John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  The forces of France and Russia advanced toward one another like two terrible juggernauts. On a walk in mid-March, Adams encountered the emperor, who said grimly, “War is coming.” Adams asked, “Are all hopes vanished of still preserving the peace?” And Alexander responded, “My will is yet to prevent it, but we expect to be attacked.” On April 21, Rumiantsev told him that the emperor had left to review the troops gathered at the Prussian border. “The forces which were assembled on the frontier, were immense,” according to the count. “On both sides. There was in history, scarcely anything like it. It was like Romance. What it would come to he knew not.” On June 28, word reached St. Petersburg that the French had crossed into Russian territory at the Niemen River, at Kovno. Alexander vowed to fight until the last French soldier had been expelled from Russia. Napoleon’s terrible romance had begun.

  Adams had been right about war between France and Russia but premature about war between the United States and England. The British had reacted to President Madison’s decision to reimpose nonimportation in early 1811 by stepping up their attacks on US shipping. The hated impressment of American sailors continued apace. The actual number of abducted navvies remained modest, but the practice made for an ideal casus belli. Officials in Washington were more confident of American abilities than Adams was, and they felt that in Napoleon they had a trump card. Buoyed by reports like those from Adams, Madison was convinced that Napoleon would conquer Russia and then turn what appeared to be his irresistible force on England, and thus that the latter would be in no mood for a draining war across the Atlantic. Canada looked ripe for the plucking.

  In fact, this was a gross miscalculation. The British worried less about Napoleon than Madison imagined. And London made a symmetrical misjudgment of its own: the government was convinced that the Americans had neither the stomach nor the wherewithal for a fight, which is why the Royal Navy continued to harass American shipping. At the same time, the British did not want war, and on June 16, 1812, His Majesty’s government revoked the Orders in Council authorizing the seizing of cargo destined for France and its allies. This should have made war unnecessary, and in an era of instantaneous communication, it would have. But two weeks earlier Madison, under pressure from war hawks who hoped to further expand American territory, had asked for a declaration of war. On June 18, ten days before Napoleon began his dreadful campaign in Russia, Congress complied. America would fight the British for the second time in thirty-five years.

  ADAMS HAD BEEN CHEERFUL FROM THE TIME OF LOUISA’S BIRTH and the move to Apothecary Island. By the fall of 1811, though, the family had had to move back to a house on the mainland, at Voznesenskoi and Little Officers’ Street. Adams sighed for the days of garden walks. That spring, he and Louisa received a letter from Abigail with an almost unimaginable skein of bad tidings: Aunt and Uncle Cranch, whom Adams loved and with whom his sons had spent precious years, died within hours of each other; Louisa’s mother, Catherine Nuth Johnson, had died; and so had John Buchanan, who was married to Louisa’s sister Caroline. And as if these were not heavy enough blows, Adams’ sister, Nabby, had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and one of her breasts had been removed. Scarcely had they digested this mass of misfortune when they received a letter from Tom saying that his daughter, his first child, had died of whooping cough at eight months.

  Both of the Adamses were prostrated by the news. Nevertheless, they had their own small children to dote on. Adams and Charles Francis took walks together almost every day, and the father spent hours listening to his four-year-old son read La Fontaine’s Fables in the original and teaching him to read English. Little Louisa had begun saying “Momma” and “Poppa.” On August 20, Adams made a brief notation in his journal: “Louisa very sick with dysentery.” She was slightly more than one year old. Louisa recovered, and then the symptoms returned, more violently. Dr. Galloway, the family physician, was out of town. At eleven at night Adams sent a carriage for another physician, Dr. Simpson, who sent back word that he would come in the morning. Adams then went to the man’s home himself and rousted him from bed. Galloway returned and suggested that fresh air might help. The Adamses removed to a village seven miles from the city, but Louisa grew weaker and weaker. On September 8, the little girl was having convulsions; the family rushed back to St. Petersburg. The doctors thought that her fever might be connected to teething, and they sent for a surgeon to lance her gums; but in fact her baby teeth were not ready to appear.

  The next few days were almost unendurable. Sometimes Louisa seemed to rally, and desperate hope washed over the family. Then she relapsed into shaking and high fever, and she shrieked with pain. Adams found himself wishing that her agony, which no medicine seemed able to palliate, much less cure, could come to an end. His wife, tormented, sat unmoving by her daughter’s cradle for days; when she finally dropped with exhaustion, Kitty took over and kept vigil for forty-eight hours straight. Adams, hopelessly distraught, went from one to the other. The doctors tried every kind of quack remedy—blisters, warm baths, laudanum, digitalis. Simpson shaved the little girl’s head to apply a blister to her skull. Finally, mercifully, at 1:25 on the morning of September 15, Louisa Catherine Johnson died—“as lovely an infant as ever breathed the air of Heaven,” Adams wrote.

  Adams did not “murmur at the dispensations of Divine Providence,” as he put it. But the consolations typically offered to assuage grief—she had been spared earthly trial and so forth—had no force. “She was precisely at the age,” he wrote, “when the first dawn of intelligence begins to reward the Parents pains and benefits. When every gesture was a charm, every look delight; every imperfect but improving accent, at once rapture and promise. To all this we have been called to bid adieu: And in renouncing all those expectations of exquisite enjoyment of which we had fondly looked forward to the prospect, we are stung by the memory of what we already enjoyed in her beaming intelligence and angelic temper.”

  Louisa’s grief was immeasurably greater; it amounted almost to madness. She blamed herself for the child’s death—she had weaned her too early, she thought—and her mind could conjure nothing but her daughter’s image. “My heart is buried in my Louisa’s grave,” she wrote in her own journal, “and my greatest longing is to be laid beside her even the desire of seeing my beloved Boys gives way to this cherished hope.” She meant this quite literally. Months later, she found herself beset with terror when a member of the expatriate American community fell gravely ill; she feared that Mr. Cabot would “usurp the space next to Louisa.” Her wits would not fully return until a year after her daughter’s death.

  CHAPTER 14

  Restoring the Peace of the World

  (1812–1814)

  DURING THE SUMMER AND FALL OF 1812 THE FATE OF EUROPE hung in the balance. When Emperor Alexander left St. Petersburg for Vilna in April, John Quincy Adams understood very well that immense forces were about to clash at the continent’s eastern frontier. Alexander’s generals were men whose names we know today from Tolstoy: Prince Volkonsky; Prince Bagration, who was to be mortally wounded at Borodino; and Marshall Kutuzov, the old man who would trust Russia’s fate to the ravages of time and winter. Adams knew them all at court. He followed the news from the front with the full knowledge that St. Petersburg was Napoleon’s bull’s-eye, and he might well have to flee with his family and the rest of the court. By July, the emperor had retreated to Russia before Napoleon’s advancing forces; Bagration had given way at Minsk. On September 23—only a week after baby Louisa’s death—the French had taken Moscow. The ancient city was being put to the torch. The diplomatic corps in St. Petersburg began to dissolve since France and its allies were no longer welcome at court. Both Count Lauriston, who had replaced Caulaincourt, and the minister from Holland came to Adams and asked him to store their diplomatic archives. Monsieur de Laval, who collected Renaissance paintings, left St. Petersburg with an enormous landscape by Claude Lorrain strapped to his carriage.

  Yet Napoleon’s terrible misjudgment v
ery soon revealed itself, for the vast Russian army hemmed him in at Moscow and began to cut his forces to bits. With little shelter and less forage, his men began to starve and freeze. On October 27, the cannons in St. Petersburg fired to signal the retaking of Moscow; the event was celebrated with a Te Deum at the magnificent Kazan Cathedral. In December, Napoleon made a solitary dash for Europe along a frozen path littered with thousands of corpses of French and allied soldiers and their horses.

  Adams’ great source of worry during this period was the American war with England, which had broken out at almost the same time as France’s war with Russia. In October 1812, on the same day he learned that Moscow had been retaken, Adams received a diplomatic dispatch informing him that General William Hull, who had been sent north to invade Canada, instead had surrendered Fort Detroit, with its men and munitions, to a combination of British and Indian forces. “The honor of my country!” Adams fumed in his journal. “Oh! God! Suffer it not to go unredeemed.” Adams exchanged letters with his parents expressing disgust at the pusillanimity of American land forces, as well as occasional reverence for the country’s extraordinary naval leaders. He feared national humiliation as much as military catastrophe. This was a war Adams believed ought never have been waged, but he had concluded that, as Europe was addicted to warfare, the United States would have to learn the arts of war to defend itself. “Occasional War is one of the rigorous instruments in the hands of Providence to give tone to the character of Nations,” he wrote to Tom. He also wrote to suggest that naval officers rouse their men’s flagging spirits by reminding them that America was fighting to end impressment—a proposal that would have seemed presumptuous in a letter to Monroe, but that he may have hoped his brother would circulate.

  Adams had an important ally in St. Petersburg. The emperor wished both sides to stop fighting one another. So long as Napoleon lived, Russia needed England to concentrate all its power on defeating him, rather than skirmishing with the United States. Alexander also viewed the United States as a valuable ally and authorized Rumiantsev to tell Adams that no matter what alliances Russia contracted, “he would assent to nothing which could interrupt or impair his relations of friendship with the United States,” as Adams wrote in a letter to Monroe. Adams’ greatest achievement in Russia—and it was a very consequential one—was preserving and increasing the deep warmth the otherwise autocratic Alexander felt for the young republic across the ocean. In September 1812, Rumiantsev approached Adams to say that the emperor wished to serve as a mediator between England and the United States. Adams promptly conveyed the offer to Washington. (Rumiantsev had also spoken to the English minister and had written to Russia’s minister in the United States.)

  The American war effort was going badly, and Napoleon, fleeing for his life, was in no position to distract England, as American officials had hoped, so Madison eagerly grasped at the Russian offer of mediation. In April 1813, he appointed Federalist senator James A. Bayard of Delaware and Albert Gallatin, the treasury secretary and probably the most able man in government, to sail to Russia to join Adams in negotiations. Adams had been hoping to finally go home and had even asked Monroe to let him return. Unbeknownst to him, Abigail had sent another entreaty to the president to bring her son back. But now he had to lead the team of negotiators. Monroe wrote to say that, in case of peace, the president wished him to serve as minister to Great Britain, adding that Madison had especially wished him to convey that he “has derived much useful information from your correspondence.”

  AS THE PANIC OVER NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE SUBSIDED, ADAMS FOUND himself becalmed in a semideserted capital. Louisa was prostrated with grief at her daughter’s death, and Adams was plunged into a deep melancholy. He finally lost his temper with his consul, Levett Harris, whom he knew very well was taking bribes to provide American papers to the captains of British ships. And he confronted Kitty and his secretary, William Stephen Smith, who had been having a not-very-secret affair. The idea of scandal in his own household was, of course, anathema to the upright diplomat. “I had a long and very serious conversation with Mr. Smith,” Adams wrote in his journal in January 1813, “who finally avowed a disposition to do right.” Three days later he noted that he had carried Smith’s proposal to Kitty, and she had accepted. The two would marry at the end of February.

  Adams spent more and more time with Charles Francis, who was outgrowing the nursery. Louisa was too distracted with grief even to attend to her little boy. Father and son took long walks together, went on sleigh rides, and gawked at the exotic sights of the winter carnival. And Adams lavished his pedagogical ambitions on his youngest child. By the spring of 1812, he was spending at least three hours a day with his son, who, several months shy of his fifth birthday, was reading French, German, and English. By the end of that year, Charles was reading from the Book of Common Prayer. Adams found it very difficult to listen in silence to his son’s flawed, multilingual English pronunciation and to endure his perpetual distraction. “The most painful struggle,” he wrote, “is to suppress the anger, which the perverseness of indocility occasions.”

  At the end of 1812, Adams wrote that “religious sentiments become from day to day more habitual to my mind”—a consequence perhaps of his suffering over Louisa’s death. He had become an increasingly serious student of religious literature, reading deeply in the sermons of Jean-Baptiste Massillon, a divine who had preached the funeral oration of King Louis XIV and was much admired in later years by Christian skeptics like Voltaire and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. He was also closely studying the works of John Tillotson, dean of Canterbury Cathedral in the last third of the seventeenth century and a leading voice of religious tolerance. The year before, he had begun writing an extraordinary series of letters to George about the Bible. They were pitched far above the understanding of even a very bright and bookish ten-year-old. Adams understood this; he expected George to read the letters with the help of Tom and others, and to refer to them later in life. Perhaps he was thinking of the letters, deeply soaked in Scripture, which his own mother had once sent him, but these long and carefully argued texts felt much more like essays composed by a man who has pondered a subject deeply and feels the need to put his thoughts in order.

  In the fall of 1811, Adams wrote a sort of introductory letter in which he explained to George that the Bible needs to be examined in different contexts—as revelation, as the early history of the world, as the history of one people, as the source of the particular system of morality and belief Christians profess. He then tackled each of these topics in a subsequent text. In his second letter he took up the idea of revelation. Beginning not with Scripture but with what he would have called natural reason—an intellectual appeal very far from the homespun world of Abigail’s letters—he asserted that “it is so obvious to every reasonable being that he did not make himself, and that the world which he sees could as little make itself, that the moment we begin to exercise the power of reflection, it seems impossible to escape the conviction that there is a Creator.” This was a principle with which few in the pre-Darwinian world would have disagreed. And then Adams proceeded through the doctrine of the immortal soul, of an all-powerful but immaterial God, of God’s righteousness and superintendence of the universe.

  The ensuing letters, continuing through 1813, were equally learned, grave, thorough—and strikingly nondogmatic. Adams regarded the Bible not as infallible text but as a human narrative inspired by revelation—the greatest of all works of literature. He knew all the debates and did not wish to be distracted by them from the central message. He told George that it was unknowable, and unnecessary to know, whether Jesus was “a manifestation of almighty God” or simply his only son. He explained why the ethical system of Scripture was superior to that of the classical world Adams otherwise admired so deeply: in the solicitude Jesus expresses toward the widow, the orphan, the deaf and the blind, and his own enemies, “we see a tenderness to the infirmities of human nature, a purity, a sublimity of virtues which ne
ver entered I say not into the codes of the Antient legislators but into the imaginations of their profoundest and most exalted Philosophers.” The great moral revelation of the gospel was: “You must love one another.” Adams did not say so here, but the doctrine of the brotherhood of man was the source of his conviction that democracy was founded on Scripture and thus that the Declaration of Independence was a realization in political form of the Gospels.

  No record survives of George’s response to this masterpiece of exegesis. But the letters tell us a great deal about his father. Adams was a passionate scholar and a relentless intellectualizer who believed that deep study illuminated every subject, whether the jumble of weights and measures or the mysteries of Christian faith. He was a man of science, and it would have been contrary to his nature to believe that the dictates of reason and of faith contravened one another. His rationalism, in turn, made him skeptical about narrow or doctrinal religious claims and predisposed him to tolerance. (This was the same man who had refused to sign an oath of religious belief at Harvard.) Yet he comfortably accepted what a deist like Jefferson might not: that revelation marked a point beyond which reason could not go. Adams was a New England Puritan raised in the spirit of Enlightenment reason.

  The period after the death of baby Louisa was a time of drift and despair for both Adamses. In his journal Adams complained of “a lassitude which has almost, but not quite yet suspended all my Industry. . . . An oppression at the heart which without being positive pain is more distressing than pain itself.” The minister had begun locking himself in his study. “Mr A is even more buried in study than when he left America,” Louisa wrote to her mother-in-law, “and has acquired so great a disrelish for society, that even his small family circle appears at times to become irksome to him. His health is very indifferent, and the melancholy prospect, of public affairs all over the World, preys upon his spirits.”