She admitted to him that she felt uncertain. She wasn’t sure of his affection and his desire to marry her (an admission she would later regret). Her humiliation was probably worse because she knew there were reasons John Quincy might be wary, and they may have talked about them. There were problems. John Quincy could easily guess that his parents would disapprove of his choice. He almost disapproved himself. She had been naturalized by Maryland, but she was still half British by birth and British—even French—by her upbringing. She could not possibly declare her American patriotism in a way that would erase his impression of her un-American life. Money was another issue. John Quincy was still not in a good position to support a wife, and a quick glance around the nice house on Cooper’s Row gave him some indication of what kind of style Louisa would expect to maintain. At Harvard, John Quincy had once given a speech about marriage. Beauty fades, passion fades, people fall out of love, he declared, and so a sound republican marriage (a citizen’s duty, he liked to say) was based on procreation, companionship, and economic security. Presumably, Louisa would bring some money to the marriage, but he had some intimations that Joshua’s finances were not nearly as good as the graceful mansion and presence of servants suggested. When he and Louisa spoke, it seems they talked about money; she let on that her father was facing difficulties that would soon force him to return to America. But the promise was made. Faced with an engagement or losing Louisa, John Quincy chose the engagement. But the problems did not disappear—least of all the tension over money. A marriage was an agreement, a contract. Along with his permission, Joshua promised a dowry: £5,000 sterling. There was only one point of lingering contention: John Quincy insisted that he would return to The Hague unmarried, and they would not marry until he was in a position to resume his law practice and support her. He would serve out the remainder of his diplomatic posting alone. He could not say how long it would take. She would have to wait. Louisa was devastated. Their bond already felt strange and fragile, and she worried that time and distance would weaken it. She worried, too, about the effects it would have on her reputation—not unreasonably. Women in limbo—betrothed but unmarried—easily became jokes, exposed to humiliating “banter and jests.” Long engagements were considered unnatural, uncertain. She begged him to let them be married before he left London, she later wrote, so that she might at least take his name. In fact, that might have been ideal: she could become a bride, the great goal of the young Johnson girls’ lives, and at the same time, nothing would change. She could remain with her parents and sisters. She could become a wife and remain a child. But John Quincy was inflexible. With no other choice but to accept his conditions or to call off the engagement, Louisa gave in. Orders arrived for John Quincy to return to Holland in May, and they faced the prospect of a separation. She was uneasy. He had committed to marrying her, and yet he insisted on delay. She was not sure whether she had fallen in love or had been convinced. She was not entirely sure what he felt at all. She saw signs that he loved her, and signs that he did not. The burden was on her to mold herself to his wishes, while she could not expect the same of him. She did try, once, to change his behavior. It was a springtime evening, warm and suggestive, and they planned to walk the next day in the fashionable pleasure gardens of Ranelagh. Teasing him, she told him that he must dress very handsomely for their excursion, “as dashy as possible.” His clothing was a sensitive subject—the one subject (besides his engagement, that is) that he fought with his mother about—and he stiffened. He distrusted fine things and disdained the conventions of lovers. But he did not like to be made fun of, and he wanted to please her. So he showed up the next day wearing a new Napoleon hat, “very handsomely dressed in blue,” looking as wonderful as she had hoped he would. She was delighted and charmed. They entered the Rotunda, broke away from the others, and took each other’s arm. Lovers were blooming like flowers. She complimented his excellent appearance—but instead of accepting her praise, he turned on her. He “assured me that his wife must never take the liberty of interfering in those particulars, and assumed a tone so high and lofty and made so serious a grievance of the affair, that I felt offended and told him that I resigned all pretensions to his hand, and left him as free as air to choose a Lady who would be more discreet.” She pulled away from his arm and went to join her mother and sisters. She had heard the lesson behind his words—he would try to change her, but she was never to try to change him—and she was stung. That night they made up, but the wound was fresh, and it refused to fully heal. It seemed to her to portend something terrible. Later, she wrote that she felt within her “a secret and unknown dread of something hidden beneath the rosy wreath of love.” • • • THEY SAID GOODBYE to each other at the end of May. To his father, John Quincy expressed relief at returning to The Hague. “At length I have been released from a situation, equally remote from all public utility and all personal satisfaction,” John Quincy wrote. To his mother, he was more honest: “Albeit unused to the melting mood, I found the separation not a little painful.”
To Louisa, he was tender, and so was she to him. She gave him a miniature to remember her by, along with the promise of her love. “An evening full of delight and of regret,” he wrote in his diary just before leaving. “Took my leave of all the family with sensations unusually painful.” So he went. He had been stringent and clear; she would have no say about when their separation would end. She did not know whether she would marry him “in one year or in seven.” She was left to wait. 5
THEIR BETROTHAL was neither an end nor a beginning. Louisa drifted through the days. A storm blew in just after John Quincy sailed for Holland, and she was left to wonder whether his ship had wrecked. A portrait, which he had spent his final hours in London sitting for, arrived at Cooper’s Row; he had wanted to give her some reminder of him. But the presence of the painting only made her more nervous. He had left her in doubt, and her doubt colored what she saw. She studied his portrait and thought the image did not match the one in her mind—his complexion was wrong, his body too large. In his expression, she thought she could detect some misgivings.
His first letter came soon after the portrait, and it offered her the tenderest expressions of his devotion. He described his reluctance to go, how it tore at him—how he was “half anxious” to reach his boat and “half fretting, at the consciousness of an involuntary wish that I might be too late.” In tones that seemed to mean it, he reassured her that their separation would not be long. In fact, he would give up his public career and devote himself to her and their home. He would take, he wrote, “the earliest opportunity” to write to America. “If I can procure any prospect that will enable me to indulge the wishes of my heart, I shall cheerfully resign a career of public life which can offer nothing satisfactory to ambition, and which forbids the professions of that private happiness, the first object of my hopes and which you only can confer.” He said everything kind. She should have been calmed, but instead she was stricken. It wasn’t what he said that so upset her; it was that he had written at all. A letter from him required her to respond with a letter of her own. “Terror which assailed me at the idea of answering it,” she recalled. She had no experience with writing, and no real desire to gain any. Nothing had happened in her life since he left, she thought, and she had no art with which to say it. She could bring herself only to tell him that she was persuaded that her letters would be boring. It was torture even to say that. She was embarrassed. “I felt my folly and my insignificance,” she would remember. Her memory did not exaggerate. She waited a month after his departure before sending her first words. When she finally wrote, the rush of her words produced the tremulous high note of a vibrating nerve. The opening sentence of her second letter (the first letter has been lost) read: So totally incapacitated do I feel myself for writing were it not through fear of giving you pain I certainly should indulge my avowed aversion to it and decline the task but judging of your feelings by my own think it incumbent on me to
avail myself of every opportunity of testifying my affectionate esteem for you I yesterday received yours of the 17 instant in which you desire my opinion of your picture I approve the likeness tho’ the complexion is much too dark and the figure altogether too large I have lately been introduced to a Mr. and Mrs: Gore of Boston who say they should never have known it but I cannot allow them to be such competent judges as myself who finds the original too deeply engraven on my heart to admit of a mistake in the likeness Oh Philosophy where art thou now without thy aid my present sensations will carry me beyond myself and far exceed the limits of my paper.
The second sentence was: “I will therefore quit this subject.” But she did not know what else she was supposed to say. It had been six years since she had left school. She may have tried reading John Milton’s poetry as a child, but her reading now was ranging and undisciplined. She was, it’s clear, well versed in the conventions of popular die-for-love stories, and in the epistolary conventions those encouraged. So was the younger children’s governess, a devotee of romantic novels—many of them written in the form of correspondence—who buffed and polished Louisa’s letters to make them “most elegant.” The result was an inelegant mess; the language was stilted and formal, and at first tight and childish. Louisa’s favorite subject, indeed her only real subject, was how much she hated to write. But she tried to mold herself into whatever he wanted. She studied his letters for clues of what he expected from her. She parroted his lessons about fortitude. “As I have very little natural philosophy I must copy yours,” she wrote. She repeated what he said about the corrupting influence of Europe, correcting her course as she went in order to conform to his little lectures. “Kindly undertake to teach your Louisa, how to avoid such errors in future,” she said. She was determined to learn. She intended to start reading, too, so that she might “lessen the immense distance” she sensed between her mind and John Quincy’s. A woman’s education, however, was not supposed to look like a man’s. Her father rented a small house in Clapham Common, a fashionable area dotted with pretty parks south of London, and sent Louisa, along with the youngest children, the governess, and two servants, there to practice running a house—ordering servants, presiding at dinner. (It may also be that her parents wanted to separate their spirited and rivalrous older daughters, perhaps for their own sanity.) There was no way for her to bridge the distance between Clapham Common and Harvard. Nor was it possible for their correspondence to make Louisa and John Quincy truly intimate. She had yet to find her own voice, and he did not know how to adapt his to address her. There were misunderstandings. When she congratulated John Quincy on the probability that his father would be elected president of the United States that November, for instance, he responded by confessing the pressure he felt. “The more conspicuous he becomes in the world, the more incumbent it will be upon me to prove myself not unworthy to be his son,” he wrote and added, “I must not be unworthy of my father or of my Country.” She took his forthright words as a rebuke against herself for asking the question. Too wound up to grasp the poignancy of his situation, and by extension her own, she could only see herself blunder. When he was honest and revealing about himself, she took it as a reproach against her own conduct or character. And he, in turn, quickly became more distant, more didactic, and more stern. Still, the two maintained the conventions of lovers’ correspondence. They sent each other the regular expressions of swooning love and tender devotion. They were trying. Then something upset the routine, the fiction that all was fine. John Quincy was appointed minister to Portugal. She heard the news before he did, near the end of July, because it came through her father. She was, in fact, the first to tell him. She pretended to congratulate him, but her tone was anguished. Another appointment meant more years apart. Portugal meant a longer distance. Joshua’s plans to return to the United States soon meant that she would have to go with her family, putting an ocean between her and her betrothed. If he planned to travel through London on his way to Lisbon, she wrote to him, she wanted him to take a different route. She could not stand the idea of seeing him and then separating again. The news shook him out of the fantasy he had been constructing of moving back to America quickly and abandoning his public ambitions. He had provocatively told his parents that he would relocate south for a life of literature, leisure, and domestic bliss (not unlike a Johnson). But he was not willing to give up the dream altogether. He told Louisa that he would take her with him to Portugal, instructing her to prepare for the trip and to be ready to leave quickly. The Johnsons flew into activity. She needed passports. He wanted a ship. She must have a trousseau. Yet there was also a hint in his invitation that all was not well between them. He cautioned her that when she went to a European court, she would have to “suppress some of the little attachments to splendor that lurk at your heart, perhaps imperceptibly to yourself.” She heard in those words the suggestion that he thought she was vain, impressionable, shallow. She was hurt and said so. She was not wrong about his suspicion—though in fairness, neither was he wrong; she did like luxury. But she knew what he was implying: he wasn’t quite sure that she was fit to be a republican American minister’s wife. The insinuation riled her, which he disliked. Their correspondence grew sharper—softened only slightly by offering surrender. “Between us two, my lovely friend let there be peace,” he wrote. “If possible teach my rebellious heart gently to acquiesce without murmering,” she wrote to him. It wasn’t possible. The insinuation against her character and her overwrought response was a scratch, another small wound, another reason for her to nurse her sense of being slighted and for him to have reservations. Soon he was backtracking, mentioning vague complications that would keep him in Holland for months longer. With sadness, and with some private relief, since she had been scared to leave her family and move to a strange place, she packed away her new gowns. Then John Quincy backtracked further. In fact, he wrote, he would be compelled to go to Lisbon without her. His tone grew distant, and the little homilies about correct conduct and republican principles grew longer and more persistent. She read these as signs that he did not trust her; he thought she would embarrass him. She tried to convince him he was mistaken: “I knew not why of your having erroneously supposed me dazzled with what you style rank.” But she vacillated between being indignant and suspecting she’d done something to deserve it. Anxiously, she studied herself—her actions, her faults, her memories of the conversations that had passed between them—to see what she had done wrong. It was true that when they had sat together on the sofa, they were surrounded by the kinds of fine things that you would find in a prosperous merchant’s house. It was true that she wore silk sashes and ostrich feathers, gloves and curls, and that she had told him he must dress handsomely for her. Now he appeared to hold those things against her. Luxury was corrupting, and she would be corrupted. She would be impressed by titles. The lifestyle that she would want would be expensive to maintain. She tried to persuade him that she preferred “domestic felicity to the alloy of ambition or parade,” but nothing she said could convince him that she was not delighted by balls, duchesses, and pretty things. To defend herself, she fired off an accusation that he was the one who was ambitious. The misfire was bigger than she could have known. To an Adams, ambition was craven, and to be accused of it, especially in the context of a European court, was a grave insult. She might as well have called him un-American. Meanwhile, John Quincy’s parents were launching salvos against Louisa from the United States, and those shots started hitting their mark. Abigail was bewildered by his choice of bride. Louisa was accomplished in “music dancing French &c.,” Abigail—the self-proclaimed “farmeress”—unflatteringly conceded. She was pretty. She was lovely! But was she an American? “Some fair one has shown you its sophistry, and taught you to admire!” Abigail wrote. “Youth and beauty have penetrated through your fancied apathy, and you find yourself warmed by one and invigorated by the other; as you tell me that the enthusiasm of youth has subsided,
I will presume that reason and judgment have taken its place. I would hope for the love I bear my country, that the siren, is at least half blood.” John Quincy still blamed his mother, though, for her role in forcing him to leave Mary Frazier. Her words may have had the opposite of their intended effect—he would defend his heart’s right to choose. He pointed out that if he waited for a choice that would satisfy all her requirements, “I should have been certainly doomed to perpetual celibacy.” The elder Adamses shifted their approach. Louisa was surely a worthy woman, they wrote—they thought of her as a daughter already—but John Quincy must not bring her to Portugal. A European court would ruin her. She would be unfit to be a wife when it came time to return to the United States. Their motivation for saying these things was not punitive, and actually, they would change their minds and urge him to marry before he went. Their advice reflected their own experience. John Adams had been a foreign minister in Europe, and its corrupting influence was a common attack against him. He was called a monarchist, a lover of courts and court style, a corrupted republican. It was a devastating and unfair charge (though it was true that he had a taste for titles), and it was deeply damaging to his political career. Despite this—perhaps because of this—they turned around and made the same charges against Louisa. “Is there not great danger of her contracting such inclinations, and habits as to endanger her youth and inexperience, as to unfit her for the discharge of those domestic duties?” Abigail wrote. “Who can answer for her after having been introduced into the dissipations of a foreign court?” “A young lady of fine parts and accomplishments, educated to drawing dancing and music, however domestic and retired from the world she may have been in her fathers house, when she comes to shine in a court among the families of ambassadors and ministers of state, if she has not more discretion, prudence and philosophy than commonly belong to her sex, will be in danger of involving you in expenses far beyond your appointments,” wrote John Adams. “I give you a hint and you must take it.” John Quincy took the hint. At The Hague, he slipped back into his scholarly routine. He had too little time for sociable frivolity. For companionship, he had his brother and his books. He had his work, which grew more interesting. Events in Europe were accelerating. While he whiled away his days threading spangles in the Johnsons’ parlor, a French general named Napoleon Bonaparte had been winning battles and amassing power, and now France had command over much of the continent. The country was using its control of ports to control commerce; it was bullying representatives from the United States while preparing for war with England. John Quincy saw how easily the United States could be swept into wars that were not its own, and he felt the weight of his responsibilities. That November, John Adams was elected president of the United States. The burden grew. John Quincy’s every move would be watched especially closely, his every word scrutinized. So would his wife’s. He had been inside enough European drawing rooms to understand—even if he would never say so—that a diplomat’s wife is also watched, listened to, judged. The childish tone Louisa sometimes adopted in her letters did not help her cause. His own tone became condescending. John Quincy counseled Louisa not only to take comfort but to find pleasure in resignation to their distance. There was a finality and self-satisfaction in the way he spoke. In his heart and mind, he was moving on. 6
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