Louisa Read online

  MY CAMPAIGNE Washington and Philadelphia, 1817–1825

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  THE TYPICAL MIX of lawyers, representatives, senators, military officers, federal bureaucrats, and diplomats—a mingling of neat lace ruffles, dusty bandanas, and splendid uniforms from France and Spain—crowded the rooms at the Adamses’ house on a bitingly cold evening in February 1819. There was an impressive spread of refreshments (Mrs. Adams’s parties rivaled anyone’s for her almonds, cakes, sweetmeats, jellies) and, in one room, a cluster of musicians and an area cleared for a dance. But the guests there that evening saw something strange: there were conspicuously few ladies.

  This was not happenstance—nor a reflection, any longer, of the makeup of the city’s elite population. Washington, half built and then half burned by the British during the War of 1812, was still a sketch of a city in so many ways, but it had transformed since the Adamses had left it after John Quincy’s resignation from the Senate in 1808. Where once there were groves of yellow poplars, now clusters of buildings cropped up; where there had been cattle, now there were people; where there had been mostly men, now there were also women. When the Adamses had lived in Washington at the turn of the century, senators and representatives generally left their wives in their hometowns, but by 1818, one congressman was writing that men who arrived without their wives were “like the odd half of a pair of scissors.” The city had become a desirable destination when the members of Congress arrived for the annual session. More nations were sending diplomats and attachés to Washington; more federal officers—and office seekers—were flocking to Washington; as the country grew, more representatives swelled Congress. And as they did, the social sphere became an arena, where country dances only half distracted from the unspoken maneuvering, and where politesse was a proxy for politics. In the Adamses’ parlor, these forces met and clashed. During Louisa and John Quincy’s absence from the city, the political and social landscape had shifted even more than the physical one, and not to the Adamses’ advantage. Washington was predicated on the rejection of an aristocracy—but it still depended on a hierarchy. Perhaps even more so. The wife of the British ambassador was amazed and amused by how seriously precedence and etiquette rules were taken in Washington. “We minded our p’s & q’s far more than if we had been at one of the P[rince] R[egent]’s scrambles,” she wrote to a friend. While the Adamses had been away in Russia and England, a system of deference and reciprocity, ranking each person by post within the government, had hardened into accepted practice. It privileged Congress over the executive branch—and not only because the people were supposed to reign supreme over the president. In practice, during the early nineteenth century the president was chosen by a congressional caucus, and any hopeful would have to pay court to the kingmakers. The rules of etiquette had adapted accordingly. The administration’s department heads—and their wives—were expected to make the first visit to every notable person, a formalized practice that then permitted more relaxed social relations. Mornings were spent in endless rounds of making and receiving “calls.” The visits themselves were short and usually dull; the routine was repeated ad infinitum. Sometimes a caller would simply leave a small card engraved with his or her name. The person who made the first visit affirmed, implicitly, his or her inferior social position. As the secretary of state, John Quincy was informally considered the president’s heir apparent, but it hardly helped his social status. He and his wife would find that they were expected to pay their respects first to hundreds of senators, congressmen, officers, and notable visitors. Louisa and John Quincy refused. Innocently, perhaps, in the beginning—certainly, that was their defense. They would return any visit, they declared, but they did not imagine that they would have to make the first call. But there is little chance they were ignorant of the standard expectations for long. Eliza Monroe Hay, President Monroe’s daughter, who often acted as his hostess, had announced that she would make no first calls, inviting criticism that had whistled through the city like a hot breeze. The Adamses, after their experiences in courts, were particularly attentive to local protocol. “Custom is the law,” Louisa had observed in Russia. But custom, in this case, was against them: it put them in a subordinate position and at a disadvantage to the other Cabinet members, who had been in Washington long enough to have established most visiting relationships already. So they ignored the rule—even after senators, who were strictest about visiting practices, visited John Quincy to spell out the situation; even after senators’ wives started boycotting Louisa’s parties. The fallout was quick and prolonged. The president’s wife, Elizabeth Monroe, summoned Louisa to the President’s House to warn her of the widespread displeasure among Washington wives and to ask her to explain herself. (Elizabeth was not unsympathetic, being caught up in a controversy over visiting with the diplomatic corps herself.) One evening, sixty men and only two women had walked through her door. That chilly night in February, the ratio was hardly more balanced. Harrison Gray Otis, a senator from Massachusetts—a rich man who’d hosted the Adamses many times in his Beacon Hill mansion, but who had fallen out with John Quincy over his desertion of the Federalists—looked around Mrs. Adams’s tea party, quietly amused. There were “men without numbers,” he wrote to his wife in Boston (with more than a note of self-satisfaction), “and but few ladies.” Mrs. Adams, he added, “could not conceal from me her chagrin.” She had looked at him with an extremely innocent expression. There had been a misunderstanding, she explained. The ladies must have been unaware that there would be dancing! But Otis did not take her to be a fool. He knew that she must know what everyone knew, he told his wife: the ladies were engaged in a standoff with Louisa. John Quincy’s refusal was less galling; after all, he was hardly known for his politesse. But the other women were taking “great offense.” This was no small matter. In fact, there would be consequences for John Quincy’s career. “Indeed I could hardly have imagined that a man’s interests could be so dependent on his wife’s manners.” Louisa knew that too. • • • WASHINGTON HAD CHANGED, but so had Louisa. She was a different woman from the one who had sailed to St. Petersburg a decade before. She had spent her first stint in the United States as a visitor at her sister’s residence in Georgetown and as a hothouse flower in her husband’s home up north. But she was no longer a young woman content to see herself as helpless. Her parents were dead. She’d survived the loss of her daughter. She’d made herself indispensable to her husband when he had needed her; she had managed a dangerous journey with more fortitude than anyone had a right to expect. She had developed not only keen social instincts but a sense of authority. She was ready to build her own house and more.

  Louisa and John Quincy moved into a rented house on the high ground at the foot of Capitol Hill. George, John, and Charles were once again left behind in Boston (George with a tutor, and John and Charles at Boston Latin School; all would in time enter Harvard), but this time, Louisa made no protest. Probably she was used to these decisions being made without her, certainly she knew about the high importance the Adams family placed on admission to Harvard, and perhaps she accepted the decision as the right course of action. The boys were older—though Charles was still only ten—and these separations were hardly the prolonged absences she had to endure in Russia; she saw them during summers in Quincy and usually over the Christmas school recess and in spring. Still, perhaps the distance was somewhat easier to bear, because she was preoccupied. For all her insistence that she lived quietly, Louisa’s days were overwhelmed with activity. Relatives and friends came to tour the federal office buildings, to attend the parties, and to watch the debates. They came to seek jobs—or husbands and wives. Dinners and balls, filled with young, restless, ambitious people, were so much a part of daily life that the British chargé d’affaires, Augustus Foster, called Washington “one of the most marrying places in the whole continent.” Some of Louisa and John Quincy’s guests stayed for weeks, and some for a few years at a time. Louisa’s niec
e Mary Hellen, Nancy’s daughter, orphaned when Walter Hellen died, moved in with the Adamses in 1817, when she was ten, and never left. The children of John Quincy’s brother Thomas, who in Berlin had been so dear to Louisa but was now often drunk, were frequent long-term residents. Young friends and cousins from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston, and New York also visited, coming to Washington in search of a husband or a good time. The younger ones especially kept things interesting on F Street. At least one broke hearts and started a fight before she left. “Fanny Johnson went off this morning and left our young men in the depths of the belle passion, but relieved me by her departure of a load of care and anxiety,” Louisa wrote after the twenty-two-year-old daughter of one of her Johnson cousins nearly provoked a physical fight among her suitors, including Louisa’s own son. “She is a beautiful creature; but the most accomplished coquette I ever saw.” With reliable suddenness and severity, Louisa would fall sick and have to take to her bed. The erysipelas that she had contracted in Russia continued to plague her, and she was, as ever, prone to vague ailments and fits of fainting. But it may also be that some of those illnesses were simply a chance to collapse and recover, because she otherwise had little time to rest. There were trips to the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Patent Office, the Navy Yards; there were dinners and teas; there were books to read and music to play; there were invitations to accept and decline and to issue. Louisa also taught school lessons to Mary Hellen—or tried, as Mary rebelled against Louisa’s assignments, and Louisa despaired about Mary’s uncultivated mind, which made her think of “those vast heaths in England.” She was busy with charitable work, newly fashionable among Washington’s elite women; she sat on the committee of the Washington Orphan Asylum. She maintained an extensive correspondence, socialized most nights, and copied John Quincy’s personal letters. “Two such . . . industrious honeybees as John Quincy Adams and his wife were never connected together before,” her father-in-law, John Adams, wrote in 1819. The servants who helped the honeybees, of course, were rarely acknowledged, except when something went wrong. The household was run by her husband’s valet, Michael Antoine Giusta, a former Napoleonic soldier who had served John Quincy since 1814, and her maid, Giusta’s wife Ellen, who had come with the Adamses from England. Generally the “subalterns” beneath the Giustas, as John Quincy referred to them, were a source of persistent distress. The German girl the Adamses had indentured ran away, the German boy lasted only three years out of the six and a half years contracted (and only after “his own and his father’s repeated solicitations” to John Quincy for a discharge), the chambermaid who had come over with them from England left to teach at a boarding school. Louisa constantly complained about the quality of servants available for hire. Working for the Adamses was doubtless not easy. There may have been real tenderness between Louisa and her housekeepers or maids, but she presumed that the separation between them was natural, and she referred to servants with a tone of dismissive superiority. So there was a hectic household and schedule to manage from the start. But there was also the matter of these visits—which was no small matter at all. Behind this petty issue lay a great one, one that was never far from her mind: advancing her husband’s political career. This question of ambition was delicate, of course—for any woman, but especially for one like Louisa. She was an object of suspicion from the start. The old taints still pertained, perhaps had spread even deeper. She was British, or at least not fully American. She had spent years and years in European courts, where, it was rumored, courtiers were debauched and women presumed their own power. She was, furthermore, the wife of a man who was respected but not much liked. And it was true, there was something imperious about her, which the etiquette controversy immediately brought out. “I could not and would not be doomed to run after every stranger that thought proper to come to Washington,” Louisa reported telling Elizabeth Monroe, the president’s wife. The matter was “absurd.” And it was absurd, but it was also central and—ultimately—useful. President Monroe became involved. The Cabinet met to discuss the Adamses’ visiting practices. But the matter would not die, and John Quincy and Louisa turned it to their advantage. John Quincy was asked to write an official memorandum. In it, he played the part of the simple republican, making it clear that he and his wife were acting in concert. They visited their friends and neighbors as private citizens, not as public figures, and they wanted to avoid making any invidious distinctions of rank among Americans. Their guiding principles, John Quincy added, were an abhorrence of hierarchies and a desire for a quiet private life. Later, revealingly, he would leak his memorandum to the newspapers. (A supporter of one of his rivals would use the leak as evidence that he had no friends.) “The ettiquette question has become of so much importance as to be an object of State,” Louisa wrote to her father-in-law, John Adams. She adopted the same line as her husband—that she was too humble, too unassuming, for all this nonsense—and, like him, protested too much. She had nothing to do with her husband’s position in the government; she was only, she insisted, a “plain individual.” This was the kind of declaration that John Adams, who was always quick to declaim the old principles of republican virtue, liked to hear. “Mais courage,” John replied. He was not surprised. Everything Louisa and John Quincy did, he said, would be viewed as political. “Well done I say stand upon the defensive for your right and maintain it—your independence.” In her letter to John Adams, she spoke properly and smartly but also, it takes not more than a glance to see, disingenuously. She insisted that refusing to make the first visit was an act of humility, when in fact it made other women come to her, granting her the dominant social role. (As an article in the Boston Courier about her practice later put it, those making the first visit would “signify their desire to form an acquaintance”—not the other way around.) She insisted that she was a woman who loved only quiet time at home, when in fact she was embarking on a series of parties that would make her Washington’s primary hostess. She insisted that the whole thing was silly, but with steely determination, she waited out the women who refused to come. For a plain individual without claims to any station, she was awfully stubborn. “Mr A & myself,” Louisa wrote, “are determined not to give up the point.” Her commitment to returning visits underscores how seriously she took the practice. As it was, she spent her mornings in the carriage returning visits, traveling from door to door. In a loose but legible hand, she carefully logged each name in her narrow book, with lists of visits received on the left-hand page and visits returned on the right. It was miserable, exhausting work. She had to go nine miles one way, then three miles in the opposite direction; she sometimes returned twenty-five visits in a single day. She once spent two hours on the rutted roads, dropping by nine or ten boardinghouses in search of two women. Her critics saw a woman who was trying to change the rules to her advantage—and in fact she was. Some ladies thought her “arrogant,” one visitor noted. Her confidence wavered. “The other Secretarys ladies do just as they please, and nobody takes any notice,” she wrote to Abigail. “Every hour adds to the conviction of my total inability to fill any station,” she fretted. She could not imagine “being of any sort of consequence.” Her mother-in-law both encouraged and warned her. “I think you have a very circumspect and critical part to act,” she wrote to Louisa. “Every step you take will be more critically scrutinized than in any situation you have ever before held. These baneful passions of envy and jealousy, are wide awake, and will follow you in every direction—you may trace from the chair of the speaker to members from all quarters of the union. With some you will find ready and willing supporters. But an heir apparent is always enveyed.” This was a very Adamsian way of looking at the political scene and the Adamses’ place in it—watchful of conspiracy; sure of persecution; exceedingly proud. That does not mean that Abigail was wrong to call John Quincy “an heir apparent.” Before Monroe had been in office a full year, the jockeying to succeed him was under way. Two candidates were clear from th
e start. One was Georgia’s William Crawford, the secretary of the treasury, who had lost to Monroe in the Republican congressional nominating caucus. He had powerful insider support—and used his patronage at the Treasury to increase it. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams was the other obvious candidate. Still, he was a Yankee, and a chilly one. Besides, as a Northern man, he had a distinct disadvantage: the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution inflated the voting power of the slaveholding states by increasing representation of the Southern states in the House and electoral college, counting slaves (“all other people”)—who of course could not vote—as “three-fifths” of an inhabitant. Several men, most of them Southerners or Westerners, began to mount challenges to succeed Monroe, even though the next contested election would not be until 1824. (In 1820, Monroe was reelected more or less unopposed.) Despite her anxieties, Louisa was becoming more confident in her relation to the Adamses. After her return from England, when John Quincy found himself too busy with his work at the State Department to send his usual lengthy letters to his parents, Louisa took over the job of writing to them. Her letters came in journal form, written first in a bound diary and then copied on loose pages that she would send to Quincy, occasionally with small changes. Those letters changed the elder Adamses’ attitudes toward her. They also changed her. Her relationship with Abigail had warmed since her first years in the United States. They had consoled each other for the deaths they had both mourned while she was in Russia, understanding each other’s losses as few others could. In their letters, “Mrs. Adams” gave way to “my dear daughter” and “my dear mother.” Louisa was never going to match the image of the frugal, enterprising New England woman that Abigail had wanted her son to marry, but they came to accept each other, and then appreciate each other. When Louisa returned to Quincy after eight years in Russia and England, the two women had a chance to lay bare past hurts and to forgive each other. Abigail told her “she was sorry she had not better understood my character,” Louisa recalled, and Louisa recognized that she had “misconstrue[d] acts intended to be kind.” Louisa never overcame her sense of inferiority toward the Adams matriarch, but at the end of Abigail’s life, the two women came to respect each other. With Abigail, Louisa could discuss Unitarianism, or write freely about John Calhoun’s cool response at the dinner table to Henry Clay’s intemperate bluster about independence movements in South America, or describe a scene at a party, all with equal interest. Her journal’s high quality surprised Abigail. It “makes me a sharer with you in your various occupations, brings me acquainted with characters, and places me at your fireside,” Abigail told her. “One single letter conveys more information in this way, than I could obtain in a whole session of Congress.” Abigail died of typhoid fever at the end of 1818, just months before the dance party in February. Louisa’s grief helped clarify for her what she had lost. Years later, while spending months reading Abigail’s letters, Louisa would write a beautiful and self-revealing tribute—perhaps the best eulogy Abigail ever received: “We are struck by the vast and varied powers of her mind; the full benevolence of an excellent heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity. . . . We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved, performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power, which diffused a mild and glowing radiance over all who moved within the sphere of her fascinating attraction.” The death of Abigail struck Louisa as well as John Quincy. Abigail’s powerful example had made its impact. But if anything, Louisa went further than Abigail in wanting to play a role in her husband’s public life. She was not content to be an adviser. She sought a public presence that Abigail avoided, and she chafed when she ran up against its limits. With bitter sarcasm, she wrote that she was “being continually told that I cannot by the Constitution have any share in the public honours of my husband.” She thought her husband should be president, and she thrived in the race, but by custom she had to deny it. Politics made her nervous; any misstep she made would be amplified by her husband’s critics. Still, she came to crave the animation of the political scene. Abigail had always felt more comfortable in Quincy. Louisa immersed herself in the political scene of Washington. When Congress was not meeting, she wrote in her journal, she experienced “a sort of waking vacancy something between life and death.” • • • JOHN QUINCY’S work at the State Department was all-consuming. Not only was he in charge of charting the foreign policy for the government; his brief included everything from the census to pensions. Meanwhile, there were lingering issues with Great Britain left over by the Treaty of Ghent; France was eager to protect its interests as the United States negotiated trade and territorial disputes with Spain; anti-Spanish interests in the United States were advocating South American independence at the same time that the United States was looking to expand farther south and west. On top of that, the Senate directed John Quincy to reproduce a report on weights and measurements—a topic that triggered his obsessive impulses and inquiries into standardization, and which would occupy him for the next four years. Despite all the challenges—and by cleverly seizing the advantage produced by turbulence in the territories—he managed by the start of 1819 to negotiate a treaty with Spain, known as the Adams-Onís (or Transcontinental) Treaty, that granted the United States Florida and set the western boundary between Louisiana and Texas, climbing to the forty-first parallel and then west all the way to the Pacific. It was a monumental moment in American history.