The Capitol Dome

The Capitol Dome 56.1

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26 THE CAPITOL DOME The Political Lives of Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams and John Quincy Adams: Historical Memory, Slavery, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum Congresses by Ryan Conner M ore than half a century after their deaths, historian Henry Adams remembered his grandmother Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams as "the Madam" and grandfa- ther John Quincy Adams as "the old President." Adams's earliest memories of his grandparents came from his time as boy with them in Quincy, Massachusetts and Wash- ington, D.C. In a vision of his grandmother living in the capital in the 1840s, the young Adams saw the 70-year- old woman sitting calmly in a breakfast room, "thor- oughly weary of being beaten about a stormy world….a vision of silver gray, presiding over her old President." When the young Adams's grandfather died in 1848, "the eighteenth century, as an actual and living companion, vanished." Upon visiting his grandmother in the capital with his father in 1850 two years after his grandfather's death, Adams stayed in her house on F Street. When he walked outside, slavery's existence in the city "repulsed" him. He called it "a nightmare; a horror; a crime; the sum of all wickedness!" Coming from pastoral life in Quincy, Adams "wanted to escape, like the negroes, to free soil." His critique of slavery influenced how he viewed the Senate during a visit with his father: "Sena- tors spoke kindly to him [Henry Adams], and seemed to feel so, for they had known his family socially; and, in spite of slavery, even J.Q. Adams in his later years, after he ceased to stand in the way of rivals, had few per- sonal enemies. Decidedly the Senate, pro-slavery though it were, seemed a friendly world." 1 As Adams's recollection subtly implies, "the Madam" and "the old President" had a tumultuous relationship with the Senate and House throughout their lives—Con- gress indeed was a "stormy world" in the early nineteenth century. Never was their relationship more fraught than when Congress debated war with Britain and France in the 1800s, confronted slavery in the territories in the 1820s, and refused even to debate slavery in the 1830s. Louisa Catherine's and John Quincy's personal concep- tions of morality informed their responses to these crises, yet each crisis, in turn, forcefully challenged their ideas of public virtue and morality. Their inter-denominational brand of Protestantism, which evolved throughout their lives, served as their "great guide in navigating the world" and "fulfilled their everyday needs," especially during the periods of crisis. 2 As the Adamses became increasingly entangled in national politics, it became increasingly diffi- cult for them to practice their ideas. During each crisis, the

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