If posterity remembered her at all, Louisa Catherine Adams probably knew that it would be as the other Mrs. Adams. She was the wife of John Quincy Adams, whose one-term presidency was arguably as disastrous as that of his father, John Adams. She was also the daughter-in-law of the formidable Abigail Adams, who, beginning in the 19th century, became a paragon of revolutionary womanhood. In her lifetime, and for a long time afterward, Louisa Catherine Adams was known as the woman who held a truly

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... tremendous party in honor of Andrew Jackson, perhaps the most extravagant that the city of Washington ever witnessed. As the newspaper editor and would-be poet John Agg put it at the time: Belles and matrons, maids and madams All are gone to Mrs. Adams.