First Ladies (40 page)

Waving her American passport and crying “Vive Napoleon,” Louisa coolly talked them out of their bloodthirsty inclinations and rode on to Paris. Far from being upset by his wife’s ordeal, John Quincy made light of it, offhandedly telling his mother that the journey, which put her maid to bed with “brain fever” for two months, seemed to have improved Louisa’s health.

Returning in triumph to the United States, John Quincy was summoned to Washington as President James Monroe’s secretary of state. He saw the position as a stepping-stone to the presidency. If Bill Clinton was, as he claims, bitten by the presidential bug when he was sixteen, that insect must have zeroed in on John Quincy Adams in his cradle. From his earliest waking moments, his doting parents seem to have selected him to resume the family’s tenancy in the White House.

Adams’s chief obstacle to attaining this goal was himself. He spoke in a high, shrill voice and by his own admission was severely lacking in likability. “I am a man of reserved, cold, austere and forbidding manners,” he confided to his diary. In a letter to Louisa, he confessed: “I never was and never shall be what is commonly termed a popular man…. I have no powers of fascination.”

John Quincy’s one and only hope of becoming President was Louisa. By now, she had been reunited with her two older boys and was more kindly disposed toward her husband. She went to work on his behalf in Washington, D.C., entertaining congressmen and their wives by the
dozen, fascinating them with her tales of foreign lands. One of her guests called her “the most accomplished American lady I have seen.”

In 1820 Louisa and John Quincy put almost every cent they had into an imposing three-story home on F Street, where they could entertain even more lavishly, as he launched his stretch run for the presidency. They added a twenty-eight-by twenty-nine-foot ballroom, in which guests could dance cotillions “with ease.” Louisa also made numerous forays into nearby Maryland, where her relatives were “most respectable and distinguished,” and succeeded in putting her home state firmly in John Quincy’s column.

It soon became apparent, as the year 1824 dawned and President Monroe entered his final months in the White House, that the two men most likely to succeed him were John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. At this point, Louisa pulled off the social coup that made her husband President. She decided to give a ball honoring Jackson on the tenth anniversary of his great victory at New Orleans in the War of 1812.

Louisa sent out nine hundred invitations, and not one was turned down. The only conspicuous nonattenders were President Monroe and his wife, who never went to private parties. Louisa, in a gleaming gown ornamented with cut steel, greeted General Jackson at the door, utterly dazzling him. He stayed at her side like a devoted suitor for the entire evening. The ball was the party of the decade in Washington and automatically elevated John Quincy to the same prominence as the hero of New Orleans.

The 1824 presidential campaign was a mess. With four major contenders, Jackson received a plurality of the popular vote—forty-two percent; John Quincy was second with thirty-two percent. But the General did not carry enough states to win a majority of the electoral votes, and the decision was thrown into the House of Representatives. There, with the help of another candidate, Henry Clay of Kentucky, who switched his support to Adams, John Quincy became the only son of a President to reach 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

He had achieved his dream, but it rapidly turned into a nightmare. Adams rewarded Clay by making him his secretary of state. Jackson’s
infuriated supporters—and a lot of other people—accused the President of making a “corrupt bargain” and coalesced against Adams’s leadership. John Quincy and Louisa found themselves marooned in a virtually ostracized White House.

After having worked so hard to get there, Louisa soon came to hate the Executive Mansion. As First Lady, she was reduced to a mere ornament, and a pointless one at that, since her husband’s administration was stranded. Moreover, the place lacked the comforts of “any private mechanics family.” She told her son George it was impossible for her to feel at home in the house, “or to feel I have a home anywhere.”

Not surprisingly, John Quincy was no help. When he relaxed and talked about literature or the arts, Adams could be interesting. (Henry Fielding’s racy novel
Tom Jones
was one of his favorite books.) But most of the time he was a bore, prone to doze off in the middle of dinner. Louisa made no secret of the fact that she did not particularly enjoy her husband’s company. One day she copied into her diary a bit of doggerel that had gotten into a capital newspaper:

Before long the First Lady was deeply depressed. Her only relief was chocolate, which she devoured by the pound, without gaining an ounce of weight. Perhaps she was trying to cram herself with the sweetness that was so abysmally missing from her life. In 1825 Louisa decided to write her autobiography, which she titled “Adventures of a Nobody.” Under the pseudonym Rachel Barb she also wrote a play about an aristocratic couple living in a great mansion. The main character, Lord Sharply, was “full of good qualities,” but ambition “absorbed every thought of his soul.” His wife, Lady Sharply, was, of course, miserable.

Inevitably, the frustrated President and his gloomy First Lady fell to quarreling. Their main bone of contention was the children. John
Quincy was always demanding impossible performances from his sons. Louisa was far more easygoing; she put happiness ahead of achievement. Hardly surprising, when she looked at her dour husband and saw the way a lifetime of parental pressure and superhuman striving had turned him into a virtual misanthrope.

John Quincy’s presidency continued sinking into political oblivion. His party lost control of Congress, which went about their business as if the White House did not exist. Worse, his son John, who acted as his secretary, was a dilettante who spent most of his time chasing beautiful girls. In an inventory of presidential expenses, young John accidentally included the cost of a billiard table, which John Quincy had installed in the White House, mostly for his sons’ amusement. The President’s enemies leaped on this mistake, which was hastily corrected, as proof of his “aristocratic tastes” and indifference to setting a good example to the young men of the nation. In those days billiard playing was synonymous with strong drink, fast women, and sin.

The President vented his frustrations on Louisa and their oldest son, George Washington Adams. More Johnson than Adams, George was a dreamy, sensitive young man who wrote poetry and lived a vaguely bohemian life in Boston, trying to ignore the stream of angry letters his father sent him. Louisa defended George against the presidential wrath, thereby bringing not a little of it on herself.

By the summer of 1828, the President and his wife were barely speaking. Louisa spent as much time away from the White House as possible. When John Quincy wrote to her, he addressed her as “Mrs. Louisa C. Adams,” as if they were divorced. He could not bring himself to write “Dear Louisa,” any more than she could write “Dear John.” Instead, she addressed him simply as “The President.”

In Boston, George Washington Adams, struggling fitfully to live up to his Adams inheritance and his father’s ferocious lectures, had gotten himself elected to the Massachusetts legislature and opened a law office. But he was defeated for reelection and few clients sought his legal services. He slowly sank into debt and squalor. Worse, he had an affair with a servant girl that produced an illegitimate daughter—a fall from grace which he managed to conceal from his parents.

Louisa made periodic trips to Boston to see George, who suffered from a variety of illnesses, some real, some imaginary. In 1827, on one of these journeys, she revealed once more that she, not her husband, was the politician in the family. She held a reception in Philadelphia at which the city’s leading citizens all but threw themselves at her feet. Louisa promptly fired off a letter to John Quincy, urging him to visit Pennsylvania and other states if he wanted to get reelected. Too angry at her to take this excellent advice, Adams announced that when he began his summer vacation, he was going home to Massachusetts “as straight and quick as possible.”

In a kind of counterpoint to John Quincy’s presidency, George’s fortunes continued to sink. He was forced to borrow a thousand dollars from a local tomb maker, and then had to reveal it to his father when he could not repay the debt. This triggered another spate of furious presidential letters, which did nothing but deepen George’s overwhelming sense of failure. Meanwhile, as we have seen, Adams’s political backers were fighting for his presidency by smearing Andrew Jackson’s wife as a fallen woman. The filthy campaign could only have further convinced this emotional, despairing young man that he wanted no part of the world of ruthless ambition and raw power into which he had been born.

The year 1828 ended in total disaster for John Quincy and Louisa Adams. The President was routed at the polls by Andrew Jackson. For George Washington Adams, this only meant more trouble. Now a lame duck, John Quincy proceeded to concentrate all his fury on his eldest son, demanding this, condemning that, in another volley of letters that ended with a command to come to Washington at once.

George dreaded the thought of confessing his derelictions to his dour father face to face. As he prepared for the journey, he showed unmistakable signs of a mental collapse. He heard birds speaking to him from nearby trees, and his sleep was repeatedly broken by a conviction that burglars were prowling around his squalid furnished room. His younger brother Charles, who was in Boston setting up his own law practice, grew deeply alarmed at his conduct. Not knowing
what else to do, Charles hoped for the best and helped George pack for his trip to Washington.

In Providence, George boarded a steamboat that would take him down the Rhode Island coast and through Long Island Sound to New York. All he could see as he gazed out at the water was his father’s frowning face. Soon he began hearing a voice in the pounding steam engines, whispering, “Let it be, let it be.” At 3:00
A.M
. he rushed to the bridge to tell the captain he wanted to be put ashore immediately because the other passengers were conspiring to kill him. The captain assured him there was no danger on his boat, and George retreated to the open deck.

A few minutes later, a passenger heard a splash. He rushed to the railing in time to see George vanishing in the steamboat’s foaming wake. “Man overboard!” the Good Samaritan shouted. The aghast captain stopped the ship; he probably knew he had just lost a President’s son. He lowered a rescue boat, but all the sailors found were George’s hat and cloak.

Two days later, the news reached John Quincy and Louisa Adams in Washington. Both realized that George had been sacrificed to John Quincy’s ambition, in which Louisa had acquiesced. John Quincy was totally devastated—until he saw that Louisa was in even worse condition. For the first time in decades, they reached out to each other with sympathy and at least an approximation of love in their hearts.

John Quincy became “a ministering angel, always at my side,” Louisa told one of her friends. She successfully stifled any impulse to blame him for the tragedy. They read comforting passages in their Bibles to each other. “We are in great distress,” the ex-President wrote his son Charles. “But the first Shock of this heavy dispensation of Providence is past, and your Mother and myself, relying on him who chastiseth in Mercy, still look for consolation in the affectionate kindness of our remaining Sons.”

When the family gathered to offer their sympathy, John Quincy asked Louisa to read the service for the dead from the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. After decades of differences, he was finally trying to acknowledge her importance in their troubled partnership.
Their reconciliation deepened steadily in succeeding weeks. If they were apart even for a few days, he wrote letters to his “Dearest Louisa.”

A few months later, an ex-President now, John Quincy walked through Washington’s Rock Creek woods. He was still deeply depressed; he could not stop thinking of George. A rain shower forced him to take shelter under a tree. The downpour left the grass gleaming and filled the warm air with the scent of growing things. Life, hope, stirred in the dry husk that John Quincy’s soul had become. Moments later, a magnificent rainbow arched above Washington, D.C. He told Louisa he felt it was a sign of God’s mercy.

A few days later, Louisa picked up a copy of the
National Journal
of Washington and received an even more mystical surprise. The paper had printed a poem that George had sent the editor a few weeks before his death:

Louisa wept and showed the poem to John Quincy. She felt it was George’s last message, telling them that in spite of the mistakes they had made as parents—especially the decision to abandon him for those eight long years of his boyhood—his love for them had remained alive in his troubled heart.

If readers require further proof that this ex-President and his First Lady had learned a profound spiritual lesson, they need only to look at the rest of their long lives. In 1830 John Quincy decided to return to Washington as a humble congressman. Louisa went with him and wholeheartedly supported the cause he soon embraced—the right of citizens to present protests against slavery to Congress. Dominated by southerners, Congress had passed a “gag rule” which enabled them to ignore the nation’s mounting disgust with this blot on America’s moral reputation. John Quincy soon won the title “Old Man Eloquent” for his struggle on behalf of this basic civil right.