Louisa and John Quincy left the Johnsons’ house and moved into the Adelphi Hotel, where they planned to live until leaving for Berlin in October, while the Johnsons continued their preparations to move to America. The plan was for Catherine, Joshua, and the other Johnson sisters to go in mid-September. On the night of September 8, 1797, Joshua, Catherine, and Louisa’s six sisters came to have dinner with Louisa and John Quincy at the Adelphi. It turned out that they were coming to say goodbye. Unknown to Louisa, two days earlier, on September 6, Joshua had a bill due to Frederick Delius, U.S. consul and a merchant in Bremen, Germany, who had generously and riskily extended credit to help fund Joshua’s brandy scheme. On September 8, an independent reviewer of Joshua’s accounts gave his books to one of Joshua’s other creditors, Jonathan Maitland, with whom Joshua had three accounts. Maitland was claiming that Joshua owed him money, too. Joshua’s response was to run. The hope—fervently held, grasped at, promised to anyone who would listen—was that Joshua could claim more of his old firm’s profits in person than he could from abroad. The Johnsons left the Adelphi and then went to meet a ship at Gravesend under the cover of the dark. Before daybreak, they were bound for the United States. In her memory, it happened all at once and without warning. As she told it, she woke and found them gone. She was “the most forlorn miserable wretch that the sun ever smiled upon.” That wasn’t quite true. But it had been a brutal night for her. “After supper we had a distressing scene, while the whole family took leave of Louisa,” John Quincy wrote in his diary of that night. The story she would later tell was that her father was wronged. He was taken by surprise; he was the victim. He had been unlucky, as any honest merchant could be, and then he had been betrayed by his creditors. There had been a wreck, a cargo of brandy lost. A ship had not arrived from the East Indies, a remittance hadn’t come in, and “he was obliged to stop payment for the sum of five hundred pounds.” The missing remittance, “the sum which had been destined to settle all my fathers current debts; every one of which it would cover,” had arrived just after he’d left, and it had been stolen by his creditor “the villain Maitland.” In Maryland, his former partners cheated him out of his fair share of his old firm’s profits. In his daughter’s view, Joshua had merely suffered the vicissitudes of a merchant’s life. For that bad luck and badly placed trust alone, the Johnson name—the name she had just given up—would be slandered. She had small details right: there was a brandy scheme, a wreck, a missing remittance, a bill for £500, and a creditor named Maitland. But she could not admit that she also had at least a dim sense of the larger picture. She had known that it was imperative that her family return to the United States as soon as possible. Much was masked by the Johnsons’ fine lifestyle, but Joshua was not calm or quiet about his financial troubles. “Several of my family are unwell, nor can they be better until I am relieved from the pain I labor under,” he had once written a correspondent during a time of financial distress. But her father was her idol, and she could not see clearly or accept the poor choices that had combined with bad luck to lead to his ruin. She could not see that, at least to an extent, he was at fault. To be fair, no one in or out of chancery courts in London and the United States could untangle the books. (Merchants from Fleet Street and the Strand and Maitland would still be arguing over the remnants of Joshua’s estate in chancery court a decade later. The verdicts have been lost.) She had been raised to defer to him absolutely. He was not a despot; he was an affectionate father, as fathers in her time and class were supposed to be; but he ruled. There were betrayals. What she could never admit was that she was one of the ones betrayed. Her father had not only left her, but he also left her in the most vulnerable position. When he fled, one of the promises he left unfilled was Louisa’s dowry. Only a few months before, Joshua had reaffirmed her dowry of £5,000 sterling to John Quincy and to Louisa as well. It wasn’t a great fortune, not by the standards of the aristocracy, but a dowry was no idle inducement. A marriage was not just a religious sacrament, and it was not just a union of two people in love. (The notion that romantic love should govern the decision at all was an idea only then gaining purchase in Britain’s upper middle class.) It was a contract. If a bride’s father could not produce the bridal portion, the groom would have legal grounds to abandon the bride. Joshua’s bankruptcy made his daughter vulnerable. John Quincy would have been justified in leaving her. The thought did cross his mind—if only to be rejected. John Quincy met with Maitland and others who had studied Joshua’s books. “Find the affairs of Mr. J. more and more adverse,” John Quincy wrote in his diary a few weeks after the Johnsons were gone. He would not help his father-in-law by lending money. “This trial is a strong one—more so indeed than I expected—and I expected it would be strong.— I have done my duty—rigorous, inflexible duty.” He acknowledged in his diary that he would be within his rights to leave Louisa. But he was dutiful by nature, and he had made his vows. “No event whatever shall convince me that by pursuing a more interested and less faithful course I should have been rewarded with greater success,” he wrote. The more interested course would have been leaving his new wife. There is no evidence from his diary or letters to anyone else that he said anything like this to her. But even had he been a saint, she would have heard accusations and threats in his voice. Money was already a difficult subject between them. He had been explicit about his sense of probity and his determination to wait until he could marry on sound financial footing. He had already accused Louisa and Joshua of conspiring to accelerate the marriage and to leave her in Holland while the rest of the family made it to the United States. He had made it clear to Louisa that money would be tight and that they would be pressed to the edge of their means. He would not live like the Europeans in court—he would not go into debt. John Quincy loathed debt—and feared it. In that, he was like the leaders of his country, including those (Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and many others) who were so deeply in debt they would never emerge from it. Debt was thought to undermine republican liberty. A man in debt could not be independent; he could not be free to act according to his own will. A debtor not only threatened his own freedom but the freedom of the United States. “A nation of men, each of whom owned enough property to support his family, could be a republic,” the historian Edmund Morgan has explained. “It would follow that a nation of debtors, who had lost their property or mortgaged it to creditors, was ripe for tyranny.” For John Quincy, Joshua’s failure followed on the heels of a crisis in the Adams family—some of which affected John Quincy directly. John Quincy had left his savings of $4,000 with his younger brother Charles to invest. Charles had speculated with it, lost it, and then more or less cut off contact with his family. John Quincy answered a six-month silence from his brother with sternness. “I hereby withdraw all power and authority that I have heretofore given you to draw for money in my behalf,” he would write to Charles a year later. Meanwhile, his sister, Nabby, had married a man—Louisa’s old friend the “dashing” Colonel William Smith—whose debts were so massive that he had abandoned his family to the care of Abigail and John Adams. To Louisa’s humiliation, and no doubt to John Quincy’s indignation, men clutching Joshua’s bills came to their hotel room. “Every rap at the door,” she wrote, “made me tremble.” They wanted John Quincy to pay, and he refused. The debts were not his. But she felt they were hers. She knew how things looked: her father had married off his daughter under false pretenses and then left her new husband in the lurch, and she’d been in on the scheme. In October, Frederick Delius sent John Quincy a damning letter, impugning Joshua’s character while implicitly and insultingly suggesting that John Quincy was privy to the truth. “It is impossible for me to describe to you the horror I feel at such a low mean and unpardonable conduct which has done more injury to my credit and reputation than Mr Johnson and his family can ever make good again,” Delius wrote. (And his family—how those words must have stung.) “I have been very much mistaken in Mr Johnson’s charact
er,” Delius continued. “I always took him to be open, upright and candid and without any deceit whatever, but his present conduct towards me shews what he meant by all his affectionate and tender expressions.” John Quincy passed Delius’s letter along to Joshua, in Washington. “The turn of affairs here has not been such as your friends could have wished,” John Quincy wrote. “Appearances and allegations are advanced which bring in question something more than merely your credit.” And John Quincy gave it to Louisa to read, too. Years later, recounting the moment, she defended her father by saying that his “misfortunes were as unexpected as they were sudden.” Really, she was defending herself. She knew how things looked. “Every appearance was against me; actions proceeding from the most innocent causes looked like deliberate plans to deceive; and I felt that all the honest pride of my soul was laid low for ever,” she wrote nearly thirty years later, the pain fresh. She marked that moment as the one that changed her—that broke her. The timing couldn’t have been worse. She was discovering a terrible truth about her family at the same moment she was forced to join a new one, turning a natural break into a traumatic rupture. And it was the worse, because she felt her husband judge her. There is little evidence that John Quincy was anything but patient with her. But no record exists of what he said to her behind closed doors. Most likely, she wanted him to defend her “beloved father,” which he would not do. Whatever he said, or whatever she imagined him saying, burned her. “It was strict and rigid justice and I had nothing to complain of—Such was my honey moon.” Louisa saw her character and position called into question. The question of money became a question of standing in the marriage, and she had lost her claim. For years, it would weigh on her. She would refer to it constantly, especially during times of stress. She could not buy her son a present because she had no money. She could not defend herself against John Quincy’s reproaches about “strict economy” because her father had gone bankrupt. “Beggar as I am,” she would write. She would consider herself poor, even when her husband was not. The memory of her father’s fall would haunt Louisa for the rest of her life, especially when she felt most vulnerable. She used it to mark the moment that divided her life: she had been a Johnson, and now she was an Adams. She had been a child, and now she was a woman. She had been innocent, but now knew shame. “It has been forty three years since I became a wife,” she would write when she was sixty-five years old, “and yet the rankling sore is not healed which then broke upon my heart of hearts. . . . It has hung like an incubus upon my spirit.” An incubus. A demon that has sex with sleeping women. This was the level of her fixation, her terror, her sense of powerlessness—her loss of innocence. The timing was unfortunate for another reason. On October 18, Louisa and John Quincy left London for Berlin. She was already pregnant. PART TWO
LIFE Was
NEW Berlin, 1797–1801
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THEY ARRIVED at Gravesend on Wednesday, October 18, 1797, after night had fallen, and discovered that the Frans, the ship they planned to take to Prussia, had already gone. They were late and despairing; there had been some confusion about the passports, and John Quincy was upset that the documents were still not right. After some inquiries, they learned that the ship had anchored for the night about ten miles downriver, at a place called Hope. They would have to row to meet it.
Louisa was exhausted. Night after night, the rowdy cheers of men lighting bonfires and shattering glass in the name of the king, celebrating Britain’s recent victory over the Dutch fleet, allies of France, had kept her and John Quincy awake. Perhaps those boisterous shouts were also a hint of what she was about to face—a continent roiled in conflict. Only two years earlier Prussia had been at war, part of the coalition of European monarchies that had united against Revolutionary France and its charismatic general, Napoleon Bonaparte. For John Quincy, at least, the clamor would have been a troubling reminder of the dangerous and difficult situation he was in, as a diplomat representing a new nation that had too often been treated as a pawn by the old great powers in their own conflicts. No doubt Louisa tossed and turned with her own fears of the unknown—the alien country to which she was headed; the dangers of pregnancy, which she faced without a friend; the almost-stranger to whom she had united her fate; and the trauma of her parents’ and sisters’ flight to the United States. There would be no turning back, and no relief. At eight in the evening, the five members of their group—Louisa and John Quincy, John Quincy’s brother Thomas (who would serve as his brother’s secretary, as he had at The Hague), and two servants, Tilly Whitcomb and Elizabeth Epps—stepped into a rowboat. The pilot pushed off, and the boat whispered through the quiet Thames, as the river widened toward the sea and opened into darkness. The moon that night was only a sliver; what little light there was came from lamps and distant stars. The air, though mid-October, was almost warm, and the travelers marveled at the fineness of the evening. It took two hours for the rowboat to reach the Frans. As soon as Louisa climbed on board, the water moved and the ship rolled. She felt ill right away. She was sick all eight days at sea, and she was scared. When huge gales blew through, Louisa became convinced the boat would sink. Passengers took turns at the pumps. The ship heaved and plunged. “Almost sick myself,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. The ship was dirty, “very disgusting,” he thought. There was little relief when she stepped onto firm ground at the harbor at Hamburg, on October 26. She hardly knew what to make of the country that would be her new home: the unfamiliar lattice of canals and narrow streets, the smell of peat that made her nauseous, the sound of water as it sluiced through rooftop gutters and shattered on the ground. From Hamburg they traveled south toward Berlin, their English carriage lurching over the rough Prussian roads. Everything was strange and horrible. She found the inns almost uninhabitable. “The house was dirty, noisy, and uncomfortable—The beds miserable; the table execrable; the manners of the Mrs of the mansion”—the only women she would have contact with on the road—“coarse though kind, and between us, no means whatever existed of communication, which would have made my situation more agreeable.” Probably, nothing would have made her situation agreeable. She was homesick, and her mind was still fixed on her family’s “downfal.” Still, she marveled at what she saw. At her father’s dinner table and in the parlor, she had heard about the extraordinary travels of captains come recently from the West Indies, envoys to Europe, and traders who trafficked in China, and she thought that she knew something about the world. So she was surprised by how much surprised her. She watched, fascinated, as the ship’s crew passed around a string with a cube of sugar tied to the end, which they sucked as they drank tea. There was something fresh about those experiences, something that made her mind reach even as she recoiled. She could not help but be curious. Later, she would insist that during those first few months of marriage, she spent her time mourning for the life she had lost. And yet, even then, she looked at the world and was amazed by what she saw. She may have thought her life was over, but when she arrived in Berlin, she discovered that it had just begun. She was twenty-two years old, weary, pregnant, and worried. And yet she was enchanted. “To me,” she wrote a quarter century later, looking back, “life was new.” • • • A LIEUTENANT stopped Louisa, John Quincy, and their group at the gates to the city. The official looked at the travelers, studied their papers, and questioned them, suspicious “until one of his private soldiers explained to him, who the United States of America were,” wrote John Quincy in his diary. John Quincy made no more comment—but the situation was enough to make any man wry and despairing. He was representing a nation that did not exist in the minds of many. What was worse, the traditional great powers of Europe generally treated the young nation as an annoying child.
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