CHAPTER XXII.

NOTED WOMEN OF WASHINGTON—A CHAPTER OF GOSSIP.

Quaint Habiliments—Portrait of a President’s Wife—A Travelling Lady—Life in Russia—A Model American Minister—A Long and Lonely Journey—When Napoleon Returned from Elba—The Court of St. James—“Mrs. Adams’ Ball”—Mr. John Agg’s Little “Poem”—Verses which Our Fathers Endured—Peculiar Waists—Costume of an Ancient _Belle_—Fearful and Wonderful Attire of a _Beau_—“A Suit of Steel”—“Smiling for the Presidency”—Attending Two Balls the Same Evening—An Ascendant Star—A Man who Hid his Feelings—The Candidate at a Cattle Show—“She Often Combed Your Head”—“I Suppose She Combs Yours Now”—Giving “Tone” to the Whole Country—A Circle of “Rare” Women—A “Perpetual Honor to Womanhood”—Charles’s Opinion of His Mother—How a Lady “Amused” Her Declining Days—Lafayette’s Visit to Washington—His Farewell to America—“A Species of Irregular Diary”—“For the Benefit of My Grandfather”—Mrs. Andrew Jackson—A Woman’s Influence—Politics and Piety Disagree—Why the General Didn’t Join the Church—A Head “Full of Politics”—Swearing Some—The President Becomes a Good Boy—Domestic Tendencies—His Greatest Loss—Sad News from the Hermitage.

The portrait which Leslie gives us of Louisa Catharine Johnson, the wife of John Quincy Adams, reminds us in outline and costume of the Empress Josephine and the Court of the first Napoleon.

She wears the scanty robe of the period, its sparse outline revealing the slender elegance of the figure, the low waist and short sleeves trimmed with lace and edged with pearls. One long glove is drawn nearly to the elbow, the other is held in the hand, which droops carelessly over the back of the chair. There is a necklace round the throat. From over one shoulder, and thrown over her lap, is a mantle of exquisite lace. The close bands of the hair, edged with a few deft curls, and fastened high at the back with a coronet comb, reveals the classic outline of the small head; the face is oval, the features delicate and vivacious; the eyes, looking far on, are beautiful in their clear, spiritual gaze. This is the portrait of a President’s wife, whose early advantages of society and culture far transcended those of almost any other woman of her time.

The daughter of Joshua Johnson, of Maryland, she was born, educated and married in London. As a bride she went to the court of Berlin, to which her husband was appointed American Minister on the accession of his father to the Presidency. In 1801 she went to Boston, to dwell with her husband’s people, but very soon came to Washington as the wife of a senator. On the accession of Madison, leaving her two elder children with their grandparents, she took a third, not two years of age, and embarked with her husband for Russia, whither he went as United States Minister.

Nothing could be more graphic than the diary which she kept on this voyage. It consumed three months. Summer merged into winter before the little wave-and-wind-beaten bark touched that then inhospitable shore. The first American Minister to Russia, Mr. Adams lived in St. Petersburg for six years, “poor, studious, ambitious and secluded.” Happily for him, his wife possessed mental and spiritual resources, which lifted her above all dependence on surface or conventional attention from the world, and made her in every respect the meet companion of a scholar and patriot.

In the wake of furious war, through storm and snow-drifts, through a country ravaged by passion and strife, she traveled alone, with her only child, from St. Petersburg to Paris, whither she went to meet her husband. Here she witnessed the storm of delight which greeted Napoleon on his return from Elba. Mr. Adams was appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, and after a separation of six years Mrs. Adams was re-united to her children.

In 1817 Mr. Monroe, on his accession to the Presidency, immediately appointed John Quincy Adams Secretary of State, when Mrs. Adams returned with him to Washington. For eight years she was the elegant successor of Mrs. Madison, who filled the same position with so much distinction. No one was excluded from her house on account of political hostility—all sectional bitterness and party strife were banished from her drawing-rooms.

As the wife of the Secretary of State, Mrs. Adams gave a famous ball, whose fame still lives in Washington. “Mrs. Adams’s Ball” lives in history as well as in the memories of a few still living. It was given January 8th, 1824, in commemoration of General Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. It was announced in advance by the newspapers, and on the morning before its occurrence its splendor was anticipated and celebrated by the following lines written by Mr. John Agg, who has passed into oblivion, although his early poems in his native England were said to have been taken for Byron’s, and although he was one of the first of newspaper correspondents and the first short-hand reporter ever in Washington.

The ladies referred to in the following lines were among the most celebrated beauties of their day, many of whose descendants still live in Washington.

MRS. ADAMS’S BALL.

[From the Washington _Republican_, Jan. 8th, 1824.]

Wend you with the world to-night? Brown and fair, and wise and witty, Eyes that float in seas of light, Laughing mouths and dimples pretty, _Belles_ and matrons, maids and madams, All are gone to Mrs. Adams’s. There the mist of the future, the gloom of the past, All melt into light at the warm glance of pleasure; And the only regret is, lest melting too fast, Mammas should move off in the midst of a measure.

Wend you with the world to-night? Sixty grey, and giddy twenty, Flirts that court, and prudes that slight, Stale coquettes and spinsters plenty. Mrs. Sullivan is there With all the charms that nature lent her; Gay M’Kim, with city air, And charming Gales, and Vandeventer; Forsyth, with her group of graces; Both the Crowninshields in blue; The Peirces, with their heavenly faces, And eyes like suns, that dazzle through; _Belles_ and matrons, maids and madams, All are gone to Mrs. Adams’s.

Wend you with the world to-night? East and West, and South and North, Form a constellation bright, And pour a blended brilliance forth. See the tide of fashion flowing, ’Tis the noon of beauty’s reign; Webster, Hamiltons are going, Eastern Lloyd and Southern Hayne; Western Thomas, gaily smiling; Borland, nature’s _protégé_; Young De Wolfe, all hearts beguiling; Morgan, Benton, Brown and Lee; _Belles_ and matrons, maids and madams. All are gone to Mrs. Adams’s.

Wend you with the world to-night? Where blue eyes are brightly glancing, While to measures of delight Fairy feet are deftly dancing; Where the young Euphrosyne Reigns, the sovereign of the scene, Chasing gloom and courting glee With the merry tambourine. Many a form of fairy birth, Many a Hebe yet unwon; Wirt, a gem of purest worth, Lively, laughing Pleasanton, Vails and Taylor will be there; Gay Monroe, so _débonnaire_, Helen, pleasure’s harbinger, Ramsay, Cottringers, and Kerr; _Belles_ and matrons, maids and madams, All are gone to Mrs. Adams’s.

Wend you with the world to-night? Juno in her court presides, Mirth and melody invite, Fashion points and pleasure guides! Haste away then, seize the hour, Shun the thorn and pluck the flower. Youth, in all its spring-time blooming, Age, the guise of youth assuming, Wit, through all its circle gleaming, Glittering wealth, and beauty beaming; _Belles_ and matrons, maids and madams, All are gone to Mrs. Adams’s.

The picture of this celebrated entertainment is still extant, and shows the _belles_ in the full dress of the period, when the dress waists ended just under the arms, and its depth, front and back, was not over three or four inches. The skirts, narrow and plain, were terminated by a flounce just resting on the floor. The gloves reached to the elbow, and were of such fine kid that they were often imported in the shell of an English walnut. Slippers and silk stockings of the color of the dress were worn, crossed and tied with gay ribbons over the instep. The hair was combed high, fastened with a tortoise-shell comb—the married ladies wearing ostrich feathers and turbans. While the _belles_ were thus attired, their _beaux_ were decked in blue coats, and gilt buttons, with white or buff waistcoats, white neck-ties and high “chokers,” silk stockings and pumps.

In this picture Daniel Webster, Clay and Calhoun are conspicuous in this dress. General Jackson, wearing bowed pumps, with Mrs. Adams on his arm, make the central figures of the assembly. Mrs. Adams wore “a suit of steel.” The dress was composed of steel llama; her ornaments for head, throat and arms, were all of cut steel, producing a dazzling effect. General Jackson’s entire devotion to her, during the evening, was the subject of comment. After the manner of to-day, it was declared that he was “smiling for the Presidency.” He was the lion of the evening. All the houses of the first ward were illuminated in his honor. Bonfires made the streets light as day, and the “sovereign people” shouted his name and fame. The same evening, he attended a ball given by the famous dancing-master, Carusi, and finished the festivities, celebrating his glory by the side of the reigning lady, the wife of the Secretary of State.

That night fixed his presidential star in the ascendency. A few days later the name of Calhoun was withdrawn as the nominee of his party, and that of Jackson put in its place. The house, a double one, in which this famous ball was given, still stands unaltered, on F street, opposite the Ebbitt House. A portion of it was long occupied as lodgings by Hon. Charles Sumner.

Through fiery opposition, John Quincy Adams was elected President. From the time she became mistress of the President’s house, failing health inclined Mrs. Adams to seek seclusion, but she still continued to preside at public receptions. Her vivacity and pleasing manners did much to warm the chill caused by Mr. Adams’ apathy or apparent coldness. Those who knew him, declared that he had the warmest heart and the deepest sympathies, but he had an unfortunate way of hiding them. It is told that when he was candidate for the Presidency, his friends persuaded him to go to a cattle show. Among the persons who ventured to address him, was a respectable farmer who impulsively exclaimed: “Mr. Adams, I am very glad to see you. My wife, when she was a gal, lived in your father’s family; you were then a little boy, and she has often combed your head.”

“Well,” said Mr. Adams, in a harsh voice, “I suppose she combs yours now?”

The poor farmer slunk back extinguished. If he gave John Quincy his vote, he was more magnanimous than the average citizen of to-day would be to so rude a candidate.

A writer of her time speaks of Mrs. Adams’ “enchanting, elegant and intellectual _régime_,” declaring that it should give tone to the whole country. Her fine culture, intellectual tastes, and charming social qualities, combined to attract about her a circle of rare and distinguished women. Among these were Mrs. Richard Rush, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the wife of the Patroon, and Mrs. Edward Livingston. Notwithstanding the opposition of her husband’s politics, Mrs. Livingston was Mrs. Adams’ most intimate friend; a lady whom any land might be proud to claim, and whose memory lives a perpetual honor to womanhood.

Mrs. Adams’ son, Charles Francis Adams, writing of his mother in 1839, says:

“The attractions of great European capitals, and the dissipations consequent upon high official stations at home, though continued through that part of her life when habits become the most fixed, have done nothing to change the natural elegance of her manners, nor the simplicity of her tastes.... To the world, Mrs. Adams presents a fine example of the possibility of retiring from the circles of fashion, and the external fascinations of life, in time still to retain a taste for the more quiet, though less showy attractions of the domestic hearth.

A strong literary taste, which has caused her to read much, and a capacity for composition in prose and verse, have been resources for her leisure moments; not with a view to that exhibition which renders such accomplishments too often fatal to the more delicate shades of feminine character, but for her own gratification, and that of a few relatives and friends.

The late President Adams used to draw much amusement, in his latest years at Quincy, from the accurate delineation of Washington manners and character, which was regularly transmitted, for a considerable period, in letters from her pen. And if, as time advances, she becomes gradually less able to devote her sense of sight to reading and writing, her practice of the more homely virtues of manual industry, so highly commended in the final chapter of the book of Solomon, still amuses the declining days of her varied career.”

Mrs. Adams was the “lady of the White House” when, in 1825, Lafayette visited the United States, and, at the invitation of the President, spent the last weeks of his stay at the “Executive Mansion,” from which, on the seventh of September, he bade his pathetic farewell to the land of his adoption.

Notwithstanding the rare qualities of mind and heart which she brought to it, and the popularity which she attained in it, her son writes:

“Her residence in the President’s house I have always considered as the period she enjoyed the least during the public career of my father. All this appears more or less in her letters, and especially in a species of irregular diary which she kept for some time at Washington, for the benefit of my grandfather, John Adams, then living at Quincy, and of her brother, who was residing in New Orleans.”

Mrs. Adams died May 14, 1852, and was buried beside her husband, in the family burying ground at Quincy, Massachusetts.

* * * * *

In mental attainments, there was an absolute contrast between Mrs. Adams and Rachel Donaldson, the next President’s wife.

Mrs. Andrew Jackson never entered the President’s house in visible form, for she had passed from earth before her husband became the Chief Magistrate of the Nation. Yet it is doubtful if the wife of any other President ever exerted so powerful and positive an influence over an administration in life as did she in death.

Born and reared on the frontiers of civilization, her educational advantages had been most scanty, and she never mastered more than the simplest rudiments of knowledge. Yet, looking on her pictured face, it is easy to fathom and define the power which, through life and beyond the grave, held the master will of the husband who loved her in sweet abeyance. It was a power purely womanly—the affectional force of a woman of exalted moral nature and deep affections. It was impossible that such a woman should use arts to win love, and equally impossible that she should not be loved. Men would love her instinctively, through the best and highest in their natures.

With the wound of her loss fresh and bleeding, President Jackson entered upon his high office. Thus in death Rachel Jackson became the tutelary saint of the President’s house. Wherever he went, he wore her miniature. No matter what had been the duties or pleasures of the day, when the man came back to himself, and to his lonely room, her Bible and her picture took the place of the beloved face and tender presence which had been the one charm and love of his heroic life.

No other President’s wife looks down upon posterity with so winsome and innocent a gaze as Rachel Jackson. A cap of soft lace surmounts the dark curls which cluster about her forehead, falling veil-like over her shoulders. The full lace ruffle around her neck is not fastened with even a brooch, and, save the long pendants in her ears, she wears no ornaments. Her throat is massive, her lips full and sweet in expression, her brow broad and rounded, her eye-brows arching above a pair of large, liquid, gazelle-like eyes, whose soft, feminine outlook is sure to win and to disarm the beholder. This remarkable loveliness of spirit and person was the source of fatal sorrow to Rachel Jackson. It won her reverence, amounting almost to adoration, but it made her also the victim of jealousy, envy and malice. These made the shadow always flung athwart the sunshine of love which made her life.

She was a woman of deep personal piety, and longed for nothing so much as the time when her husband would be done with political honors, as he had assured her that then, and not till then, could he “be a Christian.” The following anecdote, told by the late Judge Bryan of Washington, illustrates the piety of her character and the profound personal influence she held over the moral nature of her husband:

The father of Judge Bryan, an intimate friend of Mrs. Jackson, was on a visit to the Hermitage. Mrs. Jackson talked to him of religion, gave him a hymn to read that was sung at a late funeral, and said the General was disposed to be religious, and she believed would join the church but for the coming presidential election; that his head was now full of politics. While they were conversing, the General came in with a newspaper in his hand, to which he referred as denouncing his mother as a camp follower. “This is too bad!” he exclaimed, rising into a passion and swearing terribly as our “army in Flanders.” When nearly out of breath, his wife approached him and, looking him in his face, simply said: _Mr._ Jackson. He was subdued in an instant, and did not utter another oath.

In the same presidential contest this gentle being did not herself escape calumny. When her husband was elected President of the United States, she said: “For Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad; for my own, I never wished it.” To an intimate friend she said in all sincerity: “I assure you I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God than to dwell in that palace in Washington.” Dearer to her heart was the Hermitage, with the little chapel built by her husband for her own especial use, than all the prospective pomp of the President’s house.

She was a mother to every servant on the estate, and anxious to make every one comfortable during her absence in Washington. She made numerous journeys to Nashville, to purchase, for all left behind, their winter supplies. Worn out, after a day’s shopping, she went to the parlor of the Nashville Inn to rest. While she waited there for the family coach which was to convey her back to the Hermitage, she heard her own name spoken in the adjoining room. She was compelled to hear, while she sat there, pale and smitten, the false and cruel calumnies against herself which had so recklessly been used during the campaign to defeat her husband, and which he had zealously excluded from her sight in the newspapers. Here the arrow came back from the misfortune of her youth, when she married a man intellectually and morally her inferior, from whom she was afterwards divorced, and it entered her gentle heart too deep to be withdrawn. She was seized almost immediately with spasmodic disease of the heart. Everything possible was done for her relief without avail. A few nights afterwards she exclaimed: “I am fainting,” was lifted to her bed, and in a few moments had breathed her last sigh.

The grief of her husband amounted to agony. It seemed for a time that his frame must break under such grief, but he lived to worship and serve her memory for many years. December 23, 1828, a great ball and banquet was to have been given in Nashville, in honor of General Jackson’s victory at New Orleans. The whole city was gay with preparations, when the word came from the Hermitage: “The President’s wife is dead!”

From that hour her husband seemed to live to avenge her wrongs and to honor her memory. Probably into no other administration of the government, from its first to the present, has personal feeling had so much to do with official appointments as in the offices emptied and filled by Andrew Jackson. It had only to enter his suspicion that a man had failed to espouse the cause of the beloved Rachel, and his unlucky official head immediately came off. It was told him that Mr. Watterson, the Librarian of Congress, had told, or listened to something to the detriment of Mrs. Jackson, and Mr. Watterson was immediately deposed. Thus she was avenged at times, probably in acts of personal injustice, but in her own pure tones she spoke through him in all the higher acts of his administration. Thus it was in spirit that Rachel Jackson lived and reigned at the White House.

The “lovely Emily” Donelson, wife of Andrew Jackson Donelson, Mrs. Jackson’s nephew and adopted son, with Mrs. Andrew Jackson, Jr., the wife of another adopted son, shared together the social honors of the White House during the administration of President Jackson. The delicate question of precedence between them was thus settled by him. He said to Mrs. Jackson: “You, my dear, are mistress of the Hermitage, and Emily is hostess of the White House.”

This Emily was of remarkable beauty, strongly resembling Mary, Queen of Scots. Her manners were of singular fascination, and she dressed with exquisite taste. The dress she wore at the first inauguration is still preserved. It is an amber-colored satin, brocaded with _bouquets_ of rose-leaves and violets, trimmed with white lace and pearls. It was a present from General Jackson, and even at that day, before “Jenkins” supposed birth, it was described in every paper of the Union. General Jackson always called her “my daughter.” She was the child of Mrs. Jackson’s brother, and married to her cousin. She was quick at repartee, and possessed the rare gift of being able to listen gracefully. A foreign minister once said: “Madame, you dance with the grace of a Parisian. I can hardly realize that you were educated in Tennessee.”

“Count, you forget,” was the spirited reply, “that grace is a cosmopolite, and, like a wild flower, is found oftener in the woods than in the streets of a city.”

Her four children were all born in the White House. But in the midst of its honors, in the flower of her youth, “the lovely Emily” went out from its portals to die. She sought the softer airs of “Tulip Grove,” her home in Tennessee, where she died of consumption, December, 1836. A lady gives the following picture of an evening scene at the White House, in the early part of Jackson’s administration:

“The large parlor was scantily furnished; there was light from the chandelier, and a blazing fire in the grate; four or five ladies sewing around it; Mrs. Donelson, Mrs. Andrew Jackson, Jr., Mrs. Edward Livingston. Five or six children were playing about, regardless of documents or work-baskets. At the farther end of the room sat the President, in his arm-chair, wearing a long loose coat, and smoking a long reed pipe, with bowl of red clay—combining the dignity of the patriarch, monarch, and Indian chief. Just behind, was Edward Livingston, the Secretary of State, reading a dispatch from the French Minister for Foreign Affairs. The ladies glance admiringly, now and then, at the President, who listens, waving his pipe toward the children, when they become too boisterous.”