American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  “In a corner house of the Vosnesensky and Little Officer’s Streets,” John replied. Without telling Alexander, John knew that Louisa considered the spot “a very vulgar and unpopular part of the city.”

  After walking St. Petersburg’s pathways for more than thirty-five years, the emperor said he knew the place. Then, remembering Louisa’s pregnancy, he posed an important question: Had Madame—Mrs. Adams—been confined?

  “She had been,” John confirmed.

  “When?”

  “More than two months ago.”

  “What! In the country?”

  “In the country.”

  “Had her confinement been fortunate?”

  “Entirely so.”

  “What had she got?”

  “A daughter.”

  Alexander shrugged his shoulders and waved his hand. He often used this gesture to imply that he did not know a thing you were telling him. Neither John nor Louisa believed the czar was as unaware of the birth as he pretended to be.

  “As he is informed of everything concerning foreigners, he knew all about it before he put these questions,” Louisa mused when her husband relayed the conversation. She offered an explanation for His Majesty’s pretension: “He felt I suppose what a serious inconvenience he had put me to.”

  His Flirtiness’s interest, however, intrigued her.

  “How inquisitive!!!” she recorded.

  The czar’s attention may have reminded her, too, of the notice she'd received from the Prussian monarchy when she gave birth to George on April 12, 1801, in Berlin. The queen had sent a servant to Louisa’s home each day to inquire how the new babe and mother were doing. The Prussian king was so moved that he'd ordered the street where the Adamses lived to be closed to traffic so the family could recover and live in peace during the tender time of caring for a newborn. As she now was in St. Petersburg, Louisa had been a favorite of Prussian court.

  Unlike her husband, who had encountered the Russian emperor several times that fall during walks, Louisa had not seen the emperor since the summer. She attributed the reason in part to politics: “Everything is changed since the departure of Caulaincourt.”

  She didn’t expect to miss the fine-styled French ambassador. However, when he left, he also carried away much of the gaiety of St. Petersburg’s diplomatic life. Count Lauriston was not a grand host. His lack of entertaining had one positive benefit. It lowered the entertaining expectations—and burdens—of the other diplomats.

  Louisa made another keen observation about the new French ambassador. Unlike his initial feelings of inferiority toward Caulaincourt, John did not need to prove himself to Lauriston. In contrast, though equal in age, the new French ambassador looked up to Adams, viewing him as a wise but rivaling elder brother. Perhaps Caulaincourt had told Lauriston that Adams would have been an excellent minister to France. Or maybe he noted that the frugal Adams was an honest man whose best weapon was his ability to show honor to his opponents in a battle of wits. As if pulled by a magnet, Lauriston was, as Louisa explained, “a constant visitor at our house, and on very social terms as he seemed extremely partial to Mr. Adams.”

  Something else had solidified too. Though he still lacked the financial ability to entertain in splendor, John was the most successful diplomat in the imperial court. “Indeed he was styled the father of diplomacy among the corps, who all live with us upon terms of intimate friendship,” she wrote with pride.

  Louisa’s assessment of her husband was accurate. Though a short man, Adams’s integrity was tall, towering above his colleagues. He did not attract people with charisma or flattery, like Alexander or Caulaincourt. Rather, his keen intellect and careful conversations had earned the trust—and respect—of his fellow diplomats.

  Except for these musings, Louisa’s pen was mostly silent during this time. Baby Louisa captivated her heart and took so much time that she had little left for writing.

  “O she grows lovely—Such a pair of eyes!! I fear I love her too well,” she doted, noting that they had vaccinated her for smallpox.

  The theater occasionally lured Louisa from her home and later to her journal. One particular performance in November 1811 motivated her to record her thoughts about the genre of tragedy—an interesting choice considering the comet casting its spell across the sky at the time. She wrote her opinions on the difference between historical and personal dramas. Historical tragedies were based on real events, such as the French Revolution from the previous generation. Personal dramas were rooted in everyday life. She noticed that the acting in historical plays was often bad; the story itself, contrived. She faulted the playwright, concluding that children who grow up to write historical dramas could not fully understand the manners and customs of their parents’ generation. How could someone accurately portray the French Revolution and the beheading of Marie Antoinette if he or she had not lived through it?

  Louisa knew her beloved birches of Boston would not understand the American Revolution in the way John or his father did. As a result, she believed that authors of historical tragedies were usually unsuccessful. Their facts may have been accurate, but they were unable to adequately convey the emotion behind the story.

  “And this is the reason why the characters in tragedy are always stiff and stately or cold and uninteresting—or overstrained and vulgar.” She then hit upon the very point that makes history come alive. The best historical dramas are the ones that tap the subjects and emotions that transcend generations.

  “The domestic tragedy is always touching because they are the tragedies of everyday life, which speak to the heart and soul, whether in tatters or in royal robes.”

  Indeed. Tragedy can affect anyone. Louisa had no idea how prophetic that particular diary entry would later become. Only one comet streaked through the Russian sky, but John and Louisa would soon experience the theatrical pain of double, even multiple, tragedies.

  44

  Baltic Freeze

  “SEIZED WITH A VIOLENT FEVER,” LOUISA RECORDED ON DECEMBER 7, 1811.

  She was not the only one who was ill. Both Charles and the baby were sick with fevers and chills. Louisa was worse than anyone. Her head boiled with cometlike heat, sending her into danger.

  “My fever ran so high and the delirium so violent that the physician announced to Mr. Adams that if a change did not take place towards morning, he must prepare for the worst.”

  Her condition was so serious that she could no longer nurse her daughter: “My child was taken from me for the time—The children were both very ill, and our complaint was said to be the grippe.”

  Grippe is another name for influenza. Within two days Louisa’s fever diminished, but she was not well enough to ease the doctor’s mind. “Still considered in great danger, but the head partially relieved—The children severely ill.”

  Finally, after ten days, Louisa regained her strength. This lioness remained quite worried about her youngest cub: “Myself out of danger and Charles better, but my babe very ill—All of us much reduced and very suffering.”

  Nearly two months after becoming sick, the baby regained her health, and Louisa returned to life as usual. Her first outing was, of course, a palace ball.

  “After a long protracted confinement by sickness and anxiety, I once again take my station in the world for which I care so little,” she wrote sadly on January 28.

  She may have wrapped herself in a familiar Russian fur coat or her Turkish shawl, but she almost didn’t recognize the social and political world she rejoined. The thickest chill she had ever seen congealed the emperor’s court.

  The freeze was just as obvious to John. He had noticed it a month earlier when the diplomats gathered at the palace for the emperor’s birthday. Though they dressed more magnificently than ever, with stunning diamonds, the members of the imperial family were unusually reserved. Their embroidered silks stitched a pattern of power while their manners reflected steel reserve. Removing the glove of friendliness, they wore aloofness instead.


  “The emperor and empresses said very few words to the French ambassador and each of the ministers,” John noted.

  Why should they? Before the river froze weeks earlier in late October, French privateers had blockaded the Baltic to prevent any ship carrying colonial goods, particularly American or British, from going past Denmark. Then the French threatened to block any ship—not just American or British but also Swedish and Russian—from entering the Baltic. Napoleon issued an order to conscript 120,000 soldiers. Alexander responded with a similar order, conscripting 130,000 serfs from their landowners.

  In contrast, one conversation at that cold December meeting of the diplomatic corps gave John reason to smile. While the comet—which means “let the hair grow longer”—expanded its tail with each mile, Alexander commented on John’s wigless appearance.

  “The emperor noticed that I had at last left off my wig. I said I had considered His Majesty’s example as a permission, and accordingly followed it.”

  Alexander had let his hair down too. He replied by saying, “It was not so showy but it was more convenient to go without it.”

  The emperor’s decision to go wigless was another sign that the times were changing. Seriousness was replacing splendor. The precise, predictable pattern of the emperor’s customs now entered a new orbit of significant consequences.

  While favor for the French was near absolute zero in arctic Russia, John held a different status in the czar’s court of opinion.

  “Mr. Adams’s position is as high as ever with the imperial family, and . . . [he] is the sun-shine of St. Petersburg,” Louisa proudly observed.

  At the same time, she stated the obvious: “The aspect of society is greatly changed—The corps diplomatique is no longer so brilliant, and a cloud has risen to veil the future for a time.”

  Her husband put the change this way in a letter to his friend William Plumer: “In Europe darkness and gloom, blood and desolation yet prevail.” They hoped and prayed that “out of this darkness, light will also in due time be made to appear.”

  While the comet hovered, the likelihood of doom loomed just as ominously.

  “A letter full of woe announcing my mother’s death,” Louisa wrote on January 29, 1812. Before tears could stain her eyes, she learned that the news was even worse: “[And] that of my brother-in-law, Mr. Buchanan [husband of her sister Carolina].” Both died in a fever that swept through Baltimore and Washington City. Her mother was fifty-four years old.

  That was not all: “Mr. Adams’s Uncle and Aunt Cranch [died] within twenty hours of each other.”

  The tragic news continued: “And the dangerous and hopeless illness of his only sister—God help us!! Yet we are always praying for letters.”

  John’s sister Nabby had breast cancer. Four members of their family were now dead, and one was seriously ill. Imagine the pain Louisa must have felt at not being able to say good-bye to her mother. One of her greatest fears had come true.

  When she left America in 1809, Louisa worried that she would lose a family member in her absence. Now she would never see her mother’s face again. Nor could she reminisce with her sisters and brother about their childhood in London, when as wife of the US consul her mother had played hostess to Americans traveling through or living there. Now Louisa was left alone in grief, halfway around the world in a foreign country on the brink of war.

  “Full of mortal affliction—My poor mother! After ten years of poverty, dependence, and severe suffering, which at this great distance was so utterly out of my power to mitigate or assuage,” she said in her grief.

  Her sister Nancy was gone, and now a brother-in-law too. The Cranches were beloved relatives of the Adams family who had boarded George and John. Though Louisa did not know it at the time, not long after the Cranches died, the boys went to Atkinson, New Hampshire, to study and live with Elizabeth and Stephen Peabody. George had studied there for two years when John Quincy served in the Senate in Washington. By November 1812, George and John changed schools. This time they traveled to Derby Academy in Hingham, Massachusetts, which was about seven miles from Quincy. There they studied with Reverend Daniel Kimball, the academy’s master teacher.

  Would John and Louisa be able to return to America within a year as they planned? When would these tragedies end? Would his parents, either John or Abigail, die before they could see them again?

  “How different will home appear should we live to return—God’s will be done!”

  One other matter weighed on Louisa. The relationship between Kitty and William Smith had become very close—too close for Adams’s sensibilities. Mr. Gray’s departure removed the final obstacle to Kitty’s affection, clearing the path for William, who took full advantage.

  From the day she learned that Kitty was to accompany her to St. Petersburg, Louisa had worried about the young woman’s lot in life. She felt that she had failed their now deceased mother as a chaperone to her sister. She worried about her relationship with William, who was younger and showing the same destructive habits for excessive drinking and gambling that had brought down his father, who'd abandoned his family. Perhaps she was thinking of Kitty when Louisa penned these words: “He afflicts us in mercy for here we are placed amid many sore temptations.”

  More than ever it was time to go home to Boston.

  Although the year 1812 had just begun, the truth of their official circumstances was becoming more and more ominous. Official US government correspondence had also recently arrived, bringing disappointment. John knew he must tell Count Romanzoff as soon as possible.

  The meeting took place on February 4, 1812. When Adams arrived, he thanked Romanzoff for the packets he had received from Paris through the Russian courier and quickly got to his point. He had recently received a personal letter from the president of the United States and a dispatch from the secretary of state. Madison had nominated another person to the Supreme Court. His new instructions were as firm as the frozen surface of the Baltic. John was to remain in Russia and continue the US mission there until further notice.

  “A circumstance which I thought it proper to communicate to this government,” he noted.

  Romanzoff’s long face broke into a wide smile over the news. He had read otherwise. Both English and German newspapers reported that Adams was “to be removed to England.” The count confessed that he'd believed those articles so much that he “had mentioned it to the emperor and had thought it probable.” His trust came from reports that England appeared to be showing “conciliatory dispositions towards the United States.”

  Rubbish. Propaganda. John knew better. English newspapers printed predictions as facts. Their motive was to make the news, not merely to report it. “It was much the fashion to announce appointments by anticipation, which never came to be realized; that I had not the slightest insinuation of an intention by the president to remove me to England.”

  Adams was confident in the position of the president. The reason he had not been appointed as America’s top envoy to England was quite simple. Convinced that the British intended to wage war instead of revoking their abusive Orders in Council, Madison saw no need to send anyone else to London to replace US Minister William Pinkney, who returned to America in June 1811 after talks with the British government terminated in London. Instead British envoy Augustus John Foster arrived in Washington City as British minister to the United States about the same time Pinkney returned home. Peace talks with Foster started badly because of the Little Belt incident. The British government would not allow Foster to negotiate reparations for the 1801 Chesapeake incident until the US government made amends for the Little Belt.

  After President Madison announced hostile intentions toward Britain in his annual message to Congress in October 1811, Foster quickly concluded negotiations on the Chesapeake reparations. He then revealed that Britain had stiffened its terms for ultimate peace with America. Because they did not accept Napoleon’s alleged revocation of his Berlin and Milan decrees, the British would not repeal t
heir Orders in Council until the US government required France to admit both British and American cargo.

  Given all this, John explained to Romanzoff that his only hope of America avoiding war with England was the widely anticipated death of King George III: The “spirit of delirium and of stubbornness” in the old king “had almost constant rule of the kingdom of Great Britain.”

  Although King George III’s reign was officially over, he was not dead. The English king who had stubbornly refused to give America independence was now insane. His son the prince regent took the throne in February 1811. But as long as his father was alive, he competed for power with Parliament. Adams hoped the prince’s judgment was better than his father’s, whose death might free the prince to treat for peace.

  John also prayed that his country would be wise. If Congress chose war, the US government’s preparations must be substantial. In a letter he had recently written to his mother, he hoped “that Congress will have the wisdom still to preserve our country from war in which we could gain nothing and could not fail to lose something of what is worth more than all other possessions to a nation, our independence.”

  Though all this weighed on his mind, Adams took his cues from the count in their February 1812 meeting. Romanzoff wanted to change the subject, noting “that in France a better understanding with America was intended and even professed.”

  Double rubbish.

  “With regard to American vessels which should arrive in France there would be little or no difficulty made as to whence they came or as to the nature of their cargoes.”

  While Napoleon hoisted a flag of hope through front-facing official policy, he held a pirate’s flag behind his back. French privateers continued to seize American ships. Reports of French hostilities reached President Madison on January 1, 1812, leading to a heated exchange with the French minister at a New Year’s reception at the President’s House. French privateers were so successful that the English decided to abandon their blockade of the port of Elsinore in Denmark. Why harass the Americans if the French would do their dirty work for them? When it came to Napoleon’s commerce policy, nothing was permanent. Every decision was a momentary impulse.