it would come and anxious that it would not. Meanwhile, Ealing's spell was broken. Louisa's long run of unusually good health ended. She was yet again pregnant. Sick, she stayed shut in the house in Ealing for weeks at a time. The doctor was a frequent visitor; she was bled, given
laudanum, and stuck with leeches. The weather mirrored her mood. London was particularly dreary that winter, the fog so thick that pedestrians carried candles in daytime. Nor did Little Boston House seem like such a refuge. The Adamses' idyllic garden was robbed twice in ten days; hungry thieves carried off their cauliflowers and new heads of lettuce, pulled up their plants, and broke the locks to the shed. In April, the Adamses moved to Craven Street, where the American delegation had its offices.

Before they left Little Boston House, John Quincy looked back one last time at the place, and the way of life, that he was leaving behind for good. “I have seldom, perhaps never in the course of my life resided more comfortably than at the house which we now quit, and which I shall probably never see again,” he wrote in his diary that night.

In mid-April, the appointment from Monroe finally arrived, and John Quincy accepted. “I find myself not altogether well,” he wrote at the end of April, “and for some days past depressed more in spirits than in health. Every man knows the plague of his own heart. Mine is the impossibility of remaining where I am; and the treacherous prospect of the future. Let me hope.”

 • • • 

L
OUISA
WAS
forty-two years old when she boarded the ship at Gravesend to return to the United States. Considering her age and history of unsuccessful pregnancies, she probably knew that she would not be able to make the long ocean crossing without losing the child and endangering her own life.

John Quincy stayed
silent about her situation. In St. Petersburg, he had turned down the appointment to the Supreme Court by saying that he would not risk his pregnant wife's health for the sake of a public office. But now the stakes had changed; the secretary of state post was a job he actually wanted. He obscured the inconvenient truth of his wife's condition. To her brother, Thomas Johnson, he mentioned
that she was suffering from pleurisy fever “among several other serious complaints.” To a friend, he said that “the state of Mrs. Adams's health” might keep her in England when he left with his sons.

But she sailed. Aboard ship, on June 18, Louisa's sickness was so severe that she was given fifteen drops of laudanum—a mixture of opium and alcohol. The next day, the doctor administered twenty. For a week, her suffering was extreme. John Quincy described it in his diary with careful, unemotional distance, mentioning her seasickness “with other distressing symptoms.” The next day, June 28, he wrote: “My wife had a quiet night's rest, and was easy all the morning until past noon when she was again seized with great violence. I was called to her from dinner; she thought herself dying. . . . She was in very severe pain at intervals until near sunset, when she found herself relieved, and the remainder of the evening was free from pain.” That was that.

To Abigail, Louisa was blunt. She had endured, she wrote, “a bad miscarriage at sea.”

Why did she risk the child by making the voyage? It is impossible to know for sure. She may not have wanted to stay in London alone, with an ocean between her and her family and few friends to rely on. Or she may have gone because John Quincy was presented with the greatest opportunity of his career, and his life was also hers. She wanted this for him; she understood, as she told Abigail, his interest. It was harder to admit, but it seems that she also wanted it for herself.

1

T
HE
TYPICAL
MIX
of lawyers, representatives, senators, military officers, federal bureaucrats, and diplomats—a mingling of neat lace ruffles, dusty bandanas, and splendid uniforms from France and Spain—crowded the rooms at the Adamses' house on a bitingly cold evening in February 1819. There was an impressive spread of refreshments (Mrs. Adams's parties rivaled anyone's for her almonds, cakes, sweetmeats, jellies) and, in one room, a cluster of musicians and an area cleared for a dance. But the guests there that evening saw something strange: there were conspicuously few ladies.

This was not happenstance—nor a reflection, any longer, of the makeup of the city's elite population. Washington, half built and then half burned by the British during the War of 1812, was still a sketch of a city in so many ways, but it had transformed since the Adamses had left it after John Quincy's resignation from the Senate in 1808. Where once there were groves of yellow poplars, now clusters of buildings cropped up; where there had been cattle, now there were people; where there had been mostly men, now there were also women. When the Adamses had lived in Washington at the turn of the century, senators and representatives generally left their wives in their hometowns, but
by 1818, one congressman was writing that men who arrived without their wives were “like the odd half of a pair of scissors.” The city had become a desirable destination when the members of Congress arrived for the annual session. More nations were sending diplomats and attachés to Washington; more federal officers—and office seekers—were flocking to Washington; as the country grew, more representatives swelled Congress. And as they did, the social sphere became an arena, where country dances only half distracted from the unspoken maneuvering, and where politesse was a proxy for politics.

In the Adamses' parlor
, these forces met and clashed. During Louisa and John Quincy's absence from the city, the political and social landscape had shifted even more than the physical one, and not to the Adamses' advantage. Washington was predicated on the rejection of an aristocracy—but it still depended on a hierarchy. Perhaps even more so. The wife of the British ambassador was amazed and amused by how seriously precedence and etiquette rules were taken in Washington. “We minded our p's & q's far more than if we had been at one of the P[rince] R[egent]'s scrambles,” she wrote to a friend.

While the Adamses had been away in Russia and England, a system of deference and reciprocity, ranking each person by post within the government, had hardened into accepted practice. It privileged Congress over the executive branch—and not only because the people were supposed to reign supreme over the president. In practice, during the early nineteenth century the president was chosen by a congressional caucus, and any hopeful would have to pay court to the kingmakers. The rules of etiquette had adapted accordingly. The administration's department heads—and their wives—were expected to make the first visit to every notable person, a formalized practice that then permitted more relaxed social relations. Mornings were spent in endless rounds of making and receiving “calls.” The visits themselves were short and usually dull; the routine was repeated ad infinitum. Sometimes a caller would simply leave a small card engraved with his or her name. The
person who made the first visit affirmed, implicitly, his or her inferior social position. As the secretary of state, John Quincy was informally considered the president's heir apparent, but it hardly helped his social status. He and his wife would find that they were expected to pay their respects first to hundreds of senators, congressmen, officers, and notable visitors.

Louisa and John Quincy
refused. Innocently, perhaps, in the beginning—certainly, that was their defense. They would return any visit, they declared, but they did not imagine that they would have to make the first call. But there is little chance they were ignorant of the standard expectations for long. Eliza Monroe Hay, President Monroe's daughter, who often acted as his hostess, had announced that she would make no first calls, inviting criticism that had whistled through the city like a hot breeze. The Adamses, after their experiences in courts, were particularly attentive to local protocol. “Custom is the law,” Louisa had observed in Russia. But custom, in this case, was against them: it put them in a subordinate position and at a disadvantage to the other Cabinet members, who had been in Washington long enough to have established most visiting relationships already.

So they ignored
the rule—even after senators, who were strictest about visiting practices, visited John Quincy to spell out the situation; even after senators' wives started boycotting Louisa's parties. The fallout was quick and prolonged. The president's wife, Elizabeth Monroe, summoned Louisa to the President's House to warn her of the widespread displeasure among Washington wives and to ask her to explain herself. (Elizabeth was not unsympathetic, being caught up in a controversy over visiting with the diplomatic corps herself.) One evening, sixty men and only two women had walked through her door.

That chilly night
in February, the ratio was hardly more balanced. Harrison Gray Otis, a senator from Massachusetts—a rich man who'd hosted the Adamses many times in his Beacon Hill mansion, but who had fallen out with John Quincy over his desertion of the
Federalists—looked around Mrs. Adams's tea party, quietly amused. There were “men without numbers,” he wrote to his wife in Boston (with more than a note of self-satisfaction), “and but
few
ladies.” Mrs. Adams, he added, “could not conceal from me her chagrin.” She had looked at him with an extremely innocent expression. There had been a misunderstanding, she explained. The ladies must have been unaware that there would be dancing!

But Otis did not take her to be a fool. He knew that she must know what
everyone
knew, he told his wife: the ladies were engaged in a standoff with Louisa. John Quincy's refusal was less galling; after all, he was hardly known for his politesse. But the other women were taking “great offense.” This was no small matter. In fact, there would be consequences for John Quincy's career. “Indeed I could hardly have imagined that a man's interests could be so dependent on his wife's manners.”

Louisa knew that too.

 • • • 

W
ASHINGTON
HAD
CHANGED,
but so had Louisa. She was a different woman from the one who had sailed to St. Petersburg a decade before. She had spent her first stint in the United States as a visitor at her sister's residence in Georgetown and as a hothouse flower in her husband's home up north. But she was no longer a young woman content to see herself as helpless. Her parents were dead. She'd survived the loss of her daughter. She'd made herself indispensable to her husband when he had needed her; she had managed a dangerous journey with more fortitude than anyone had a right to expect. She had developed not only keen social instincts but a sense of authority. She was ready to build her own house and more.

Louisa and John Quincy moved into a rented house on the high ground at the foot of Capitol Hill. George, John, and Charles were
once again left behind in Boston (George with a tutor, and John and Charles at Boston Latin School; all would in time enter Harvard), but this time, Louisa made no protest. Probably she was used to these decisions being made without her, certainly she knew about the high importance the Adams family placed on admission to Harvard, and perhaps she accepted the decision as the right course of action. The boys were older—though Charles was still only ten—and these separations were hardly the prolonged absences she had to endure in Russia; she saw them during summers in Quincy and usually over the Christmas school recess and in spring. Still, perhaps the distance was somewhat easier to bear, because she was preoccupied.

For all her insistence
that she lived quietly, Louisa's days were overwhelmed with activity. Relatives and friends came to tour the federal office buildings, to attend the parties, and to watch the debates. They came to seek jobs—or husbands and wives. Dinners and balls, filled with young, restless, ambitious people, were so much a part of daily life that the British chargé d'affaires, Augustus Foster, called Washington “one of the most marrying places in the whole continent.” Some of Louisa and John Quincy's guests stayed for weeks, and some for a few years at a time. Louisa's niece Mary Hellen, Nancy's daughter, orphaned when Walter Hellen died, moved in with the Adamses in 1817, when she was ten, and never left. The children of John Quincy's brother Thomas, who in Berlin had been so dear to Louisa but was now often drunk, were frequent long-term residents. Young friends and cousins from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York also visited, coming to Washington in search of a husband or a good time. The younger ones especially kept things interesting on F Street. At least one broke hearts and started a fight before she left. “Fanny Johnson went off this morning and left our young men in the depths of the
belle passion
, but relieved me by her departure of a load of care and anxiety,” Louisa wrote after the twenty-two-year-old daughter of one
of her Johnson cousins nearly provoked a physical fight among her suitors, including Louisa's own son. “She is a beautiful creature; but the most accomplished coquette I ever saw.”

With reliable suddenness
and severity, Louisa would fall sick and have to take to her bed. The erysipelas that she had contracted in Russia continued to plague her, and she was, as ever, prone to vague ailments and fits of fainting. But it may also be that some of those illnesses were simply a chance to collapse and recover, because she otherwise had little time to rest. There were trips to the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Patent Office, the Navy Yards; there were dinners and teas; there were books to read and music to play; there were invitations to accept and decline and to issue. Louisa also taught school lessons to Mary Hellen—or tried, as Mary rebelled against Louisa's assignments, and Louisa despaired about Mary's uncultivated mind, which made her think of “those vast heaths in England.” She was busy with charitable work, newly fashionable among Washington's elite women; she sat on the committee of the Washington Orphan Asylum. She maintained an extensive correspondence, socialized most nights, and copied John Quincy's personal letters. “Two such . . . industrious honeybees as John Quincy Adams and his wife were never connected together before,” her father-in-law, John Adams, wrote in 1819.

The servants who helped
the honeybees, of course, were rarely acknowledged, except when something went wrong. The household was run by her husband's valet, Michael Antoine Giusta, a former Napoleonic soldier who had served John Quincy since 1814, and her maid, Giusta's wife Ellen, who had come with the Adamses from England. Generally the “subalterns” beneath the Giustas, as John Quincy referred to them, were a source of persistent distress. The German girl the Adamses had indentured ran away, the German boy lasted only three years out of the six and a half years contracted (and only after “his own and his father's repeated solicitations” to John Quincy for a discharge), the chambermaid who had come over with them from
England left to teach at a boarding school. Louisa constantly complained about the quality of servants available for hire. Working for the Adamses was doubtless not easy. There may have been real tenderness between Louisa and her housekeepers or maids, but she presumed that the separation between them was natural, and she referred to servants with a tone of dismissive superiority.

So there was a hectic
household and schedule to manage from the start. But there was also the matter of these visits—which was no small matter at all. Behind this petty issue lay a great one, one that was never far from her mind: advancing her husband's political career. This question of ambition was delicate, of course—for any woman, but especially for one like Louisa. She was an object of suspicion from the start. The old taints still pertained, perhaps had spread even deeper. She was British, or at least not fully American. She had spent years and years in European courts, where, it was rumored, courtiers were debauched and women presumed their own power. She was, furthermore, the wife of a man who was respected but not much liked. And it was true, there was something imperious about her, which the etiquette controversy immediately brought out. “I could not and would not be doomed to run after every stranger that thought proper to come to Washington,” Louisa reported telling Elizabeth Monroe, the president's wife. The matter was “absurd.”