“Some portions of the city are forty miles from Baltimore. The situation is indeed beautiful and pleasant.
“The President’s house was built to be looked at by visitors and strangers, and will render its occupants an object of ridicule with some and of pity with others. It must be cold and damp in winter, and cannot be kept in tolerable order without a regiment of servants. There are but few houses at any one place, and most of them small, miserable huts, which present an awful contrast to the public buildings. The people are poor, and as far as I can judge, they live like fishes, by eating each other.”
The first New Year’s reception at the White House was held by President Adams in 1801. The house was only partially furnished, and Mrs. Adams used the oval room up-stairs, now the library, as a drawing-room. The formal etiquette established by Mrs. Washington at New York and Philadelphia was kept up in the wilderness-city by Mrs. Adams.
At this time the health of Mrs. Adams, which had never been very firm, began decidedly to fail. Her residence at Philadelphia had not been favorable, as it had subjected her to the attack of an intermittent fever, from the effects of which she was never afterward perfectly free. The desire to enjoy the bracing air of her native climate, as well as to keep together the private property of her husband, upon which she early foresaw that he would be obliged to rely for their support in their last years, prompted her to reside much of her time at Quincy.
Thus closed Mrs. Adams’ life in Washington, of which she has given a picture in her letter to her daughter; and spring found her once more in her Massachusetts home, recuperating her failing health. She lived in Washington only four months—and yet she is inseparably connected with it. She was mistress of the White House less than half a year, but she stamped it with her individuality, and none have lived there since who have not looked upon her as the model and guide. It is not asserting too much, to observe that the first occupant of that historic house stands without a rival, and receives a meed of praise awarded to no other American woman.
In the midst of public or private troubles, the buoyant spirit of Mrs. Adams never forsook her. “I am a mortal enemy,” she wrote upon one occasion to her husband, “to anything but a cheerful countenance and a merry heart, which Solomon tells us does good like a medicine.” “This spirit,” says her son, “contributed greatly to lift up his heart, when surrounded by difficulties and dangers, exposed to open hostility, and secret detraction, and resisting a torrent of invective, such as it may well be doubted whether any other individual in public station in the United States has ever tried to stem. It was this spirit which soothed his wounded feelings when the country, which he had served in the full consciousness of the perfect honesty of his motives, threw him off, and signified its preference for other statesmen. There are oftener, even in this life, more compensations for the severest of the troubles that afflict mankind, than we are apt to think.”
The sacrifices made by Mrs. Adams during the long era of war, pestilence, and famine, deserves and should receive from a nation’s gratitude a monument as high and massive as her illustrious husband’s.
Let it be reared in the hearts of the women of America, who may proudly claim her as a model, and let her fame be transmitted to remotest posterity—the “Portia” of the rebellious provinces.
Statues and monuments belong rather to a bygone than a present time, and are indicative of a less degree of culture than we of this century boast. The pages of history are the truest, safest sarcophagi of greatness, and embalm in their records the lives of the master-workers. Not in marble or bronze be her memory perpetuated, for we need no such hieroglyphics in this country of free schools. Place her history in the libraries of America, and the children of freedom will live over her deeds. To the crumbling monarchies of Europe on their way to dissolution, it may be necessary to erect statues of past greatness, that some shadow of their nothingness may remain as warnings; but the men and women of revolutionary memory are become a part and parcel of this government, whose very existence must be wiped from the face of the earth ere one jot or tittle of their fame is lost.
In viewing the character of Mrs. Adams, as it looms up in the pages of the past, we can but regret that she occupied no more enlarged sphere. The woman who could reply as she did to the question, (“Had you known that Mr. Adams would have remained so long abroad, would you have consented that he should have gone?”)—could have filled any position in civil life. “If I had known,” she replied, after a moment’s hesitation, “that Mr. Adams could have effected what he has done, I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured, painful as it has been, but I would not have opposed it, even though three more years should be added to the number. I feel a pleasure in being able to sacrifice my selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family but as the small dust of the balance, when compared with the great community.”