Louisa

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Louisa Thomas

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Frontispiece: National Park Service, Adams National Historical Park

Hardcover ISBN 9781594204630

E-book ISBN 9781101980828

FOR
MY
GRANDMOTHER

O
sceola
H
erron
F
reear

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

PART ONE

Fraught with Bliss:
London
, 1775–1797

PART TWO

Life Was New:
Berlin
, 1797–1801

PART THREE

My Head and My Heart:
Washington and Massachusetts
, 1801–1809

PART FOUR

The Gilded Darkness:
St. Petersburg
, 1809–1815

PART FIVE

Narrative of a Journey:
From St. Petersburg to Paris
, 1815

PART SIX

A Little Paradise:
London and Ealing
, 1815–1817

PART SEVEN

My Campaigne:
Washington and Philadelphia
, 1817–1825

PART EIGHT

A Bird in a Cage:
Washington
, 1825–1829

PART NINE

Beginning the World Anew:
Washington and Quincy
, 1829–1836

PART TEN

In My Own Name:
Washington and Quincy
, 1836–1852

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

L
OUISA
C
ATHERINE
A
DAMS
waited at the doors. She was easy to overlook—small and slight and nearing fifty, with shadows beneath her large dark eyes. But that night, January 8, 1824, she stood where she would be seen, and all attention was on her.

“
Have a beautiful plan
in my head,” she had written in her diary three weeks earlier. She had cleared four rooms of her house in Washington, then eight. Chandeliers were hung, doors taken off their hinges, and pictures of eagles and flags chalked on the ballroom floor. Fifty-four bonfires were lit lining the road. In the end, newspapers reported that about a thousand guests had come. It was “as splendid an assemblage of beauty and fashion as we have ever witnessed,” the
Richmond Enquirer
would write. All the members of Congress (except two Virginians who had been obnoxious to her husband, John Quincy) were in attendance. The department heads, the diplomatic corps, and all the leaders of Washington society were there. Only President James Monroe and his wife were absent, as was their custom. It was the tenth anniversary of victory at the Battle of New Orleans, and this ball was in Andrew Jackson's honor. It was Old Hickory's day and it was his time; his candidacy for president of the United States was starting to
surge. But one thing was already clear: though it was Andrew Jackson's day, it was Louisa Catherine Adams's night.

A little after eight o'clock, a carriage made its way through the throng, and Jackson emerged. Louisa was there to meet him and lead him through the rooms. Her spangled silk dress shone in the lamplight. “In her manner she unites dignity with an unusual share of ease and elegance; and I never saw her appear to greater advantage than when promenading the rooms, winding her way through the multitude by the side of the gallant General,” read one of the dozens of accounts of the ball published in newspapers around the country. When supper was called, Jackson raised his glass and drank to her. Then he left, but it did not matter. The guests stayed, and the dancing went on.

Louisa and John Quincy were
not merely throwing a party that night. They had an aim in mind: Jackson's ball would become the Adamses' ball. It was a bid to establish John Quincy Adams as the front-runner for the presidency. She had been preparing for this moment not for weeks but for years. She called her parties “my campaigne.”

 • • • 

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
did not like to think that throwing a ball could help him become president. He had served his country since he had been a boy, shaped by the Revolution. He had seen dead and bloodied soldiers, had stood on a hillside and watched the Battle at Bunker Hill across the bay, and had felt the shudder of a cannonball blasting through a ship's wall. His mother had made herself a model of American motherhood, and his father was an instrumental figure in American intellectual and political life. As an adult, John Quincy had been minister to Holland, Prussia, Russia, and England. He had served as a senator from Massachusetts, had negotiated the treaty to end the War of 1812, and now held the prime post, secretary of state, in James Monroe's Cabinet. He was the architect of the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain and had helped devise the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that would
guide the country for a century. He had done his duty at every chance. He would rather believe, or at least pretend, that he did nothing to position himself for the presidency—that if it came to him, it came to him simply because he deserved it, not because he begged for it. He feared ambition, thought it craven. The greatness of the republic depended on that disinterest. This was what his parents had taught him, and his parents, John and Abigail Adams, had done as much as anyone to invent the United States. John Quincy had grown up in their shadow. Yet he was also their great hope. If the republic was to last, it would be up to the second generation, he was constantly told: it would be up to him.

The United States were turning
out not to be quite the country the founding father and mother had envisioned. The virtues that the Adamses so strongly stressed—education, duty, deference to the public good—were not held with the common commitment they had assumed. Commercial interests, political factions, and private concerns were growing more powerful. More men were getting the power to vote, and fewer had studied Seneca and Tacitus. Sectionalism, undergirded by slavery, was pulling the country apart. Power would not merely come to John Quincy; he had to pursue it. He had to make promises, impressions, and friends. Relationships governed politics then, as they always have. Adams did not have the support of the larger public that a man like Jackson had, but that was hardly decisive—the masses did not choose the president, at least not yet. “The only possible chance for a head of a Department to attain the Presidency is by ingratiating himself personally with the members of Congress,” he wrote in his diary. This, he added, “leads to a thousand corrupt cabals.” Terrible at currying favor, he made a show of his distaste for flattery. But John Quincy knew he would fail without friends. Knowing that it was his wife, not he, to whom people were drawn, he endured and encouraged their social life. In fact, this ball for Jackson had been his idea.

Louisa Adams understood him. Sometimes she thought she could see through him. Certainly, she could see politics for what it was, and
she knew at that moment there was a part she could play. She was a wonderful hostess, generous and outgoing, though she called herself shy. As young women in London, she and her sisters had entertained a steady stream of visitors by singing, hoping to demonstrate the depths of their souls with the range of their voices, or by playing the harp, hoping to flatter their shapely arms. The courts of Prussia, Russia, and England, where the Adamses lived when John Quincy was a diplomat, had taught her when to compliment and when to gossip, what to watch for and what to overlook. While John Quincy studied laws and treaties, she studied people, wrote letters, and read books. By befriending royalty, by whispering with whatever dignitary she was seated with at supper, by being the one the king asked to dance to open a ball, she had made herself into an asset for John Quincy abroad. And by being the social presence he refused to be, she was integral to his efforts at home. She knew she should not be proud of this, though sometimes she could not help it. She knew that women were supposed to be selfless. She also knew that an Adams—an American—was supposed to build a sturdy, dutiful life instead of a searching one.

She saw the new nation a little differently than an Adams did. She saw herself as different, too.

 • • • 

A
FTER
ALL
, she was born in London on February 12, 1775, a time before the city of Washington even existed. The Revolutionary War would begin only months after Louisa Catherine Johnson's birth, but more than three thousand miles away. Louisa's father was a proud, patriotic American merchant; her mother was vivacious, charming, socially ambitious, and English. Her parents had secrets, some of which Louisa may have sensed. She spent the American Revolution as a young child living in an opulent mansion in Nantes, France. When the war was over, she returned with her family to London, where she was taught to be lovely and ornamental. Her family lived in a gracious
house on Tower Hill, above the Thames, where there were fine oil portraits on the wall, a harp in the parlor, and a neat carriage and stables. For the most part, Louisa was raised as young, pretty, wealthy English girls were raised—only she was told to consider herself an American and, more important, to marry one.

One problem was that John Quincy was supposed to marry an American, too, and Louisa was not quite one. Another problem was that Louisa perplexed him. It was unclear to him how his self-mastery and his responsibility to the public and to his parents could coexist with his desire for her. In Louisa—and in a life that revolved around the parlor, not the public—he found an alluring alternative to the life for which he had been trained. Their courtship was spirited and contentious. In 1798, when they wed, he made it clear that he was committed to his country, and in marrying Louisa, he committed her to his country, too. In more ways than one, then, she had to leave the Johnsons behind in order to become an Adams.

She tried at once to conform and to resist. Wherever she was, she was caught between roles. After their wedding, she and John Quincy moved to Berlin, where he was tasked with negotiating a treaty and she with negotiating a royal court as a republican who had never been in a republic, representing a nation she had never seen. Louisa was twenty-six and newly a mother when she stepped onto American soil for the first time. Navigating Quincy, Massachusetts, and the fine social distinctions of “democratic” Washington—not to mention her relationship with the Adams family—would turn out to be much harder than dancing with a king. There was a model for an American woman—she thought of her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams—and Louisa knew she did not fit it. She often felt misunderstood and unsure of where she could call home.

There were apartments, hotels, houses, dachas, cottages, the White House; ships, carriages, sleds, coaches, trains, steamboats. It might not be too much to say that for long stretches, she lived in trunks and
traveling cases. But there were also rare opportunities and extraordinary experiences. At a time when limits were the norm for women, her life was wide ranging. Her experience was the ground from which she grew.

 • • • 

T
HIS
BOOK
follows
Louisa from London, to Nantes, to Berlin, to the United States. It then takes her to St. Petersburg, Russia, where, for six years, she was moored in gaudy loneliness and buffeted by grief, and where she made herself indispensable. From there, it follows her on a dangerous and difficult journey with her eight-year-old son Charles across Europe, from St. Petersburg to Paris, where her husband was waiting. England came next—a stretch of domestic tranquility. Then the family returned to Washington, where the pursuit of power began. There would be costs. In the White House, she found only sadness. John Quincy was stymied as a leader, Louisa was isolated, and they fought; their children struggled; their family began to fall apart. Within a few years, she would bury two sons. When she and her husband returned to Quincy, she believed they had come to live out their days, weary and bereft. But their last and greatest act had not yet begun. While her husband became one of the first great antislavery leaders in Congress, Louisa wrestled with what it meant to be free. Women should cast off “the thraldom of the mind,” she wrote to her daughter-in-law, “which has been so long, and so unjustly shackled.”

Louisa accepted many of the conventions that constrained her, but she sometimes resisted what those conventions implied. And in doing so, she both witnessed and helped shape the new nation. When John Quincy died, some said that in his life one could find the history of the country's first half century. Something like that could be said of her. When she was born in England, her king ruled the colonies. When she first reached the United States' shores, federal power passed peacefully to the opposition for the first time. On the day that her
daughter died in St. Petersburg, Moscow was set on fire. When she traveled across Europe through the wreckage of war, she converged on Paris with Napoleon, newly escaped from Elba. When she died, the United States were only a few years away from civil war.

Wherever she lived, she was always pressing her nose against the glass, not quite sure whether she was looking out or looking in. She was certain she would not be remembered like her husband, John Quincy, or her father-in-law, John Adams, or her son, Charles Francis Adams, men who considered themselves architects of American history. The only history Louisa could claim was personal history, but even there, she sometimes wondered whether she had the right. She started three memoirs for her family, but she gave them shy titles: “Record of a Life”; “Narrative of a Journey”; “The Adventures of a Nobody.” She felt she was misunderstood.

But she did something
extraordinary with her self-doubt: she explored it. That was unusual. The idea that a woman should wonder about her independent identity—apart from her husband, apart from her son, apart from her family—was hardly prevalent or desirable during the era in which she lived. It could be painful, but there was also a kind of freedom in it. The other members of the Adams family took their identity and the expectations it implied for granted. Because she did not have to speak for the ages, she could speak for herself. It became her habit, even her strategy, to define herself as not like them. And yet in some larger sense, the Adams family helped instill in Louisa what it helped instill in the young republic: a concern for the value of the individual; a fascination with human nature in its manifold forms; an awareness of selfish instincts; a suspicion of power; a respect for traditions; and an invitation—almost an imperative—to scrutinize people, including oneself. She did not always know what to say, and she sometimes doubted whether women should speak at all. Still, there was something singular in the way she related to the world. “Now I like very well to adopt my husband's thoughts and words when I
approve them,” she wrote to John Quincy at the age of seventy, “but I do not like to repeat them like a parrot, and
prove
myself
a nonentity. . . . When my husband married me, he made a great mistake if he thought I only intended to play an echo.”

She was not a modern woman, but she had a kind of modern voice.

 • • • 

F
OR
TWO
CENTURIES,
Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams has been treated mostly as another name on the well-examined Adams family tree. There were times when she saw herself that way too—as a nobody. She figures only indirectly in the history of men's great deeds. I do not pretend that she held some secret political power, though her help was crucial for her husband's career. Her real power is in the story of her life, and in her efforts to learn, to feel, to think, to understand, to have faith, to find what to live for and why. This book tells that story. It is also a story about a transforming country in a transformative age, and a story about what it means to be a woman—a question that had different answers in the nineteenth century but that still resonates today.