by James Traub
Like most of his colleagues, Adams had a great deal of time on his hands and began to develop eccentric hobbies of his own. He became fascinated, and then obsessed, by the variation among the weights and measures of various nations. The actual height or weight or volume denoted by terms of measurement had not yet been fixed, so that it was not possible to compare measurements in different countries with perfect certainty. This fact did not seem to bother most men, but it consumed Adams. After intense study of reference works and exacting calculations, he was able to determine that a Russian pound corresponded to 6,316.596 grains English troy weight. One day Adams wrote in his journal that he had become absorbed by the proportions between the French pied du roi and the English foot. Before he knew it, hours of the day were gone. “Any occupation to which a spur of inclinations impels me,” he lamented, “operates as a sort of compulsion upon me, and leaves me no longer master of my own time.”
The elder Adams had a metaphysical bent; his son was, at bottom, a systematizer. The younger Adams had always loved to count and measure things, such as how long it took him to walk from Cambridge to Quincy. But over time, this wish to impose intellectual clarity and arithmetic order upon the fuzzy world became a more marked element of his mental life.
ADAMS WAS NOW AMERICA’S MOST SENIOR, AND MOST HIGHLY regarded, diplomat. Throughout 1810 he wrote extensive letters to Secretary of State Robert Smith examining Russia’s fluctuating sympathies toward France, England, and the United States. In April, he predicted that Russia’s need for English trade ensured that it would eventually break with Napoleon’s Continental System. But in the ensuing months he watched, with all of Europe, as Napoleon went from victory to victory, first fully absorbing Holland, then conquering northern Belgium, then Westphalia, Hanover, Hamburg, Lubeck, Norway, and a region of northern Germany known as Swedish Pomerania. Could Russia really afford to defy the French diktat? The Danes, acting on French orders, were still seizing many American vessels bound for the Baltic. American ships landing at Archangel were still being detained with one pretext or another. Rumiantsev offered unconvincing explanations. Perhaps, Adams wrote, Caulaincourt was circumventing Rumiantsev and going directly to the tsar—a suspicion he was willing to commit to correspondence only in cypher, for he knew that his letters might be opened by Russian, French, or English officials.
Adams spent much of his time preaching to Rumiantsev about the futility of the Continental System; he knew that the Russian minister repeated much of what he said to Caulaincourt, whom he believed to be sympathetic to the American cause. He often buttonholed Caulaincourt himself. It was hard to know if he was making any headway, since expressions of sympathy were the cheapest currency of the court. Leverett Harris, the American consul who had been established in St. Petersburg before Adams arrived, reported that Alexander was said to have told his foreign minister, “The Emperor Napoleon may do as he pleases. I will not quarrel with the Americans.” Rumiantsev himself had plainly become more pro-American and less pro-French as he had watched the emperor’s own sympathies shift. Convinced that he had worn out his welcome, Caulaincourt asked in the late spring of 1810 to be recalled to Paris. In October, the count told Adams that Alexander’s feelings about the United States “were as strong and fixed as they ever had been; and he might even say stronger. Our attachment to the United States, says he, I assure you is obstinate; More obstinate than you are aware of.”
Rumiantsev apparently knew something he could not tell the American minister. Tsar Alexander had been provoked by Napoleon’s continual push to the east and the north. He had, as Adams had predicted, come under pressure from merchants damaged by the embargo. And he had not wanted to sacrifice relations with America to Napoleon’s insatiable war aims. On December 31, 1810, the emperor issued a ukase lifting all restrictions on exports from Russia and on imports coming by sea, while at the same time imposing a heavy tariff on goods arriving overland, most of which came from France. Alexander thus broke decisively with the Continental System. This was a tremendous diplomatic triumph for the United States, since most cargo carried to Russia by ship came in American vessels, whether the cargo was American or English. Napoleon, who had forged a crucial alliance with Alexander at Tilsit only three years earlier, would soon conclude that he had to invade Russia in order to preserve his domination of Europe.
BY THE MIDDLE OF 1810, THE ADAMS FAMILY HAD BECOME SETTLED in St. Petersburg, if not quite comfortably so. They had taken over a house left by a departing ambassador, paying $1,500 a year. Adams found that it was impossible to live a respectable life in the capital city without a retinue that struck him as wildly extravagant and unnecessary. He described his household in his journal: “We have a Maitre d’Hotel, or Steward. A Cook who has under him two Scullions, Moozhiks, A Swiss or Porter, Two footmen, A Moozhik to make the fires, A Coachman and Postillion, and Thomas the Black man, to be my valet de chambre, Martha Godfrey the maid we brought with us from America, A femme de chambre of Mrs. Adams, who is the wife of the Steward, A House-Maid and a Laundry maid. The Swiss, the Cook, and one of the footmen are married; and their wives all live in the house. The Steward has two Children, and the washerwoman a daughter; all of whom are also kept in the house.” Virtually all of the servants considered petty thievery a privilege of their position, and Adams was forever double-checking the wine cellar.
Despite his desperate efforts at household economy, Adams considered himself comfortably established, and he very much enjoyed the marks of respect he received from the emperor. He was deeply engaged in the never-ending struggle to remove obstacles from American trade in Russia. He did not know that Abigail’s efforts to have him returned home—the consequence of his earlier complaints—had finally born fruit. On February 26, 1811, Secretary Monroe sent Adams a letter that referenced the correspondence between Abigail and President Madison and announced that the president had nominated him to fill a vacant seat on the Supreme Court.
The news had already shot around Quincy, producing a flood of letters from delighted family members. Abigail described the appointment as “a call of Providence” and the post of Justice as higher even than that of “First Majestrate.” She assured him that the job had not been solicited by his friends and glossed over the fact that it had already been refused by Madison’s first choice, while the Senate had rejected the second. “I will,” she wrote, “take it for granted that after mature reflection you will resign yourself to the call of your Country.” She took it so for granted, in fact, that she told George and John that their parents would soon be coming home and wrote separately to Louisa with congratulations. John Adams wrote to say that, astonishingly, the Senate had immediately and unanimously confirmed the nomination, and that “both parties vie with each other in expressions of Satisfaction.” The elder Adams acknowledged that his son had said before that he had no wish to be a judge, but reminded him of the joys of family and fatherhood that awaited him. Hoping, apparently, to foreclose any possible path of escape for his very prickly son, he added, “Such is the Popularity of the appointment that your Refusal of it, will create a National Disgust and Resentment. It will be imputed to Pride, Oddity, Fastidiosity and an unbridled unbounded Ambition.”
Adams did not receive official notice of the appointment until early July, but by April he had read about it in the English newspapers. And in early June, after a period of reflection, he wrote a letter to the president declining. Adams had often said, and plainly believed, that a man in public service must be prepared to heed his country’s call, whatever it was. That was the trump card he had played with Louisa when she had begged him not to accept the post he now occupied. But when the nation’s call collided with his own wishes—as it had not in the case of his ministerial position—he could make the kind of exceptions to which he would never admit. He wrote to Tom to say, “I am also, and always shall be, too much of a political partisan for a judge.” Adams viewed a Supreme Court judgeship as a gloriously upholstered prison cell with a lifetime sentence. Of cour
se he could not say as much to Madison. To the president he noted, with elaborate circumlocution, that Louisa was pregnant and so could not travel. She had suffered yet another miscarriage a few months earlier, and there could certainly be no question of an arduous ocean passage with an infant. But that was also a useful pretext.
To his father Adams admitted that nothing had ever satisfied him more than the news of his unanimous confirmation, which he could now enjoy in the retirement to private life he said he had in mind. Is that, in fact, what he had in mind? John Adams’ allusion to “unbounded Ambition” had been meant to alert his son to the widespread assumption that only a man aiming for the presidency would turn down a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. The possibility that he would set tongues wagging would scarcely deter the stubborn diplomat. There is no evidence that Adams seriously entertained that hope this early in his life, but he had been raised from childhood to make himself fit for the nation’s highest honors, a euphemism no one had to define.
John Adams was too logical a man to maintain the argument, but he knew that the withdrawal of which John Quincy wrote was as contrary to his temperament as cool impartiality. “Shall you retire, and devote your Life to Science, Litterature and publish your Studies from Time to Time?,” he wrote. “Your Nature cannot bear it. Your dearest Friend can not endure it. And what is harder to resist than your Wife’s Nature, your Country will not Suffer it. This Nation will not cease to irritate and torment you, both with Flattery and Reproach till they force you out, that they may have the pleasure of insulting and abusing you.” This, too, was the shared Adams ethos.
Adams’ decision was devastating to his parents, perhaps to his children, and certainly to Louisa. She had grasped at every scrap of hope that they might all return to the familiar world of Quincy, and above all to George and John. And she had just suffered a serious blow. In May 1811 a letter had arrived from Walter Hellen announcing the terrible news that Nancy, his wife and Louisa’s older sister, had died in childbirth, leaving him a frail widower with three young children. Both Louisa and Kitty were deeply stricken, Louisa so much so that the doctor had to administer two doses of laudanum despite the fact that she was then at the end of her second term of pregnancy. It seemed likely that she would lose the baby, as she had so many others, but she didn’t.
A new summer had arrived, always a shockingly swift transition from the hyperborean winter. St. Petersburg became an entirely new city as the snow and ice receded. The city took on distinct form once again, as the broad, straight boulevards, the winding Neva, and the massive granite palaces emerged from their shaggy blanket of snow. The gilded spires and domes of the churches and the gaily painted roofs of the mansions of the nobility shone in the brilliant sun. Sleds gave way to droschkas. The ice on the Neva finally broke, marking the official end to the city’s punishing winter. This boon was celebrated by an ancient ritual: the governor of the province offered the emperor a glass of river water, and the emperor rewarded him with a hundred ducats. The river filled with gondola-like boats, and the peasants sang ancient folk tunes as they paddled along.
The Adams’ landlord had forced them out of the home they were renting on the grounds that it had been requisitioned by the court, but they had turned this misfortune to good account by renting a house on Apothecary’s Island, a tiny spot of land in the middle of the Neva then (and still) used for summer homes and entertainment. Their cottage was adjacent to the magnificent gardens of Baron Stroganoff, through which they could wander. Charles Francis had a little world of his own to roam. Adams himself was thoroughly delighted with his quiet perch. “From my Cabinet windows,” he wrote, “I see all the boats passing up and down the river, and am as quiet and undisturbed, as if it were an hermitage a hundred miles from the City.”
Adams’ natural state was fretfulness, but that summer he felt useful, busy, hopeful, and almost contented. On July 26 he wrote a passage in his diary that was more than usually reflective, as well as candid:
I have this day been married fourteen years, during which I have to bless God, for the enjoyment of a portion of felicity resulting from this relation in Society, greater than falls to the generality of mankind, and far beyond any thing that I have been conscious of deserving. Its greatest alloy has arisen from the delicacy of my wife’s Constitution, the ill health which has afflicted her much of the time, and the misfortunes she has suffered from it. Our Union has not been without its trials; nor invariably without dissensions between us. There are many differences of Sentiment, of tastes and of opinions in regard to domestic economy, and to the education of children between us. There are natural frailties of temper in both of us; both being quick, and irascible, and mine being sometimes harsh. But she has always been a faithful and affectionate wife, and a careful, tender, indulgent and watchful mother to our children, all of whom she nursed herself.
Adams knew himself; he knew that he was a difficult man, and he felt grateful that he had found so admirable a partner. His sense of unworthiness was altogether sincere. And yet he could not, or would not, curb his temper, or modify his views of “domestic economy,” or ward off in advance the “dissensions” between himself and Louisa. He would never be easy, whether as a husband, a father, or a friend.
In mid-August, after twelve hours of severe labor, Louisa was delivered of a baby girl—the first after three boys. Her husband insisted on naming the child Louisa. The mother was at first gravely ill, as she had been after her previous births, but in two weeks she was able to take a walk around the island and to delight in the new baby. Even the stern father was besotted with his daughter. In November, he wrote to his mother to say, “We are daily seeking for resemblances in her countenance, and associate her in fancy with all our dearest friends—She has the eyes of one; the nose of another, the mouth of a third and the forehead of a fourth, but her chin is absolutely and exclusively her own.”
Adams had begun to think more and more about his children’s education. On this, as on many other subjects, Adams’ views were instinctively retrograde. He found much to agree with in “Discourse on the Education of Children and Youth,” by the early-eighteenth-century churchman Isaac Watts, who railed against “fashionable education” and came down on the side of “severity” and “rigour.” Louisa favored gentle persuasion over harsh instruction. But by now experience had cured Adams of his tendency to approach such a subject theoretically. He wrote to Tom that he had once thought of writing a treatise on education, like Locke or Rousseau, “but when George was born I very soon found that a child is not itself a piece of clay to be made according to the fancy of every potter; and secondly, that the clay, such as it was, was not committed exclusively to me, to be molded by my taste alone.”
Adams had rediscovered this wisdom with Charles Francis, who was reading quite well, in French, before his fourth birthday. “He comes to me of his own accord,” Adams wrote in his journal, “but it is for his apple or pear, or sugar plums, without which I cannot prevail upon him to read. . . . The sight of a boat, a noise in any other part of the house, a fly lighting upon the table, everything that can catch his eye or his ear diverts him from his book.” Adams sadly, and perhaps hyperbolically, accused himself of the same distractedness—“the greatest, perhaps the only Cause, which has bound the voyage of my life in the shallows.”
Adams received glowing reports about George from his mother and from Aunt Cranch, who raved about his “capacious mind,” his “quickness of apprehension,” his attentiveness, his love of history. George was an insatiable reader, like his father. Adams nevertheless tried to direct George’s education from afar. He wrote to Tom to say that he must pay attention to George’s French but also to his drawing, fencing, shooting. He must have sport, but “nothing delicate or effeminate.” He should be inured to labor and fatigue. Tom and their father should subject George to a monthly examination on his studies, one that would test not simply his memory but his understanding. But all education, at bottom, was moral education, and he wro
te to George with exactly the sort of warnings he used to receive from his own parents: “I hope to always hear that among your companions, the best boys are your best friends, and I trust you will always be ashamed to let any one of them learn faster or by his good conduct make himself more beloved than you.”
ADAMS CONTINUED TRACKING THE STORM SIGNALS OF WAR WITH a practiced doomsayer’s sense of fatality. He wrote to Secretary Monroe that Napoleon, deeply confident of his military superiority, would attack Russia no later than the summer of 1812. He warned friends and family of the folly of entering war with England. He recoiled when he heard talk of defending America’s “rights,” much though he believed that England had trampled on those rights. As he wrote to Abigail, “In the present condition of the world, and it is much to be doubted whether it will ever be otherwise, that right is not worth a straw, which a Nation has, without force to defend it.” To his father, the great enthusiast of “wooden walls,” he wrote that the United States could build a navy just fast enough to provoke Britain but not to seriously contest its control of the seas. He counseled patience; France and England would destroy one another before either could turn on the United States. A grain shortage in England had made the country dependent on trade with America.