Slavery’s unresolved place in the western territories remained a crucial question in the spring of 1850, when Charles Francis brought Henry to the District of Columbia. On this, his first trip outside of New England, the observant twelve-year-old noticed a host of cultural and regional distinctions. Quincy’s unspoken idolatry of order and structure gave way to Maryland’s lovely “raggedness”; the casual warmth of southern manners and May sunshine put the boy, so eager to condemn the wicked slave drivers, unexpectedly at ease. Raised in the Revolution’s shadow, he arrived in the capital city as the old republic entered its final phase. Congress was then in the midst of debating what proved to be the history-shaping Compromise of 1850—a series of resolutions designed to address a host of post–Mexican War tensions between the free and slave states. All of the Senate’s leading figures were there, and Charles Francis, as both a Free Soiler and an Adams, wanted to be there as well. The season’s high political stakes, however, combined with yet another and more personal reason for his arrival in the capital. Here, against a backdrop of growing sectional discord and threats of disunion, he visited one final time his ailing mother, Louisa Catherine Adams.
Following her husband’s death two years earlier, Louisa had left the Old House for good, making her permanent residence in Washington. Raised in cosmopolitan surroundings, she had never embraced rustic Quincy. Her father, Joshua Johnson, a handsome Annapolis merchant and the son of a prominent Maryland jurist and politician, had sailed for London in 1771 to represent an American tobacco firm; there he met Catherine Nuth (or Young), then still in her teens. They became partners, started a family, and in 1775, when Catherine was perhaps eighteen, welcomed a second daughter, Louisa. Without the conclusive proof of a parish record, it is uncertain if they ever wed. Their daughter Louisa was the only wife of a president born outside of the United States until Melania Trump in 2017, and she remains the only first lady apparently born out of wedlock. During the American Revolution, Joshua and Catherine, siding with the colonies, crossed the Channel with their young children and took refuge in the port city of Nantes on the lower Loire; there, Louisa learned to speak French and her parents entertained a number of Americans, including, in 1779, the visiting diplomat John Adams and his twelve-year-old son, John Quincy. After the war, the family returned to England, where Johnson served as the American consul general, assisting U.S. citizens in London. It was in that capacity, while holding a social gathering in his home, that his daughter again met the younger Adams, now U.S. minister to the Netherlands.1 The following year, 1797, they married at the ancient Anglican parish church of All Hallows-by-the-Tower, established in 675 by the Anglo-Saxon Abbey at Barking and one of London’s oldest churches.
Louisa’s eclectic range of Anglo-Euro-American references made a powerful impact on Henry. Though a Brooks and most certainly an Adams, he identified strongly with the Johnson side of his stock—the “quarter taint of Maryland blood,” as he evocatively put it. This pleasant blemish he came to regard as something of a saving grace as it represented a relaxed southern sense of protocol and politeness that he found altogether lacking in the less yielding New England conscience that otherwise dominated his outlook. At its best, this Chesapeake influence offered Henry a kind of double identity, for though he might fail to prove the mocking Irish gardener wrong and rise to the presidency, he more fully and perhaps more satisfyingly mimicked the life of Grandmother Louisa. Like “the Madam,” as he and his siblings respectfully referred to her, Henry would come to appreciate the cultural amenities of London and, even more so, Paris, where he spent a considerable part of his life; also like her, he too escaped from cramped Quincy in search of a Washington situation. Her brave resistance to Boston proved a distinct inspiration. “He liked her refined figure,” he wrote in the Education, and admired “her gentle voice and manner; her vague effect of not belonging there, but to Washington or to Europe.… Try as she might, the Madam could never be Bostonian, and it was her cross in life, but to the boy it was her charm. Even at that age, he felt drawn to it.”2
Leaving New England that spring of 1850 to make his first journey to the South, Henry experienced the agreeably jarring sensation, as he later put it, of entering “a new world.”3 Boston gave way to New York, followed by Trenton, Philadelphia, Havre de Grace, and Baltimore, from which he entrained to Washington. He found Maryland wonderfully ramshackle and uncombed, an unexpected contrast to the tidy Puritan communities at home. Its fields were unfenced, its woods overgrown, and its streets indifferently shared with roving pigs and cattle. With a population of fifty thousand (some four thousand of whom were enslaved), Washington was little more than a medium-size city, about equal to Albany, New York. Entering the capital, Henry would have soon spied the incomplete Washington Monument, only two years into construction, inching slowly toward the sky. A September 1850 drawing by Montgomery Meigs, engineer for several District of Columbia facilities, shows the shrine’s marble shaft barely fifty feet high, its tiered crown supporting a crane lumbering idly with no apparent purpose. Impeded by poverty, politics, and civil war, the monument remained unfinished until 1888.
Something of an Adams family fiefdom, Washington experienced a host of improvements since being torched by British forces during the War of 1812. Turnpikes, canals, and railroads bore evidence of progress, as did hospitals, colleges, and a secure water supply for the city. The appearance of sidewalks on Pennsylvania Avenue provoked much approval, as did the costly makeover of the old burned-out Capitol Building, as brick and freestone gave way to sleek, carved Italian marble. A few years before Henry’s arrival, the British writer Harriet Martineau marveled at Washington’s intensely fluid society, one “singularly compounded,” she insisted, from a variety of influences, including “foreign ambassadors… members of Congress… flippant young belles, ‘pious’ wives dutifully attending their husbands, and groaning over the frivolities of the place; grave judges, saucy travelers, pert newspaper reporters, melancholy Indian chiefs, and timid New England ladies, trembling on the verge of the vortex; all these are mixed up together in daily intercourse like the higher circle of a little village.”4
Combined, the buildings, pathways, and people of Washington furnished a comparatively “primitive” atmosphere that stirred Henry’s adolescent imagination. Like many northerners he exoticized the South, emphasizing, he later wrote, its “want of barriers, of pavements, of forms; the looseness, the laziness; the indolent southern drawl… the negro babies and their mothers with bandanas; the freedom, openness, swagger, of nature and man.” As an adult Henry traveled much of the world, including extended stays in Egypt, Japan, and Polynesia, which drew from his ever-present pen extensive descriptions of desert and island otherness. It was in the American South, however, where he first learned to romanticize the inscrutable locals and their untamed land. Here, he surrendered to the thick scent of catalpa trees, stared silently at the scattered congregations of dark-skinned slaves, and thought the unfinished District, with its dusty roads and rickety wooden homes amid the occasional clean white-columned government building, resembled nothing so much as a strange ruin from an ancient “Syrian city.”5
Ultimately, the South presented to Henry a confusing contrast to Quincy. He knew what was right—education and free labor, piety and industry—yet he found himself undeniably attracted to the lack of southern institutional oversight, of church, state, and school, that pinched him at home. For the first time, he came upon a contradiction that he could neither solve nor shake. The South, he recognized from the parlor politics that held court in the Old House, represented the unhealthiest aspects of America—and of man. The region was choked with bad roads, and “bad roads,” Henry knew, “meant bad morals.” And yet here is where his grandmother had chosen—over Quincy, over the Old House—to live, and here, in a capital city conspicuous, even notorious for its slaves, he felt a kind of freedom unknown to him at home. “Though Washington belonged to a different world, and the two worlds could not live together,” he later observed in the manner of confessing a heresy, “[I] was not sure that [I] enjoyed the Boston world most.”6
Henry and his father stayed in Louisa’s fashionable home at 244 F Street (now 1333–1335 F Street NW), just east of the Executive Mansion. John Quincy and Louisa had purchased the place—to be known for many years as the “Adams Building”—in 1820 during his tenure as secretary of state. Henry’s aunt Mary, Louisa’s niece and daughter-in-law, greeted them at the door. As Mary Catherine Hellen she had, following the death of her parents, moved in with her aunt Louisa and uncle John Quincy. In 1828 she married their son, John Adams II, in a small White House ceremony; an alcoholic, he died just six years later of what one member of the family stoically called “the scourge of intemperance.”7
Using the Madam’s house as a base, Henry and his father circulated through Washington, the Governor taking his son to the Capitol Building and shepherding him through the crush of congressmen. Sitting in the old Senate Chamber, neoclassical in style with a bright crimson and gold color scheme, they listened from the gallery to addresses made by the future Confederate president, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster, who, just three months earlier, had delivered his controversial “Seventh of March” speech in favor of what became known as the Compromise of 1850. Though its separate bills included several planks favorable to the North—making California a free state, banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and rejecting Texas’s claim to New Mexico—it also contained a strengthened fugitive slave law that, under pain of financial penalty, required officials and citizens of free states, when summoned by a federal marshal, to cooperate in the capture of runaways and alleged runaways. Much of Massachusetts Whiggery had sharply denounced Webster’s address, and Charles Francis was “appalled” by it. He called the senator “a mountebank… degraded by the lowest sensualities and by the upmost rapacity.” Now, as Henry observed these celebrated figures in their fine blue dress coats making their long orations sprinkled with classical allusions, still more thoughts on regional variation came to mind. Though he knew all politicians to be pretentious, he was surprised to discover that “southern pomposity, when not arrogant, was genial and sympathetic, almost quaint and childlike in its simplemindedness; quite a different thing from the Websterian… pomposity of the north.”8
Sometime during their stay, Henry and his father called upon President Taylor at the Executive Mansion, itself something of a presumed ancestral possession. The visit made a distinct impression on the boy, for this is where his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all once lived. John and Abigail Adams, leaving the comparative comfort of Philadelphia, the nation’s second capital after New York City, were its original occupants, in November 1800. Henry remembered thinking he “owned it” and “should some day live in it.” Taylor, who died of an ill-defined digestive ailment just a few weeks after entertaining the Adamses, left less of an impression. Presidents in the boy’s family, after all, were common, something one might expect to see, so the boy later wrote, “in every respectable family.”9
As a kind of ceremonial conclusion to what he called his “Washington education,” Henry, driven with the Governor in a carriage and pair, visited Mount Vernon, still a private residence owned by the widow of George Washington’s grandnephew John Augustine Washington II. There, he discovered an antique colonial world that bore a striking resemblance to Quincy: “It was the same eighteenth-century, the same old furniture, the same old patriot, and the same old President.”10 But as he ambled about the ancient plantation, its precincts redolent with historical suggestion, a puzzling contradiction began to wedge its way into the boy’s ripening mind. For he had been taught to revere the great Washington—a man above all other statesmen, all other presidents. And yet this Roman among Romans had held slaves on the very grounds upon which the boy now trod, and Henry, the clean-faced Puritan who knew the difference between a good road and a bad one, knew slavery to be wicked. It was a paradox that, in 1850, the entire country began to wrestle with in earnest.