The poor farmer slunk back extinguished. If he gave John Quincy his vote, he was more magnanimous than the average citizen of to-day would be to so rude a candidate.
A writer of her time speaks of Mrs. Adams’ “enchanting, elegant and intellectual régime,” declaring that it should give tone to the whole country. Her fine culture, intellectual tastes, and charming social qualities, combined to attract about her a circle of rare and distinguished women. Among these were Mrs. Richard Rush, Mrs. Van Rensselaer, the wife of the Patroon, and Mrs. Edward Livingston. Notwithstanding the opposition of her husband’s politics, Mrs. Livingston was Mrs. Adams’ most intimate friend; a lady whom any land might be proud to claim, and whose memory lives a perpetual honor to womanhood.
Mrs. Adams’ son, Charles Francis Adams, writing of his mother in 1839, says:
“The attractions of great European capitals, and the dissipations consequent upon high official stations at home, though continued through that part of her life when habits become the most fixed, have done nothing to change the natural elegance of her manners, nor the simplicity of her tastes.... To the world, Mrs. Adams presents a fine example of the possibility of retiring from the circles of fashion, and the external fascinations of life, in time still to retain a taste for the more quiet, though less showy attractions of the domestic hearth.
A strong literary taste, which has caused her to read much, and a capacity for composition in prose and verse, have been resources for her leisure moments; not with a view to that exhibition which renders such accomplishments too often fatal to the more delicate shades of feminine character, but for her own gratification, and that of a few relatives and friends.
The late President Adams used to draw much amusement, in his latest years at Quincy, from the accurate delineation of Washington manners and character, which was regularly transmitted, for a considerable period, in letters from her pen. And if, as time advances, she becomes gradually less able to devote her sense of sight to reading and writing, her practice of the more homely virtues of manual industry, so highly commended in the final chapter of the book of Solomon, still amuses the declining days of her varied career.”
Mrs. Adams was the “lady of the White House” when, in 1825, Lafayette visited the United States, and, at the invitation of the President, spent the last weeks of his stay at the “Executive Mansion,” from which, on the seventh of September, he bade his pathetic farewell to the land of his adoption.
Notwithstanding the rare qualities of mind and heart which she brought to it, and the popularity which she attained in it, her son writes:
“Her residence in the President’s house I have always considered as the period she enjoyed the least during the public career of my father. All this appears more or less in her letters, and especially in a species of irregular diary which she kept for some time at Washington, for the benefit of my grandfather, John Adams, then living at Quincy, and of her brother, who was residing in New Orleans.”
Mrs. Adams died May 14, 1852, and was buried beside her husband, in the family burying ground at Quincy, Massachusetts.