by Harlow Unger
The renewed joys of fatherhood combined with watching the mysterious mother-daughter bond to make John Quincy long for his sons. “My dear boys are never out of my thoughts,” he wrote to his brother Thomas. “Your account of George’s rapid improvement in learning to read was a banquet to my soul. There are so many things that I want them to learn that I can scarcely wait with proper patience for the time when they ought to be taught them.”4
The birth of his daughter seemed to him “the proper time” to change the tone of his daily letters to his children. “I want to write to my son George upon subjects of serious import,” he said, “but I . . . find my ideas so undigested and confused.” His heart wanted to tell his eleven-year-old that he loved him, but his Puritan mind could only express that love as his father had—with guidance: “I advise you, my son, in whatever you read and most of all in reading the Bible to remember that it is for the purpose of making you wiser and more virtuous.”
I have myself for many years made it a practice to read through the Bible once every year . . . that it may contribute to my advancement in wisdom and virtue. . . . You must soon come to the age when you must govern yourself. . . . You know some of your duties and . . . it is in the Bible that you must learn them and from the Bible how to practice them. Those duties are to God, your fellow creatures and you yourself.5
Writing to his son made John Quincy regret having rejected the Supreme Court appointment. His rash decision would mean remaining in Europe, apart from his boys, indefinitely. He wrote to his parents declaring, “I can no longer reconcile either to my feelings or to my sense of duty their absence from me. I must go to them or they must come to me.”6
In the spring of 1811, Secretary of State Robert Smith resigned. From the first, he had proved himself incompetent and all too cozy with the British ambassador, who promised an end to the British blockade of American ports if President James Madison ended the embargo on British trade. After Madison responded accordingly, the British government repudiated their minister and recalled him from the United States, leaving an embarrassed President puzzling whether to reimpose the embargo and risk plunging the nation into another recession.
President Madison dismissed Smith and appointed James Monroe secretary of state. Experienced in foreign affairs, Monroe had represented the nation in both Britain and France and, next to John Quincy, was the nation’s foremost European affairs expert. The appointment, however, outraged New England’s Federalists, who accused Madison of perpetuating the “Virginia dynasty” by giving Monroe an office that had become the stepladder to the presidency. Federalist newspapers called Madison and Monroe James I and James II. The British were even less pleased. Monroe was as outspoken a Francophile as his mentor Jefferson, and the British responded to his appointment by attacking an American ship within sight of New York and impressing a seaman. Under orders to protect American ships, the frigate President countered by attacking the British ship Little Belt, killing nine and wounding twenty-three. When the new British minister demanded an explanation, Monroe replied angrily that American ships had as much right to recover impressed seamen as British ships had to impress them in the first place. He then renewed American demands that Britain cease depredations on American shipping and respect the rights of neutral ships carrying noncontraband.
When the British refused, Congress declared British impressment and ship seizures an affront to the nation’s rights and honor. On April 1, 1812, Madison went to Congress and requested a sixty-day reinstatement of the embargo on British trade; ten days later, Congress authorized him to prepare for war and call up 100,000 militiamen for six months’ service.
War fever was infecting Europe as well. After Russia refused to cease trading with Britain, Napoléon ordered French troops to the Russian border. Fearful of an imminent invasion, foreign diplomats sent their wives and daughters home from St. Petersburg, leaving Louisa Adams and her sister Kitty as the only foreign ladies in the diplomatic corps—and Kitty as the only target for the czar’s amorous glances. In mid-January 1812, however, the Adamses—and the czar—noticed a decided change in Kitty’s demeanor. She was pregnant—not by the czar, but by John Quincy’s nephew Billy Smith, Nabby’s son. John Quincy was irate, and after he had a “very solemn conversation” with his nephew, Smith married Kitty Johnson in a private ceremony at the Adams house in early February.
Tragedy marred their marriage from the start, however, and seemed to envelop the rest of the family. Kitty’s baby was stillborn. Then the two newlyweds learned that Billy’s mother, John Quincy’s older sister Nabby, was dying from cancer, and as Billy and Kitty prepared to leave for America, the Adamses’ one-year-old, Louisa Catherine, came down with dysentery. A common disease in St. Petersburg, it gripped the baby in convulsions, fever, and dehydration for two months—then claimed her life.
“At twenty-five minutes past one this morning,” John Quincy sobbed over his diary on September 15, “expired my daughter Louisa Catherine, as lovely an infant as ever breathed the air of heaven.”7 Louisa was out of the room when the baby died, but having nursed her daughter for nearly two months, she had spent her last emotions and, according to John Quincy, “received the shock with fortitude and resignation.” Two days later, he and his nephew accompanied the baby’s diminutive coffin to the graveyard of the Anglican church, where John Quincy “saw her deposited in her last earthly mansion.” Louisa had caught a bad cold and was too sick to accompany her husband, who returned home in a state of near collapse. He tried to make sense of his loss, to explain the inexplicable:
Perhaps an affectionate parent praying only for the happy existence of his child could wish no better for it than that it might be transported to the abodes of blessedness before it has lived to endure the pangs and sorrows inseparable from existence in the body. As life is the gift of God . . . it is our duty to be grateful for it. . . . We ought perhaps be no less grateful for the death of a tenderly loved child than for its life. . . . Had it pleased God to prolong the life of my darling infant, to what miseries, distress and sufferings might she not have been referred? . . . In the bosom of her Father and her God, she has no more suffering to endure.8
By spring of 1812, the American embargo had combined with Napoléon’s embargo to cripple British foreign trade and domestic industrial production. Factories and mills shut down, unemployment rose, and food prices soared. British exports dropped by one-third, and employers and workers united in demanding that Parliament restore good relations with the United States by ending depredations against American ships. On June 23, Parliament agreed. The Americans had at last won their long-running conflict with Britain’s parliament.
But the victory came too late.
It took a month or more for messages to cross the Atlantic, and unaware of Parliament’s decision, President Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain, citing impressment, the blockade of American ports, seizure of American ships, and incitement of Indians on the frontier as his reasons. On June 4, after three days of debate, the House agreed; the Senate followed suit two weeks later. Not knowing that the British had sued for peace, American troops charged into Canada along three fronts in northern New York: at the Saint Lawrence River, at Niagara in western New York, and farther west at the Detroit River.
Just as American troops were invading Canada, war erupted in Europe when Napoléon ordered his 450,000-man Grande Armée into Russia. With Britain’s fleet in control of the Baltic Sea, Russian forces blocked the paths to St. Petersburg, funneling French troops westward onto the Russian steppes. Within weeks, the French had overrun Minsk and reached Smolensk—almost without firing a shot. After a fierce battle at Borodino, Russian troops retreated to Moscow, and after the civilian population had fled, the soldiers set the city afire, leaving nothing but smoldering ashes for the French army to plunder when it marched in on September 14.
Only an occasional echo of battlefield explosions reached St. Petersburg, but the war nonetheless brought diplomatic activity to a halt and l
eft John Quincy with almost nothing to do. Even the czar had left—to be with his generals at the front. John Quincy managed to score a last-minute diplomatic triumph, however, by coaxing the czar to give America’s Robert Fulton “the privilege for the term of fifteen years” to build and sail steamboats between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt and along navigable Russian rivers whenever the war permitted.9
Without food or other resources in Moscow for the approaching winter, the French had to retreat. On October 19, however, swarms of mounted Cossacks thwarted the French about-face with fierce hit-and-run attacks. Darting in and out of snow gusts like ghosts, the Cossacks slaughtered French troops at will and left every farm and village along the way in ashes, without a grain of wheat, stick of wood, or shred of canvas to nourish, warm, or shelter a Frenchman. The “scorched earth” strategy left the French nothing to harvest but cold, hunger, and death. With surviving French troops in full flight, Napoléon abandoned them on December 3 and fled to Paris. Only about 20,000 of his half million troops survived their long retreat. John Quincy described the disaster to his mother:
Of the immense host with which he [Napoléon] invaded Russia, nine-tenths at least are prisoners or food for worms. They have been surrendering by ten thousands at a time, and at this moment there are at least one hundred and fifty thousand of them in the power of Emperor Alexander. From Moscow to Prussia, eight hundred miles of road have been strewed with French artillery, baggage wagons, ammunition chests, dead and dying men . . . pursued by three large regular armies of a most embittered and exasperated enemy and by an almost numberless militia of peasants, stung by the destruction of their harvests and cottages. . . . It has become a sort of by-word among the common people here that the two Russian generals who have conquered Napoléon and all his marshals are General Famine and General Frost.10
The slaughter of the French army convinced John Quincy more than ever of the wisdom of America’s policy “not to involve ourselves in the inextricable labyrinth of European politics and revolutions. The final issue . . . is not yet completely ascertained, but there is no longer a doubt that it must be disastrous in the highest degree to France.”11
Although they lacked the magnitude of the French invasion of Russia, American incursions into Canada in 1812 proved just as futile. In the West, the British forced 2,200 American troops to surrender without firing a shot in Detroit, ceding control of Lake Erie and the entire Michigan Territory to the British. To the east, some six hundred American troops in western New York crossed into Canada and seized the heights above the Niagara River, only to face a devastating counterattack by 1,000 crack British troops, who forced the American commander to send for help. New York militiamen, however, refused to cross into Canada, saying their terms of service required them to defend only New York State and no other states or foreign territories. As the British savaged the little American legion, survivors fled back into New York.
Farther to the east, just north of Lake Champlain, the largest of the three American forces faced similar humiliation when another group of New York militiamen refused to cross into foreign territory to the north.
Out at sea, America’s little navy—twelve fast and highly maneuverable ships—had better results. The forty-four-gun frigate Constitution demolished Britain’s thirty-eight-gun Guerrière off the coast of Nova Scotia in only thirty minutes, killing seventy-nine British sailors and losing only fourteen of her own. Other American ships humiliated Britain’s navy off the coasts of Virginia and Brazil. Captain Stephen Decatur’s United States captured a thirty-eight-gun British frigate near the Madeira Islands off the African coast and brought her all the way back across the Atlantic Ocean to New London, Connecticut, as a prize of war. Complementing the tiny American navy were five hundred privateers, which captured about 1,300 British cargo ships valued at $39 million and forced the British navy to plug America’s outlets to the sea with an impenetrable blockade of gunboats along the Atlantic coast and the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Although the navy’s exploits lifted American morale, they did little to turn the tide of war, and less than three months after the American army had fired its first shots, Secretary of State Monroe instructed the American minister in London to approach the British foreign office with an offer of peace. The proposal simply repeated America’s prewar demands, however, and Britain rejected it.
As word of American defeats reached St. Petersburg, John Quincy Adams’s friend the czar offered to mediate the Anglo-American dispute. John Quincy’s influence had left the czar an admirer of all things American, although he remained allied to Britain in the war against France. With the U.S. Navy bottled up and British forces in Canada poised to invade, President Madison jumped at the czar’s offer, hailing John Quincy as a master diplomat. The President’s peace envoys had no sooner sailed off to St. Petersburg, however, when a British frigate renewed the fighting with another attack on the ill-fated USS Chesapeake, killing 146 American seamen before capturing the ship and sailing it to Nova Scotia as a prize. With the British sensing victory in the war near at hand, London abruptly rejected the czar’s offer to mediate, leaving America’s peace envoys bobbing across the Atlantic on a useless voyage.
The humiliation of the Chesapeake set Americans aroar with anger at what they now called “Madison’s War.” New Englanders demanded Madison’s resignation, and settlers in the West took matters into their own hands, pouring into army camps to avenge defeats by the British. General Henry Dearborn, who had failed in his first invasion of Canada at Niagara, now had a corps of ardent patriots to replace the recalcitrant New York militiamen who had refused to fight outside state borders. They sailed across Lake Ontario and swept into York (now Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada (now Ontario), burning the city’s public buildings, including the Assembly houses and governor’s mansion.
After the raid, the Americans trekked westward around Lake Ontario to Niagara and joined 2,500 troops under Colonel Winfield Scott in capturing Fort Niagara, Fort Erie, and Buffalo’s Black Rock Navy Yard, where they freed five American warships. To these ships, Secretary of the Navy William Jones added six new warships, giving Captain Oliver Hazard Perry a lake fleet of ten ships—four more than the British squadron. On September 10, 1813, Perry engaged the British at Put-in-Bay for three hours. The battle left Perry’s ship in splinters and killed or wounded 80 percent of his men, but inflicted even more damage on the enemy. The British retreated, ceding control of Lake Erie to the Americans. Perry emerged from the wreckage and sent his famous message: “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”12
Perry’s victory allowed General William Henry Harrison’s troops in the west to rout a combined force of British and Indian warriors on the banks of the Thames River, killing Shawnee chief Tecumseh and giving Harrison control of the Illinois, Indiana, and other northwestern territories. When news of the American victories reached London, the British prime minister reversed his previous stance and sent Secretary of State Monroe an offer to begin direct negotiations for peace at a neutral site in Ghent, Belgium. President Madison named John Quincy to lead the negotiations, promising, as a reward for success, promotion to the highest post in the foreign service as minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. Rather than risk having Louisa and seven-year-old Charles Francis travel through areas where fighting might still be taking place, John Quincy left St. Petersburg alone on April 28, 1814, relieved at distancing himself from the scene of his daughter’s death.
By the time John Quincy had crossed out of Russia, the Russian, Prussian, and other armies allied against Napoléon had captured Paris and forced the French army to surrender. Napoléon abdicated and accepted exile on the tiny isle of Elbe, in the Mediterranean Sea off the Italian west coast. Louis XVIII, the dead Louis XVI’s younger brother, acceded to the French throne, freeing 14,000 British troops to sail for North America for a massive land and sea attack against the United States. Even as British and American peace negotiators were preparing to meet in Europe, British ships b
egan shelling U.S. coastal cities, allowing British troops to seize Fort Niagara and take control of Lake Champlain. Coastal raids devastated the entrance to the Connecticut River, Buzzard’s Bay in Massachusetts, and Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington City. The United States seemed helpless to respond. The government was bankrupt and the President impotent, with no command of his armed forces, no credit with Congress, and little influence over or respect from the American people. Everything he said or did only alienated more of his countrymen. He coaxed Congress into reimposing the Embargo Act—and almost starved the people of Nantucket Island. The embargo so devastated the New York and New England economies that state leaders again threatened secession to negotiate a separate peace with England. Northern merchants openly defied the President and federal law by trading at will with the enemy across the Canadian border—and with British vessels that sailed unimpeded in and out of New England ports.
Recognizing the Embargo Act as a failure and a personal humiliation, Madison asked Congress to end the charade and repeal it. Congress erupted into cheers and overwhelmingly agreed. Congressmen stopped cheering in early August, however, and fled for their lives when a British fleet sailed into Chesapeake Bay. Some 4,000 British troops landed and set up camps along the Patuxent River near Benedict, Maryland, about forty miles southeast of Washington and sixty miles south of Baltimore. Within days they were on the banks of Indian Creek outside Washington at Bladensburg. As the British forded the stream, the shrill scream of rockets pierced American skies for the first time in history, sending bolts of fire into the midst of defending militiamen. To the terror-stricken Americans, the heavens had unleashed the stars.p Their front line broke and fled in panic. With bugler retreats piercing the air, 2,000 Americans sprinted away, tripping over and trampling each other to escape the advancing British, never firing a shot at the enemy.