by Jane Cook
The news was a stunner for other reasons too: party politics. By this time a two-party political system was firmly anchored in America. The term federalist initially characterized supporters of the new US Constitution in 1787. When the first federal administration began two years later, political “parties were generally deplored.” Many thought a republican government should avoid a party system. As a result “President George Washington was able to exercise nonpartisan leadership during the first few years of the new government.”
Disagreements over fiscal policies and the French Revolution split Washington’s administration, pitting treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton against secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, among others. The Federalists became a solid party by 1796 and elected vice president John Adams to the presidency. Jefferson founded another party, the Republican Party, which was later called the Democratic-Republican Party and Jeffersonian Republicans. This party eventually became today’s Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams did not refer to this party as Jeffersonian Republicans or Democratic-Republicans. He used the terms Federalists and Republicans. Though similar in name to Jefferson’s party, the modern Republican Party grew out of an anti-slavery movement embodied by Abraham Lincoln.
Despite John’s dropping by the Republican celebration that day, Louisa knew her husband was far from a sold-out supporter of the party that had defeated his father. Yet he was no longer a devoted Federalist, either. A politician without a party, Adams was as independent as a boulder between two intersecting streams.
John was aware that the Senate’s prior rejection of the post and his nomination had greatly relieved his anxious wife.
“I believe you will not be much disappointed at the failure of the proposition to go to Russia,” he understatedly, if not sarcastically, wrote to her in March 1809 from the nation’s capital, where he presented arguments to the Supreme Court for a legal case. He strategically leveraged the proceeding’s timing to attend Madison’s inauguration and ball with Louisa’s oldest sister, Nancy, and her husband, who lived on K Street. This gave him an opportunity to see if any other nomination from Madison was possible. It was not.
In that same March 1809 letter, John wrote that he had little “expectation of that or any other appointment; and although I feel myself obliged to the president for his nomination, I shall be better pleased to stay at home than I should have been to go to Russia.”
His lack of interest buried the possibility even further. Now he was singing a different but patriotic tune, one of duty and acceptance. All this—Adams’s attitude, the political dynamics, and the Senate’s reversal—left Louisa feeling betrayed.
“I had been so grossly deceived, every apprehension lulled—And now to come on me with such a shock!” she wailed. The timing was ironic. While celebrating Independence Day, Mrs. Adams discovered that she would soon be shackled into a type of diplomatic captivity.
John could not decline the opportunity to serve his country, especially after his failure in the Senate. What would people think? He could not show any hesitation or coolness to the idea.
“I have determined to go,” he confided to a friend in Congress. “I have yet acquiesced in the judgment of those to whom the Constitution has left it, and who have thought best to place me abroad.”
Two constitutional organs now called him to duty: the president and the Senate. He could not decline the post any more than he could an appointment to the US Supreme Court. Adams’s ambition prevented him from saying no.
“The public service, to a man of independent patriotism, is neither to be solicited nor refused,” he later reflected.
Regardless of feeling deceived, deep in her heart, Louisa knew the truth. Madison had made a wise choice. Her husband was the most qualified citizen to represent the United States in Russia. More than anyone else, he had the experience, skills, and intellect to succeed there.
She also understood the stresses of diplomatic life. Her path had first crossed with Johnny Adams’s when they were children. Johnny and his father had visited Louisa’s family in Nantes, France, in 1779 before the Adams duo returned to America. Louisa and Johnny had met again in London in 1783 when she was eight years old. He was sixteen.
Louisa didn’t get to know John Quincy the man until years later, in London in 1795. By the time he met Louisa again, he was living on his own. He had caught the attention of President Washington, who was so impressed with young John’s grasp of international affairs that he named him minister in residence to the Netherlands. Adams later traveled to London for the temporary assignment of exchanging ratifications for a treaty. There he spent many hours at the Johnson household. She was twenty; he was twenty-eight. Assuming at first that he was interested in her older sister Nancy, Louisa felt free to be herself. She played the piano, sang, and revealed her other passions. They fell in love and married two years later.
When the senior Adams became president in 1797, he appointed his son as minister to Prussia. For four years John Quincy and Louisa enjoyed the pleasures and challenges of diplomatic life in Berlin. Their early marriage was set against a backdrop of parties and pretension. They saw both the wickedness and wellspring of European courts. When John Adams lost the presidential election to Jefferson in 1800, the curtain closed on John Quincy’s court life in Berlin. Not wanting to give Jefferson the chance to fire or embarrass his son, President Adams recalled Minister Adams from Europe. John and Louisa exited the diplomatic stage and returned home in 1801.
By the time of her husband’s Russian appointment in July 1809, Louisa was sufficiently past her newlywed days. The Declaration of Independence was thirty-three years old; Louisa, thirty-four. She was too old to be seduced by the romance of court life.
“I had passed the age when courts are alluring.” So she thought.
Louisa knew, too, that if her husband represented America well in Russia, he might reverse his political fortunes at home, something he longed to do more than he would ever admit.
No Independence Day is complete without fireworks, which was how Louisa and John concluded their day. Adams returned to their house about 10:00 p.m., only to discover that his father had already taken his son John back to Quincy—perhaps to give the recent runaway the freedom to roam on an open farm. Everyone else went to a neighbor’s home to watch the fireworks from the rooftop.
“They [the fireworks] were principally from the gun house, and the rockets sent up, came down in blazing paper and burning sticks upon a house itself and several of the neighboring houses and yards including mine—in a manner which I thought dangerous,” John observed.
What neither John nor Louisa realized at the time was another hazardous possibility. The fireworks between them were just beginning, as intense and equally threatening to their home, marriage, and romance as those blazing paper sticks.
“No accidents of fire however ensued,” he recorded of the literal fireworks.
6
Good-bye, Boston Birches
JOHN HANDLED ALL THE ARRANGEMENTS FOR THEIR VOYAGE TO St. Petersburg, including packing and cataloging crates and crates of books, transferring his law cases to his brother Thomas, settling his finances, delivering his last lecture, resigning from Harvard, and drawing up his final will and testament. Although it was not unusual for a husband to make such business decisions, many choices bothered Louisa’s more liberal leanings about the capabilities of the female sex.
“Every preparation was made without the slightest consultation with me,” she wrote in her diary. Worst of all, John made the most important decision affecting her life and their marriage: he chose to leave their oldest boys behind in Boston.
“And even the disposal of my children and my sister was fixed without my knowledge until it was too late to change,” Louisa lamented over the man-made earthquake breaking up her family. The plan was as carved in stone as an epitaph on a grave—Louisa’s. At least that’s how it felt to her.
The decision came just two weeks before their departure. On July 22 Ab
igail Adams dined with John Quincy in Boston. John Quincy took George with him so the youngster could return with his grandmother to Peacefield, the family homestead in Quincy. His father had named this estate Peacefield in 1796 as a reminder of the peace between England and America that he’d helped broker to end the Revolutionary War in 1783. With such a name, Peacefield was a continual reminder of John Adams’s unsurpassable legacy.
The younger John had been with his grandparents since July 4. Perhaps assuming that her boys would feel trapped by the ship on such a long ocean voyage, Louisa probably didn’t mind if they spent a few more days with their grandparents at the farm.
The next day Adams and his father visited a local teacher, who agreed to educate George. Then he paid Aunt and Uncle Cranch to board his sons at their nearby home. The senior Adams had known Richard Cranch for years. He attended Cranch’s wedding to Mary Smith in 1762. John later courted Mary’s young sister, Abigail, and married her in 1764. Because Abigail had maintained a close relationship with her sister, John Quincy knew his sons would be in good hands. Thus the Adams men implemented the plan. The older boys would stay behind in America under the care of their grandparents and great-aunt and -uncle, while Louisa and toddler Charles accompanied Minister Adams to Russia.
“Judge Adams was commissioned to inform me of all this as it admitted of no change,” she documented of her brother-in-law’s role in giving her the news.
No matter the customs of the day dictating male-female decision making, Louisa felt betrayed. Perhaps she saw her marriage differently. Hadn’t he chosen the Genesis model to leave his family and cleave to her? Out of courtesy to her and her role as mother, why didn’t he consult her? If he loved her, why didn’t he tell her instead of sending Thomas? Was he cold? Cowardly? Or was his heart too sensitive to be the one to break the news to her?
Louisa pleaded. As in the case of death, no amount of mourning could change the outcome. Without recourse, legal or otherwise, she quickly descended into depression.
“O it was too hard! Not a soul entered into my feelings and all laughed to scorn my suffering at crying out that it was affectation.”
Affectation means “pretension” or “pretending.” How dare they insinuate her reaction was an act of theatrical emotion! She was experiencing the genuine heartache of a mother losing her children and her God-given responsibility to raise them. The Adams men knew of her previous losses. She was no Shakespeare. She was not drafting a drama or acting out a part but merely pouring out her heart.
Louisa’s in-laws had made similar sacrifices. John and Abigail had lived apart for most of the Revolutionary War. Abigail had cared for four children in Massachusetts while he served in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and later abroad.
The senior Adams knew all too well the temptations of European court life. He had witnessed the ways of the French court when he lobbied for the American cause. Perhaps forgetting the academic education John Quincy had received in Paris, he wanted to shield his grandsons from the depraved morals of similar circles. Or maybe the old man was simply prioritizing his lineage’s survival. If something happened to John, Louisa, and Charles on their travels, then at least the Adams line would continue through the male heirs left behind.
“On the 4 of August we sailed for Boston. I having been taken to Quincy to see my two boys and not being permitted to speak with the old gentleman alone, lest I should excite his pity and he allow me to take my boys with me.”
Louisa was permitted to say good-bye to her sons but not to her father-in-law. He couldn’t bear to hear the cracking of her voice as she tried to reassure George and John that she loved them. He couldn’t watch the torrent of tears streaming from her doelike eyes. Her journal might have given him a heart attack, had he been privileged enough to read it.
“Oh this agony of agonies! Can ambition repay such sacrifices? Never!!” she wrote.
Her sons would grow tall and strong, like the birches of Boston, in her absence. As she bid adieu to America, Louisa’s paper diary proved her safest refuge for weeping. She wrote with abandon, as if the pages were her best friend. And they were. Here she felt safe to pour out her deepest feelings, her dark thoughts. No matter that others thought the choice was logical; she understandably lacked hope for her future and her sons.
“And from that hour to the end of time life to me will be a succession of miseries only to cease with existence,” she wrote. No reasonable arguments could erase reality. Louisa was being separated from her children against her will—a heartbreaking way to start a dangerous journey into the unknown.
With the conspiracy unraveled and the plan fixed, a captive Mrs. Adams and her husband bid adieu to America on August 5, 1809. Closing the door of their home at Frog Lane and Nassau Street, they traveled by carriage a little more than two miles to Gray’s Wharf, owned by William Gray. There they boarded the Horace, one of Gray’s merchant vessels assigned to take them all the way to St. Petersburg. Built in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1800, the Horace weighed 382 tons. They departed in this three-mast, square-sailed boat just as the church bells rang at one o’clock in the afternoon.
John feared they had already left too late. After Gray told him the waters leading to St. Petersburg could freeze as early as October, Adams decided to embark no later than the end of July. Several logistical delays stalled their departure. Finally they had all they needed to set sail by August 5.
Fanfare followed them from the wharf. Ships in the Navy Yard saluted them. A garrison from Fort Independence marched and paraded as they passed. When the captain of a revenue cutter saw them, he sent an officer in a rowboat to extend well wishes for a safe intercontinental journey. The crew of the six-gun Horace returned these salutes. Guided by fair wind supported by fresh breezes, they couldn’t have asked for a better bon voyage as they left the bonds and birch trees of Boston and sailed toward a Russian destination.
No sooner did she step onto the deck’s wooden planks than Louisa regretted leaving her oldest boys behind. Guilt consumed her faster than seasickness.
“A man can take care of himself—And if he abandons one part of his family he soon learns that he might as well leave them all—I do not mean to suggest the smallest reproach—It was thought right and judicious by wiser heads than mine but I alone suffered the penalty—They are known only to God,” Louisa recorded of her heartache. This was her way of forgiving her father-in-law and husband, or at least an attempt at it.
Though he often hid his passions from public view, Adams was not indifferent to leaving his children behind; far from it.
“It is with a deep sense of the stormy and dangerous career upon which I enter; of the heavy responsibility that will press upon it, and of the unpromising prospect which it presents in perspective,” he wrote in his diary on July 5, 1809, after sending his acceptance letter to President Madison.
“My personal motives for staying at home are of the strongest kind; the age of my parents, and of the infancy of my children, both urge to the same result,” he reflected on why he ought to turn down the appointment.
Nevertheless, he could not say no to his country’s call. Because he believed the president’s motive was for the “welfare of the whole union,” he intended to devote all his powers to earning Madison’s trust.
He bade good-bye to his sons in a separate visit at his parents’ home. Though he claimed he was too busy making preparations—and his diary is full of the many details he finalized before leaving—he may have hidden the truth from his journal. Knowing they were not unified in the decision, he likely couldn’t bear to accompany Louisa to Quincy and say good-bye together.
Worrying that they might not survive the voyage, he also implored “the blessings of Almighty God, upon this my undertaking . . . and prepared alike for whatever event his Providence destines for its termination.”
John, Louisa, and Charles were not the only players on this nautical stage set. Joining them was Catherine, nicknamed Kitty. The presence of Kitty, too, was
forced upon Louisa. Of the seven daughters and one son in the Johnson clan, Louisa was second oldest; Kitty, the third youngest. In preparing for the voyage, John asked Thomas for advice on what to do about his sister-in-law: “I also enquired of him if Catherine Johnson should not go with us.”
Thomas and John’s sister, Nabby, had accompanied their mother to England and France years earlier in 1784. Thomas agreed that Louisa would benefit from the company of an American female companion. Louisa most assuredly loved Kitty, but she did not want to parent her. With their father deceased and their mother impoverished, Kitty needed Louisa to take care of her. Thus societal customs thrust Mrs. Adams into a chaperone for a very flirtatious woman in her early twenties on a ship filled with single men.
As planned from the beginning, nephew William Smith served as John’s secretary. Nine other men applied or inquired on behalf of a son or other male relative for the position of secretary to the new minister to Russia. While keeping his outer reserve in check, John was flattered by the attention. Everyone wanted to accompany him to St. Petersburg except one person—his wife.
Though he couldn’t solve that problem, he found a way to satisfy the demand and fill a need. With permission from the secretary of state, he allowed a few of these men, those with the greatest character and loyalty to country, to go as attachés. John made sure, however, that they would not drain the US Treasury. He informed them: “[T]hey should go altogether at their own expense and occasion no charge to the government.” Three agreed: Francis Gray, Alexander Everett, and John Spear Smith.
Francis was Mr. Gray’s son. The richest man in America at the time, Gray owned the Horace among thirty or more ships. He was one of the few who had stood by Adams when he resigned in defeat from the Senate. He trusted John so much that he was willing to send his son with him to Russia. There Francis could see the Baltic trade world with his own eyes and return to Boston to steer the family business.
