Louisa (8 page)

“
A young lady
of fine parts and accomplishments, educated to drawing dancing and music, however domestic and retired from the world she may have been in her fathers house, when she comes to shine in a court among the families of ambassadors and ministers of state, if she has not more discretion, prudence and philosophy than commonly
belong to her sex, will be in danger of involving you in expenses far beyond your appointments,” wrote John Adams. “I give you a hint and you must take it.”

John Quincy took the hint. At The Hague, he slipped back into his scholarly routine. He had too little time for sociable frivolity. For companionship, he had his brother and his books. He had his work, which grew more interesting. Events in Europe were accelerating. While he whiled away his days threading spangles in the Johnsons' parlor, a French general named Napoleon Bonaparte had been winning battles and amassing power, and now France had command over much of the continent. The country was using its control of ports to control commerce; it was bullying representatives from the United States while preparing for war with England. John Quincy saw how easily the United States could be swept into wars that were not its own, and he felt the weight of his responsibilities.

That November, John Adams was elected president of the United States. The burden grew. John Quincy's every move would be watched especially closely, his every word scrutinized. So would his wife's. He had been inside enough European drawing rooms to understand—even if he would never say so—that a diplomat's wife is also watched, listened to, judged. The childish tone Louisa sometimes adopted in her letters did not help her cause. His own tone became condescending. John Quincy counseled Louisa not only to take comfort but to find pleasure in resignation to their distance. There was a finality and self-satisfaction in the way he spoke. In his heart and mind, he was moving on.

6

L
OUISA
GREW
DESPERA
TE
,
the more so because her family's preparations to move to the United States were under way at No. 8 Cooper's Row. If she was not married by the time the Johnsons left, she would be going too. What hope could she have that her engagement to John Quincy could survive across the Atlantic? It hardly seemed possible when it was so hard with only the Channel between them. There was, she wrote to John Quincy, “a feeble ray of hope” that they might see each other before she sailed for America, however. The Johnsons would travel aboard one of her father's ships, and she happened to know he had one in Holland. She would ask if the Johnsons could leave for America from there. She feared that if they did not see each other at all, their relationship would not survive.

Her youth, her inexperience, and her lack of reassurance exaggerated her natural fears—and her family surely heightened them. Her sisters mocked her for seeming withdrawn. As an engaged woman, she was restricted in her company. Neither married nor unattached, she was not allowed to do anything that might attract reproof—even speaking to bachelors at balls. She was isolated and insecure.
Considering that Catherine had intervened to pressure John Quincy when he had been in London, Catherine was probably also expressing her anxiety about John Quincy's intentions in some way at home. Joshua, too, had something at stake in ensuring the marriage came off, more than his daughter's happiness. His finances were under extreme pressure, which could have brought the engagement contract into danger. Joshua followed Louisa's letter with one of his own, suggesting that the family might stop at The Hague on the way to the United States in order to restore his daughter's happiness. John Quincy was quick to read between the lines. He responded to Joshua coldly and accused Louisa of conspiring with her father to be left behind with him in Holland while her family went to America.

It was a cruel thing to say. He made no allowance for the idea that Louisa might miss him, or that she might want to strengthen their attachment by seeing him before a longer separation. Nor did he acknowledge that Joshua had made no explicit mention of hurrying the marriage in his own letter. But his paranoia was not completely unfounded. Joshua probably did have ulterior motives. He was in trouble.

 • • • 

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
did not
know just how bad Joshua's problems were. Joshua could not hide his debts for much longer; they were spiraling out of his control. Money had been a recurring problem for him since his arrival in England twenty-five years before. The life of a merchant was unpredictable. 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. Shipping was risky in the best of times. A sunk cargo could mean ruin. Joshua was not cavalier. He had advised his partners and instructed them intelligently on how British and European trade operated. He had won business and earned respect. He did operate in the margins of his accounts sometimes, as
many merchants did, and his bookkeeping grew increasingly disordered as business grew more complex. He had been criticized by some of his associates. But he was still trusted by many.

Joshua had dark eyes
—the same eyes as his daughter Louisa—and a piercing gaze. His friends knew him for his ardent feelings and his calculating mind. He inspired at once confidence and wariness in men who met him. “Mr. Johnson seems cool, collected, and decided, a most valuable friend or a dreadful enemy,” wrote one acquaintance. “I hope to know him only as the former.” There were men who would know him as the latter. He was self-interested and self-preserving. But Louisa did not misjudge his character when she later said that he was too optimistic, too trusting. He was also quick to panic, abandon friends, and to protect himself when things went wrong. He had a tendency to enter trading arrangements with the highest hopes, and was crushed when they failed. In the late 1780s, the firm of Wallace, Johnson & Muir was so deeply in debt that he had to put the account books in the hands of the firm's major creditors in order to avoid bankruptcy. By the time John Quincy knew him, his finances were a mess. Wallace, Johnson & Muir had dissolved effective 1790, but it had taken years for the business to unwind, and he was still fighting not only those former partners over his share of the profits but the widow of John Davidson, from his first firm, which had ended before the Revolution.

His latest problem
centered on a scheme to enter the brandy market with Colonel John Trumbull. In November 1795, at just the time that Trumbull brought John Quincy to dinner at the Johnsons' house, Joshua and Trumbull had hatched a plan to export brandy to the United States. Joshua lined up backers in London and handed the colonel instructions, along with a stack of letters of introduction. Joshua wrote to the Hennessys, whose brandy house had just begun selling to the United States, and to Mr. Turner, the mayor of Cognac, and to his contacts in France. He gave Trumbull a bill of remittance for £5,000. “As the advantage promises to be considerable, I hope the quantity will be
large,” he wrote to Trumbull, and told him to “get all the rum you can lay your hands on.” But within months, the familiar pattern began. Joshua's soaring self-confidence gave way to doubt, then panic. Orders were rejected for poor quality. A ship was wrecked in Guernsey Roads, when the tide went out and several pipes of cognac shattered on the rocks. “I am sorry to tell you our ill luck continues,” Joshua wrote Trumbull when he reported yet another disaster. Money was scarce, and Joshua had to rely on massive lines of credit. In May 1796, just as John Quincy was packing to return to The Hague, Joshua asked one investor alone, his friend Frederick Delius, a merchant in Bremen, Germany, to extend Trumbull's credit—on Joshua's account—to £40,000. “Had it not been for this friendship and genteel behavior our whole scheme must have been defeated,” Joshua confessed to Trumbull, adding that he was desperate to get a ship with a full cargo of tobacco to Delius to make up some of the difference. The situation had not improved over the summer and fall. In December, Joshua was writing to Trumbull of a shipwreck—six or eight pipes of brandy lost. His creditors were having trouble paying their own debts. To satisfy his hungry investors, and to pay that promised dowry to John Quincy, Joshua needed to return to the United States and lay his claim to everything he could.

John Quincy had some hint
of Joshua's situation from Louisa and perhaps from others. He acknowledged to his mother that he suspected that the Johnsons' wealth was not as great as their fine lifestyle suggested. His suspicions only went so far—he did not doubt that the dowry would be there, and in his daydreams, he was living on the Johnsons' southern land. But John Quincy had friends in London who did business with Joshua and may have heard something from one of them, or he may have merely surmised. Joshua was open about his struggles with his former partners in Maryland and his need to wrap up matters in person. One of his letters to John Quincy contained a disconcerting line: “I am in hourly expectations of letters from my late partners, they will be interesting, and as then rec[eive]d, I will come
to a decided resolution will then communicate to you my planns without guile or reserve.” John Quincy read guile and reserve straight into his words, guessing at a plan to leave Louisa in Holland so that he would have to fix the wedding date.

Maybe that really was the plan. Maybe Joshua knew, too, that if his financial situation grew much worse, it would be that much harder for him to marry his daughter off. He had once been a young man with a cavalier attitude toward marriage himself. Perhaps he saw John Quincy's reluctance and decided to apply some pressure himself.

Whatever the truth
, John Quincy responded to Louisa in the worst possible way. “You will be sensible what an appearance in the eyes of the world, your coming here would have; an appearance consistent neither with your dignity, nor my delicacy,” he wrote to Louisa, accusing her of conspiring with her father. Impugning a young woman's “dignity” and “delicacy”—which she rightly read as
her
modesty, not his—was as bad an insult as he could have made to a young woman. Her suggestion that a betrothed couple facing a long separation might welcome a reunion was treated as disgraceful. He tried to soften it by saying, “Let us my lovely friend rather submit with cheerfulness to the laws of necessity than resort to unbecoming remedies for relief,” but that just made matters worse. John Quincy was calling her virtue into question.

She recoiled from
his response. “Believe me I should be sorry to put it in your power, or in that of the world, to say I wished to force myself upon any man or into any family,” Louisa retorted, as angry at his innuendo as she deserved to be. She had done nothing, she added, to deserve such “mortification” as his letters brought. So began a period of angry, passionate attacks. While couching their words in claims of total devotion and love, they hurtled shots across the Channel fast and thick. She criticized his excessive attachment to his books. With careless cruelty, he scorned her choice of reading—and so the quality of her mind. She was, she could easily infer, no match for him.

In truth, his insult had a liberating effect. She wrote, for the first time, without the help of the governess. She would not let herself be so easily dismissed, so rudely pushed around. Her writing grew in confidence, style, and wit. It is remarkable that, in so short a time after writing such cringing, pathetic letters, she started to find a voice. It was immature, and not as strong and vivid as the one she would later develop, but it was her voice nonetheless.

They engaged in
a series of small skirmishes—feinting with this one, pulling back with the next—that led to passion and flirtation, and also to anger and misunderstanding. It was a charged correspondence, in which the heat emanated from both their attraction and their fury. She used sarcasm. He found her tone unattractive. “Let us understand one another, Louisa,” John Quincy wrote to her (on her birthday, no less). “I never thought your disposition deficient in
spirit
, and that I am fully convinced you have as much of it as can be consistent with an amiable temper, but let me earnestly entreat you never to employ it in discussion with me, and to remember that it is in its nature a
repellent
quality.”

She found his
peremptory style offensive. He detected “suspicion and distrust” within her.

He accused her of “childish weakness or idle lamentations.” She was incensed by his sanctimony and turned on his “philosophy.” She did not pause to punctuate all her lines. “Ah my beloved friend, this boasted philosophy that I have heard so much of is indeed a
dreadful
thing. . . . Delusive as may have been my imagination, I have never dreamt of
cloudless
skies Yet did I not expect that
you
would have been the person to have strewn my path with needless
thorns
.”

They were at cross-purposes
, even when it came to names. He called her Louisa, and she addressed him as “my Adams,” which must have sounded rather romantic. John Quincy bridled. “I have endeavoured to habituate myself to it, because you appear fond of using it; but it looks to me more and more uncouth and awkward,” he wrote to her.
The address seemed to him “too much like that of novels.” She learned the lesson a little too well; after that, she did not address him by name in her letters at all.

They would apologize and try to soothe each other's hurt feelings, calling each barb a proof of their care. Sometimes their apologies would work; their letters, even the harsh ones, were little grappling hooks binding them together. They could not efface their attraction; they did in fact care. But mail took time to travel, and before one conciliatory letter could arrive, another hurtful missive was already en route, slashing open the wounds before they could heal.