by James Traub
Louisa, marooned in remote St. Petersburg, poring over accounts of British atrocities from her husband and her mother-in-law, swelled with outrage; she sounded more and more like an Adams. “I could almost wish I were a man in these times,” she wrote to her husband, as Abigail had written forty years earlier to John, “for I feel that sort of ardour and enthusiasm in the cause which I think in a man would produce great things.” When she learned that in Massachusetts, preachers were inveighing against the war—Abigail had stopped attending church in protest—and legislators were once again plotting secession, Louisa burst out in a very uncharacteristic manner, “I blush to think that my Sons are brought up in that hot Bed of Treason and Cowardice which makes one ashamed of owning it for ones Country.”
Louisa was growing yet more unhappy in St. Petersburg. She had lost her most important source of companionship in late July, when Kitty and her husband and baby daughter had sailed to Europe. In October, she wrote her husband that she had moved into a small apartment to save money but feared nevertheless that he would blame her for extravagance. She had arranged to buy wood for the winter, but the seller had backed out when he had gotten a better price, and she had been forced to pay more—though still less than was usually charged. “If from want of judgement or habit of management I have injured my Children’s property,” she wrote, “I must submit to their reproaches as I have for many years submitted to yours.” In fact, she sounded more angry than apologetic. If he didn’t want her to waste money, she added, he shouldn’t leave her alone in a foreign country. As the winter drew on, her hopes of being soon reunited with her husband dimmed. “I am so sick and weary of it I would willingly run all the risks attached to the Voyage in the present state of things than undergo it much longer,” she wrote.
The tides of war turned back and forth in the fall of 1814. Adams’ fears and British hopes about the American will to fight were, in fact, completely misplaced. Americans were enraged at the desecration of the nation’s capital—and at Madison for letting it happen—and more determined than ever to fight on. In short order, American forces turned back the British at Lake Champlain, Plattsburgh, and Fort Erie. Lord Liverpool began to wonder if time was, in fact, on his side. Still, he hoped to improve his negotiating position and wrote to the Duke of Wellington in Paris proposing that he lead a naval campaign against the American upstarts. In a famous note, Wellington responded that while he would do so if ordered, the failure of British forces to take and hold American territory gave London no right to demand uti posseditis, or indeed “to demand any concession of territory from America.” This letter, written November 9, effectively put an end to British pretensions.
Meanwhile, the Americans at Ghent continued to fight among themselves. The British had offered to retain American fishing rights on the Grand Banks in exchange for the reciprocal privilege of freedom of navigation for British ships on the Mississippi. This was an ingenious means of turning Adams and Clay against one another. For Adams, the fishing rights were sacrosanct, both because New England depended on them and because his father had won them. Clay viewed American control of the Mississippi as no less indispensable to the people of the South and the West. And he was convinced that the British would use their presence in the West to keep stirring up the Indians against the settlers. Throughout October and November, as the American team drew up a draft treaty of their own, Adams and Clay fought over the language. And Gallatin, with his tact and patience and droll wit, served as referee.
Then the situation on the battlefield began to swing further in the Americans’ favor. In late November, both sides learned that the American army had repulsed the British attack on Baltimore. Britain’s leaders began to conclude that the game was not worth the candle. Peace at home could no longer be taken for granted: France was in turmoil, for the Bourbons, whom England had put back on the throne, were deeply unpopular. Years of war had left the Exchequer in a shambles; a new property tax had provoked widespread anger. Liverpool concluded that he had little choice but to take Wellington’s advice. On November 25, the British team presented a new draft treaty that dropped all previous demands while also rejecting the American terms.
Clay, the poker player, had always thought the British were bluffing. Adams, the deep pessimist, had never believed they would settle. And he still didn’t believe it. Adams wrote to Louisa to say that he had seen through the British “game of duplicity,” which involved offering to settle “rags and tatters of contention” while holding out on points they knew the United States could not accept. He and Clay continued to argue over whether either fishing rights or navigation on the Mississippi could be bargained away. Gallatin, like Adams, did not view the Mississippi issue as inviolable. Clay had a volcanic temper; and as his control over the debate slipped away, so did his composure. In mid-December he told his colleagues that he was prepared to fight three more years rather than concede navigation rights. Gallatin and Bayard tried to calm him down. But Clay, Adams wrote in his journal, “walked to and fro across the chamber repeating five or six times, ‘I will never sign a treaty upon the Status Quo Ante Bellum, with the Indian Article, so help me God.’”
On December 22, the British team proposed to cut the Gordian knot: all remaining points, including both fishing rights and the Mississippi, would be put off for settlement at a later date. Clay wanted to hold out for an explicit renunciation of navigation rights, but now he was isolated. The following day, after a marathon thirty-hour session, the two sides agreed to terms. The war thus ended precisely where it had begun. This was a peace that only a diplomat could love, but it was nevertheless a tremendous victory for the Americans. The British had hoped for, and expected, so much more. And they could have gotten it had the American team not waited until the military campaign swung in their favor, or had Gallatin prevailed on his colleagues to take a softer line—which he did not seek to do—or had either Adams or Clay walked out of the talks. The United States that would have emerged from Ghent, in that case, would have been a weaker, more vulnerable, and more divided country.
The two sides signed a draft treaty on Christmas Day 1814. Adams wrote to Louisa to say that though he still had doubts about the document, “I consider the day on which I signed it the happiest of my life; because it was the day on which I had my share in restoring the peace of the world.” He asked her to come to him right away, though of course it was the dead of winter. And he wrote to his mother to say that if President Madison did, as was rumored, ask him to serve as minister to Great Britain, she should send George and John to London.
The American negotiators parted on bad terms—or rather, the two chief protagonists did. Adams insisted that, as the lead negotiator, he should have custody of their papers. Clay said that the papers belonged to the State Department. The two men bickered. With Adams absent, the others took a vote and agreed to give the papers to Clay, who would turn them over to State. Adams was furious. Clay tried to calm the waters by saying that he “did not want to part in enmity.” This only made Adams stiffen into a mask of propriety, insisting that personal feelings didn’t enter into the question. Adams then wrote an intemperate letter to all three accusing them of misrepresenting their position on the stewardship of the documents. At another meeting January 6, Clay flew into a rage. “You dare not, you cannot, you shall not, insinuate that there has been a cabal of three members against you,” he shouted at Adams; “no person shall impute any thing of that kind to me with impunity.” He appears to have been an inch away from challenging Adams to a duel. In the end, they agreed that Adams would take the papers, while the books and other effects would go to an agent in London.
THE WAR OF 1812 HAS LARGELY DISAPPEARED FROM AMERICAN historical memory. Neither side won; no great principles were settled. And yet the Treaty of Ghent marked the end of the first, and very fragile, stage of American political history. First England, then France, and then England once again had seemed poised to crush the infant republic with its vastly superior military might. At the
same time, both powers played on American sympathies to advance their cause. The English had exploited the Anglophilia of the New England Federalists, while France had played on the Jeffersonian admiration for the Revolution. American politics had become precisely what George Washington had feared: a contest between partisans of foreign powers. The great statesmen—Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison—had tried to rise above this bitter debate, ideological as well as sectional. And some of them had paid a very bitter price. John Adams had ended his political career despised as a turncoat by many in his own party. His son had been so battered by abuse from the Essex Junto that he had been only too happy to leave for Russia.
And now, finally, it was over, and the nationalists had won. The bitter-enders of the Junto met at Hartford in December 1814 with the hopes of finally realizing their dream of separation. But the delegates to the Hartford Convention refused to call for secession, and the subsequent news of Andrew Jackson’s great victory at New Orleans in January 1815, and then of the Treaty of Ghent, made even the more modest demands of the separatists sound ludicrous. The treaty was universally embraced by a nation sick of war and happy to escape without humiliating concessions. America was at last free to pursue the destiny its most farsighted and ambitious leaders, very much including John Quincy Adams, had foreseen. No longer burdened by the fear of foreign invasion, America would become a continental nation with a size and a power to rival Europe’s great powers and ultimately Europe itself.
CHAPTER 15
A Card of Invitation to a Dress Party at the Prince Regent’s
(1815–1817)
ADAMS’ FINAL WEEKS IN GHENT WERE THOROUGHLY DELIGHTFUL. The citizens had taken to the republican cause and from the outset treated the Americans as honored guests, inviting them to judge art contests, visit courtrooms, attend dinners and balls. Local musicians had asked for a patriotic tune; after Gallatin’s black servant, Peter, whistled “Hail Columbia!,” this proto-anthem was heard all over town. (Francis Scott Key was just then penning his ode to the “rockets’ red glare.”) Adams was feeling quite pleased with himself. On January 3, 1815, he wrote to Louisa in a tone of sheer ebullience: “A happy New-Year! And many, many happy years to my beloved wife, and to my beloved son Charles, and his far distant brothers!” After Marianne Meulemeester, the twelve-year-old daughter of a dear friend in Ghent, played the harp and sang couplets in praise of the American mission, Adams, perhaps still in his state of rapture, spent the day devising a response that teetered on the edge of the inappropriate:
Fair maid of Ghent! Were mine the days,
Of beauty and of Youth;
And mine the Bard’s ecstatic lays,
Inspired by Love and Truth,
My harp, of all that Poets dream
The sweetest song should chuse;
Thy virgins charms should be my theme,
And thou shouldst be my Muse.
There was a great deal more in that strain. One can only say that he must have been extremely moved. Adams left reluctantly for Brussels and then, a week later, for Paris.
Adams and Louisa wrote each other regularly throughout this period, usually twice in a week. Louisa reported that the impossibly precocious Charles Francis, now seven and a half, had picked up Racine’s tragedy Britannicus and was asking her if she didn’t find it very beautiful. Charles Francis wrote a letter of his own to his father: “Mrs. Betancourt has taken away my Gun and has given me another, a smaller and a lighter Gun; but I hope to learn to handle my Gun in such a way as to be able to defend both my Country and the ladies in case of need.” He was well on his way to becoming John Quincy Adams in miniature.
Louisa had lived in St. Petersburg longer than she had any other place since she had married, but she had never felt drawn to the city or learned its language, and she had suffered the greatest tragedy of her life there. She no longer wanted to be buried in Russia; she longed to leave. In early January she wrote that the New Year’s holiday was oppressing her: “I feel so isolated among all the gay folks & it makes me feel our separation more keenly than ever.” On January 20 Louisa received her husband’s letter telling her to come to Paris immediately. She began frantically to sell what belongings she could, to ship some things and pack others, and to prepare for the arduous journey. She hoped to leave no later than mid-February.
Adams reached Paris in early February. The last time he had been there he had been a romantic young man, and barely familiar sensations now flooded back, as they had when he had seen the Hague once again. “There is,” he wrote in his journal, “a moral incapacity for industry and application, a mollesse”—that Voltairean word for softness he had written at the head of his diary in his last months in Europe before setting off for Harvard—“against which I am as ill-guarded as I was at the age of twenty.” He went to see Molière’s Le Misanthrope and looked on in delight as his neighbors in the pit repeated every line from memory and critiqued each gesture and intonation. He took lodgings in the Hôtel du Nord in the rue de Richelieu and walked down the street to inspect the Hôtel Valois, where he had stayed with his father more than thirty years before. It was a melancholy reunion: the old apartment, he reported to Abigail, was much dilapidated. He visited old friends. The Marquis de Lafayette came to Paris from his country seat expressly to thank him for having looked after his son-in-law, Victor de Tracy, who had been imprisoned in Russia during the Napoleonic invasion.
On March 12, Adams recorded an astonishing rumor he had heard: Napoleon was at Lyons with an army of twelve thousand. A year earlier, Napoleon’s generals, hopelessly outnumbered by an alliance of all Europe, had finally turned against the emperor and forced him to abdicate. Napoleon had accepted exile on the tiny Mediterranean island of Elba. His brilliant and bloody twenty-year campaign of conquest had finally reached what Adams and so many others viewed as its foreordained end. But it hadn’t—not quite. Napoleon escaped from Elba on February 26, arriving at Golfe-Juan with barely a thousand men. The troops sent to capture him instead had flocked to his side. He and his men began the five-hundred-mile march northward to Paris. On March 19, Adams wrote to Abigail to say that Napoleon was believed to be only six days from the capital. “The Government,” he reported, “has been collecting a force upon which they could depend which will meet him before he can arrive here, and the first actual resistance he meets will I think determine his fate.” For once Adams erred on the side of optimism; perhaps he could not bring himself to believe that this man who had littered Europe with corpses still enjoyed the favor of his own people.
He wasn’t the only one, of course, to underestimate Napoleon’s appeal. Louis XVIII sent Marshall Ney, who had forced the emperor to abdicate, to deliver the final blow, and Ney, too, defected. On March 20, Adams watched in wonder as the king and his court fled northward. The following day, Napoleon’s advance guard marched to the royal palace in the Tuileries. The crowds lined the streets to shout “Vive l’empereur!” Adams wrote to his father that “the walls of all the public places were covered with the proclamations of Napoleon . . . pasted over the proclamations scarcely dry of Louis 18 declaring Napoleon Buonaparte a traitor and rebel.” A huge bonfire in the middle of the Palais Royal consumed all the books and pamphlets denouncing Napoleon—no doubt kindled, Adams drily noted, by the same people who had printed them in the first place. It was much the same scene he had witnessed twenty years earlier when the good republicans of Holland had woken up one fine morning as French revolutionaries in tricorne hats. Personal experience had taught Adams to distrust fine professions of faith; few men had the courage of their convictions when they were put to the test.
Adams also began to wonder what had become of Louisa. Napoleon’s march had led to a mass exodus. Adams worried that she might have been unable to find a post horse to bring her to Paris. Was she stuck somewhere?
In fact, Louisa had endured an ordeal that her husband could barely have imagined. She had left St. Petersburg on February 12 with Charles Francis, a French nurse named
Babet, a personal servant, and Baptiste, a former Napoleonic soldier who would serve as her guard. She carried Russian, French, and German passports, letters of credit, and gold and silver sewn into a hidden pocket. She and her son traveled in a fine covered carriage known as a berline, whose delicately sprung wheels would be replaced by runners until, further south, the snow gave way to frozen earth and mud. The servants would bring up the rear in a kibitka, a rough Russia sled with a bonnet-like covering.
Louisa had just turned forty. Her hair had begun to gray, and she was no longer as slender, or as vain, as she had been. The days when she had argued over rouge were long behind her. Louisa had been through a great deal; she remained physically frail, but she was no longer the hothouse plant she had once been. She had lived by herself in St. Petersburg since Adams had left almost a year earlier. Nevertheless, she was very much a woman of her time: she had never traveled by herself for any great length before and certainly not over much of the expanse of Europe, in the dead of winter, with a small child, in countries whose languages she did not speak and in the company of people she did not know. What was second nature to her husband must have been terrifying to her.
Louisa’s journey across war-torn Europe reads at times like the harrowing tale of a wandering damsel from the pages of the Faerie Queen. Outside Mitau, a provincial city in Latvia, she found herself beset by danger in a dark wood. The postilion admitted to her that he was utterly lost. Should they turn back? Louisa ordered him to continue. They traveled on by the wan light of a slim moon. “We were,” Louisa wrote, “jolted over hills, through swamps, and holes, and into valleys, into which no Carriage had surely ever passed before, and my whole heart was filled with unspeakable terrors for the safety of my Child.” Baptiste rode off to look for help, leaving Louisa and the terrified servants trembling. At last Baptiste returned with a gallant Russian officer, who proceeded to escort them to the safety of his home.
