Louisa (42 page)

 • • • 

I
T
TOOK
something heroic
not only to survive but to see the worth in her life, and to make something of it. She endured months, as she had endured years, of suffering, sometimes mixed with boredom. She punished herself often, especially for the deaths of her children. “O my racked conscience,” she wrote in her diary, “night and day I reproach myself for my passiveness and never shall I cease to regret the past for I was a—Mother.” The following June, 1836, she opened her diary again. John Quincy was still chained to his desk in the House, once even through the night. The weather was hot and oppressive. She
might have given way to her grief, or dwelled on her powerlessness or her children's deaths or her father's bankruptcy. She might have felt wretched and looked for solace only in God.

But she did something else—something extraordinary. Instead of thinking of how she had failed, she thought of something she had accomplished, something of which she could be proud. She began thinking about her journey from St. Petersburg to Paris. As she saw it now, it was not only a good story. It was something that had meaning—and something from which she could
make
meaning, something from which she could illuminate, for herself and others, something of her fortitude, her inventiveness, her curiosity—something of her personality, and indeed her very self. And in that, she might find a larger meaning, a lesson that could apply to all women.

It occurred to her
that it might help for other women to hear it, because women as a rule heard so little that encouraged them to be brave and strong. They were discouraged from exerting their existence. Women were shadows in the histories of men. She knew that well. While her husband debated the admission of the new states Michigan and Arkansas, while he thundered in defense of fundamental freedoms, disregarding cries of “Order! Order!” she stayed inside, fell ill, claimed to be quiet. Since her children had been grown, she had been told that boredom was her lot. Louisa had been constrained by conventions and buried by tragedy. Many people were crushed by much less than what she had to bear. Many accepted their fate in silence. It took courage, then, to underscore her existence—to say that she was “one,
who was
.”

“
Narrative of a Journey
from Russia to France” begins at five o'clock in the evening on the 12th of February, the moment that she departed St. Petersburg, and ends the moment she arrived in her husband's hotel room in Paris. She had made no notes during the journey itself; she had only her memory and perhaps the letters she had sent to John Quincy, which he had saved, to rely upon. She disavowed her
capacity for—and interest in—research, but she must have used a map; her geography was, for the most part, surprisingly good. She put a great deal of effort into it. She worked on the text, writing a second draft on unbound pages, for at least a year and a half.

This was not a private remembrance. It was written to be read “at some future day”—written for those who knew her, but perhaps also for those who did not. In the American tradition of autobiography, she meant to encourage emulation. It was the story about the making of a self—and in particular, a female self. She wanted to show that women were stronger and braver than they were said to be. She thought her story might “show that many undertakings which appear very difficult and arduous to my sex, are by no means so trying as imagination forever depicts them—And that energy and discretion, follow the necessity of their exertion, to protect the fancied weakness of feminine imbecility.”

She wrote about Baptiste, innkeepers, haggard soldiers she had passed on the road, frightened faces of the women she met, cries of
Vive Napoléon!
She remembered the practical difficulties she had overcome: the moment the carriage wheel had come loose, the problem of procuring servants, the dangerous decision to ford a half-frozen river. She wrote about her growing confidence, which rippled out of her descriptions and into her voice. Her story was energetic and clear and a little romantic, which was understandable, because there was romance in what she had been through.

Her story was her own. No other woman in America had experienced anything like it. But she made its lessons universal. It was a story about women and what women could achieve. She was, as ever, ambivalent; it was her weakness, she claimed, that encouraged her to have faith that she would be protected. Yet she also did not deny her strength. She wrote: “Under all circumstances, we must never desert
ourselves.”

1

T
HERE
WA
S
MORE
behind Louisa's impulse to write “Narrative of a Journey” than resilience. Tragedy was not her only school. She had begun to think about women's rights and responsibilities more broadly, prodded by what she saw in public, not only private, life. She was forced into thought at times, and there were days when she would say it was all too much. She would close her door, stay in her room. But even there, her thoughts dogged her. How could she account for herself and her life? What rights and responsibilities did people have—women, Americans, politicians, slaves? Louisa was about to turn sixty-two—at a time when the life expectancy of an American white woman was around forty—but she was still growing. She was asking questions that the nation's leaders were strenuously trying to avoid—or most of them were. John Quincy was the great exception.

Louisa had not planned
on being at the Capitol on February 6, 1837, when John Quincy took part in an extraordinary scene. She was only there trying to “spin out the time.” An afternoon of returning visits with her niece Elizabeth Adams had gone long; it had grown late, until it was nearly time for the House of Representatives to adjourn. Elizabeth proposed that they visit the Rotunda, which had been
completed in time for Lafayette's visit to the city, so that Louisa could see Colonel Trumbull's new paintings. They would wait in the library until John Quincy was ready for a ride home.

Had Louisa mentioned
to John Quincy that she would be at the Capitol that day, he might have told her not to come. It was Monday, a petition day, time set aside for the House to hear what the people wanted from their representatives. The petitions could concern anything at all; they were commonly called “prayers.” That particular Monday was Massachusetts' turn in the roll call. Everyone in the House knew what kind of prayers the old representative from Massachusetts would deliver. Everyone knew that a fight was coming—John Quincy most of all, because John Quincy was the one who planned on provoking it.

For more than a year, Congress had been engaged in a battle over the right of the people to petition the House for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in the District of Columbia, and other issues that touched on the South's “peculiar institution”—though calls for immediate abolition of slavery altogether were still rare. Since the “Missouri question” had inflamed Congress more than fifteen years earlier, the fight over the expansion of slavery had been ever present but largely sublimated, fought in proxy battles over federal powers and the right of states to nullify laws. But the previous winter, the issue had surfaced and would not be suppressed—largely because one man, John Quincy, now refused to stay silent. He was relentless. He tried to submit the pleas, one after another. They came from Dorchester, from South Weymouth, from Plymouth and Salem. Their signatures numbered in the hundreds, sometimes thousands. They called for forbidding slavery in the territories, for repealing the gag rule, for ending the internal slave trade. Antislavery petitioners (many of them women), driven by a confluence of religious zeal and a culture of uplift, and able to mobilize because of vastly improved communications and transportation, were flooding the offices of sympathetic congressmen with
letters. Some rolls had a few signatures, some had thousands. No one introduced more of these petitions than Louisa's husband.

Southern “hotspurs” hated and feared John Quincy. Behind him they saw a phantom army of abolitionist “fanatics,” and behind the abolitionists they saw the specter of their own slaves ready to rise up violently against them. The Southerners were terrified of insurrections, terrified that any encouragement from Congress might spark a slave rebellion. They kept stoking memories of revolts like the one in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, led by Nat Turner, in which some sixty whites were murdered. The Northern congressmen, by contrast, were nervous, disordered, and ineffective. Most of them were sympathetic to slave owners, keenly aware of the political and practical difficulties of emancipation, and racist. Abolition was a dirty word in much of the North, too.

John Quincy was not
an abolitionist. He saw a civil war coming and thought his job was to forestall it. But the abolitionists looked to him to carry their message, if not yet to endorse it. He stood up. That spring of 1836, Congress passed a “gag rule” ordering that any petition regarding slavery would be immediately tabled without discussion. Nothing could have strengthened John Quincy's resolve more. He stood up again. When his name was called for the vote on the gag rule, he did not say yea or nay but instead cried out, “I hold the resolution to be a direct violation of the constitution of the United States, the rules of this House, and the rights of my constituents.” Since then, he had constantly tested the resolution, and that February 6, he planned his biggest challenge yet.

When they arrived
at the Capitol, Louisa and Elizabeth summoned a member of the House to show them into the Rotunda. As Louisa waited to see the famous scenes painted by Colonel John Trumbull—the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the surrenders of General Burgoyne and Lord Cornwallis, George Washington resigning his commission—perhaps her mind was on the painter. After all,
Colonel Trumbull had played a great role in her life. He had tried to teach her to paint, had introduced her to her husband in London, and had told her that he wished he were younger, for he would have pursued her himself. Whatever she was thinking in that moment, though, was forgotten when she saw George Lay, a young congressman from New York, approaching. He looked distressed. He told the women that “the House was in a state of
prodigious excitement
; Mr. Adams being the principal actor.” He was not sure they should go inside. The women went to the library instead and were looking at “some choice views of the Rhine” when Lay reappeared. The scene in the House had calmed, and John Quincy was speaking. Louisa and Elizabeth went into the House chamber to watch him.

They made their way to the gallery, behind the oval of the members' mahogany desks that ringed the Speaker's chair. John Quincy, sixty-nine years old, was just sitting down.

He had shrunk a little since the last time she had seen him in that cavernous space, when he was secretary of state. His great, round, bald head had sunk toward his small but mighty chest; white sideburns framed the sharp lineaments of his face. But he had a way of appearing bigger and more immovable than he was. His opponents usually described the small man in gigantic terms, so great was their fury against him alone.

That morning he had
introduced a petition from “nine ladies of Fredericksburg” calling for the prohibition of the slave trade in the federal city. The petition was of course tabled under the gag rule, but a member from Virginia saw the women's names on the document and announced that he recognized one, a “free mulatto woman of the worst fame and reputation.” And how, John Quincy asked slyly and suggestively, did the good congressman know of this woman's bad reputation? He followed that by approaching the Speaker's chair to ask about the status of another petition, one purported to be sent by slaves. The House erupted. “Expel him!” members cried. “Expel him! He
ought to be expelled!” Quickly, Southern members drew up resolutions to censure him. The member from Massachusetts—the former president of the United States—had “committed an outrage on the rights and feelings of a large portion of the people of this Union, a flagrant contempt on the dignity of this House; and by extending a privilege only belonging to freemen, directly incites the slave population to insurrection; and that the said member be forthwith called to the bar of the House, and censured by the Speaker,” their proposed resolution declared. A congressman from Georgia shouted that the petition from slaves should be carried out of the Capitol and burned.

Representatives from antislavery states, meanwhile, sat silently. A few members sympathetic to John Quincy may have tried to reach the floor, but the Speaker, future president of the United States James K. Polk, an ardent slaveholder, made sure not to see their approach.

Three days later, John Quincy would hold the floor for the full day to defend himself. This was the way the representative body of Congress conducted debates, he thundered—by silencing them! This was the contempt with which the champions of slavery held the rights of people from another state—not to mention the first right of a democracy! Sarcasm gleamed in his words. He was almost playful as he tugged the rug from under his opponents' feet. They had been too quick to dismiss the petition from slaves without reading it. In fact, he revealed, the slaves were petitioning
not
to abolish slavery. Did the slave owners disagree?

At this trick
,
the enraged congressmen exploded again. At their desks, they furiously revised their resolutions: John Quincy had “committed a gross contempt of the House.” He had “trifled with the House.” He should “receive the censure of the House.”

John Quincy did not agree with the many petitioners who came to him saying that it was the right moment for abolition, he continued, or even to end the slave trade in the District; his argument was not to end slavery. His defense was only of the right to petition, which he held up
as sacred. It was the foundational right not only of the people of the United States but of humanity. “Petition is supplication—it is entreaty—it is prayer! . . . And, so far from refusing to present a petition because it might come from those low in the estimation of the world, it would be an additional incentive, if such an incentive were wanting,” he told the House.

The fury had not died when Abijah Mann of New York, a free state, stepped in to defend John Quincy—or at least as much as anyone would defend him that night. It was true, Mann said, that the representative from Massachusetts was putting on a “deplorable spectacle.” But perhaps they should excuse him, because he was old, and perhaps a little senile. “The high noontide of that life has long since passed with him,” Mann said, “and its wane is no doubt upon him, before he is either aware or sensible of it.” Surely some allowance, “by the aid of liberal charity,” Mann suggested, should stay the vote that would censure him.

John Quincy was indeed
old, the oldest member of the House. His eyes watered, and his lungs strained for breath, and his hands trembled; he was known to fall asleep at his desk. But he was also known for enduring marathon sessions—seventeen hours, twenty-eight hours—with only a few crackers in his pocket or a thumb of stale bread. Mann's belittling speech could not touch him. People talked about him now as a force of nature: a lion, an elephant. One who watched him withstand the attacks by the proslavery faction said it was like seeing “the sting of so many musquitoes upon the hide of a rhinoceros.” Ralph Waldo Emerson put it best. “When they talk about his old age and venerableness and nearness to the grave, he knows better,” Emerson wrote. “He is like one of those old cardinals, who, as quick as he is chosen Pope, throws away his crutches and his crookedness, and is as straight as a boy. He is an old roué, who cannot live on slops, but must have sulpheric acid in his tea.”

His wife was different
. A ripple had passed through the chamber
when the members noticed that the small old woman, dressed in mourning, was present. Heads swiveled to see Mrs. Adams and gauge her reaction. “I found myself,” she wrote, “in the brunt of the fight.”

 • • • 

T
HE
FEELING
of a fight
, at least, was real: she fought within herself. On the one hand, Louisa opposed slavery; on the other hand, she dreaded turning against her family. Opposing Southerners meant opposing the Johnsons, the name she had clung to and defended for so long. “Although I can fairly justify your fathers opinion, and fully discriminate the justice of his cause; still I deplore the necessity which brings him in contact so often and so painfully with the public,” she wrote to Charles. “You know that I can have no southern feeling on the subject, other than sympathy with my connections.”