Louisa by Louisa Thomas Page A

Penn’s Hill was set in farmland and woods. When they arrived, Louisa and Eliza had to milk the cow themselves, laughing “heartily” at their failure.
    But her good humor quickly soured. Although she liked rambling in the fields and forest with George and John and occasionally John Quincy, who would try to teach his “unfruitful scholars” to distinguish the blooming peach trees from the plum, she disliked living in the woods after a life spent in cities. She felt at once claustrophobic and exposed, worried about “two or three insane persons” at loose in the area, and trapped in the tiny farmhouse—four rooms downstairs and three small rooms above, too small for three adults, a few young servants, a toddler always up to mischief, and a baby just learning to run. When she had more space, though, after John Quincy began to spend more time at his parents’ and Eliza went to Boston for parties,she felt no better; she felt alone. It was hard for them to be together, hard for them to be apart.
    It would have been hard to be around John Quincy, in any event, that summer. He lashed himself in his diary for his “mental imbecility.” “My prospects are again blasted, and I have nothing left before me but resignation,” he wrote. Abigail wrote to Hannah Quincy that she was worried about John Quincy’s “depression of spirits,” but did not know what to do. “There are some malidies so deep rooted,” Abigail wrote to Eliza Susan Quincy, “that the most delicate hand dare not probe. The attempt might fix an incurable wound.” She took him to Dr. Cotton Tufts, in hopes that he could prescribe a pill.
    An offer from Harvard to be the first Boylston Professor of Rhetoric partly boosted his spirits, but it produced new tension with his wife. Louisa didn’t like Harvard; she thought that the school was more concerned with its own wealth and power than with its students. But it was not her decision. He took the job, teaching during summers when Congress was not in session. His spirits rose—but hers dropped as he became even more preoccupied with Cicero. He spent his days preparing his lectures and had no time for anything but teaching—certainly not for her. She found the whole thing “odious.” “Having relinquished almost all claim to [your presence] in the winter . . . I am the less willing to give it up in the summer,” she wrote to John Quincy. But what she was willing to tolerate didn’t much matter.
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    S O THEY TRIED different arrangements. They split up, shuttled back and forth, and made unhappy compromises. When Louisa and John Quincy returned to Washington in the fall of 1805, they left George, now four years old, and John, now two, behind at John Quincy’s insistence and by Abigail’s arrangement. Louisa protested, which the other Adamses considered unreasonable. It was common for members of the extended Adams family to share in the education and care of oneanother’s children. Abigail grew tired of Louisa’s self-pitying, forlorn letters about missing her children: “I believe they are much better off than they could have been at any boarding house in Washington, where they must have been confined to some degree, or have mixd with improper persons”—harsh words, since the “boarding house” in question was the home of Louisa’s own sister.
    â€œNothing but compulsion would have induced me to leave them,” Louisa responded.
    Her husband or her children; her children or her husband. Having her children meant no husband, but having no children meant, it seems, the chance to grow closer to him. During the winter they spent together without George and John, 1805–6, they were moody—at times short with each other, and at times more tender and affectionate. She was pregnant, and its effects were violent. “My health was