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  PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 375 Hudson Street New York, New York 10014 penguin.com Copyright © 2016 by Louisa Thomas Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Frontispiece: National Park Service, Adams National Historical Park Hardcover ISBN 9781594204630 E-book ISBN 9781101980828 Version_1

  FOR MY GRANDMOTHER

  Osceola Herron Freear CONTENTS

  Title Page Copyright Dedication Introduction PART ONE Fraught with Bliss: London, 1775–1797 PART TWO Life Was New: Berlin, 1797–1801 PART THREE My Head and My Heart: Washington and Massachusetts, 1801–1809 PART FOUR The Gilded Darkness: St. Petersburg, 1809–1815 PART FIVE Narrative of a Journey: From St. Petersburg to Paris, 1815 PART SIX A Little Paradise: London and Ealing, 1815–1817 PART SEVEN My Campaigne: Washington and Philadelphia, 1817–1825 PART EIGHT A Bird in a Cage: Washington, 1825–1829 PART NINE Beginning the World Anew: Washington and Quincy, 1829–1836 PART TEN In My Own Name: Washington and Quincy, 1836–1852 Acknowledgments

  Notes Index INTRODUCTION

  LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS waited at the doors. She was easy to overlook—small and slight and nearing fifty, with shadows beneath her large dark eyes. But that night, January 8, 1824, she stood where she would be seen, and all attention was on her.

  “Have a beautiful plan in my head,” she had written in her diary three weeks earlier. She had cleared four rooms of her house in Washington, then eight. Chandeliers were hung, doors taken off their hinges, and pictures of eagles and flags chalked on the ballroom floor. Fifty-four bonfires were lit lining the road. In the end, newspapers reported that about a thousand guests had come. It was “as splendid an assemblage of beauty and fashion as we have ever witnessed,” the Richmond Enquirer would write. All the members of Congress (except two Virginians who had been obnoxious to her husband, John Quincy) were in attendance. The department heads, the diplomatic corps, and all the leaders of Washington society were there. Only President James Monroe and his wife were absent, as was their custom. It was the tenth anniversary of victory at the Battle of New Orleans, and this ball was in Andrew Jackson’s honor. It was Old Hickory’s day and it was his time; his candidacy for president of the United States was starting to surge. But one thing was already clear: though it was Andrew Jackson’s day, it was Louisa Catherine Adams’s night. A little after eight o’clock, a carriage made its way through the throng, and Jackson emerged. Louisa was there to meet him and lead him through the rooms. Her spangled silk dress shone in the lamplight. “In her manner she unites dignity with an unusual share of ease and elegance; and I never saw her appear to greater advantage than when promenading the rooms, winding her way through the multitude by the side of the gallant General,” read one of the dozens of accounts of the ball published in newspapers around the country. When supper was called, Jackson raised his glass and drank to her. Then he left, but it did not matter. The guests stayed, and the dancing went on. Louisa and John Quincy were not merely throwing a party that night. They had an aim in mind: Jackson’s ball would become the Adamses’ ball. It was a bid to establish John Quincy Adams as the front-runner for the presidency. She had been preparing for this moment not for weeks but for years. She called her parties “my campaigne.” • • • JOHN QUINCY did not like to think that throwing a ball could help him become president. He had served his country since he had been a boy, shaped by the Revolution. He had seen dead and bloodied soldiers, had stood on a hillside and watched the Battle at Bunker Hill across the bay, and had felt the shudder of a cannonball blasting through a ship’s wall. His mother had made herself a model of American motherhood, and his father was an instrumental figure in American intellectual and political life. As an adult, John Quincy had been minister to Holland, Prussia, Russia, and England. He had served as a senator from Massachusetts, had negotiated the treaty to end the War of 1812, and now held the prime post, secretary of state, in James Monroe’s Cabinet. He was the architect of the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain and had helped devise the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy that would guide the country for a century. He had done his duty at every chance. He would rather believe, or at least pretend, that he did nothing to position himself for the presidency—that if it came to him, it came to him simply because he deserved it, not because he begged for it. He feared ambition, thought it craven. The greatness of the republic depended on that disinterest. This was what his parents had taught him, and his parents, John and Abigail Adams, had done as much as anyone to invent the United States. John Quincy had grown up in their shadow. Yet he was also their great hope. If the republic was to last, it would be up to the second generation, he was constantly told: it would be up to him.

  The United States were turning out not to be quite the country the founding father and mother had envisioned. The virtues that the Adamses so strongly stressed—education, duty, deference to the public good—were not held with the common commitment they had assumed. Commercial interests, political factions, and private concerns were growing more powerful. More men were getting the power to vote, and fewer had studied Seneca and Tacitus. Sectionalism, undergirded by slavery, was pulling the country apart. Power would not merely come to John Quincy; he had to pursue it. He had to make promises, impressions, and friends. Relationships governed politics then, as they always have. Adams did not have the support of the larger public that a man like Jackson had, but that was hardly decisive—the masses did not choose the president, at least not yet. “The only possible chance for a head of a Department to attain the Presidency is by ingratiating himself personally with the members of Congress,” he wrote in his diary. This, he added, “leads to a thousand corrupt cabals.” Terrible at currying favor, he made a show of his distaste for flattery. But John Quincy knew he would fail without friends. Knowing that it was his wife, not he, to whom people were drawn, he endured and encouraged their social life. In fact, this ball for Jackson had been his idea. Louisa Adams understood him. Sometimes she thought she could see through him. Certainly, she could see politics for what it was, and she knew at that moment there was a part she could play. She was a wonderful hostess, generous and outgoing, though she called herself shy. As young women in London, she and her sisters had entertained a steady stream of visitors by singing, hoping to demonstrate the depths of their souls with the range of their voices, or by playing the harp, hoping to flatter their shapely arms. The courts of Prussia, Russia, and England, where the Adamses lived when John Quincy was a diplomat, had taught her when to compliment and when to gossip, what to watch for and what to overlook. While John Quincy studied laws and treaties, she studied people, wrote letters, and read books. By befriending royalty, by whispering with whatever dignitary she was seated with at supper, by being the one the king asked to dance to open a ball, she had made herself into an asset for John Quincy abroad. And by being the social presence he refused to be, she was integral to his efforts at home. She knew she should not be proud of this, though sometimes she could not help it. She knew that women were supposed to be selfless. She also knew that an Adams—an American—was supposed to build a sturdy, dutiful life instead of a searching one. She saw the new nation a little differently than an Adams did. She saw herself as different, too. • • • AFTER ALL, she was born in London on February 12, 1775, a time before the city of Washington even existed.
The Revolutionary War would begin only months after Louisa Catherine Johnson’s birth, but more than three thousand miles away. Louisa’s father was a proud, patriotic American merchant; her mother was vivacious, charming, socially ambitious, and English. Her parents had secrets, some of which Louisa may have sensed. She spent the American Revolution as a young child living in an opulent mansion in Nantes, France. When the war was over, she returned with her family to London, where she was taught to be lovely and ornamental. Her family lived in a gracious house on Tower Hill, above the Thames, where there were fine oil portraits on the wall, a harp in the parlor, and a neat carriage and stables. For the most part, Louisa was raised as young, pretty, wealthy English girls were raised—only she was told to consider herself an American and, more important, to marry one.

  One problem was that John Quincy was supposed to marry an American, too, and Louisa was not quite one. Another problem was that Louisa perplexed him. It was unclear to him how his self-mastery and his responsibility to the public and to his parents could coexist with his desire for her. In Louisa—and in a life that revolved around the parlor, not the public—he found an alluring alternative to the life for which he had been trained. Their courtship was spirited and contentious. In 1798, when they wed, he made it clear that he was committed to his country, and in marrying Louisa, he committed her to his country, too. In more ways than one, then, she had to leave the Johnsons behind in order to become an Adams. She tried at once to conform and to resist. Wherever she was, she was caught between roles. After their wedding, she and John Quincy moved to Berlin, where he was tasked with negotiating a treaty and she with negotiating a royal court as a republican who had never been in a republic, representing a nation she had never seen. Louisa was twenty-six and newly a mother when she stepped onto American soil for the first time. Navigating Quincy, Massachusetts, and the fine social distinctions of “democratic” Washington—not to mention her relationship with the Adams family—would turn out to be much harder than dancing with a king. There was a model for an American woman—she thought of her mother-in-law, Abigail Adams—and Louisa knew she did not fit it. She often felt misunderstood and unsure of where she could call home. There were apartments, hotels, houses, dachas, cottages, the White House; ships, carriages, sleds, coaches, trains, steamboats. It might not be too much to say that for long stretches, she lived in trunks and traveling cases. But there were also rare opportunities and extraordinary experiences. At a time when limits were the norm for women, her life was wide ranging. Her experience was the ground from which she grew. • • • THIS BOOK follows Louisa from London, to Nantes, to Berlin, to the United States. It then takes her to St. Petersburg, Russia, where, for six years, she was moored in gaudy loneliness and buffeted by grief, and where she made herself indispensable. From there, it follows her on a dangerous and difficult journey with her eight-year-old son Charles across Europe, from St. Petersburg to Paris, where her husband was waiting. England came next—a stretch of domestic tranquility. Then the family returned to Washington, where the pursuit of power began. There would be costs. In the White House, she found only sadness. John Quincy was stymied as a leader, Louisa was isolated, and they fought; their children struggled; their family began to fall apart. Within a few years, she would bury two sons. When she and her husband returned to Quincy, she believed they had come to live out their days, weary and bereft. But their last and greatest act had not yet begun. While her husband became one of the first great antislavery leaders in Congress, Louisa wrestled with what it meant to be free. Women should cast off “the thraldom of the mind,” she wrote to her daughter-in-law, “which has been so long, and so unjustly shackled.”

  Louisa accepted many of the conventions that constrained her, but she sometimes resisted what those conventions implied. And in doing so, she both witnessed and helped shape the new nation. When John Quincy died, some said that in his life one could find the history of the country’s first half century. Something like that could be said of her. When she was born in England, her king ruled the colonies. When she first reached the United States’ shores, federal power passed peacefully to the opposition for the first time. On the day that her daughter died in St. Petersburg, Moscow was set on fire. When she traveled across Europe through the wreckage of war, she converged on Paris with Napoleon, newly escaped from Elba. When she died, the United States were only a few years away from civil war. Wherever she lived, she was always pressing her nose against the glass, not quite sure whether she was looking out or looking in. She was certain she would not be remembered like her husband, John Quincy, or her father-in-law, John Adams, or her son, Charles Francis Adams, men who considered themselves architects of American history. The only history Louisa could claim was personal history, but even there, she sometimes wondered whether she had the right. She started three memoirs for her family, but she gave them shy titles: “Record of a Life”; “Narrative of a Journey”; “The Adventures of a Nobody.” She felt she was misunderstood. But she did something extraordinary with her self-doubt: she explored it. That was unusual. The idea that a woman should wonder about her independent identity—apart from her husband, apart from her son, apart from her family—was hardly prevalent or desirable during the era in which she lived. It could be painful, but there was also a kind of freedom in it. The other members of the Adams family took their identity and the expectations it implied for granted. Because she did not have to speak for the ages, she could speak for herself. It became her habit, even her strategy, to define herself as not like them. And yet in some larger sense, the Adams family helped instill in Louisa what it helped instill in the young republic: a concern for the value of the individual; a fascination with human nature in its manifold forms; an awareness of selfish instincts; a suspicion of power; a respect for traditions; and an invitation—almost an imperative—to scrutinize people, including oneself. She did not always know what to say, and she sometimes doubted whether women should speak at all. Still, there was something singular in the way she related to the world. “Now I like very well to adopt my husband’s thoughts and words when I approve them,” she wrote to John Quincy at the age of seventy, “but I do not like to repeat them like a parrot, and prove myself a nonentity. . . . When my husband married me, he made a great mistake if he thought I only intended to play an echo.” She was not a modern woman, but she had a kind of modern voice. • • • FOR TWO CENTURIES, Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams has been treated mostly as another name on the well-examined Adams family tree. There were times when she saw herself that way too—as a nobody. She figures only indirectly in the history of men’s great deeds. I do not pretend that she held some secret political power, though her help was crucial for her husband’s career. Her real power is in the story of her life, and in her efforts to learn, to feel, to think, to understand, to have faith, to find what to live for and why. This book tells that story. It is also a story about a transforming country in a transformative age, and a story about what it means to be a woman—a question that had different answers in the nineteenth century but that still resonates today.

  “In the entire span of the Adams dynasty, no figure is more central than the wife of the second Adams statesman, John Quincy Adams,” wrote the first editor of the Adams Papers, Lyman H. Butterfield. “And yet none is less known or more elusive.” She was unknown because, for two centuries, she was seen to exist outside the bounds of history—those great tracts of men, deeds, and laws. She was elusive, too, because she was contradictory, left false trails about her family’s background, demurred and denied her merits, and was quick to describe her doubts. Her character was quicksilver, and the roles she held were unofficial. She was also an American who was foreign born, a first lady in a country that was not entirely her own, and a mother who survived all but one of her children. She was torn between cultural and familial ideals and strong instincts that she could not ignore. She was sunk by despair and lifted by laughter. Her biography cannot be told like
her husband’s. It is a history of feelings as well as facts, of questions as well as answers, of doubt as well as certainty. It is a record of a life, a narrative of a journey, the adventures of an extraordinary woman. And her story begins where, as a young girl with a romantic imagination, she might have assumed it would happily end: at the moment she met the man whom she would marry. PART ONE

  FRAUGHT with

  BLISS London, 1775–1797

  1

  THE FIRST TIME Louisa Catherine Johnson saw John Quincy Adams, she thought that he looked ridiculous. When he came to dinner at the Johnsons’ house in London, on Wednesday, November 11, 1795, the young American diplomat was dressed in a strange boxy Dutch coat so pale that it appeared, absurdly, almost white. Watching him talk at the table, though, she did like him. He seemed spirited, showing no signs of exhaustion after a long and difficult journey from Holland, where he was the United States’ representative. He was handsome, with penetrating, dark round eyes under a pair of peaked eyebrows, and a mouth that was full and strong. He liked a good story and a good glass of wine. Only twenty-eight years old, he was already a high-ranking diplomat—and the son of the vice president of the United States. No one who met him could miss his intense intelligence. Still, after John Quincy had gone, the girls sat in the parlor and joked a little about his unfashionable attire. They were drawn to men who wore well-cut jackets, men who arrived at dinner looking ready for a gallop. John Trumbull, an artist and frequent guest at the Johnsons’, who had brought John Quincy to dinner, tried to convince them that Mr. Adams was “a fine fellow and would make a good husband.” The sisters laughed.

  More than a month passed before John Quincy came back, and Louisa did not miss him. She was twenty years old, clever, and charming, though she could be shy, and she and her sisters were accustomed to being objects of admiration. There were seven daughters in all—beguiling, lively, and lovely—and their mother, Catherine, knew how to exploit their good looks. (An eighth child, a son named Thomas, was at boarding school and then across the Atlantic at Harvard.) Catherine was petite and pretty, with a sparkling wit and a talent for putting guests at ease while keeping them on their toes; she was, Louisa remembered, “what the French call spirituél.” When they were little, Catherine had dressed her children in matching clothes and marched them into church by twos. “We were objects of general curiosity and permit me to say admiration to the publick,” Louisa would remember with a touch of unembarrassed pride. When they were older, the girls had ostrich feathers for their hats, buffons of starched muslin, and hairdressers to curl, sculpt, and powder their hair. They ordered gloves by the dozen. The three oldest—Nancy was twenty-two, two years older than Louisa, and Caroline eighteen, two years younger—had already been introduced to society, and society was happy to be introduced to them. There were frequent visitors to entertain them, dinners with dignitaries, merchants, scientists, ministers, British abolitionists, wealthy American plantation owners, young men and old. Their elegant house, No. 8 Cooper’s Row on Tower Hill, perched above the Thames and the Tower of London, was known as a welcoming place. Visitors from the United States were treated especially well. Louisa’s father, Joshua Johnson, a merchant from Maryland, was the American consul in London, appointed by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in 1790. He interpreted his responsibilities liberally. (Perhaps a little self-interestedly, too, which was not uncommon for a consul.) His ships carried Americans’ mail to and from the United States; he found them a doctor when they were sick; he pled their case when they were in trouble; he offered his house as their haven. Americans came to Cooper’s Row to collect their letters and stayed for tea. They came to discuss a trading scheme and found themselves at dinner. After dinner they would linger for card games, conversation, and music in the parlor. They came for the comforts of the sofa in the parlor, the oil paintings on the walls, the cook in the kitchen, the harp in the corner, and the eleven servants who would suddenly appear at their elbow to whisk away their finished plates or materialize in the drawing room with a glass of good brandy. They also came, perhaps, for the women. Louisa barely noticed John Quincy’s reappearance at the dinner table in December, but he returned and returned again. He could be found on Tower Hill almost every night. He would linger after dinner with the sisters to watch their skits, play their games, and listen to their laughter. He teased them and was teased; they called him “Mr. Quiz.” He sat on the sofa next to Louisa and held the end of a string as Louisa threaded spangles on it for her embroidery. He loved watching them perform—Nancy played the pianoforte, Caroline the harp, and Louisa sang. “Evening at Mr. Johnson’s. His daughters pretty and agreeable . . . Late home,” he would record in his small, strict handwriting, logging his visits to the Johnsons’ night after night. He was drawn to them, this warm feminine circle—to the sound of a soprano voice, the mellifluous laughter, the suggestion of a life not of strain and hardship but of modestly easy luxury. It was so different from the atmosphere of expectations in which he’d been raised, so different from what he told himself he wanted. He noted the difference and it disturbed him; yet he could not seem to stay away. The Johnson sisters could sense the increasing attention from this almost-stranger, serious and somewhat supercilious, though not unable to smile. He was unusual—but then, there were ways in which they were unusual too—and perhaps Louisa most of all. • • • SHE WAS almost an outsider by birth. At the time the American Revolution broke out across the Atlantic, when she was only two months old, her father was the buyer for a firm based in Annapolis. He was a proud American patriot unafraid to show his allegiance, which meant that it became neither safe nor profitable for him to live nearly in view of the Tower of London. When Louisa was three, her family moved to Nantes, France, where Joshua worked for a time as an agent for the nascent American government and tried to establish his own business. His house there, on L’Île Feydeau, in the middle of the Loire River, the part of town fashionable among the newly rich, became a frequent meeting point for Americans passing through—Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, and dozens of others, including John Adams, perhaps with his middle son in tow. They came for business, and perhaps for pleasure; Joshua Johnson projected a sense of living well. His apartments were in a mansion called “Le Temple du Goût”—the Temple of Taste. Rows of wrought iron balconies curved and curled into delicate tendrils; long windows opened like doors; the fireplaces were made of marble; and the ceilings soared. Later, Louisa blamed Le Temple du Goût for encouraging a certain showiness and ruinous cupidity in her mother, but it molded her own aesthetic as well. Long after she had been to the Hermitage, to the Tuileries, to Peterhof, to Sans Souci, she would remember Le Temple du Goût as a singular marvel, elegant and perfect.