by Jane Cook
From her perspective, her husband simply did not understand. His patience seemed as thin as the silk stockings he had to wear with his full court suit to the palace.
“I feel what a burden I must be to all around me, and it is this which has made me so solicitous to return home.”
The death of her daughter made her heart cry out even louder for her sons. She longed to escape the prison of St. Petersburg. It was time—past time—to leave this so-called honorable exile.
“There is something in an American life more active and varied and the idea of seeing my children was an object on which my mind could rest with real pleasure.”
John’s reserved emotions and high expectations were not what she needed in this time. His grief led him to increase his attention to Charles’s education, particularly mathematics, and take him on long walks. By keeping his emotions to himself, John seemed cold to her heartache. She knew there was someone in their family who would understand her suffering, whose heart had experienced the loneliness and despair marked by the loss of a daughter.
“In Mrs. Adams, I should have found a comforter, a friend who would pity my sufferings, which she would have understood,” she emphasized.
Susanna, John’s younger sister, had died on February 4, 1770, at age thirteen months, the same age as baby Louisa. Oh, how Abigail could have comforted her! For now the board-bound book with its crude handmade paper would have to do.
News from the war between the United States and England understandably came much more slowly than the hurried horseback messengers beating the roads from Moscow. Mr. Harris delivered the latest startling report found in the English Courier.
The USS Constitution had defeated the HMS Guerriere at sea on August 19, 1812. After being chased by a British squadron off the coast of New Jersey, the USS Constitution had sailed east of Boston, where it had been commissioned fifteen years earlier. Led by the plucky Isaac Hull, the Constitution came across the Guerriere. Under fire Hull maneuvered his ship within musket-firing range and launched a successful broadside at the British warship. After thirty minutes of violent and close action, the Guerriere was such a wreck that it had to be burned after its defeat.
Because so many of the British shots failed to penetrate the Constitution’s oak sides, the American sailors gave their vessel the nickname “Old Ironsides.” For a US ship to win a battle at sea against the best navy in the world was an astonishing feat. Suddenly Congress’s decision in January against building twenty-two more warships, as Madison had requested, now seemed foolish.
The news, however, was not all good, not by a cannon shot. Years earlier President Jefferson had named distinguished Revolutionary War veteran General William Hull—who had adopted his orphaned nephew, Isaac Hull—as governor of the Michigan territory. Madison subsequently looked to General Hull to capture Fort Detroit and launch an assault into Canada. Hull’s initial efforts were successful. He captured Fort Detroit on July 5, 1812, and moved into Canada on July 12. “Suffering from the residual effects of a stroke in 1811 and aged 59, Hull cut an unimpressive figure.” Then the tired, corpulent general, known for excessive drinking, wasted two weeks preparing for an assault on a nearby puny fort.
Meanwhile British General Isaac Brock had enough time to move a small, elite army to Detroit, where Brock called on Hull to capitulate. Brock scared Hull with threats of an attack and massacre of women and children led by Shawnee Chief Tecumseh and his combined forces. At the same time these tribes swarmed Hull’s two-hundred-mile-long supply line, weakening it and validating Brock’s scare tactics. Perhaps under the influence of too much liquor, Hull began to break down. His erratic behavior included crouching in corners, trembling as he spoke, and drooling at the corners of his mouth. Without a fight Hull surrendered Fort Detroit to the British on August 16. His defeat completely erased any hope of capturing Upper Canada. Worse, America lost vital territorial gains to the British and Native Americans in Ohio and the entire Northwest Territory.
John knew very little of this at the time, only the outcome, which horrified him: “There are scarcely any details of the affair given. The honor of my country—O God! Suffer it not to go unredeemed.”
49
Impressment
WHILE THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT POSTED HANDBILLS ASSURING St. Petersburg residents that they were safe from invasion, the loss of Moscow was too serious to ignore. Rest would not come until the enemy within became the enemy expelled.
“About noon this day a report of cannon fire from the fortress announced that important and pleasing intelligence from the armies had been received,” Adams recorded on October 27.
Mr. Harris discovered the reason for the victorious salutes and hurried over to the Adams residence to tell his boss the good news. Moscow was back in Russian hands. A corps under the leadership of General Wintzingerode retook the city, though the French captured Wintzingerode. At noon the palace summoned John, the other diplomats, and the Russian nobility to a Te Deum celebration. That night residents lit lanterns on their doorsteps, illuminating the city in celebration. The Moscow victory was sweeter than any French wine but with a far more satisfying aftertaste. Hope for ultimate victory lingered.
“The passions of almost all the politicians whom I now see and hear are concentrated upon the head of one man. It seems almost universally to be considered that the destinies of mankind hang upon his life alone,” John wrote after dining at the home of Mr. Krehmer, one of his few friends left in town. Everywhere Adams went, he heard about the desire to kill Napoleon. Everyone had an opinion.
“I know not how it has been with former conquerors during their lives, but I believe there never was a human being who united against himself such a massive execration and abhorrence as this man has done.”
John now had little business to occupy him. He occasionally conversed with Count Romanzoff, who had returned from the battlefield. Until he heard from President Madison or Secretary Monroe on the US acceptance or rejection of the czar’s offer to mediate the war with England, John did not have much to do. With the Orders in Council repealed, he mulled over what now mattered the most in making peace with England: the practice of impressment, the moral cause behind the war.
He picked up a book on philosophy, whose English author had been a strong advocate for abolishing the slave trade. Though the trade itself had ceased five years earlier, the practice of slavery continued.
“The trade is beyond question an abomination, disgraceful to the human character,” John reflected, hoping that slavery would be outlawed one day.
Like his father and mother, Adams abhorred slavery. His family managed their Massachusetts farms with tenants and paid laborers, not slaves. The practice of impressment bothered him just as much as slavery. Impressment was the act of forcibly taking someone into military service. It was one thing for the British to compel lads from the English countryside into wearing the redcoat uniform; it was another to take Americans from US ships and force them to turn their coats from blue to red.
“[F]or the impressment of seamen is to all intents and purposes a practice as unjust, as immoral, as base, as oppressive and as tyrannical as the slave trade.”
While he admired the author’s abolitionist views, he saw hypocrisy too. Adams wrote:
Yet the same members of the British Parliament, who have been the greatest zealots for abolishing the slave trade, are not only inflexible adherents to the practice of impressments among their own people, but are now waging a rancorous war against the United States to support the practice of their officers in impressing men from American merchant vessels on the high seas. Every particle of argument [that] can bear up against the slave trade bears with equal force against impressment.
He would never forget the forlorn looks of his countrymen trapped in Kristiansand, Norway, on his ocean voyage to St. Petersburg three years earlier. Those merchants had lost their cargo and ships, but they had not lost their identity as American citizens. They had not been captured by the British and
impressed into His Majesty’s navy. But many sailors had. Likewise he would never forget the fear in the eyes of the lad from Charleston, who was nearly taken from the Horace by an English officer.
By 1812 the British had impressed as many as nine thousand American citizens. Now many of these same Americans were being forced to fight against the country of their birth or of their adoption. Such injustice! This crime was the strongest proof that US sovereignty was in name only. The king of England may have lost America during the Revolutionary War, but he had found a way to enslave US independence nonetheless, suppressing it through impressments. If independence depended in part on John Adams in 1776, actual independence now depended in part on John Quincy Adams and the War of 1812.
The mind can be a dark place. Louisa’s psyche became her worst enemy, plaguing her with ideas she had never entertained. Her depression took a dangerous turn.
“My thoughts have been so very gloomy that I have refrained from writing some time, and I dare not commit to paper all that passes in my mind,” she wrote in her journal in early November. Though she tried to “fly from them,” her efforts were in vain.
Depression deepened. Nightmares haunted her. Her mind tapped her visual memory of her daughter and other deceased loved ones and twisted them into horrific scenes. As long as her eyelids were closed, these visions seemed as real as her bed: “My babe’s image flits forever before my eyes and seems to reproach me with her death.”
Louisa blamed herself: “Necessity alone induced me to wean her and in doing it I lost her.”
She couldn’t help wondering what would have happened had she continued to nurse. Did weaning baby Louisa too early lead to her sickness and dysentery? One dream took Louisa to a house where she'd lived as a child. Her daughter was there, and so were her deceased father and sister Nancy.
“I was playing with my babe, who appeared in full health, when I was suddenly called by my father, who was sitting in the next room with a party of gentlemen to beg that I would go down into the cellar to fetch him some wine.”
Feeling afraid, she agreed but asked Nancy to go with her.
“We descended a flight of steps which appeared to lead to a deep vault, and at the bottom of the stairs, I stumbled and fell over a body newly murder’d from which the blood still appear’d to stream. I arose with difficulty and looked for my sister who seem’d to stand as if immovable and as if just risen from the grave not withstanding my terror.”
Instead of running up the stairs to tell her father about the murder, Louisa took him some wine. “Methought I got three bottles and carried them to my father, who upon examining them told me that they were bottles of Port which was entirely spoilt.”
Nightmares are often strange narratives. “With the usual inconsistency of dreams, I got over all these painful impressions and was as at first playing with my child who was all life and animation.”
In another dream, a storm sparked vivid flashes of lightning toward the heavens. “I was left alone in indescribable terror. I fell upon my knees and implored the mercy of heaven.”
Then the thunder and lightning suddenly ceased. “And I raised my eyes and beheld as it were a stream of fire which extended completely across the heavens in which was distinctly written ‘be of good cheer[;] thy petition is granted’—I fell flat upon my face in a swoon and awoke.”
Soon the desire for death left her dream world and became real.
“I struggle in vain against the affliction that consumes me, and I feel that all my wishes center in the grave,” she wrote. “I am a useless being in this world . . . surely it is no crime to pray for death. [I]f it is wickedness, I implore thy mercy, O Lord, to cleanse my heart and to teach me to bear my trials with fortitude.”
Depression deeply impressed Louisa’s mind, overtaking her longtime yearning to be reunited with George and John. “My heart is buried in my Louisa’s grave, and my greatest longing is to be laid beside her, even the desire of seeing my beloved boys gives way to this idea [of] cherished hope.”
50
Retreat
“[T]HERE WAS A REPORT CIRCULATING IN THE CITY THAT BONAPARTE [he is now nothing more than plain Bonaparte] was killed,” John wrote on December 8.
“We afterwards, in the course of the day, heard the same report from two other quarters; and even that his body had been found after a battle.”
John had first heard of the Battle of Krasnoi nearly two weeks earlier on the morning of November 25, when the master of ceremonies sent a messenger requesting his attendance at an impromptu victory service at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan.
Adams had walked along the Kazan’s mosaic tile floor many times. When the emperor opened the Latin-cross-shaped cathedral in 1811, he made sure the diplomats received several opportunities to admire its fifty-six interior pink granite Corinthian columns and massive chandelier. Alexander’s father, Paul, envisioned the cathedral as a rival to St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which is why Kazan’s dome soars more than 230 feet above a colonnade of ninety-six columns arranged in an arch. The cathedral’s purpose was to pay homage to the Russian church’s highest icon, Our Lady of Kazan, whom the Russians credited for ending the Polish occupation of Russia in 1612.
As soon as John stepped into the cathedral that day, he couldn’t help noticing the obvious. Standing in front of the bejeweled lady icon were trophies from the Battle of Krasnoi. Chief among them was a truncheon, a spear-shaped club. What made this baton special was not its size or shape but its owner. The club belonged to Louis-Nicolas Davout, one of the French field marshals defeated by the Russians from November 15 to 18 in several skirmishes in and around Krasnoi.
“It is the greatest victory that the Russians have gained since the war commenced, and is perfectly decisive of the fate of the campaign and of the Emperor Napoleon’s main army,” Adams observed.
During his invasion of Russia, Napoleon had chosen Smolensk as one of several supply depots. When Alexander failed to negotiate after the burning of Moscow, Napoleon abandoned the now useless burnt city and retreated 260 miles to Smolensk, which he planned to make his winter headquarters. Brutal subzero temperatures, starvation, and supply losses had degraded his army so much that he decided to continue his retreat rather than stay in Smolensk.
Thinking the Russian army was as worn down by the weather as his was, Napoleon miscalculated Russian commander in chief Kutuzov’s capabilities and location. As a result Bonaparte ordered his dwindling army to march from Smolensk to nearby Krasnoi in waves, leaving at separate times and on separate days. They marched in linear columns, not battle-ready blocks. Napoleon himself led his Imperial Guard.
Though failing to launch an all-out assault, Kutuzov took advantage of the situation. Among the booty they captured was French marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout’s personal baggage, which included maps and his beloved truncheon. Fewer than thirty thousand remained of the Grande Armée.
“Joy and triumph were upon every countenance” who entered the church. Each time someone arrived, the person next to him whispered the exciting news about Krasnoi. Each face brightened in succession, as if lighting candles.
“It is now morally impossible that the remnant of them should escape. In every probability they are at this hour all prisoners of war. He is lost without resource,” John observed.
Alexander and the imperial family led the congregation and “performed their prostrations to the miraculous image of the Virgin.” Religion and government were so intertwined in Russia that it was hard to know where one ended and the other began.
“The emperor, on leaving the church, was greeted with loud shouts of the populace.”
The enemy within was close to being without an army. This latest victory launched an earthquake of convulsions that could be felt more than sixteen hundred miles to Paris. The aftershocks were not known. But by early December, the hope of Bonaparte’s death was very real.
“The crisis is great and awful beyond all example. Almighty God, grant that it may turn to
good! To peace! To the relief of mankind from the dreadful calamities of unbridled ambition.”
Meanwhile Louisa continued to face her enemy within. “It is long since I have written. My spirits are still dreadful and nothing but constant occupation prevents me from dwelling with unremitted sorrow for my irreparable loss,” she wrote on November 27.
She tried to distract her mind by reading books, including a biography of the mistress of Henry II of France. The woman had lived forty years “of uninterrupted virtue” only to be seduced by the teenage Henry. “How often when we think we have attained to the highest state of perfection, of which human nature is capable, are we dashed from our elevation and degraded to the lowest stations of infamy?”
As she thought about how fragile human virtue can be, no matter how great the talent, her mind naturally turned to Napoleon: “We behold here, the emperor of France, after sixteen years of the most unheard of successes, in the short space of one month, plunged into all the horrors of extreme distress, flying for his life, pursued by barbarians, a revolt in his country, his army totally overthrown, and surrounded by treachery, dashed instantaneously from the summit of splendor, into such a scene of horror, and calamity.”
Louisa may have been depressed, but she was not losing her mind. Her analysis of Napoleon was as sharp as a bayonet: “The character of this man produces unceasing astonishment, and we cannot trace his rise and see his fall, without shuddering at the length to which a blind and inexhaustible ambition will lead mankind. And though conscious of the justice of his fall, we shrink with pity and horror from a fate so dreadful, so hopeless.”
She did not know whether his downfall included his death.
By December 7, 1812, Adams had received official notification from the US government about the war with England. Although the declaration was six months old, he needed to clarify a few points and update Romanzoff.