First Ladies (9 page)

When Louisa arrived in Paris on March 21, after weeks of difficult and dangerous travel, her husband was waiting at the Hotel du Nord “perfectly astonished at [her] adventures.” His diary makes light of the whole trip, and he wrote matter-of-factly to his mother: “Mrs. A performed the journey from St. Petersburg in 40 days and it has been of essential service to her and Charles' health. She entered France precisely at the time when the revolution was taking place.”
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Although her maid needed two months of bed rest to recover, Louisa Adams, whom her family and historians portrayed as frail and sickly all her life, immediately resumed her regular schedule.

Abigail Adams could never match her daughter-in-law in European experience, but by the time her husband became president the older woman had lived in both France and England and had recorded her trials and triumphs in many letters home. She had joined John first in 1784 when for a few months the family rented a house in Auteuil outside of Paris. Because she could not speak French, although she read it, Abigail found dealing with servants difficult; dinner parties with non-English speakers made her uncomfortable. She worried about her clothes in a country where style obviously mattered. “To be out of fashion is more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature,” she observed, “to which,” she added primly, “Parisians are not averse.”
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But her curiosity and genuine interest in French ways proved more powerful than her complaints; and her own letters, as well as those of her daughter and husband, indicate these were some of the family's happiest times.

The French stay was cut short when John Adams was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James in 1785. It was an extremely awkward post since his presence served as a reminder to Britons that they had recently lost thirteen of their American colonies. Abigail found her reception icy, and she informed her sister: “I own that I have never felt myself in a more contemptible situation, than when I stood four hours together for a gracious smile from majesty.”
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She could not wait to leave England. When the queen was later reported as having her own worries, Abigail showed little sympathy: “Humiliation for Charlotte is no sorrow for me,” she wrote her daughter, “[because she] richly deserves her full portion for the contempt and scorn which she took pains to discover.”
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After five years in Europe, Abigail could not hide her nostalgia for home. “I have lived long enough and seen enough of the world,” she wrote her friend Thomas Jefferson, “to bring my mind to my circumstances and retiring to our own little farm feeding my poultry and improving my garden has more charms for my fancy than residing at the Court of St. James where I seldom meet characters so inoffensive as my hens and chick[s] or minds so well improved as my garden. Heaven forgive me,” she added, “if I think too hardly of them. I wish they had deserved better at my hands.”
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In spite of their protests, the early First Ladies who lived for long periods in Europe profited from the experience—a preparation that few of their successors could boast. Not until a century later, during the Hoover administration of 1929 to 1933, would a First Lady's travels rival those of Abigail Adams, Elizabeth Monroe, or Louisa Adams, who acquired the reputation of the most traveled woman of her time. The Constitution had set very few requirements for election to the country's highest office and none at all in training or travel, but in the early years of the republic, when the psychological separation from Europe was not yet as complete as the physical one, international expertise rendered potential leaders more attractive. Four of the first six presidents (the two Adamses, Jefferson, and Monroe) spent several years in diplomatic service abroad and, except for the widowed Jefferson, had their families with them for at least part of the time, with their wives running large European households.

In one sense, the travel made up for the women's lack of formal education. Abigail Adams frequently complained that she had not had a single day of schooling in her entire life. Rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation remained mysteries all her life, and in her letters, she made one mistake after another. Wide reading and long sessions with her Grandmother Quincy supplied her with her frequent references to the classics but did not prepare her, Abigail acknowledged, for knowing everything people expected her to know.

The other first presidents' wives came no better equipped. Dolley Madison had very little schooling, and during her husband's administration she admitted that she read infrequently. When a young man asked about the Don Quixote volume in her hand, she explained it was just a prop, carried to provide for awkward breaks in conversation. Martha Washington had so much difficulty with spelling that George finally took to writing out her letters for her and having her copy them; but even then she managed to botch the job, carelessly converting his “describe” to “discribe” and using her own quaint versions of “boath” and “occation.”
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Too little is known of Elizabeth Monroe to
make a judgment on her education, but neither she nor any of the others made any move to improve women's education. Abigail Adams's one daughter had little more schooling than her mother, and Martha Washington raised her granddaughter much as she had been raised, putting more importance on the spinet than on spelling.

Small improvements in women's schooling in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth did not result from the example or the cajoling of the presidents' wives. Some Americans argued that their sisters deserved education—it would make them better wives and better people. But the central argument was a practical one. As the country expanded westward, more teachers were needed. When the first girls' academies opened in the 1780s and 1790s, their founders claimed to offer instruction on the same level as boys' schools so that the graduates would be prepared to teach. Benjamin Rush, then professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading advocate of better education for girls, explained in 1787 to the first class of the Young Ladies Academy in Philadelphia that they were there because of the country's needs. Since American girls married earlier and assumed more responsibility for tutoring their children than did their European counterparts, they ought to go beyond basic math and reading, Rush said, to learn world history and geography.
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Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Adams, and Abigail Adams learned their European history and geography first hand.

In assessing how each of the early First Ladies handled the responsibilities imposed on them when their husbands became president, it is safe to conclude that they reacted differently. Only Abigail Adams appears to have shaped the job more than it shaped her. She refused to be silenced, and, with her husband's encouragement, continued to air her opinions. Whether such activity constitutes “feminism” is beside the point—Abigail demonstrated very early in the republic that the opportunity existed for a substantive role (alongside the ceremonial role) for spouses who wanted it—provided, of course, they had the consent of the president. The others, despite objections and occasional rebellions, acquiesced in limiting themselves to a supportive role reflecting the predominant attitude about femininity.

In many ways, the early presidents' wives, along with their husbands, form a distinct group. Unlike those who followed them after 1829, the early chief executives are notable for their close personal connections and for their exceptional training. The wives also stand apart from their successors. In attempting to define just what demands their husbands' jobs imposed on them, they collectively built the foundation for those who followed, and they anticipated most of the
problems. With one eye on the rules of protocol and another on their husbands' popularity, they sought (some more diligently than others) to find the middle ground. They worked to improve the President's House, which served as their home as well as a national monument, and they struggled with the publicity that focused on them as a result of their husbands' jobs. In the evident and continuing debate over just how much distance a president should keep between himself and the people, wives took an important part, striking a balance between commoner and queen.

ANDREW
J
ACKSON'S INAUGURATION IN
1829 signaled a new mood in the country—one that would affect presidents' wives for decades to come. Crowds converged on the capital from all over the eastern seaboard, arriving in carriages and carts, wearing silk and homespun. Never one to disappoint crowds, the tall, white-haired war hero gave his speech, took the prescribed oath, kissed the Bible, and then in an immensely popular gesture bent in a low bow to the people. Word immediately went out that the President's House was now the People's House and open to all without distinction. Thousands headed towards it.

No precautions had been taken to protect the mansion's furnishings, but the unexpectedly large crowd would have rendered such measures ineffective anyway. Glasses shattered and furniture broke as the hungry and curious surged towards tables where food, prepared for hundreds, proved insufficient. People filled their pockets as well as their stomachs. When the president was nearly crushed, one Jackson admirer and staunch defender of “people's rule” decided this was going too far: “Ladies and gentlemen only had been expected at this Levée,” Margaret Bayard Smith, a newspaper editor's wife, wrote, “not the people en masse…. Of all tyrants, they are the most ferocious, cruel and despotic.”
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Margaret Bayard Smith rebelled against much more than the results of a single election. The 1820s and 1830s introduced changes that eventually altered the entire process by which Americans advanced to the top of the political ladder. Instead of looking to a small party caucus for nomination, anyone hoping to be president had to appeal to a convention of delegates, many of whom were strangers. Most states gradually changed the qualifications for voting so that all adult
white males—rather than just property owners—had the suffrage. Old traditions of deference to the rich and the well educated weakened, paving the way for new ideas about who was qualified for high office.

Historians at first emphasized the democratic flavor of the changes and argued that the common man acquired great power, but later scholars concluded that candidates for high political office still came from wealthy backgrounds no matter how humbly they presented themselves.
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Andrew Jackson, so frequently touted as defender and symbol of the common man, possessed enormous personal wealth, and most of the nineteenth-century presidents who claimed to have been born in log cabins actually came from much more prosperous beginnings.

Yet for all the shifting interpretations in American history, the fact remains that presidential styles changed after 1829 so that new importance was put on appearing “natural” rather than “cultured,” and “good” rather than “learned.” Heroes seemed to come from the ranks of the common folk rather than from the obvious elite. John Calhoun had commented in 1817 that the quality of congressmen had declined, a change he attributed to low salaries. Although that may have played some part, the addition of new western states was also relevant since frontier areas frequently elected representatives who had little formal education and even less regard for fixed class differences. Robert J. Hubbard, a congressman from upstate New York, reported with some shock to his wife in 1817 that his colleagues sat through legislative debates with their hats on, removing them only when they addressed the Speaker.
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Much more important than changes in etiquette, the new style in politics altered voters' ideas about who merited consideration for election to the highest office in the land. After 1829, presidents more frequently owed their elevation to military victories or to mundane political apprenticeships than to diplomatic service abroad or to years of leadership as statesmen. Their wives came to “the head of female society” with entirely different experiences from their predecessors. These later women had not had the opportunity to develop Elizabeth Monroe's familiarity with French philosophers or Louisa Adams's habit of sprinkling letters with Latin phrases. Nor had they had the pleasure, or pain, of having been presented at the Court of St. James as had Abigail Adams. Many had not ventured far from the town where they were born until they journeyed to Washington.

Thus, presidents' wives after 1829 lacked some of their predecessors' training in etiquette, a lack deemed important by a segment of
the Washington population that had taken upon itself the responsibility of formulating and enforcing rigid rules of protocol and style. Called the “cave dwellers,” because of their long and continued residence in Washington while elected officials and their families came and went like “a kaleidoscope that changed every four years,”
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the locals did not shrink from claiming prerogatives. Sarah Pryor, wife of a southern congressman and newspaper editor, explained how the “cave dwellers” held themselves apart, separate from the “floating population” of transients, reigning as a “fine society of old residents who never bent the knee to Baal … sufficient to itself, never seeking the new, while accepting it occasionally with discretion, reservations and much discriminating care.”
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Presidents' wives always counted among the “floaters,” up for critical judgment by the entrenched jury.
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In the middle four decades of the nineteenth century, presidents' wives frequently chose to abdicate their public roles rather than risk the censure of the “cave dwellers.” Most First Ladies moved to Washington when their husbands were inaugurated, but they delegated responsibility for official entertaining to someone else. From 1829 to 1869, it is the exceptional First Lady who carves out for herself a public role. In the entire time, only Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Mary Todd Lincoln (1861–1865) achieved any kind of public recognition. The other administrations had stand-in chatelaines in charge at the President's House.