There is nothing to indicate that the James Monroe mentioned is the Monroe who was in the battle of White Plains, and received a ball in the shoulder at the attack on Trenton, who fought by the side of Lafayette at Brandywine, who was Minister to France in 1794, and afterward to England; who was Secretary of State in 1811, and for two full terms President of these United States. Yet such is the fact, and that weather-stained slab of marble, two feet square, covered for many years the grave of Ex-President Monroe.
Many years afterward, by order of the Virginia Legislature, the remains of Ex-President Monroe were removed to Richmond, and a monument befitting his fame was erected over his grave.
The property of Oak Hill is now owned by Mr. Fairfax, and with it one thousand acres of land. Three hundred acres are comprised in the McGowan estate.
The second daughter of President Monroe, Mrs. Maria Gouverneur, died in 1850 at Oak Hill, where she was buried by the side of her mother. The eldest daughter died in Paris, and was buried in Pere la Chaise. There are now living but few descendants of Mrs. Monroe.
At this short remove from her day, not many incidents relating to her career are extant. She lived as public a life as did Mrs. John Adams, and was far better acquainted with society in this country and Europe than several of the ladies who preceded her in the semi-official position she filled, but her ill-health and her temperament unfitted her for familiarity with the people, and kept her from being popular in the sense that Mrs. Madison was. The difference between these two women was that the latter was fond of company, enjoyed life and had a healthy, hearty interest in the events transpiring about her. The other lived in retirement as far as possible, and the record of so quiet an existence is not as familiar to the people of this country as is that of those of her contemporaries who occupied the high place she filled.
Society was differently organized in her time than it is now. It is difficult to realize that newspaper correspondents were the exception and not the rule, and that public attention was rarely directed to ladies; whereas now it is impossible for women in semi-official life to keep themselves out of the multitudinous prints of the day, object as they may.
VI.
LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS.
Mrs. Adams was the sixth in the succession of occupants of the Executive Mansion, and with her closed the list of the ladies of the Revolution. A new generation had sprung up in the forty-nine years of Independence, and after her retirement, younger aspirants claimed the honors. Born in the city of London on the 12th of February, 1775, she received advantages superior to those enjoyed by most of the ladies of America. Her father, Mr. Johnson, of Maryland, although living at the outbreak of the war, in England, was ever a patriotic American, and soon after hostilities commenced, removed with his family to Nantes, in France. “There he received from the Federal Congress an appointment as Commissioner to examine the accounts of all the American functionaries then entrusted with the public money of the United States, in Europe; in the exercise of the duties of which he continued until the peace of 1782. Our National Independence having then been recognized, he returned to London, where he continued to reside, and where he acted as consular agent for the United States, until his final return in 1797, to his native soil.”
It was fortunate for Mrs. Adams that her husband was a strong, intellectual nature; he both satisfied and sustained her, and rendered her sojourn on earth contented and agreeable. In her father’s house in London he first saw her, in 1794, and on the 26th of July, 1797, they were married at the Church of All-Hallows. Soon afterward his father became President, and he was transferred to Berlin, where he repaired with his wife as a bride, to play her part in the higher circles of social and political life. It need scarcely be added that she proved perfectly competent to this; and that during four years, which comprised the period of her stay at that court, notwithstanding almost continual ill-health, she succeeded in making friends and conciliating a degree of good-will, the recollection of which is, even at this distance of time, believed to be among the most agreeable of the associations with her varied life. In 1801, after the birth of her eldest child, she embarked with Mr. Adams on his return to the United States. Not to Maryland, the home of her childhood, but, a stranger to their habits and manners, she went among the New England people, and settled with her husband in Boston. Here she determined to be satisfied and live with a people whom in feeling she was not unlike, but scarcely was she beginning to feel at home when Mr. Adams was elected Senator, and she removed with him to Washington. A sister was already established there, and she met once more the members of her own family, where to her the winter months passed pleasantly away. Each summer she returned to Boston, and thus alternating between there and Washington in winter, she passed the eight years of Jefferson’s term. To many, the capital was an out of the way place, and not always pleasant to Congressmen’s wives, some of whom left the gayeties of larger cities to be detained six or eight months; but Mrs. Adams was peculiarly fortunate in her position, having around her near and dear relations from whom she had been separated many years. It became home to her, and to a Southerner, the climate was more congenial than the region of her husband’s birth-place.