Louisa (33 page)

That January night
, the decided enemy became the best friend. As a particularly capable Speaker of the House, Clay had wielded significant influence (and claimed probably more than he could actually offer). Denied the possibility of becoming president, he enjoyed the prospect of playing kingmaker. On January 12, at a dinner hosted by the members of the House of Representatives to celebrate the Marquis de Lafayette, Jackson and John Quincy were among the guests. Someone had the perversity to seat Jackson next to John Quincy with a vacant chair between them. Clay sauntered over and slid into the empty spot. “Well gentlemen,” Clay said, “since you are both too near the chair, but neither can occupy it, I will slip in between you, and take it myself.” Everyone laughed, except John Quincy.

So when Clay called on John Quincy that evening, he came aware of his power and purpose. It may be that some understanding passed between them—that in exchange for Clay's support, John Quincy would give him a plum post in the administration. Something seems to have happened of note, because John Quincy left half the page of his diary describing his meeting with Clay blank. His diary was, he told his oldest son, a “second conscience.” In this case, it appears he wanted to hide something from himself. He never did say exactly what had passed between him and his old rival. Whatever it was, though, didn't matter. No laws were broken. Clay was never going to throw his support behind
Jackson, whom he hated personally and considered a despotic threat to the republic. Clay's outlook, foreign and domestic—especially his ambition for an extensive system of internal improvements—was far more in line with John Quincy's agenda than Jackson's. Clay had already privately said that he would be supporting Adams before he arrived at F Street that Sunday night. The process played out as the Constitution mandated. But that meeting would come to haunt them. Jackson's supporters were crying foul even before the ballots in the House were counted. The appearance of collusion between John Quincy and Clay, the suggestion of backroom dealing, seemed to taint the election.

Did his wife know
what really happened in that meeting? No one defended John Quincy's integrity more fiercely than Louisa. Yet she knew that he would use men as means to his ends, that he would make compromises that he was unwilling to admit. She once wrote about a character she based on him that he saw other men as “the medium through which the great plans he formed for the welfare of his country were to be matured.” He was not above making deals. John Quincy was pushing Maryland and Louisiana. He had Clay and Daniel Webster working on Stephen Van Rensselaer, who had the vote for New York and who sometimes played the fool but was shrewder than he looked. And he was in conversation with Daniel Pope Cook, who had the sole vote for Illinois and who would switch it from Jackson to Adams. As it happened, Cook was a frequent guest at the Adamses' house and a favorite of Louisa's—someone who responded to her charm. Cook also happened to be the nephew of Louisa's sister Eliza's husband.

Louisa held her last tea party on the evening of Tuesday, February 8, 1825—the night before the House vote. Sixty-seven members of the House came to F Street, and “at least four hundred citizens and strangers,” John Quincy noted in his diary. The next day the ballots were cast and counted. The family stayed at home, waiting for news. That afternoon, Alexander Everett came through the snow from the
Capitol to the Adams house to tell John Quincy that he was the next president of the United States.

Exactly what Louisa said
, thought, or did when she heard the news is unrecorded. She wrote no letters that survive; she kept no diary that day. “Your journal which has become a necessary of life to me has failed me for a long time,” John Adams gently chided her at the end of March. In his own diary, John Quincy hardly mentioned her. “Congratulations from several of the officers of the Department of State ensued—from D. Brent, G. Ironside, W. Slade, and Josias W. King—Those of my wife, children, and family were cordial, and affecting, and I received an affectionate note from Mr. Rufus King of New York, written from the Senate chamber after the event.”

That night, she accompanied him to the President's Drawing Room. Andrew Jackson was there, and Andrew Jackson was still the main attraction. From the start, there were signs of trouble, indications of the high price of success. The public's support—even in Washington—was clearly for the Old Hero. A few days later, she and John Quincy attended the theater. The applause that greeted them was smattering. But when the orchestra played “The Hunters of Kentucky”—a song celebrating Jackson's victory at the Battle of New Orleans—the crowd cheered wildly and clapped in time with the song.

On Thursday, March 3
, the night before John Quincy was inaugurated as president of the United States, Louisa was “seized with a violent fever,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. The doctor was summoned and she was bled. She was ill all night, and before daybreak had “a long and alarming fainting fit.” It seems that she was not in the audience at the Capitol the next morning to watch John Quincy take the oath of office. If she had been able to watch him speak, dressed in his plain black suit, or if she heard him practice his delivery the night before, perhaps while she lay ill in bed, she would have heard some quiet, perhaps unintended, acknowledgment of her own important role. “The harmony of the nation is promoted and the whole Union is knit
together by the sentiments of mutual respect, the habits of social intercourse, and the ties of personal friendship formed between the representatives of its several parts . . . at this metropolis,” John Quincy said. Those were the kinds of ties that were knit by his wife.

When the inauguration was over, John Quincy returned to F Street and the crowd followed him there. Louisa roused herself, fastened the hooks of her dress, and went downstairs. Her campaign was over. They had won—but what?

After dinner, while the rest of the family went to a celebratory ball, Louisa went to bed.

1

O
NE
DAY
IN
LATE
A
PRIL
1825,
Louisa sat with blank paper in front of her. She had not written to her son Charles for weeks, not since his return to Boston after the inauguration more than a month before. “Even now I have no subject on which to occupy your attention,” she wrote.

The “perpetual trouble” of the move to the President's House had consumed her. She disliked her new home, and that day she had put herself in a spot where she might dislike it even more. Instead of facing south, overlooking the gardens and the fields sloping toward the wind-shirred river, she looked north, out over the scrubby grass, the tall iron fence, and the locked gate. Instead of going to her own room, she sat in her son John's. It had been a stormy day and the wind was still violent. The loose glass panes made such a noise, she wrote to Charles, that her headache was “fit to split and I am obliged to close with a wish that you had seen our splendid misery.”

She had been astonished to find that the Monroes had left the White House in disrepair. She wandered through the vacant rooms, aghast. The furniture, bought by James Monroe with public funds, was
scuffed and threadbare. Walls were naked plaster. Finishing touches were unfinished. “I believe it would be difficult to find such unassortments of rags and rubbish even in an alms house,” she told Charles. Vagrant drafts blew in and swirled around her. Twenty-five years after the President's House was first occupied, and a decade after the British had burned it, reconstruction was incomplete. Some parts were still closed off. “Like everything else in this desolate city,” she wrote, it was “but a half-finished barn.”

It galled her to think that the public perception of the President's House was so wrong. Closed doors had hidden the dereliction; in fact, the complaint was that the mansion was too magnificent. Louisa decided to have a public viewing, to let the people see the cracks in the walls, the bare fixtures, and derelict furniture—and to shame Congress into appropriating money for repairs. Instead, her open house was called unseemly. “Some people pretend I have done wrong,” she wrote, “but as we are pretty much in the situation of the man and his ass in the fable”—the man who was criticized whether he rode his ass or walked it—“I do not care at all who likes or dislikes.”

The fable was apt
; she was in an impossible position. She and John Quincy could be neither close to the people nor distant. Whatever she did, she would be criticized. Almost any stranger could call on President Adams, almost any morning—and almost every morning, strangers did. The president and his wife were not supposed to consider themselves superior, and yet they
were
socially superior, in a class by themselves. Admiration for the presidency was rivaled by distrust of authority. Everything they did was scrutinized; nothing could satisfy. There was little precedent to follow, no book to govern their behavior, and no one charged with codifying and insisting upon the rules. John Quincy, like President Monroe before him, at least could sometimes refer questions of protocol to his Cabinet. Louisa had no such body to advise her. So, when it came to etiquette, she followed her own course, as she had when she had been the wife of the secretary of state.

Only now, her independence
was more defensive than calculating; her campaign was over. Dignity mattered to Louisa, and she wouldn't apologize for it. She always said that her great sin was pride. She did not call the President's House by its informal name, the White House, as others increasingly did; she was more likely to call it the “Palace.” With the help of her nephew Johnson Hellen, who was among the extended Adams-Johnson clan living with Louisa and John Quincy for a time, she oversaw the arrangements and furnishing, and she had high standards. When her friend Joseph Hopkinson, who was in Philadelphia—where one could find the best of everything—offered to help, she sent long lists. She wanted tables, vases, consoles, and “one handsome sopha table.” She needed a ground glass lamp and a gilded chain so that she could suspend it in the circular summer sitting room. She asked for alabaster ornaments and silk that might match the room's pale green walls. She requested a carriage light in color and “not too small.” She needed a good French cook from Philadelphia for “25 dollars a month but that is the very utmost.”

She tried to preserve some of the formality the Monroes had established. She followed Elizabeth Monroe's custom of holding Drawing Rooms every two weeks when Congress was in session. These were open to the public (or at least what passed for the public—not free blacks, servants, or slaves), and it was easy to get an invitation or to come without one. The parties were impressive. A staff of servants would wait on guests, carrying trays of ice cream, hot chocolate, champagne. The crowds would number among the hundreds or even thousands. The crush of people was oppressive. There were no dances, no recitals, and little of the joie de vivre that had characterized her Tuesday tea parties. Margaret Bayard Smith, who had once been so enthusiastic about the spirited, lovely Mrs. Adams, was not alone in objecting to her “silent, repulsive, haughty reserve” at the President's Drawing Rooms. Louisa herself seems not to have enjoyed these evenings much. Her job was to turn her head from one guest to the next. “Mrs. Adams
I could scarcely see, the crowd around her was so great,” recorded a visitor to one of her Drawing Rooms. It was tiresome, and perhaps it was harder to see the point of these parties than it had once been. Louisa could never acknowledge it, but there was no prize to work for anymore. Sometimes, she would come down for only an hour, excusing herself on account of illness.

She had been instrumental to her husband's election. It may have been difficult, then, to become merely ornamental. And it must have been hard to be criticized for being too visible, to be told to stay in the background. A pattern had already developed, and now it held. When exertion was called for, she was confident and capable. But when she was no longer needed, she no longer flourished. She could actually feel herself wilt.

“
I am utterly weary
of the thankless task of wasting my life and strength for those who neither care whether I live or die provided their purpose is accomplished and I have arrived at that period of life when I believe women mostly meet with the same fate,” she wrote to Charles. She had lost her sense of purpose. She was surrounded by people but felt alone. “
Isolation
is an evil,” she added.

“There is something in this great unsocial house which depresses my spirits beyond expression,” she wrote to George, “and makes it impossible for me to feel at home or to fancy that I have a house any where.”

 • • • 

S
UMMER
BROUGHT
HEAT
, which grew worse as the weeks passed. It was too hot to move, too hot to think. Even John Quincy avoided his writing desk. His diary was reduced to shorthand scratches and scattered notes. His days were overwhelmed by drudgery. Petitioners and office seekers appeared at his door.

He had little goodwill
to draw on in Congress. He had come into office with the support of a tiny majority of state delegations—
including small states like Vermont and Rhode Island, which had as much weight in the House's presidential election as states like Virginia and Pennsylvania, but not when it came to getting his will done. A special session of the Senate called by Monroe just before his inauguration had rejected the treaty John Quincy had negotiated with Colombia to enforce the suppression of the international slave trade—as if to make a shot across the bow of the new president's ambitions. He was dealing with a contested treaty between the Creeks and the state of Georgia, a treaty that would be revealed as fraudulent. Andrew Jackson's 1828 campaign was already being launched in Tennessee. Jackson's supporters in Washington—soon including John Quincy's own vice president, John Calhoun—were also organizing and plotting. The cries of corruption and usurpation against the president continued unabated.

“We are all half dead with the heat,” Louisa Catherine Adams wrote to a nephew in the summer of 1825. Inside the White House, the Adams family drifted “like floating logs upon a glassy stream.”

The weather did
not break as the weeks passed. Louisa tried to shake off her malaise. The Marquis de Lafayette was on his way to the White House, and she knew how much his visit meant to the nation. She had read the speeches delivered in his honor, the encomiums, the newspaper accounts, the florid poems. He was at the end of a thirteen-month triumphal tour of the United States in recognition of his service during the American Revolution, and everywhere he went, he was greeted with paroxysms of patriotism. The upswell of national spirit was unlike anything the country had yet seen. A crowd of eighty thousand had greeted his ship when he arrived in New York; another forty thousand people watched him lay the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument. Fifty years had passed since the Battle of Bunker Hill. A new generation had come into power. The story that Americans told about themselves was passing from memory to myth.

Lafayette was an old friend
; Louisa had visited his estate outside
Paris ten years earlier, and John Quincy had first met him as a boy accompanying his father, John Adams, on missions to France during the Revolutionary War. At any other moment, Louisa wrote, she would have looked forward to his visit with pleasure. But in the intense heat, she groaned to think of the effort required to welcome him and his large retinue. Extra servants needed to be hired, excursions planned, and bedrooms cleared, with her sons, nephews, and servants doubling up to make extra room. Once Lafayette arrived, there would be formal dinner after formal dinner—fixed smiles, quick pleasantries, and heavy silk dresses trapping the humidity and heat. There would be toasts and speeches, fervent expressions of thanks and praise. She would have to take part in it, but without ever seeming to show her face too much. By the time he boarded the ship to sail back to France, she would add her own poem dedicated to Lafayette—written in French—to the pile of panegyrics. But she was self-conscious about seeming forward.

As she waited for Lafayette to arrive, her thoughts moved in eddies around the legacy of the Revolution, pooling in her own past. The stories that were being told and written down left her out. She heard the encomiums to the heroes of the Revolutionary War, saw the pantheon of American idols take shape. Her father had also played his part in the Revolution. Where was he? And so where was she? She had heard and read it said that she was not a real American, that she was British. As she had during her hardest times in Russia, she began to obsess over her father's failure, which she considered so unjust. She told herself that he had been an American hero; she told herself he was being neglected.

She was unhappy. She kept to her room. She thought how she had ended up where she was: the United States, Washington, the President's House, upstairs. She opened her diary and began to write her story down. She called it “Record of a Life.”