American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  Seeing that flag meant one thing: America was still free. “Through the clouds of the war the stars of that banner still shone in my view.” The people of Baltimore saved the nation from being conquered and losing its sovereignty.

  Key quickly penned the immortal words of a new lyrical poem first called the “Defense of Fort McHenry,” which was published anonymously and distributed throughout Baltimore as a broadside. The words were set to an old English tune, “To Anacreon in Heaven”—the same tune for the “Adams and Liberty” song written to honor President Adams years earlier. The poem title was later changed to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” America’s second quest for independence, not its first, gave it a national anthem. Decades later the US Army and Navy adopted the song as a national hymn, and the US Congress made it official in 1931.

  Adams later understood the confusion about the numbers at Fort McHenry. One thousand referred to the number of patriots who defended the fort, not the total number of casualties. The US losses were much lower. Only three men and a woman died, while twenty-four were injured defending the fort.

  When British Admiral Cochrane realized that Fort McHenry would not fall, he took his fleet and fled rather than face the fifteen thousand men of the militia who were ready to defend Baltimore. Several factors influenced his decision. Baltimore ship owners sank twenty of their own ships across the channel, which made the water too shallow for the Royal Navy to safely reach Baltimore’s wharf.

  One other deciding factor had taken place two days earlier. After preparing for a land attack, General Ross and six officers decided to eat breakfast at a local farmhouse outside Baltimore. Ross, nicknamed the baron of Washington for his role in burning the US Capitol, ordered the farmer to fix them breakfast and taste the food as he served them. They could not risk death by poisoning. After his “guests” finished, the farmer asked if they planned to return for supper.

  “No,” Ross replied tersely. “I shall eat my supper in Baltimore or in Hell!”

  No sooner had the words left his mouth than they heard muskets firing in the distance. Galloping over to the scene, they met their own advance guardsmen, who were shooting at a small group of Americans. Sniper fire suddenly struck Ross, who fell from his horse with a rifle ball lodged in his spine. His men took him to cover in the woods. The newspapers reported that he was greatly concerned about his wife and children as he lay dying, within view of the farmhouse where he had made his fateful prediction.

  “The noble baron should have thought about the dear wives he had made widows and the children he had made suffer in his savage exploit upon Washington,” Adams mercilessly remarked when he read about Ross’s death.

  The Capitol may have been destroyed, but because of the people of Baltimore, America was not conquered. Soon the news was even better. When word from Plattsburgh, New York, arrived at Ghent, the reserved Adams could not contain his joy.

  A British army of ten thousand left Canada to attack Plattsburgh. They stopped at Lake Champlain to wait for their navy to arrive as backup. With only thirty-four hundred men, the Americans surprised the invaders by pushing back the royal fleet. As a result the patriots secured a victory at Lake Champlain on September 11, 1814.

  Instead of marching toward Boston or pushing to New York, the British then removed their forces from northern America. They abandoned the East Coast and steered their ships toward New Orleans. Capturing the Mississippi gulf was their last hope of changing the map of North America in their favor. John was elated over the victories in Baltimore and Lake Champlain.

  When Louisa learned the glorious truth, [she wrote:] “Heaven has not deserted us, and if we do not desert ourselves we shall yet make our proud and insulting enemies feel that we are and must be a great nation.”

  The game changer—the great modulation that the US negotiators needed at Ghent—had finally taken place. Adams, Gallatin, Clay, Bayard, and Russell could now take matters into their own hands.

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  Antebellum

  AFTER HIDING BEHIND THE PRETENSE OF PRETREATY OBJECTIONS, the British commissioners dared their US counterparts to write their own treaty. With the news of Baltimore and Plattsburgh lifting their spirits, the Americans did just that. They drafted a response to the pretentious preliminary points of the British and then wrote an actual treaty, a proposal for peace.

  “We had never before taken so much time to reply; the reason of which delay is that we have been preparing the draft of a treaty to send with the note. This has brought us upon the whole field of this negotiation,” Adams wrote Louisa on November 8, 1814.

  They labored for days. Though their internal deliberation was sometimes a dissonant quintet, John was hopeful of cordial unanimity, a tutti outburst at the end: “But our deliberations have been cool, moderate, mutually conciliatory, and I think will result in full harmony.”

  They retained the treaty items they wanted but didn’t realistically expect to obtain, such as the abolishment of impressment and a definition of neutral trade rights. With Napoleon out of power, English navy captains would have no more need to impress American sailors. The moral issue of the war was a moot point as long as Bonaparte was locked away in exile.

  Without knowing for sure whether President Madison would approve their draft and fearing they could violate Monroe’s initial secret instructions to move the US boundary north into Canada, John made a bold move, one that potentially jeopardized his standing with his government. He proposed keeping the boundary line as it was before the war, antebellum. At first Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell objected. Then after more deliberation, which drew out Adams’s lawyerly logic, they agreed to take the risk. Defying Madison and Monroe’s old, original orders, they embraced a pragmatic course to peace. Failure could sink them all, especially Adams, sending them back to private life and professions out of public service.

  Several times they had asked the British to discuss a treaty, but the English negotiators replied with pretenses about etiquette. Now the Americans gave them a proposal for peace, which sent the English scrambling back to their bosses. In London government leaders held an emergency meeting to discuss the American treaty option. Adams complained that the English commissioners were nothing more than “a post-office between us and the British Privy Council.” He was right. That was exactly what the British commissioners were.

  While they waited for the lords in London to respond, a ship carrying letters from the US government arrived in France. A messenger rushed the correspondence to Ghent. Included was the most important piece of paper they could have possibly received in their hour of risk and uncertainty. President Madison had issued additional instructions, proposing exactly what Adams had suggested and the commissioners had already proposed to the British. John didn’t need a nonexistent telephone to do what was right and obvious. In the analogy of his father, his conscience approved, and America would soon applaud him as well.

  “In the instructions that we have now received, dated 19 October, we are expressly authorized to make the same identical [antebellum] offer. The heaviest responsibility therefore, that of having trespassed upon our instructions, is already removed.”

  John and his colleagues had triumphed. If the British accepted their terms, America would remain an independent nation once and for all. An honorable peace just might give Adams what he had long wanted, an end to the war and an honorable exit from his St. Petersburg post.

  “For the first time I now entertain hope that the British government is inclined to conclude the peace,” he wrote, also noting that the Congress of Vienna had not given the Brits what they wanted: supreme power in Europe. France through Talleyrand had prevailed, while Alexander stuck to his support for American trade rights.

  “We are now in sight of port. Oh! that we may reach it in safety!” John wrote.

  As her husband waited in Ghent for acceptance of the secret treaty, Louisa found herself face-to-face with pretense. She had met an Englishman at a party in St. Petersburg. He wanted to know if Jo
hn was near success.

  “[He] asked me, formally if you were likely to make peace, and if affairs were not already arranged,” Louisa wrote John. “I could not help staring at the man. I have never had such a direct question put to me. I told him you never wrote me upon business.”

  The moment also underscored how anxious everyone was for peace—Americans, Brits, and Europeans. The rest of the negotiations hung on a hair. A grain of sand was all that remained—so Adams and his wife hoped.

  Soon his joy faded. The British were stalling again. Maybe the de facto king of England had been the trump card. Or perhaps Lord Liverpool was willing to wait for the outcome of a battle at New Orleans. John’s colleagues, however, were hopeful that the negotiation would end before the New Year began.

  “I speak of it as doubtful whether we shall finish here before the spring, because notwithstanding the present complexion of the rumors and prevailing opinions in England, the prospect of peace is very little brighter than it has been at our gloomiest hours,” he moaned to Louisa in a letter dated December 9, 1814.

  Peace seemed so close. However, with no response from the British, it lingered as a phantom, taunting them.

  “I’d write you from this place where I arrived last evening and where I have again met with a severe disappointment in not receiving letters more especially as the public news renders my intention is extremely unpleasant,” Louisa quickly penned to John from Frankfurt on March 17, 1815.

  Her plan was simple, to leave Frankfurt that evening. She promised to travel “night and day” to meet him in Paris. She would journey through Strasbourg. He should expect her very soon. Before the ink on her letter could dry, she realized that getting to the French border town would not be as easy as she thought.

  “My two servants requested to speak to me, and informed me that circumstances having totally changed, since their engagement to attend me to France; in consequence of Napoleon’s return, they must quit my service, and preferred to remain at Frankfurt.”

  Her servants either saw an opportunity to join the military units that were forming in hopes of following Napoleon or were afraid of entering France amid the rumors of Bonaparte’s surprise return. Regardless, they wanted to leave her service.

  “Here was a situation—I could not compel them to stay; no bribe could induce them to go on in their state of panic,” she recalled with emphasis.

  Louisa asked them to wait until she visited a banker, a man recommended to her by friends. She sent the man a note, and he quickly arrived at her hotel.

  “He was very polite; and urged me very strongly to remain a few days in the city, and he would endeavor to make arrangements for me.”

  The banker was just as her friends had predicted: understanding and wise. “My position was so unpleasant, he thought it required great prudence in my arrangements.”

  If she could reach John in Paris, then he would be able to protect her through diplomatic immunity in case of a French civil war. “I insisted that it would be better for me to get into France as soon as possible; as I should probably meet my husband on the frontier, and every moment would add to the difficulty, should I delay—At present the panic itself would prove advantageous; as it would require time to ascertain events, before the governments could take decisive measures.”

  The banker agreed, but the king’s troops were likely already assembled and headed for the French frontier, the very region she was about to enter. The disbanded troops who supported Napoleon were reuniting. The bond of brotherhood was as alive as the man himself. Life in France could revert to its antebellum status as well—as dangerous and divisive as the French Revolution. The greatest threat to Louisa would be the soldiers rallying to Bonaparte and the stragglers who followed them.

  The fervor for Napoleon was so great that people began painting their houses in the tri-colors of red, white, and blue. It was as if a carrier pigeon was flying, soaring from one village spire to the next to deliver messages. If Bonaparte had his way, even the towers of Notre Dame would fly his colors.

  “He [the banker] advised on the whole that it would be best to proceed, but thought I should change my intended route for one more circuitous but safer; and more likely to be quiet; and he would try to find some person to go with me.”

  The banker left. Within a short time, he returned, escorting a fourteen-year-old boy, who was “the only creature he could find willing to go.”

  Arranging her financial accounts and helping her into the carriage, the banker told the driver which route to take and gave her one piece of advice. The boy was smart, but a chatterer.

  “He had though so young been in the Russian Campaign with a Prussian officer; and told me a great many anecdotes concerning Napoleon during the retreat—Of his sitting among his soldiers to warm himself! Of his partaking of their soup, when they had any! His kindness to them in the midst of their misery &cc &cc.”

  While he admired Bonaparte, a part of the boy also despised him. “At the same time he expressed great hatred of the man, with all the petulance of boyish passion—It was singular to watch the workings of this young mind, swayed equally by admiration and detestation, uttered in the strong language of natural feeling.”

  A shocked Louisa rode toward Strasbourg. Had Napoleon truly returned? She was more grateful for the banker’s advice than she could possibly express. Though she didn’t mourn the loss of Baptiste, the departure of both of her male servants put her, Charles, and Madame Babet in even greater jeopardy.

  Once again her business sense and ability to make sound decisions were put to the test. Now she was traveling with a servant whose young face could not have been much different from George’s or John’s. Many times she had worried that her decisions in St. Petersburg were too costly. The new route proposed by the banker would lengthen her journey, making it more expensive. Nevertheless, perhaps the route would keep her from the clutches of Napoleon and his rowdy supporters. So she hoped.

  “From want of judgment or habit of management I have injured my children’s property, I must submit to their reproaches as I have for many years submitted to yours,” she had bitterly written months earlier in a letter to John at Ghent.

  Though she had not willfully mismanaged their finances, she worried about her husband’s approval each time she spent money, no matter how small the purchase. Maybe if he was so displeased with her, he would never make the mistake of abandoning her again. Why couldn’t she have traveled with him to Ghent? Then he could have avoided her business mistakes. “It will at least be a lesson to you not to leave me with a large establishment in a foreign country another time.”

  John, however, had needed Louisa to represent America in St. Petersburg. He couldn’t trust Mr. Harris, who often gambled too much and maintained friendships with Englishmen that were too chummy in Adams’s opinion.

  Guilt over money had also consumed Louisa when she found herself needing another gown for a ball. The occasion was the emperor’s birthday on December 24, 1814. She wrote John that gowns had been seven hundred rubles in the summer, but when she went shopping for a new dress in December, she was astonished to find that they had more than doubled. Fearing her husband’s displeasure over spending too much money, she'd made a few alterations to a dress she already owned, which cost only three hundred rubles.

  While she was enjoying Alexander’s hospitality, John wrote her a note revealing just how much he trusted her judgment. This letter would change her life forever.

  “On Saturday last, the twenty-fourth of December, the Emperor Alexander’s birthday, a treaty of peace and amity was signed by the British and American plenipotentiaries in this city.”

  The US commissioners had finally triumphed. A month of dithering over details led to an honorable peace. What Adams did not know, of course, was Lord Liverpool’s secret position. For weeks the prime minister had been wailing at the high cost of the US war and longing for enough harmony in Vienna to satisfy his people’s hunger for real progress. Liverpool was so secret
ly anxious to get the American war behind him that he was willing for the boundary between Canada and the United States to return to its prewar location—the exact offer Adams had initiated at high risk.

  “I consider the day on which I signed it as the happiest of my life; because it was the day on which I had my share in restoring peace to the world,” John gleefully confessed in another letter to Louisa.

  However, he had to change his plans. He could not return to St. Petersburg as he had promised his wife because he and the other commissioners had to get to Paris to wait for news from President Madison and the US government. If the US Congress ratified the treaty, then he and the others would receive new appointments. The rumor was that Madison would either promote Adams to US minister to England or recall him home to Washington or Boston.

  “I therefore now write you to break up altogether our establishment at St. Petersburg, to dispose of all the furniture which you do not incline to keep, and have all the rest packed up carefully, and left in the charge of Mr. Harris to be sent next summer either to London or to Boston and to come with Charles to me at Paris, where I shall be impatiently waiting for you.”

  If the weather was too severe, he offered for Louisa to wait to travel until the spring or summer. Though the choice was hers, he desperately hoped she would take the risk of winter. Then he gave her some business advice and suggested she hire a good man and woman servant to accompany her. Post houses should provide tolerable lodging along the way.

  “I hope neither you nor Charles will suffer much on the road. I hope to embrace you in Paris about the 20th of March. The sooner, the happier for me.”

  His request was one of the most shocking of Louisa’s life. The reality of traveling without a male companion and being responsible for decisions along the road was nearly too much for her.

  “Consider the astonishment your letter has caused me if you can and still more the treaty which is published in the English papers,” she replied in a letter to him.