First Ladies (14 page)

The Adams experience underscores a seldom recognized danger when First Ladies become political partners. In many ways John and Abigail Adams were too much alike; they rarely if ever disagreed on the issues of the day. This can be a wonderful reinforcement—but if the partners make a blunder as serious as the Alien and Sedition Acts and then sit around telling each other they are right and the rest of the
world is wrong, the mistake can swiftly become a political disaster that engulfs the presidency.

Abigail Adams was our first intensely political First Lady. Doesn’t she look it? Note those shrewd eyes. This portrait by Gilbert Stuart was begun while she was in the White House
.
(AP/Wide World Photos)

Still another danger of intense political partnerships was glimpsed in Abigail Adams’s experience in 1798. After nearly two years as First Lady, the savage name-calling and reckless accusations against her husband had taken a fearful toll on Abigail’s nerves. That summer, as she journeyed to the Adamses’ farm in Massachusetts, she began hearing voices, warning her that “this Life’s a dream, an empty show.” She felt “ligaments” in her body giving way one by one. At home Abigail took to her bed and plunged into a four-month-long mental and physical collapse. She was racked by diarrhea and disabled by insomnia, which left her sleepless five nights out of six.

In the fall, the President returned to Philadelphia without her, and Abigail tormented herself for deserting her “post.” John filled the mails with letters urging her to banish such gloomy thoughts and forget politics for a while. But Abigail stubbornly upheld her side of the partnership, making sure the President’s secretary sent her all the Philadelphia papers plus a stream of confidential reports on the administration’s ongoing crises.

There were some nonpolitical factors in Abigail Adams’s collapse, which brings up another side of the First Lady’s job. Most presidential partners have been mothers as well as wives. Abigail worked at her maternal role as intensely as she tried to be a super First Lady. A stream of letters poured out to her four adult children, full of advice, concern, and more advice.

A heritage of mental instability haunted the Adams family. Abigail’s brother had died of alcoholism, and her husband was as subject to bouts of depression as she was. Their second son, Charles, after a brilliant start as a lawyer in New York, developed a fondness for alcohol which rapidly destroyed his marriage and his career.

Abigail’s youngest son, Thomas, was another headache, though a less serious one. Twenty-four when his father became President, he set up as a lawyer in Philadelphia and in his first case defended the owners of a local brothel. Thomas scorned the hairstyles of the establishment, which called for wigs or powdered hair. Any parent who has
lived through the hair wars of the nineteen sixties and seventies can only groan, “The more things change the more they remain the same.”

As seriously troubling as Charles was Abigail’s son-in-law, William Smith, who had married her beloved only daughter and namesake. A courageous soldier in the Revolution, Smith was a disaster as a peacetime husband, spending himself into bankruptcy with high living and feckless speculations. When the President, with partner Abigail’s full support, proposed to make Smith adjutant general of the American army, they had the humiliation of seeing him rejected by the Senate, in spite of being endorsed by none other than George Washington. This occurred in the summer of 1798 and undoubtedly contributed to Abigail’s prostration.

In the spring of 1799, a recovered Abigail returned to First Ladying. She heartily backed her husband’s decision to defy Secretary of State Pickering and the rest of the inherited cabinet and send to France an envoy who defused the undeclared war Americans were already fighting at sea against French raiders. She also supported one of the President’s most controversial decisions, pardoning John Fries, an eccentric Pennsylvanian who had been sentenced to death for leading a ragtag revolt against federal taxes that the government crushed in about ten minutes.

This humane act outraged conservative Federalists such as Pickering and Alexander Hamilton, and they resolved to jettison Mr. and Mrs. President Adams. Their machinations only succeeded in splitting the Federalist Party and handing the presidential election of 1800 to the father of all Democrats, Thomas Jefferson.

Thanks to Abigail’s busy pen—she left behind over two thousand letters—we have interesting descriptions of her first days in the White House, which everyone called the President’s Palace. Abigail arrived in the middle of November 1800, with the presidential election roaring to a climax. The White House was still unfinished; wet plaster oozed from the walls; the entire place was pervaded by a chill which twelve fireplaces could not banish. Gazing at the sea of mud surrounding the mansion, she described Washington as “a city only in name.” But Abigail, ever the politician, was careful to confide her
opinions only to family members. “When asked how I like it,” she advised her daughter, “say that I wrote you the situation is beautiful.”

On December 4, the first election returns arrived, putting Jefferson narrowly ahead of Adams. Abigail was not surprised; unlike her husband, who had persisted in hoping against hope, she had been pessimistic about his chances. On the same day, a letter from New York told Abigail news she had dreaded far more than a lost election: her son Charles had died of alcoholism. She had visited him en route to Washington and realized there was little or no hope for his recovery. Eight days later, in the middle of a blizzard, a post rider from South Carolina arrived with the news that the Palmetto State had gone for Jefferson, making him the certified winner.

Abigail accepted political defeat far more graciously than her husband. John Adams met his former friend Thomas Jefferson at the door of the White House with a roar: “You have put me out! You have put me out!” Four years as a presidential partner had left Abigail feeling old at fifty-six. No doubt the death of her son Charles contributed to this feeling. She claimed to have only one regret about relinquishing political power: the loss of “one of the principle pleasures of my life”—to “do good according to my ability.”

That was a touching tribute to the reality and nobility of a political partnership that had helped to create the United States of America. It was also, I suspect, an attempt to solace the pain of defeat. But this first presidential partner deserves credit for helping her husband set an example of a peaceful transfer of power between political parties who thoroughly detested each other. She also set another example which succeeding generations have followed. For the rest of her long life, Abigail referred to John Adams in letters and conversation as “the President.”

—

F
ORTY
-
FIVE YEARS LATER
,
ANOTHER PRESIDENTIAL PARTNER
,
IN SOME
ways more formidable than Abigail Adams, strode the halls of the White House. Sarah Childress Polk also has the distinction of being the only First Lady who was selected by a preceding President. James
Polk was an almost thirty-year-old bachelor, going nowhere in politics, when he sought advice from his mentor and fellow Tennessean, Andrew Jackson. What was he doing wrong?

“Stop your philandering!” Jackson roared in his usual blunt style. The handsome Polk was known as an incorrigible lothario. “You must settle down as a sober married man!”

“Which lady shall I choose?” asked the startled Polk, no doubt thinking the question would confound the white-haired old warrior, who was U.S. senator from Tennessee at the time of this exchange.

“The one who will never give you any trouble!” Jackson growled. “Her wealth, family, education, and health are all superior. You know her well.”

“You mean Sarah Childress?” Polk asked. He thought it over for a moment and decided he had just gotten some good advice. “I shall go at once and ask her,” he said.

That conversation bears witness to nineteen-year-old Sarah Childress’s remarkable gifts. Tall and dark, with features that usually won the adjective
handsome
rather than
beautiful
, she was the daughter of a wealthy Tennessee planter who believed in educating his daughters as well as his sons. She was attracted to Polk, but not to the point of instant capitulation. She told him she would accept his offer of marriage if he ran for a seat in the state legislature—and won.

With the office and Sarah safely in hand, Polk was ready for his next political move. Within a year of their marriage on January 1, 1824, he had run for Congress and won. Unlike most congressional wives of the era, Sarah abandoned their Tennessee homestead and went to Washington with him. Among several reasons why I have always felt an affinity with Sarah Polk was her frank dislike of housework and cooking. My father used to say, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” (He was talking about politics, of course.) My Grandmother Truman taught me an even more useful lesson about kitchens: “If you can’t cook, no one will ever ask you to.”

In Washington, Sarah Polk became famous for having the boldest political opinions of any woman in the capital. She was a frequent visitor to the House gallery, where she listened more intently to the oratory
than ninety percent of the congressmen. A skillful hostess, even if she did not go near the kitchen, Sarah played a major role in Polk’s rise from legislative nobody to Speaker of the House of Representatives in just ten years.

Andrew Jackson’s backing did not hurt, of course. Sarah charmed not only the General-turned-President (in 1828) but a host of other important politicos as well. Congressman (and future President) Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire said he liked to discuss politics with her more than with most men. Another conquest was Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, the most famous jurist of his time after the legendary John Marshall. A lover of good books and intelligent women (his favorite author was Jane Austen), Justice Story wrote a poem in praise of Sarah when the Polks left Washington to run for the next step in their political game plan, the governorship of Tennessee:

While Polk hit the campaign trail in Tennessee, Sarah stayed home and played political boss, organizing support for him among influential politicians in the state capital. In one of her letters she speaks of “operating” on a group of prospective allies. She used the same technique to marshal support for his 1844 presidential candidacy, when Polk came out of nowhere, comparatively speaking, to win the Democratic nomination at a divided convention.

During the campaign Sarah made political history, of sorts, by becoming the first First Lady to take on the wife of her husband’s opponent, Henry Clay. Mrs. Clay was portrayed as a model wife who knew how to make good butter and keep a spotless house. Sarah tartly replied that if she got to the White House and had the President’s salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year (a huge sum in those days, when state governors were paid two thousand dollars) she would “neither keep house nor make butter.” And people gave Hillary Rodham
Clinton a hard time for scoffing at the idea of staying home to bake cookies!

The Polks arrived in the White House with a four-year plan that was breathtaking in its ambition. They were going to push the border of recently annexed Texas to the Rio Grande, even if it meant war with Mexico, settle the disputed border with Canada in the Oregon Territory, even if that meant war with England, and acquire New Mexico and California, extending the United States to the shore of the Pacific. They accomplished all three of these large goals, settling the Oregon question through astute diplomacy and the other two by fighting and winning the Mexican War.

The war made James Polk an unpopular President in some parts of the country, notably New England, where it was seen as a covert attempt to expand slavery. But Sarah Polk remained popular with all parties. During a White House reception, a southern visitor said, “Madame, I have long wished to look upon a lady upon whom the Bible pronounces a woe!”

Everyone waited for an explanation, which was forthcoming. “Does not the Bible say, Woe unto you when all men speak well of you?’”

Sarah retained her popularity in spite of the way she let her religious beliefs intrude on the management of the White House. A devout Presbyterian, she forbade liquor at receptions and dinners and also banned music and dancing. This was not an attempt to make a statement against alcohol, as in the case of Lucy Hayes. The President went along with her, explaining to his thirsty Tennessee friends that “Sarah directs all domestic affairs.”

Polk’s acquiescence made more than a few politicians think his wife was the real boss in their partnership. His own vice president, George Dallas, told his friends: “She is certainly mistress of herself and I suspect of somebody else also.” Yet a search of Polk’s detailed diary of his White House days uncovers little evidence of a henpecked man. Rather, it offers admiring examples of his wife’s political astuteness.