First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Dolley’s successor, Elizabeth Monroe, was another story, however, and she acted to reduce dramatically the social obligations of all future First Ladies. The results of the 1816 election had hardly come in when it became clear that Elizabeth Monroe had no intention of allowing her daily schedule to be dictated by others, certainly not by the provincial wives of midwestern congressmen. Born to wealthy New Yorkers, she was acquainted with the courts of Europe, having accompanied her husband, James Monroe, when he held diplomatic posts in both Paris and London. She meant to guard her schedule against “democratic” encroachments.

  If Dolley Madison was a First Lady of the people, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe was anything but. Extremely reticent, she preferred privacy and insisted on elegance. Parisians had dubbed her “la belle américaine” when she lived among them in the 1790s, and it was generally agreed that she had retained her spectacular beauty at age fifty-four when her husband became president. Portraits made of her at that time show a regal woman, dark and poised, flattered by the new fashions that exposed more arm and breast than had previously been considered proper. She preferred to order her dresses from France and reportedly paid $1,500 per costume for the privilege.66 Her exquisite clothing, remarkable both for its design and workmanship, later added interest to the popular Smithsonian exhibition on First Ladies, but it produced a great deal of envy among her contemporaries.

  Elizabeth Monroe’s final indiscretion, in the eyes of many Washingtonians, was to appear much younger than her age. One indignant woman complained: “Mrs. Monroe [has] an appearance of youth which would induce a stranger to suppose her age to be 30, in lieu of which, she introduces them to her granddaughter 18 or 19 years old.”67 Fifty years old at the time, Elizabeth Monroe had one granddaughter, then age twelve. There was then some exaggeration in the statement, but it was generally agreed that she appeared much younger than her years. Since the use of cosmetics still carried the taint of wickedness, long debates ensued as to how much of her attractiveness resulted from nature and how much from “paint.”68

  Even while her husband served as secretary of state (1809–1817), Elizabeth Monroe had made clear that she expected to have little to do with the wives of other department heads, and, after seven years in the capital, she and her husband remained “perfect strangers,” one social leader wrote, “not only to me but all citizens.”69 James’s elevation to the presidency caused no deviation in the Monroes’ custom. Some hope prevailed that invitations to the President’s House would flow more freely after the mansion, destroyed in the 1814 burning of Washington by the British, had been rebuilt. However, Elizabeth’s handling of her daughter’s wedding ended that speculation.

  In a “first” for a president’s family, Maria, the younger of the two Monroe daughters, was married in 1820, and many Washingtonians expected to find their names on the wedding guest list. This was the chance, reasoned congressmen and diplomats, for the president to make them all one family, sharing the festivities associated with the nuptials. Dolley Madison would doubtless have complied, so dedicated she remained to maintaining political harmony, but Elizabeth Monroe had other ideas. She insisted that the wedding remain strictly private, and she invited only the family’s closest friends. Later presidents’ sons and especially their daughters, who chose to be married in small ceremonies even though their parents happened to reside at the White House, might well thank Elizabeth Monroe’s stubbornness. She resisted all requests that she increase the number of guests invited, and when the diplomatic corps persisted, she dispatched the secretary of state to set them straight.

  Such open refusal on the part of a president’s wife to court public favor puzzled observers during the first Monroe administration; during her husband’s second term, when Elizabeth put even more distance between herself and everyone else, the public reaction became severe. She stayed away from Washington for months at a time visiting her two married daughters. Such absences might have caused little more than speculation about her marital felicity, as happened when Jackie Kennedy took long vacations from the White House in the 1960s, but Elizabeth Monroe’s behavior had more serious repercussions. The old rule still prevailed that no women guests came to the President’s House in the absence of a hostess. This meant that wives and daughters who had accompanied congressmen to Washington had to keep their party dresses put away until Elizabeth Monroe chose to make an appearance. Her absence caused, one Massachusetts senator wrote home, “no little mortification and disappointment [among the] ladies.”70 At the stag dinners of President Monroe, who had no reputation for conversational brilliance, long silences and early departures became the pattern.71

  Left with much of the detail of running the White House, the president, rather than his wife, received the blame for mishandling furniture purchases. Just before James Monroe’s inauguration in 1817, Congress had appropriated $20,000 for furnishing the rebuilt mansion and then two years later, another $30,000. Deeming furniture selection an official responsibility, he assigned the job jointly to his commissioner of public buildings, Colonel Lane, and to the auditor of the Treasury, William Lee. While the president waited impatiently for the new furniture to arrive from Europe, he offered the loan of his own fine pieces, acquired during his years in France.

  The money exchanges that followed became so confused that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams expressed unqualified dismay. President Monroe accepted money from the furniture account, paid it back, then took it again.72 When Colonel Lane died in 1823, his personal finances were so tangled, with so much public money missing, that Congressman John Cocke of Tennessee called for an investigation. In the end, stuffy John Quincy Adams concluded that the president had done nothing wrong but had, nevertheless, exposed himself to embarrassment “almost as incongruous to the station of a President of the United States as it would be to a blooming virgin to exhibit herself naked before a multitude.”73

  John Quincy Adams had considerable interest in James Monroe’s behavior as president because he intended to claim the job for himself in the 1824 election. To that end he enlisted the aid of his wife, Louisa, who had already been caught up in the dispute over how accessible the wives of government leaders should be to other citizens. While John Quincy Adams served as James Monroe’s secretary of state, Louisa had refused to make the initial call on the families of all legislators who arrived in the capital, causing Elizabeth Monroe to summon her for a conference. As John Quincy Adams explained in his diary: “All the ladies arriving here as strangers, it seems, expect to be visited by the wives of [Cabinet members] and even by the President’s wife.” It was an expectation they did not meekly renounce. John Quincy continued that Elizabeth Monroe, who offered poor health as the reason for not making the calls herself, had informed Louisa that “the ladies had taken offence at [Louisa’s] not paying them the first visit….” “My wife returns all visits,” John Quincy Adams noted, “but [she] adopts the principle of not visiting first any stranger who arrives, and this is what the ladies have taken in dudgeon.”74

  When Elizabeth Monroe refused to go running all over Washington to court the favor of congressmen’s wives, they retaliated by boycotting the few parties she did give. “The drawing room of the President was opened last night,” one woman wrote in December, 1819, “to a beggarly row of empty chairs…. Only five females attended, three of whom were foreigners.”75 Louisa Adams received an equally severe reprimand; on one occasion, after inviting “a large party … only three came.”76

  Since offended congressmen figured in the results of the next election, this was no insignificant matter to John Quincy Adams, particularly when it spilled over into criticism of his own behavior. The wives’ reluctance to pay visits had called attention to how the cabinet members handled their own social responsibilities, and the observation was made that insufficient attention had been shown to legislators. President Monroe called John Quincy in to discuss the “etiquette of the visits” and to relay the displeasure of senators who had complained “that the S
ecretary of State refuses to pay them the first visit.” The President “mentioned it with much delicacy,” John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary, “but observed that it occasioned uneasiness, heart-burnings, and severe criticism.”77

  A cabinet meeting on the subject followed a few days later and when no agreement could be reached, John Quincy Adams wrote letters to both the president and vice president to outline his own position. The secretary of state evidently wrote in his usual pedantic style: one Washington woman, who gained access to the letters, described them as the work of “a bookworm and abstracted student [rather] than a man of the world.”78 But the letters served their purpose and settled the matter. Wives of cabinet members would not be expected to act as the Welcome Wagon to every legislator’s family who moved to Washington, and the president’s wife would similarly be relieved of the responsibility to call.

  Elizabeth Monroe had won her point, but her ally, Louisa Adams, stood in quite a different position. James Monroe was already president but John Quincy Adams still had to capture the office and he had to rely on a caucus of congressmen to nominate him. Louisa recognized that she could ill afford to assert her independence in the matter of visits. “It is understood,” she wrote sarcastically in her diary, “that a man who is ambitious to become President of the United States must make his wife visit the Ladies of the members of Congress first. Otherwise he is totally inefficient to fill so high an office.”79 Each morning her husband prepared a set of cards for her “as carefully as a commercial treaty,” and she started on her hated rounds, going sometimes to as many as twenty-five different houses in one day even though it meant traveling from one end of the city to the other. “Oh these visits have made me sick many times,” she wrote in her diary, “and I really sometimes think they will make me crazy.”80

  Nor did the visits end her responsibilities, because each time Congress convened, a new round of callers came to her door—representatives, their wives, relatives, and aides—to pay their respects to her husband. John Quincy made a meticulous accounting of the time thus consumed: “I have received in the course of this month two hundred and thirty-five visitors, which is an average of about eight a day. A half hour to each visitor occupies four hours a day; but that is short of the average. The interruption to business thus incessantly repeated is distressing, but unavoidable,” he wrote in March 1824, as the date of the next presidential election approached.81

  That John Quincy Adams performed so poorly on social occasions increased his dependence on his wife, who had a reputation for charming everyone. As part of the 1824 campaign, he decided that they should give a large party marking the anniversary of Andrew Jackson’s great victory in 1815 at New Orleans. Though Louisa lacked enthusiasm for the idea, she bowed to her husband’s conclusion that such a party could help win votes. “It was agreed this day,” she wrote in December 1823, “that we should give a Ball to General Jackson on the 8th [of January]. I objected much to the plan but was overpowered by John’s argument and the thing was settled.”82 She had less than three weeks to prepare. In addition to sending invitations, which went out by the hundreds up until the day before the event, she had to arrange that beds be folded up and furniture moved so that their house could accommodate the crowd. While preparations continued, she maintained a full social schedule, even giving a small party on January sixth.

  The ball became the season’s most spectacular social affair, singled out for years to come as the model of everything a party should be. Dolley Madison, then living in Montpelier, Virginia, could not attend but she received a glowing report from a good friend: “Mrs. Adams’ reception on the 8th … was really a very brilliant party and admirably arranged. The ladies climbed on chairs and benches to see General Jackson and Mrs. A[dams] very gracefully took his arm and walked through the apartments with him, which gratified the general curiosity. It is said 1,400 cards [were] issued and about 800 [guests] present.”83

  From the hostess came a somewhat different report. She well understood the political implications of the evening, and when a lamp had fallen on her head and oil trickled down her back, she had joined in the joking about her “being anointed.” But after the last guests left at 1:30 she concluded she was just glad to “have got so well through this business.”84 Louisa Adams had frequently remarked that “friends grow warmer as … Mr. A[dams] rises in popularity,”85 and she saw the new attention focused on her as just one more example of the fickleness of politics.

  In calling attention to the burdens of her ceremonial role in her husband’s politicking, Louisa Adams echoed preceding presidents’ wives, each of whom tackled the problem in a different way. Martha Washington had hardly arrived in New York when she informed her sister that she felt “more like a state prisoner than anything else. There [are] certain bounds set for me which I must not depart from and as I cannot do as I like I am obstinate and stay at home a great deal.”86 Later she confessed to her friend, the historian Mercy Warren, that a “younger, gayer woman” might have liked the job more. Only a stubbornness to make the best of things kept Martha trying, having “learned from experience,” she wrote, “that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions and not upon our circumstances.”87

  Energetic Abigail Adams had risen at five in the morning to take care of “family arrangements” so she could have the afternoons for First Lady work. Dolley Madison, who thrived on being the center of attention, wore herself out with a rigorous schedule of visits. Elizabeth Monroe protected her time and her privacy by staying away from Washington a great deal.

  Contemporaries frequently commented that the women’s health suffered from their heavy schedules. “Mrs. Monroe is in a very nervous way,”88 Louisa Adams wrote late in 1820, and James Monroe admitted “the burdens and cares of my long public service have borne too heavily [on Mrs. Monroe].”89 John Quincy Adams worried over his wife’s sleepless nights, while friends concurred that she overexerted herself. “[Mrs. Adams’ entertaining] keeps her ill half the time but she is a woman of great spirit and carries it through with a high hand,” one senator wrote.90 Louisa persisted in keeping social commitments even when she was ill. “Miserably sick,” she wrote in her diary on New Year’s, 1820, “but went to the President’s to pay my respects.”91 All through her husband’s administration, she made the President’s House a center for the arts by playing the harp for her guests and encouraging them to perform in amateur musical and theatrical productions.92

  Hard as she worked at her job, Louisa Johnson Adams did not win unanimous approval. She had been born in England and, although her father came from Baltimore, seemed a bit too foreign to suit some Americans, including her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams. Louisa did not set eyes on her husband’s country until age twenty-six, when she arrived with John Quincy and their three-month-old son. The encounter was a disaster. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark, I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished,” she wrote, recognizing at once how unacceptable her husband’s family found her. “Do what I would there was a conviction on the part of others that I could not suit … I was literally without knowing it a fine Lady.”93

  John Quincy offered little support to bolster his wife’s confidence, and although she followed him back and forth, from Berlin to Massachusetts, then from Washington to St. Petersburg and Paris, she never ceased to complain about his insensitivity. In Russia, she became depressed because she regretted having left her two young sons back in Massachusetts with their grandparents. Her condition worsened in 1813 when her infant daughter died. She blamed herself for the baby’s death, explaining in her diary, “Necessity alone induced me to wean her and in doing so I lost her.”94 Tutoring the one son who had come with her gave her some pleasure but she understood that her husband disdained her efforts. When time came to select a gift for her, he chose a book on “the diseases of the mind.”95 He refused to discuss anything relevant to his diplomatic work, although Louisa shrewdly pointed out that she could hardly remain ignorant of
what went on around her. In commenting to her son many years later that the Adams men made poor husbands, she may well have had the St. Petersburg years in mind.

  Louisa Adams’s diary and unpublished autobiography, which she titled “Adventures of a Nobody,” show evidence of a trained, inquisitive mind but one easily pushed into acquiescence. During the winter of 1812 to 1813 she noted that she had read more than twenty books, including many biographies and memoirs. The records of women, especially those attached to famous or powerful men, particularly interested her. After reading a biography of Diane de Poitiers, mistress of France’s King Henry II, Louisa pondered how Diane’s life had been shaped by others. “[This book] has convinced me,” Louisa wrote, “how little we can do of ourselves.”96 Louisa had hoped to study astronomy but bowed to advice that it was too difficult for her,97 and when warned away or kept ignorant of political intrigues, she showed a similar obeisance. “[I am] continuously told that I cannot by the Constitution have any share in the public honours of my husband,” she wrote later after she had returned to the United States; when a congressman broached a political subject, “[I] was again forced to repeat that I had nothing to do with affairs of State.”98

  Politics formed the center of John Quincy Adams’s life, but Louisa understood that he had effectively relegated her to the domestic sphere. “[Politics] is absolutely essential to [my husband’s] existence,” she wrote, “[but as for myself] I have since the first year of my marriage entered upon my great honours with tears and I do not recollect ever having lost them with regret…. I have nothing to do with the disposal of affairs and have never but once been consulted.”99

  At any public appearance, Louisa knew that she was carefully observed for some indication of her husband’s position. “Trifling occurrences are turned into political machinery—even my countenance was watched at the Senate during Mr. Pinckney’s speech as I was afterward informed by some of the gentlemen.”100 She had been among the first women to attend congressional debates during the Madison administration, but what had started out as a way to keep herself informed had turned into another opportunity to be scrutinized and evaluated.