![]() She is elegantly dressed and plays the harp, an emblem of her musical ability and refinement. ![]() Here, Louisa is shown about thirty years later, around the time her husband took office as president. He fell in love with Louisa, and proposed to the twenty-two-year-old beauty only four months after they met. John Quincy Adams visited the Johnsons while serving as American minister to Holland. Her father was the first American consul in England after the Revolutionary War, and the elegant Johnson household was a gathering spot for prominent Americans passing through London. (Louisa Catherine Johnson) John Quincy Adams Luce Center Label Louisa Catherine Johnson was born in England to an American father and British mother. 1824 Artist Charles Bird King, born Newport, RI 1785-died Washington, DC 1862 Sitter Mrs. Learn more about Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams’s spouse, John Quincy Adams.Object Details Date ca. Copyright 2009 by the White House Historical Association. The biographies of the First Ladies on are from “The First Ladies of the United States of America,” by Allida Black. He was fatally stricken at the Capitol the following year she died in Washington in 1852, and today lies buried at his side in the family church at Quincy. The Adamses could look back on a secure happiness as well as many trials when they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary at Quincy in 1847. Louisa thought she was retiring to Massachusetts permanently, but in 1831 her husband began 17 years of notable service in the House of Representatives. The necessary entertainments were always elegant, however and her cordial hospitality made the last official reception a gracious occasion although her husband had lost his bid for re-election and partisan feeling still ran high. ![]() Though she continued her weekly “drawing rooms,” she preferred quiet evenings–reading, composing music and verse, playing her harp. ![]() Good music enhanced her Tuesday evenings at home, and theater parties contributed to her reputation as an outstanding hostess.īut the pleasure of moving to the White House in 1825 was dimmed by the bitter politics of the election and by her own poor health. Happily, the next two years gave her an interlude of family life in the country of her birth.Īppointment of John Quincy as Monroe’s Secretary of State brought the Adamses to Washington in 1817, and Louisa’s drawing room became a center for the diplomatic corps and other notables. To join him, Louisa had to make a forty-day journey across war-ravaged Europe by coach in winter roving bands of stragglers and highwaymen filled her with “unspeakable terrors” for her son. Peace negotiations called Adams to Ghent in 1814 and then to London. Despite the glamour of the tsar’s court, she had to struggle with cold winters, strange customs, limited funds, and poor health an infant daughter born in 1811 died the next year. She left her two older sons in Massachusetts for education in 1809 when she took two-year-old Charles Francis to Russia, where Adams served as Minister. When the Johnsons had settled in the capital, Louisa felt more at home there than she ever did in New England. Then began years divided among the family home in Quincy, Massachusetts, their house in Boston, and a political home in Washington, D.C. At the Prussian court she displayed the style and grace of a diplomat’s lady the ways of a Yankee farm community seemed strange indeed in 1801 when she first reached the country of which she was a citizen. Three years later they were married, and went to Berlin in course of duty. She was born in London to an English mother, Catherine Nuth Johnson, but her father was American–Joshua Johnson, of Maryland–and he served as United States consul after 1790.Ī career diplomat at 27, accredited to the Netherlands, John Quincy developed his interest in charming 19-year-old Louisa when they met in London in 1794. Political enemies sometimes called her English. Louisa Catherine Adams, the first of America’s First Ladies to be born outside of the United States, did not come to this country until four years after she had married John Quincy Adams.
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