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First Ladies of the United States: Louisa Adams

Louisa Adams

Louisa Catherine Adams (1775-1852) was the wife of President John Adams. 

Writings of Louisa Adams

Perspectives

A Traveled First Lady

Congress adjourned on 18 May 1852 for Louisa Catherine Adams's funeral, according her an honor never before offered a first lady. But her life and influence merited this extraordinary tribute. She had been first the daughter-in-law and then the wife of a president. She had assisted her husband as a diplomat at three of the major capitals of Europe. She had served as a leading hostess and significant figure in Washington for three decades. And yet, a century and a half later, she is barely remembered. A Traveled First Lady: Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams seeks to correct that oversight by sharing Adams's remarkable experiences in her own words. These excerpts from diaries and memoirs recount her early years in London and Paris (to this day she is the only foreign-born first lady), her courtship and marriage to John Quincy Adams, her time in the lavish courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg as a diplomat's wife, and her years aiding John Quincy's political career in Washington. Emotional, critical, witty, and, in the Adams tradition, always frank, her writings draw sharp portraits of people from every station, both servants and members of the imperial court, and deliver clear, well-informed opinions about the major issues of her day. Telling the story of her own life, juxtaposed with rich descriptions of European courts, Washington political maneuvers, and the continuing Adams family drama, Louisa Catherine Adams demonstrates why she was once considered one of the preeminent women of the nineteenth century.

The Adams Women

Paul Nagel's Descent from Glory was an extraordinary critical and popular success, a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection hailed by reviewers as "magnificent" (The New York Times Book Review) and "splendid" (The Christian Science Monitor). That book focused on the men in the Adams family, but many readers--and Nagel himself--felt that the most interesting and stirring part of the Adams family saga was the story of the women. Here at last is the book many readers urged Nagel to write: the full story of some of the most interesting and important and articulate women in American history. This is no mere sequel to the first book; it is an attempt to do justice in their own right to some extraordinary individuals in their own right who happened to be women and whose personal lives and outlooks have been eclipsed by the famous men who surrounded them. Nagel portrays his subjects as they saw themselves and each other. This is possible because of the abundant comment and confession they shared with each other, much of it surviving in the Adams Papers. They spoke to one another about their existence with a frankness and detail which is unmatched in American historical sources. We find them in the joy, sorrow, dreariness, and peril which came to females of that era, no matter who they were. Thus this intimate and candid portrait may be our nearest approach to how American females actally lived and thought between 1750 and 1850.

Mrs. Adams in Winter

Early in 1815, Louisa Catherine Adams and her young son left St. Petersburg in a heavy Russian carriage and set out on a difficult journey to meet her husband, John Quincy Adams, in Paris. She traveled through the snows of Eastern Europe, across the battlefields of Germany, and into a France then experiencing the tumultuous events of Napoleon's return from Elba. The prize-winning historian Michael O'Brien reconstructs for the first time Louisa Adams's extraordinary passage. An evocative history of the experience of travel in the days of carriages and kings, Mrs. Adams in Winter offers a moving portrait of a lady, her difficult marriage, and her conflicted sense of what it meant to be a woman caught between worlds.

Ladies of Liberty

In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times bestselling author and renowned political commentator--praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"--continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities. Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources--many of them previously unpublished--Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.