THE BRITISH REJECTED the tsar’s offer of mediation, believing that Alexander was biased toward the United States (“I fear the Emperor of Russia is half an American,” wrote the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, to the foreign minister, Lord Castlereagh, in September). Instead, Britain proposed an independent peace conference and agreed to a neutral location. John Quincy went to join Gallatin and Bayard, who had already left St. Petersburg, and Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Jonathan Russell, who were coming from the United States to join the peace commission. John Quincy left St. Petersburg in April 1814. He planned to go to Revel, Stockholm, and Gothenburg; he would end up adding Ghent and then Paris. He was supposed to be gone from St. Petersburg for several months, though he privately expected that he would never come back. He would not reunite with his wife or son for eleven months.
It seems that he was relieved to leave her. Placidly, he told her that the distance would be good for their marriage. “In the affection of those who truly love,” he wrote to her, “there is a fervour of sentiment when they are separated from each other, more glowing, more unmingled and more anxious, than when being together it has the continual opportunity of manifesting itself by acts of kindness.” She was having none of it. “What being on earth is so wretched as a woman without her husband, more especially in a foreign country, without knowing the languages of those who surround her,” she responded furiously. With a note of arch defiance, she declared that she was fine without him. “At first it was dreadful, I am now becoming more reconciled to it,” she continued. “Perhaps in time I shall like it.” John Quincy took her words as serious. When he applauded her fortitude but expressed his hurt at her declaration of independence, she responded in a different tone, now mournful. “I should never even in jest have hinted that I could live happily without you. There are some wounds which are not easy to heal, and forgetfulness is not my best quality.” She had not wanted him to go. She and Charles had accompanied him as far as Strelna, twelve miles outside St. Petersburg, on a cold, gusty day, where they shared a meal and then said goodbye. After the sound of the horse’s bells had vanished, six-year-old Charles cried indignantly, seeing the tears on his mother’s cheeks. She was thirty-nine years old by then. Gray streaked her hair. The long winters, endless nights, sealed rooms and stoked smoky ovens guarding against the Russian cold, constant pregnancies and heartbreaking disappointments, anxieties about her children, her parents, her sisters, and money, grief for her daughter, and lonely days had left their marks. Time had loosened the skin around her chin. Her face had grown thinner. She did not know what to expect now. For months, she had felt distant from John Quincy. He was—as he would be for much of his life—self-involved in unbelievable ways. But his absence made her miss him. And her doubts in herself, some of which he had planted, made her unsure of her capabilities without him. John Quincy had never shown much confidence in her ability to manage herself, let alone the family’s affairs. He tended to lecture and chide her. He once wrote to her that he knew her “heart would always take the tenderest care” of the children, but he felt the need to encourage “continual reflection—if possible to prevent a thoughtless moment.” The implication was clear: she could not be trusted. Of course, that particular admonition came after she admitted to leaving a candle unattended and nearly burning down the house. She did not always blame him for not believing in her; she often thought he was right. So one of his first letters from the road surprised her. He said that he had forgotten to give her something important. “It is my Will—of which you are constituted the sole Executrix, for all my affairs out of the United States,” he wrote. From a man whose affairs were so extensive, and who by nature was so controlling, this was an extraordinary task, but also an extraordinary declaration of confidence. When the document arrived, she tucked it away in a trunk and proclaimed it quite unnecessary. Actually, though, it was a gift, one of the greatest he ever gave to her. “I have been labouring for many years under a false impression so painful to my heart,” she wrote to him. She had always thought that he did not trust her. His will was only the start of the responsibilities he now entrusted her with. He sent her memoranda and lists of all his business. He told her to open his mail and judge its importance, passing on what was necessary. He asked her to send him the listed exchange rates from London, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Paris, the values of silver rubles and ducats, and, “as often as you can conveniently get the information, the current price of the obligations, in the market.” He told her to settle bills, keep accounts with merchants, pay interest when it came due, fire servants when they stole too much. What was more, she was expected to represent the United States in court—unofficially, of course, but in practice. John Quincy had left Levett Harris, the American consul, as the chargé d’affaires, but reluctantly. Harris was well liked, but it was no secret to anyone, including Louisa or John Quincy, that the unsalaried consul lived the lavish life of a Russian noble—elegant clothes, fine furniture, “very tasty and expensive” apartments with crimson damask walls—by accepting huge bribes. He was also, as Louisa amusedly observed, chasing John Quincy’s job. That John Quincy was willing to leave his business in St. Petersburg in the hands of his inexperienced wife and untrustworthy lieutenant speaks to what he stood to gain by going. He wanted to help end a war he thought unwise, and if he played his part right, his reward, he had heard whispered, would be the highest diplomatic post—minister to Great Britain. He would then be able to return to the United States no longer an outcast, no longer an irrelevant figure but a leading candidate for the presidency—having completed a commission with Clay and Calhoun, two of the nation’s brightest young stars. Louisa saw the situation clearly. She may have written about his ambition in her diary with a dagger for a pen, but in her letters to him, she gently teased. “I feel a little anxious to know how the rival candidates for the Presidency will feel towards each other,” she wrote to him. Maybe John Quincy was right; maybe being apart allowed them to be more tender with each other. Twice a week, they wrote each other letters. His were long, full of charming and self-deprecating anecdotes and evaluations of his fellow commissioners and of himself. He would sketch a scene at supper, or assess Gallatin’s considerable talents, or draw the curious comparison between himself and Clay, who was destined to become a crucial figure in his life. Outwardly, Clay seemed the opposite of John Quincy—tall and gaunt, where John Quincy was stout; a gambler, where John Quincy was at heart a Puritan. Clay would sometimes return to bed after a night of cards just as John Quincy was rising. But John Quincy sensed an unflattering kinship. He half joked about it: they shared “the same dogmatical, overbearing manner, the same harshness of look and expression, and the same forgetfulness of the courtesies of society.” The two men sparred throughout the peace conference. Then again, John Quincy sparred with everyone. Admiring Louisa’s own ability to sketch a character in a letter, he could be sure that his descriptions of others and his self-analysis would interest her. It was more surprising that his letters to her were also full of news. He would report the capture of the frigate Essex, the threat to Sackets Harbor, the deals cut at the Congress of Vienna, and the British peace commissioner’s delaying tactics. He wrote to his wife as he was used to writing to his mother. Louisa encouraged him and tried to respond in kind, though her insights into geopolitical events were never as shrewd as her insights into people, and the foreign newspapers she read were usually outdated and wrong. But she was earnest in her effort to engage him. Unlike Abigail, she cared less about what he said than about his saying anything at all. It was a measure of how badly she wanted to be taken seriously. “I have just done reading the Life of Cicero, (dont laugh) and there is a passage in it concerning the defence of republic’s, that has struck me most forcibly, and is certainly the most applicable to the present state of our country, of any thing I ever met with,” she would write. She was afraid of being made fun of, but the effect of their exchange was galvanizing. “You will smile at my politics but whe
n I write you my thoughts run so rappidly, that I find my paper full before I am aware of it, and generally on subjects very foreign to my intentions, when I first sat down to write.” Her confidence in herself and her ability to manage was growing. Given the chance, she did her best, and she did well. She rented a dacha for the summer, negotiated rent for a new apartment in the city, hired and fired servants. When her carriage broke, she bought a new one. She had arrived in Russia lamenting that she could not buy a present for George and John because of her lost dowry, but now she sent each of them a watch. She spent more than usual on her clothing “on account of the fetes.” “I am sorry for it,” she lied. She liked the independence, which was new to her. She claimed to hate going into public, especially without her husband. But after one ball she wrote, “On the whole I was never at a more charming party in my life.” When Alexander returned to St. Petersburg for the first time since the defeat of Napoleon, she went to her first Te Deum—the great Russian Orthodox service of celebration—and joined the multitudes in watching the tsar kiss the cross. In early August, she went to a ball at the summer palace at Peterhof, where the terraces over the Neva seemed to spread in all directions, lit by lantern globes, extending even into the sea. From that vantage, St. Petersburg seemed only a slender white vision. She said she feared she would disgrace John Quincy, but in fact she was proud of how she had done. An Englishman, Mr. Bailey, “said he would astonish the world, and show them that the English and Americans had enter’d into an alliance, by dancing a Polonaise with me,” she wrote. The emperor, she added, was delighted to see it done. She now did things her way, confident in her good intentions. When Levett Harris, the chargé d’affaires, ordered her not to attend the great ball at Pavlovski (he was miffed at the form of the invitation he himself had received), she went without an escort, taking her young son Charles. They walked through the rose garden, dined with the diplomatic corps, delighted in the pleasure boats, and enjoyed a sense of distinction, after the empress received them with special notice and invited them to stay an extra night. While Charles watched fireworks, Louisa attended the empress mother’s ball. “Poor I became the only representative of America,” she wrote to John Quincy—quite pleased. Charles began to appear more often in her letters and diary. He had always been a part of her life in St. Petersburg, but never before quite in this way. Before John Quincy left, Louisa’s preoccupations were elsewhere, on the endless rounds of social obligations, her health, her grief, her other two sons, almost nearer to her mind by their absence. Charles spent much of his time with servants, or his friends—mostly children of expatriates—or at a little school. John Quincy, of course, superintended his education, and Louisa had long ago given up the sense that she should have some say in it. So Charles had spent his five and a half years in St. Petersburg in a strange setting—trapped inside for much of the frozen year; more comfortable speaking French or German, the language of his nursemaid (English was his third language); becoming a kind of curious appendage to the court, as they all were. He had played with the tsarina on the floor; he had been put on display at children’s balls and parties, where there were “oceans of champaign for the little people.” Once, at the age of three, he opened a ball with the French ambassador’s illegitimate daughter. (Louisa had dressed him as an Indian chief, and when he entered—to his startled surprise—the crowd applauded. Another time, he had gone as Bacchus.) He had borne the burden of standing in for his dead sister and absent brothers. John Quincy, in fact, had measured Charles’s height not only on his own birthday, but also on George’s and John’s. But Louisa came to find herself fascinated by her youngest son—his precocity, his arrogance, his tenderness, and his temper, which could be as stormy as his parents’. He was seven years old and very small, with ginger hair and hazel eyes, fiercely loyal to his mother and sensitive to her moods. In many ways he was so young, a child who took delight in fantastical stories or in discovering a row of tiny cucumbers underneath the blossoms in the garden, who threw tantrums, who missed his father. He liked to test his mother’s authority, but he was curious, intelligent, and could be tender. They spent endless hours together. Most unusually, he had learned to read his mother’s feelings and moods. When she was grieving for her daughter, he comforted her with “little tender assiduities; attentions gentle and affectionate beyond [his] years.” He had drawn her back into the world, breathing “new hope” into her. And when she found herself fully in charge, she came to see how her influence might shape him, too—not only her husband’s. She was also capable of giving an education. “I found delight,” she would later tell him, “in your opening mind.” In Charles, she found a companion when she most needed one. On some days, though, not even he could help her feel less alone. After Kitty and William Smith left that summer, she spent days roaming the house like a ghost. Sometimes, she could not help but cry, and when winter came, her sadness grew worse. She was “sick and weary,” too keenly aware of the “gaudy loneliness” of the court. “I know not what ails me to day but these holidays do not suit me at all I feel so isolated among all the gay folks,” she wrote to John Quincy, “and it makes me feel our separation more keenly than ever.” “Mama is a great amateur of cards,” young Charles wrote to his father that November. “She is always laying out the cards, to see if you will come back soon.” Still, when 1814 ended, she was stronger on her own than she had been when the year began. She even had a stronger sense of herself as an American. The War of 1812 had clarified her allegiance. Where before she had been cynical, more distant, now she spoke fervently of “our country.” In that, she was like many Americans. Even from afar, John Quincy thought he could see that the war had brought together a fractured nation. He wrote to Louisa, “The sentiment is the same among us all—It is profound—anxious—and true to the honour and interest of our Country—It is a sentiment which is generally felt by the People of the United States, will rouse them to exertion.” She agreed. “Our situation is perilous in the extreme, but it is extreme distress alone which can ever discover to us the extent of our resources.” It was also true of herself. On December 27, John Quincy wrote to Louisa to announce that the treaty, finally, had been signed. The terms were not all he had wished for—it was status quo ante bellum—but still, it was peace. They would be headed next to London; he was the new minister plenipotentiary to Great Britain. First, though, as she had suggested he should, he would make a trip to Paris. “I therefore now invite you, to break up altogether our establishment at St. Petersburg,” he wrote to her, “to dispose of all the furniture which you do not incline to keep, to 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.” • • • “I AM TURNED woman of business,” Louisa declared to John Quincy. She had to sell the furniture, dispose of the house, and buy a carriage that could carry her across the continent. She needed supplies: food, drink, clothing, maps, and tools. As one who was so often sick, she needed medicines. If she consulted a guidebook for what to bring (John Quincy’s library had several), she might have brought enough herbs and remedies for a small apothecary. One 1820 guidebook recommended: “Iceland moss—James’s powder—sal volatile—aether—sulphuric acid—pure opium—liquid laudanum—paregoric elixir—ipecacuanha—emetic tartar—prepared calomel—diluted vitriolic acid—essential oil of lavender—spirit of lavender—sweet spirit of intro—antimonial wine—super-carbonated kali—court-plaster and lint.”
Louisa Page 19