Free Louisa by Louisa Thomas Page A

expensive. He could not be certain of how the United States would be received; after all, when he had made the trip to Russia as a boy, accompanying the envoy Francis Dana, Dana had been entirely ignored. And there was, of course, the matter of their three young boys.
    If the thought of bringing all the children or leaving Louisa behind with them even crossed his mind, there is no record of it. John Quincy seems to have wanted his wife with him, even where wives were not often found.
    But the children were another story. The two older children, John and George, would stay in the United States, boarded with Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch. Later, Louisa would claim that she wasn’t involved in the decision. There is no evidence to contradict Louisa’s ownmemory of how that decision was made, and it is in keeping with how the family tended to work. When John Quincy weighed the factors for going to St. Petersburg, he included his job at Harvard, the president and his countrymen’s faith in him, the old age of his parents, the young age of his children. Nowhere, it appears, did he consider his wife. Nor did he acknowledge her resistance, even if the anguish she later described was amplified by tragedy and time. John Quincy’s exercise of his power in deciding to leave George and John behind would become an inextinguishable source of her fury. “I had been so grossly deceived!” she would write. Again and again, and when it mattered most, Louisa was absent in the major decisions that involved her life and the lives of her children.
    John Quincy and Abigail made the arrangements for George and John to live with John Quincy’s aunt and uncle, the Cranchs. “I think I could not consent to part with them all,” Abigail wrote to her sister. The boys’ mother was apparently not given that choice. As Louisa would tell it, Thomas was the one who broke the news to her. Not even John Adams was told ahead of time, for fear that she would “excite his pity and he allow me to take my boys with me.” Abigail was the one who suggested that Kitty Johnson accompany Louisa, and Charles, not even two years old, would also come. The details were managed; the trunks were packed; passage was arranged; in all of these discussions and arrangements, she would later insist, and John Quincy’s diary at the time would suggest, she was nowhere to be found.
    Just before they left, John Quincy and Louisa had their silhouettes cut by an artist for their children. If George and John could not remember the color of her eyes and the feel of her cheeks, then at least they would know the slope of her nose, the curve of her small chin. Then at noon on Saturday, August 5, 1809, a group consisting of John Quincy; Charles, only two weeks from his second birthday; Louisa’s sister Kitty, who was vivacious, charming, and “entirely dependent without one sixpence in the world”; John Quincy’s twenty-two-year-old nephewWilliam Steuben Smith, who would serve as his secretary; Martha Godfrey, Louisa’s chambermaid; Nelson, a free black from Trinidad who would serve as John Quincy’s valet; and Louisa boarded the ship
Horace
in the Charlestown harbor. Waiting for them were two young men, Alexander Everett and Francis Gray, who were going to Russia as diplomatic attachés at their parents’ expense. As the church bells in Boston and Charlestown rang in one o’clock in the afternoon, the ship left its mooring. By the time night obscured the view, land was almost out of sight.
    What Louisa thought as she fell asleep that first night at sea is impossible to know; she left no contemporaneous record. None of her letters from the time survive, save for a stiff thank-you to Dolley Madison for the honor bestowed on John Quincy. But in Louisa’s late accounts of that moment, she insisted that it had not been her choice to leave her children. At the time, she felt no choice but to do as her husband