Louisa
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Most tellingly, she was hazy and misleading about her mother’s origins—so much so that Catherine Johnson’s identity was a mystery. For more than a hundred and fifty years—in fact, until now—the Adams family and historians alike thoroughly misinterpreted her background. Even her maiden name was invented: she was called Catherine Nuth, instead of the name she was born with, Catherine Newth. “All families are not as indifferent to their maternal connections as ours are,” Louisa later wrote self-pityingly to her son Charles, but she was the one largely to blame. About her maternal grandfather, she was vague. The story she told was strange and full of holes. Her grandfather’s “name was Nuth . . . I do not even recollect his Christian name and am not sure that I ever heard.” He “had a place like that of Charles Lamb mentioned in his memoirs of a writer I think it is termed in the India House.” He married a woman named Mary Young, with whom he had “twenty two living children born but only reared two.” Her grandfather, she added, “died at the age of 96—I think when I was about 12 or 13 years old—He lived in Camberwell and left at his death the sum of 500 sterling to my Mother which my Father permitted her to use as her own.” The only other information she offered about her mother was an age. Catherine was, Louisa wrote, “not one and twenty” when the family moved to Nantes in 1778—which would have made her fifteen when Nancy was born. Louisa’s descendants in fact were quite interested in her maternal connections—but when they tried to reconstruct the story she had given them, they were left with more questions than answers. The great nineteenth-century historian Henry Adams, Louisa’s grandson, was among those who tried to track down Catherine’s origins and failed. He joked that his great-great-grandmother’s existence was “one of the deepest mysteries of metaphysical theology.” He hired a genealogist in London to comb through parish registers, looking for her; for two years he searched “everywhere he could think, but not a trace has he ever found of Nuth or Young or Johnson, in marriage or out.” Later, historians who normally knew enough to squint hard at Louisa’s careless use of numbers and dates found a scandalous version of Catherine’s past, without contrary evidence, irresistible. In the story they told, Catherine’s parents were unmarried and her grandmother was possibly a prostitute who left a steady stream of children at the foundling hospital. In this version, Catherine was hardly more than a child when she met Joshua, and possibly a disreputable one. In one historian’s telling, “it was a cold fact” that Catherine “had been the fondling sort.” But Catherine Newth’s parish birth record does exist, and it is now possible to create a map of Catherine’s family background. No one can say for certain what Catherine did in bed, but the real story of her birth is more quotidian than the one that has been told until now, and it changes our understanding of Louisa’s background. Her grandfather, Martin Newth, was married to a woman named Mary (née Young). There may have been many Newth children—there are several extant baptismal records of children born to Martin and Mary (if not twenty-two), but the burial records suggest that the children were not abandoned; they died. Catherine was not “not one and twenty” when she moved to Nantes; she was not one and thirty—she was born in 1749. Many of Louisa’s facts were confusing, misunderstood, or wrong. Most of her errors are probably innocent. The biggest, of course, is her mother’s maiden surname. “Nuth” sounds like “Newth.” Louisa may not have ever seen the name in writing, and she had a habit of using phonetic spellings in any case. Because of the breach between Joshua and Catherine’s father, she spent very little time with her grandparents, and it’s unlikely she heard much about them. As for Catherine’s age, Louisa may have made a meaningless mistake when she wrote that Catherine was twenty instead of thirty, or it may have been a telling slip: Louisa herself was twenty-two when she moved from England to continental Europe. Describing the fear her mother must have felt moving to an unknown city in a strange culture, she may have put herself in her mother’s place. Or she may have wanted to put the emphasis on her father’s ancestry, since she was proud that Joshua Johnson descended from aristocratic stock. Martin Newth’s humble profession of a shoemaker may have been something to hide. But whether she knew of her illegitimacy and how it influenced her are open questions. In the United States, rumors of impropriety in Catherine and Joshua’s union circulated first in Maryland and then more widely—indeed, they would become widespread. There is a good chance that, at least by the time Louisa wrote her second memoir sketch, “The Adventures of a Nobody,” those rumors reached her. Again and again, she dwells on her insecurity and her sense of illegitimacy in the Adams family—her sense of not belonging. It’s tempting to wonder whether she had some sense that she had been an illegitimate child. Whatever Louisa discovered about her parents, this much is certainly true: a sensitive child intuits more than she knows, and Louisa was a sensitive child. From the earliest age, Louisa had learned to read those around her. “My disposition inclined me to read the countenances of all who approached me with extreme care,” she later wrote, “and my judgment of character was almost immediately stamped upon this investigation.” She grew up in a household where there were secrets. Catherine’s meeting with John Quincy to learn of his intentions toward Louisa was one more thing that happened without her knowledge. But the meeting did not remain a secret for long. • • • IN HIS DIARY, John Quincy wrote that Catherine “declared herself satisfied.” (Presumably, he told her he planned to marry.) But Louisa was not—perhaps not with the meeting at all. Her mother had intervened in an unusual way, she was still fighting with Nancy, and John Quincy’s hesitation no doubt hurt her in the first place. “Something uncommonly out of course,” John Quincy wrote in his diary two days after his conversation with Catherine. The next day: “Required an explanation of last evening’s singularities, from Louisa.” He got it, or gave it, two days after that. “Conversation with Louisa. Was explicit with her, and obtained her acquiescence. The same with him”—presumably, consent from her father.