The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams by Phyllis Lee Levin

Author:Phyllis Lee Levin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2014-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

“The Usual Mixture between Sweet and Bitter”

Joshua Johnson, the United States consul, lived on Cooper’s Row on Great Tower Hill—both Roman and medieval in its structures, and the sometime habitat of Chaucer—on the eastern edge of the city of London and the north bank of the River Thames. Of the brothers’ introduction and first evenings together at the Johnson household, there are two distinct versions. According to John Quincy’s spare testimony in his daily diary, dated November 11, he dined with Mr. Trumbull at Johnson’s and a few weeks later pronounced all the daughters “pretty and agreeable,” and he admired the way Nancy played the pianoforte, Louisa sang, Caroline was at the harp.1

For Louisa, the memory was more vivid, despite penning the details a distant 30 years later in the “Record of My Life,” July 25, 1825. As she recalled, the painter Colonel John Trumbull (formerly aide de camp to General Washington, whom the French servant called Colonel Terrible) had introduced them, and when John Quincy first supped with her family, “he was in high spirits, conversed most agreeably and after he retired all the family spoke well of him. His dress, however, produced some mirth as it was completely Dutch and the coat almost white.” In fact, when Trumbull joked with the girls and said Mr. Adams was a fine fellow and would make a good husband, Louisa and her sisters did not take his recommendation seriously for “his dress did not impress us agreeably as it made his person appear to very great disadvantage.”2

Also, for some strange reason, Louisa said, her sister Nancy had nicknamed John Quincy “Cain” and his brother Tom “Abel.” Louisa also mentioned in her memoir, “merely to show how little idea or desire there was in the family to plot or plan a marriage between the families,” that they were “too entirely happy to make marriage a want and we only looked forward to it as . . . evidence that we were not devoid of those attributes which generally are the operating causes of affection.” What she does not mention is her family’s pressure on John Quincy to marry Louisa within four months of their introduction.3

John Quincy went to the Johnsons’, in the shadow of the looming Tower of London, to collect letters from home that brought “the usual mixture between sweet and bitter.” In a sense, that mixture described the state of affairs abroad that John Quincy would report in seven-, eight- and eleven-page, tightly scripted, densely newsworthy, encyclopedic letters to the new secretary of state, Timothy Pickering, and to colleagues, friends and family—such news as the alarming fact that England’s state was not much less critical than that of France, that grain and flour were scarce, that riots had taken place in different parts of the kingdom and, on the first day of the current session of Parliament, the king had been personally insulted, the glass of his coach shattered by a stone.4

As for France, the establishment of

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