Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams

Louisa Catherine

The Other Mrs. Adams

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

HALCYON DAYS

All the scenes of my infancy ... float upon my fancy like visions which never could have any reality yet like visions of delight in which all was joy and peace and love.

—LOUISA CATHERINE ADAMS, "Record of a Life"

Louisa wove her myth of an idyllic childhood around "the handsomest man I have ever seen," her adored father, Joshua Johnson. In his daughter's eyes, Joshua's "temper was admirable; his tastes simple; his word sacred; and his heart pure and affectionate as that of the most unsophisticated Child of Nature." Others may have harbored a more jaundiced view of Joshua's moral compass, but Louisa never wavered in her loyalty. It was, after all, her father's willingness to seize the main chance that had provided the luxurious backdrop for the "visions of delight" that warmed her memory.

Sprawling, chaotic London was the place to be in 1771 if you were vigorous, restless, and hungry to make your fortune. Joshua perfectly fit the mold. A twenty-nine-year-old partner in the Annapolis mercantile firm Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson, he had arrived in London with a simple, audacious plan: cut out the middleman. If he could buy tea, calico, shoes, cutlery, and china directly from English manufacturers and suppliers, his firm would make a higher profit on sales of these products in America than if it employed London-based agents.

Joshua's task would require boldness, cunning, and charm. A stranger to the City of London's complex web of banking and trade, he first had to convince exporters to deal with him instead of with a familiar network of middlemen. He then had to identify those merchants who could offer him the most flexible and generous credit—a necessity considering the time lag in making transatlantic payments on the goods he hoped to ship overseas and sell in Annapolis.

Just before the American Revolution, Britain was coming into its own as the most powerful colonial power on earth. War with France over control of the North American colonies—called, in England, the Seven Years' War; in America, the French and Indian War—had ended in Britain's favor just seven years earlier. London, the largest city in the world and the center of international trade, teemed with nearly a million men, women, and children, most living in heartbreaking poverty in the city's East End. But the mid-eighteenth century had also seen historic growth in middle-class prosperity, fueled by the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the increasing dominance of England in maritime trade. Even the top tiers of society had begun to be infiltrated by self-made men and, trailing rich dowries, their daughters.

King George III, at thirty-three nearly Joshua's contemporary, had been on the British throne for eleven years. He ruled an empire that included Canada, the American colonies, islands in the Caribbean, and outposts in India and Africa. The wealth of his realm depended on trade within the Empire—huge quantities of manufactured goods sent to North America and the West Indies in exchange for tobacco, sugar, cotton, and wheat. A flourishing triangular trade involving African slaves shipped to the West Indies and the southern American states in exchange for raw materials like tobacco and sugar was at its height. Signs of prosperity were everywhere—in the newly lighted and paved streets, the busy shops, and the leafy squares graced by stately brick townhouses.

Now playing on a world-class stage, the handsome, mercurial Joshua knew he had to look the part. Throughout his life, he cared deeply about appearances, and although Annapolis society in the 1700s was as elegant as any in America, he desperately feared being taken for an unsophisticated colonial. Within a week of arriving in England he headed for the tailor's. "I am getting clothes made and shall have more the appearance of a Londoner," he reported in his first hurried dispatch to his business partners at home.

Louisa later described her father as the "descendant of an English Gentleman," and he was indeed a member of a prominent Maryland family descended from an equally well-respected clan of the same name in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. Joshua (1742–1802) was the eighth of eleven children, and one of seven sons, born to Thomas Johnson II (1702–c. 1777), a Maryland planter who served from time to time in the Maryland state legislature, and Dorcas Sedgwick Johnson. Joshua's older brother, Thomas III (1732–1819), was a delegate to the first Continental Congress, where he became a good friend of John Adams. He was later elected the first Revolutionary governor of Maryland, and, briefly (1792–1793), served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. For a younger son like Joshua, it would have been made clear early on that he was responsible for making his own way in the world. At a young age, he was apprenticed in the countinghouse, or office, of a merchant who had emigrated from Scotland. There he would probably have learned the rudiments of accounting as well as the business of transatlantic trade. In his early twenties Joshua seems to have set himself up as a retail merchant in Annapolis. He must have had some early success because, just before departing for England, he entered into partnership with the older and better-established Charles Wallace and John Davidson as a full member of the firm.

Wallace and Davidson believed they could adequately maintain their young partner in London on the profits realized by not having to pay various agents' commissions and by the more advantageous credit terms they expected him to negotiate with London merchants. Crucially, their plan assumed a firm financial market in both England and America, continuing strong demand in Annapolis for European goods, and sustained high tobacco prices in Maryland to ensure full coffers from which Annapolis and Chesapeake Bay planters and professionals could pay for their goods. The strategy was initially successful. Joshua, who had been staked by the firm to £3,000, began by fulfilling the orders he had brought with him from Annapolis. A month and a half after his arrival in London, he was able to dispatch a large shipload of goods to his partners in Annapolis. Elated with his success and taking his cue from the opulence all around him, he immediately began to cast himself as a "Gentleman and a Partner." He moved from cheap lodgings to more comfortable quarters in the heart of the City's financial and mercantile district, and his living expenses quickly began to mount. In Annapolis, Wallace and Davidson protested, not for the last time, that their young partner was living extravagantly, but Joshua was not deterred: "It is a maxim with me that I had rather sink the profits of my labour than to diminish my partners and self in the good opinion of the world. It has added all the consequence to us that I wished, as it has stripped me of the appearance of a transient person," he replied to their complaints.

Wallace, Davidson, and Johnson's business in London was at first limited to exporting household goods and clothing for retail sale in Maryland, but it soon expanded to include a tobacco trade in conjunction with Chesapeake Bay growers. Between 1773 and 1775, the partners handled as much as 70 percent of Maryland's tobacco exports. Joshua, meanwhile, expanded the firm's business interests to include insurance and other services and appears to have speculated privately in tobacco. As a result, he now had more than the appearance of wealth to recommend him; he was, at least temporarily, a man of property.

Joshua's newfound prosperity could not have come at a more opportune moment. In December 1773, at age thirty-one, he had become the father of a baby girl, Ann (invariably called Nancy). The infant's mother was Catherine Young Nuth (or Newth) (1758?–1811), probably sixteen years old. Three months before Nancy was born, Joshua was insisting in letters home to Maryland that there was no truth to the rumor he was married. "A man must possess true courage indeed to engage in the matrimonial way.... I am content to let the more enterprising enjoy the charmer with all her charms." In November 1773, with Nancy's arrival imminent, Joshua informed his partners that his expenses would continue to increase and that he required a combined "dwelling house, counting house, and sample house" in which to carry on the firm's business and entertain visiting American merchants. There was no mention of raising a family in such an establishment.

In fact, no record of a marriage between Joshua and Catherine around the time of Nancy's birth date has ever been located, although several biographers and genealogists, including an expert hired by Joshua's great-grandson Henry Adams, have made valiant efforts to do so. Joshua may not have been alone in wishing to keep the relationship under wraps. The prospective bride was legally a minor in 1773 and, at fifteen or sixteen, well under the average age (twenty-three) when English women of the time married. There may have been objections to a wedding on the part of her parents, who would have been required to provide their consent since a parish priest would have refused to celebrate the marriage without it. Catherine, herself, may have been illegitimate and estranged from one of her parents. Yet, as Nancy was duly baptized as legitimate in January 1774, a priest must have been convinced that a wedding had taken place before her birth.

The priest was almost certainly misled. Joshua and Catherine did not marry until August 22, 1785—more than eleven years after Nancy's birth and ten years after the arrival of Louisa—at a time when they were already the parents of six living children. Their wedding, celebrated on a Monday by the curate of Saint Anne's Soho, took place in a part of London far from their Tower Hill mansion and under a civil jurisdiction distinct from that of St. Botolph Aldgate and All Hallows Barking, the two parish churches where their London-born children were baptized.

Soho, then as now, was notorious for its raffish bohemianism and was home to prostitutes, music halls, and abundant pubs and bars. According to the St. Anne's Soho marriage register, curate John Jefferson affirmed that Joshua and Catherine were "of this parish" and had posted banns (typically for the three preceding weeks) before their marriage. It is possible that St. Anne's Soho, reflecting the ethos of its parish population, had a reputation as a church where few questions were asked of a prospective bride and groom and where a contribution to the curate's personal funds was not unwelcome, but precisely how Joshua and Catherine managed to marry without alerting anyone—except their two witnesses—will never be known. The small expatriate American community in London was effectively kept in the dark: no rumor of the secret wedding apparently reached the ears of John and Abigail Adams, who were living in England at the time and were occasional dinner guests of the Johnsons. Just as significantly, the Johnson children seem to have remained unaware that all but the two youngest daughters in the family had been born out of wedlock. There is no hint in any of Louisa's letters or autobiographical fragments to indicate she might have suspected there were any shadows surrounding her birth.

It may have been one of their witnesses, their longtime friend Elizabeth Hewlett, portrayed later by Louisa as "a very excentric woman of strong mind and still stronger passions," who persuaded Joshua and Catherine, after eleven years and seven children (one of whom had died), to make legal what they had successfully passed off as a fait accompli for so long. Throughout their lives together, the Johnsons had appeared in all respects to be legally married, and they were socially accepted as a married couple. They moved easily in American expatriate society and served as the London home away from home for many well-connected young men from the colonies who found themselves in London for business, study, or pleasure before and after the Revolution. Well-to-do American families would have been unlikely to have put their sons under the Johnsons' protection had there been a cloud over their marital status. All of the Johnson children were baptized as legitimate, a fact that may indicate their parents considered themselves married from the outset.

Louisa idealized her parents' marital relationship, particularly, as time went on, when her own proved so different. As she remembered it, her father worshipped her beautiful, delicate, alluring mother: "My father seemed to hang on every word she uttered and gazed on her with looks of love and admiration 'as if an encrease of appetite had grown by what it fed on' never did man love woman with a devotion so perfect—His sparkling eye beamed on her with an excess of tenderness and his smile seemed to blend all those good and amiable feelings which spring spontaneous from a faithful and benevolent heart—She was his pride his joy his love and in her and his Children was concentrated all that made life desirable."

Louisa also fondly recalled that her father's devotion to Catherine was so great that, if she felt unwell, he would cut her food and warm her fork, wrapping it in a napkin and heating it by the fire. It is not surprising that in later life, when her own world became achingly hard and she felt herself unloved and unappreciated, Louisa seemed to turn to illness as a way to elicit sympathy and attention.

In her parents, she was also witness to a pattern in marriages that flourished at the end of the eighteenth century, went into decline during the Victorian era, and did not emerge again until the twentieth century—a union in which husband and wife were bonded not as master and servant but as loving partners and companions. (Abigail and John Adams—who addressed one another in their letters as "My Dearest Friend"—were another prime example of this marital model.) Again and again, Louisa would look back—sometimes ruefully—on the mutual respect and appreciation she called "domestic felicity" that appeared to characterize her parents' relationship and that was often missing from her own.

Though in Louisa's eyes Joshua was the strong, central personality around whom the family gathered, Catherine was much more than a delicate, lovely flower, reclining on the parlor settee while a warmed fork was held to her lips. Catherine was a force to be reckoned with. Like other gentlewomen of her time, she probably handled the family's finances, and her decisions regarding the daily management of a complex household, which eventually included eight growing children, many long-term guests, and eleven servants, would have been respected.

Ambitious for her family, Catherine was an exceptional beauty, a gracious hostess, a brilliant conversationalist, and an excellent, if extravagant, household manager. In later years, she would be welcomed to the White House by Thomas Jefferson and invited to Mount Vernon by George and Martha Washington. Louisa, writing of the way she remembered Catherine at the time when she herself was a teenager, described her charm: "My Mother had been beautiful; she was at this time very lovely, her person was very small, and exquisitely delicate, and very finely proportioned. She was lively; her understanding highly cultivated, and her wit brilliant, sometimes almost too keen."

Catherine must have had some education—as had most girls, except those in the very lowest classes at the time—and her lively letters, written in a fine hand, demonstrate an easy command of spelling and composition. In later years, Abigail Adams delighted in hearing from her: "I shall be happy to learn from your pen whatever occurs worthy of observation, for tho retired from the world I like to know what is passing in it—especially if I can obtain it from one who is so capable of describing Life & Manners," the former First Lady wrote her friend in November 1809.

Since Catherine's letters to Abigail are as yet missing, their special quality has to be judged by the pleasure both John and Abigail Adams took in reading them. In the former president's estimation, "She was a woman of fine Understanding and held an ingenious Pen. A constant correspondence with [Abigail] was a high entertainment to us, full of useful information." The feisty Adams was not in the habit of praising the "fine Understanding" and "ingenious Pen" of even the most highly educated of his contemporaries, let alone a woman who died a poor widow of uncertain parentage. He recognized in Catherine Johnson a quality of mind that must have been nurtured in her youth by something finer than the street sophistication picked up from the prostitutes with whom she has sometimes been relegated. Later generations of Adamses and their biographers may have raised questions concerning Catherine's origins, but there is no hint that the former President and First Lady had anything but admiration for her.

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Excerpted from Louisa Catherine by Margery M. Heffron, David L. Michelmore. Copyright © 2014 The Estate of Margery Heffron. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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