Louisa Read Free Page A

disordered as business grew more complex. He had been criticized by some of his associates. But he was still trusted by many.
    Joshua had dark eyes —the same eyes as his daughter Louisa—and a piercing gaze. His friends knew him for his ardent feelings and his calculating mind. He inspired at once confidence and wariness in men who met him. “Mr. Johnson seems cool, collected, and decided, a most valuable friend or a dreadful enemy,” wrote one acquaintance. “I hope to know him only as the former.” There were men who would know him as the latter. He was self-interested and self-preserving. But Louisa did not misjudge his character when she later said that he was too optimistic, too trusting. He was also quick to panic, abandon friends, and to protect himself when things went wrong. He had a tendency to enter trading arrangements with the highest hopes, and was crushed when they failed. In the late 1780s, the firm of Wallace, Johnson & Muir was so deeply in debt that he had to put the account books in the hands of the firm’s major creditors in order to avoid bankruptcy. By the time John Quincy knew him, his finances were a mess. Wallace, Johnson & Muir had dissolved effective 1790, but it had taken years for the business to unwind, and he was still fighting not only those former partners over his share of the profits but the widow of John Davidson, from his first firm, which had ended before the Revolution.
    His latest problem centered on a scheme to enter the brandy market with Colonel John Trumbull. In November 1795, at just the time that Trumbull brought John Quincy to dinner at the Johnsons’ house, Joshua and Trumbull had hatched a plan to export brandy to the United States. Joshua lined up backers in London and handed the colonel instructions, along with a stack of letters of introduction. Joshua wrote to the Hennessys, whose brandy house had just begun selling to the United States, and to Mr. Turner, the mayor of Cognac, and to his contacts in France. He gave Trumbull a bill of remittance for £5,000. “As the advantage promises to be considerable, I hope the quantity will belarge,” he wrote to Trumbull, and told him to “get all the rum you can lay your hands on.” But within months, the familiar pattern began. Joshua’s soaring self-confidence gave way to doubt, then panic. Orders were rejected for poor quality. A ship was wrecked in Guernsey Roads, when the tide went out and several pipes of cognac shattered on the rocks. “I am sorry to tell you our ill luck continues,” Joshua wrote Trumbull when he reported yet another disaster. Money was scarce, and Joshua had to rely on massive lines of credit. In May 1796, just as John Quincy was packing to return to The Hague, Joshua asked one investor alone, his friend Frederick Delius, a merchant in Bremen, Germany, to extend Trumbull’s credit—on Joshua’s account—to £40,000. “Had it not been for this friendship and genteel behavior our whole scheme must have been defeated,” Joshua confessed to Trumbull, adding that he was desperate to get a ship with a full cargo of tobacco to Delius to make up some of the difference. The situation had not improved over the summer and fall. In December, Joshua was writing to Trumbull of a shipwreck—six or eight pipes of brandy lost. His creditors were having trouble paying their own debts. To satisfy his hungry investors, and to pay that promised dowry to John Quincy, Joshua needed to return to the United States and lay his claim to everything he could.
    John Quincy had some hint of Joshua’s situation from Louisa and perhaps from others. He acknowledged to his mother that he suspected that the Johnsons’ wealth was not as great as their fine lifestyle suggested. His suspicions only went so far—he did not doubt that the dowry would be there, and in his daydreams, he was living on the Johnsons’ southern land. But John