Louisa (47 page)

INTRODUCTION

“Have a beautiful plan”
:
Louisa Catherine Adams (hereafter LCA), “Diary,” in
Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams,
ed. Judith S. Graham et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 2:680–88 (hereafter DLCA); Charles Francis Adams (hereafter CFA),
Diary of Charles Francis Adams
, online edition, in
Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses
, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, http://www.masshist.org/apde2/, 2015, 1: January 5, 6, 8, 1824 (hereafter DCFA); Richmond
Enquirer,
January 13, 1824; New York
Spectator,
January 16, 1824; New York
Statesman,
January 16, 1824.

Louisa and John Quincy were
:
“Diary,” DLCA 2:444. I have taken the liberty of silently correcting capitalizations for ease of reading. Spelling and syntax, unless unclear, are for the most part left as they appear in the original.

The United States were turning
:
John Quincy Adams (hereafter JQA) to LCA, June 2, 1796, microfilm edition of the Adams family papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter AFP);
The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection
, Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005, http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries, February 3, 1819 (hereafter DJQA). The Adams family correspondence through April 1798 has been published. For letters between July 1795 and April 1798, see
Adams Family Correspondence
, Vol. 11, edited by Margaret A. Hogan et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), and
Adams Family Correspondence
, Vol. 12, edited by Sara Martin et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015). The United States is now considered singular, but before the Civil War the noun was plural. Benjamin Zinner, “Life in These, Uh, This United States,” http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/myl/languagelog/archives/002663.html (accessed May 1, 2015).

This book follows
:
LCA to Abigail Brooks Adams, November 27, 1840, AFP.

“But she did something”
:
LCA to JQA, May 14, 1845, AFP.

“In the entire span”
:
L. H. Butterfield, “Tending a Dragon-Killer: Notes for the Biographer of Mrs. John Quincy Adams,”
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
118, no. 2 (1974): 165–78.

PART
ONE
:
FRAUGHT
WIT
H
BLISS

1

The first time
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:37, 19, 21.

More than a month
:
For the gloves, see Nancy Johnson to John Trumbull, undated, John Trumbull Papers (MS 506), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

There were frequent
:
Regarding the possibility that Joshua took advantage of his position, it is also possible that Jefferson paid for Joshua's “political intelligence” out of a secret slush
fund. (Margery M. Heffron,
Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams,
ed. David L. Michelmore [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014], 32–33.)

Louisa barely noticed
:
JQA to LCA, June 2, 1796, AFP; DJQA, December 26, 1795.

She was almost
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:4; Heffron,
Louisa Catherine,
15–16; Joan Challinor, “Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams: The Price of Ambition,” Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1982, 43–44.

She remembered her
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:4; Jon Meacham,
Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
(New York: Random House, 2012), 181.

The school was only
:
LCA to Abigail Brooks Adams, March 2, 1834, AFP; “Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:4.

the Johnsons returned
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:7. There was a famous bluestocking named Elizabeth Carter, but she is not the same as the Elizabeth Carter who ran the school. This Elizabeth Carter ran the girls' boarding school until 1798. Dr. Tony Scott, vice chairman, Merton Historical Society, e-mail to author, November 21, 2012. Around 1787, Mrs. Carter's school was relocated to Mitcham, where it occupied Baron House for ten years. See E. N. Montague,
Lower Mitcham
(Merton, UK: Merton Historical Society, 2003), 100–1.

What happened next
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:6–9, 19; LCA to Abigail Brooks Adams, March 2, 1834, AFP.

John Hewlett, Louisa wrote
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:19; George Clement Boase and Colin Matthew, “Hewlett, John (1762–1844), biblical scholar,”
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), online ed.; Mary Wollstonecraft to Eliza Bishop, September 23, 1786, in
The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft,
ed. Janet M. Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 79; Mary Wollstonecraft,
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters:
With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

So Louisa began
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:11–12, 17; LCA to [illegible], April 9, 1849, Everett-Peabody Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Louisa was pulled
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:17; Kirsten Olsen,
Daily Life in 18th-Century England
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1999), 34. For more on the pervasive suspicion of educated women, see Lawrence Stone,
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), 356–58.

Louisa romanticized her childhood
:
“Adventures of a Nobody,” DLCA 1:64; “Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:57.

She had to be careful
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:22, 35–37.

Joshua planned “to get”
:
Joshua Johnson (hereafter JJ) to Thomas Johnson, February 17, 1786, Joshua Johnson Letterbook, Peter Force Collection, Library of Congress (hereafter LC).

2

Joshua would have
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:37, 17, 33.

The American men
:
Ibid., 33, 29, 23, 36.

One night at the Johnsons'
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:40–41.

What did John Quincy
:
Andrew Oliver,
Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 45–46; for another portrait, see also ibid., 25; “Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:32.

Louisa would always
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:17, 26, 7; “Adventures of a Nobody,” DLCA 1:76.

So there was something
:
LCA to Abigail Brooks Adams, March 2, 1834, AFP; “Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:33, 37.

At the end of January
:
DJQA, January 27, 1796; “Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:41.

Louisa might have
:
DJQA, February 21, 1796.

Despite how close
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:11.

It was, in fact
:
Ibid., 11, 40. For Colonel Trumbull, see JQA to Louisa Catherine Johnson (hereafter LCJ), December 5, 1796, AFP.

3

He was alternately direct
:
Thomas Boylston Adams (hereafter TBA) to JQA, April 17, 1796, AFP.

“At present without”
:
JQA to Abigail Adams (hereafter AA), February 20, 1796, AFP.

In his diary, though
:
DJQA, February 1, 11, 1796.

He was silent
:
DJQA, February 29, 1796; March 1, 1796. The Latin is by Horace. Alison Weisgall Robertson helped with the translation.

Passions were pernicious
:
JQA to John Adams (hereafter JA), December 29, 1795, in
Writings of John Quincy Adams,
ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Macmillan Company, 1913), 470.

His career was drifting
:
Samuel Flagg Bemis,
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 68–69.

He could have
:
JQA to JA, December 29, 1795, in
Writings of John Quincy Adams
, 470; Bemis,
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy,
77–79.

For nearly two years
:
Ibid.

He was used
:
Heffron,
Louisa Catherine,
47; AA to Martha Washington, June 20, 1794, AFP. There are dozens of biographies of JQA. Bemis's
John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy
and
John Quincy Adams and the Union
(New York: Knopf, 1956) remain among the best. For the full scope of the life, see also Fred Kaplan,
John Quincy Adams: American Visionary
(New York: Harper, 2014); Paul Nagel,
John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Marie B. Hecht,
John Quincy Adams: A Personal History of an Independent Man
(New York: Macmillan, 1972).

It might have been easier
:
JQA to JA, December 29, 1795, in
Writings of John Quincy Adams
, 470.

He went to galleries
:
DJQA, November 28, 1795.

He carried his loneliness
:
JQA to AA, November 24, 1795, AFP; DJQA, November 12, 1795.

He had been in love
:
JQA to AA, November 24, 7, 1795, AFP; DJQA, November 12, 1795.

Marriage had been
:
Kaplan,
John Quincy Adams,
131; JQA to TBA, November 2, 1795, JQA to AA, November 7, 1795, AFP.

His parents' goal
:
JQA to JA, December 29, 1795, in
Writings of John Quincy Adams,
470; Phyllis Lee Levin,
Abigail Adams
(New York: Thomas Dunne, 2001), 129; JQA to JA, December 29, 1795, in
Writings of John Quincy Adams
, 470; Edith B. Gelles,
Portia: The World of Abigail Adams
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 138.

John Quincy had tried
:
Memoirs of John Quincy Adams: Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848,
ed. Charles Francis Adams (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 1:7–8.

When he was only eleven
:
Heffron,
Louisa Catherine,
49–50; JQA, “William Vans Murray,” in
Letters of William Vans Murray to John Quincy Adams, 1797–1803,
ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, reprinted from the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1912, 347–48.

“I see you sitting”
:
JQA to LCJ, June 2, 1796, AFP.

“Wherefore must this”
:
DJQA, March 19, 1796.

“Solitude is the only”
:
DJQA, February 20, 1796.

A maelstrom of emotions
:
JQA to AA, July 25, 1796, AFP.

What Louisa could see was
:
“Record of a Life,” DLCA 1:41–42; DJQA, May 10, 1796.

John Quincy wrote about the situation
:
DJQA, February 29, March 2, 1796; Challinor, “Price of Ambition,” 154.

If his real desire
:
DJQA, April 1, 13, 1796.

4

Joshua Johnson had arrived
:
Edward S. Delaplaine,
The Life of Thomas Johnson
(New York: Frederick H. Hitchcock, Grafton Press, 1927), 13–15; Edward Papenfuse,
In Pursuit of Profit: The Annapolis Merchant in the Era of the American Revolution, 1763–1805
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 53; Jacob M. Price, “Introduction,”
Joshua Johnson's Letterbook 1771–1774: Letters from a Merchant in London to His Partners in Maryland
, ed. Jacob M. Price (London: London Record Society, 1979), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol15/vii-xxviii (accessed May 10, 2015).

Early success made
:
JJ to the firm, June 4, 1771, JJ to John Davidson, July 22, 1771, in Price,
Letterbook
.

When he arrived
:
JJ to the firm, April 26, 1773, in Price,
Letterbook.