Louisa (29 page)

She sometimes wrote
to John about books, and writing seems to have prompted her to read more. Soon, she was also writing her boys,
away at grade school and then Harvard, about the books that passed through her hands—as if she were a student just as they were. She read constantly. Her diaries are strewn with quotations and allusions, and letters to her sons are filled with references to books. “I believe you have never read Johnson's Lives of the Poets . . . and the Life of Savage is as interesting as any novel,” she wrote to her son John. She also told him to read Milton, Pope, Dryden, Gray—“not to say anything of Shakespeare, whose works like an everlasting spring pour forth new beauties on every perusal.” To George, who, she worried, was developing intemperate habits, she recommended
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
, which was rife with instruction in common sense and self-discipline. She read Voltaire and Molière in French. She read newspapers and literary journals—the
North American Review
, the
Edinburgh Review
, and
Blackwood's Magazine.
She was not afraid to say what she thought of them, though she would habitually apologize for having any opinions at all. “It is the consciousness of my own nothingness that causes the liberty,” she wrote to her father-in-law.

She tended to read
for moral instruction, as many of her contemporaries did (including her husband), and she preferred clarity to ambiguity. “The principal objection I have to W Scott's novels are that his heroes and heroines are almost always vicious and that he still paints them in so interesting a light that it is difficult even while you are aware of their great defects to restrain your admiration of their few good qualities,” she wrote to Charles.
Humphry Clinker
, by Tobias Smollett, she could admire, but she disapproved of the author's own character. She cautioned her sons against novels, disapproving of their “mawkish sensibility.” Yet she also had a strong preference for naturalness over artifice, and found herself bewitched even by books she might not have liked to approve of. One night, she became so engrossed in
Ivanhoe
that she forgot to get ready to go to dinner at the French minister's.

Her reading was
as voracious as it was undisciplined. It included all kinds of texts, even political philosophy. In 1819, John Adams told her
to read ancient and modern philosophy. In fact, she responded, she already had. Her reply was playful, apologetic, and winning. Political philosophy? Her mind was not “sufficiently strong, or capacious, to understand, or even to comprehend” it. “You certainly forgot when you recommended it, that you were addressing one of the weaker sex, to whom Stoicism would be both unamiable and unnatural, and who would be very liable in avoiding Scylla, to strike upon Charybdis—or to speak without metaphor, to rush into skepticism.” But almost as if to prove herself wrong, she went on: “The systems of the Ancients have been quite out of my reach, excepting the Dialogues of Plato which Mr A. recommended to me last year, and which I read attentively. With the modern philosophers, I have become more intimate. . . . Locke has puzzled me, Berkley amused me, Reid astonished me, Hume disgusted me, and Tucker either diverted me or set me to sleep.” In the end, she wrote, “I have never seen anything that could satisfy my mind, or that could compare with the direct and exquisitely simple doctrines of Christianity.” She would go on reading in this manner for the rest of her life: Hogarth, Plutarch, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Dickens, travelogues, trashy fare, histories of the English Revolution. She would meditate upon genius. She would write of “instances of instability” that set ideas spreading like fires.

Motherhood was her excuse
to study books. What she did, she would justify herself, she did for her sons. It was socially acceptable, even virtuous, for a mother to concern herself with her children's educations, though not her own. So when she translated Plato's
Apology
from the French, it was so that she and her boys could be “occupied in some measure in the same studies.” When she asked Charles to teach her Latin, she excused the unfeminine behavior by claiming it might teach him humility to have such a poor student. She may have believed these things; certainly, she had no choice but to say them. Even John Adams, who did more than anyone to encourage her, expressed his
“curiosity, astonishment, and excuse me when I say risibility” when he received her translation of Alcibiades.

She was by no means
a feminist (a word that did not yet even exist), but she was curious about those who fought for women's rights, and perhaps even a little tempted toward radicalism. She read Mary Wollstonecraft, whose book
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
had caused a sensation—and an extraordinary backlash in the United States when it had appeared more than twenty years before—and she admired it. She urged it on her son Charles. “I hope you benefited from your study of the rights of women,” she told Charles, “which [in] spite of the prejudices existing against Miss Woolstoncroft [
sic
] are undeniable.”

Her writing strengthened
as she read and wrote more. She started to write all the time. “It is singular that I who have always had such a decided dislike to writing should all of a sudden have to launch out quite on a large scale,” she told George. Her voice sharpened, becoming more particular and vivid. “Your style in writing is known to be that of the most animated conversation; but in this instance it seems to obliterate the ideas of time and distance and to bring me near to you,” George responded to one thoughtful and honest letter, “not in the mood of mortified affection and extinguished expectation, but in that of gratified feeling arising from a sensible confidence imparted by a superior.”

While her sons were in Boston, letters gave her a way to remain close, while their absence gave her mind the space to roam. She did worry about them. No doubt the lectures about smoking and eating vegetables she sent them could grow tiresome. She was anxious about Charles's confidence, especially after he entered Harvard at the young age of fourteen in 1821, and she worried about George's diligence and romantic sensibility as he approached and passed twenty years old. She would caution John, who was prone to finding trouble, against his quick temper—a characteristic, she was quick to say, she shared. But
she also encouraged them, and she learned along with them. Through them, she entered into a more rigorous intellectual environment. As they grew, with her guidance, she grew along with them. The eldest, George, especially seems to have cherished her letters.

So did her father-in-law
. He needed her as much as she needed him. Abigail's death had undone him. His best friend was gone. “The dear partner of my life for fifty four years and for many years more as a lover, now lyes in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to,” he wrote to Jefferson in 1818. Louisa was not Abigail, but she was a smart woman with whom he could exchange warm and wandering letters. Louisa brought out the best in John, as he did in her—the full force of his intellect, his humor, and his charm. “Your last three journals are three pearls,” he wrote to her in 1819. “I have not been able to thank you for either untill now, they bear the form and impression of the age. They let me into the characters of statesmen, politicians, orators, poets, courtiers, convivialists, dancers, dandys and above all, of ladies, of whom I should know nothing, without your kind assistance. I am a little surprised at the depth of your speculations—upon oratory, phylosophy, and policy. But I need not be, when I recollect, who you are, where you have been, and who is your husband.” Four years later, he wrote to her, “Your journal is a kind of necessary of life to me. I long for it the whole week.”

“
Write without fear
and put down on your paper what you think, without thinking of what you must say,
” Louisa told her niece Mary Hellen, drawing firm lines beneath her words, “and your letters will be most acceptable.” It was true of herself. More and more, the woman who had been afraid to write for so long had begun to write without fear. “What is the reason I am no longer afraid to write all that passes in my head or in my heart to use,” she wrote to her husband when she was traveling without him. “Time was when my pen refused to mark the dictates of my fancy and I dreaded a censure where I claimed a friend.” Back in Washington with their eldest son, George, he responded with
the same language his father had used to describe what her letters meant to him. They had, he wrote, “become a sort of necessary of life to George and me.”

These exchanges turned
out to be a necessary of life for her as well. She was like John Adams in some ways. She was neurotic and proud, but she had some self-awareness. She could be caustic, but was also generous. She mocked others but also herself. She wrote wildly, freely—with ritual disclaimers about her poor intellect and lack of interest. Perhaps it was easier for her to write to John Adams, because she always had the sense, from the moment she had met him, that he cared for her and understood her. And perhaps he sensed in her a need to be acknowledged, and a fear of being overlooked. Perhaps he saw that in her because he saw it in himself—and in all men. Decades before, in his
Discourses on Davila
, John Adams had written that what really makes a poor man so poor is obscurity. He is a nobody: “
He is only not seen.
This total inattention to him is mortifying, painful, and cruel.” There were times when Louisa felt that way. But in her journal letters, she stepped into the light, saw, and was seen.

3

T
HERE
WAS
ONE
subject
about which Louisa wrote to John Adams with particular delicacy—although the subject itself was anything but subtle. “Hear much of the Missouri question,” she wrote to him in December 1819, at the start of the debate over whether Missouri would be admitted as a slave state. “Should like to know your opinion upon the right of Congress to stop the progress of slavery as this is a strongly disputed point—We shall hear much of this, this winter.”

She was right about that. There was no avoiding the subject of slavery any longer, however much the members of Congress—and Louisa herself—might have wanted to avert their attention. For years, slavery had been a subject rarely broached inside the walls of the Capitol—a building dedicated to freedom and the rights of men but built by chattel labor. During those long years of silence, slavery had become only more entrenched in the Southern economy, and the slavocracy amassed wealth and power. Now, as the country expanded, the debate over slavery—would new land be slave or free?—was a wedge that was driving the country apart.

“The Missouri question . . . hangs like a cloud over my imagination,” John replied to Louisa.

And it hung over hers. Louisa followed the debates with fascination and fear. She went to the Capitol to watch the arguments, read the newspapers, and struggled with her own assumptions—influenced by her London upbringing, her Southern father, her New England husband, her religion, her compassion, and her reflexive conventional racism. She used crude language to describe slaves. When their characters were called into question—usually through fearmongering by whites—she was always ready to assume the worst. She interacted with slaves all the time. In 1820, about 20 percent of Washington's population was made up of slaves. Slavery was everywhere.

Slaves served Louisa
hot chocolate in Elizabeth Monroe's Drawing Rooms at the President's House. They delivered purchases from stores and drove hired hacks. They brought her groceries. They cleared her plate when she was done with dinner at the Calhouns'. Directly across from their F Street home lived their friends the Thorntons—slave owners. A few doors away from the Adamses' house stood Lafayette Tavern, the hotel “most frequented” by slave traders. A few doors in the other direction stood Miller's Tavern, where, in 1815—only a few years before—a slave had jumped from the third floor to avoid being sold into the killing fields of the Deep South. She broke her back and arms but survived, sentenced to be still a slave. Even antislavery congressmen often lived in boardinghouses that used slaves, and along with room and board, sometimes a “boy” was dedicated to each boarder for the length of his stay. “At day light my boy
Lewis
comes to my room and builds my fire puts a tin cup of water on, to heat and takes out my clothes to brush,” wrote a New York congressman to his wife. (
New York, of course
, didn't abolish slavery until 1827.) Some of these “boys” (who could have been men of any age) may have been paid wages, but some were certainly slaves. “We were waited upon by a slave, appointed for the exclusive service of our party during our stay,” wrote the antislavery advocate Harriet Martineau when she stayed at a Washington boardinghouse a decade later. There were pens
where people were chained and held captive in view of government buildings. Almost everyone in Washington was complicit.

Not everyone who came
to the city remained quiet about the evils of slavery, of course. After an educational reformer named Jesse Torrey saw a group of slaves chained together on the road near the Capitol, he wrote one of the first widely read and sensational antislavery tracts,
A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States.
It included accounts of free blacks who were kidnapped in Washington and sold to planters in Louisiana and South Carolina. Some congressmen—including slaveholders—declared their discomfort with slave pens so close to the Capitol. But their scruples were superficial. There was still no prominent advocate for ending slavery in Congress. Most white Americans at the time, slave owners and antislavery advocates alike, were racist.

There were a few who were starting to see the issue in light of the old Revolutionary ideals, who could see that the existence of slavery not only was something that the country would fight over, but that perhaps it was something it should fight over. John Quincy was one of those.

 • • • 

I
N
THIS
, he was braver
than Louisa and becoming more so—though during the Missouri debates only to a point, and only privately. Years later, John Quincy would devote himself to arresting the spread of slavery and beginning the work toward emancipation. But not yet. As the two sides lurched toward a series of compromises, John Quincy began to reflect on slavery and the fate of the Union in his diary—repeatedly, passionately, and at length. At a Cabinet meeting, he expressed his qualified, reluctant support for the first Missouri compromise, brokered by Henry Clay, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, to preserve the balance of slave and nonslave states, and forbade slavery in the territories north of 36°30' north latitude.

In his diary
, John Quincy raised a personal challenge. He called slavery “the great and foul stain upon the North American Union” and raised the question of its “total abolition.” “A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would be certainly necessary. . . . The Union then might be reorganized upon the fundamental principle of emancipation. This object is vast in its compass, awful in its prospects, sublime and beautiful in its issue. A life devoted to it would be nobly spent or sacrificed.” He may have been echoing, faintly, a pair of widely circulated articles in the
Edinburgh Review
about Thomas Jefferson's
Notes on the State of Virginia
. “Every American who loves his country, should dedicate his whole life and every faculty of his soul, to efface this foul stain [of slavery] from its character,” the reviewer wrote.
But John Quincy
was not merely aping someone else's opinion. He sometimes could have difficulty empathizing with the troubles of those in his immediate family, yet he was often the only one among them who stopped to consider the humanity of blacks. He saw how they were punished for crimes they did not commit and subject to injustice without recourse. He keenly felt the inhuman treatment of slaves, who were forbidden the most basic human rights—“from the bed, from the table, and from all the social comforts of domestic life.”

Still, John Quincy
was only beginning to connect the inheritance of Revolutionary ideals to the project of emancipation. For the moment, he had to consider politics, including his own future. He was “a servant of the whole Union,” he told Senator Ninian Edwards of Illinois, for whom “there was neither East, West, North, or South to my duty or my feelings,” whatever his views on the immorality of slavery. He remained aloof, not wanting to jeopardize the passage of his Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, already rabidly denounced by Henry Clay (not incidentally, a slaveholder) for setting the western boundary without including slaveholding Texas. Nor did he want to antagonize slaveholders who might support him in the 1824 election. He instructed
Louisa to write a message to his talkative, frank, impolitic father, asking him to decline answering any questions on the subject from others, “as he does not think the time has arrived in which he can with propriety take a part in the business.”

She was relieved
at his cautious position. Really, she wanted to avoid the whole issue. At a party at the French minister's on the night of March 4, 1820, the day after the compromise bill granting Missouri statehood was passed by Congress, she found herself on the spot. “[T]here was an odd sort of crowing tone among some of the members of Congress which seemed to aim at my husband, and some queer questions were asked me concerning his opinion on the Missouri business which I could not understand,” she wrote to the old president John Adams. “I have never pretended to understand the question in all its bearings as a political one; in a moral and religious point of view and even as a gross political inconsistency with all our boasted institutions, liberty, and so forth, it is so palpable a stain that the veryest dunce can see it and understand it. . . .” She excused herself, but she, no dunce, knew better.

 • • • 

H
ER
DISCOMFORT
may
have been complicated by more personal reasons. The Johnson family—her family, the name she so fiercely protected—was a slaveholding family. Louisa's father had owned slaves. So did her sisters' husbands and, most likely, her brother in New Orleans. There may also have been at least one slave living in her own house. The 1820 census showed a female slave under the age of fourteen living in the Adams residence. In light of his antislavery views and his statement later that he never owned slaves, John Quincy almost certainly did not own the person himself; he may have rented her from her owners and paid her (and, likely, her owner) wages—a common practice in Washington at the time. Or she may have been
owned by a member of the extended family who was living with them at the time.

The most likely
possibility is that the slave belonged not directly to Louisa and John Quincy but to Louisa's young niece Mary, the daughter of her older sister Nancy. Mary's father, Walter, had been a slaveholder, and in 1816, the executor of Walter Hellen's will allotted Mary approximately $7,600 from stock and “cash, furniture and negroes.” Mary may have brought a slave, a child, with her when she moved in with the Adamses. In the South, it was common for a wealthy white girl to be “given” a domestic slave about her age; it was thought to cultivate the slave's loyalty. Mary would later manumit a slave named Rachel Clark—but not until 1828, a decade after she moved in with Louisa and John Quincy. In 1834, Louisa's younger sister Adelaide, who married Walter Hellen after Nancy's death, freed a slave named Jane Clark, whom the Adamses called Jenny, and who “lived sometimes with us,” John Quincy later wrote. Jane also had a son named Joseph, whom Adelaide sold, and who was taken by his new owner to Arkansas.

John Quincy later insisted
that he did not tolerate having slavery in his family, but it seems that he did tolerate having slaves in his house—and, considering that he would consider Mary a kind of daughter, his claim was only technically true. He was like most whites living in Washington, making tortured distinctions between principle and practice. This would become harder; he would become braver—but not until later. Louisa was even less troubled by these compromises than he. She was opposed to slavery as an idea; she openly referred to it as an injustice. But she did not want to fight slavery herself. She wanted to close her eyes and have the debate disappear. She avoided using even the word “slavery.” “It is really a pity that the Southern interest should have renewed a subject altogether so inimical to the peace and quiet of the country,” she wrote to John Adams. “It is calculated to rouse a spirit which will prove more difficult to exorcise than
all the ghosts who have been doomed to the Red Sea.” Like many others, she would prefer the perpetuation of one of the worst atrocities in modern history for the sake of peace and quiet—peace for whites, that is, since there was no such thing as peace for those under the threat of the lash.

There may have been a psychic cost. The subject exhausted her to talk about; it also exhausted her to avoid it. As she wrote to John Adams that night after the French minister's party, the Missouri Compromise still on her mind, “Returned home very weary tired of myself and all the world.”