Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams

388 Pages·2016·3.02 MB·English

by  Louisa Thomas

PENGUIN PRESS
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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,