John Quincy and Louis Catherine Adams, painted by Charles Robert Leslie in the fall of 1816.

John Quincy and Louis Catherine Adams, painted by Charles Robert Leslie in the fall of 1816. A year after assuming his post as minister to Great Britain, JQA and his wife sat for the young American painter. This likeness of JQA conveys a relaxed, confident manner befitting his recent diplomatic successes. Louisa, in her reclining pose, richly outfitted in the Regency style, reflects the poise and elegance of a worldly woman. Both portraits capture the Adamses at a particularly happy time. After six long years in St. Petersburg, they were finally reunited with their sons.

As part of his daily walks, JQA paced out the distances between bridges and buildings in St. Petersburg. Taking into account the length of his stride and the number of paces, he recorded in minutes the distances between key landmarks. He eventually measured nearly all of the pedestrian routes of St. Petersburg.

JQA kept meticulous accounts of his dwindling finances. In addition to the various household expenses, Adams was obliged to give holiday presents not only to his own servants and their children, but also to the domestics of the Emperor, his mother, and several high ranking diplomats.

At the start of his Russian-English vocabulary list, John Quincy confessed,
“I have now been here seven months, and know scarcely a word of the language— I have not the time, (at least I am willing to excuse myself with that plea) to learn the language familiarly. . . The following vocabulary will show how long, and with what success I shall persist in this Resolution.” While fluent in seven languages, John Quincy never did learn to speak Russian. Fortunately, the official language of the Russian Court was French.

In November 1809, the American Consular Levett Harris sent John Quincy a Russian and French dictionary, with which Adams first tried “to learn the characters of the Russian Alphabet.” It was a short-lived attempt, and Adams put his study of the Russian language aside until May 1810, when he began once again to practice the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.

Louisa Catherine was a favorite at the Court of Tsar Alexander I. Upon his death in November 1825, she was given an engraved gold ring with his profile in relief.

John Quincy Adams’ complete diaries are available online at the Massachusetts Historical Society website: masshist.org/jqadiaries. The diary of his wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, is currently in production and will be published in a two-volume edition in 2011. Please visit masshist.org for the new Adams Papers Digital Editions, a full text presentation of all previously published volumes. The Adams Papers is a documentary editing project dedicated to publishing the correspondence and diaries of the Adams family, including John, Abigail, John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and Charles Francis.