John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  In his letters home, John Quincy only hinted of a liaison at first, without identifying Louisa. Fearing her son’s intended was English and would destroy his prospects for political success in America, Abigail fretted, “I would hope for the love I bear my country, that the siren is at least half-blood .”22 With memories of Bunker’s Hill and the Boston occupation swirling in her head, Abigail still despised the British. John Quincy’s father was more philosophical than his wife, however. “Alas! Poor John!” he remarked to Abigail. “If the young man really loves her, I will not thwart him. . . . Ambition and love live together well. . . . A man may be mad with both at once. . . . His father and his mother too know what it is. . . . Witness Caesar and Anthony with Cleopatra and many others.”23

  Twenty-year-old Louisa Catherine Johnson, the English-born daughter of the American consul in London, caught John Quincy Adams’s eye, and he proposed marriage to her in February 1796. (PORTRAIT BY EDWARD SAVAGE, NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  A letter from John Quincy eventually calmed both their fears:

  Your apprehensions as to the tastes and sentiments of my friend [were] perfectly natural, and all your observations on the subject were received by me with gratitude, as I know them to proceed from serious concern and the purest parental affection. . . . But she has goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition as well as spirit and character and with those qualities, I shall venture upon the chances of success and hope you will find her . . . such a daughter as you would wish for your son.24

  Moved by his letter, Abigail answered contritely, “I consider her already as my daughter.” She went on to ask for a miniature portrait and lock of her future daughter-in-law’s hair.25 John Adams also sent his blessing, telling his son, “You are now of age to judge for yourself; and whether you return [to England] and choose her or whether you choose elsewhere, your deliberate choice will be mine.”26

  Although Louisa had wanted to marry immediately, John Quincy refused, insisting he could not consider marriage until he was financially secure. His salary, he insisted, was not enough to afford proper lodgings for a minister and his wife, let alone a wife used to luxuries. His plan was to finish his three-year assignment in Holland and, in 1797, return to Massachusetts, reestablish his law practice, and then marry. A month after John Quincy had proposed, he spent one last “evening of delight and of regret, and I took my leave of the [Johnson] family with sensations unusually painful.”27

  “On my return from England,” he wrote in his diary, “I determined to resume a life of applications to business and study,”28 and, indeed, he reveled in the calm and relaxation of intense, solitary study. “To improve in the Dutch language, I have usually translated a page every day. . . . My progress in Italian is slow. . . . The language is enchanting. . . . To keep alive my Latin, I have begun to translate a page of Tacitus every day . . . into French.”29

  His official duties seldom required more than a few hours a day. He wrote to the Leyden Gazette, for example, protesting an article asserting that “disgust at the ingratitude of the American people had induced General Washington to retire from his eminent station.” John Quincy asked the editor to “have the goodness to correct . . . an imputation both injurious to the President and people of the United States.”

  The reasons assigned by the President himself for declining to be viewed as a candidate for the approaching election are his time of life, his strong inclinations towards a retired life, and the peaceable, calm and prosperous state of affairs in that country. . . . The imputation of disgust to General Washington and of ingratitude to the Americans is merely the calumny of English spirits beholding the felicity of the Americans.30

  As summer neared its end, John Quincy learned that George Washington had promoted him from minister to minister plenipotentiary, with a new assignment in Lisbon, Portugal, to begin in the spring of 1797. His salary would double to $9,000 a year and allow him an additional $4,500 a year for expenses—enough to marry Louisa and take her with him to his new post. The promotion was not only a reward for his good work and steadfast loyalty to the President’s policies; it was the President’s way of publicly demonstrating his confidence in John Quincy’s diplomatic skills. Although reluctant to postpone his return to America by another three years, John Quincy agreed to take the post after his brother Thomas promised to go as well.

  “I am still delighted with your facts, your opinions, and your principles,” Vice President John Adams wrote to his son. “You need not be anxious about the succession to the presidency. . . . No man who has been mentioned or thought of, but has a just value of your merits. Even if your father should be the person, he will not so far affect a disinterest as to injure you. If Jefferson, Henry, Jay, Hamilton or Pinckney should be elected, your honor and promotion will be in no hazard.”31

  On September 19, 1796, the American Daily Advertiser published President Washington’s Farewell Address stating emphatically that he would not serve after his second term in office. He also warned Americans of the dangers of divisive political parties at home and urged them to unite in a “fraternal union.” In foreign affairs, he urged keeping the United States a perennially neutral nation, out of foreign wars and with no long-term ties to any foreign nations.

  In the vicious election campaign that followed, Federalists supported Vice President John Adams, who pledged to continue Washington’s policy of rapprochement with Britain within the context of neutrality in foreign conflicts. Adams’s chief opponent was former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, who called himself a Democrat-Republican, supported the French Revolution, and sought closer ties to France, regardless of the effects on trade with England.

  French minister Pierre August Adet tried to influence the election with pamphlets urging Americans to vote for Jefferson but only succeeded in provoking widespread revulsion against France and eroding the influence of Francophiles in America. Federalists demonized Adet and warned that a Jefferson presidency would be “fatal to our independence, now that the interference of a foreign nation in our affairs is no longer disguised.”32 The Connecticut Courant warned that the French minister was trying to “wean us from the government and administrators of our own choice and make us willing to be governed by such as France shall think best for us—beginning with Jefferson.”33 Even Republicans were offended by Adet’s meddling, with one of them railing that Adet had destroyed Jefferson’s chances for election and “irretrievably diminished the good will felt for his government and the people of France.”34

  In the end, John Adams eked out a victory over Thomas Jefferson by three Electoral College votes, by rule relegating Jefferson to the vice presidency.

  In the days before the election, Abigail Adams had repeatedly warned her son not to demand any special consideration if his father won, and John Quincy had responded accordingly: “I hope my ever dear and honored mother . . . that upon the contingency of my father’s being placed in the first magistracy, I shall never give him any trouble by solicitation for office of any kind.”

  Your late letters have repeated so many times that I shall in that case have nothing to expect that I am afraid you have imagined it possible that I might form expectations from such an event. I had hoped that my mother knew me better; that she did me the justice to believe that I have not been so totally regardless or forgetful of the principles which my education has instilled, nor so totally destitute of a personal sense of delicacy as to be susceptible of a wish in that direction.35

  President John Adams, America’s second President, ignored charges of nepotism and, on the advice of George Washington, retained his son John Quincy Adams in America’s foreign diplomatic corps. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Deeply touched by her son’s letter, Abigail Adams sent it on to her husband, who shared it with Washington. The President had, in fact, worried that John Adams’s revulsion at nepotism might lead him to dismiss his son from the diplomatic corps, and, indeed, Adams had planned to do just that. After Washingt
on read John Quincy’s letter, he told Adams, “The sentiments do honor to the head and heart of the writer, and if my wishes would be of any avail, they should go to you in the strong hope [his italics] that you will not withhold merited promotion for Mr. John [Quincy] Adams because he is your son.”

  For without intending to compliment the father or the mother . . . I give it as my decided opinion that Mr. Adams is the most valuable public character we have abroad, and that he will prove himself to be the ablest of all our diplomatic corps. . . . The public, more and more as he is known, are appreciating his talents and worth, and his country would sustain a loss if these are checked by over delicacy on your part.36

  “Go to Lisbon,” the President-elect wrote to reassure his son, “and send me as good intelligence from all parts of Europe as you have done.”37

  After John Quincy told Louisa of his new appointment—and the enormous increase in his salary—they saw no reason to postpone their marriage. He and Thomas packed up their things and shipped everything to Lisbon before sailing to London for the wedding. To their consternation, however, unexpected letters arrived from the secretary of state and from John Quincy’s father, the new President, directing him not to proceed to Lisbon but to wait for a commission to the Prussian court in Berlin. Although Berlin was a far more important post than Lisbon, neither John Quincy nor Louisa (nor Thomas, for that matter) was pleased about foregoing Portugal’s sunny climes for the long, grey, dismal winters of northern Europe. And John Quincy was livid about having spent $2,500 to ship most of his and Thomas’s clothes, furniture, and books—especially his books—to Lisbon.

  John Quincy Adams married Louisa Catherine Johnson in an Anglican service in London on July 26, 1797, with his brother and her parents and sisters attending. Two weeks earlier, John Quincy had turned thirty; his bride was twenty-two; and in the course of three idyllic months honeymooning in the English countryside, they wrote to his “Dear and Honored Parents” to share their joy: “I have now the happiness of presenting you another daughter,” John Quincy wrote, “worthy as I fully believe of adding one to the number of those who endear that relation to you. The day before yesterday united us for life. My recommendation of her to your kindness and affection I know will be unnecessary.”

  Louisa Catherine appended her own appeal for the Adamses’ parental support:

  The day before yesterday, by uniting me to your beloved son, has given me a claim to your parental affection, a claim I already feel will inspire me with veneration to pursue the path of rectitude and render me as deserving of your esteem and tenderness. . . . To be respected . . . and to meet the approbation of my husband and family is the greatest wish of my heart. Stimulated by these motives . . . will prove a sufficient incitement never to sully the title of subscribing myself your Dutiful Daughter.38

  The joys of their honeymoon suddenly vanished, however, when they returned to London. They knew, of course, that they faced three years of northern European winters in Berlin and enormous difficulties recovering John Quincy’s possessions in Lisbon. What they did not—could not—expect was an angry mob at the front door of the Johnson mansion in London, screaming for John Quincy to pay thousands of pounds in overdue bills.

  CHAPTER 6

  A Free, Independent, and Powerful Nation

  When John Quincy and his bride crossed London Bridge to the Johnson family mansion after their honeymoon, they expected relatives, friends, and other well-wishers to greet them. Instead, they found a mob of angry, twisted faces, screaming for “money! my money!” During John Quincy and his new wife’s absence, Louisa’s father’s business had collapsed. A cargo-filled ship had sunk in mid-ocean, and one of his partners absconded with company funds. Bankrupt and facing debtors’ prison if he remained in England, he fled to America with his wife and children, leaving behind the angry creditors who now blocked John Quincy and Louisa’s access to her parents’ home.

  With no other recourse, Joshua Johnson’s creditors demanded that John Quincy cover his father-in-law’s debts. The press accused Louisa and her father of having lured the unsuspecting American into marrying a penniless woman to bilk him of his money. “It is forty-three years since I became a wife,” Louisa would recall years later, “and yet the rankling sore is not healed which then broke upon my heart of hearts.”1

  Her father’s bankruptcy erased the £500 dowry he had pledged to John Quincy and, indeed, gave John Quincy the legal right to recant his marriage vows, but he stood by his bride even as she sank into despondency under the weight of humiliation. As he tried to comfort her, John Quincy faced serious difficulties of his own. Having arranged to transfer his belongings from Lisbon to Berlin, he now learned that the Senate had postponed voting on his appointment to the Prussian court. Although it had unanimously approved his appointment to Lisbon by President Washington, it balked at approving his appointment by President Adams after newspapers assailed the President for nepotism.

  Noting that Washington had refused to select even the most distant relatives for office, Boston’s Independent Chronicle called John Quincy “the American Prince of Wales”—sent abroad “to prosecute his studies.” The newspaper charged that, as the first appointment of his father’s administration, “this young man, from an obscure practitioner of the law, has been mounted on the political ladder with an uncommon celerity. Young John Adams’s negotiations have terminated in a marriage with an English lady. . . . It is a happy circumstance that he has made no other treaty.”2 And Aurora editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, Benjamin Franklin’s grandson and John Quincy’s former schoolmate, demanded that President John Adams resign “before it is too late to retrieve our deranged affairs.”3

  Abigail was furious at what she called “misrepresentations” and “billingsgate” (vulgar abuse). John Quincy reacted with equal rage. “My old schoolfellow Bache,” he snapped, “has become too thoroughbred a democrat to suffer any regard for ancient friendship or any sense of generosity for an absent enemy to suspend his scurrility.”4

  Despite Abigail’s protests, Bache’s “billingsgate” had its desired effect on the Senate, which postponed consideration of John Quincy’s Berlin appointment three times before acceding to the President’s wishes. John Quincy Adams, his wife Louisa, and his brother Thomas set sail for Hamburg, on October 18, 1797, elated by the prospects of a new adventure. As they put to sea, Louisa added to their collective joy by announcing that she was pregnant.

  On November 7, the Adamses reached Berlin’s gates, only to be “questioned by a dapper young lieutenant who did not know—until one of his private soldiers explained to him—who the United States of America were.”5

  By the time they reached Berlin, King Frederick William II had died, and John Quincy had to send to Philadelphia for new papers designating him minister plenipotentiary to the new court of King Frederick William III. The papers arrived just before Christmas—as did all the furniture, baggage, and books from Lisbon. With all their personal possessions in hand, John Quincy, Louisa, and Thomas were, at last, able to move from their hotel into a house of their own. A few days later, John Quincy presented his papers at court, where the new king, his three highest ministers, and other dignitaries received him warmly after he demonstrated his fluency in both French and German. Royal society embraced John Quincy and Louisa as an American prince and princess. The pair attended royal banquets and balls, and John Quincy spent three days as a guest of honor at “the grand annual reviews of the troops”—a spectacle of color, parades, and precision marching by tens of thousands of soldiers over hundreds of acres. Always gathering intelligence to relay to the secretary of state, he noted, “There were five regiments of cavalry of twelve hundred men each and ten regiments of infantry of two thousand men each. The troops are in admirable condition and exhibit a very fine appearance.”6

  With an elegant house—and expense account—John Quincy and Louisa opened their doors to European society and looked forward to a festive Christmas, when tragedy struck. Louisa miscarried
—not once, but twice in succession over the next six months. “For ten days,” he wrote to his father, “I could scarcely leave her bedside for a moment.”7

  Her miscarriages left her so pale that the queen urged her to use rouge on her cheeks and gave her a box, which John Quincy insisted she must return. Only actresses and “fallen women” wore makeup in New England, and when John Quincy saw his wife wearing rouge as they were to leave for the ball one evening, he told her that “unless I allowed him to wash my face, he would not go.” Louisa said, “He took a towel, drew me on his knee, and all my beauty was washed away.”8

  Although John Quincy kissed her later and put the incident behind him, Louisa never forgot it. Decades later, the wound still festered, as she recalled her husband’s response. Louisa’s pallor, however, continued to provoke “teasing about my pale face” at court. Months after the first incident, she again applied a touch of rouge and “walked boldly forward to meet Mr. Adams. As soon as he saw me, he requested me to wash it off, while I with some temper refused,” and John Quincy left without her. Louisa went on her own to dine with friends, and when John Quincy met her at the end of the evening, “we returned home as good friends as ever.”9 John Quincy never explained his uncharacteristically hurtful behavior.

  Between Louisa’s illnesses, John Quincy attempted to negotiate extending a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia for another ten years. Benjamin Franklin had negotiated the original treaty, but by the time John Quincy Adams appeared in Berlin, the status of the United States had changed. Now a trading nation of consequence and all but out of debt, the United States had become a valuable trading partner, and the Prussians eagerly renewed their ties—on John Quincy’s birthday, July 11, 1799.

  The treaty renewal, however, came at just the wrong time for both countries. The French Directory’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, had just proclaimed what he called France’s “natural right” to give law to the world and recover the colonial empire of the 1750s that France had lost to Britain in the Seven Years War. French troops swept across the Rhineland, Switzerland, Italy, Venice, Dalmatia, and the Ionian Islands, and French warships wreaked havoc on Anglo-American trade in the Caribbean and on the Atlantic. By the time John Adams assumed the presidency, the French had seized 340 American ships—more than half the American merchant fleet, with cargoes valued at more than $55 million. Hundreds of American seamen languished in prison chains in Brest, Bordeaux, and the French West Indies. Insurance rates on American cargoes soared and threatened to price American exports out of world markets. After France rejected Charles Pinckney as America’s new ambassador, President Adams and the Federalist-controlled Senate threatened war.