Louisa (3 page)

John Hewlett did bring her around to a more or less conventional religious view (although, she would write in 1825, “I am not quite sure that some people do not think me a little of a fanatic even now”). But he did something that Joshua did not intend when he asked John to minister to Louisa: he listened to her, talked with her, recommended books for her to read, and treated the child with unusual respect. On her visits over the years, he and Louisa would engage in “serious conversation.” His wife, too, treated her with unusual attention and care. Elizabeth Hewlett was “a very eccentric woman of strong mind and still stronger passions.” She was a woman for the age of sensibility—but also a counterpoint to the woman Louisa would have encountered in popular advice manuals of the day. Elizabeth was not quiet and delicate; she did not blush and fade. So forceful was her personality that her neighbors, including the formidable Mary Wollstonecraft—the author of
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—
found her bossy and intimidating. (Wollstonecraft, at the time a local schoolmistress, complained of Elizabeth's power over John Hewlett: “How he is yoked!”)

John Hewlett, Louisa wrote
, “led me early to think.” Thinking was not something that most young women were encouraged to do. John Hewlett was something of a radical. He ran a boys' school in Shacklewell and was a sizar of Magdalen College at Oxford, and he would go on to have an illustrious career as a scholar and preacher, but in the 1780s and 1790s, his friends included famous dissenters and writers, and he had unusual ideas about the education of young women. Even as he was encouraging Louisa, John was urging Mary Wollstonecraft to write an essay about her ideas about the education of young women, which he carried to the publisher himself. Though
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
was less explosive than Wollstonecraft's more famous work
,
it still had an incendiary message: a woman should learn to think for herself.

So Louisa began
to imagine she might have a mind of her own, which further set her apart. “At school,” she later wrote, “I was universally
respected
, but I was never beloved.” While she was there, she and her best friend, Miss Edwards—another misfit, “an East Indian very dark, with long black Indian hair; not handsome, but looked up to by all the teachers as a girl of uncommon talents”—were the “decided favorites” of a teacher named Miss Young. By conventional definitions of the time, the Miss Young she described was hardly a woman at all. “Her uncle had her educated with boys for many years; and obliged her to wear boys clothes: and in this way she had in a great measure acquired something like a classical education,” Louisa wrote in “Record of a Life.” In Louisa's world, there was nothing natural about a lady who acted like a man, and Louisa would routinely express her uneasiness with women who did. Yet in the same breath, she would often also express her admiration. Miss Young was, Louisa wrote, “a most extraordinary woman.” She was the kind of woman—strong, forceful, unconventional, educated, “masculine”—who would always both impress and confound her. Louisa flourished under her attention. Miss Young “conversed freely with us upon the books we read,” and taught her and Miss Edwards how to recognize “the most beautiful and striking passages.”
She took the lessons to heart. When her father gave her a guinea, Louisa used it to buy the kinds of books Miss Young and John Hewlett had encouraged her to read: Milton's
Paradise Lost and Regained
and John Mason's
Self-Knowledge: A Treatise, Shewing the Nature and Benefit of that Important Science, and the Way to Attain It
.

Louisa was pulled
, then, between seemingly incompatible imperatives. A woman should not think for herself, because a woman pursued knowledge at the cost of a husband. When she recalled her purchase—as she did more than once, even into old age—she said she regretted buying those books and studying them closely. “How often since that time have I thought it injured me; by teaching me to scrutinize too closely into motives, and looking too closely at the truth,” she wrote.
Too closely at the truth!
Understanding the truth was not the goal of a young woman's education. A wife did not need self-knowledge; she needed self-effacement. As Hannah More, the most popular author of her day, had written in
Essays Addressed to Young Ladies
, “Girls should be taught to give up their opinions betimes, and not pertinaciously to carry on a dispute, even if they would know themselves to be in the right.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, another author whom Louisa read, taught herself Latin and Greek in secret and urged her daughter to teach her granddaughter how to hide a good education. Book learning, Lady Montagu wrote, should be concealed “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”

When Louisa was around fourteen, she was taken out of school, and the point of her schooling was made plain: she had been educated to be married, not to learn about Milton's poetry or the science of self-knowledge. To this end she was brought home to finish her education—her embroidery, her dancing, her painting—under the half-mindful eye of the younger children's governess. Before long, she was introduced into society—which is to say, she was brought into the marriage market. The search began, as it were, for a man in possession of a fortune and in want of a wife.

What Louisa called “work” was mostly embroidery, stitching that was elegantly useless. Her daily tasks were made easy by the assistance of a team of servants—servants to wake her in the morning, to cook her food, to carry her plates, to drive the carriage to the theater or the park. In her spare time (and all of her time was spare), she painted or drew, or visited acquaintances, or received verses from admirers, or played games and gossiped. Some evenings, at parties or in the parlor, she danced. Some afternoons, she read novels that taught her to waste away from love.

Louisa romanticized her childhood
, but imperfectly. As she herself evocatively put it, her youth was “fraught with bliss.” She was, she would later say—protesting a bit much, perhaps—happiest at home, among her siblings and parents, singing to calm her father at the end of a long day, or perhaps rolling up the carpets and dancing. At parties and balls, she was “timid as a hare.”

She had to be careful
, too, because at those parties—at the Johnsons' rich friends the Churches, say, or the Pinckneys or the Copleys—she was tasked with remembering that she was different: she was an American. Learning to be an American, of course, was not exactly on the curriculum at Mrs. Carter's school, and it was hardly an identity her mother could impart to her. She had missed the critical experience of the first generation of those growing up in the United States, the Revolution itself. Most of her sense of it was formed, it seems, by whatever story or testimony she happened to hear from Americans visiting for tea or dinner, and from her father's stories, which generally played up his daring and dangerous actions on behalf of the rebels during the Revolution. He would describe visiting Americans in prison, or General Washington, “of whom he spoke with a degree of enthusiasm which fired our young hearts with the purest love and admiration.” He would tell them how, on learning that he held Benedict Arnold's pen in his hand, he had picked up the pen with a pair of tongs and thrown it in the fire. He had named Louisa's younger sister, born in 1776, Carolina
Virginia Marylanda. All of this made its impact, and it didn't. The girls were British by their habits. As a child, Louisa's favorite game was “duchess”; she answered only to Your Grace. But their Americanness was forcefully impressed upon them after Lord Andover took a liking to Caroline: the girls were told they must marry Americans.

Joshua planned “to get
them to America before they fix their affections on any object here,” he wrote to his brother Thomas, the first Revolutionary governor of Maryland, but business kept him in London. It helped that if Joshua could not bring them to America, he could bring Americans to them.

2

J
OSHUA
WOULD
HAVE
preferred that his daughters marry Southerners, but he could not afford to be too choosy. Every American bachelor who walked through the door was a potential suitor. The stakes were high. For the girls, it was such anxious business that it was better treated as a game. They made bets among themselves that would be settled only at an altar. Those who joined in the girls' jokes were favored. Colonel William Smith, General Washington's dashing former aide, was their “model” for a fashionable, daring, desirable man. Walter Hellen was good for a game of battledore. David Sterrett called Louisa his “little wife.” After a French servant botched an introduction at a party, Peter Jay (son of the statesman John Jay) and Colonel John Trumbull were forever known as “Mr. Pétéràjay” and “Colonel Terrible.” When young Thomas Adams came to the house for dinner while visiting London, Nancy nicknamed him, for some reason, “Uncle Abel.” After that, his absent brother John Quincy was known as “Cain.” Louisa had no idea then, of course, of the significant roles both those men would come to play in her life.

The American men
who visited her father were not in England to find wives. They generally planned on living well and then leaving. In
fact, already Nancy had one engagement slip away when her intended partner returned to the United States. There were other, more dangerous aspects of marriage that a young woman was not supposed to acknowledge. A woman was not supposed to think about what marriage might entail. She was not allowed to dwell on the idea of separation from her family or the dangers of childbirth—or above all sex. She could not dismiss the overt attention of any bachelor, even if that bachelor was “old enough to be my father,” as Louisa once described Colonel Trumbull (or “Colonel Terrible”). Yet she had to deny it, even if “he took every opportunity to mark the distinction between myself and my sisters,” and even if he confessed his ardor to her, as Trumbull once did. She was supposed to be demure, pleasing, passive, and agreeable, to blend in, and yet also to be the one chosen. She was encouraged to expect a man's attentions and accept his proffered verses but to be “very much surprized” when he compared her to a cherub. Chastity and the appearance of spotless modesty were paramount. The girls were, Louisa wrote, “never permitted to be out of sight a moment.”

All games have rules. One was that the Johnson girls could not admit to being pursued. When her sisters decided that William Vans Murray was chasing Louisa, for instance, she professed perfect innocence. “I was perpetually quized literally without knowing what it meant,” she later wrote, “for my heart was as free as the roving birds who spreads in wanton sport his plumage to the garish sun.” Another rule was that bachelors were always in pursuit of the sisters. “A man old or young who visits frequently in a family of young ladies must be supposed to be in love,” Louisa would remember. Another rule was that love had an object. “When a young man frequents a family on terms of great intimacy where there are young ladies,” Louisa wrote, “one of them must of course be selected as an object of preference.” And who selected who was the object of preference? The sisters did.

And so when John Quincy became a fixture at the Johnsons' dinner table on Tower Hill, as 1795 turned to 1796, they decided that he
must be in love with one of them. And in fact, he was. But they were wrong about which one.

 • • • 

O
NE
NIGHT
at the Johnsons
' house on Tower Hill, just after the New Year, 1796, Louisa turned to John Quincy and, in her mellifluous voice, teased him. She had heard that he was a poet, she said, and she wanted him to write her a song. Her demand became a running joke, part of the “perpetual banter” between them. He took the challenge seriously, though, as he took every challenge. John Quincy actually did consider himself something of a poet, and throughout his life nothing made him want to rhyme like the presence of a pretty woman. So at dinner one evening soon after, he reached across the table and slipped Louisa a sealed piece of paper. She opened it immediately, found the promised song, and started to read it aloud. But she had made it through only a few lines when the younger Johnson girls' governess snatched the paper from her hands and whispered in her ear to stop—as if to say the sentiments in the poem were meant for Louisa alone.

A fluster of feeling inside Louisa echoed the fluster at the table. She would later insist that she was sure the poem wasn't private, and that the sentiments it expressed weren't genuine. She would later say that the governess's imagination was overwrought, and that the whole situation was based on a mistake. It was her older sister Nancy, not her, whom John Quincy was courting.

But in that moment, as she would remember it, something happened. The suggestion that he looked at her differently made her look at him differently. There was a surge of emotion, and then a change between them. Was this love? She had her doubts.

What did John Quincy
see when he looked at Louisa? There was a portrait painted of her at around the time she met him. In it, her skin is the same color of the milk-pink roses that she holds in her fingertips, and her hair is powdered and piled on top of her head in a nebula
of curls, as was the fashion. A baby blue sash encircles her narrow waist, pale where it catches the light and then darkening as it curves into shadow. A black velvet ribbon wrapped around her wrist, startling in its simplicity, is her only adornment. But what makes the painting so striking is the directness of her look. It is not at all the expression of a vain and vapid girl, of a pleasure seeker. It is not the face of some of the other girls John Quincy spent time with in London, like the rich Kitty Church, “a sweet girl entirely engrossed with pleasure, and formed to give as well as to enjoy it.” Louisa's dark gaze is intelligent, her smile small and assured. She is beautiful.

Louisa would always
insist that her looks were unremarkable. She claimed that she could not compare to her sister Nancy, who had auburn ringlets, a dimpled smile, and hazel eyes—“a perfect Hebe.” Nor did she think she rivaled Caroline, whose “form was light her complexion dazzling her manners arch and playful and her disposition sweet.” Her mother, Catherine, had been a Venus, and “was at this time very lovely, her person was very small, and exquisitely delicate, and very finely proportioned.” Louisa probably looked at herself and catalogued faults, as young women often do: a long face, a nose that swept a little upward. She was slight, usually thinner than she wanted to be. And it was true, she was not someone whose appearance radiated in the air around her, not someone who stopped the conversation when she walked into a room. Her face was singular, her prettiness more subtle than conventional. But she also may have deprecated her own appearance and insisted upon her modesty a little much, especially when she was fifty years old and writing a memoir for descendants in a family that frowned on superficiality, because she knew good looks were not a simple blessing. Even the Johnsons, despite their expensive tastes and interest in the
mode du monde
, knew that while beauty may have made a woman seem special and desirable, modesty was supposed to be the greater virtue. So Louisa both celebrated beauty and, with a little note of falseness, denied its importance. “Accustomed to consider
both my sisters superior to myself; surrounded by a beautiful growing family, and remarkably handsome parents, it never appeared to me to possess intrinsic value; and though I ranked it high among the blessings which I had received from heaven, it seemed
too natural
to excite a puérile vanity in my mind.” She knew she was beautiful—or at least that others thought she was. “In my own eyes I never possessed beauty,” she wrote; “and yet strange to say, I was so familiarized to the idea of possessing it.”

So there was something
unusually attractive about her, with suggestions of unmentionable desires. But there was something else, something that could only be glimpsed in the serious set of her mouth and in her eyes. She was different from other girls, different even from her sisters. Louisa's mother would later tell her that she had been “thoughtful or grave” as a child, yet also “a creature of ardent affections and strong impulse.” She still was. She had an untutored, solemn intelligence, a watchfulness that had earned her the nickname “Cassandra” within her family. But her seriousness enlivened into wit when she was at ease. She had a sense of humor, a teasing and testing nature. She thought of herself as timid, but she was contradictory by nature. Confident that she had nothing to gain or lose from John Quincy—since, of course, he was supposed to be Nancy's suitor—she had “rattled on” to him without reserve.

 • • • 

A
T
THE
END
OF
J
ANUARY
, with Louisa's birthday approaching—she would turn twenty-one on February 12—her father, Joshua, threw her a ball. (Perhaps he held it to help her find a husband, perhaps not—either way, the goal was likely never far from her parents' minds.) The house was filled with guests; the musicians played and the dancing continued long past midnight into morning. John Quincy stayed until three a.m. “Evening very agreeable,” he wrote in his diary afterward. He paid the guest of honor more than the usual attentions. Those
at the party whispered that his preference for the second Johnson daughter was “decidedly publick.” His obvious interest, Louisa would remember, “brought much trouble on my head.”

Nancy was furious. She was the one whom the sisters had designated as the chosen one. The unspoken rules of their game were broken. Marriage was the best viable opportunity open to a woman, but society dictated that she could not openly pursue a man. She was the passive player; she had only veto power over the choice of a mate. If John Quincy wanted Louisa and not Nancy, Louisa it would be, and “the whole family [was thrown] into confusion.”

Louisa might have
tried to defer or to stop John Quincy right there. But now in the superior position, she refused to refuse him. For weeks the sisters fought. A cold silence fell between them. Even John Quincy—not much disposed to note the moods of women in his diary—registered that something was wrong. “Nancy very much affected, I know not at what,” he wrote in his diary. “Louisa pretended a head ache for the privilege of being cross.”

Despite how close
the sisters were—or, more probably, because of it—their relationship had never been perfectly easy. Louisa was not the much-wanted son, nor the oldest or youngest or neediest—in fact, her father treated her as more independent and capable than the others, which made her a target of her older sister's envy, and so she found it “painful.” There had always been little sharp jokes and pranks between the sisters. Louisa would never forget the time her sisters slyly cut her hair short and curled close to her head; once they had powdered it, she looked awfully like a lamb. Louisa and Nancy had been introduced into society at the same time, had access to the same small pool of American men, had the same pressures placed upon them. And if they shone brighter for the combined lights of their beauty and accomplishments, then it was also because their competitiveness generated so much heat. The way Louisa describes a music performance with Nancy is telling, despite her claims that “no jealousy was excited” between
them. “On the contrary each endeavoured to add lustre to the other,” she insisted, before describing in a backhanded way how their competitiveness drove each of them to perform. “My natural timidity which was excessive, often proved almost insurmountable; but she would say something to me when sitting down to the instrument which would pique me, when she was particularly desirous that I should shine; and then I would sing at her and by pointing the words of the songs I selected; give them an expression of which I was unconscious but which generally produced the happiest effects on my auditors.”