Louisa Adams, la Melania Trump du dix-neuvième siècle

Mrs. John Quincy Adams par Charles Bird King, 1824

 Louisa Adams est toujours la seule "First lady" née à l'étranger, ce qui ferait de Melania Trump la seconde. Née à Londres en 1775, l'épouse de John Quincy Adams ne fut jamais pleinement considérée comme "totalement américaine", une caractéristique que les adversaires politiques ne manqueront pas d'exploiter.

 "The attacks on Louisa’s origins only intensified—and became more public—after her husband was elected president in 1824 and the couple moved into the White House. Supporters of Andrew Jackson, the U.S. senator from Tennessee who had run against John Quincy, immediately launched what would become their 1828 campaign—and this time they openly attacked John Quincy by attacking his wife, insinuating that Louisa was not a genuine American.

Louisa was sensitive to the implications and sought to insulate herself from them. After a rare visit to her relatives in Maryland, she wrote to them asking for anything in her uncle Thomas’ papers that might help establish her American lineage. “The electioneering canvas calls forth questions which make this a question of high importance to me,” she wrote. In 1827, a kind of campaign biography of Louisa appeared in the Philadelphia Evening Post—anonymously, but, as her critics charged, “manifestly written by Mrs. Adams herself.” Its goal, the article stated, was to put an end to the rumors that the president’s wife was not American and to establish, instead, that “Mrs. Adams is the daughter of an American Republican Merchant.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/melania-trump-19th-century-louisa-adams-first-lady-213908