Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  JOSHUA WOULD HAVE preferred that his daughters marry Southerners, but he could not afford to be too choosy. Every American bachelor who walked through the door was a potential suitor. The stakes were high. For the girls, it was such anxious business that it was better treated as a game. They made bets among themselves that would be settled only at an altar. Those who joined in the girls’ jokes were favored. Colonel William Smith, General Washington’s dashing former aide, was their “model” for a fashionable, daring, desirable man. Walter Hellen was good for a game of battledore. David Sterrett called Louisa his “little wife.” After a French servant botched an introduction at a party, Peter Jay (son of the statesman John Jay) and Colonel John Trumbull were forever known as “Mr. Pétéràjay” and “Colonel Terrible.” When young Thomas Adams came to the house for dinner while visiting London, Nancy nicknamed him, for some reason, “Uncle Abel.” After that, his absent brother John Quincy was known as “Cain.” Louisa had no idea then, of course, of the significant roles both those men would come to play in her life.

  The American men who visited her father were not in England to find wives. They generally planned on living well and then leaving. In fact, already Nancy had one engagement slip away when her intended partner returned to the United States. There were other, more dangerous aspects of marriage that a young woman was not supposed to acknowledge. A woman was not supposed to think about what marriage might entail. She was not allowed to dwell on the idea of separation from her family or the dangers of childbirth—or above all sex. She could not dismiss the overt attention of any bachelor, even if that bachelor was “old enough to be my father,” as Louisa once described Colonel Trumbull (or “Colonel Terrible”). Yet she had to deny it, even if “he took every opportunity to mark the distinction between myself and my sisters,” and even if he confessed his ardor to her, as Trumbull once did. She was supposed to be demure, pleasing, passive, and agreeable, to blend in, and yet also to be the one chosen. She was encouraged to expect a man’s attentions and accept his proffered verses but to be “very much surprized” when he compared her to a cherub. Chastity and the appearance of spotless modesty were paramount. The girls were, Louisa wrote, “never permitted to be out of sight a moment.” All games have rules. One was that the Johnson girls could not admit to being pursued. When her sisters decided that William Vans Murray was chasing Louisa, for instance, she professed perfect innocence. “I was perpetually quized literally without knowing what it meant,” she later wrote, “for my heart was as free as the roving birds who spreads in wanton sport his plumage to the garish sun.” Another rule was that bachelors were always in pursuit of the sisters. “A man old or young who visits frequently in a family of young ladies must be supposed to be in love,” Louisa would remember. Another rule was that love had an object. “When a young man frequents a family on terms of great intimacy where there are young ladies,” Louisa wrote, “one of them must of course be selected as an object of preference.” And who selected who was the object of preference? The sisters did. And so when John Quincy became a fixture at the Johnsons’ dinner table on Tower Hill, as 1795 turned to 1796, they decided that he must be in love with one of them. And in fact, he was. But they were wrong about which one. • • • ONE NIGHT at the Johnsons’ house on Tower Hill, just after the New Year, 1796, Louisa turned to John Quincy and, in her mellifluous voice, teased him. She had heard that he was a poet, she said, and she wanted him to write her a song. Her demand became a running joke, part of the “perpetual banter” between them. He took the challenge seriously, though, as he took every challenge. John Quincy actually did consider himself something of a poet, and throughout his life nothing made him want to rhyme like the presence of a pretty woman. So at dinner one evening soon after, he reached across the table and slipped Louisa a sealed piece of paper. She opened it immediately, found the promised song, and started to read it aloud. But she had made it through only a few lines when the younger Johnson girls’ governess snatched the paper from her hands and whispered in her ear to stop—as if to say the sentiments in the poem were meant for Louisa alone.

  A fluster of feeling inside Louisa echoed the fluster at the table. She would later insist that she was sure the poem wasn’t private, and that the sentiments it expressed weren’t genuine. She would later say that the governess’s imagination was overwrought, and that the whole situation was based on a mistake. It was her older sister Nancy, not her, whom John Quincy was courting. But in that moment, as she would remember it, something happened. The suggestion that he looked at her differently made her look at him differently. There was a surge of emotion, and then a change between them. Was this love? She had her doubts. What did John Quincy see when he looked at Louisa? There was a portrait painted of her at around the time she met him. In it, her skin is the same color of the milk-pink roses that she holds in her fingertips, and her hair is powdered and piled on top of her head in a nebula of curls, as was the fashion. A baby blue sash encircles her narrow waist, pale where it catches the light and then darkening as it curves into shadow. A black velvet ribbon wrapped around her wrist, startling in its simplicity, is her only adornment. But what makes the painting so striking is the directness of her look. It is not at all the expression of a vain and vapid girl, of a pleasure seeker. It is not the face of some of the other girls John Quincy spent time with in London, like the rich Kitty Church, “a sweet girl entirely engrossed with pleasure, and formed to give as well as to enjoy it.” Louisa’s dark gaze is intelligent, her smile small and assured. She is beautiful. Louisa would always insist that her looks were unremarkable. She claimed that she could not compare to her sister Nancy, who had auburn ringlets, a dimpled smile, and hazel eyes—“a perfect Hebe.” Nor did she think she rivaled Caroline, whose “form was light her complexion dazzling her manners arch and playful and her disposition sweet.” Her mother, Catherine, had been a Venus, and “was at this time very lovely, her person was very small, and exquisitely delicate, and very finely proportioned.” Louisa probably looked at herself and catalogued faults, as young women often do: a long face, a nose that swept a little upward. She was slight, usually thinner than she wanted to be. And it was true, she was not someone whose appearance radiated in the air around her, not someone who stopped the conversation when she walked into a room. Her face was singular, her prettiness more subtle than conventional. But she also may have deprecated her own appearance and insisted upon her modesty a little much, especially when she was fifty years old and writing a memoir for descendants in a family that frowned on superficiality, because she knew good looks were not a simple blessing. Even the Johnsons, despite their expensive tastes and interest in the mode du monde, knew that while beauty may have made a woman seem special and desirable, modesty was supposed to be the greater virtue. So Louisa both celebrated beauty and, with a little note of falseness, denied its importance. “Accustomed to consider both my sisters superior to myself; surrounded by a beautiful growing family, and remarkably handsome parents, it never appeared to me to possess intrinsic value; and though I ranked it high among the blessings which I had received from heaven, it seemed too natural to excite a puérile vanity in my mind.” She knew she was beautiful—or at least that others thought she was. “In my own eyes I never possessed beauty,” she wrote; “and yet strange to say, I was so familiarized to the idea of possessing it.” So there was something unusually attractive about her, with suggestions of unmentionable desires. But there was something else, something that could only be glimpsed in the serious set of her mouth and in her eyes. She was different from other girls, different even from her sisters. Louisa’s mother would later tell her that she had been “thoughtful or grave” as a child, yet also “a creature of ardent affections and strong impulse.” She still was. She had an untutored, solemn intelligence, a watchfulness that had earned her the nickname “Cassandra” within her family. But her seriousness enlivened into wit when she was at ease. She had a sense of humor, a teasing and testing
nature. She thought of herself as timid, but she was contradictory by nature. Confident that she had nothing to gain or lose from John Quincy—since, of course, he was supposed to be Nancy’s suitor—she had “rattled on” to him without reserve. • • • AT THE END OF JANUARY, with Louisa’s birthday approaching—she would turn twenty-one on February 12—her father, Joshua, threw her a ball. (Perhaps he held it to help her find a husband, perhaps not—either way, the goal was likely never far from her parents’ minds.) The house was filled with guests; the musicians played and the dancing continued long past midnight into morning. John Quincy stayed until three a.m. “Evening very agreeable,” he wrote in his diary afterward. He paid the guest of honor more than the usual attentions. Those at the party whispered that his preference for the second Johnson daughter was “decidedly publick.” His obvious interest, Louisa would remember, “brought much trouble on my head.”

  Nancy was furious. She was the one whom the sisters had designated as the chosen one. The unspoken rules of their game were broken. Marriage was the best viable opportunity open to a woman, but society dictated that she could not openly pursue a man. She was the passive player; she had only veto power over the choice of a mate. If John Quincy wanted Louisa and not Nancy, Louisa it would be, and “the whole family [was thrown] into confusion.” Louisa might have tried to defer or to stop John Quincy right there. But now in the superior position, she refused to refuse him. For weeks the sisters fought. A cold silence fell between them. Even John Quincy—not much disposed to note the moods of women in his diary—registered that something was wrong. “Nancy very much affected, I know not at what,” he wrote in his diary. “Louisa pretended a head ache for the privilege of being cross.” Despite how close the sisters were—or, more probably, because of it—their relationship had never been perfectly easy. Louisa was not the much-wanted son, nor the oldest or youngest or neediest—in fact, her father treated her as more independent and capable than the others, which made her a target of her older sister’s envy, and so she found it “painful.” There had always been little sharp jokes and pranks between the sisters. Louisa would never forget the time her sisters slyly cut her hair short and curled close to her head; once they had powdered it, she looked awfully like a lamb. Louisa and Nancy had been introduced into society at the same time, had access to the same small pool of American men, had the same pressures placed upon them. And if they shone brighter for the combined lights of their beauty and accomplishments, then it was also because their competitiveness generated so much heat. The way Louisa describes a music performance with Nancy is telling, despite her claims that “no jealousy was excited” between them. “On the contrary each endeavoured to add lustre to the other,” she insisted, before describing in a backhanded way how their competitiveness drove each of them to perform. “My natural timidity which was excessive, often proved almost insurmountable; but she would say something to me when sitting down to the instrument which would pique me, when she was particularly desirous that I should shine; and then I would sing at her and by pointing the words of the songs I selected; give them an expression of which I was unconscious but which generally produced the happiest effects on my auditors.” It was, in fact, probably her singing that most powerfully brought her to John Quincy’s attention. She had a pliant voice, and she knew its power. As a student at Mrs. Carter’s boarding school, she had enjoyed her “great reputation” as a singer. Singing brought her pleasure, and it brought her a complicated kind of attention—attention both sought and feared, attention that could be neither acknowledged nor denied. It had given her even a hint of John Quincy’s interest; she had noticed that when she began to sing the songs “which he knew to be favorites of Col. Trumbull,” John Quincy would pick up his hat and leave. (Later, John Quincy confessed to Louisa that he had noticed that Colonel Trumbull was trying to woo her. “By my Gods—Wish’d him at the D——” John Quincy later wrote to Louisa, “Innocent as he was of all I feared.”) John Quincy often recorded the Johnson sisters’ musical performances in his diary, and he noted in particular when Louisa sang. He enjoyed watching her perform for him, and she enjoyed performing. Their evenings became part of a larger performance, a courtship. She began to assume the role her life had prepared her for, a lover. But she found that her lover wouldn’t follow the same script. 3

  THE WINTER OF 1796, cold and wet, began to warm into spring. The days grew longer quickly, and the gardens showed budding signs of life. John Quincy adopted a routine not only of dining with the Johnsons but also of taking daily walks with the ladies in the park. It was customary for John Quincy and Louisa to break away—not out of sight of their chaperone, and certainly not out of mind, but out of hearing. The two lovers would stroll beneath springtime’s budding boughs, the picture of romance, discussing “philosophy.”

  Philosophy, John Quincy told Louisa, was not so much about theory as an attitude, not something you developed through thought but a character trait, something you had or you didn’t. Its attributes were patience, restraint, and endurance. Louisa was impatient, hardly knew the meaning of restraint, had never had reason to endure—but she wanted to be taken seriously. She was, after all, a girl who had used her guinea to buy Self-Knowledge and Paradise Lost. She had, clearly, a conventional and sentimental conception of romance, but she fashioned herself as his student. So she listened and would speak often of “my philosophy”—which was, anyway, pretty romantic itself: desire was sharpened by fortitude; love went hand in hand with pain. Love was confusing. Its source seemed uncertain, and her lover seemed not entirely convinced. He was alternately direct and evasive—and not only to her. Writing to his younger brother Thomas, who was also his secretary at The Hague, where John Quincy was stationed as the American minister, Louisa’s suitor was playful but coy. Thomas was teased into replying, “But tell me a little, who among this most attractive society has most ‘charms’ for you?” To his mother, John Quincy was suggestive but vague: “At present without having any thing to do, I find it extremely difficult to snatch so much as a quarter of an hour to write ever so short a letter. Perhaps I may tell you the reason of this at a future day; or perhaps you may guess at it without being told.” In his diary, though, he was perplexed and anxious. “Customary day, dull and dispirited . . . Wrote scarce anything,” John Quincy wrote on February 1, less than a week after the birthday ball where he danced with Louisa. “Dine out almost every day, and pass the evening at Mr. Johnson’s. Health low. Spirits lower still. This must be reformed almost entirely.” His misery and his displeasure with himself were constant themes during his months in London. “Scope for reflection,” he wrote another day. “The life I am leading totally dissatisfactory.” He was silent in his diary about his love, and nearly as silent about his lover. In John Quincy’s famously massive diary—some fifteen thousand pages in fifty-one volumes—Louisa appears very little, even when he was pursuing her. Except when she was ill, he rarely recorded anything particular about her—not the way she looked, or the things she said, or the way she made him feel. She was merely marked as present or absent, sick or well. This doesn’t mean he didn’t think of her—indeed, his silence was often telling; it may suggest he thought of her much more than he wanted to admit. He was oblique and contradictory about his feelings. He wrote that pleasure made him miserable. After recording walking with the Johnsons, “reflections perplexing,” he actually skipped a day in his diary—which was unheard of for him. March 2, 1796, followed February 29; March 1 followed that with the parenthetical “(omitted above).” “The regular day as objectionable as before,” he wrote of March 1. “Very little different from the last, excepting that it is still more marked with the character of indolence & dissipation. Can find no time to write, none to read, But much to dross and dross over again to visit and be visited, to lose my home, and to find pernicious passions. O rus (/) quando te aspiciam.” O country / when will I see you. Passions were pernicious; his time was tyrannized by his attraction to Louis
a—and to the whole way of life on Tower Hill. He was drawn to her in ways that he could hardly understand, and perhaps in ways that made him question what he wanted. Writing home, he told his father that a man in service of his country must think only of his duty, at the cost of “love of ease, or the love of life, or the love of fame itself.” At the Johnsons’, though, he found ease, he found life, and he found flattering attentions—and there he found himself, night after night. His career was drifting. It had taken him twenty-eight days to travel from The Hague to London, twenty-eight days of frustration and despair that ended in failure. His task, the formal exchange of the ratification of a treaty between the United States and Britain, had already been completed before he arrived. What was worse, he had known it would be. His instructions were very clear. He was given a deadline of October 20 to complete the task; if he could not reach London by then, then William Allen Deas, the secretary of legation, would do it. Weather had trapped John Quincy on the coast of Holland, in Helvoetsluys; he would not reach London until November 11. He could have turned around and returned to his post at The Hague. But he was bored there, restless and brooding, anxious about his future and unhappy with his past. So he came. It was more than a pointless exercise; it was self-inflicted frustration. The treaty was a sign of closer amity between the two nations, resolving contentious issues left over from the Revolution and laying the groundwork for trade, but it was loathed by some in the United States (especially followers of Thomas Jefferson), who foresaw the dangers of subservience to Britain. John Quincy Adams was hardly a Jeffersonian, and he was cautiously in favor of the treaty, but he hated any suggestion of servility to the British, and once in London, he found himself continually ignored or insulted by British officials. “I have been accustomed all my life to plain dealing and candour, and am not sufficiently versed in the art of political swindling to be prepared for negotiating with a European minister of state,” he wrote in a dispatch describing a meeting with Lord Grenville, the minister of foreign affairs. He became so incensed by the perceived insults that some started to worry he’d provoke a rift. For nearly two years he had been living in Holland, on the edge of Europe, watching the convulsions and aftershocks of the French Revolution rock the continent, but always as an observer. He wrote brilliant dispatches to the secretary of state as the destruction of France’s monarchy transformed the continent, and he also wrote, more intimately, to his father, dispatches that were highly valued. George Washington read them while composing his famous Farewell Address, warning the United States against involvement in European conflicts—and expressed his admiration. Still, John Quincy called himself an exile. He was used to being far away, thousands of miles from his home. He had the example of his father, who had left the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, in order to join the Continental Congress when John Quincy was only a child, telling his tiny oldest son that he entrusted the family to him. Abigail was more than up to the task—she was an extraordinarily capable farmer, manager, teacher, and mother—but Johnny remembered his father’s words and knew what was at stake, saw the soldiers and the distant flash of guns. He had accompanied his father on two diplomatic missions, serving as a secretary though he was only a boy. On two voyages to France he brushed up against the war, watched a surgeon saw off the leg of a wounded man, and nearly died in a shipwreck. At times without a formal school to attend, he taught himself Latin and learned to play alone. His father sent him to Russia to serve as the American emissary’s private secretary when he was only fourteen. He knew what patriotism entailed and what incredible sacrifices were expected of Adams men—especially of him. Raised to live for his country, he had been taught that his life was not too much to offer. “At a very early period in life, I devoted him to the publick,” Abigail Adams told Martha Washington. It might have been easier if the Adamses truly had conceived of their family as a monarchical dynasty, as their critics charged. Then there might have been some support in the sense of a birthright—that rulership came naturally, divinely. But the dynasty that John Quincy was supposed to be a part of was one based on merit. Nothing would be given; everything had to be earned. And everything would be earned—if only he lived according to strict and steady virtue, according to the expectations of his parents. The pressure was enormous. From London now, he told himself (and his parents) that he was ready to pay any cost when “my duty commands me to act.” But how should he act? What could he do? He waited for his orders. He went to galleries, read plays (The Wheel of Fortune and First Love), and went to the theater at Drury Lane. He wrangled with the British foreign secretary’s office over protocol, becoming absurdly agitated about matters of deportment. He told himself that he was in London against his wishes, consoling himself with a lecture about duty. “The die is cast,” he wrote in his diary. “Here I must be, spite my wishes and endeavors. My duty to the best of my judgment shall be done: the result must be left to Providence.” In fact, he had come knowing the ratification had already been exchanged, but he wrote as if he had no choice. He carried his loneliness with him. “There is something so dissipated and yet so solitary in the residence of a city like this, that I have never found in it either the pleasures of society or the profits of retirement,” he wrote to his mother two weeks after he arrived in London. “There is a continual flutter, an agitation of the spirits excited by the multitude of objects that crowd upon the senses at once.” He had made it his habit to call solitude bliss, but now that same solitude was “the craving void.” The city was also, he admitted, full of beautiful women, which shook him. His opinion had not much changed since he was eighteen, when he had written, “I consider it the greatest misfortune; that can befall a young man to be in love.” He had been in love, and in pain, when he left the United States to go to the Netherlands. In Massachusetts, he had wanted a woman, Mary Frazier, but she was too young to marry and his law career was not established. A sense of responsibility—and the foreboding of his parents’ disapproval—had led him to break off the relationship, even if he could not completely bury his love. Leaving Mary Frazier was, he wrote to his mother bitterly, “voluntary violence” to his feelings. Marriage had been on his mind while he waited in Helvoetsluys, Holland, for the wind to turn so that he could leave for London. After hearing that his older brother Charles had wed, he waxed lyrical that he was “buffeted about the world in solitary celibacy.” To his mother, he was mournful and even angry, writing her a long and unusually open and emotional letter about Mary Frazier. He had done his duty, he told her, sacrificing his passion for “prudential and family considerations”—but it had cost him dearly. He now had, he said, a “widowed heart.” He met Louisa Johnson only four days later. His parents’ goal for him was nothing less than greatness. “Let your ambition be engaged to become eminent,” Abigail wrote to him when he was still a schoolboy. Eminence to the Adams family was not what it was to the Johnsons; it was not the kind of greatness that could be gauged by the quality of a coat or popular opinion. “Nothing great or valuable among men, was ever achieved, without the counterpoise of strong opposition,” John Quincy wrote to his father, repeating his father’s lesson, “and the persecution that proceeds from opinion, becomes itself a title to esteem, when the opinion is found to have been erroneous.” Instead, greatness adhered to civility, disinterestedness, independence, and thrift. Abigail pushed the point. “Justice, humanity and benevolence are the duties you owe to society in general,” she wrote to her son. “To your country the same duties are incumbent upon you with the additional obligations of sacrificeing ease, pleasure, wealth and life itself for its defense and security.” Johnny was thirteen years old. John Quincy had tried hard to live up to his parents’ warnings and expectations, disciplining himself from the earliest age. “I make but a poor figure at composition,” he wrote to his father when he was nine. My head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. . . . I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the
3d volume of Smollett, tho’ I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent. . . . I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my studies and my play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours.