How Do You Solve a Problem Like Louisa?: Gender, Politics, and an Adams Family Revival

Correction:
There was a misspelling of Margery M. Heffron's name on pages 402 and 405. Jane Austen's name was misspelled on pages 403 and 405. The HTML version of this article has been corrected.

That John Quincy Adams was one of our Great Americans is beyond debate. At age ten he accompanied his (founding) father to Europe as a diplomatic aide during the Revolutionary War. It is not too much to say that his life, from that moment forward, was devoted to public service. Sixty-nine years later he collapsed and died on the floor of the House of Representatives while protesting an immoral war against Mexico. John Quincy was brilliant, indomitable, and selflessly devoted to the interests of the nation. One of the best-travelled men of his age, he served as a diplomat in three European countries and helped negotiate the treaty of Ghent, bringing the War of 1812 to a close. He was a good senator, brilliant secretary of state, and one of the bravest congressional representatives in U.S. history. He was a visionary in the realms of foreign policy and economics. And he was a committed intellectual who devoted his little spare time to a sprawling study of weights and measures, undertaken with the intention of bringing the nations into alignment through systematization. The study was dense and largely ignored at the time of its publication, which was at government expense. Not even John Quincy’s father, the great John Adams, could digest it. But much like its author, it is appreciated today for its breadth, ambition, intensity, and remarkable foresight.

Had it not been for his single disastrous term as president in the 1820s—a term that began in scandal and accomplished virtually nothing—John Quincy would probably be better loved. Like the man who eventually became his secretary of state, Henry Clay, he might be remembered as a brilliant innovator who should have been president, instead of as a failed, moralizing pedant. He might, indeed, never have needed a revival, because he would never have disappeared from view.

But John Quincy Adams was never well loved. “He did not aim to please, and he largely succeeded,” as James Traub succinctly puts it (p. xi). In the era of popular politics personified by Adams’ great rival, Andrew Jackson, not to at least aim to please was a cardinal sin in a politician. It was unthinkable in a president. Nor has it necessarily become more palatable since.

Were John Quincy’s antagonism limited to the public, it could be explained away. But most scholars agree that he was also a difficult husband and father. He repeatedly deserted his children for months at a time, and on one occasion for years. When he was appointed the first U.S. minister to Russia in 1809, he insisted over his wife Louisa’s objections that two of his three sons, neither older than nine, remain in the United States while Louisa and their youngest child accompanied him. The two boys were without their parents for six years. While present he withheld affection from his sons and made his disappointment with their accomplishments abundantly clear. Few biographers have been willing to disagree with Louisa’s assessment that those desertions, combined with their father’s harsh and demanding standards, were in part responsible for the early deaths...