Louisa

by Louisa Thomas

  LOUISA GREW DESPERATE, the more so because her family’s preparations to move to the United States were under way at No. 8 Cooper’s Row. If she was not married by the time the Johnsons left, she would be going too. What hope could she have that her engagement to John Quincy could survive across the Atlantic? It hardly seemed possible when it was so hard with only the Channel between them. There was, she wrote to John Quincy, “a feeble ray of hope” that they might see each other before she sailed for America, however. The Johnsons would travel aboard one of her father’s ships, and she happened to know he had one in Holland. She would ask if the Johnsons could leave for America from there. She feared that if they did not see each other at all, their relationship would not survive.

  Her youth, her inexperience, and her lack of reassurance exaggerated her natural fears—and her family surely heightened them. Her sisters mocked her for seeming withdrawn. As an engaged woman, she was restricted in her company. Neither married nor unattached, she was not allowed to do anything that might attract reproof—even speaking to bachelors at balls. She was isolated and insecure. Considering that Catherine had intervened to pressure John Quincy when he had been in London, Catherine was probably also expressing her anxiety about John Quincy’s intentions in some way at home. Joshua, too, had something at stake in ensuring the marriage came off, more than his daughter’s happiness. His finances were under extreme pressure, which could have brought the engagement contract into danger. Joshua followed Louisa’s letter with one of his own, suggesting that the family might stop at The Hague on the way to the United States in order to restore his daughter’s happiness. John Quincy was quick to read between the lines. He responded to Joshua coldly and accused Louisa of conspiring with her father to be left behind with him in Holland while her family went to America. It was a cruel thing to say. He made no allowance for the idea that Louisa might miss him, or that she might want to strengthen their attachment by seeing him before a longer separation. Nor did he acknowledge that Joshua had made no explicit mention of hurrying the marriage in his own letter. But his paranoia was not completely unfounded. Joshua probably did have ulterior motives. He was in trouble. • • • JOHN QUINCY did not know just how bad Joshua’s problems were. Joshua could not hide his debts for much longer; they were spiraling out of his control. Money had been a recurring problem for him since his arrival in England twenty-five years before. The life of a merchant was unpredictable. The system of credit and payment by bills of exchange meant that men had to be able to collect in order to pay—and sometimes they couldn’t collect. Shipping was risky in the best of times. A sunk cargo could mean ruin. Joshua was not cavalier. He had advised his partners and instructed them intelligently on how British and European trade operated. He had won business and earned respect. He did operate in the margins of his accounts sometimes, as many merchants did, and his bookkeeping grew increasingly disordered as business grew more complex. He had been criticized by some of his associates. But he was still trusted by many.

  Joshua had dark eyes—the same eyes as his daughter Louisa—and a piercing gaze. His friends knew him for his ardent feelings and his calculating mind. He inspired at once confidence and wariness in men who met him. “Mr. Johnson seems cool, collected, and decided, a most valuable friend or a dreadful enemy,” wrote one acquaintance. “I hope to know him only as the former.” There were men who would know him as the latter. He was self-interested and self-preserving. But Louisa did not misjudge his character when she later said that he was too optimistic, too trusting. He was also quick to panic, abandon friends, and to protect himself when things went wrong. He had a tendency to enter trading arrangements with the highest hopes, and was crushed when they failed. In the late 1780s, the firm of Wallace, Johnson & Muir was so deeply in debt that he had to put the account books in the hands of the firm’s major creditors in order to avoid bankruptcy. By the time John Quincy knew him, his finances were a mess. Wallace, Johnson & Muir had dissolved effective 1790, but it had taken years for the business to unwind, and he was still fighting not only those former partners over his share of the profits but the widow of John Davidson, from his first firm, which had ended before the Revolution. His latest problem centered on a scheme to enter the brandy market with Colonel John Trumbull. In November 1795, at just the time that Trumbull brought John Quincy to dinner at the Johnsons’ house, Joshua and Trumbull had hatched a plan to export brandy to the United States. Joshua lined up backers in London and handed the colonel instructions, along with a stack of letters of introduction. Joshua wrote to the Hennessys, whose brandy house had just begun selling to the United States, and to Mr. Turner, the mayor of Cognac, and to his contacts in France. He gave Trumbull a bill of remittance for £5,000. “As the advantage promises to be considerable, I hope the quantity will be large,” he wrote to Trumbull, and told him to “get all the rum you can lay your hands on.” But within months, the familiar pattern began. Joshua’s soaring self-confidence gave way to doubt, then panic. Orders were rejected for poor quality. A ship was wrecked in Guernsey Roads, when the tide went out and several pipes of cognac shattered on the rocks. “I am sorry to tell you our ill luck continues,” Joshua wrote Trumbull when he reported yet another disaster. Money was scarce, and Joshua had to rely on massive lines of credit. In May 1796, just as John Quincy was packing to return to The Hague, Joshua asked one investor alone, his friend Frederick Delius, a merchant in Bremen, Germany, to extend Trumbull’s credit—on Joshua’s account—to £40,000. “Had it not been for this friendship and genteel behavior our whole scheme must have been defeated,” Joshua confessed to Trumbull, adding that he was desperate to get a ship with a full cargo of tobacco to Delius to make up some of the difference. The situation had not improved over the summer and fall. In December, Joshua was writing to Trumbull of a shipwreck—six or eight pipes of brandy lost. His creditors were having trouble paying their own debts. To satisfy his hungry investors, and to pay that promised dowry to John Quincy, Joshua needed to return to the United States and lay his claim to everything he could. John Quincy had some hint of Joshua’s situation from Louisa and perhaps from others. He acknowledged to his mother that he suspected that the Johnsons’ wealth was not as great as their fine lifestyle suggested. His suspicions only went so far—he did not doubt that the dowry would be there, and in his daydreams, he was living on the Johnsons’ southern land. But John Quincy had friends in London who did business with Joshua and may have heard something from one of them, or he may have merely surmised. Joshua was open about his struggles with his former partners in Maryland and his need to wrap up matters in person. One of his letters to John Quincy contained a disconcerting line: “I am in hourly expectations of letters from my late partners, they will be interesting, and as then rec[eive]d, I will come to a decided resolution will then communicate to you my planns without guile or reserve.” John Quincy read guile and reserve straight into his words, guessing at a plan to leave Louisa in Holland so that he would have to fix the wedding date. Maybe that really was the plan. Maybe Joshua knew, too, that if his financial situation grew much worse, it would be that much harder for him to marry his daughter off. He had once been a young man with a cavalier attitude toward marriage himself. Perhaps he saw John Quincy’s reluctance and decided to apply some pressure himself. Whatever the truth, John Quincy responded to Louisa in the worst possible way. “You will be sensible what an appearance in the eyes of the world, your coming here would have; an appearance consistent neither with your dignity, nor my delicacy,” he wrote to Louisa, accusing her of conspiring with her father. Impugning a young woman’s “dignity” and “delicacy”—which she rightly read as her modesty, not his—was as bad an insult as he could have made to a young woman. Her suggestion that a betrothed couple facing a long separation might welcome a reunion was treated as disgraceful. He tried to soften it by saying, “Let us my lovely friend rather submit with cheerfulness to the laws of necessity than resort to unbecoming remedies for relief,�
� but that just made matters worse. John Quincy was calling her virtue into question. She recoiled from his response. “Believe me I should be sorry to put it in your power, or in that of the world, to say I wished to force myself upon any man or into any family,” Louisa retorted, as angry at his innuendo as she deserved to be. She had done nothing, she added, to deserve such “mortification” as his letters brought. So began a period of angry, passionate attacks. While couching their words in claims of total devotion and love, they hurtled shots across the Channel fast and thick. She criticized his excessive attachment to his books. With careless cruelty, he scorned her choice of reading—and so the quality of her mind. She was, she could easily infer, no match for him. In truth, his insult had a liberating effect. She wrote, for the first time, without the help of the governess. She would not let herself be so easily dismissed, so rudely pushed around. Her writing grew in confidence, style, and wit. It is remarkable that, in so short a time after writing such cringing, pathetic letters, she started to find a voice. It was immature, and not as strong and vivid as the one she would later develop, but it was her voice nonetheless. They engaged in a series of small skirmishes—feinting with this one, pulling back with the next—that led to passion and flirtation, and also to anger and misunderstanding. It was a charged correspondence, in which the heat emanated from both their attraction and their fury. She used sarcasm. He found her tone unattractive. “Let us understand one another, Louisa,” John Quincy wrote to her (on her birthday, no less). “I never thought your disposition deficient in spirit, and that I am fully convinced you have as much of it as can be consistent with an amiable temper, but let me earnestly entreat you never to employ it in discussion with me, and to remember that it is in its nature a repellent quality.” She found his peremptory style offensive. He detected “suspicion and distrust” within her. He accused her of “childish weakness or idle lamentations.” She was incensed by his sanctimony and turned on his “philosophy.” She did not pause to punctuate all her lines. “Ah my beloved friend, this boasted philosophy that I have heard so much of is indeed a dreadful thing. . . . Delusive as may have been my imagination, I have never dreamt of cloudless skies Yet did I not expect that you would have been the person to have strewn my path with needless thorns.” They were at cross-purposes, even when it came to names. He called her Louisa, and she addressed him as “my Adams,” which must have sounded rather romantic. John Quincy bridled. “I have endeavoured to habituate myself to it, because you appear fond of using it; but it looks to me more and more uncouth and awkward,” he wrote to her. The address seemed to him “too much like that of novels.” She learned the lesson a little too well; after that, she did not address him by name in her letters at all. They would apologize and try to soothe each other’s hurt feelings, calling each barb a proof of their care. Sometimes their apologies would work; their letters, even the harsh ones, were little grappling hooks binding them together. They could not efface their attraction; they did in fact care. But mail took time to travel, and before one conciliatory letter could arrive, another hurtful missive was already en route, slashing open the wounds before they could heal. “I am so miserably dull, stupid, and cross, that I have gained the appellation of the Nun,” Louisa wrote. “I will freely confess a material change which absence has produced,” John Quincy replied. “It is the restoration of sober reason, and reflection, which alas! if they did not abandon me were without all the influence they should have, during the latter part of my residence in London. It was indeed a time of delight; but a time of too much indulgence. . . . I am the man I was when you first knew me”—which is to say, the man who had not returned to the Johnsons’ right away. “My lovely friend, that man, is much more estimable, and much more respectable than the man I was for two or three months before I left you.” He could not have been more provocative. He was not the man who had fallen in love. They were pushed to the brink. With quiet sadness, with philosophy, she saw that they might have gone too far. “Let us mutually forget the past,” she wrote. “Our departure for America is fixed.” The Johnsons were to leave England in three months. She would, she wrote, “indulge the pleasing idea” that he would follow them soon, and when he did, she would be happy to “share the simple fortunes of my dearest friend.” Only then, “should this happen,” when he was “divested of rank,” would she be able to prove that he, not his station, was what drew her to him—“that it was not your situation, but yourself that I loved.” It nearly ended there—almost in heartbreak. She felt she had to prove herself and her affections to him. She felt him slipping away. “Should this happen,” she had written, because there was doubt. Though anguished, she was ready to let go. Gracefully, she was saying goodbye. But John Quincy changed course once more. He pulled her back. On April 13, 1797, he wrote to her that circumstances had changed. It might be possible to come through London, if he could travel by an American ship (such as one, incidentally, that Joshua owned), and if he was able to come to London, then he would marry Louisa and bring her to Lisbon. He gave Louisa a chance to call off their engagement. He spoke honestly. They knew each other now; they knew not only their attraction to each other but also their capacity to repel. “You know the Man you have chosen, for the friend of your life,” he wrote to her. You know him the better, for that absence, which has at once shewn you a trial of his affection and of his temper.—He has disguised to you none of his failings and weaknesses. You know the chances of hardship, inconvenience and danger, which you may be called to share with him. You know his inviolable attachment to his Country, and his resolute determination not to continue long his absence from it.—You know that upon his retirement, the state of his fortune will require privations, which will be painful to him only as they may affect you. Choose, Louisa, choose for yourself, and be assured that his Heart will ratify your choice.

  Her opportunity to withdraw was real. Women could, and did, end engagements. It was the brief window in which women were allowed, in theory, to be masters of their fate. She could not ask for marriage, and she could not escape from it; once vows were exchanged, she was subject to her husband’s authority. But she had the freedom to say no, up until that point at the altar when she submitted herself to his control. That she would be submitting herself if they married, he left no doubt—and not only to him, but to his country. In his life, he wrote to her, she would always come second. There was sadness in that—but perhaps there was also something stirring about his dedication, something pure and clear in the clarion call. “I may therefore own to you,” he wrote to her, “that my duty to my Country is in my mind the first and most imperious of all obligations; before which every interest and every feeling inconsistent with it must forever disappear.” She could have told him to leave for Lisbon without her. Instead, she told him to come. 7

  JOHN QUINCY ARRIVED in England with his brother Thomas on July 12, 1797. She knew he was in London, and she expected him to come to her right away. Night came and he did not. He appeared at the Johnsons’ door the next day, finding “my friends there and particularly my best friend, well.” Either she hid her disappointment that he had not hurried to her, or he chose not to see it. She, meanwhile, could do nothing but sense his misgivings. Her insecurity worked as a magnifying glass. When John Quincy asked her to set a wedding date she replied that she wanted to marry as soon as possible—“naturally supposing that it was what he most desired.” When she saw the startled expression on his face, she felt she had done something wrong.

  In fact, the wedding could not come soon enough for the Johnsons, who were hurriedly packing to leave for the United States in early autumn. It’s no wonder that she wanted to be married fast. Not only had John Quincy kept her in wait, but the ground kept moving beneath her. News arrived that President Adams, his father—and his commander—had changed his son’s appointment from Portugal to Prussia. John Quincy was furious; it was one thing for George Washington to give him a large commission and another f
or his own father to do it. It was nepotism, and he felt ashamed. He wrote to his father of “the degraded and humiliating aspect in which it places me personally” and considered asking for a recall. He would accept the new position, he wrote to his father, for two reasons—both revealing. The first was “parental authority.” The second was “that the new destination, will be so much more inconvenient and troublesome to myself.” He had already shipped his beloved books to Portugal, at high expense. Characteristically, he managed to turn annoyance into a virtue. Anything that required a significant sacrifice on his part was easier to accept. It’s unlikely he kept secret from his bride-to-be how upset he was; already, she was sensitive to his dark moods, no doubt especially in the days leading to their union. The switch in destinations wouldn’t have been easy for her, either. Portugal had promised warmth, proximity to the ocean; it would have brought her as close to her family, once they had sailed for the United States, as possible while remaining in Europe. Prussia meant long nights and cold winters. It meant the guttural sounds and glottal stops of German. It meant an extra 1,400 miles between her and her family. It was another swerve, another hard adjustment, another lesson that in her husband’s life, she would never have a say. It was a reminder that John Quincy’s first devotion was to his country, his second to his parents, and his third to his books—he was insistent about the books. She could expect a share of his attention and his affection, but it would be only a share. He had said this explicitly. It would help if she could learn to love his country, his parents, and his books; but that summer, 1797, in London, his country was abstract, his parents unknown, and she could not understand his attachment to his books. She thought too much reading injured his health. Despite all this, their wedding day was a happy one. The ceremony was small. It took place at eleven on Wednesday morning, July 26, at All Hallows Barking, around the corner from the house on Cooper’s Row. Louisa’s family, John Quincy’s young brother, Thomas—his secretary at The Hague—and two of John Quincy’s friends were there to witness. Rev. John Hewlett, the man who had taught Louisa “early to think,” performed the service. She walked out of the dark stone church into the bright sunlight as a wife. It was a hot and cheerful day. The Tower of London lay below them, and lighters and skiffs crowded the Thames. For the next month, Louisa’s days were filled with celebrations: excursions to the countryside, dinners and parties hosted by friends for the bride and groom. Late mornings followed the late nights—the loss of sleep while in bed, as John Quincy wrote in his diary with a touch of circumspect pride, coming “from an inevitable cause.” Louisa was happy. She had her family around her and her husband with her; she had everything she wanted and every hope for the future. “At this moment,” Louisa wrote in “Record of a Life,” “every thing seemed to combine to make my prospects brilliant.” • • • THE CELEBRATIONS for the newlyweds culminated in a large ball thrown by Joshua at the Johnsons’ house on Tower Hill on August 25. The party was a triumph; the last guests, flushed from pleasure, dancing, and drink, did not leave until four in the morning. But for Joshua, the ball must have been torture. Earlier that day, letters had arrived from America with news that a ship he needed in order to cover a bill for £500 would not arrive. He was broke. He knew that the bills for the flowers, the food, the musicians, the flowing wine would come soon, and he knew he could not pay them. The worst was to come. He did not, it seems, tell his daughter.