Louisa (41 page)

Politics, she finally admitted to Charles, were her “bread meat and desert.”

But family was her
real sustenance. To her surprise, living with John and Mary was a good arrangement. Parenthood had changed the two of them, she thought—made Mary softer, John more generous, and both more tender and attentive. Her grandchildren astonished her. “Louisa is a lovely child with an intellect that almost frightens me,” the girl's grandmother wrote, “wild” but also “everything that can be wished. As to Fanny she is one of those gifted things that seem to have been formed in an existence prior to her birth.”

Within a year, Charles and Abby were having children of their own; they named their first, a daughter, Louisa Catherine Adams. “When I venture to anticipate what the rising generation are to produce,” Louisa wrote to Abby, watching her grandchildren grow, “I am lost in ecstasy of wonder, and entirely deny Solomon's assertion that there is nothing new under the sun.”

 • • • 

T
HE
BIBL
ICAL
ALLUSION
was not unusual. More and more often, her lines would curve into the familiar phrases or parables of Scripture, sometimes spiraling tighter and tighter, until the train of her thought was diverted altogether. Louisa had always had a strong religious impulse, ever since her childhood in Nantes, when she'd fallen to her knees on the stone floor to worship the wretched figure of Jesus on the cross. During her time in the President's House and especially after George's death, her religiosity had become more reflexive. Almost anything—any little provocation, stray comment, or beautiful sight—could trigger her reflections. More and more often, as she grew older, her letters ended in homilies. She would say: only in Christ could she find comfort, only in God forgiveness. Her words would veer toward the formulaic. In contrast to the originality of her own language, her prayers sounded genuine but rote. This was not a bad thing to her. She wanted the strength of inherited tradition, the sense of submitting what she could not understand to the wisdom of something she could never know. Sounding new was not her aim.

No one blinked
when she spoke of God and the superiority of Christianity to all other philosophies and modes of faith. Her fervor, after all, was no hotter than that of many at the time, and not as intense as that of some. An evangelical spirit was sweeping through the country. Men—and some women—were riding from town to town preaching salvation, and calling for people to receive the spirit and to be born again. Revivals crowded town greens; denominations fissured; sects built new communities. Not far from Quincy, people—some of whom she knew—were talking about the inherent goodness of men instead of their natural depravity, about the divine spark in nature, and about the purity of the individual uncorrupted by the corrosions of conventions. It was in this far-flung and fertile religious climate, the Second Great Awakening, that she turned and turned again toward Christianity.

That atmosphere affected
her, but only indirectly, as the weather does. She kept a careful distance. Twice, she went to see the Shakers in New York, and was at once fascinated, admiring, and repelled. She read about Unitarianism and Swedenborgianism, which appalled her; if doctrines undermining the divinity of Christ were adopted, she trembled to think where the subversion would end. Transcendentalism perplexed her; she thought it left “nothing but shadows behind a mass of ideal and imaginative confusion.” But she was hardly a traditionalist herself. She often skipped church and had no special love for ministers of any kind. Her faith had always been idiosyncratic, out of line with almost everyone around her. Raised an Anglican, and with early exposure to the Catholic Church in Nantes, she was inclined toward the aesthetic pleasures of Episcopalianism, the way the forms and language spoke to the heart. In 1837, her confirmation in Rock Creek Church, near the graves of her mother and her sister Nancy, gave her more of a “melancholy satisfaction” than an actual commitment to the Episcopal Church. Living abroad, she had attended whatever service was nearby, if any at all, and her confirmation did not change her flexibility. God was too much of a mystery for men to assume their own answers were true. She was, she wrote, “
bigoted
to no creed.”

She was sure
, though, that she did not like Puritanism, which she thought too cold and stony, or transcendentalism, which was complacent and naive. Once, on a trip by herself north, she found herself seated with a “very
pretty
transcendental companion,” eighteen years old, just graduated from college and about to study in Heidelberg. He “hopes shortly to compete with his great friend Carlysle; his protoype Emerson . . . he is to supersede Kant etc. etc., to correct the errors which have crept in to our religious faith, and to produce a revelation far exceeding any yet discovered by the Christian World,” she wrote, bemused. “We are to be entirely independent of everything but the
divinity within ourselves
.” He was, she continued, pointedly, “a Virginia
aristocrat and a slave holder; and thinks
our sex
very well calculated to write pretty familiar letters; and to live in modest seclusion, taking care of their husbands and children and superintending their servants.” One can easily picture her cocked head and bemused smile.

But there was poignancy, too, in her portrait. His simplicity, sensitivity, and sweetness she found “really attractive and winning: and it recalled to my mind too forcibly the past, where I had so often witnessed the same ambitious yearnings, hoping
so much
, only to be blasted by death and disappointment.” Her mind, it seems, was turning to another young man with a poetic soul—to her son, whom she had loved and lost. Her traveling companion “seems to me to be one of those beautiful visionaries, whose vitality is to be extinguished in the too great brightness of its own blaze, which while it illumines the mind, consumes the body which contains it, and leaves no trace behind.”

She had watched
her children die and mourned the loss of those who had not been born; she had been blasted by death and disappointment. She had seen too much corruption to believe in the perfectibility of man, and she knew too much of her own darkness to believe in the untrammeled divinity within herself. She had experienced worldly success through her husband's career, and had played a real and unmistakable part in it, but that had not brought her real and lasting happiness. She often felt lonely. Her body was forever breaking down. Sicknesses scared her—even though she declared herself, often with a maudlin flourish, ready for death. She was never ready for the deaths of those around her, and terror at the idea consumed her. In 1832, when Louisa was in Quincy, a cholera outbreak killed thousands along the East Coast and gripped the population in terror. In her letters, she returned to the threat of cholera again and again. Other serious ailments threatened the family: scarlet fever, influenza, undiagnosable maladies. John could “scarcely crawl.” Mary was losing weight. “Their suffering is
real
,” Louisa wrote to John Quincy, “ours only imaginary.”

When Louisa was anxious or sad, her religious beliefs became a lens that she turned on herself. She used religion like a magnifying glass, not only to study her own sins but as a tool to start a fire. She would catch a ray of truth and use herself as tinder, as if her soul were like withered grass. It might burn, but from the scorched earth would come new growth.

3

S
HE
HAD
OUTBURSTS
of shame. They came unprompted, at any time. But they had special intensity in the summer of 1834. Instead of returning to Quincy for the summer with her husband, she had stayed behind in Washington to take care of her brother, Thomas, who was sick, and her son John, who was also unwell. The stress of the situation seems to have affected her and provoked, with a vengeance, her self-doubt. When John Quincy wrote to praise her kindness to those around her, she turned against herself, and her response streamed out in a rush of uninterrupted anguish and regret for her “rash acts uncharitable constructions mistakes never properly elucidated and false impressions.” She lamented “the most unhappy effects” that her mistakes had upon herself. Her temper, she wrote, was “wildly irascible and rendered by mortification disappointment and misfortune I fear vindictive.”

John Quincy was gentle in his response. “There is nothing vindictive—nothing unkind—nothing ungenerous in your natural disposition—nor after all that you have suffered in the world or by the world, or even by those whom you loved, and from whom you had the right to expect love in return, after all there is nothing but full and
overflowing kindness and affection in your nature now,” he wrote. His grammar was contorted, as hers had been in her lament, but the thought was clear. Everyone surrounding her knew the goodness of her heart, he wrote—most of all himself.

But she replied that she did not deserve his kindness, and she could not accept it. Only the grace of God could offer comfort, and only by his standards could she be judged. “Truth therefore must be severe: and the leniency that hoodwinks it, is decidedly vicious.” With a wrenched, wrenching tone of submission, she asked for John Quincy's forgiveness for subjecting his temper to so many trials.

Her severity was extreme, but so was the situation she then faced. If she felt the hand of God pressing against her, plunging her down, it is no wonder. Her second son, John, was dying, and she was watching it happen in front of her.

 • • • 

J
OHN
WAS
ONLY
twenty-nine
years old when his body began to shut down. For several years, his illnesses—periods of blindness and weakness, symptoms that his parents, at least, flinched from describing—were hard for doctors to diagnose, but one thing was not a mystery. He was an alcoholic. “I do not know whether vices are hereditary in families,” Charles wrote in his diary the following summer, 1833, while John was visiting Quincy, “but it would almost seem so from the number of examples which one meets with. The Smith blood”—his grandmother Abigail's family—“seems to have had the scourge of intemperance dreadfully applied to it.”

Living with him
, Louisa and John Quincy saw his decline too clearly. Their alarm turned to panic as his health grew worse. John, Louisa wrote to Charles in 1833, was “seldom able to get out of his bed until twelve o'clock and then shuffles about the house wrapt up in his wadded coat.” She and John Quincy tried to help, tried to bolster him
as they never had before. They were clearly scared and desperate. Louisa praised his talents and urged him to try writing fiction, perhaps hoping that he would find the outlet in writing that she had found for herself. John Quincy's hectoring about John's management of the Columbia Mill ceased, even though the mill faltered. Instead, he and Louisa praised John's effort and diligence.

In July 1834, it became clear that their encouragement was not enough. John was giving up and letting go. Louisa asked John Quincy to help her persuade John to leave Washington altogether. “The convenience resulting from the residence of our children in this place for political purposes has blinded us to the truth of its difficulties in so far as it regards any possibility of promoting their personal interests,” she wrote to John Quincy. Her reference to their residence “for political purposes” was as accusatory as it was desperate, of course, and even then she could not resist a jab about the sacrifices the family had made for John Quincy's ambitions. “In no way as you know have I ever been consulted or have I ever participated in the settlement of my children”—a pointed reminder of those many years of separation, against her will, long ago—“but it is impossible for me any longer to remain a silent spectator when I think timely and judicious exertion might save them from years of misery.”

John Quincy listened
. He urged John to leave the District and move to Quincy. “I say it with a heart full of affection and of anxiety,” he wrote on July 23. Three days later, he coaxed his son again. “Nothing could be more easy. . . . Come and stay here the remainder of this unparalleled summer, recruit your health, recruit your spirits, and take time to consider what you shall determine upon for your future prospects. . . . Washington is no place for enterprize. Here so long as I live and have a house over my head, it shall be yours and your children's.”

Faced with few alternatives
, John started to make arrangements to move. But the plans moved slowly, because John's body, mind, and will
were failing. Louisa left for Quincy without him on July 31, bringing her young granddaughter Mary Louisa with her. She brought the child reluctantly; she was having premonitions of her own death. But her conviction that her son would die first was stronger, and she begged John to hurry his departure from Washington, hoping that it might save him. “I shall be perfectly miserable until I hear that you have left the city as the health of yourself your wife and Fanny's make it essential and the season leaves no time for deliberation,” she wrote from Philadelphia. If he needed money, she added, then he should sell her silver breadbasket and waiter and take the money for himself. “Do not hesitate to take this step as they are my own and if they can prove serviceable they will yield me more pleasure and more solid wealth than they ever have since I have owned them.”

To his wife, Mary, she wrote, “Language cannot express the affection I bear him.”

It was too late. On Monday, October 6, a letter arrived from Caroline saying that both Mary and John were very sick. Twelve days later, on Saturday afternoon, October 18, Charles received a letter from Mary's brother Walter saying that John's situation was critical. Charles rode out to Quincy immediately, arriving just after dinner, and gave the letter to his father.

“
Then came the
most trying part of it, the disclosure to my Mother,” Charles wrote in his diary afterward. Her suffering, John Quincy recorded, was “agonizing” to watch. She had been ill herself since the beginning of September and was still unable to walk across the room. Still, she insisted that she would go to Washington, changing her mind only when the doctor arrived to convince her that the trip would kill her.

John Quincy left
the next morning, traveling by a succession of steamboats—including the
Benjamin Franklin
, the boat from which his George was lost—and stages and railway. The trip that had once taken weeks of fast travel now took, though at a punishing pace, three days. Even that was not fast enough. He arrived at his son's house on
October 22 at ten at night. John was already unconscious. John Quincy bent down and kissed his son's smooth, warm brow.

He found Mary upstairs, “emaciated.” When she saw him, she began to cry. “I promised her,” he wrote, “that I would be a father to her and her children.”

Around two in the morning, John Quincy went to sleep. At half past four, he woke up and went to John's room. Caroline's husband Nathaniel Frye was there, closing John's eyes. John was thirty-one years old.

“My dearest, best beloved friend,” John Quincy wrote to Louisa later that day. “Your message to our dear departed child, was faithfully retained by me, to be delivered in all its tenderness and affection, so far as a father's lips can speak the words of a mother's heart.” He had not been able to give it to John in time, but had John been able to speak, “he would repeat to you the same message in almost your words.”

By the time
his letter reached her, she knew what it would say. On October 26, Kitty and William Smith had appeared at the house in Quincy. Charles greeted them. They came from New York, where they had received a letter from Thomas Johnson saying that John was dead. They had traveled to Quincy straightaway.

Charles went upstairs to his mother's room. When she asked who had come to the door, he told her that it was Kitty. He did not need to say anything else; she knew why her sister had come. “She lay in a state of almost stupor for some time,” he wrote in his diary, “followed by a violent and indefinite emotion.”

 • • • 

A
YEAR
LATER
, on Sunday, November 6, 1835, she began another diary. On the first page of the book, she wrote:

Mélanges d'une

Délassée

It means: Miscellaneous writings of one who is refreshed. It seems possible that she may have meant to write
Mélanges d'une / Délaissée
—miscellaneous writings of one who is forsaken.

She began the diary in despair and anger. She opened with a question: “Is it not singular that I can scarcely ever make an observation upon any subject without clashing with the opinions or the prejudices of some one or other?” At church that morning, Mary and Caroline had been appalled when she refused to approach the altar to take communion. They were horrified by her explanation: “I said that I felt afraid to present myself at the Lords table; as there was still a livid spot in my heart.” In that moment, the proxy target of her anger was Andrew Jackson. She was furious with him; she could not forgive him for how his campaign had insulted her and her family, especially John.

“The spirit of forgiveness is angelic,” she wrote, “and I would fain feel as my loved Son did, when four or five months before he died he said, in that tender tone of melancholy enthusiasm. ‘Mother I am at peace with all mankind; I know not the living being that I would harm.'” She was not at peace with all men. John Quincy wrestled with his Christian faith after John's death, but quietly. Christian resignation, he wrote, was “my duty, but is not always in my power.” Louisa, though, felt herself to be in a full state of rebellion—against herself, against others, and so against God.

This diary, unlike most of the ones that she had written before, was not meant for the eyes of others. It was private. It was not a record of her days but of her mind, her confusion, her doubts, her convictions, her desires, her prayers, her hopelessness. Over that long winter and spring, she wrote searchingly about the nature of free will, predestination, and the frailties of human nature. She asked questions and proposed answers. What was the relationship between reason, will, and conscience? “As I understand reason the so much boasted triumph of man is the medium by which will is actuated and conscience the means by which
will
is govern'd.” The next day, a revision: “I should say conscience dictates—
Reason regulates—and impulse is the action of human instinct—always true to human nature but often in contradiction to conscience and reason combined.”

At the start of the diary especially, she wrote as a penitent, sometimes in language borrowed from the psalms. The appeal of those verses to her is obvious, in their expressions of pain, guilt, stain, darkness, light, cleansing, mercy, and redemption. They offered her a way through her pain, an inward path to salvation. By this exercise, she could weave her personal crisis into a larger but still intensely private pattern of confession and redemption. They connected pain of the body with pain of the soul. They helped her say, with the weight of ages but in a lone thin voice, “My God my god have mercy on me.” They gave her a language to describe her “stains of despair”; they gave her words to send up “the cry of my desolation.” She borrowed from the psalms. There was a story there, a story about a king who finds himself divided not only from God but from his family. Echoing the psalms allowed her to praise God even when she was anguished. They allowed for the otherness of God and the loneliness of a woman. If she could submit, she might then be able to transcend. Her prayers let her acknowledge her faith despite her doubt: “Forsake me not in the hour of my distress, and if this is religion teach me not to despise it.”