by Jane Cook
What the American commissioners needed the most was an interlude, a game changer. Without it they would never be able to secure a peace treaty with Britain. If they couldn’t change the tune, they needed a face-saver. Either way all sorts of politics pressed on them, continuing to prevent John from returning to Louisa in St. Petersburg in the final quarter of 1814.
“Early in the morning I left the city of Berlin, for the last time with feelings both of gratitude and regret—There I had felt at home; all the sweet sympathies of humanity had been reawakened; and the sterile heartlessness of a Russian residence of icy coldness, was thawed into life and animation.”
As Louisa said good-bye to Berlin in March 1815, she reflected on Prussia’s Princess Louisa, who “was as little altered as possible, considering that time had not strewed roses in her path; but though the thorns had left some marks of their wounds, they had left traces of a softer shade of character on her face, than that which she possessed in the brilliancy of youth, and the entourage of splendid royalty.”
Louisa could have written the same thing about herself. The thorns of grief had given her face a softer shade too.
“I quitted its [St. Petersburg’s] gaudy loneliness without a sigh, except that which was wafted to the tomb of my lovely babe—To that spot my heart yet wanders with a chastened grief, that looks to hopes above.”
For so long she felt responsible for her infant daughter’s death. Louisa wrote Abigail in April 1813 that she had fallen while holding baby Louisa and perhaps that was why she later died. Babies who experienced an accident of that type would have developed a hematoma or internal bleeding in the brain. If that were the case, baby Louisa most likely would have started vomiting or displayed some obvious altered state. The fact that Louisa didn’t observe even a bruise on her child or the “slightest injury” significantly diminishes hematoma as a cause for the baby’s death.
Why did the child die at thirteen months of age? Although it is impossible to know, Louisa left a few facts about her baby’s health that point to some possibilities. The seizures are the strongest clue in this medical mystery.
“My lovely beautiful babe is very, very ill—Ah! the fountain of her precious existence is sapped by these constant shocks and I look at her with fear and trembling!” she recorded in February 1812, not long after both of her children had the grippe, or flu. Baby Louisa was seven months old at the time.
Febrile seizures are convulsions stemming from a fever in babies and small children. About one in twenty-five children will have at least one febrile seizure in childhood. During a febrile convulsion, which usually lasts less than a minute or two, children can lose consciousness, shaking limbs on both sides of the body. Most children outgrow the condition, while fewer than 5 percent go on to develop epilepsy.
Both of Louisa’s children contracted the grippe or flu that winter. If the baby had encephalitis instead, which was commonly mistaken for influenza back then, the resulting brain inflammation could have caused tissue damage, leaving her prone to seizures.
The baby’s convulsions could also have been congenital, not the result of disease. By this point Louisa had miscarried at least six times in her lifetime. Without modern contraceptives, families were larger in the nineteenth century. With three boys and one daughter, John and Louisa’s family was small by comparison. A genetic disorder is a possible explanation for Louisa’s multiple miscarriages and her daughter’s convulsions.
It is not uncommon for a woman, back then or today, to experience one miscarriage. Two miscarriages are less likely, and three even more so. If Louisa and John were alive today, doctors would possibly advise them to undergo genetic testing. Chromosomal abnormalities are common causes of miscarriages, particularly multiple ones.
Though it is normal for any couple to produce occasional abnormal chromosomes, some couples are much more prone to mismatches than others. As a result their children may also have a higher chance of developing a congenital condition. Baby Louisa could have suffered from a genetic abnormality or disorder that caused seizures.
By August 1812 the baby was cutting multiple teeth at once, which led Louisa to begin weaning her in the days before her death. The baby developed dysentery, which could have been a side effect from drinking animal’s milk or water. Or baby Louisa could have had a congenital disorder that manifested itself through seizures when she faced physical stress, such as high temperatures from the flu or dysentery from weaning.
Her diarrhea could have led to hyponatremia, an electrolyte disturbance where the salt levels in the blood decrease while the brain swells. Hyponatremia can cause death, especially if it comes on suddenly.
Medicine was so rudimentary in 1812 that physicians provided supportive, not scientific-based care. The doctors lanced the baby’s gums and administered blisters because they mistakenly thought the practice freed poisons from the brain. In reality bleeding made the patient worse.
Louisa blamed herself for her daughter’s death. If only she had waited a few more months to wean her or if she hadn’t fallen, she thought. She became so depressed that John encouraged her to read his friend Benjamin Rush’s new book, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon Diseases of the Mind, which was first published in 1812.
Advanced medical knowledge could not have erased the pain of Louisa’s loss, but knowing the cause of her daughter’s death would have helped her to more quickly understand what happened. Regardless, she did not need to blame herself.
By the time of her homecoming in Berlin in 1815, Louisa had come to terms with her daughter’s death. John’s departure from St. Petersburg forced her to depend on herself for her everyday needs—the first time in her life, she observed. She was the sole parent of Charles in his absence. She had to make business decisions that were beyond her expertise. Their separation, particularly her fears that he was happier without her, made her consider what really mattered to her in life.
Happy to leave St. Petersburg, Louisa was also no longer a depressed woman. That woman—the one who had once exchanged her desire for reunion with her boys with a quest to die and be buried next to her baby—was now gone. Replacing her was a lady of courage, a phoenix determined to get to Paris at all costs. She had a new purpose in life. Reunion with her paramour was now paramount. If she could be reunited with her husband, then maybe, just maybe, they could sail home to Boston and embrace their boys again.
Though conversations with old friends cheered her, she left Berlin with some sadness. She had yet to receive a letter from John. Was it merely a delay of the post? Or had he not written her? He knew she would stop in Berlin. She had even asked him for advice on the best route from there to Paris. Lacking suggestions from John, Louisa gathered her own intelligence instead.
“My friends in Berlin had advised me to avoid Leipzig, as I should have to cross the battlefield so celebrated a year before, and we went on a different route.”
The roads were now sandy, dotted with pleasant pine trees. Green was replacing the gray. Spring was coming out of hibernation, but so was hidden danger.
“In the evening after dark I used to put on my son’s military cap and tall feather, and lay his sword across the window of the carriage; as I had been told, that anything that looked military escaped from insult—My two servants rode on the box armed; and I was always careful to put away my insignia before I came to any house.”
Charles’s military interest became an asset. The previous fall, he had become so excited to receive a gun from his instructor in St. Petersburg that he had gleefully written his father of his best friend’s jealousy. He had also used his finest handwriting to tell his father about some cucumbers he'd planted.
John replied instructively. “And if you take up one of them [a cucumber], and keep it over winter, and cut it open next spring you will find seeds in it, and by planting them in a garden they will produce another crop of cucumbers, for next summer salad,” Adams told Charles.
The news had stirred the farmer in the father, motivati
ng him to plant a vision for his son for their future together: “But if you take out the seeds now and keep them dry, and we go home to America the next year, you can take them with you and plant them in a garden there and when the cucumbers come I hope we shall have your brothers George and John to share them with us.”
As she left Berlin, it was up to Louisa to make sure that the reunion John had promised Charles would happen. Much exhausted, she decided to stop for the night at a post somewhere between Berlin and Hanau. The master of the house was as hospitable as he was gossipy. What he had to say was ghostlike and shocking.
“A rumor had arrived of the return of Napoleon to France.” The innkeeper laughed, noting that the rumor had sparked many “jokes, as he was known to be very safe at Elba! But such a rumor was abroad, and in everybody’s mouth.”
“I started with astonishment—True or false the coincidence was strange; and the bonne aventure of Countess Apraxin forced itself upon my mind in spite of my reason.”
If the rumor was true, Napoleon, now the king of spades, seemed ready to play his final card and trump all of Europe once again.
56
“The Star-Spangled Banner”
THE POSSIBILITY OF NAPOLEON’S ESCAPE FROM EXILE IN ELBA zapped what was left of Louisa’s energy the night she first heard the rumor. Her exhaustion led to carelessness: “I went to bed very tired, and for the first time left my purse with some gold in it upon the table.”
Madame Babet, who had lived for thirty years with Madame Colombi, was trustworthy. She locked the doors. When Louisa awoke the next morning, she noticed that her chamber’s lamp was extinguished, along with her money: “My purse was there, but the gold was gone! I ordered the carriage immediately, and again we pursued our route.”
Her friends in Berlin advised her to take the route toward Hanau, not Leipzig. She followed their suggestion. As she journeyed farther away from Berlin, John’s letter addressed to her in Berlin likely arrived. Their correspondence crossed in the mail. He had suggested a different route from Berlin to France: “Last week . . . I was informed,” he wrote to her from Paris, “that the best road was by way of Leipzig and Frankfurt.”
His final words would have also cheered her insecurities had she been able to read them: “No farewell but a welcome to the arms of your affectionate husband and father.”
The reason her friends advised her to avoid Leipzig was simple. Napoleon had suffered his worst defeat there in October 1813. After his armies failed to take Berlin, he retreated. With 300,000 soldiers, the allies approached his regrouped army of 185,000. They surrounded him from all sides, which forced him into a defenseless battle at Leipzig. The losses were great for both, with 38,000 French killed or wounded and another 30,000 captured, and 55,000 allies killed or wounded. Though the losses were among the war’s worst, because the Battle of Leipzig broke Napoleon’s longtime hold on Germany, it was the strongest victory for the allies.
Regardless of which road Louisa chose, through Leipzig or Hanau, the air was thick with the same rumor in March 1815. “Wherever we stopped to change horses, we heard of the return of Napoleon,” she wrote, noting that many doubted the news.
“At about a mile before we entered the town [Hanau], I had observed a number of mounds like graves with crosses at the feet, in the ditches on the sides of the roads—We entered on a wide extended plain, over which was scattered remnants of clothes; old boots in pieces; and an immense quantity of bones, laying in this ploughed field.”
They had crossed into a battlefield, the very reason she'd avoided the road to Leipzig. Had she received John’s letter in time, she might have been spared this particular sight, but carnage was unavoidable no matter which road she traveled.
“My heart throbbed; and I felt deadly sick at my stomach and faint; guessing where I was, when the postilions pointed out a board on which it was stated, that this was the field of battle where the Bavarians had intercepted the retreat of Napoleon, and that in this plain, ten thousand men had been slain.”
The Battle of Hanau had taken place at the end of October 1813, a couple of weeks after Leipzig. Bavarian forces had attempted to block Napoleon’s retreat. The Bavarians had lost ten thousand men, and Napoleon’s army had successfully occupied Hanau, but only briefly. Just days later, the surviving Frenchmen crossed the border into France. While Napoleon’s losses were far fewer at this battle, about ten thousand French stragglers from both Leipzig and Hanau became prisoners of war.
Ever since Louisa’s childhood, she had heard about war. The American Revolution was the very reason her Maryland-born father had fled London to Nantes, France, when she was a babe. As an adult she had read newspaper accounts of European and American battles, but she had never seen carnage with her own eyes until now.
“Conceive my horror at the sight of such a butchery! I could with difficulty keep from fainting, as fancy realized the torture, suffering, and anguish, thus brought before my eyes, with all the ghastly relics of the dead, exposed with savage barbarity to the view.”
Louisa’s carriage hurried away from the battlefield and into town, where they found many armed men at the gates.
“I was much questioned, and with some difficulty procured horses, which however I was obliged to wait for three or four hours.”
When she arrived at an inn, she found the people talkative, but speaking mostly French, not German.
“They . . . took great pains to point out to me the wonders that had been performed by Napoleon, and his officers—three times they were beaten back from the bridge, but at last took it against a strong force, and obtained possession of the town.”
The innkeepers showed her the very place where three cannonballs had hit the house during the battle. They boasted that they had hosted three French officers. Praise for Napoleon was so great, she might as well have been in Paris.
“It was a very remarkable fact that in the course of my journey, I heard but little praise of the allied armies, and unceasing admiration of the exploits of the French; yet suffering, and devastation, had followed their steps—but the renowned cruelties, and barbarities, of the Cossacks, seemed to have white washed all other crimes from their minds.”
As they traveled, they saw soldiers mustering on the town greens and in fields. Suddenly the isolated German roads changed into cluttered places where people were gathering to chatter over the possibility of Napoleon’s return.
Louisa was not the only one affected by the awakening. “At this place I observed that my servants began to grow uneasy, and frequently talked about conscripts, and renewal of the wars—for which neither appeared to have any taste.” She added, “Feeling very uneasy; I pushed on with all the celerity that tolerable roads, and good horses, six of which were always forced on me, would admit; and should have found many agreeable objects to attract my attention, if my mind had been more at ease.”
As much as the skeleton field unnerved Louisa that March day in 1815, a bombardment was the very news that had put her mind at ease a few months earlier.
Reports of the British departure from Washington City and assault on Baltimore arrived in contradictory waves. In late October 1814 Mr. Harris informed her that the residents of Baltimore had surrendered and declared themselves British subjects. If that was true, then America was indeed conquered. Gossip in the parlors of St. Petersburg burst with barbs that Bostonians had also declared, “Long live the king!” Louisa was much more confident of American patriotism—especially in Boston—than she was in the rumors of Russia.
The pace of the British commissioners in Ghent also increased, suddenly snapping from slow adagio into fast-paced allegro. They were more elated than ever about their chances to defeat the US commissioners and lower the boundary line between Canada and the United States. They were hopeful of soon controlling the coveted Mississippi River, especially if their military captured New Orleans as planned.
From his post in Ghent, John heard the opposite about the outcome in Baltimore. Unofficial word arrived
that the Americans had won a victory over the English at Fort McHenry, which guarded the city from its lookout location over the river. He heard that four hundred English soldiers were dead, compared to a thousand Americans. The numbers did not add up to a US victory. Hence, Adams was uncertain whether the news was true.
Eventually the official news from Baltimore reached the commissioners in Ghent. Admirals Cochrane and Cockburn along with General Ross arrived in the Chesapeake Bay with a fleet of fifty British ships and nearly six thousand soldiers and sailors. Taking four thousand men on the southeast side of the Patapsco River on September 12, Ross marched within striking distance of Baltimore. He planned to launch a land attack as soon as Fort McHenry raised the white flag of surrender to the Royal Navy.
Admiral Cochrane sent a portion of his fleet through the Patapsco River to the point opposite the star-shaped Fort McHenry. The bombardment began at dawn on September 13. For some twenty-four hours the Royal Navy pounded Fort McHenry with hundreds of Congreve rockets and shells. When it was over, the fort remained. Instead of showcasing the white flag of surrender, the dawn’s early light revealed America’s Stars and Stripes on September 14.
The sight of that enormous flag, which measured thirty by forty-two feet, was the most beautiful sight that American attorney Francis Scott Key had ever seen. While trying to secure the release of a US prisoner of war, Key became trapped on a ship during the bombardment. The sound of continuous blasts was frightfully loud. The firing was so earsplitting, some say it could be heard ninety miles away in Philadelphia.