Louisa (17 page)

“Mr. Adams was so deeply engrossed with business that he had scarcely time to speak to the family; and we had but little conversation on any subject,” she remembered. That was harsh—it's unlikely she had wanted to know the details of his work, the way his mother did. But it was impossible to ignore the larger situation, not least because of how it affected her. British ships routinely lurked off the shores of the east coast in order to stop and search vessels. Crisis was only a trigger-pull away. On June 22, 1807, the British warship
Leopard
fired on the USS
Chesapeake
after its commander refused to hand over alleged
British deserters. Three of the
Chesapeake
's crew were killed (another died later in Norfolk), eighteen wounded, and four were captured by the British and tried as deserters. Three of them were American-born free black sailors who had escaped impressment, having been seized and forced into the British navy. One was an actual deserter; the British hanged him. In response to the incredible affront to American rights, Jefferson tried an experiment. With anti-British feeling high on one side and a stubborn pro-British faction on the other, Jefferson had no good options. He was absolutely opposed to going to war, but he could not afford to let the crisis pass. He proposed a shipping embargo, which he hoped would be war by pacific means, and he turned to John Quincy to help him.

The senator from Massachusetts was an improbable ally for Jefferson. The animosity between John Adams and Jefferson had grown so deep that they were not speaking, and the Federalists in Boston were rabidly pro-British; the economy of New England depended on British trade. John Quincy's constituents would bear the burden of a commercial retaliation disproportionately. Indeed, his fellow Massachusetts Federalist senator, Timothy Pickering, was plotting disunion and scheming to undermine John Quincy specifically. But John Quincy was offended by the affronts from Britain. The scenes of the Revolution he had witnessed as a child remained, always, fresh in his mind. He was determined to prove that he was no one's man, and he was willing to risk his own comfort at a chance to prove his patriotism. It did not escape Jefferson that John Quincy was trying to distance himself from his supposed allies, nor that John Quincy could be counted on to act as he felt right, even if—or especially if—the action was wrong for his career. John Quincy knew he had more or less deserted his supporters altogether when he agreed to consider Jefferson's proposal. Jefferson appointed John Quincy and four Republican senators to a committee to consider his confidential recommendation for a general embargo. John Quincy was cynical about the measure's efficacy.
But with reluctance, and while proposing terms to amend it, he gave it his support.

So the embargo
passed Congress, and John Quincy's Senate term was sunk. He may not have minded, anyway, losing his seat. He was frustrated by his work, and he probably gambled that his help for the other side might lead to new opportunities. In fact, he may have cannily taken a longer view: there was little future for him among Federalists anyway. His move meant political suicide in the short term, but it was politically expedient in the long. He was sending signals to the Republicans that although he would not ask for one, he might be interested in some plum post as a reward. The feud between John Quincy and Pickering spilled into the newspapers. In Washington, Federalists considered him a turncoat, while Republicans distrusted him but called upon him constantly. “Since the Commencement of the present Session I have been placed upon every Committee of national importance, and made the reporter of several,” John Quincy wrote to his father. “Without having the weight of a single vote besides my own, in point of personal influence, I find myself charged with the duty of originating—and conducting measures of the highest interest—I am made a leader without followers.” There was frustration in this—but also some peculiar note of pleasure.

His wife was
less pleased. She was also isolated in Washington, not by her choice. “Our situation here this winter is not very pleasant as it is universally believed your son has changed his party and the F[ederalists] are extremely bitter,” Louisa wrote to Abigail.

He shut the door to his room and worked in silence. She was aware of the anger and distrust that her husband aroused. “In private,” Louisa wrote to Abigail, his opponents “circulate reports very much to his disadvantage.” For the sake of a president who had humiliated his father, and for a measure he did not believe would really work, John Quincy defended the embargo. He signaled his break with the Federalists altogether when he attended the meeting of the Republican
caucus that nominated James Madison for president in January 1808. At the end of May, the Massachusetts legislature voted him out of office ten months early, effective when his term expired, and the state senate issued instructions that he must vote for the embargo's repeal. It was a vote of no confidence. He resigned his Senate seat immediately.

So Louisa packed up her trunks again, and the Adamses returned north—this time, she thought, for good.

 • • • 

W
HEN
THEY
reached
Boston, where they planned to live permanently, John Quincy and Louisa found themselves ostracized. Even John and Abigail were upset; in caucusing with the Republicans, John Quincy hadn't simply turned against his own party, but allied himself with the one that had so savaged his father's reputation. Papers accused John Quincy of being a “party scavenger.” Anonymous letters called him Lucifer. Some Federalists were openly encouraging merchants to break the embargo; some were secretly corresponding with the British. Louisa, loyal to her husband, was disgusted. “With all their boasted independence [they] hang on the skirts of Great Britain, as child clings to its nurse,” she wrote. But she could console herself that she was unpacking her bags once and for all, that her husband was done with public life.

Perhaps anticipating the premature end of his Senate term, John Quincy had bought a house on Nassau Street and Frog Lane the year before, and they had already partly moved in. The house was hard to heat and drafty in winter, and smoke filled the rooms when it snowed, but it was theirs—it was home. Louisa quickly embraced it. She had her sister Catherine (“Kitty”) for company, and began to entertain once more, learning that not everyone planned to stay away. “The mere commonplace routine of every day life suits me very well,” she wrote in November. She was pregnant again but complained less frequently of illness. She had her husband home and her children back. “Once again,” she later remembered, “we were a family.”

And then, once again, he was gone.

He would make only a short visit to Washington, he reassured her. In January 1809, with James Madison set to be sworn into office in March, John Quincy accepted three cases before the Supreme Court—cases he was confident he would lose—and went to Washington until the court adjourned. He claimed he needed the money. Though he would never admit it, those who knew him suspected that he wanted to be in Washington when Madison was making federal appointments. John Quincy had risked and lost his political career to support the Republicans Jefferson and Madison. There might be a reward.

Louisa and John Quincy fought
just before he left. The immediate cause isn't clear, but the arc of their correspondence suggests that she knew he was positioning himself for more than a trip to argue a case before the Supreme Court. “I forgive you though you did part with me very
cavalierly
,” she wrote.

“I do not know whether I have yet
forgiven you
—” he responded. “I am sure I have not yet got over it.”

A few weeks later she slipped on some ice, struck her back on a street curb, and miscarried. John Quincy, normally so attentive to her when she suffered a miscarriage, responded coolly, even cruelly. “As to the disappointment which we suffer from it,” he wrote, “I certainly can bear it without complaint, and you must reconcile yourself to it by the reflection how much of pain and suffering it may relieve you from.”

She was caustic in her own letters. “It is here said you are nominated for the War Department and have accepted to walk in the steps of the God of War I make no comments,” she wrote. A week later, she told him that if he planned on staying in Washington for any longer, he should consider himself too busy to write to her again.

On February 26
, John Quincy told Louisa to ignore “the ridiculous reports” that he was to be offered a federal appointment. “There is not the slightest foundation for any one of them.” Hardly a week later, James Madison summoned John Quincy to his office and offered him
the position of minister plenipotentiary to Russia. “How long will the mission probably continue?” John Quincy asked.

“Indefinitely,” Madison answered.

John Quincy immediately accepted.

But the following day
, the Senate rejected the nomination, saying it was “inexpedient” to send a minister to Russia. John Quincy waited two more days, until March 9, to tell Louisa of the nomination and its rejection. “I believe you will not be much disappointed, at the failure of a proposition to go to Russia.” It took no imagination to believe so.

She might, then, have considered herself out of danger and settled. But on July 4, while listening to the Fourth of July oration at the Old South Church in Boston, John Quincy was informed that Congress had reversed course and accepted his nomination. He was the new minister plenipotentiary to Russia.

 • • • 

H
E
MIGHT
HAVE
LEFT
his wife behind, as his father had done when he crossed the Atlantic, and as many diplomats did when they were posted abroad. The journey to Russia would be long and extremely dangerous. St. Petersburg would be cold, dark, expensive. He could not be certain of how the United States would be received; after all, when he had made the trip to Russia as a boy, accompanying the envoy Francis Dana, Dana had been entirely ignored. And there was, of course, the matter of their three young boys.

If the thought of bringing all the children or leaving Louisa behind with them even crossed his mind, there is no record of it. John Quincy seems to have wanted his wife with him, even where wives were not often found.

But the children
were another story. The two older children, John and George, would stay in the United States, boarded with Abigail's sister Mary Cranch. Later, Louisa would claim that she wasn't involved in the decision. There is no evidence to contradict Louisa's own
memory of how that decision was made, and it is in keeping with how the family tended to work. When John Quincy weighed the factors for going to St. Petersburg, he included his job at Harvard, the president and his countrymen's faith in him, the old age of his parents, the young age of his children. Nowhere, it appears, did he consider his wife. Nor did he acknowledge her resistance, even if the anguish she later described was amplified by tragedy and time. John Quincy's exercise of his power in deciding to leave George and John behind would become an inextinguishable source of her fury. “I had been so grossly deceived!” she would write. Again and again, and when it mattered most, Louisa was absent in the major decisions that involved her life and the lives of her children.

John Quincy and Abigail made the arrangements for George and John to live with John Quincy's aunt and uncle, the Cranchs. “I think I could not consent to part with them all,” Abigail wrote to her sister. The boys' mother was apparently not given that choice. As Louisa would tell it, Thomas was the one who broke the news to her. Not even John Adams was told ahead of time, for fear that she would “excite his pity and he allow me to take my boys with me.” Abigail was the one who suggested that Kitty Johnson accompany Louisa, and Charles, not even two years old, would also come. The details were managed; the trunks were packed; passage was arranged; in all of these discussions and arrangements, she would later insist, and John Quincy's diary at the time would suggest, she was nowhere to be found.

Just before they
left, John Quincy and Louisa had their silhouettes cut by an artist for their children. If George and John could not remember the color of her eyes and the feel of her cheeks, then at least they would know the slope of her nose, the curve of her small chin. Then at noon on Saturday, August 5, 1809, a group consisting of John Quincy; Charles, only two weeks from his second birthday; Louisa's sister Kitty, who was vivacious, charming, and “entirely dependent without one sixpence in the world”; John Quincy's twenty-two-year-old nephew
William Steuben Smith, who would serve as his secretary; Martha Godfrey, Louisa's chambermaid; Nelson, a free black from Trinidad who would serve as John Quincy's valet; and Louisa boarded the ship
Horace
in the Charlestown harbor. Waiting for them were two young men, Alexander Everett and Francis Gray, who were going to Russia as diplomatic attachés at their parents' expense. As the church bells in Boston and Charlestown rang in one o'clock in the afternoon, the ship left its mooring. By the time night obscured the view, land was almost out of sight.

What Louisa thought as she fell asleep that first night at sea is impossible to know; she left no contemporaneous record. None of her letters from the time survive, save for a stiff thank-you to Dolley Madison for the honor bestowed on John Quincy. But in Louisa's late accounts of that moment, she insisted that it had not been her choice to leave her children. At the time, she felt no choice but to do as her husband wished; he was her authority. Later, she would wish she had resisted. She would struggle with her desire to submit and her desire to revolt for the rest of her life. “A man can take care of himself:—And if he abandons one part of his family he soon learns that he might as well leave them all,” she wrote in 1840, as she furiously raked over John Quincy's decision not to bring her sons to Russia. Immediately, she pulled back. “I do not mean to suggest the smallest reproach.”