An Adams Homecoming

On September 4, 1801, John Quincy Adams stepped ashore in Philadelphia, returning to the United States almost exactly seven years after he had left on his diplomatic mission to the Netherlands. He was not returning alone however; now his wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, and their first son, five-month-old George Washington Adams, accompanied him. Greeted by his brother Thomas Boylston Adams who was living in the city, the reunion was a happy but brief one. Both Louisa and John Quincy were anxious to see their parents once more but as the Johnsons lived in Washington, D.C., and the Adamses in Quincy, going together would mean a long wait for one of them. Neither wanted to put off greeting their families and so they went in opposite directions for the first time in their marriage. Louisa departed on the stage on September 12 with their son headed south, and John headed first to New York to see his sister, Nabby, before completing the journey to Massachusetts.

The decision to go independently was not without its concerns, however. Although her father was American, Louisa was “yet a forlorn stranger in the land of my Fathers” and ultimately in an unfamiliar country with an infant. John Quincy noted his distress over the separation in his Diary: “I parted from her and my child with pain and no small concern and anxiety.”

In her Autobiography, Louisa recalled reuniting with her parents for the first time in four years: “When I arrived after a tedious and dangerous journey, my Father was standing on the steps at the door of the house, expecting his Child, yet he did not know me— After he had recovered from the shock at first seeing me; he kept exclaiming that ‘he did not know his own Child,’ and it was sometime before he could calm his feelings, and talk with me.” John Quincy’s experience on the other had was quite different; on the 21st he recorded the event: “Here I had the inexpressible delight of finding once more my parents. After an absence of seven years— This pleasure would have been unalloyed but for the feeble and infirm state of my mother’s health. My parents received me with a welcome of the tenderest affection.”

As both John Quincy and Louisa settled in, they reunited with old friends and wrote to each other from afar. Although the plan was for Louisa to once again travel alone and meet John Quincy in Massachusetts, John Quincy agreed to meet Louisa and escort her and their son northward for one more significant homecoming—on November 25 John Quincy “had the pleasure of introducing my wife and child to my parents.” For her part, Louisa acknowledged that she had been received “very kindly,” but after London and Berlin, Quincy was quite an adjustment, and indeed Louisa declared, “Had I steped into Noah’s Ark I do-not think I could have been more utterly astonished.” It would take time for this homecoming to feel like home.