Louisa (13 page)

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Q
UEEN
L
UISE
was
and would remain an angel in Louisa's mind, whatever John Quincy thought. But it was another woman who exerted an even more powerful influence upon her, a woman who had the kind of fascinating attraction Louisa was drawn to throughout her life. In 1800, a new British ambassador, Lord Carysfort, arrived in Berlin, and he brought with him his wife. Elizabeth Carysfort was a forceful, even dazzling figure. It was Louisa's opinion, at least, that Lady Elizabeth Carysfort “did most of the diplomacy” on behalf of her husband, and even John Quincy, who was not inclined to compliment anyone's intelligence too highly (let alone a woman's), was impressed
by Elizabeth's mind. Lady Carysfort was, John Quincy wrote to his brother, “a woman of a remarkable fine understanding.” Educated like her brothers (one of whom was Lord William Grenville, Britain's foreign secretary), she was, Louisa wrote, “one of the finest women I ever knew—of very superior mind and cultivation.” This was a fault, even as it was a strength. In the same breath, Louisa betrayed her sense of conflict. She wrote that Elizabeth was “very plain in her person; somewhat masculine in her manners,” and she had a tendency to make other women “timid and afraid.”

Louisa was drawn to such “masculine” women (her teacher Miss Young had been another), even though she believed that she should be repelled. And they were drawn to her. However Louisa described their gender, what these women seem to have offered her was a kind of mothering. Lady Carysfort “took a fancy to me,” and in return Louisa loved the older woman “as if she were my own mother.” Louisa would visit Elizabeth in her boudoir, “a sort of sanctum sanctorum,” where the British ambassador's wife would talk about books, her thoughts for the future, death, and how her faith in God wavered. “Here she sometimes gave way to her private sorrows—and here only she could talk to me of her private history; of her afflictions; of her own peculiar opinions; both religious and literary,” Louisa wrote.

This idea that a woman's “private history” might have value, that she might have a rich inner life shaped by deep emotions, strong beliefs, and personally formed opinions, was crucial. When she was older, it would mean more to her, but the seed was planted when she was young. And her time with Lady Carysfort helped her in a more immediate sense. It gave her strength. At the start of 1801, she needed it. She was pregnant again.

She and John Quincy
hardly let themselves hope, not even writing to their parents about the possibility of a child. Lady Carysfort refused to let Louisa submit herself to her anxiety. Instead of letting her lie on her sofa, weak and reclining, Lady Carysfort would appear at her door
and demand that they go riding. She would send an invitation for dinner and refuse to take no for an answer. And so Louisa rode out into the bracing air, or spent evenings in “
a perfect gale
” of laughter while sitting next to some “German lump of obesity,” or listening to the king of England's son play the piano while a Frenchwoman sang “God Save the King.”

In mid-April, Louisa
entered her confinement. The king, she later said, ordered the street outside the Adamses' apartment blocked, so that the clatter of traffic would not disturb her. On April 12, she went into labor. The pain was intense, the German male midwife drunk, and Louisa's left leg temporarily crippled. But a son was born, breathing. They named him George Washington Adams.

A high fever gripped Louisa after the delivery. Puerperal fevers were common; doctors, drunk or sober, were not always in the habit of washing their hands. John Quincy was anguished and scared. When he wrote to tell his mother about the birth of her grandson, he added that he was waiting a few days to tell Catherine Johnson: he was afraid to write immediately, since he might have to follow the good news with a letter saying that her daughter was dead. But his responsibilities to his country remained foremost in his mind. Two weeks after the child was born, John Quincy received his recall to the United States, and he wanted to leave without delay. One of John Adams's last acts as president had been to summon his son home. On the day John Quincy received his recall, Louisa, who had been slowly improving in health, was “continually seized” with “sudden faintings.” John Quincy despairingly wrote in his diary that she was “immovable,” unable even to shift from one side of her bed to the other. She lay there for weeks, her baby suckling one breast while a borrowed infant nursed the other, since Dr. Brown feared that excess milk would spread her fever to her brain.

But she could not convalesce forever—however much some part of her, consciously or not, might have wanted to remain right where she was. John Quincy prepared to leave Berlin at the earliest possible
chance. There was not even time to wait for the child to be vaccinated by traditional methods; a faster, experimental one was done instead. By the time Louisa managed to limp across the room with assistance, arrangements had been made to sail to the United States. She still could not climb the stairs. On June 17, she was lifted into a carriage, and she, John Quincy, their son, and their two servants, Whitcomb and Epps, left Berlin. Saying goodbye, she cried “bitter tears.”

The son she held in her arms was her solace. What she thought of his name is unknown. Perhaps it was a chance to prove her American patriotism. Perhaps she was just glad that the name was not an Adams name, that it was not John. (Presumably, the disgraced Joshua was not an option.) Perhaps she didn't care. What mattered was the existence of the child in her arms. It was her triumph, the redemption of what she saw as her failures so far. “I was a
Mother
,” she wrote.

They went first to Hamburg, where, on July 8, they boarded a ship. It was called the
America.
Its deck was as close to America as Louisa had ever
been.

1

T
HE
A
MERICA
FLO
ATED
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
slavering 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.