Complementarity: Lessons from the Adams Family
by Susan Hanssen
Alexis de Tocqueville called “the strength of American women” the great secret of the strength of the American republic. Likewise, strong women were the backbone of the Adams family and its contribution to the political integrity of the American republic.
The letters of John and Abigail Adams were first published by their grandson, Charles Francis Adams (President Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain). The diaries and letters of John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, have just been published this year, a project explored by their grandson, Henry Adams. Henry Adams—who called Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the “bible of my own private religion”—worried that American men and women were losing their appreciation for the complementary strengths and gifts of men and women. He thought the best remedy was to hold up for Americans the image of his grandmother.
Part of the charm of John and Abigail Adams’s letters (which are frequently addressed with terms such as “Dear Miss Adorable” and “My Dearest Friend”) is the way that the two weave a life-long conversation about universal human virtue into their ongoing inquiry into their complementary contributions to mothering and fathering their “little flock” of children. Louisa Adams had a hard act to follow in such a renowned mother-in-law, but her journals reveal a woman of profound reflection—on the meaning of piety (filial, patriotic, and religious) and her role as daughter, wife, and mother.
The Only Perfectly Balanced Mind in the Adams Family
Louisa Adams is the only American First Lady to have been born in a foreign country. Her American parents were living in London when she was born, and during the Revolution she was educated in a French convent school. She married John Quincy Adams during his diplomatic work, and the two immediately set off for Prussia, where he was stationed. She had already endured a number of difficult miscarriages and given birth to her three sons—little George Washington, John II, and Charles Francis—before she made her first visit to her “native” land.
She was soon called on to leave her two oldest sons behind and accompany her husband to Russia with her youngest child. In Tsarist Russia, she endured a very personal “winter”: painfully separated from her older children, she lost her only infant daughter, received news of her own mother’s death, and had to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris in the midst of the Napoleonic wars.
Late in life, she bitterly reproached herself for having left her oldest sons behind while she accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to Russia. Both of those sons were deeply troubled youths, impregnating women before wedlock, and dying young from drink or suicide.
Only the son whom she had kept close to her carried on the family tradition of public service, political integrity, and a lifelong happy marriage with many children. In fact, his sons marveled at Charles Francis Adams as a man “singular for mental poise.” It seemed to them that it was the influence of his mother who had balanced the analytical tendencies of his father, which often led members of the Adams family to deep depression, bitterness, and drink. With a good dose of both mothering and fathering, he struck his sons as “the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.”
Sexless as the Bees
When her grandson Henry Adams read Louisa’s diary, he was inspired to compare Russia to Woman, Woman to Russia—the two conservative forces at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia acted as a conservative political force in Europe comparable to Woman as a conservative social force in America. Perhaps with the help of Russia the threat of an imperial Germany could be contained. Perhaps with the help of Woman the threat of a corroding materialism might be contained.
Each was powerful, but each powerfully directed its forces internally. Russia, he argued, had its axis of rotation around the Church and around agricultural production to feed its enormous population. It had not yet turned its forces toward industrialization and modernization. If Russia’s forces were ever to be ripped from its axis by, let’s say, an atheistic modernizing revolutionary regime, Adams wrote in 1905, it might destroy all of Europe.
But if Woman were to be torn from her axis of rotation around the cradle, it wouldn’t just destroy Europe—it could destroy human society. In his wide-ranging third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams observed:
The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the race.
In this context of a Tocquevillean fear of whether Russian absolutism or American freedom would triumph in the coming century and whether the American triumph would indeed be a victory for liberty or for the incessant pursuit of petty and paltry pleasures that “enervate the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action,” Adams held up, at the beginning of The Education, the image of his grandmother.
The letters of John and Abigail Adams were first published by their grandson, Charles Francis Adams (President Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain). The diaries and letters of John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, have just been published this year, a project explored by their grandson, Henry Adams. Henry Adams—who called Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the “bible of my own private religion”—worried that American men and women were losing their appreciation for the complementary strengths and gifts of men and women. He thought the best remedy was to hold up for Americans the image of his grandmother.
Part of the charm of John and Abigail Adams’s letters (which are frequently addressed with terms such as “Dear Miss Adorable” and “My Dearest Friend”) is the way that the two weave a life-long conversation about universal human virtue into their ongoing inquiry into their complementary contributions to mothering and fathering their “little flock” of children. Louisa Adams had a hard act to follow in such a renowned mother-in-law, but her journals reveal a woman of profound reflection—on the meaning of piety (filial, patriotic, and religious) and her role as daughter, wife, and mother.
The Only Perfectly Balanced Mind in the Adams Family
Louisa Adams is the only American First Lady to have been born in a foreign country. Her American parents were living in London when she was born, and during the Revolution she was educated in a French convent school. She married John Quincy Adams during his diplomatic work, and the two immediately set off for Prussia, where he was stationed. She had already endured a number of difficult miscarriages and given birth to her three sons—little George Washington, John II, and Charles Francis—before she made her first visit to her “native” land.
She was soon called on to leave her two oldest sons behind and accompany her husband to Russia with her youngest child. In Tsarist Russia, she endured a very personal “winter”: painfully separated from her older children, she lost her only infant daughter, received news of her own mother’s death, and had to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris in the midst of the Napoleonic wars.
Late in life, she bitterly reproached herself for having left her oldest sons behind while she accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to Russia. Both of those sons were deeply troubled youths, impregnating women before wedlock, and dying young from drink or suicide.
Only the son whom she had kept close to her carried on the family tradition of public service, political integrity, and a lifelong happy marriage with many children. In fact, his sons marveled at Charles Francis Adams as a man “singular for mental poise.” It seemed to them that it was the influence of his mother who had balanced the analytical tendencies of his father, which often led members of the Adams family to deep depression, bitterness, and drink. With a good dose of both mothering and fathering, he struck his sons as “the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.”
Sexless as the Bees
When her grandson Henry Adams read Louisa’s diary, he was inspired to compare Russia to Woman, Woman to Russia—the two conservative forces at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia acted as a conservative political force in Europe comparable to Woman as a conservative social force in America. Perhaps with the help of Russia the threat of an imperial Germany could be contained. Perhaps with the help of Woman the threat of a corroding materialism might be contained.
Each was powerful, but each powerfully directed its forces internally. Russia, he argued, had its axis of rotation around the Church and around agricultural production to feed its enormous population. It had not yet turned its forces toward industrialization and modernization. If Russia’s forces were ever to be ripped from its axis by, let’s say, an atheistic modernizing revolutionary regime, Adams wrote in 1905, it might destroy all of Europe.
But if Woman were to be torn from her axis of rotation around the cradle, it wouldn’t just destroy Europe—it could destroy human society. In his wide-ranging third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams observed:
The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the race.
In this context of a Tocquevillean fear of whether Russian absolutism or American freedom would triumph in the coming century and whether the American triumph would indeed be a victory for liberty or for the incessant pursuit of petty and paltry pleasures that “enervate the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action,” Adams held up, at the beginning of The Education, the image of his grandmother.
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