Louisa (9 page)

“
I am so miserably
dull, stupid, and cross, that I have gained the appellation of the Nun,” Louisa wrote.

“
I will freely confess
a material change which absence has produced,” John Quincy replied. “It is the restoration of sober reason, and reflection, which alas! if they did not abandon me were without all the influence they should have, during the latter part of my residence in London. It was indeed a time of delight; but a time of too much indulgence. . . . I am the man I was when you
first
knew me”—which is to say, the man who had not returned to the Johnsons' right away. “My lovely friend,
that
man, is much more estimable, and much more respectable than the man I was for two or three months before I left you.” He could not have been more provocative. He was not the man who had fallen in love.

They were pushed
to the brink. With quiet sadness, with philosophy, she saw that they might have gone too far. “Let us mutually forget the past,” she wrote. “Our departure for America is fixed.” The Johnsons were to leave England in three months. She would, she wrote, “indulge the pleasing idea” that he would follow them soon, and when he did, she would be happy to “share the simple fortunes of my dearest friend.” Only then, “should this happen,” when he was “divested of rank,” would she be able to prove that he, not his station,
was what drew her to him—“that it was not your situation, but yourself that I loved.”

It nearly ended there—almost in heartbreak. She felt she had to prove herself and her affections to him. She felt him slipping away. “Should this happen,” she had written, because there was doubt. Though anguished, she was ready to let go. Gracefully, she was saying goodbye. But John Quincy changed course once more. He pulled her back.

On April 13, 1797
, he wrote to her that circumstances had changed. It
might
be possible to come through London,
if
he could travel by an American ship (such as one, incidentally, that Joshua owned), and
if
he was able to come to London, then he would marry Louisa and bring her to Lisbon.

He gave Louisa
a chance to call off their engagement. He spoke honestly. They knew each other now; they knew not only their attraction to each other but also their capacity to repel. “You know the Man you have chosen, for the friend of your life,” he wrote to her.

You know him the better, for that absence, which has at once shewn you a trial of his affection and of his temper.—He has disguised to you none of his failings and weaknesses. You know the chances of hardship, inconvenience and danger, which you may be called to share with him. You know his inviolable attachment to his Country, and his resolute determination not to continue long his absence from it.—You know that upon his retirement, the state of his fortune will require privations, which will be painful to him only as they may affect you. Choose, Louisa, choose for yourself, and be assured that his Heart will ratify your choice.

Her opportunity to withdraw was real. Women could, and did, end engagements. It was the brief window in which women were
allowed, in theory, to be masters of their fate. She could not ask for marriage, and she could not escape from it; once vows were exchanged, she was subject to her husband's authority. But she had the freedom to say no, up until that point at the altar when she submitted herself to his control.

That she would be
submitting herself if they married, he left no doubt—and not only to him, but to his country. In his life, he wrote to her, she would always come second. There was sadness in that—but perhaps there was also something stirring about his dedication, something pure and clear in the clarion call. “I may therefore own to you,” he wrote to her, “that my duty to my Country is in my mind the first and most imperious of all obligations; before which every interest and every feeling inconsistent with it must forever disappear.”

She could have told him to leave for Lisbon without her. Instead, she told him to come.

7

J
OHN
Q
UINCY
ARRIVED
in England with his brother Thomas on July 12, 1797. She knew he was in London, and she expected him to come to her right away. Night came and he did not. He appeared at the Johnsons' door the next day, finding “my friends there and particularly my best friend, well.” Either she hid her disappointment that he had not hurried to her, or he chose not to see it. She, meanwhile, could do nothing but sense his misgivings. Her insecurity worked as a magnifying glass. When John Quincy asked her to set a wedding date she replied that she wanted to marry as soon as possible—“naturally supposing that it was what he most desired.” When she saw the startled expression on his face, she felt she had done something wrong.

In fact, the wedding
could not come soon enough for the Johnsons, who were hurriedly packing to leave for the United States in early autumn. It's no wonder that she wanted to be married fast. Not only had John Quincy kept her in wait, but the ground kept moving beneath her. News arrived that President Adams, his father—and his commander—had changed his son's appointment from Portugal to Prussia. John Quincy was furious; it was one thing for George Washington to give him a large commission and another for his own father
to do it. It was nepotism, and he felt ashamed. He wrote to his father of “the degraded and humiliating aspect in which it places me personally” and considered asking for a recall. He would accept the new position, he wrote to his father, for two reasons—both revealing. The first was “parental authority.” The second was “that the new destination, will be so much more inconvenient and troublesome to myself.” He had already shipped his beloved books to Portugal, at high expense. Characteristically, he managed to turn annoyance into a virtue. Anything that required a significant sacrifice on his part was easier to accept.

It's unlikely he kept secret from his bride-to-be how upset he was; already, she was sensitive to his dark moods, no doubt especially in the days leading to their union. The switch in destinations wouldn't have been easy for her, either. Portugal had promised warmth, proximity to the ocean; it would have brought her as close to her family, once they had sailed for the United States, as possible while remaining in Europe. Prussia meant long nights and cold winters. It meant the guttural sounds and glottal stops of German. It meant an extra 1,400 miles between her and her family. It was another swerve, another hard adjustment, another lesson that in her husband's life, she would never have a say. It was a reminder that John Quincy's first devotion was to his country, his second to his parents, and his third to his books—he was insistent about the books. She could expect a share of his attention and his affection, but it would be only a share. He had said this explicitly. It would help if she could learn to love his country, his parents, and his books; but that summer, 1797, in London, his country was abstract, his parents unknown, and she could not understand his attachment to his books. She thought too much reading injured his health.

Despite all this, their wedding day was a happy one. The ceremony was small. It took place at eleven on Wednesday morning, July 26, at All Hallows Barking, around the corner from the house on Cooper's Row. Louisa's family, John Quincy's young brother, Thomas—his secretary at The Hague—and two of John Quincy's friends were
there to witness. Rev. John Hewlett, the man who had taught Louisa “early to think,” performed the service.

She walked out of the dark stone church into the bright sunlight as a wife. It was a hot and cheerful day. The Tower of London lay below them, and lighters and skiffs crowded the Thames. For the next month, Louisa's days were filled with celebrations: excursions to the countryside, dinners and parties hosted by friends for the bride and groom.
Late mornings followed
the late nights—the loss of sleep while in bed, as John Quincy wrote in his diary with a touch of circumspect pride, coming “from an inevitable cause.”

Louisa was happy
. She had her family around her and her husband with her; she had everything she wanted and every hope for the future. “At this moment,” Louisa wrote in “Record of a Life,” “every thing seemed to combine to make my prospects brilliant.”

 • • • 

T
HE
CELEBRATIONS
for
the newlyweds culminated in a large ball thrown by Joshua at the Johnsons' house on Tower Hill on August 25. The party was a triumph; the last guests, flushed from pleasure, dancing, and drink, did not leave until four in the morning. But for Joshua, the ball must have been torture. Earlier that day, letters had arrived from America with news that a ship he needed in order to cover a bill for £500 would not arrive. He was broke. He knew that the bills for the flowers, the food, the musicians, the flowing wine would come soon, and he knew he could not pay them. The worst was to come. He did not, it seems, tell his daughter.

Louisa and John Quincy left the Johnsons' house and moved into the Adelphi Hotel, where they planned to live until leaving for Berlin in October, while the Johnsons continued their preparations to move to America. The plan was for Catherine, Joshua, and the other Johnson sisters to go in mid-September. On the night of September 8, 1797, Joshua, Catherine, and Louisa's six sisters came to have dinner with
Louisa and John Quincy at the Adelphi. It turned out that they were coming to say goodbye.

Unknown to Louisa
, two days earlier, on September 6, Joshua had a bill due to Frederick Delius, U.S. consul and a merchant in Bremen, Germany, who had generously and riskily extended credit to help fund Joshua's brandy scheme. On September 8, an independent reviewer of Joshua's accounts gave his books to one of Joshua's other creditors, Jonathan Maitland, with whom Joshua had three accounts. Maitland was claiming that Joshua owed him money, too. Joshua's response was to run. The hope—fervently held, grasped at, promised to anyone who would listen—was that Joshua could claim more of his old firm's profits in person than he could from abroad. The Johnsons left the Adelphi and then went to meet a ship at Gravesend under the cover of the dark. Before daybreak, they were bound for the United States. In her memory, it happened all at once and without warning. As she told it, she woke and found them gone. She was “the most forlorn miserable wretch that the sun ever smiled upon.” That wasn't quite true. But it had been a brutal night for her. “After supper we had a distressing scene, while the whole family took leave of Louisa,” John Quincy wrote in his diary of that night.

The story she
would later tell was that her father was wronged. He was taken by surprise; he was the victim. He had been unlucky, as any honest merchant could be, and then he had been betrayed by his creditors. There had been a wreck, a cargo of brandy lost. A ship had not arrived from the East Indies, a remittance hadn't come in, and “he was obliged to stop payment for the sum of five hundred pounds.” The missing remittance, “the sum which had been destined to settle all my fathers current debts; every one of which it would cover,” had arrived just after he'd left, and it had been stolen by his creditor “the villain Maitland.” In Maryland, his former partners cheated him out of his fair share of his old firm's profits. In his daughter's view, Joshua had merely suffered the vicissitudes of a merchant's life. For that bad luck
and badly placed trust alone, the Johnson name—the name she had just given up—would be slandered.

She had small
details right: there was a brandy scheme, a wreck, a missing remittance, a bill for £500, and a creditor named Maitland. But she could not admit that she also had at least a dim sense of the larger picture. She had known that it was imperative that her family return to the United States as soon as possible. Much was masked by the Johnsons' fine lifestyle, but Joshua was not calm or quiet about his financial troubles. “Several of my family are unwell, nor can they be better until I am relieved from the pain I labor under,” he had once written a correspondent during a time of financial distress. But her father was her idol, and she could not see clearly or accept the poor choices that had combined with bad luck to lead to his ruin. She could not see that, at least to an extent, he was at fault. To be fair, no one in or out of chancery courts in London and the United States could untangle the books. (Merchants from Fleet Street and the Strand and Maitland would still be arguing over the remnants of Joshua's estate in chancery court a decade later. The verdicts have been lost.) She had been raised to defer to him absolutely. He was not a despot; he was an affectionate father, as fathers in her time and class were supposed to be; but he ruled.

There were betrayals. What she could never admit was that she was one of the ones betrayed. Her father had not only left her, but he also left her in the most vulnerable position. When he fled, one of the promises he left unfilled was Louisa's dowry. Only a few months before, Joshua had reaffirmed her dowry of £5,000 sterling to John Quincy and to Louisa as well. It wasn't a great fortune, not by the standards of the aristocracy, but a dowry was no idle inducement. A marriage was not just a religious sacrament, and it was not just a union of two people in love. (The notion that romantic love should govern the decision at all was an idea only then gaining purchase in Britain's upper middle class.) It was a contract. If a bride's father could not
produce the bridal portion, the groom would have legal grounds to abandon the bride. Joshua's bankruptcy made his daughter vulnerable. John Quincy would have been justified in leaving her.

The thought did cross
his mind—if only to be rejected. John Quincy met with Maitland and others who had studied Joshua's books. “Find the affairs of Mr. J. more and more adverse,” John Quincy wrote in his diary a few weeks after the Johnsons were gone. He would not help his father-in-law by lending money. “This trial is a strong one—more so indeed than I expected—and I expected it would be strong.— I have done my duty—rigorous, inflexible duty.” He acknowledged in his diary that he would be within his rights to leave Louisa. But he was dutiful by nature, and he had made his vows. “No event whatever shall convince me that by pursuing a more interested and less faithful course I should have been rewarded with greater success,” he wrote. The more interested course would have been leaving his new wife.

There is no evidence from his diary or letters to anyone else that he said anything like this to her. But even had he been a saint, she would have heard accusations and threats in his voice. Money was already a difficult subject between them. He had been explicit about his sense of probity and his determination to wait until he could marry on sound financial footing. He had already accused Louisa and Joshua of conspiring to accelerate the marriage and to leave her in Holland while the rest of the family made it to the United States. He had made it clear to Louisa that money would be tight and that they would be pressed to the edge of their means. He would not live like the Europeans in court—he would not go into debt.

John Quincy loathed
debt—and feared it. In that, he was like the leaders of his country, including those (Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and many others) who were so deeply in debt they would never emerge from it. Debt was thought to undermine republican liberty. A man in debt could not be independent; he could not be free to act according to his own will. A debtor not only threatened his own
freedom but the freedom of the United States. “A nation of men, each of whom owned enough property to support his family, could be a republic,” the historian Edmund Morgan has explained. “It would follow that a nation of debtors, who had lost their property or mortgaged it to creditors, was ripe for tyranny.” For John Quincy, Joshua's failure followed on the heels of a crisis in the Adams family—some of which affected John Quincy directly. John Quincy had left his savings of $4,000 with his younger brother Charles to invest. Charles had speculated with it, lost it, and then more or less cut off contact with his family. John Quincy answered a six-month silence from his brother with sternness. “I hereby withdraw all power and authority that I have heretofore given you to draw for money in my behalf,” he would write to Charles a year later. Meanwhile, his sister, Nabby, had married a man—Louisa's old friend the “dashing” Colonel William Smith—whose debts were so massive that he had abandoned his family to the care of Abigail and John Adams.