by Jane Cook
What stood out to John was the headgear. “The gentlemen wearing black Venetian hats with large plumes of feathers and cloaks and the ladies rich dresses of the most splendid style.” Gone were tricornes, the three-sided hats of his father’s generation. The new hat style was cone shaped. More impressive than the fashions of the guests were the museum’s showpieces.
“Here is one of the most magnificent collections of masterpieces in many of the arts that the world can furnish—pictures, antique statues, medals, coins, engraved stones, minerals, libraries, porcelain, marble; and the catalogue seemed without end,” John reflected. Admiring the Hermitage’s collections was one activity that John and Louisa could comfortably do as the Russians did. The paintings so captivated him that he could have spent years studying them.
Louisa agreed: “It is impossible to describe the splendor of the scene—All the palace, that is the two united the imperial and the Hermitage, with all its magnificent embellishments are laid open to the public.”
She particularly admired the Hermitage’s labyrinth of art and architecture: “The illuminations exceed all description and the pictures, vases and rich ornaments of every description produce an effect perfectly dazzling to the eyes and the imagination.”
America didn’t have anything like the Hermitage in size, scale, or substance. Boston’s and New York’s city streets were lined with taverns and shops, not museums. American portrait artist Charles Willson Peale had only recently expanded his museum of art and odd curiosities in Philadelphia by moving into new space in Independence Hall in 1802. His collection featured crude novelties from western explorers such as Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Zebulon Pike, paintings by Peale and his sons, and donations ranging from dead weasels to a piece of a meteor that fell in Connecticut in 1808. As much as John and Louisa loved America, visiting the Hermitage was one European pleasure their principles fully embraced.
John saw another sign of French strength at the Hermitage. While few paintings came from Italian artists, the collection was rich in paintings from the French and Flemish schools.
Though thousands packed the palace like ants at a picnic that night, only two hundred were privileged enough to take dinner with the imperial family. The Adamses and their party left the crowds to join this elite group. While taking a stroll among the paintings, Louisa saw the empress mother.
“I . . . was gazing at the pictures when I observed the empress mother make a sign to me to come to her.”
Insecurity swelled worse than nausea as she remembered the woman’s admonishment. How could she possibly explain why she missed the previous ball? Her true reasons were too impolite to reveal. Regardless of her misgivings, she could not ignore the empress. Her husband’s success depended on it.
“I immediately walked up to her and she told me that she wanted to introduce her sons to me.” Louisa prepared for an exchange of pretension. “[The empress mother] then presented the Grand Duke Nicholas, then about 16 and the Grand Duke Michaal, a year or two younger—Nicholas was the most beautiful boy I ever looked on—His manner was elegant and he addressed me in a style of the most polished breeding.”
Because Alexander did not have a legitimate heir, one of those boys would become the next emperor of Russia. Louisa smartly issued compliments. “I believe that my astonished admiration gratified the empress [mother] more than any words could have done.”
The empress mother seemed to be introducing her sons as any proud mother would do. She was so gracious that Louisa felt absolved from her prior social sin of omission.
Dinner was served at 11:00 p.m. In the center of the room was the head table, where the emperor took his supper. The sign of French strength was as obvious as the meat on the serving trays. Caulaincourt sat conspicuously at the emperor’s table—the only foreign diplomat with the privilege.
“The other foreign ministers had the second table to themselves,” John noted.
While Emperor Alexander played favorites with Caulaincourt, he made it a point to greet everyone at the second table. “To me he was very courteous and seemed pleased at my expressions of admiration of the scene,” Louisa happily reflected.
When the imperial family retired at one in the morning, the Adamses left. With signs of French influence visible everywhere he went, John made an important decision, a resolution of sorts, on that Russian New Year’s Day. Before the ball, he had visited the French ambassador’s home and asked for an appointment. The meeting was set for three days later. He could not rely on Alexander’s intervention alone to solve America’s trade problems. He needed to confront the French économie, face-to-face.
20
Water
WATER. WHETHER DRINKING FROM A ROYAL CHALICE OR A THIN TIN cup, no one can live without it. Water is as essential to a king’s well-being as it is to the survival of the poorest serf. And when winter awakens in the Arctic, water becomes the enemy of both.
“On this day was performed the usual solemnity of the benediction of the waters of the Neva,” John reported.
Just as late nights shortchanged his need for rest, so spontaneity also frustrated his sensibilities. Invitations for royal events, even annual traditions, often arrived at their hotel the day before they occurred. Such unpredictability was sheer madness. After all, he had business to conduct. Worried he was behind in sending reports to his government, he lacked a reliable way to transport his correspondence. Ships were stalled until spring. Land couriers were expensive. Such realities frustrated him as much as the short notice to attend palace events.
John answered the latest imperial summons by joining the other diplomats at the palace the morning of January 18 for the annual "Blessing of the Waters" celebration. Sealing the city with such a powerful grip by prohibiting travel for six to eight months, the Neva River was the natural focal point of this tradition in St. Petersburg.
“It is a grand ceremony of the church which takes place on the Neva right opposite to the palace in the presence of the imperial family,” Louisa recorded.
“The foreign ministers, excepting the French Ambassador, who attended the emperor on horseback, were first received in the apartments of the Hermitage,” John noted. Once again Caulaincourt received preferential treatment.
Not invited to watch from the palace, Louisa and Kitty observed the ceremony from a mansion on Palace Square, which was crowded with onlookers. “We obtained a seat in a window of a house in the square and saw the procession of priests with the archbishop at their head performing the ceremony.”
With the imperial family gathered around, the archbishop performed the rituals and blessed the frozen river. Even with all his power, Alexander could not break nature’s prison. He was trapped too. The exiled Americans might have felt shackled by French and Russian politics, but nature, the fiercest foe, chained everyone. No one could conquer the frozen river.
Through this blessing, all looked to Providence. How they longed to hear the ice crack and see the sun glisten on summer’s free-flowing water.
“After the ceremony, the two empresses . . . returned to the palace, and went upon a balcony which overlooks the river,” John recalled.
With Caulaincourt by his side, the emperor stayed behind at the river’s edge. The court attendants and foreign ministers joined the empresses on the balcony to watch the military review. “Magnificent furs covered the balcony” and “all the imperial family attended by the grandees with all the foreign corps in superb costumes accompanied them,” Louisa observed.
While the other diplomats donned uniforms representing their countries, Adams proudly wore a plain American suit. From their separate vantage points, Louisa and John watched something they would never see in the United States. Thirty-two thousand men wearing full uniforms paraded before Alexander and Caulaincourt. The soldiers were mostly serfs taken from wealthy landowners for the Russian army.
By reviewing the troops after blessing the waters, the emperor showed the superiority of his military. He could not conquer nature, b
ut he could conquer another nation. Perhaps that was why he gave the French ambassador a front-row seat for the ceremonial review.
The precision of the troops impressed Louisa, and their splendid horses, which not “deviating the breadth of a hair from the line” displayed amazing accuracy. “This is the most splendid sight that can be imagined.”
The United States did not have anything like it. The Continental Army mostly dissolved after the Revolutionary War ended in 1783. When George Washington became president in 1789, military personnel numbered fewer than eight hundred. Instead of organizing a large standing army, many statesmen preferred the militia approach, where men took up arms to fight only as needed.
Despite this philosophy, the military’s numbers increased over the years. By 1809 the US Army reached nearly six thousand, the Navy six thousand, and the Marines more than five hundred. Though the military was the strongest in its history, these numbers were weak compared to France’s Grande Armée and Russia’s Cossacks. A pack of dogs was no match for a forest swarming with wolves.
Though exhausted from the ceremonies, John and Louisa met their social obligations that night, the nineteenth-century version of Mardi Gras. They attended a ball at the Krehmers’ home. Once again custom confronted Adams’s conservatism. He found the celebrated bean in his slice of cake.
“At supper the 12th cake was cut and Mr. Adams was made king; but declined the honor being a republican,” Louisa wrote with amusement.
What would the newspapers have printed if Adams had been made a king? Knowing what his political enemies back home would say, he passed the honor to another guest.
“We danced, and it was past five o clock when we got home,” Louisa wrote. The activity was too much. Once again a fatigued Louisa took to her bed.
Adams was more exhausted from a battle of wills. Two days before the blessing of the river, he had visited the French ambassador as planned by appointment. While he fastened his waistcoat’s buttons and straightened his wig in a looking glass, he likely couldn’t help stewing about French politics. Napoleon didn’t care whether American ships were victimized in the process of conquering the British. They were one and the same to Bonaparte, so it seemed. John wasted no time when he arrived at Caulaincourt’s.
“I told him the object upon which I wished particularly to converse . . . was the order of the King of Denmark,” Adams explained of the American property sequestered by the Danes.
“[T]his measure was . . . intended only for . . . suppressing an illicit trade between these ports and the English . . . but in reality it had fallen most oppressively upon American citizens and American property,” he continued.
Caulaincourt countered coolly. If Denmark’s purpose was to keep British goods from entering other ports, then yes. Napoleon’s government may have interfered to urge compliance.
Those sailors were not British, and neither was their cargo. Adams wanted the Frenchman to ask his government to stand on the side of justice for the Americans. Caulaincourt doubted whether he could do anything but promised to relay their conversation to his government. Was his assurance real or a pretense? Adams did not know. While doubting that anything would come of it, all he could do was take the man’s word—a matter of honor.
Adams then steered their conversation toward the general topic of trade. Perhaps he could open Caulaincourt’s eyes to the bigger picture. Careful not to blame Napoleon, he used his best persuasion techniques. The current Continental System seemed to embolden the English, did it not? The British were not as damaged as the French government intended.
Just as he began to engage Caulaincourt, a servant interrupted, introducing Count Schenk, the minister from Würtemberg. The men exchanged pleasantries, but Schenk’s presence stifled further talk. John understood why. The politics behind the countries that Schenk and Caulaincourt represented were behind the most significant change in recent European history: the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. For ten centuries starting with the Franks, the origin of the French people, followed by the Germans, this Christian empire dominated Europe. After Napoleon humiliated Russia and Austria in 1805 at the Battle of Austerlitz in Moravia, he dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon subsequently reorganized the states of Germany. As a result Würtemberg changed from a state into a kingdom in 1806, which left Count Schenk dependent on Caulaincourt for favors.
At three in the afternoon, with evening fast approaching, Caulaincourt had no more time for business. He was hosting another ice-hills party in the country. Once again it was time for the diplomats to play. Ice sledding turned the tables on nature’s nemesis. While winter’s greatest woe trapped them in St. Petersburg, they could at least frolic among its icy glory.
By trying to confront the problem, John had a clear conscience. France could no longer claim ignorance. If nothing else, maybe his conversation with Caulaincourt would reduce interference by France in Denmark. He felt failure nonetheless. Adams took out his frustrations with his pen in his diary: “My time hitherto has been wasted almost entirely.”
Louisa became so exhausted that she could not bear another party. Fewer than ten days after making amends with the empress mother at the Russian New Year’s ball, she received another invitation to the palace. The next festivities honored Empress Elizabeth.
Every inch of Mrs. Adams’s body cried out for rest. This type of fatigue comes only with pregnancy. Though she wouldn’t have known exactly what was happening—such medicine was still in its infancy—she could feel the changes women have felt since the beginning of time. Her body was working double time, ramping up its blood flow and hormone production.
Years earlier, when Louisa miscarried several times in Berlin, her mother-in-law meddled. Abigail concluded that her daughter-in-law’s constitution was so delicate that she would live a short life. Wondering whether Louisa’s propensity to miscarriage stemmed from Prussia’s social swirl, Abigail blamed one of Louisa’s miscarriages on her imprudent decision to attend a party in Berlin. When the hostess fell and broke her leg, Louisa helped the woman and strained herself in the process. Someone’s lifestyle becomes an easy—though often misinformed—target for pregnancy problems. With such messages coming from Abigail, Louisa easily blamed herself for her lost pregnancies.
What should she do about the latest imperial invitation from the empress mother? She chose to stay home but avoided spending a quiet evening with a friend instead. Louisa knew the reality. If the empress mother didn’t believe she was ill, she just might permanently cross her name off the palace invitation list—a fatal embarrassment to her husband. More than fearing the empress mother, Louisa feared for the life within. She may have been an absent mother to her two oldest children, but she would not let an empress rule or ruin her chance of becoming a mother again.
Her understanding husband attended the ball alone. “As usual inquired of Mr. Adams why I was not there—He informed that I was quite ill and unable to attend being confined to my bed,” Louisa wrote in her diary on January 24, 1810.
Then her pen went silent, her journal empty of activity.
Whether Louisa felt her womb contract or saw twinges of blood, hints of a miscarriage sent her to bed. With each cramp ricocheting across her lower back, she may have worried. Had she pushed her body too far?
Meanwhile Adams wrote, “We have at length got through the continual series of invitations which have so long kept us in a state of dissipation and absorbed my time in a manner the most opposite to my wishes and judgment.”
With his wife ill in bed, Adams turned his attention to business. His letter writing greatly troubled him. Although the frozen river prevented sending correspondence by sea, he desperately needed to update his government on what he had accomplished—no matter how insignificant it seemed to him. “My correspondence, however, continues greatly in arrear, and I know not whether I shall ever bring it up.”
Three days later John wrote a letter to the secretary of state. His dispatching options were to hire an expensive land courier or
find someone traveling in that direction to take his letter to the American ministry in Paris, where a ship could take it to Washington City. Whom could he trust with official US government business? To avoid Napoleon’s spies, he would have to write certain passages in the US secret code that the secretary of state had given him.
“I have sent to Holland, France and England, dispatches and letters for America, without knowing how or when they would find a conveyance,” he wrote his mother. “It is not improbable that this, which is the first I have written you from this place, and which I yet know not how I shall send, will find its way to Quincy as soon as any of the rest.”
Although the frozen water hindered communication, Adams was growing more fearful of what would happen after the water thawed in spring.
John had welcomed numerous American merchants into his meager quarters, including Captain Beckford, who, like the other captains there, was waiting to return the Horace to America when the ice broke. Beckford earned $115,000 by selling his cargo in St. Petersburg. John listened to his and the others’ fears that summer would see war upon the seas.
“The expectation of an immediate war between the United States and England has given great alarm not only to the Americans who are here, but to all the commercial part of this city,” Adams reported of their fears in a letter to Secretary of State Smith.
“This however is not their only apprehension. On the one hand it is generally believed that the emperor of France . . . will persist in renewing the experiment of totally annihilating the commerce between the British Islands and the continent of Europe.” Because the United States and England were conducting diplomatic talks, Adams doubted that an immediate war between America and Britain would begin soon.
“On the other it is feared that the British government will at the opening of the spring declare all the ports of the Baltic in a state of blockade.” While Adams did not believe the bluster about war, he feared that trade would worsen, not improve, in the upcoming season. He fretted about the catastrophic effects of Napoleon’s policies on American commerce.