Louisa (4 page)

It was, in fact
, probably her singing that most powerfully brought her to John Quincy's attention. She had a pliant voice, and she knew its power. As a student at Mrs. Carter's boarding school, she had enjoyed her “great reputation” as a singer. Singing brought her pleasure, and it brought her a complicated kind of attention—attention both sought and feared, attention that could be neither acknowledged nor denied. It had given her even a hint of John Quincy's interest; she had noticed that when she began to sing the songs “which he knew to be favorites of Col. Trumbull,” John Quincy would pick up his hat and leave. (Later, John Quincy confessed to Louisa that he had noticed that Colonel Trumbull was trying to woo her. “By my Gods—Wish'd him at the D——” John Quincy later wrote to Louisa, “Innocent as he was of all I feared.”) John Quincy often recorded the Johnson sisters' musical performances in his diary, and he noted in particular when Louisa sang. He enjoyed watching her perform for him, and she enjoyed performing. Their evenings became part of a larger performance, a courtship. She began to assume the role her life had prepared her for, a lover. But she found that her lover wouldn't follow the same script.

3

T
HE
WINTER
OF
1796,
cold and wet, began to warm into spring. The days grew longer quickly, and the gardens showed budding signs of life. John Quincy adopted a routine not only of dining with the Johnsons but also of taking daily walks with the ladies in the park. It was customary for John Quincy and Louisa to break away—not out of sight of their chaperone, and certainly not out of mind, but out of hearing. The two lovers would stroll beneath springtime's budding boughs, the picture of romance, discussing “philosophy.”

Philosophy, John Quincy told Louisa, was not so much about theory as an attitude, not something you developed through thought but a character trait, something you had or you didn't. Its attributes were patience, restraint, and endurance. Louisa was impatient, hardly knew the meaning of restraint, had never had reason to endure—but she wanted to be taken seriously. She was, after all, a girl who had used her guinea to buy
Self-Knowledge
and
Paradise Lost.
She had, clearly, a conventional and sentimental conception of romance, but she fashioned herself as his student. So she listened and would speak often of “my philosophy”—which was, anyway, pretty romantic itself: desire was sharpened by fortitude; love went hand in hand with pain. Love
was confusing. Its source seemed uncertain, and her lover seemed not entirely convinced.

He was alternately direct
and evasive—and not only to her. Writing to his younger brother Thomas, who was also his secretary at The Hague, where John Quincy was stationed as the American minister, Louisa's suitor was playful but coy. Thomas was teased into replying, “But tell me a little,
who
among this
most attractive society
has most ‘charms' for you?” To his mother, John Quincy was suggestive but vague: “
At present without
having any thing to do, I find it extremely difficult to snatch so much as a quarter of an hour to write ever so short a letter. Perhaps I may tell you the reason of this at a future day; or perhaps you may guess at it without being told.”
In his diary, though
, he was perplexed and anxious. “Customary day, dull and dispirited . . . Wrote scarce anything,” John Quincy wrote on February 1, less than a week after the birthday ball where he danced with Louisa. “Dine out almost every day, and pass the evening at Mr. Johnson's. Health low. Spirits lower still. This must be reformed almost entirely.” His misery and his displeasure with himself were constant themes during his months in London. “Scope for reflection,” he wrote another day. “The life I am leading totally dissatisfactory.”

He was silent
in his diary about his love, and nearly as silent about his lover. In John Quincy's famously massive diary—some fifteen thousand pages in fifty-one volumes—Louisa appears very little, even when he was pursuing her. Except when she was ill, he rarely recorded anything particular about her—not the way she looked, or the things she said, or the way she made him feel. She was merely marked as present or absent, sick or well. This doesn't mean he didn't think of her—indeed, his silence was often telling; it may suggest he thought of her much more than he wanted to admit. He was oblique and contradictory about his feelings. He wrote that pleasure made him miserable. After recording walking with the Johnsons, “reflections perplexing,” he actually skipped a day in his diary—which was unheard of for him.
March 2, 1796, followed February 29; March 1 followed that with the parenthetical “(omitted above).” “The regular day as objectionable as before,” he wrote of March 1. “Very little different from the last, excepting that it is still more marked with the character of indolence & dissipation. Can find no time to write, none to read, But much to dross and dross over again to visit and be visited, to lose my home, and to find pernicious passions. O rus (/) quando te aspiciam.”
O country / when will I see you.

Passions were pernicious
; his time was tyrannized by his attraction to Louisa—and to the whole way of life on Tower Hill. He was drawn to her in ways that he could hardly understand, and perhaps in ways that made him question what he wanted. Writing home, he told his father that a man in service of his country must think only of his duty, at the cost of “love of ease, or the love of life, or the love of fame itself.” At the Johnsons', though, he found ease, he found life, and he found flattering attentions—and there he found himself, night after night.

His career was drifting
. It had taken him twenty-eight days to travel from The Hague to London, twenty-eight days of frustration and despair that ended in failure. His task, the formal exchange of the ratification of a treaty between the United States and Britain, had already been completed before he arrived. What was worse, he had known it would be. His instructions were very clear. He was given a deadline of October 20 to complete the task; if he could not reach London by then, then William Allen Deas, the secretary of legation, would do it. Weather had trapped John Quincy on the coast of Holland, in Helvoetsluys; he would not reach London until November 11.
He could have
turned around and returned to his post at The Hague. But he was bored there, restless and brooding, anxious about his future and unhappy with his past. So he came. It was more than a pointless exercise; it was self-inflicted frustration. The treaty was a sign of closer amity between the two nations, resolving contentious issues left over from the Revolution and laying the groundwork for trade, but it was
loathed by some in the United States (especially followers of Thomas Jefferson), who foresaw the dangers of subservience to Britain. John Quincy Adams was hardly a Jeffersonian, and he was cautiously in favor of the treaty, but he hated any suggestion of servility to the British, and once in London, he found himself continually ignored or insulted by British officials. “I have been accustomed all my life to plain dealing and candour, and am not sufficiently versed in the art of political swindling to be prepared for negotiating with a European minister of state,” he wrote in a dispatch describing a meeting with Lord Grenville, the minister of foreign affairs. He became so incensed by the perceived insults that some started to worry he'd provoke a rift.

For nearly two years
he had been living in Holland, on the edge of Europe, watching the convulsions and aftershocks of the French Revolution rock the continent, but always as an observer. He wrote brilliant dispatches to the secretary of state as the destruction of France's monarchy transformed the continent, and he also wrote, more intimately, to his father, dispatches that were highly valued. George Washington read them while composing his famous Farewell Address, warning the United States against involvement in European conflicts—and expressed his admiration. Still, John Quincy called himself an exile.

He was used
to being far away, thousands of miles from his home. He had the example of his father, who had left the farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, in order to join the Continental Congress when John Quincy was only a child, telling his tiny oldest son that he entrusted the family to him. Abigail was more than up to the task—she was an extraordinarily capable farmer, manager, teacher, and mother—but Johnny remembered his father's words and knew what was at stake, saw the soldiers and the distant flash of guns. He had accompanied his father on two diplomatic missions, serving as a secretary though he was only a boy. On two voyages to France he brushed up against the war, watched a surgeon saw off the leg of a wounded man, and nearly
died in a shipwreck. At times without a formal school to attend, he taught himself Latin and learned to play alone. His father sent him to Russia to serve as the American emissary's private secretary when he was only fourteen. He knew what patriotism entailed and what incredible sacrifices were expected of Adams men—especially of him. Raised to live for his country, he had been taught that his life was not too much to offer. “At a very early period in life, I devoted him to the publick,” Abigail Adams told Martha Washington.

It might have been easier
if the Adamses truly had conceived of their family as a monarchical dynasty, as their critics charged. Then there might have been some support in the sense of a birthright—that rulership came naturally, divinely. But the dynasty that John Quincy was supposed to be a part of was one based on merit. Nothing would be given; everything had to be earned. And everything
would
be earned—if only he lived according to strict and steady virtue, according to the expectations of his parents. The pressure was enormous. From London now, he told himself (and his parents) that he was ready to pay any cost when “my duty commands me to act.” But how should he act? What could he do? He waited for his orders.

He went to galleries
, read plays (
The Wheel of Fortune
and
First Love
), and went to the theater at Drury Lane. He wrangled with the British foreign secretary's office over protocol, becoming absurdly agitated about matters of deportment. He told himself that he was in London against his wishes, consoling himself with a lecture about duty. “The die is cast,” he wrote in his diary. “Here I must be, spite my wishes and endeavors. My duty to the best of my judgment shall be done: the result must be left to Providence.” In fact, he had come knowing the ratification had already been exchanged, but he wrote as if he had no choice.

He carried his loneliness
with him. “There is something so dissipated and yet so solitary in the residence of a city like this, that I have never found in it either the pleasures of society or the profits of
retirement,” he wrote to his mother two weeks after he arrived in London. “There is a continual flutter, an agitation of the spirits excited by the multitude of objects that crowd upon the senses at once.” He had made it his habit to call solitude bliss, but now that same solitude was “the craving void.” The city was also, he admitted, full of beautiful women, which shook him. His opinion had not much changed since he was eighteen, when he had written, “I consider it the greatest misfortune; that can befall a young man to be in love.”

He had been in love
, and in pain, when he left the United States to go to the Netherlands. In Massachusetts, he had wanted a woman, Mary Frazier, but she was too young to marry and his law career was not established. A sense of responsibility—and the foreboding of his parents' disapproval—had led him to break off the relationship, even if he could not completely bury his love. Leaving Mary Frazier was, he wrote to his mother bitterly, “voluntary violence” to his feelings.

Marriage had been
on his mind while he waited in Helvoetsluys, Holland, for the wind to turn so that he could leave for London. After hearing that his older brother Charles had wed, he waxed lyrical that he was “buffeted about the world in solitary celibacy.” To his mother, he was mournful and even angry, writing her a long and unusually open and emotional letter about Mary Frazier. He had done his duty, he told her, sacrificing his passion for “prudential and family considerations”—but it had cost him dearly. He now had, he said, a “widowed heart.” He met Louisa Johnson only four days later.

His parents' goal
for him was nothing less than greatness. “Let your ambition be engaged to become eminent,” Abigail wrote to him when he was still a schoolboy. Eminence to the Adams family was not what it was to the Johnsons; it was not the kind of greatness that could be gauged by the quality of a coat or popular opinion. “Nothing great or valuable among men, was ever achieved, without the counterpoise of strong opposition,” John Quincy wrote to his father, repeating his
father's lesson, “and the persecution that proceeds from opinion, becomes itself a title to esteem, when the opinion is found to have been erroneous.” Instead, greatness adhered to civility, disinterestedness, independence, and thrift. Abigail pushed the point. “Justice, humanity and benevolence are the duties you owe to society in general,” she wrote to her son. “To your country the same duties are incumbent upon you with the additional obligations of sacrificeing ease, pleasure, wealth and life itself for its defense and security.” Johnny was thirteen years old.