granddaughters, the children of their son John II. What should have been a summer of joy, however, proved a season of heartbreak, when the older girl, nine-year-old Fanny, contracted diphtheria. Often shrieking from the pain gripping her throat, she spent weeks in agony before dying in the fall. Her death devastated John Quincy and left him pessimistic about his own future, as he faced expulsion from the House. “I fear I have done little good in the world,” he moaned, “and my life will end in disappointment of the good I would have done had I been permitted.”1 After burying Fanny, the Adamses returned to Washington and brought their surviving granddaughter and her mother to live in their house on F Street. Their presence brought new joy into Louisa’s otherwise drab life and even sparked a smile or two on John Quincy’s often dour face—especially when Mary Louisa turned to her “Grandpappa” for help in algebra and logarithms. He often encouraged her to copy poems—one of them a favorite of his by Scottish poet William Russell, whose “Ode to Fortitude”2 asked, “Can noble things from base proceed?”
