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29 THE CAPITOL DOME Adamses thought and wrote often. They should be remembered as much for what they wrote as for what they did. This article is the story—in their own voices— of how John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams nav- igated these national dramas. This one is a unique take on a story that has been told many times and in different ways. It is one worth telling. The Authors John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) contributed to several of the most important political developments of the early United States. Having traveled to Europe with his father, John Adams, when the elder Adams was an American diplomat during the American Revolution, the young John Quincy quickly learned the travails of politics and diplomacy. Upon returning to the newly independent United States in 1785, he studied at Harvard until 1787, then became a lawyer in Boston like his father. Early in his career, he served as minister to Holland (1794–1797) and as minister plenipotentiary to Prussia (1797–1801). He first went to Washington, D.C. in 1803 as a U.S. sena- tor, yet resigned five years later in 1808. After his term in the Senate, he served as minister plenipotentiary to Russia (1809–1815) and Great Britain (1815–1817). Though he often fell short of his political goals, his sense of a "grand strategy"—to defend the United States from the European powers while preserving a republican form of govern- ment—consistently guided his political life in the State Department, the White House, and Congress. In 1817, Pres. James Monroe appointed Adams as his secretary of state, a position Adams would hold until his inaugu- ration as president in 1825. Adams led the development of the Monroe Doctrine, which abetted U.S. expansion across the North American continent. At the end of the 1824 presidential election, none of the candidates held a majority of the Electoral College votes, so the election went to the House of Representatives. Despite strong support for other candidates such as Andrew Jackson, the House elected Adams as president. Andrew Jackson later defeated Adams in the 1828 presidential election, leading Adams to retreat from national politics for sev- eral years. Adams returned to national politics in 1831 as a representative from Massachusetts. He would serve during each session of Congress over the next 17 years, where he fought the increasingly powerful "slavocracy," for which he received assassination threats and southern representatives' attempts to censure him. In 1841, by then vociferously opposed to slavery, Adams defended cap- tive Africans before the Supreme Court in the famous Amistad case. Seven years later, on 21 February 1848, Adams suffered a stroke on the f loor of the House and died two days later in the Speaker's Office. In honor of his life, Adams was given a funeral service in the House Chamber, a funeral procession from Wash- ington to Boston, and a memorial service in Boston. 3 Louisa Catherine Johnson (1775–1852) lived a life of public significance, though she probably did not see it that way for much of her life. As she defined the mean- ing of her own life, she navigated the nationalism of her husband's family and the cosmopolitanism of her own family. Yet just as the arc of the early United States can be seen in her husband's life, so too can it be seen in hers. 4 Louisa Catherine Johnson married John Quincy Adams in London on 26 July 1797 while her father served as U.S. consul and John Quincy served as minister to the Netherlands. Born in London to a wealthy American merchant and an English socialite and educated at a con- vent school in Nantes, France, Louisa Catherine had a cosmopolitan upbringing which informed her entire life, one which often put her at odds with the Adamses' nation- alism. She spent 34 years of her life in Europe before spending the rest of her life in the United States. After marrying John Quincy, she accompanied him to Berlin on his diplomatic post before returning to the United States in 1801. During her husband's terms in the U.S. Senate, Louisa Catherine traveled between Quincy, Massa- chusetts, where the Adams family lived, and Washington, Fig. 3. John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives, wood engraving (1870) by Russell Richardson