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Illicit Love
The habits of profligacy may have begun with an illicit affair, his lover Miss Mary E. Shreve, the niece of Johnson's wife and the daughter of a wealthy and “most estimable gentleman” of Loudoun County.
Probably meeting her while visiting his wife’s family, Johnson returned in the late summer of 1857 to find his Mollie staying with relatives as she prepared to enter the Catholic Female Seminary at Frederick City, Md.
Just coming from a meeting with her father, James told Mollie that her parent had agreed to her visiting Johnson’s house for a few weeks to see her aunt who was ill and anxious to have her niece there.
Before leaving for Rappahannock, Mollie wanted to stop at her home to pick up her clothes but Johnson persuaded her to abandon that request, promising that he would return soon to Loudoun on business and would get whatever she needed.
They arrived at the Johnson house in August, 1857.
Auburn Haired Beauty
Mollie was a beautiful girl, about 18 years of age with dark auburn hair, blue eyes, educated and intelligent but "simple and childlike in her manners.” According to the unidentified chronicler, she soon became a favorite of Rappahannock society.
‘‘No one doubted her purity and chastity” and the residents of Washington assumed that she was staying at the Johnson home out of charity attributable to an affection for her aunt.
Her father, however, believed she was still visiting friends and it was some weeks after her departure before he discovered that she had accompanied Johnson to Rappahannock.
After nearly a year had elapsed, he wrote a letter ordering her home at once but the letter was picked up at the Washington post office
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