Louisa Read online

  MY HEAD and

  MY HEART Washington and Massachusetts,

  1801–1809

  1

  THE AMERICA FLOATED into the harbor of Philadelphia on September 4, and John Quincy’s brother Thomas stood on the dock to meet it. When he caught sight of the travelers disembarking, he was shocked to see Louisa, his dear friend, still fragile and limping after her difficult delivery of George followed by two months at sea. The evident distress on Thomas’s face at the sight of her made her self-conscious. She was uncertain of the ground beneath her feet, about to see the country she was supposed to consider her home, and painfully aware of how she looked after the taxing voyage.

  The prospect of other reunions stood before her. She would be reunited with her parents and siblings for the first time since their sudden flight. It had been four years, almost exactly, since the night Louisa’s family had left her at the Adelphi Hotel in London; four years since her “beloved father” had given her a “worse than broken-hearted look” and then fled. In that time, Nancy had married Walter Hellen and had a child. Her brother, Thomas, a schoolboy when she’d seen him last, was already practicing law. Even the youngest, little Adelaide, who had been eight when Louisa last saw her in 1797, was no longer quite a child. She would also meet John Quincy’s family, which loomed so large in his life. And she would be judged, scrutinized, compared to others. She was already doing it to herself. In “The Adventures of a Nobody,” she would remember that trip as the time when John Quincy told her—in some detail—about his thwarted love for Mary Frazier. The “elaborate but just account which I heard of her extreme beauty; her great attainments; the elegance of her letters; altogether made me feel little,” she later wrote. But the city of Philadelphia, despite an intense late-summer heat wave, revived her. The former capital had a tidy, reassuring appearance: two miles of wharfs crowded with ships and shallops, a forest of masts with furled topgallants; neat brick buildings flush against the foot-walks and tidy streets; the optimistic edifices of the State House and Carpenters’ Hall; shops displaying familiar French brandy and French shoes; gentle gardens. During a week spent in the city, she grew physically stronger and more confident, despite round after round of introductions, dinners, and excursions. But the day before she was supposed to head south to see her parents and John Quincy was to head north to his, she fell ill. In his diary, John Quincy attributed her illness to the weather—it was a drop in the temperature, he wrote, that brought it on. It’s likely that there was another factor, one that he would not have wanted to acknowledge: Louisa and John Quincy would be separated for the first time since their marriage, and Louisa would have to face her family, which had been through so much that pained her, without him. She wanted him to come. Despite her cough, they followed his plan and went separate ways, he to Quincy and she to Washington. She was not alone. Her baby, George, and their servants Elizabeth Epps and Tilly Whitcomb, were with her. Still, she felt abandoned, lost, and confused in the country that she’d been instructed to consider her home. The trip was “tedious and dangerous.” Aboard a series of stages, she passed through a landscape that invited brooding: dense, dark forests and scrubby fields, past shacks and shanties, past slaves working in succulent tobacco fields, through overgrown forests and barren stretches of land, empty but for the clouds of insects humming sawtoothed songs. They reached the Chesapeake Bay and drove into Maryland, that mythical place in her father’s stories. But her reflections on the reality of what she saw were curt and unhappy. She was, she described herself, “a forlorn stranger in the land of my Fathers.” They crossed the limits of the Federal City, though it would have been hard to notice; the wild landscape hardly changed. Oaks and pines, dusty turnpikes and cratered roads, muddy creeks and churning rivers; a few scattered clusters of dwellings amid broken plaster, kilns, and weedy fields were all that existed. They passed the two wings of the headless Capitol and the President’s House, which John Quincy’s parents had so unhappily inhabited. They passed little clusters of boardinghouses where members of Congress sat in their smoke-filled messes, divided into fractious camps. “Mrs. Adams is going to a place different from all she has ever yet visited, and amongst a people where it will be impossible for her to be too gaurded,” Abigail warned her son the day after Louisa had left Philadelphia. “Every syllable she utters will be scaned not with loss of candour, but carping malice; such is the spirit of party.” The spirit of party—in those days, the United States were, not was, and the collective was riven, as men tried to work out the mechanics of power. Their ideals of harmony ran up against the realities of personal ambition, divergent interests, distrust, and differing ideologies. Louisa would not be able to escape the nasty business of gossip and intrigue even at home. Georgetown, where the Johnsons lived, was a small outcropping of civilization on an escarpment above the Potomac—but it was hardly a place of civility. Joshua’s troubles had followed him from London. The fight with his partners had become public—as Louisa had dreaded—and his debts were now known. “I doubt not she will be prudent,” Abigail continued to John Quincy, “but her family have been very basely traduced.” Did Louisa know the details of her father’s financial situation? It would have been impossible to remain entirely ignorant of his reputation: the gangrene of gossip had spread. Joshua Johnson couldn’t have hidden much anyway. He was doing everything he could to search for money to pay off his debts. He was suing the widow of one of his former partners; he was being sued by his creditors in courts in both Britain and the United States; he was in a fight over ownership of land in Georgia; he was suing Wallace and Muir. Wallace and Muir were circulating a handbill defending themselves against his attacks. As a final blow, President Thomas Jefferson had removed Joshua from his post as superintendent of stamps, which deprived him of a $2,000 salary. (In fact, Joshua owed the post to Jefferson in the first place; the vice president had cast the deciding vote for his confirmation in a deadlocked Senate.) The removal was simply a part of the sweeping changes Jefferson was making in the federal government, but the Johnsons took it personally. However much Louisa knew, she knew enough to be angry and ashamed. “Your father . . . is obliged to sue every man to realize one shilling,” Catherine had written to her in Berlin. “Such is the honor of honesty of this part of the world.” When Louisa arrived at the house in Washington, Joshua was standing on the steps waiting for her. His appearance shocked her. His handsome looks were gone; pain lined his face. She assumed that her own worn, wretched appearance was the cause of it. “He kept exclaiming that ‘he did not know his own child,’” she would remember. But really, he was the one who was altered. Once, a portrait painter had depicted him wearing an immaculate lace cravat, holding a stack of papers, with a gleaming stylus, ink pot, and little handbell by his side; smiling slightly, giving him an enigmatic knowingness—a man of business, a man of purpose. Now he appeared broken. Only the baby George and his other infant grandson, Johnson, could make him smile. The morning after her arrival, Louisa woke with a high fever. The doctor declared that she had to wean the child, which she did “with great bodily suffering,” submitting herself to the care of her mother and sisters. It was a relief to be back among her family, but it was also awkward. They had expected her husband to come down to Washington in order to accompany her to Quincy. She did not tell them that he expected her to make the journey alone. She tried to lure him south, stressing how much she liked Washington, and how it was “very well worth coming to see.” “I am quite delighted with the situation of this place,” she wrote when she arrived, “and I think should it ever be finished”—here she hedged—“it will be one of the most beautiful spots in the world.” Repeatedly, she pressed her purpose. “I only want you here to be completely happy,” she wrote three times in two weeks. She wanted him to come, and she wanted them to stay in Washington. He responded to her first desire, at least, right away. How much he missed her, and in different ways, is clear. “Our dear George—how I long to kiss even his s
lavering lips!” he wrote in one. “As for those of his mother I say nothing. Let her consult my heart in her own and all that pen can write or language express will shrink to nothing.” He had not seen his own parents since leaving the United States in 1794, and in his absence his parents had suffered painful losses. It was natural that he would be eager to see them upon his return. But no sooner did he arrive in Quincy than he agreed to leave. He took a fast route, riding “the whole night through,” and arriving in a week, on October 21. His plan was to turn around almost immediately. Winter was coming; the roads would become dangerous. But politics drew him in, even though, after his father’s defeat, he’d called it a dirty business. He went to dinners and meetings, connected with his contacts, with congressmen, Cabinet members, the president. “He has no propensity to engage in a political career,” his brother Thomas had reassured their mother, Abigail, after seeing him in Philadelphia. Anyone watching him move through Washington, visiting all the right people, might have heard that and laughed. Louisa was in no hurry to leave either. On October 30, the day before their planned departure, Louisa “caught a violent cold,” pushing back their departure by several days. But she couldn’t delay it forever. Finally they set out, traveling in a large group: Louisa, John Quincy, George, Elizabeth Epps, and Tilly Whitcomb, along with Louisa’s parents and three younger sisters, who accompanied them as far as Frederick, Maryland. They had only just left Washington when Joshua fell ill, in pain “of more excessive violence than I have ever witnessed,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. As soon as Joshua could be moved—the attack appears to have been kidney stones—the group made its way to Rose Hill, the large estate where his brother Thomas Johnson lived. Thomas’s reputation and fortunes were as good as Joshua’s were bad. He had been the one to nominate George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army. He had been the first Revolutionary governor of Maryland. He had served as a judge on the U.S. Supreme Court. Through his friendship with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and because of their mutual regard for him, he had been an important link between the North and South. He had also been an investor and (sometimes critical) adviser in some of Joshua’s business ventures. Joshua had always written to him in a deferential, even nervous tone. The lively “little old man with sharp bright gray eyes” gently took in his ailing brother. The prodigal had come home to die. Before that day would come, but with it looming, Louisa would have to leave him. Winter was fast approaching, and the journey to Quincy was growing more difficult with each passing day. After a week by her father’s bedside, Louisa was pulled away, not even allowed to say goodbye for fear of upsetting them both. The reduced group traveled at a relentless speed to make up for lost time, twice setting out on the road at two a.m. They would push onward until Louisa or the child could go no farther. They had to stop to rest. “It is I find, utterly impossible, travelling with such a family, to fix a day when I can expect to reach any given place,” John Quincy wrote to his mother. He thought the group was dragging; she thought they moved at a punishing pace. George, teething, was “constantly shrieking,” and suffering from diarrhea. The turnpike was rough and jarring. The stagecoach was crowded with strangers. In Philadelphia, Louisa fell ill, had a day to rest, and then rose to move out before dawn. In New Jersey the roads were slowed by drenching rains. The Hudson was rough with storm, the boat to cross it open and flat-bottomed. Louisa shivered in her thin, lace-trimmed, blue satin pelisse. No carriage was there to meet them on the far shore. They had no umbrella or roof to keep them dry. When they reached the house of John Quincy’s sister Nabby in New York, Louisa collapsed. “More depressed in her spirits than really ill,” John Quincy wrote in his diary. As they traveled north, the rain turned to snow. They reached Boston on November 24, missing the day’s last stagecoach to Quincy. After breakfast the following morning, in cold, clear weather, they took their final stage, traveling south along the edge of the steely bay, to the Adamses’ house. In Louisa’s eyes, everything was strange and grim. 2

  “QUINCY! What shall I say of my impressions of Quincy!” Louisa wrote in “The Adventures of a Nobody.” “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark, I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished.” November in Quincy was a month of black bark, brambles, and dead leaves, of mossy weather and low, smoky skies. The day after their arrival was Thanksgiving. Everything about it was strange and astonishing—the holiday itself, the church, the congregation. With her Anglican sensibility, she found the place bleak, the singing plain, and the people appallingly “snuffling through the nose.” She remained quiet, feeling “so much depressed, and so ill,” which she’d later think a blessing, because otherwise she would “certainly have given mortal offense.”

  Writing in 1840, she painted herself as naive. It was as if the United States were her first foreign land and not the fourth country in which she had lived. It was as if she had never met a stranger until she arrived in Quincy. It was as if she’d never submitted to an unfamiliar custom until she had to sit through church (or “meeting,” a term that sounded odd to her). It was as if no one had ever looked at her curiously until the relics of John Quincy’s childhood peered at her. “Dr. Tufts!” she wrote. “Deacon French! Mr Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! and Capt Beale!!!” She had already lived in three countries, but she had never felt herself as much a foreigner as she was in her husband’s hometown. The shock she felt when she arrived at the Adamses’ house was real, common, and comic: she was meeting her in-laws. She saw in them what she wanted to see, and they saw in her what they wanted too. Where another woman might have looked around the Adamses’ clapboard mansion and seen the English cut-glass candelabras, Louis XV chairs, and a Chippendale-style sofa, Louisa saw a farm. Where another woman might have looked at Abigail and seen a woman who had lived in Paris and London, who had charmed generals and dignitaries, she saw a thin-lipped woman who boasted about waking at five to milk the cows. For her part, Abigail wasn’t more charitable. The mother-in-law regarded the young woman with a critical eye. Quincy women didn’t wear satin coats in the cold rain. Louisa saw the gaze, felt the judgment, and saw herself as someone who was set apart. John Adams took “a fancy to me,” she wrote pointedly in “Adventures,” but “he was the only one.” The person who unsettled her most was Abigail Adams—the matriarch, the authority, the real Mrs. Adams. Abigail had planned a special welcome for Louisa. The newcomer was given a separate dish at dinner. “Every delicate preserve” was offered to her alone, every kind attention paid. Louisa responded to the attention mutely, which appeared to others as ingratitude, though it sprang from shame. She was too aware that the special treatment “appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness,” Louisa wrote. No doubt Abigail intended well. She was determined to accept her son’s wife, as she had already accepted the others in the Johnson family—writing them often, inviting them to visit in Philadelphia, welcoming Louisa’s brother Thomas for dinner when he was at Harvard, lobbying for Joshua to get a government job, and showing the whole family unstinting generosity. But she had also seen them in London, and had observed the way they lived: the servants, the paintings, the harp. She damned Catherine with her praise, calling her “conspicuous” for her “taste of elegance.” Abigail had a hard time overcoming her early and instinctive aversion to Louisa. From the start, she had imagined Louisa as a flighty, spoiled, sickly, English child, a half-blood siren not made of the right stuff to be her son’s wife. Even before seeing her, Abigail fretted about how caring for a “poor, weak and feeble wife and boy” would affect her John Quincy. Although she called Charles’s widow “Sally” and the woman Thomas would marry “Nancy,” she called Louisa “Mrs. Adams”—except when she referred to her as “Madam.” Abigail heard her daughter-in-law’s hacking cough and looked at her thin pale frame, her delicate wrists, and her large, grief-worn eyes, and predicted to Thomas that Louisa would probably soon die: “I have many fears that she will be of short duration.” Then she added that John Quincy’s “helpless family
” was a terrible burden to him. “The constant state of anxiety which has harassed his mind upon her account,” she wrote, “has added a weight of years to his Brow, which time alone could not have effected in double the space.” But this, as unfair as it was, accounts for only half the story. Louisa did not make her acceptance easy. She was as determined not to adapt to Quincy as Abigail was to prove her unfitness. If Abigail was unsympathetic, then so was Louisa. Abigail, after all, was not as one-dimensional as Louisa made her out to be. The wife of John Adams had lived in Paris and London, had charmed every kind of statesman. She was proud, even aristocratic, a woman who had ordered the Quincy coat of arms painted on her carriage when she went to New York. Abigail was also, in the fall of 1801, suffering, which Louisa seems not to have seen. Louisa arrived in Quincy at a difficult time. John Adams had been humiliated during the presidential election of 1800, repudiated not only for his politics but—as a pamphlet by Alexander Hamilton too thoroughly spelled out—for his vanity, splenetic temper, jealousy, and incapacity. The Adamses had retreated to Quincy shamed by failure and furious with the country. Greater misfortunes, which they could hardly bear to speak of, followed them home. Charles had died only the previous winter. His parents had watched his decline with anger and overwhelming anguish. To John Adams, Charles was “a mere rake, buck, blood and beast . . . I renounce him.” Abigail wrote to John Quincy about her eldest son with unreserved anguish. Charles wasn’t the only source of deep grief. At just the moment Charles had died, Abigail had learned that her daughter Nabby’s husband, William Smith, had abandoned her on a farm in upstate New York. Now her prized son, her hope for the nation, appeared with a wife as pale and fragile as porcelain. So there was a chasm between them, and neither of the women helped the other cross it—or made much of a meaningful attempt herself. “I longed for my home, with an impatience that made me completely disagreeable,” Louisa later wrote. “In short I was in every respect any thing but what I should have been.” • • • RELIEF CAME when John Quincy and Louisa left the elder Adamses’ home, Peacefield, and moved into a house on Hanover Street in Boston just before Christmas 1801. But that relief was short-lived. No sooner had Louisa begun to settle in than she realized that she had no idea how to run a New England household.