Read Online John Quincy Adams by Harlow Unger - Free Book Online Page A

Catherine Adams hosted weekly “levées,” or open houses, for the public to visit the presidential mansion and see the President and First Lady. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

    â€œMrs. Adams, like her husband, had . . . a love of literature,” explained one observer of the social scene of that era. “The most scholarly woman who has presided over the White House, she possessed the adaptability of a French woman or of an American and could turn gracefully from her books or her family cares to inaugurate certain much needed reforms in official circles. By her grace, tact, and savoir faire , Mrs. Adams did much to neutralize the effect of the President’s cold and often forbidding manner.” 26
    The President, of course, had no intention of being cold or forbidding—and, indeed, did not realize he was. He could not, after all, alter the lines, shadows, and shape of his face. Though his thoughts often contained a smile, it did not leak onto his face or into his words. “I am by nature,” he said repeatedly, “a silent animal, and my mother’s constant lesson in childhood, that children in company should be seen and not heard, confirmed me irrevocably in what I now deem a bad habit.” 27

    On July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence from Britain, John Adams died in Quincy, Massachusetts—an hour after the death at Monticello of his onetime vice president and longtime friend, Thomas Jefferson. George Washington Adams was with his grandfather when he died. John Quincy arrived with John II in time for the funeral and burial at the local churchyard, after which he returned to his father’s house and went into his father’s bedroom. “That moment was inexpressibly painful,” he moaned.
    My father and my mother have departed. The charm which has always made this house to me an abode of enchantment is dissolved; and yet my attachment to it and to the whole region round is stronger than I ever felt before. I feel it is time for me to begin to set my house in order and to prepare for the churchyard myself. . . . I shall within two or three years . . . need a place of retirement. Where else should I go? This will be a safe and pleasant retreat, where I may pursue literary occupations as long and as much as I can take pleasure in them. 28
    His father’s death gave John Quincy more work to do than his job as President. John Adams left a complicated will. For John Quincy to assume sole ownership of the ninety-five-acre property, the will required him to establish a trust for his brother, Thomas Boylston, who lived in his father’s house with his wife but had grown too dependent on alcohol to support himself. Thomas’s drunken orgies so disgusted Louisa that she refused even to visit the Quincy homestead with her husband, and when John Quincy left to spend the summer at his birthplace, she remained at the White House, neither writing letters of any consequence to the other.
    Meanwhile, midterm congressional elections only added to the Jacksonian majority and further stifled John Quincy’s efforts to serve the nation. Although the best-prepared chief executive in American history at the time, he was the least effective and least popular, and he did not understand why, given his deep love for his country. “I must await my allotted time,” he sighed. “My career is closed.” 29

    As the new, decidedly hostile Congress assembled in Washington, John Quincy’s son John II provided the President and Louisa with a bright moment by marrying Louisa’s niece Mary Hellen in the Blue Room of the White House.
    â€œThe bride looked very handsome in white satin, orange-blossoms, and pearls,” wrote John Quincy’s niece, who said that she and the other three bridesmaids had “an amusing time . . . arranging flowers and ribbons.” They then “passed the cake . . . [and] cut slices to distribute