Louisa (44 page)

He agreed that it was a woman's “duty” to attend to her “sphere,” and he admired women who did. But why should she not be allowed to expand it? “Why does it follow that women are fitted for nothing but the cares of domestic life? For bearing children, and cooking the food of a family? Devoting all their time to the domestic circle—to promoting the immediate personal comfort of their husbands, brothers, and sons?”

John Quincy is now remembered for that speech and those good sentiments. That was not, however, the only thing he said on the matter.

When a woman
from Hingham wrote to thank him for defending the right of women to petition, he pointedly said he was doing it to honor his memory of his
mother
—and really, only his mother
.
“My intercourse with the sex, since that time has not left me ignorant of the imperfections in which they participate as a portion of the human race nor of the frailties incidental to their physical and intellectual nature,” he wrote. “My attachment to them is not enthusiastic, nor have I ever been remarkably exemplary in the observance of those delicate attentions.”

In early September
, on a late summer day, Louisa went with John Quincy to a picnic that the women of Quincy were giving in his honor. He made a short speech there “on the right of women to petition, and on the propriety of their taking a part in public affairs,” John Quincy wrote in his diary afterward. He damned the idea with his praise.

There was not the least danger of their obtruding their wishes upon any of the ordinary subjects of legislation, banks, currency, exchange, sub-treasuries, internal improvement, tariffs, manufactures, public lands, revenues and expenditures, all which so profoundly agitate the men of the country; the women, so far from intermeddling with them, could scarcely be prevailed upon to bestow a thought upon them; and, knowing that, it was scarcely consistent with civility so much as to name them in their presence. I now alluded to them only to discard them. But, for objects of kindness, of benevolence, of compassion, women, so far from being debarred by any rule of delicacy from exercising the right of petition or remonstrance, are, by the law of their nature, fitted above all others for that exercise.

What must it have
been like for his wife to hear these words? As he spoke, Louisa sat beneath an evergreen arch in the park, shaded from the warm sun by the leafy lime trees. What did she think of what she heard? Did she nod in agreement—or did her thoughts turn to her sister Kitty, who, that spring, “was full of the Sub Treasury; and rattled off
finance
, as I rattle nonsense; until I actually stared at the extent of her knowledge”? Did she remember the letters she had written to her husband the previous year, when she was in Washington and he in Quincy, in which she'd given regular updates on the run on the banks during the Panic of 1837, reporting minutely the flurry of activity at the Treasury as it tried to keep enough cash on hand? “I am told by good
authority
after three anxious Cabinet meetings and it is generally
asserted
and that very loudly that if the bank can get on until the first of the month it will not then be able to meet in payments for government and that the Treasury will stop,” she added. Did she recall the discussion at the dinner table about Mr. Lawrence's “fine speech” on the “tariff question” in the House? Banks, currency, subtreasuries,
tariffs—these were not her areas of expertise, to be sure. She was the first to say so. But to suggest, even rhetorically, that she had never bestowed a thought on these subjects—it was as if John Quincy had said that his own wife's letters did not exist.

She defended herself
. In 1841, as Southern members fought to tighten the gag rule and her husband fought to end it, Louisa would write a short statement, “On the Right to Petition.” The ideas she expressed were in line with what her husband had said about the right of women to petition Congress. What was different was that she took the initiative—and claimed the right—to say it herself, instead of letting her husband simply speak for her. She sent her statement to Charles. “You will think that I am turned a crazy polititian and I believe I am my dear Charles,” she wrote, “but as no eye sees what I write; and no one knows that I have written this, I only send it to you that you may understand my feeling which is that all may petition although all petitions cannot be granted.”

 • • • 

H
ER
THOUGHTS
ABOU
T
GENDER
, as they had been for decades, remained fraught as she tried to work through them. In her view, the genders were equal but separate. Implicitly, she recognized the fluidity and fragility of the differences—but feared the idea. She suggested that even adopting, for only a few hours, the outward trappings of a man might taint a woman, that to put on a pair of pants “unconsciously injures the manners” of a lady. When Charles's spirited, athletic, tomboyish daughter Louisa was to act in a school play, for instance, her grandmother wrote and begged her parents not to let her take a male part. “The masculine stride, the bold look” were not merely unbecoming, Louisa wrote: they might “destroy the timid and blushing graces of a girl of sixteen on her entrance into a world, where feminine elegance has assumed a positive and fixed standard.”

Essays like one
in a popular magazine of the time, the
Portfolio
,
made the warning plain: “A woman always loses by attempting to be a man.” The social pressure to embody a strict model of femininity was enormous and growing more intense as the century progressed. “Warlike women, learned women, and women who are politicians, equally abandon the circle which nature and institutions have traced round their sex; they convert themselves into men,” read an essay in
Boston Magazine.

Nothing less than
the social order seemed to rest on the maintenance of this well-defined “circle.” Those who lived outside its bounds, like the French writer and intellectual Germaine de Staël, “could not be fitted for the common relations of society,” Louisa wrote. De Staël's extraordinary talents made it impossible for her to “bear the shackles and restraints which man for his own comfort necessarily imposes, and would soar above that social and moral compact, which forms the strong basis of family union, peace, and happiness.” However strange it sounds now, Louisa believed that “shackles and restraints” were necessary for those common goods.

Where did that leave
women? At times her view was dark. There were men, Louisa wrote, who made marriage a “badge of slavery.” In 1839, she would use the phrase “
chains
of wedlock” in a negative, nervous tone. She was writing about a divorce suit in Connecticut; a minister had struck his pregnant wife. Connecticut courts had one of the most equitable traditions for granting divorce—and yet the woman still lost her case. “I do not by any means wish to favour my sex!” she wrote, “but when we reason fairly we must be aware that the world adjudges all the weakness and the frailties of temper, as on our side—We know that the power the property and the law are all on the other, as well as publick opinion; which created by man is, always in favour of himself. . . . In the full and almost unlimited possession of power [men] rarely tie up their own hands!!!”

Louisa did not want to be radical. She did not want to stand against public opinion. She wanted to reflect the consensus. She wanted to fit
in. Her own logic agonized her. “I and all the Ladies cry out against my doctrines on this point! they say forbear, and be silent!!”

She was conflicted, then—but her respect for strong women was unshakable, no matter how hard she tried to deny it. In her writings, she sketched portraits of women in quick, broad strokes, with all the chiaroscuro that she used to paint herself. Women who had strongly “masculine” characteristics, including some of the most formative figures from her life, fascinated her. Elizabeth Hewlett had been eccentric, with a strong mind and stronger passions, but also another mother figure. Her favorite teacher at school, Miss Young, had grown up studying Greek and Latin and dressed like a boy. Lady Carysfort had been masculine and forbidding, but also a second mother. Louisa was drawn to them and yet insisted that she was not like them.

It wasn't only
that Louisa shared the common assumption that “masculine” was a derogatory way of describing a lady. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a woman's strength was said to be coupled with—in fact dependent on—her weakness. Intellect, appearance, and gender were inextricable in Louisa's world. Women with “masculine manners” had “ugly and coarse” styles and were intimidating. Yet in the same breath, she might describe them as “remarkable” and “pleasant and amusing.” She would say that she wasn't up to the level of conversation of strong-minded women, but when she wrote of meeting the bluestocking Hannah Adams, after her arrival in the United States, she described with pride sending Hannah into a reverie of “poetic fervor” while speaking of Rousseau. “I really felt proud to have had the power to draw out a mind of such strength and such purity,” Louisa wrote.

How should a woman think, speak, feel, behave? Louisa was of two minds, and she never could sort out which one was her own. “There is generally a want of feminine grace and sweetness, in these showy, strong minded women; which produce fear in us lesser lights: and this has always been my first impression on becoming acquainted with
them,” she later reflected, “yet they always appear to me to be
what God intended woman to be
, before she was cowed by her master
man
.”

For Louisa to make something of herself, then—to assert herself, to try to understand how to be, to insist that she, too, had rights, had a story—was brave. The struggle for women to claim rights and defend their abilities had barely begun. At the end of 1838, a few months after John Quincy's speech in the park, the correspondence between Louisa and Sarah Grimké ended. So, for the most part, did the Grimké sisters' agitation for women's rights, at least for the moment. Pressure from within the abolitionist movement cut it off; it was considered a distraction from a more important cause. The Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention in the United States, was still ten years in the future.

 • • • 

H
OW
HARD
it was
for her is reflected in the periods of silence she sometimes went through—or in her destroying what she wrote. For months after the abrupt ending of her correspondence with Sarah Grimké, Louisa stopped writing altogether. She was depressed and scared. Assassination threats against John Quincy continued to arrive. “Some Gentlemen in this section are ready and anxious to pay a large premium for the head of J.Q. Adams,” wrote one man. “If you don't you will when least expected, be shot down in the street, or your damned guts will be cut out in the dark,” wrote another. “I shall be in Washington next March and shall shoot you.
Remember!!!
” “On the first day of May next I promise to cut your throat from dart to ear.”

When she did
pick up her pen, she repeatedly tried to persuade John Quincy to stop his antislavery activities, however “just” his cause. Her warnings and fears had no effect. When he took on the case of thirty-six Africans from the Mende tribe who had been kidnapped into slavery and rebelled aboard the ship
Amistad
, she tried to talk him out of it, believing it would bring the family more distress. Charles
agreed. After John Quincy successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court, he rebuked his son. “The agony of soul that I suffered from the day when I pledged my faith, to argue the cause of the Africans, before the Supreme Court, till that when I heard Judge Story deliver the opinion and decree of the Court, was chiefly occasioned by the reprobation of my own family, both of my opinions and my conduct, and their terror at the calamities which they anticipated they would bring upon
them
,” John Quincy wrote. But his ancestor, Saer de Quincy, had been one of the men who signed the Magna Carta, the Charter of Liberties, six hundred years before; John Quincy had seen the signature on the document in the British Museum himself. There was more to life than personal comfort, he told his son. Freedom was worth fighting for.

He must have
said something along the same lines about Saer de Quincy to Louisa, because that month she signed a letter “
Louisa Catherine De Quincy Adams.
” It was a joke, but perhaps it hid a sting. Who, after all, was she, with her terror at calamities, set against the great Saer de Quincy, with his petition against the king?

She kept to her
room, returning no visits. On New Year's Day, 1840, 240 visitors came to pay their respects to the ex-president and his wife, but Louisa stayed upstairs. She left the house only three times that winter. Her granddaughter Fanny, Mary's daughter, died in November, only nine years old. When Mary Louisa fell sick soon after, Louisa was desperate with worry. Her granddaughter's life, she wrote, was almost a part of her own.

She had no one to talk to, she wrote, because she was “imbued . . . with strange and singular opinions.” Time passed slowly and heavily. Her correspondence, at least that which survives, trailed off, and she wrote only occasionally in her diary—her thoughts dwelling on religion, Plutarch, Shakespeare. She partly absolved Lady Macbeth from Macbeth's crimes; it was
his
ambition and guilty conscience that motivated his actions and warped his mind, before he had even seen his
wife. Her husband had once used the phrase “secret history” in a letter to her to describe the backstabbing and double-dealings of the Monroe administration. She used the phrase now. “Were we to look deeply and minutely into the secret histories of men; how constantly we should observe this same retributive justice—It is one of the most remarkable facts; and it has caused me deeply to reflect upon its repeated and continued recurrence.”