Louisa (5 page)

John Quincy had tried
hard to live up to his parents' warnings and expectations, disciplining himself from the earliest age. “I make but a poor figure at composition,” he wrote to his father when he was nine.

My head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. . . . I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the 3d volume of Smollett, tho' I had designed to have got it half through by this time. I have determined this week to be more diligent. . . . I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions with regard to my time, and advise me how to proportion my studies and my play, in writing, and I will keep them by me, and endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, yours
.

His self-assessment in London, at the age of twenty-eight, was still as damning, and his determination to be more diligent, to be more resolved, to be better, was just as strong. Only the nature of the distractions had changed. Instead of birds' eggs and trifles, beautiful women were the sirens, pulling him from the path. They stirred feelings in himself that he could hardly contain. To put distance between him and them, to flee, was the only way he understood how to maintain his
perfect self-control. John Quincy called relaxation a “hard word.” Social gatherings were always “dissipations.” He was wary of his feelings; he wanted to dislike what he liked.

When he was only eleven
, Abigail had written of her fear of what exposure to life in Europe would do to him. “To exclude him from temptation would be to exclude him from the world in which he is to live,” she had said, “and the only method which can be persued with any advantage is to fix the padlock upon the mind.” But the padlock Abigail tried to place on his mind would not protect him. He would later write of London as “a luxurious and splendid metropolis, where all the energies and powers of man are combined to vary the scenes of delight, and multiply enjoyments, where sloth allures to beds of down, and pleasure beckons with swimming eye, and enchanting smiles, he retained the firmness and resolution of devoting his time and attention to those objects, which were to mark the usefulness of his future life.” John Quincy associated London with danger—pleasure and enchantment. The problem wasn't that he wasn't enjoying himself; the problem was that he was.

Instead of attending to Tacitus, instead of reflecting on the dramatic changes taking place in Europe and the formidable challenges the nascent United States faced, John Quincy was walking in the park with the Johnson girls. He was horrified by his own pleasure. He had not gone to the Johnsons' house in the hopes of coming away with a wife. But he was drawn to their manner of life, the animate warmth of the parlor, the refuge from the English winter evenings he spent alone. He had become a part of the household at Cooper's Row, not merely an observer but a participant, already almost part of the family—a family so unlike his own. The terse, self-critical, agonized John Quincy that appears in his diary is not the John Quincy that Louisa met at her house. He knew it as well as she. In fact, he sketched the scene himself in a letter to her:

I see you sitting
on the sopha with the table before you, working at a Vandyke, and Caroline at the other end with her silken network pinned before her, while Nancy calls the very soul of harmony from the forte-piano. I place myself between you, I run a file of spangles upon a needle; I urge you, though without success to produce the long-expected harp, or to give the graces of your voice to the shepherds charming “pipe upon the mountain.” From thence we pass to the opposite room, where the humorous additions to the dictionary from one sister, and the unfilled outlines of imprecation from another, delight and charm though they cannot inspire the inflexible dulness of gravity, at your Mamma's left hand; and at length when the hour of midnight sounded from the unrelenting monitor of the moments past, in spite of reluctance commands my departure, then is the moment for the illusion to vanish, and leave me to that solitude which the pencil of Fancy herself can no longer colour.

It was very unlike the house where he had grown up in New England, where the snowdrifts piled against the house and the cows grew lean in winter. He tried not to enjoy himself, but he could not help it. “
Wherefore must this
be so pleasing?” he wrote, resisting and acquiescing at once. The contrast between this letter and his writing in his diary is almost tragic. He both wanted to be with her and wanted to run from her.

“
Solitude is the only
source of my valuable enjoyments,” he wrote on another day. “This day was however remarkable pleasant.—That indeed is the greatest objection against it for what will be tomorrow?”

A maelstrom of emotions
and self-reproaches was raging within the heart and mind of Louisa's suitor, behind the wall of the stony expression he had learned to practice as a boy. She did not know about
Mary Frazier, or of the expectations of the Adamses. She did not know that when he looked around the Johnsons' parlor—when he heard the soft, slippered whisper of the girls' silk skirts and saw the harp in the corner—he might consider the comforts she took for granted to be evidence that she was not in his eyes “
wholly
American.” She had no idea of Quincy, no conception of the Puritan inheritance, no real understanding that John Quincy, like his forebears, distrusted happiness and was prone to punish himself. But she could sense that something was not right.

 • • • 

W
HAT
L
OUISA
could see was
that her suitor was fickle and uncertain—and she was not so sure either. That it was not “love at first sight,” she later wrote, she was convinced. But she told herself it could become real “affection,” which could last “much longer.” John Quincy was a good match for her. It was not easy to come across a young American man from an illustrious family and with bright prospects while living in London—not least when one had to compete for attention with sisters such as hers. She might not do better. It's likely that she also faced some pressure from her parents to make the match. Catherine openly advocated for John Quincy, and Joshua had more than the usual reasons for a father to want his daughter to find a husband. His business, highly leveraged and always uncertain, was going badly, and he was fighting over profits with his former partners back in Maryland. He was not the kind of man who would discount that a marriage between his daughter and the son of the vice president of the United States might help his own reputation—and perhaps bring him good connections. But Nancy was unhappy, and the discord between the sisters continued.

Louisa felt herself withdraw “in a sort of consciousness of something wrong without knowing [how] to find the error.” Instead of feeling the kind of passion that she had encountered in plays and books, she felt insecure and somber around her lover. “Love seemed to chill
all the natural hilarity of my disposition,” she said in “Record of a Life”—written at a time of sadness decades later, to be sure, but it may have been true. After all, John Quincy had made his attentions to her clear, but not yet his intentions. They were not engaged, and he would not be staying in London for much longer. He was indecisive. There were “asperities” between them. Both had tempers, both were sensitive, and neither was adept at soothing bruised feelings.

John Quincy wrote about the situation
in his diary as if he were helpless to affect it. “Reflections perplexing,” he wrote at the end of February. “Ring from Louisa's finger.—Tricks play'd, a little music and dancing.—Placed in a very difficult dilemma,” he wrote two days later. “Know not how I shall escape from it.”
Ring from Louisa's finger? Tricks play'd? Placed in a very difficult dilemma?
It was as if he were a completely passive, helpless agent. Perhaps, as one historian wryly noted, the ring just jumped.

If his real desire
was to escape the Johnsons, then he was making a debacle of it, because he was spending more time with them, not less. Day after day, his diary records dinner with the Johnsons, walks with the Johnson sisters, card games at the Johnsons', music at the Johnsons'. A month later, he recorded his daily schedule: “Walk or ride with the Ladies from 2 till dinner time. Evening at Mr Johnson's and very often dine there. Home between midnight & 1 in the morning, abed between 1 and 2.” He wrote of being unable to get away. He practically called himself kidnapped.

John Quincy was waiting for orders to return to The Hague, apparently half hoping they'd force him to escape. The Johnsons were waiting for a proposal to marry. Neither was quick in coming. Finally, on the morning of April 13, Louisa's mother, Catherine Johnson—not Joshua, and not Louisa—took matters into her own hands. She sent the withholding suitor a note at his hotel, the Adelphi. The language was “partly apologetic and partly spirited.” Catherine had seen enough. She demanded a meeting. And so John Quincy went to Tower Hill
and gave her a “full explanation of my views and intentions . . . upon the subject which was interesting to her.”

The subject of John Quincy's intention to marry Louisa was more interesting to Catherine than John Quincy could have known. Catherine was aware of what was at stake—all too aware. She had once been in a similar position to her daughter's. She, too, had been a young woman who attracted the amorous attentions of an American man living near Tower Hill. She, too, had been petite, stylish, and beautiful. She had been desirable, and Joshua Johnson had desired her. In early 1773, Joshua made Catherine pregnant. But that did not mean he married her.

4

J
OSHUA
J
OHNSON
HAD
ARRIVED
in Britain in 1771, two years before his daughter Nancy was born. The eighth of twelve children (including one who died young), he had left his father's plantation in Calvert County, Maryland, eager to make money, to enjoy himself, and to become a man of some reputation. He went to Annapolis first, where he was apprenticed in the countinghouse of a Scotsman named Charles Wallace, and then started a business importing goods and selling them to the growing class of rich tobacco planters. He did well, accumulating enough wealth to build a showroom and residence in the market facing the docks, where he could see the ships sail to and from London, leaving laden with tobacco and returning loaded with luxuries—linens, shoes, rugs, dresses, tea, sweets.

Since those goods were generally bought through British merchants, with money changing hands at each step, his old boss Charles Wallace sensed an opportunity. Wallace approached Joshua and proposed forming a firm based in Annapolis, with a man in London. The plan, hatched at Wallace's house on cheerful nights with drinks in hand and feet up on the jamb, was to have a buyer on the spot, at the center of the mercantile world. They would cut out the middleman,
avoiding his onerous fees, and negotiate credit with London sellers on better terms. Joshua and Charles Wallace joined a third, John Davidson, a trader and deputy naval officer of the port of Annapolis, to form the firm of Wallace, Davidson & Johnson. Joshua left for London in the spring of 1771. He was twenty-eight years old, handsome, and confident. His brows were arched, his nose long and fine, and his slight smile suggested an enigmatic knowingness, secretive or supercilious. He sailed with £3,000 capital, and a wealth of self-importance. He arrived in Bristol and immediately bought new clothes.

Early success made
him bold. Soon, he was telling correspondents to address his letters “simply to J. J., Merchant, London, as I am become of that consequence that they will readily come to hand.” But being of consequence was costly. The prices in London made him despair. He was given £30 a year for rent, but laundry alone, he reported, would cost him £20. “I am frighted at the expense attending one's living here,” he wrote to his partner at home. “O Joney, you have no idea of it.”
When he arrived
, Joshua rented two rooms on Fenchurch Street, not far from alleyways and rookeries where light never penetrated, streets with names like Idle and Seething. He used the smaller of his two rooms, the “closet,” for his bed; in the front room, the papers piled so high that there was no place for a visitor to sit. It offended him to live so low; he described his situation with drama and elaborate shame. Often sick, he wrote mournful letters home describing his ailments—the festering leg, the cough he feared was consumptive, the inflamed lungs—but during his first year, at least, his real underlying illness may have been homesickness. News of a smallpox outbreak in Maryland sent him sympathetically to bed in London for a week. He worried that he would be forgotten by his friends. He wrote that he yearned for letters, though they sometimes contained unwelcome news. His partners were unhappy with the quality of his first shipment; there were troubles collecting remittances; bills of exchange were protested and unpaid. He had arrived just in time for a financial crisis in London, when some of the most
reputable banks went belly-up. His British contacts were less helpful than he hoped. 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. Every ship that sailed was a gamble, a game of trust. Ships sank and cargoes rotted. Remittances were slow in coming, and profits bled quickly into debts. Small bills that went unpaid could send a man to debtor's prison. Joshua feared for his fate. His capital was sunk. When a ship was late, he feared the dun. If his partners could not come up with money fast, he warned them more than once, “expect to hear I am fast in some damned dungeon living on musty mutton chops.”

Business was volatile
. When Joshua wasn't fearing debtors' jail, he was flush. After Wallace, Davidson & Johnson moved into the tobacco trade, they dominated the Maryland market—accounting for as much as 70 percent of Maryland's exported tobacco business between 1773 and 1775. Charles Carroll, one of the Chesapeake's wealthiest planters, brought his business to Joshua; others followed suit. Joshua assumed more than an intermediary role. He explained how the system of credit, purchasing, and exchange rates worked in London. He advised his partners on favorable deals and told them which firms to trust and which to avoid. He gossiped and complained. He rewarded himself whenever he could.

In 1773, he moved
into better lodgings on Swan Street. Even when money was tight, he went out of his way to appear successful. When his partners grew nervous about his lifestyle, he defended himself. “It is a maxim with me that I had rather sink the profits of my labour than to diminish my partners and self in the good opinion of the world,” he wrote. The house a respectable merchant needed, he wrote to his partners in November 1773, had to be large enough to include a “dwelling house, counting house, and sample house” for business. He did not mention that it also needed to be large enough for a woman and infant to live with him. Nor did he mention that, in that very house, that very month, Catherine gave birth to Nancy, their first child.

Joshua and Catherine
did not marry before Nancy was born. Nor did they marry a year later, around the birth of Louisa. They were not married in 1777, at the birth of Caroline, nor in 1778, when their fourth child was born, nor in 1779, when they had their fifth, or in 1781, when Catherine gave birth to their sixth child. For years, Joshua kept Catherine's existence a secret from his correspondents across the Atlantic. In a time of trouble, when he suggested leaving London in secret should the need to escape his creditors arise, he did not mention that he might bring a woman with him. Nor did he mention a family when he talked of plans to return home to fight during the Revolution, including when Louisa was one month old.
The first reference
we have to Catherine in one of his letters—and careful copies of much of his correspondence have survived—is from 1776. It is a request to a ship captain to buy Mrs. Johnson some lace.

After that, and without
extant explanation, Mrs. Johnson begins to appear in his letters very often. In London, “the Johnsons” seem to have passed for married from the start. No rumors of any taint seem to have circulated among the expatriate community; no gossip kept distinguished visitors from their table. Indeed, they may have considered themselves married. “Catherine Johnson” and Joshua baptized all their children as legitimate—a fraud with consequences were the true facts found out. By the time they moved to Nantes, in 1778, Joshua was not shy about referring to his family in letters home. The opposite, in fact: when he needed money, he claimed it was because he had so many mouths to feed.

Since he kept
her a secret at first, and since any account of their relationship she may have written has been lost, we don't know when or how Joshua met Catherine Newth. Since Joshua was a merchant, they may have met at her father's shoe shop. Martin Newth was a shoemaker, a good one—a Citizen Freeman Cordwainer, nominated to be an arts-master, whose work, according to court records, was good enough at least for a thief to steal—and Joshua was always on the
lookout for fine shoes to ship to America. Or Joshua may have simply seen Catherine on the street or in the neighborhood. Around the time he moved to London, she lived only a few steps from where he settled. She was known as beautiful, “very small, and exquisitely delicate, and very finely proportioned.” Pretty as she was, she may have caught Joshua's eye.

So why did
they remain unwed, even as their lives grew intertwined—and their attraction became, apparently, love? That was how their adoring daughter remembered it, at least. “My father seemed to hang on every word she uttered and gazed on her with looks of love and admiration,” Louisa wrote. Her mother was “his pride his joy his love.” This is idealized, but perhaps not by too much. Joshua spoke of “Kitty” to correspondents in a tone that was often playful and intimate. He was quick to defend her, and she was quick to defend him. When the other was sick, both were affected. Where she was not welcome, he told a friend, he would not go. He doted on her, tried to buy the luxurious and pampered life that she wanted. He cut her meat when she was sick, and he wrapped the handles of her forks with a paper and warmed them by the fire.

It is possible
, though unlikely, that remaining unmarried was not Joshua's choice. Catherine could have been wary of marrying an American who occasionally found himself threatened with debtor's prison. There is also a little evidence to suggest that Catherine's father forbade the marriage. Joshua and Martin Newth disliked each other; Louisa later spoke of “some misunderstanding” that ended all communication between the two after the death of Catherine's mother while the Johnsons were in Nantes. Louisa wrote that Joshua (without mentioning Catherine) “loved and respected [Mary Newth] to the hour of his death and always spoke of her to us, as an example of exalted goodness.” But Martin Newth was presented to the children as a man “whose character was I am sorry to say very indifferent.” Whether that was true, it was certainly convenient for Joshua to think so—especially if the cause
of the rupture was Martin's anger toward Joshua for impregnating his unwed daughter. Or perhaps Martin didn't want his daughter to marry an American patriot, one who would go on to petition the House of Lords in support of Boston after the Boston Tea Party, one who would turn rebel. Martin does seem to have given Catherine some money, which suggests that he distrusted Joshua to provide for his daughter. Had Joshua and Catherine been legally married, Catherine's money would have been absorbed into Joshua's estate by the laws of coverture, which subsumed a wife's legal status to her husband's.
She invested it
, shrewdly, herself.

It is, of course
, possible that the decision not to marry was mutual. Unusual family arrangements were not entirely uncommon in eighteenth-century London. In fact, after low rates of prenuptial pregnancy in the seventeenth century, during the second half of the eighteenth century it became increasingly common for women outside of the social elite to give birth within eight and a half months of marriage. But the Marriage Act that came into force in 1754 restricted clandestine marriages, and if it did not immediately change behavior, it at least influenced attitudes toward it. The middle classes became more concerned about sexual permissiveness and mores as the eighteenth century went on—and showed a titillated interest in prominent cases of adultery, written up in magazines like
Town and Country
and
Bon Ton
, which reported misbehavior among the elites as a kind of sport. The fact that all of the Johnson children were baptized as legitimate means that the Johnsons went out of their way to appear married; it mattered to them.

The ruse worked
. Society accepted Mrs. Johnson as a married woman. She was listed as Joshua's wife in the annals of the Maryland state legislature when she and the Johnson children were naturalized as citizens of the state. Perhaps being legally married seemed beside the point. Perhaps no one was aware that they were not. Whether or not anyone else knew it, though, Catherine did. Lesser sins could set off scandals. Marriage was one of the fundamental bonds of polite society.
Indiscretions happened, but they were not openly tolerated in the Johnsons' circle. Joshua's friends and acquaintances included more than a few who were committed to disrupting the social order—American patriots, British abolitionists, and self-described freethinkers—but there were certain aspects of society even the iconoclasts did not openly question, and the institution of marriage was one of them. Catherine's unwed status made her vulnerable. She had more to lose than he.