Louisa (38 page)

Jackson told Duff Green to leave Mrs. Adams—and women generally—out of his attacks. But of course in politics there is no stopping anything once started. A year later, Edward Everett gave a speech on the House floor refuting, while at the same time airing, charges that Louisa had presented her maid, Martha Godfrey, for the pleasure of the tsar.

 • • • 

I
T
WAS
the more frustrating, because it could seem to her that she was defending herself and her husband's presidency without her husband's help. Her sense of grievance became clear when her son John got into the scuffle in the Capitol with the lead editorial writer of the pro-Jackson
Telegraph
after the two had traded insults at one of her levees. Louisa was nearly undone by the incident, but she was also proud of her son for, as she saw it, defending her honor. The thin, sickly, doe-eyed woman was at heart a fighter.

She wanted to fight
for the presidency, too, however miserable she was in the White House. She and John Quincy had their same old fight over “electioneering,” after she encouraged him to meet with his supporters. “My journeys and my visits wherever they may be shall have no connection with the Presidency,” he chided her. “I am sincerely sorry for it,” she replied—with more iciness than sympathy. He was, she reminded him, not the only one who would be affected by his reelection; his supporters had something at stake too. Yet he refused to
do much himself to help them or his own cause. He did not give speeches or encourage coordination, unlike Jackson, whose campaign was once again—and now more strongly—running on the strength of the candidate's magnetic personality. John Quincy's supporters were more inclined to disclaim their “personal predilections” for Adams, though they supported his general course. Daniel Webster's brother Ezekiel confessed that he supported Adams “from a cold sense of duty.” He wrote to Daniel, “We do not entertain for him one personal kind feeling.” John Quincy made it hard. Unlike Jackson, who for the most part followed the conventions of not campaigning too openly in public but welcomed any political operatives who came to see him in Tennessee, John Quincy refused to talk politics with hungry men who showed up at his door. A young Thurlow Weed—who would later become one of the greatest and most instrumental political advisers of the nineteenth century, and who had helped orchestrate John Quincy's 1824 win in New York—came to talk to John Quincy intending to work on behalf of the administration, only to be smoothly rebuffed. Later, Weed would bitterly write that President Adams, “with the great power he possessed,” not only failed to recognize those who supported him but failed to make “a single influential friend.”

He had trouble sleeping
, only four or five hours “of not good repose,” and was bothered by indigestion. His hand trembled, his pen wavered, his skin sagged, and his eyes watered. When he took his morning swims, he was shaking his fist at the incoming tide of time. Sometimes he wondered whether life had any point. For his whole life, John Quincy had struggled with dark moods, apathy, and sometimes severe depression. He never suffered so much, though, as he did when president of the United States. He labored under “uncontrolable dejection of spirits,” he wrote in his diary at the end of July 1827, “insensibility to the almost unparalleled blessings with which I have been favoured; a sluggish carelessness of life, and in wish that it were terminated with a clinging to it as close as it ever was in the days of most animated hopes.”

As his cares compounded, his depressed moods grew worse. John Quincy's doctor recommended a vacation, telling him “to doff the world aside and bid it pass; to cast off as much as possible all cares, public and private, and vegetate myself into a healthier condition.” That ran counter to all of John Quincy's instincts. What he felt he needed was “a habit of useful industry.” He had imagined difficulties, controversies, and what his father had liked to call stormy seas, to be sure, but not this drifting.

He looked forward to the day when he could exit the President's House, but he made no move to pull his name from the running. He distrusted Jackson's views and vision for the country, and it was humiliating to lose. Only one president had ever been expelled from the office after only one term; that man, of course, was John Quincy's own father.

It was difficult
for him to see, with his reflexive aversion to campaigning, that the new reality he couldn't accept in the election was the same reality that stymied his ambitious agenda. Politics were undergoing a fundamental realignment. Sectionalism deepened during a crisis regarding a fraudulent Native American treaty in Georgia, where the governor declared the federal government had no right to intervene. A fall in the price of cotton led to growing resistance to John Quincy's tariff reform efforts—and an explosion of anger toward the administration after the so-called Tariff of Abominations was passed in 1828. The solidarity among the slaveholding South that had begun to take shape during the Missouri debates was hardening. John Quincy's ambitious national economic program, Southerners especially felt, was only a prelude to the federal government's usurpation of states' rights. To some slaveholders, the implications were dire. If the federal government could exercise such power, who was to say it would not use it to interfere with slavery? Adams's own vice president, Calhoun, was working openly against the president. Outside of the obstructionist Congress, John Quincy's economic program had some support, but distrust of Washington was growing. Populist appeals
gained traction. Farsighted politicians like Martin Van Buren built populist coalitions held together by little other than their dislike of the political elite—and John Quincy in particular. In the 1828 election, every state but Delaware and South Carolina would choose their electors by popular vote. It was a contest between visions of a country, one that appealed to betterment through national policy versus one that appealed to the virtue of common men. John Quincy held white-knuckled on to the idea that the election was a referendum on his economic program and not on the candidates' organizations or personalities. But the old ideal of disinterestedness, the one John Quincy had inherited from his father's generation, was dead.

John Quincy was actually
a cannier political animal than he allowed himself to be, which tore at him. He may have done nothing overt to promote his campaign, but he did nothing to stop it, either, and that became one more thing that oppressed him. It could be, though, that while he couldn't see the full scope of the transformation of American politics, he could see one aspect far too well: the increasing sectionalism of the country, undergirded by the awful existence of slavery. Disinterested or not, he faced an uphill battle: the three-fifths compromise put him, as a Northerner (and a Yankee at that) and as an antislavery figure, at a huge disadvantage. “I fell, and with me fell, I fear never to rise again the system of internal improvement by national means and national energies,” he would write a decade later. In his place, as he came to see it, would be a series of presidents who would “rivet into perpetuity the clanking chain of the slave.”

 • • • 

P
ERHAPS
THE
SUBJECT
of slavery was more personal, perhaps it hit closer to home, than he ever dared admit to himself or anyone. At the Adamses' house on F Street, and later in John Quincy's White House, there may have been a slave or two, although he or she was probably not owned by John Quincy. “I abhorred slavery and did
not suffer it in my family,” John Quincy would tell an abolitionist in 1832, and John Quincy was not one to lie. But this distinction may have been semantic.

On February 23, 1828, John Quincy wrote in his diary, “Holzey, the black boy belonging to Johnson Hellen and who has been several years with us, died about five o'clock this afternoon. He has been sinking several months in a consumption.” It is possible that “belonging” might have meant that he was Johnson's hired servant, but there is evidence to believe he was a slave. Johnson Hellen, who frequently lived with the Adamses, was a slaveholder; according to the 1830 census, he had two slaves. The day after, February 24, Holzey was buried. John Quincy marked the occasion with a quiet note of grief. In memoriam, he added lines from Horace about how death strikes all men equally:
“Pallida Mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / Regumque turres. / Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam.”
Pale death beats with an impartial foot the inns of paupers and the towers of kings. The sum of brief life forbids us to begin a long hope.

The president's mourning, such as it was, occurred privately. So did his thoughts about slavery. He was known to oppose the institution, but he did nothing to help the antislavery cause as president. He even ignored letters on the subject. He may not have felt he could address it. He considered himself the tribune of the whole country, including the slaveholding South. He also needed the support of some slaveholding states and some slaveholders (Henry Clay, for one). Southerners and proslavery advocates already viewed him suspiciously, accusing him of claiming powers that would lead to the abolition of slavery. John Quincy was also remarkably good at compartmentalizing and rationalizing. He lived, after all, in Washington, where slaves were everywhere—in pens, in the shops, running errands on the Capitol floor, and working at places like Gadsby's Hotel, which hosted John Quincy's inauguration ball.

John Quincy, though
, may have helped set free at least one slave
while president, a slave who may have lived at least for a time in the White House. Two days after Holzey died, on February 25, 1828, Mary Catherine Hellen and John Adams were married. That same day, her wedding day, Mary filed papers liberating a slave named Rachel Clark. Rachel may have been the young girl who was listed as living in the Adams household on F Street in 1820. It's possible that Rachel did not live in the White House; perhaps she lived with one of Louisa's sisters (most likely Adelaide Hellen, whose slaves included Jenny and Joseph Clark). But it is also possible that when John Quincy later told an abolitionist that he “did not suffer” slavery in his family, he was thinking of Mary's emancipation of Rachel. Perhaps, though it can only be speculated, he made the manumission of Mary's slave a precondition for her marrying his son.

He never mentioned
Rachel Clark's manumission in any extant diary or letter. Nor did anyone else, except the clerk who recorded it. In his diary, John Quincy recorded in great detail what else had happened that day of the wedding: his walk at daybreak, his sitting for a portrait, his visitors, his tasks, and the names of the twenty or so friends and family who gathered at the President's House to witness the marriage. “The servants of the family were likewise all present,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. Whether “the servants” included Rachel Clark is not known.

John Quincy had strongly opposed John and Mary's marriage. But for whatever reason, John Quincy seems to have been particularly happy the day of their wedding. “May the blessings of God Almighty rest upon the Union!” he wrote in his diary. To the astonishment of all, he danced a reel.

Might Louisa have
also pressured Mary to emancipate Rachel? Possibly. Louisa was opposed to slavery in the abstract. But her feelings were more anxious and conflicted than her husband's. Before she was an Adams, she was a Johnson, after all—and while she lived in the White House, she was obsessed with defending the Johnsons. The
Johnsons owned slaves. Louisa did try to whitewash the extent of their connection to slavery. In “Record of a Life,” she mentioned being horrified and uncomprehending at seeing how young Kitty Carroll of Maryland treated her slave, “as we had always been severely punished for improper conduct to Servants this matter produced many unpleasant scenes while [Kitty Carroll] staid between us young people.” She recorded the names of prominent British abolitionists who were friends with her father. But the fact was, in 1800, after returning to Washington, Joshua Johnson owned four slaves. Unless they were sold to offset his financial troubles, Louisa would have seen them when she was reunited when her family in 1801. The 1820 and 1830 census records show that, like most Washington families, the families of Louisa's sisters mixed one or two slaves with hired white and black servants. So, it seems, did her nieces and nephews.

The day after John and Mary's wedding at the President's House, Louisa's sister Caroline and her husband Nathaniel Frye threw a party for the newlyweds. It is possible that at least one slave was on hand, greeting guests or carrying bowls of ice cream; the 1820 census shows that Nathaniel Frye owned a male slave between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five, and in 1830, Nathaniel owned a female slave between ten and twenty-three. Nathaniel himself was not originally a Southerner; he came from a prominent family in Maine. But in Washington, practices were local. Aside from a tiny but increasingly vocal abolitionist presence in Washington, few had the courage or inclination to publicly protest slavery. It touched everyone, and to varying degrees almost everyone, not only Southerners but Northerners, Easterners, and Westerners, the Jacksons and the Adamses, lived with it.

6

E
VEN
MORE
THAN
her husband
, Louisa withdrew in the White House, often pleading sickness and confining herself to her bedroom. For stretches of time, she was almost alienated from John Quincy. “You know how little he communicates with me on any subject at any time and now we only meet at table,” she wrote to Charles. She, who had played such a central role in John Quincy's election, was now living in the White House, as close to the center of power as a woman could be. But she felt herself an exile.

For company, she had music: Mozart, Handel, Vincenzo Pucitta, Thomas Campbell. Sometimes she copied out their scores herself, onto page after page of blank stanzas. She had her sisters and her sons, though worrying about them could bring her pain. And she had her journals, their pages blank, their marble covers stamped with her name. She had, too, her sadness. She sometimes tended its flames as if they could keep her warm. Her self-pity could be outrageous; she lashed out almost with rage against her sense of isolation. She begged Charles to send her something to translate from French, “as I cannot bear the loneliness of my life and you know that my mind is easily absorbed by any pursuit to which it devotes itself.” She wrote
prolifically and began to experiment with forms. She wrote farces and poetry, which she would send to George. She sometimes set her poems at sea.

Thou art gone thou art gone away love

Across the briny sea

Sure, long thou wilt not stay love

And I away from thee? . . .

In the blooming month of May love

Thy bark shall homeward turn

My throbbing heart will pray love

To speed thy blest return

The winds shall swiftly waft thee love

To me and to thy home

And thou no more wilt leave me love

Across the seas to roam.

She was more social
than she claimed to be; her letters are full of references to parties, dinners, and levees. But when she drew on them for her writing, she had the critical distance of an observer. She wrote a work of fiction called “The Metropolitan Kaleidoscope / or / Winter Varieties,” featuring Lady Sharply and her husband, Lord Sharply, a man of “high station” in Parliament. The Sharplys' guests, whom she depicted as British courtiers, were easily recognized public figures—drawn dazzingly with texture, colors, and firm lines.

She sketched a parade of politicians, generals, dandies, ambassadors, and wives. She captured the mighty aspect of Lord Leadall (Daniel Webster), whose dark brow and dark eyes communicated something stormy and brooding, “something vast and powerful; of thought even to madness,” but whose mouth could twitch into a smile like the sun cutting through the clouds. Andrew Jackson and his wife, Rachel, arrived as “Lord and Lady Playfair.” She captured what made them so appealing to so many—and so appalling to others. “Her Ladyship was
an unaffected unpolished friendly woman. . . . Her mind was strong and untutored,” Louisa wrote. “His Lordship was one of those gifted children of nature that as Shakespeare says were
born great.
He was rude and rugged in feature; art had done little to fashion him into order, loose in his morals, above the shackels of fixed principles, daring in his projects, with a deep and profound knowledge of mankind acquired by an enlarged experience and acquaintance with human nature in all its moods and tenses; he was a perfect master of their passions, tho' he took little trouble to control his own. His mind was of the strongest and boldest cast; full of energy, enterprise, and activity, he scorned personal danger.” Life itself was his school, she wrote, and “man was the
book
from which he drew all his knowledge, all his views.” Louisa's portrait of Martin Van Buren, or “Lord Vandyke Maneuvre,” is as revealing as any account of his political cunning. “His Lordship was one of those singular beings who gain a prodigious and unaccountable influence with mankind, without apparently possessing any of those great or shining qualities which we naturally
look
for,” she wrote. Lady Sharply recognized—rightly—that he was positioning himself to join forces with Lord Playfair (Jackson). Yet it was “impossible” for even an enemy to speak to Lord Maneuvre without liking him. “He possessed that greatest and perhaps most subtle of all arts, that, of so naturally addressing himself to the capacity, the taste, and the style of those with whom he talked, that they forgot that he was a
Star
.”

Much went unobserved
in her sketch, as was polite. She left out the servants. Off the page, in the real White House, she counted sixteen of them: a steward, a housekeeper, a butler, housemaids, cooks, coachman, scullion, two “boys” who carried wood and waited on the table, a porter who answered the door and lit the fires. The servants lived in the west end of the attic and in the basement, off a vaulted passage, in little rooms with walls washed white or yellow. The floor of the basement's long hallway, where Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had
kept their slaves, was slick and covered with sand or sawdust grit. The kitchen was a furnace; its fire never went out. The servants began flowing through the house before dawn, knocking on doors to rouse the sleeping, carrying basins of fresh water, ready to light the morning fires. They brushed out the day's clothes, cleaned the night's messes. They cooked and carried dinner, trays, plates. A system of bells would summon them to respond to some request. They rode on the outside of the carriage, in snow and in rain, over dangerous roads, brought inside the vehicle only when injured in an accident. They were half invisible, noticed only when there was a problem.

Some of the servants were black, members of Washington's sizable free black population—though their freedom was limited at best. In 1827, Washington's corporation passed laws requiring free blacks to register with the mayor and get a permit to live and work within the city. There was a citywide ten p.m. curfew for blacks, and a permit was required for free blacks to assemble. They were routinely fingered as suspects in crimes, even when there was no evidence. They were regarded with suspicion and degraded daily. In this, Louisa was no better than most. Her set of instructions for her servants made her prejudices plain. “The coloured females to apply to Housekeeper for permission to go out and to be sent away if they are not at home at ten o'clock at night,” she wrote. This was in accord with the local law—but then she added “or for imprudence or disrespect to any of the White people in the family.” (If there were in fact any slaves, of course, in the White House, they went unacknowledged altogether.)

She had that blindness
. But she was clear-eyed in other ways, as sharp as the name she gave herself in “The Metropolitan Kaleidoscope.” In her fiction, she described herself as Lady Sharply, capturing her character only by contradictions. “She was the oddest compound of strong affections and cold dislikes; of discretion and caprice; of pride and gentleness; of playfulness and hauteur; that I ever met with—irritable one
moment, laughing the next, there was nothing tangible in her character on which you could rest, to censure or approve.”

She also described Lord Sharply, and in doing so, perhaps captured John Quincy better than he has ever been described, then or since.

Lord Sharply was a man of extraordinary talents. . . . His natural disposition was ardent and impetuous, but a perpetual watchfulness over these natural defects, had taught him to master them completely, and it was only those who were the most constantly with him, who were aware that occasions could arise in which the internal volcano would sometimes produce an eruption that was short but violent in its explosion. A fond father, a negligent and half indulgent husband, and utterly indifferent to almost all the other branches of his family, he often appeared to forget or not to know, that others had found obstacles in their path which he had never dreamt of, and deemed things must be so, without considering how or why they were so. He was full of good qualities but ambition had ever been the first object of his soul to attain that object no sacrifice would have been deemed too great.

This was incisive. But it wasn't quite fair. She rejected sympathy; she refused to see, too, how high the stakes were, and how terrible his powerlessness was. She was angry with him. During those years in the White House, he may have been only a half-indulgent husband, but it's safe to say that she was only a half-indulgent wife.

 • • • 

A
S
THE
1828
CAMPAIGN
moved toward its conclusion, Louisa watched, at once wanting to win and wanting release from her miserable situation. Her mood swung back and forth as the year progressed. One day she could be cheerful, and the next listless and depressed. In
September, with the election entering its final pitch, she suffered a “severe attack,” “inflammation of the head pressing on the brain, and also on the heart.” Charles rushed to Washington from Boston and, though he was relieved to find the expression in her eyes as tender and intelligent as ever, she was so weak that she could not sit up. She “was recovered by being most purposely bled, by being almost rolled in mustard and cayenne and by blisters,” Charles wrote to his fiancée, Abby Brooks, who came from a wealthy Boston family. While in Washington, Charles also noticed that his father was making preparations to leave the capital, two months before any votes were counted.

The president's loss seemed a foregone conclusion. When the ballots were finally counted, no one was surprised. Jackson had won 68 percent of the electoral vote and 56 percent of the popular tally. More than a million men voted—about four times as many as in 1824.

John Quincy was
, at times, morose and morbid. His life had been oriented toward one ambition, and now it was gone. When the first day of 1829 dawned overcast, John Quincy saw omens. When he began the morning's writing, his lamp had gone out, “
self-extinguished.
” But he could not totally hide his relief. Nor could his wife. “Although we have lost our main mast and have come in a wreck we are all well in very good spirits and that your father grows so fat he could no longer wear your pantaloons,” Louisa cheerfully reported a week after the election.

She began the year with a sleepless night, sick and in pain. But she began to emerge from her long darkness. Life continued, as life does. On December 2, John and Mary had a daughter, and Louisa and John Quincy became grandparents. Louisa's mood was elated. She was once again her husband's greatest champion and advocate. “Your father is well and growing very fat. It is impossible to behave with more real dignity than he does amidst trials which are sufficient to shake the nerves of a Pallas,” she wrote in December.

At one of their last
Drawing Rooms, in late December, they were
so cheerful that the guests could not believe it. “Mr. and Mrs. Adams have gone a little too far in this
assumed
gaiety,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, noting their “social, gay, frank and cordial manners. What a change.” The doors to the East Room, never before used, were thrown open. A band was hired and there was, for the first time during one of Louisa's White House Drawing Rooms, dancing. The ladies of the Cabinet showed up “in new dresses just arrived from Paris.” Margaret, for one, was suspicious. “Every thing in fact was done to conceal the natural feelings excited by disappointment and to assume the appearance not only of indifference, but of satisfaction.”

But it was not affectation. The weather that winter was unusually freezing and wet, but they were finally able to tell themselves that spring would come.