by Jane Cook
In this case Dr. Galloway’s supportive care, however, helped Louisa. “A favorable change took place and perfect quiet was relied on for recovery.”
With the contractions easing, Louisa would have been able to sense the baby’s movements again. The pleasure of feeling the baby stretch his or her arms or legs or turn over would have given Mrs. Adams great comfort that her child was alive.
With his private world in turmoil, John received news about his public world that shook his normally reserved nature. “Mr. Krehmer sent me the London Courier from the 19th to the 26th of April,” John wrote in his diary on May 24, “where I found articles which give me great concern upon the account of my country. They [the British] threaten war in the most unequivocal terms.”
Diplomatic attempts to resolve America’s conflict with Britain had failed, with little hope from new attempts. Though British envoy Augustus Foster would soon arrive in Washington City, he carried instructions from his government refusing to change its trade policies or make reparations for the 1807 Leopard-Chesapeake incident. The US government insisted that the British government make amends for the HMS Leopard’s attack on the US frigate, the Chesapeake, off Virginia’s coast. The British overplayed their hand by firing several broadsides when the Chesapeake fired only one and surrendered. Americans were still angry that the British had killed three sailors, injured eighteen, and captured four when the nations were at peace.
“I fear the British ministry have made it unavoidable. They menace us with an ‘Illiad of woes,’ and already deny us every particle of compassion for our sufferings under them,” John ranted.
America was such a young nation. Though George Washington had died more than ten years earlier, few had forgotten the American Revolution that shaped John’s childhood. Had the United States grown into adulthood by 1811? The problems with Britain revealed the glaring truth. The United States was still an infant in the eyes of the world. Each time a British ship hoisted the red, white, and blue to avoid Napoleon’s trade restrictions, the British spit at American sovereignty. Every time a British admiral impressed an American merchant into service in the British navy, a piece of American independence was kidnapped too.
Adams understood the gravity of the situation better than most. If the Brits coaxed President Madison into war and won, the English lion would dominate the American eagle. Independence would be lost. America would be annexed by Great Britain. Those who had lived loudly for liberty during the Revolution would have died in vain.
“Non nobis Domine!” Adams wrote in Latin, which means, “not to us, O Lord.” He added, “If our trial is now to come, God of justice and mercy! Give us your spirit to bear with fortitude and to derive ultimate power and virtue from all the evils that they can inflict, and spare us from that woe of woes—the compassion of Britons!”
38
Supreme Recall
“AFTER APPEARING BETTER FOR THE WHOLE DAY OF YESTERDAY, I was again seized with violent illness and hope was nearly crushed both for my life and that of my child.”
Louisa relapsed. A worried John called Dr. Galloway again. He resorted to one of the strongest sedatives available, a mixture of opium and alcohol. To prevent labor, physicians used alcohol, albeit intravenously, until the 1970s. The bitter balm, which tasted like licorice, had a sweet effect, as did John holding her hand.
“Laudanum was freely resorted to by my physician but it at first aggravated my illness, but a second dose judiciously applied produced sleep.”
Her contractions relaxed. “On awaking I was quite composed, the crisis had passed and hope—blessed hope was renewed.”
Opium and alcohol provided medicinal comfort while faith gave her spiritual support. She clung to the truth of her heart, the promises that “lie dormant” in the everyday. She took comfort in her belief that Nancy was dancing in heaven—perhaps even a polonaise. Such peace “rush[ed] forth uncontroul’d.” Her faith and hope were her “best sympathies.”
Soon she received a tangible comfort, one tailor-made for her.
“Slowly recovering God in his mercy has spared me—received letters from our children—This was the best cordial in my weak state—They allayed my fears and assisted my recovery.”
Another of Abigail’s letters arrived. “I have the great pleasure to say to you, that your sons are well, that they grow in stature, and increase in knowledge.”
Cheered by her mother-in-law’s words and letters from John and George, Louisa felt much better by the week’s end. Her crying eased; her contractions subsided. One statement from her mother-in-law, stood above the rest.
“Your mama wrote me that she expected quite a crop of little ones this winter. No less than four. May they live and prosper,” Abigail wrote about Mrs. Johnson’s expectation for grandchildren from her other children. Neither grandmother knew of Louisa’s advanced pregnancy. “The Russian climate is too cold to produce an American,” Abigail added.
How Louisa longed to prove her mother-in-law wrong.
“Was able to sit in the parlor, the adjoining room to my chamber and Mr. Harris kindly called to see me—He is very attentive.”
About the time Louisa regained her strength, the Russian consul general to France arrived in St. Petersburg from Paris. Although he delivered papers of importance to the Winter Palace, he also brought Adams the most important correspondence he ever received from the US secretary of state.
“I have the satisfaction to inform you that the president had thought it proper to avail the public of your services at home, and has accordingly appointed you, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to the seat on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States vacated by the death of Judge Cushing,” Smith had written to John four months earlier on February 25, 1811.
Adams could hardly believe it. Though his mother had suggested that Lieutenant Governor Lincoln had assumed the post to keep it warm for him, her information was wrong. Lincoln had declined the offer. John must have read the lines a hundred times as the news sank into his mind and tormented his heart. President Madison had appointed an Adams as a Supreme Court justice.
The response from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue was just as unexpected. Not only had the US Senate confirmed his appointment, but the senators also had done so unanimously. Even his political enemies voted for him. Adams was shocked and more pleased than his reserved nature could outwardly express.
“This appointment will make it proper that you should return to the United States as soon as the public interest and your own convenience will permit. You are accordingly herewith furnished with a letter of leave to the emperor,” Smith ordered.
As he had previously made clear, Madison did not want Alexander to misconstrue Adams’s recall as evidence that America wanted to distance itself from Russia. Smith instructed John to assure Alexander of the continued friendship of the United States.
A thousand thoughts must have crisscrossed John’s mind at once, contracting and tightening as he considered the greatest public service offer of his life. In his gut he knew what he wanted to do. Nevertheless, he needed a multitude of walks along St. Petersburg’s quay to think through the options and implications of his decision. He had many factors to consider: his wife, Charles, their unborn child, George and John, their finances, the honor of the position—not to mention his mother’s prophecies of his future and his father’s boundless expectations.
He would need to make a decision soon. Because the Russian consul to France had delivered the correspondence, Count Romanzoff probably knew of the appointment before Adams did. If he didn’t know already, Alexander would soon find out.
On May 31, Adams took a walk along the Fontanka. By that time the canal was as iceless as the sun. Though the day was unseasonably cold, the water flowed briskly. A crisp wind kissed his face as he walked and thought. Sure enough, the emperor also embraced the fresh air. They met near the bridge where the canal joins the river.
“Monsieur Adams, il y a cent ans que je ne
vous ai vu,” Alexander hailed, suggesting that he had not seen him in a hundred years, though it was less than a month since they had last spoken. They shook hands with great cordiality.
Did Adams intend “to take a house in the country this summer?” Alexander inquired.
“No, I had for some time had such an ambition, then had given it up.”
“Why?”
John hesitated. How could he possibly afford to take a country home?
Alexander relieved him from embarrassment. “Fort bien vous avez raison. Il faut toujours proportionner la dépense à la recette,” he replied in French, suggesting that it is better to live within your means.
Have you “received any late news from America?”
“I had,” John replied coyly.
If Alexander was aware of John’s appointment, he gave no hint. Instead, he came right to his point. What was the status of America’s affairs with England?
“They had a very hostile appearance, and . . . the English journals were threatening us,” John replied, referring to the London Courier reports that had earlier caused him such heartburn. Instead of showing his true feelings or relying on the propaganda of English newspapers, John spoke only of what he knew from his official correspondence. He told Alexander that the letters he had received from the US government did not seek a war with Great Britain.
“It has, however, very much that appearance—at least if we believe the French journal,” the emperor replied, referring to the prediction of war between the United States and Britain in the French government newspaper. “But we know how much the Moniteur is to be believed and certain deductions are to be made from whatever that contains.”
“To be sure, people were very apt to publish as fact what they had an interest and a wish to believe,” John said to him.
The emperor raised his hand and gave John a military salute. The pair parted, each continuing his separate walk. Both had much to mull over. The appointment to the Supreme Court and America’s woes with England weighed on John’s conscience, while a possible war with France tormented the czar.
Two days later on June 2, John put his decision in writing to the secretary of state: “Deeply sensible of the honor done me by the President and Senate in the appointment to the bench of the Supreme Court, I lamented that circumstances beyond my control have prescribed declining it.”
Though the president had offered him the most honorable exit possible from St. Petersburg: the bench, and not just any bench—the supreme one—he could not accept the honor.
39
Summer Solstice
LOUISA PICKED UP HER PEN AFTER HER HUSBAND’S DECISION.
“With the mind sorely depressed by the late appalling intelligence from America and the many additional circumstances which are hourly occurring to increase the difficulties of my present situation,” she began her letter to Abigail, “I feel almost incapacitated from writing even a few lines.”
She thanked her mother-in-law for the tender way “you broke to us the melancholy tidings of our poor Nancy’s dreadful death.” After explaining how the shock had sent her into a premature confinement, she assured her that her health was better.
When Louisa had first heard about the possibility of returning home, the news had soared like a symphony in her heart. Her husband had finally received what he longed for—an honorable position, respect from his peers, and an exit from St. Petersburg. She could finally be reunited with her darling boys. How she longed to hold them again, kiss their foreheads a thousand times, and run her fingers through their hair. She hadn’t seen them in nearly two years. They had probably grown so much that she would not recognize them if they unexpectedly stepped onto St. Petersburg’s wharf and chased each other around Peter the Great’s statue.
But the pleasure of feeling her baby roll over in her womb was the best evidence of her situation.
“I am restored to health with every prospect of going through my full time, but even this circumstance adds to the present uneasiness of our family here, as it renders a removal impossible,” she explained of her husband’s decision to decline the nomination.
Louisa and John discussed returning. They debated leaving as late as October, after the baby’s birth. Yet the nights were so long by then and the seas so shallow that Adams did not think it wise.
“At least Mr. Adams will not hear of it and the season of the year when I shall be released will render a passage very dangerous . . . for all of us but particularly for myself and so young an infant.”
She, however, was so desperate to return home that she made another suggestion. What about hiring a carriage?
“Mr. A. does not like the idea of rushing a journey by land which would be attended with almost equal difficulties before we will reach a port from when we could sail with less danger.”
The irony was as obvious as St. Petersburg’s daily eighteen hours of summer sunlight. Giving birth to another child would keep her from being reunited with her sons. Shakespeare himself could not have created a more ironic plot point. Timing was their foil. Like a heroine acting in a play, she covered her anguish with a mask of pretense.
John wrote to the secretary of state and explained his reasons for declining the nomination:
One of them, itself decisive to dictate my determination, is the impossibility of my return to the United States during the present year, arising from the peculiar situation of my family, the length of time necessary to accomplish a voyage from the extremity of the Gulf of Finland to the coast of North America, and the short portion of the year during which such as voyage can be commenced.
John also wrote a private letter to President Madison and expressed his gratitude over “the new mark of confidence, which you have been pleased to show me in the nomination to an office so highly honorable.”
Keeping within the austere manners of the day, he diplomatically explained his situation without explicitly stating that Louisa was pregnant: “My expectation is to be detained here until the next winter, by ties which the affections of a husband and a parent can neither dissolve nor sever.”
Her brush with labor after receiving notice of Nancy’s death worried him deeply. How could he possibly ask Louisa to make the journey? With her sister’s death so fresh on their minds, how could they dare take the risk? Ambition two years earlier had led him to leave his sons behind. Though outwardly reserved, he knew his wife’s heartache. He felt it too. He could not let ambition—no matter if it came from him or his parents—endanger the love of his life or their unborn child. Adams had softened. He had changed.
Recent newspaper articles gave Louisa new cause to worry, as she wrote Abigail: “[T]his circumstance places us in a most uncomfortable situation as we are beset by reports that keep us in a state of perpetual agitation.”
They had received more newspapers, likely from London. President Madison had appointed an old but respected Republican rival, James Monroe, as the new US secretary of state. The accounts suggested that outgoing secretary Robert Smith was en route to St. Petersburg to take John’s place. How they hoped the news was a mistake or miscommunication!
As politically astute as her mother-in-law, Louisa could hardly imagine that Madison would send a replacement without waiting for her husband’s answer. Yet she did not have all the facts. Had she been in Washington City, she would have heard the whispers of Smith’s backstabbing and misrepresentation of Madison’s policies to foreign diplomats. Though Smith saw his appointment to Russia as an exile to Siberia, a slap in the face, neither he nor Madison realized what an awkward predicament the Adamses now faced. If Smith arrived in St. Petersburg soon, as the newspapers predicted, they would find themselves jobless and without income—stuck in Russia until the water broke free in the spring of 1812.
Such uncertainty about John’s employment status understandably bothered Louisa and kept her mind “in such a state of trouble, agitation, and suspense that I hardly know what I write and I am sure you will feel and accept my excuse,” she
concluded, begging Abigail to “kiss my sweet boys for me.”
Adams knew one person would be extremely disappointed over his decision to decline the president’s Supreme Court nomination. “The commission, inasmuch as it offered me an honorable station, and a pittance (a miserable one indeed) for the maintenance of my family during the remainder of my days, was all that my ambition could wish, or that my estimate of the value of money could expect,” he explained in a letter to his father.
Though he could not accept it, he wanted to show his father that he appreciated the appointment and its importance: “Yet I am deeply sensible to the personal kindness, as well as to the honor, shown me by the president in the nomination, and to the more surprising, though not more unexpected, unanimity of the Senate in approving it.”
The appointment renewed his hope in returning home with honor. He assured his father that he longed to be restored to the bosom of his country and resume the superintendence of the education of his “darling boys.” He also dreamed of a more southern climate. And compared to St. Petersburg, Boston was a hot spot.
“From this dilemma the blessing of Providence (for so I fervently pray that I may ultimately have cause to consider it) had, by a simple and very natural circumstance in the condition of my family, graciously pleased to relieve me. . . . In this state of things I cannot embark for a voyage to America.”
No serpent’s apple could tempt this Adams to expose his Eve and infant to the dangers of an ocean journey. His decision was as firm as the core of the earth itself. If Madison had already sent Smith to replace him, then John would stay in Russia as a private citizen until his tender family could withstand a rough ocean voyage.
Why didn’t he ask Madison to hold the seat open until he could return the following year? The possibility squeezed his principles as tightly as Louisa’s preterm contractions wrenched her womb. Wouldn’t such a request seem selfish? Was it honorable to ask for a delay? Judge Cushing had died in September 1810. By the time Adams could return in the summer of 1812, the seat would have been vacant for nearly two years. What would happen to the cases pending before the Supreme Court in the meantime? Adams did not believe it was right to ask the public to wait such a long time to fill such an important position.
