American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  “The first was the desire of the United States that this war might be confined to them and Great Britain, that no other power might be involved in it,” he told the count.

  The US government did not consider itself at war with any of England’s allies and wanted to continue its amicable relationship with Russia. Romanzoff told Adams that America’s desire for ongoing commercial relations with Russia would be “peculiarly agreeable to the emperor.”

  Adams, however, couldn’t communicate what he most wanted to tell the count. He didn’t know whether Madison had accepted Alexander’s offer to mediate. Romanzoff also updated Adams. The British government had not accepted the czar’s mediation proposal, but neither had they rejected it. Lord Cathcart hinted that Parliament was waiting until the outcome of the 1812 US presidential election with hopes that Madison would lose. Believing the British were stonewalling, John plainly gave his opinion: “I believed the emperor’s proposal would be very acceptable, whatever the event of our election might be.”

  Romanzoff asked if the US government’s position had changed since Parliament revoked the Orders in Council.

  “It had not, but that although I was satisfied, if that revocation had been known, the declaration of war would not have been made.”

  Knowing that Russia might mediate, Adams used his best legal argument to persuade the count about the main moral issue behind the war: “Upon the chief of these, the impressment of seamen from our merchant vessels, it appeared the British government would listen to nothing.” This practice made it impossible for the United States to have a “sense of independence.”

  The count challenged attorney Adams. Didn’t the British complain that they'd lost great numbers of men, who claimed to be naturalized Americans?

  “It was not exactly that. There were very few British sailors who ever were or could be naturalized as Americans.” Adams explained the conditions for naturalization outlined by US law and noted that “few foreign seamen can avail themselves of them.” The problem was economics, not national loyalty.

  “The American sea service, public and private, was more attractive than the British, for our common seamen were better fed, better paid and better treated than English seamen are wont to be in their own service. It was natural therefore for English sailors to prefer our service to their own, and to seize every opportunity they could of entering it.”

  Rather than improve their system, the English opted to kidnap Americans instead. “And they have no other remedy against it, than that violent and tyrannical practice of their naval officers, of stealing men from our merchant vessels. I did not know that it would be possible ever to come to a compromise with them upon it.”

  John put forward a bold suggestion. If the Americans could not solve impressment through war, perhaps “he, the count, would furnish us with one [a solution]” through a peace treaty.

  Though persuaded by his friend’s logical argument, Romanzoff could not promise to advocate against impressment. For now all they could do was wait to hear whether or not the US and British governments would agree to the mediation.

  In the days that followed, new information emerged. Though defeated, the nucleus of Napoleon’s army had slipped past a Russian officer and escaped over the border. For all their successes, the Russians were as much indebted to famine and frost for the French army’s demise as their own might. Dead men littered the roads. Those who survived were so sick with dysentery that the route out of Russia toward Courland was a long, continuous latrine. Napoleon miscalculated the severity of Russia’s winter, which at thirty degrees below zero was more frigid than usual from the atmospheric changes of the fading comet.

  By December 9 a credible report arrived in town.

  “The news of the Emperor Napoleon’s being killed is not authenticated.”

  Napoleon was not dead. He had escaped.

  Louisa continued to immerse her mind in all sorts of books, particularly French biographies. However, dealing with depression is more than just finding distractions. A depressed person often has difficulty facing new problems that arise from everyday life.

  “Kitty has been very sick and the doctor kindly told me that if we did not make haste and return home that the climate would kill us both.”

  Louisa’s response revealed the depth of her depression: “To me there is nothing frightful in this idea. I am only desirous of mingling my ashes with those of my lovely babe.”

  She believed her petition was well thought out, not a crazy whim: “I know myself I never was calmer or easier in mind and body than I am at this moment.”

  Her wish to die now surpassed her hope for reunion with her sons.

  As 1812 came to a close, John discovered the latest news from America while playing cards with Louisa and Kitty. When Mr. Harris brought him a special edition of the London Gazette, he learned that the British had defeated US forces as they attempted to cross the Niagara River border into Canada in the Battle of Queenston Heights on October 13, 1812. The casualties were severe, with ninety Americans killed, one hundred wounded, and eight hundred captured.

  Adams felt distress and shame for “one who loves his country.” He noted, “The reliance of man in all cases can only be upon heaven. God grant that these disasters instead of sinking may rouse the spirit of the nation.”

  More certain than the war’s outcome was the comet’s fate. What was first seen in France in March 1811 disappeared from the skies as the year 1812 evaporated. For the Adamses, two wars and personal tragedy were more than enough to say farewell to the worst year of their lives.

  At the time, they did not know of a recent coincidence. The last of Napoleon’s army had surpassed Russia’s borders and reached the Baltic Sea by December 19, the very day that Alexander had made a surprising decision for the leader of an army that had just evicted the enemy. Instead of retiring, the czar chose to continue the war and chase Napoleon toward Paris. Burnt Moscow illuminated his soul. As far as he was concerned, it was either him or Napoleon. They could no longer reign in Europe at the same time.

  “The Emperor Alexander is gone to the army, I suppose he intends to become as famous in pursuit as he is in retreat,” Louisa observed.

  51

  Dry Bones

  MRS. CABOT WAS SERIOUSLY ILL. IF SHE PASSED AWAY, SHE WOULD be buried next to the infant Adams in St. Petersburg’s English graveyard. The possibility was too much. Louisa couldn’t let Mrs. Cabot have the spot next to her daughter. In her mind that dirt belonged to only one person—Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams.

  “They tell me that Mrs. Cabot is likely to die, and I cannot describe the terror I feel, lest they should usurp the little spot of earth which I have set my heart on that adjoins my Louisa’s grave,” she wrote in her diary in March 1813.

  “In vain I reason with myself, the desire is uncontrollable, and my mind is perpetually dwelling upon some means to procure this desired blessing.”

  Except to be buried in it, Louisa had no interest in sliding into her silver tissue ball gown or silk threads of any other color the winter of 1813. She also had scant need to wear her fanciest dresses. St. Petersburg’s eighteen-hour nights made life gloomy in any winter, but this season was the worst to date for the Adamses. They had little to occupy their minds; no balls or parties to attend. The social scene was as dead as dry bones in a graveyard.

  Leading troops on the frontier gave Alexander insight into the plight of the Russian common man in a way he had never known. He heard the wailing and mourning that rattled the shacks throughout his land. People were reduced to beggary. As a result, he banned entertaining at the Winter Palace, especially on his birthday. This great bear of Russia couldn’t bear for anyone to taste wine, enjoy stringed melodies, or pleasantly touch a lady’s hand during a polonaise while soldiers were dying on the battlefield.

  “The emperor’s birthday which, for the first time since I had been here, passed over without any celebration and almost without notice,” John had observed months earlier at th
e beginning of the social season.

  By the time of Mrs. Cabot’s illness, letters from home seemed even more absent than in years past to the Adamses. Louisa had no fresh samples of her boys’ handwriting to admire or updates about the subjects they were studying. The two great wars severely restricted the arrival of any kind of mail, whether by ship or by land. They had nothing but books to occupy them. John turned to Plato, Cicero, and other philosophers while she read the writings of a female French author.

  Louisa was consumed by the letters of Madame Anne Marguerite Petit du Noyer, a Frenchwoman who had documented the negotiations of a treaty between Great Britain and France a century earlier. By sorting gossip from reality, Noyer had become an early journalist and a female one at that. Then her religious conversion from Catholicism to Calvinism cost her dearly in 1701, when she was banished from France.

  Identifying with this woman’s exile from her homeland, Louisa was so struck with the beauty of one of Noyer’s poems that she copied fifteen lines of it into her diary. The poem spoke of the suffering of Christ for all humanity, explaining that though he possessed the rights of a sovereign, he lowered his head on the cross and chose death instead, like a human. Nature trembled in a fit. The sun faded “as if the world’s end would have been close. He took sin from the heart of a stone.” This reminder of the resurrection of Christ’s dry bones gave Louisa eternal hope.

  The prospect of leaving St. Petersburg, however, appeared quite dead. The best evidence came from John’s diary on March 17, 1813: “I sent for my landlord, Mr. Strogofshikoff, and paid him a half-year’s rent in advance.”

  In a letter to Secretary James Monroe the previous October, Adams had requested a recall as planned: “It has, indeed, constantly been my wish not to be continued in the mission here beyond the ensuing spring, and I suggested this desire to the president as early as last February [1812].”

  His decision had not changed, but the world had. Traveling through the waters of Europe and into the Atlantic would have been difficult and risky in peacetime, much less under the extreme duress of cannon fire. Before he left Boston in 1809, he thought the voyage to St. Petersburg on the Horace would escape the whims of war. The dueling Danish and the English blockade proved him wrong. With all of Europe now in upheaval and the United States at war with England, traveling by ship would be more dangerous now.

  “I still retain it, subject to the supposition that my return to the United States with my family should be practicable, which in the event of the continuance of our war with Great Britain it would scarcely be.”

  Adams had also suggested, but did not insist, that Madison appoint someone else to handle the mediation if he accepted Alexander’s offer. Without any real business to conduct and the prospect for returning home chained to the outcome of both wars, all they could do was wait for battle updates. Fresh news of Alexander’s pursuit of Napoleon brought occasional showers to their dry lives.

  “[Strogofshikoff] conversed with me, as he always does, upon politics, and upon the character of the Russian people. He is very well satisfied with the present state and prospect of affairs, and thinks the Emperor Alexander might now come home and take his ease.”

  After the Cossacks took Warsaw, officials brought back the Polish city’s two brass keys and displayed them at the Kazan Church. More thirst-quenching news came via an army courier. The Cossacks would soon be in Berlin. What was even more refreshing was the alliance between Russia and Prussia. The Russians now possessed a key ally.

  The reason for Strogofshikoff’s hope of Alexander’s near return was a simple equation. Now that fifty thousand Prussians had turned against France and joined Russia, perhaps the czar would transfer his field command to a general.

  News from the war between the United States and Great Britain was not as hopeful. America’s successes at sea—the taking of two British frigates—only mortified the pride of London, which subsequently turned the war of economic jealousy into a fight for revenge. The British navy retaliated by barricading the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.

  John believed it was another illegal blockade with malicious intent against Philadelphia and Baltimore, two of the three largest cities in the United States.

  Propaganda fueled rumors. English newspapers propelled the story that the new US minister to France was so attached to Napoleon that he had followed him to Moscow. This was untrue.

  Tattoo them. That was the remedy for impressment prescribed by Sir Francis d’Ivernois, the most eccentric knighted Brit now living in St. Petersburg. The English were swarming the city like bees with poison in their pens. Sir Francis was among them. Adams could hardly believe his ears that March day in 1813 when he learned of the man’s unusual solution.

  “As to the question of impressment, he [Sir Francis] said he did not see how that could be settled unless all the sailors in the British navy would submit to be tattooed with a G. R. in Indian ink upon the arm; but he doubted whether they would consent to that,” John recorded.

  G. R. meant Georgius Rex, a reference to King George imprinted on British coins. Sir Francis was far from flippant. He was not joking.

  “This is the strangest expedient, I believe, that was ever devised; but he mentioned it seriously.”

  The idea of tattooing British sailors to distinguish them from Americans was the most outrageous solution that Adams had heard. Originally from Switzerland, Francis was a naturalized British citizen. On his first day at the Russian court, he asked to be introduced to John. He knew Adams’s father in England. Yet each conversation the younger Adams held with the man proved to be as unbelievable as the one before. His exaggeration and over-the-top ideas made him quite a character, which was fitting for the British agent—or spy—that he likely was.

  John and the eccentric Brit talked about many subjects, including the American Revolution. Sir Francis believed that the loss of America was the beginning of King George III’s madness.

  “As Sir Francis is under personal obligations to the King of England, I did not think it suitable to tell him what I thought—that he had mistaken the cause for the effect,” Adams wryly wrote.

  One of Sir Francis’s current claims surprised him nearly as much as the tattoo option: “He very stoutly contends that the British ministers deplore the war with America.”

  Adams asked why he thought Parliament opposed the war. Amazingly, Francis was one of the last people to speak to Prime Minister Perceval before his assassination. He had left him five minutes before the murder. Francis believed this was Perceval’s war, and the current leadership under Lord Liverpool wanted a way to end it.

  “Sir Francis appeared to hope that the war between America and England would yet be short.”

  Adams hoped the same but doubted it.

  Louisa’s depression continued. Not even fresh correspondence from home cheered her for very long.

  “We have at length received letters from America—which bring favorable accounts of the health of our friends and my dear children,” she wrote with relief on April 4.

  Her depression was so heavy and her perspective so disjointed that she now seriously doubted she would ever see her older children again: “To hear from them once in six or seven months is all that is left me as my prospect of ever seeing them more is now alas hopeless.”

  Likely Mrs. Cabot recovered because Louisa continued to claim that dirt: “I scarcely can define my feelings much as I wish to see my children. My heart is torn at the idea of quitting forever the spot where my darling lays and to which my whole soul is linked.”

  Weighing on her was the realization that her husband had extended their lease for another six months: “My health, the climate, and this dreadful war have added to the improbability of our return this summer.”

  George’s and John’s letters provided a positive effect. Her husband’s suggestion that she read a book on diseases of the mind may have also nudged her to pick up her pen and open her heart to someone who would understand her.

  “I ha
ve just closed a letter to Mrs. Adams. It is the first I have written for many months and it has rent my heart afresh.”

  The letter was stingingly honest. She tried to control the “pang of my bursting heart” and asked for Abigail’s compassion, not condemnation: “Had you witnessed the horrid circumstances of my angel’s death you would pity and forgive me, my heart is almost broken, my health is gone, and my peace of mind is I fear forever destroy’d, dreadful.”

  Searching for answers, Louisa continued to blame herself for her baby’s death.

  About the same time, John was becoming more restless with each dour report. He learned on April 17 from a newspaper that US General James Winchester and more than one thousand men were taken prisoner in Canada at the Battle of Frenchtown. Only thirty escaped. The victorious British general left many of these imprisoned Americans under the guard of his Native American allies, who killed as many as sixty of the war prisoners. Called the River Raisin Massacre, the slaughter became a rallying cry for later efforts to control Lake Erie. Despite this catastrophe, John received good news. The USS Constitution had destroyed another British frigate.

  The War of 1812, as it would later be called, defied logic. Americans should have been strong on land and weak at sea. The upside-down reality did not escape the notice of Count Romanzoff, who brought up the issue at a dinner party.

  “How happens it that you are constantly beating at sea the English, who beat all the rest of the world, and that on land, where you ought to be the strongest, the English do what they please?” Romanzoff asked with emphasis in an inquisitive but good-natured tone.

  Adams pleasantly responded with evidence from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes. “I knew not how to account for it, unless by supposing that these times were reserved to keep the world in a continued state of wonder, and to prove that there is something new under the sun.”