by James Traub
A Bull-Dog Among Spaniels
(1809–1812)
THE LAST TIME ADAMS HAD SAILED FOR EUROPE HE HAD been a novice of twenty-seven, easily flustered and very worried about the impression he would make. Now, fifteen years later, he was a husband and father of three, a former US senator, and an influential thinker and legislator. He had already experienced tumult; as he boarded the Horace, he seemed to be leaving in his wake the wreckage of his political career. Adams felt the separation from his parents as he never had before; perhaps he would never see them again. And he had left his boys to grow up without their parents. He was a man with many cares, and already, at forty-two, the thin line of his mouth and the sharp set of his jaw conveyed a settled air of solemn watchfulness. In his journal he scrupulously described each stage of the trip to the wharf in Charlestown, listed the names of each of the passengers on the Horace, noted the salute from other ships as they sailed out of the harbor. He felt the weight of the moment.
Adams felt the peril as well. He was sailing into the middle of a maritime war between France and England, each with its own allies. Both sides tried to prevent neutrals like the United States from trading with the other. In mid-September, off the coast of Norway, a Danish warship demanded that the Horace put into the harbor of Christiansand. The Danes enforced the French blockade of Northern Europe. The Horace’s Captain Bickford refused; the Danish officer ordered his men, standing by in a rowboat, to board the American vessel, and Bickford instructed his sailors to resist. “We had in half a minute a dozen or fifteen men with pikes, axes and swords on the quarter-deck,” Adams wrote to Tom, “and the men from the boat pressing forward to her forecastle to attempt boarding us.” The Danes blinked first, and the Horace survived what would have been a very bloody clash.
But that was only the beginning. A week later, after rounding the northern tip of Denmark, the Horace was boarded by officers from a British man-o’-war. The British were enforcing their own blockade against Copenhagen to the south. Nor could an American ship be permitted to pass without a search for fugitive English sailors. The British captain demanded to see the crew’s papers and strode up and down—with infuriating arrogance, Adams thought—inspecting every last sailor to make sure that each man matched his description. The Horace was allowed to pass only when Adams insisted on seeing the admiral of the fleet and explaining his diplomatic mission.
The ship sailed southward until it reached the narrow channel between Sweden and Denmark. And then a tremendous North Atlantic storm blew up, snapping the Horace’s foremast in half, though Captain Bickford quickly rigged up a new one. For ten days the storm raged, and the ship remained stuck off the eastern coast of Sweden as if fastened to the bottom. To the left, on the Danish side, was the island of Elsinore, where Shakespeare had set Hamlet, which Adams regarded as the greatest of all works of the human hand. From somewhere he produced a set of watercolors and in his journal made a sketch of Elsinore castle and another of a harbor with sailing ships.
It was now mid-October. Captain Bickford, who had made the voyage eleven times before, dreaded the winter passage through the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland and “absolutely despaired of reaching his destined port this winter,” Adams wrote his brother. The Danish pilot they had taken on board, who had made the trip thirty-six times, was yet more certain that the Horace would be trapped in ice before reaching the Russian port of Cronstadt. And there would be no place along the way to put in.
These deeply experienced sailors were telling Adams that they all risked death if they continued onward. Captain Bickford proposed that they retrace their path to Kiel, in northern Germany, from where Adams could, if he wished, make a 1,500-mile overland passage to St. Petersburg. Or, more likely, they could pass the winter there. Everyone on board favored turning around, but Adams alone refused. He could not accept the prospect of arriving months late, even though no urgent business awaited him. Still, though he was happy to risk his own life, he had to think of his family. He finally agreed to go to Kiel but insisted that they double back if the wind changed over the next few days.
The wind promptly changed, and Captain Bickford resumed the forward journey. But the winds reversed themselves again the following day. Bickford wanted to turn around once again, but Adams refused. Bickford angrily told Adams that he alone would bear the consequences for whatever mishap they suffered. Adams promptly accepted. The winds stayed adverse for an agonizing thirty-six hours. And then they blew fair once again and stayed that way. The Horace reached Cronstadt on October 22; by the next day, the Adams party had docked at a quay on the Neva River just opposite the famous equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St. Isaac’s Square. Adams felt that he had narrowly averted disaster—but not the disaster of being locked in ice. He later wrote to Tom, “I cannot but reproach myself for this momentary compliance, as it indicated a flexibility, which ought not belong to me.” This would be the first of many instances in which Adams demonstrated a cool nonchalance in the face of mortal danger. This was not the acquired courage of a man who had overcome the natural fear of death in battle but a kind of principled insistence on placing one’s own life beneath that of the republic—the courage of a Cicero or a Cato, the classical exemplars of Adams’ era. That, certainly, is how Adams would have described the matter to himself. However, the “compliance” with which Adams taxed himself was, in fact, his very meager consideration for the lives of his wife and children, as well as those of the captain and crew. He felt that the duty imposed upon him obliged him to endanger as well all those who happened to be accompanying him.
The Adams party was lodged at the Hotel de Londres overlooking the river on the Nevsky Prospect. This establishment was a good deal more rudimentary even than the Hotel de Russie in Berlin. Louisa later recalled that her room was “a stone hole entered by Stone passages and so full of rats that they would drag the braid [bread] from the table by my bedside which I kept for the Child.” But apartments in the city were ruinously expensive and scarcely affordable on Adams’ salary of $9,000, the same figure he had received in Berlin a decade earlier. Worse yet, diplomats were expected to be kitted out in an elaborate uniform—even republicans like Adams. On his first day in town he was taken to the tailor, the milliner, the wigmaker, the shoemaker, and so on. A few days later, Louisa wrote to Abigail asking her to send cotton cambric, muslin for cravats, fine cotton stockings, and other articles for her husband’s wardrobe. She asked little for herself or the baby.
Adams found that life in St. Petersburg was like life in Berlin but on an immensely grander and more opulent scale. He was invited to dancing parties, balls, masquerades, luncheons, outings. Everyone gambled at cards and dice. The French ambassador, the Duc de Caulaincourt, entertained on a colossal scale; his budget, Adams learned, ran to a million rubles a year. A lunch “sans ceremonie” at his palace began at three thirty, proceeded through a theatrical performance by French actresses, dancing, a light dinner, sleight-of-hand tricks, and more dancing. Adams got home after one in the morning. At the bal masqué d’enfants (children’s masked ball) held soon thereafter, Charles Francis, at not quite two and a half years of age, made his debut in St. Petersburg society dressed as an Indian.
As in Berlin, Adams was fortunate to represent his country at a court ruled by an energetic young prince. Alexander had ascended to the throne in 1801, when conspirators had murdered his father, Paul, a paranoid and unstable figure who had threatened to drag the empire down with him. By the time Adams arrived in St. Petersburg, Alexander was thirty-one, amiable and gracious, a liberal and a reformer by the standards of the Romanovs. He was a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and fair skin. Adams had been formally presented to the emperor within days of his arrival—an auspicious sign, he thought. Alexander had taken him by the arm and asked him, in French, about his family, his voyage, the principal cities of America. Adams had been very impressed. He wrote to Tom of Alexander’s “spirit of benevolence and humanity.”
At forty-two, Adams was close
r in age to Alexander than were the other members of the diplomatic corps. And only one other minister was accompanied by his wife. Alexander and Empress Elizabeth felt a sense of kinship with the young American family, as had Frederick Wilhelm and Luise. Louisa had been terrified to be presented to the beautiful Elizabeth—a contemporary and thoroughly smitten English traveler described her elegant figure as “lilylike”—but the empress had done her best to put the overwhelmed young woman at her ease. Alexander and Elizabeth had lost two children before the age of two, the last one only eighteen months before the Adamses arrived, a shattering event for the tsarina. They were much taken with Charles Francis. Louisa reported to Abigail that the imperial majesties had played with the toddler for an hour, both speaking English to him, though the boy was actually more comfortable in French and German. “His Majesty told Mr. A he was a most charming Child.”
Adams was fortunate to have a charming and socially adroit wife in Louisa, and an adorable child in Charles Francis, for the minister himself had already taken on the aspect of a graven idol. “He sat in the frivolous assemblies of St. Petersburg like a bull-dog among spaniels,” as a British visitor put it, “and many were the times that I drew monosyllables and grim smiles from him and tried in vain to mitigate his venom.” Adams’ hostility toward the British, especially at this period, probably accounts for this menacing description, but it is true that he often turned what this official called his “vinegar aspect” on the world. He could not, like Caulaincourt, seduce through charm.
AT THIS TIME, RUSSIA PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN NAPOLEON’S FAR-FLUNG constellation of alliances. Starting in 1805, Napoleon had won a string of victories that had made him master of much of Europe and given him the upper hand in his perpetual bid to isolate Great Britain and bring his great rival to its knees. He had defeated the Austrians at Austerlitz and the Prussians at Jena, marching into Berlin in 1806. The following year he took on and defeated the tsar’s forces at Eylau and Friedland, and he forced Alexander to sue for peace at the conference of Tilsit in July. There the tsar had signed a treaty of alliance with his fellow emperor and had agreed to join the so-called Continental System, a series of embargos that kept English goods, whether carried by English ships or neutrals like the United States, out of the ports of Europe. Napoleon had invaded Portugal and Spain in the hopes of sealing off the Continent to English trade.
Adams’ central task was persuading Alexander and his advisors to make an exception from the Continental System for American ships. Russia had not formally blockaded American vessels, but on one pretext or another merchant ships that made it as far as the Russian ports of Cronstadt or Archangel had typically not been permitted to unload their cargoes of sugar and coffee, cotton and indigo. But Adams found that he had an even more pressing problem to address: on his passage through Denmark he had learned that Danish privateers had impounded as many as fifty American ships with cargo valued at no less than $5 million. The goods, in most cases, were destined for Russia. Soon after his arrival, Adams had spoken to the Danish minister, who had said that he was powerless to help because Denmark had little choice but to do France’s bidding. He then approached Alexander’s foreign minister, Count Nikolai Rumiantsev, pointing out that the Continental System—like Jefferson’s ill-fated embargo—had done little to damage England or turn English public opinion against war and was mostly doing harm to neutrals like the United States.
Rumiantsev, the most pro-French figure at court, demurred. But Adams pressed on. Could he ask the tsar to intercede with Denmark, a small nation that could scarcely afford to vex Russia? Rumiantsev, despite his own disapproval, agreed to transmit the message, and several days later he returned to say that, to his great surprise, Alexander had ordered him to inform the Danes that the emperor would like to see American claims processed quickly and American ships released. The foreign minister added that Alexander had been eager to demonstrate his partiality to America. Two months later, in February 1810, Rumiantsev related to Adams a conversation he had just held with the Danish minister, who said that his country, wishing to oblige the tsar, had agreed to expedite the American claims. This was a remarkable diplomatic victory to have won in so short a time.
Exactly how much credit Adams—or Louisa or Charles Francis—deserves for this change of heart is impossible to say. Rumiantsev often told the American minister how very well disposed the emperor was to him, but flattery was second nature for so accomplished a courtier. And Caulaincourt, whose job was to entertain his way into the heart of the Russian court, recognized that he was not making as much headway as his unique social position would seem to imply. He wrote to Napoleon to say that “beneath all his natural benevolence, honesty, and loyalty, beneath all his exalted ideas and principles, there is a strong element of royal dissimulation born of an obstinacy which nothing can conquer.” Alexander did not trust Napoleon and bristled as France engulfed Poland, whose aristocracy was deeply tied to his own. And Russian merchants were clamoring over the loss of trade that had come with the French alliance.
In that first winter of 1809–1810, Adams discovered that St. Petersburg was a place of marvels. The city turned perfectly white, and the Neva itself, frozen as solid as marble, seemed to disappear into the flat vista. The gaily painted rooftops turned white, as did the men’s long beards. The low-wheeled droschkas (carriages with leather aprons projecting from either side) gave way to sleds, which shot down the broad avenues at astonishing speeds; the vehicles of the nobility were borne along by splendid horses with the gait of greyhounds, one in harness and the other, loosely bound, prancing and curvetting in perfect synchrony. Caulaincourt held a magnificent party at his country villa. A giant hill had been fashioned from snow and ice; elegant women in fur-lined riding regalia scooted down the slope on sleds whose runners fit into grooves carved in the ice. Adams, of course, stayed inside and talked to Baron Blome, the Danish minister. This rustic fantasia concluded with a cotillion danced by men and women who had exchanged clothes with one another. Louisa, who was both mildly scandalized and ashamed of her humble wardrobe, declined.
Louisa was not pleased with her new life, and not being an Adams, she lacked the high tone of self-sacrifice that was second nature to her husband and his family. She wrote desperate-sounding letters to Abigail about the exorbitant costs and the dreadful habits of their social circle. The women of the nobility, she wrote soon after arriving, “are cold and haughtily repulsive in their manners but there is at the same time a degree of freedom and unrestraint which is utterly impossible to describe[.] Everything like wit or superior sense is entirely exploded and nothing but sentiment of the most languishing and susceptible kind can be tolerated.” Even compared to Berlin, St. Petersburg society was indolent, frivolous, and wildly extravagant. A gentlemen was expected to run up immense debts and as often as not repudiate them. Adams, of course, would do no such thing: instead, the family scrimped and saved and lived like church mice amid the stupefying luxury of the court. Adams wrote home to describe his epic struggle against debt.
Abigail had never wanted her son to leave; she wrote to Louisa’s mother, Catherine, to say that she had consented only because she felt he needed to escape the obloquy and the loss even of dear friends that he had suffered after the debate over the embargo. In August 1810, Abigail took matters in hand in a way that very few mothers would or could have done: she wrote to President Madison to inform him that “the outfit and sallery allowed by Congress” to a minister was so grossly inadequate to her son’s expenses in Russia that “inevitable ruin must be the consequences to himself and family.” She asked the president to bring Adams home.
Two weeks later, Madison wrote back to say that since he had no wish to bankrupt her son, the minister could return home with no damage to his reputation. The president may have imagined that Adams had been too embarrassed to speak on his own behalf and so had asked his mother to do so for him, since he then wrote directly to Adams describing the exchange with Abigail and saying that he would send a b
lank commission permitting him to sign over the powers to someone of his own choosing. It is true, the president reflected, that the emperor could not fail to take such an abrupt departure as a personal affront. Of course Adams would sooner have gone to the bottom on the Horace than leave his post on such conditions.
Adams had a gift for adapting to his circumstances without ever sacrificing an ounce of his essential nature. The St. Petersburg winter drove everyone inside—but not the American minister. Even in the dead of winter, when the temperature often fell to 25 below zero, Adams donned his bearskin coat, his fur hat, and his thick mittens and trudged out into the blinding whiteness along the Neva Prospect and the river, alone save for the occasional hunched-over figures zipping by in sleds—and the emperor. Alexander liked to travel around the city with only his carriage driver for company, often stopping to talk to his subjects, and he kept up this habit even in the winter. The conversation between tsar and minister was usually banal, but always warm; Adams had suffered an inflammation of the eyes—a chronic condition—and the emperor asked with what seemed to Adams a genuine show of concern if he had yet recovered. Alexander often practiced his English on the American minister.
Alexander was a man in whom both piety and license were equally pronounced. His many romantic affairs were public knowledge, and before long he had fixed his eye on Kitty, a flirtatious young woman who already had acquired a sizeable collection of beaux in St. Petersburg. He paid Kitty such attention that she and Louisa stopped taking their usual walk for fear of provoking gossip. When they resumed, the emperor happened upon them again and said, looking straight at Kitty, that they must not omit their daily stroll. In May 1810, when Caulaincourt gave a ball in honor of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise of Austria, Kitty was explicitly invited even though she had not been presented at court—normally a serious breach of etiquette. At the ball, Alexander asked Louisa to dance a Polonaise, a kind of syncopated stroll, and then asked where her sister was. “I’ll get her,” said a shocked Louisa. “No, I will,” said the emperor. Soon the two were dancing, and Louisa was horrified to see that her unschooled sister was behaving as if the tsar of all the Russians was a prize catch, laughing out loud and prattling about who knows what. Dinner was delayed twenty-five minutes while the emperor enjoyed his flirtation. An actual affair between the two, which Alexander evidently had in mind, would have been a scandal of colossal proportions, and while it was impossible for the Adamses to keep Kitty at home, or stop the emperor from holding private chats with her, they kept a careful watch over her. The relationship developed no further.
