by James Traub
Louisa would suffer more than her share of calamities in the years to come, and she may, in retrospect, have been hyperbolically attributing all the suffering to this one mishap. But the discovery that she had brought nothing to the marriage—nothing, that is, save herself—made her feel unworthy of her brilliant husband, who, she imagined, could have made a far more advantageous match. Adams loved Louisa, and there is no evidence that he regretted the match he had made, but neither did he have warmth enough, or perhaps understanding enough, to melt her fears. Adams did not, after all, expect happiness from life. Louisa had, but life had taught her otherwise. Between them, over the years, there would be respect and compassion and sometimes love—but never the sense of perfect trust and mutuality that allows couples to surmount whatever problems life puts in their way.
CHAPTER 8
President Adams’ Political Telescope
(1797–1801)
ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS’ DIPLOMATIC career is that he rarely served in a hot spot. Holland, of course, had been a backwater, though Adams insisted that he wished and deserved nothing more. Years later he would serve in Russia, but only in the period before the tsar formed the Holy Alliance, which posed a challenge to the republics of the New World. He was appointed minister to England, but only after the War of 1812 had come to an end. The only time he would work inside the crucible of war and peace was when he helped end that war by serving on the delegation that signed the Treaty of Ghent. Adams was a great diplomat not because his personal interventions abroad proved so momentous, nor because he had a gift for winkling secrets from foreign ministries, but because his mind was so fine. He saw further than other men did. His three and a half years in Berlin would be as calm as a zephyr, but Adams would provide insight that helped keep America from fighting what might have been a ruinous war.
On October 19 Adams left London with Louisa, Tom, and their two servants, Whitcomb and Epps. Louisa fell ill as soon as she boarded the ship; she had a frail constitution. The party endured violent gales on the passage to the mouth of the Elbe, and soon enough everyone was ill. “Almost sick myself,” noted Adams, a veteran of a great many storms at sea. They made land at Hamburg and then took a laborious coach ride along sandy paths to Berlin, which they reached November 7. With no accommodations of their own, the party put up at the Hotel de Russie near the Unter Ten Linden, the city’s Champs Elysée. They knew no one, and none of them spoke German. Louisa was miserable. Still deeply wounded and fearful that she was unworthy of her partner, she was also pregnant. (Louisa was always to suffer terribly through her pregnancies.) She had no one to care for her save her seventeen-year-old servant, Epps, and she recoiled from the commonness of the hotel and what she considered the crude manners of the innkeepers and the other guests. The Russie was one of the city’s finest establishments, but Louisa had very little experience of hotels. Tom was sick as well, adding to the air of chaos and helplessness.
After four days, Adams found an English doctor who proved to be both kindly and professional. But Louisa’s condition only grew worse. Within a week, it became clear that she would lose the child. On November 17, Adams wrote in his journal, “A dreadful night again, passed in continual expectation, and with the torture of disappointment prolonged which yet continues.” He counseled submission to the divine will but added, “The mind at least submits, however the heart will rebel.” Louisa miscarried two days later. Sickness would often bring Louisa to the edge of death, and Adams, who always expected the worst, would be prostrated with anxiety and often prove to be more of a burden to her than a source of support.
When Adams left Louisa’s bedside, he began to see to his professional responsibilities. Berlin was a great city of 150,000, busier and grander and more formal than the Hague. It was the capital of Prussia, which had become one of Europe’s most powerful states under the rule of Frederick the Great, the famed “philosopher-king” and friend of Voltaire. Frederick had vastly increased Prussia’s territory by conquering much of the region to the east. And he had used the empire’s growing wealth to turn Berlin into a modern metropolis, with broad, perfectly straight tree-lined avenues, parks, and gardens. The central boulevard, the Unter Ten Linden, was lined with neoclassical palaces. Under his rather dissolute successor, Frederick Wilhelm II, Prussia had relaxed its martial rigor, and Berlin had gained a reputation as a city of gaiety and dissipation.
Adams happened to have arrived at the moment when this king, the least of the Fredericks, was dying. He passed away in mid-November, and his son and successor, Frederick Wilhelm III, waiving diplomatic protocol, agreed to see Adams and accept his diplomatic credentials almost immediately after ascending the throne. This new Frederick Wilhelm was only twenty-seven—three years younger than Adams; Luise, his beautiful and much-admired queen, was twenty-two, the same age as Louisa. He made a good first impression on Adams, who wrote to William Vans Murray: “His disposition is martial. His manners and personal appearance remarkable for great simplicity, his habits industrious and active.” In fact, the new king, though far more correct in outward manner than his father, inherited his philandering ways, as well as his general aversion to bloodshed.
Adams had worried about arriving in a new place where he knew no one, but as America’s first minister to the Prussian court, not to mention the son of the president of the United States, he enjoyed a very warm welcome. The social demands on a minister in Berlin were immensely greater than those in the relaxed setting of the Hague. The city had a dizzyingly complicated nobility, for each small German state had its own petty prince, its landgrave or margrave. Moreover, Adams had to be presented, seriatim, in a stultifyingly redundant parade, to the chief members of the royal family. Adams found the rigmarole time-consuming and tedious. Of one ball, he wrote: “stiffness, coldness, formality, politeness, labored affability, studied attention.”
Meanwhile, he and Louisa had gone looking for a place to live. Adams was now making $9,000, double his previous salary, but scarcely enough to pay for his lodgings, furnishings, dress, and the other expenses attendant upon a ministerial position. Everything they looked at was either unaffordable or appalling, but neither could they afford to stay in the Hotel de Russie. Finally they took an apartment beneath the Brandenburg Gate, a fashionable spot at the edge of the Unter Ten Linden. Louisa, however, could hear soldiers drill all day long, a form of background music she didn’t particularly enjoy. Several months later they moved to a more central address on Friedrichstrasse, where many of Adams’ fellow diplomats lived. The lodgings themselves, however, were very spare, as Adams had warned. The study, Louisa recalled, included a “list carpet,” made from cast-off strips of material, “pine wood bookshelves, a mahogany writing desk, a second hand Sopha and a few Chairs.” Her own bedroom had no carpet on the floor. They could not afford a fire in winter, Louisa recalled, or German lessons for her.
Indeed, Adams didn’t seem to know quite what to do with a ministerial wife. Louisa stayed home while her husband made the rounds. Nobody came to call. Finally, one of the court ladies explained to her that she could not receive visitors until she had been presented to the queen, who was perplexed by the delay and had been heard to wonder if the American minister was, in fact, married. Adams had somehow overlooked this element of protocol.
Pauline, Countess Von Neale, a minor court figure as maid of honor to the King’s cousin, kindly took Louisa in hand, arranged the presentation, dressed her properly, and prepared her with an explanation of the elaborate protocol. Louisa was petrified. By the time Pauline, who herself was only eighteen, had deposited her at the queen’s private apartments, Louisa was so overcome with fear that her body trembled from head to foot, and she stood rooted to the spot. “The Queen,” she wrote, “perceiving my great embarrassment and pitying my situation waived all ettiquette and came forward to speak to me kindly telling me how much she had been interested for my situation which she had heard of very fully from my physician.” Louisa was smitten and would
ever afterwards regard the Prussian queen as a goddess and a paragon. Her Majesty asked her to dine that evening with the ladies of the court. Once again Louisa had to overcome her sense of mortification. But she survived and went home that night to regale her husband and brother-in-law with the astonishing things she had seen. And so Louisa’s life as a diplomatic wife began.
Louisa slowly began to emerge from the chrysalis in which she had passed her entire life. She befriended an English family and then other expatriates—usually titled—as well as diplomats and ladies in the queen’s circle. She mastered the court gossip, even as she recoiled at its meanness of spirit. She danced with the king, with the celebrated Beau Brummel, and with Lord Elgin, of the Parthenon marbles, whom she described as “a remarkably handsome roué.” She learned to survive by herself at parties, for her bored husband would sometimes leave her to make it home on her own. She could barely have survived without Tom, a good dancer who accompanied her almost everywhere. He was easy and undemanding company, and full of attention to his sister-in-law, whom he liked very much. Soon after the wedding, he had written to his mother to say that Louisa was “a most lovely woman, and in my opinion worthy in every respect” of her new husband—an endorsement that Tom knew Louisa very much needed. The feeling was mutual. Louisa spoke of Tom as a brother figure who had “soothed me in my afflictions” and “corrected gently my utter want of self-confidence.”
Louisa became a fixture on the social scene. During carnival, a period that consumed much of January and February, she attended masked balls, which astonished her by their magnificent display. She was the only foreigner invited to the Ridotto, at which the queen and one of the royal princes and their retainers reenacted the marriage of Queen Mary of England and Philip of Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1554. The court minutely scrutinized paintings of the period for clues on dress and deportment. Louisa herself spent six weeks on her costume, with her husband grousing about the expense. “The Queen,” she recalled, “was covered with Diamonds; wearing all the Crown Jewels superbly set; and her own, which were magnificent! On her head she wore the Royal Crown, and her rich Robes of State, with the broad ermine, were supported by Youths brilliantly dressed as Pages; with her eldest Son, and the eldest Son of the Princess of Orange walking a little behind her, holding the large tassels attached to her robes.”
It was a shimmering world of fancies invented for the very rich and very idle. Both the Adamses were fascinated and appalled by it, but to different degrees. A world of rank and aristocracy was natural to Louisa, and the high artifice of Prussian court life was more a source of wonder to her than of disgust. The court ladies, including the queen, urged the very pale Louisa to wear rouge, as they did. Adams bridled at this violation of the principles of republican simplicity. One evening Louisa applied her makeup and before coming downstairs asked Adams to snuff the light. This imposture failed, and he forced her to wash her face. She tried yet again. This time, she recalled, she “walked boldly forward to meet Mr. Adams—As soon as he saw me, he requested me to wash it off, which I with some temper refused; upon which he ran down and jumped into the Carriage, and left me planté là! even to myself appearing like a fool crying with vexation.” Perhaps, though he would never have let on, Adams was vexed about and a little jealous of his wife’s rapid conquest of the hearts of gentlemen, rakes, and even a king.
PRESIDENT ADAMS HAD HAD GOOD REASON TO ASSIGN HIS SON TO Berlin rather than to Lisbon. In mid-1797 Napoleon had just completed his triumphal march through Italy, decisively defeating Austrian as well as local forces and imposing on Austria the Treaty of Leoben, by which France gained formal title to Belgium as well. With Prussia neutralized by its own treaty with France, the coalition that had formed to defeat France and reverse the revolution had fallen apart. France seemed prepared for further conquests, while England would do whatever it could to counter French ambitions. The elder Adams wrote to his son that he needed to have a “political telescope” trained on Prussia, Austria, and Russia, as well as Sweden and Denmark, the neutral states of the north. “In short,” he concluded, “what is to be the future system of Europe, and how We can best preserve friendship with them all, and be most Useful to them all, are Speculations and Inquiries worthy of your head and heart.” It was the president’s good fortune that America’s most gifted diplomat was his son, and he made it clear that he expected to receive regular intelligence from him separate from what the minister wrote in his official capacity to Secretary of State Pickering. John Quincy Adams thus served as the president’s back channel on European affairs.
The young minister viewed France as a revolutionary power bent on dominating the world—something like the way diplomats of a later generation would see the Soviet Union. Napoleon had christened the conquered Italian states “republics,” with gaudy names like the Cisalpine Republic, though in fact they functioned as satellite states of France, just as the Batavian Republic had after 1794. “They are tearing up the very roots of Italy in the name of liberty and equality,” Adams reported to his father; “they are edging an insurrection in Spain, and are carrying on the proselytism of atheism and democracy with more vigour than ever throughout Europe.” Adams believed that England, then in the midst of a financial crisis, would experience its own revolution before long, though whether monarchical or democratic, he wasn’t sure. Here, as sometimes happened with Adams, he erred on the side of pessimism.
Adams had feared since the time of Genêt that France would turn its unholy engines on America. In his view, James Monroe and other Republican partisans had persuaded the French that the United States was divided between pro-French and pro-British factions, and thus that adroit propaganda could sway Americans to one side or the other. He believed that France had a secret plan to foment an uprising that would pit the south and west against the Eastern Seaboard states, and he viewed French partisans like Thomas Paine and Benjamin Bache, Franklin’s grandson and publisher of the scabrously Republican Aurora, as a fifth column in this conspiracy. He was convinced, that is, that the America experiment was far more imperiled than most Americans understood.
Startling though this sounds to us today, most leading Federalists, including Adams’ friend William Vans Murray and Secretary Pickering, shared this view. The Directory really did hope to purchase Louisiana from Spain and thus gain a very sizeable foothold in North America. At the time, nothing came of these ambitions, but the truculence of French revolutionary diplomacy gave Americans good reason to fear France’s intentions. Starting in late 1796, French privateers had begun to seize American merchant ships and auction off their cargoes with increasing frequency, while American ships had been embargoed in the port of Bordeaux. In early 1797, the Directory refused to receive Charles Pinckney, Monroe’s replacement as minister, and drove him from France.
President Adams agreed with his son and others that France could be dissuaded only by a show of resolve. On May 16, 1797, he convened a special session of Congress to warn that France was seeking to separate the American people from their own government, and to admonish France that Americans were not a “degraded people” to be treated with such contempt. A great believer in the security of warships, which he called “wooden walls,” Adams called for an active effort to build up a navy to counter French depredations. But he also insisted that diplomacy could avert hostilities; he appointed two additional envoys to join Pinckney in Paris. This was the opening American move of what would come to be known as the “quasi-war” with France—a war that didn’t happen but easily could have.
During this trying period—the great crisis of his presidency—John Adams often turned to his son for counsel. “Is France to establish a universal Domination over the whole Globe,” he asked in July 1797, “by Land and by Sea?” His son wrote back to say that Europe was, indeed, on the brink of dissolution before France. Edmund Burke, the great defender of the old European order, had just died, and this in turn had put Adams in mind of Cicero, who had braved the rabble commanded by Caesar a
nd been put to death by Mark Antony as a result. In Adams’ mind, it was always time to take a stand, and now he felt that America was directly, urgently threatened by the forces of insurrection. On September 4, Napoleon had helped lead the so-called coup of Fructidor, which replaced more moderate members of the Directory with committed revolutionaries deeply hostile to John Adams and to the American government. John Quincy Adams warned his father that “all the preparation possible to meet such conduct on their part must be made.”
This very long letter, written September 19, includes a majestic assault upon absolutism of which Burke himself might well have been proud:
The French Revolution was commenced in the name of the People, in their name all its horrors have been palliated and excused, in their name the Guillotine has mowed its thousands and the grapeshot have swept off their tens of thousands. . . . For them, for their unlimited and unalienable sovereignty have these deeds without a name which make an humane mind ready to deny its own nature and shrink from the name of Man, been almost justified, always palliated, as the unpleasant but necessary means for the attainment of a glorious end.
It would, of course, be left to the twentieth century to plumb the full horror of the principle that revolutionary ends justify savage means, but in the supposed doctrine of the “sovereignty of the people,” Adams identified what he considered the core of absolutism. In his own understanding of limited democracy, citizens freely chose to surrender a portion of their sovereignty to representative institutions. Only under the most extraordinary circumstances, as he had written in his critique of Paine, do they seek to reclaim their rights through direct action. The doctrine of revolutionary France, by contrast, stipulated that sovereignty resides, and remains, in “the whole mass of the citizens” and thus may be exercised at any moment to destroy those institutions—as Paine himself had argued.
