by Jane Cook
“Mr. & Mrs. Bezzara came according to appointment and I was obliged to accompany in full dress mourning to introduce [them] to Madame Litta at the palace which was more than a mile round from us as we had to cross the river.”
Although she expected to give birth in early August, Louisa fulfilled her commitment to the Bezzaras on July 25, despite the risk of going into labor. Traveling over a bumpy road and crossing the river at such an advanced stage of pregnancy left her exhausted before her swollen feet ever stepped an inch into the Kamenny Ostrov Palace.
“Countess Litta received us very kindly but begged that I would go home directly and not wait for Madame Bezzara’s presentation to the empress.”
How she longed to take Litta’s kind advice. “As however she [Madame de Bezzara] had no carriage but mine, I was obliged to remain nearly an hour before I could get home.”
In this way she waited at the palace while the imperial family formally received Madame de Bezzara. Except for the palace’s exterior’s pale orange color, the entrance was similar in shape to the President’s House in Washington City. Both boasted a triangle pediment supported by a handful of white columns. With plenty of time to gaze at the views of the park and the water, what would happen if Louisa’s water broke? Though a rare occurrence, women have long feared going into labor in public. As she waited, she could not afford for her delicate condition to lead to a delicate embarrassment.
“And when the countess came back from the empress, she took my hand and sent me off saying, while she laughed, that she had never taken leave of anybody with so much pleasure in her life.”
Litta was relieved, and so was Louisa as she said good-bye and passed through the palace’s iron gate toward her new country estate.
“We reached home in safety and they stayed to pass the evening,” she wrote, adding that “this was a killing life.”
The day after his wife jaunted to the palace, like Mary to Bethlehem, John did something he rarely did. He wrote about his love for her. His diary often reflected his work, a method for documenting conversations so he could copy them into letters to the US government. Rarely did he reveal his deeper feelings about his private life. Most of his statements about family were mere facts, such as “went with Mrs. Adams” to the ball.
Perhaps observing how well his wife had made arrangements for their move led him to pick up his pen. Or maybe it was her willingness to reach out to Madame de Bezzara in spite of how she felt. Regardless of what motivated him, he was inspired.
“I have this day been married 14 years, during which I have to bless God for the enjoyment of a portion of felicity, resulting from this relation in society, greater than falls to the generality of mankind, and far beyond anything that I have been conscious of deserving,” he began his entry on July 26. “Its greatest alloy has risen from the delicacy of my wife’s constitution, the ill health which has afflicted her much of the time, and the misfortunes she has suffered from it.”
Their union had not been without dissension. She could be irascible; he, harsh. “But she has always been a faithful and affectionate wife, and a careful, tender, indulgent, and watchful mother to our children, all of whom she nursed herself. I have found in this connection from decisive experience the superior happiness of the marriage state over that of celibacy, and a full conviction that my lot in marriage has been highly favored.”
About this time, Louisa was also more reflective and appreciative: “At last for a few days we have obtained a little quiet—I go down to the end of the garden; have a chair on the bank of the river with Charles; and we catch fish not worth eating—It is an indolent sort of an amusement that just suits me for I do not think.” The countryside brought pleasure and quietude.
“When I look forward I tremble,” she wrote, reminded of her sister’s death in childbirth. “But I bow down with trust in him who has mercifully saved me through a life of trouble and granted to me so many blessings.”
As if gently draping her Turkish shawl around her shoulders, Louisa wrapped herself in faith and fortitude as she anticipated the birth of her child.
41
The Confinement
WHAT JOHN MOST NEEDED THAT SUMMER WAS THE YET-TO-BE-invented telephone. As August 1811 began, he had one last major social obligation to attend before the season’s end. Because the emperor had canceled the Peterhof party the previous year, attendance was even more expected this year. Indeed only one diplomat, Mr. Navarro, declined.
At 11:00 a.m. on August 3, John reluctantly left his very pregnant wife behind to travel some twenty miles to Peterhof. While riding, he tried to pass the time by reading recently arrived reports of Congress’s winter session, but his mind was distracted even more than usual. Though the horses didn’t stop, the distance seemed farther than he remembered. The time lasted three hours instead of two. “The road was crowded with carriages of all kinds from the city gate to the palace at Peterhof.”
Despite the packed path, he arrived early enough to spend an hour walking in the gardens before returning to his room and donning his finest clothing for the festivities. As distinguished guests, the emperor’s diplomats wore their lighter-weight full court suits for this summer event. They received privileges not available to the throngs who would flock the lawn that night. Adams’s invitation included the masked ball, fireworks, dinner, and overnight lodging at Peterhof’s outer buildings.
He joined the other diplomats inside the palace. The protocol officer assembled them in a line where they would be presented after the emperor spoke from a balcony to the crowd of fifty thousand gathered on the grounds. The most obvious changes were the diplomatic corps’s newest additions: the recently arrived French ambassador and the Bezzaras from Portugal. Not only were both newcomers, but they also received the prestige of serving as line leaders. The gala brought out some mischief from the protocol officer, who purposefully paired them to lead the others in the parade before the people. As an ally of Britain, Portugal was an enemy of France.
“A Portuguese minister’s lady escorted by the French ambassador was, in the present state of the world, a singular curiosity,” Adams observed wryly, noting that the other diplomats were also amused at the sight of Count Lauriston taking Madame de Bezzara’s arm at the front of the line. Louisa would have appreciated the irony.
The diplomats, however, had every reason to be relaxed. Napoleon had recently given a speech suggesting pacific intentions toward Russia. Adams wondered whether Caulaincourt “had administered a cooling and quiet potion” to the French emperor after returning to Paris because Napoleon suddenly seemed satisfied with Russia’s compliance to his Continental System. John doubted the appeasement would last.
However cunning the Russian protocol, the fête brought out the best of summer produce. Silver serving trays abounded with appetizers of “cherries, strawberries, raspberries, apricots, plums, peaches, oranges, grapes, and pine-apples.” Louisa’s sweet tooth would have found much satisfaction had she been there. Though he had attended other events without her, John felt especially uneasy and lonesome this night.
After enjoying the fruit, the diplomats rode around the gardens in court carriages to wait for the fireworks, which began at nine o’clock. The illuminations delighted all.
“Countess Litta said that the whole garden was lighted in ten minutes; there were three hundred thousand lamps and sixteen hundred persons employed to light them.”
The diplomats then returned to the palace to play cards and dance. Soon the imperial family arrived, circling the room to speak to each envoy.
“They asked the same questions—whether my wife was there? Why was she not there? Where we now resided? Whether we had a comfortable house?” Adams recorded of the empress mother’s inquiry. While wearing a tiara entirely covered by diamonds, she asked the most unbelievable question of all: “Whether Mrs. Adams would be conveniently situated for her confinement!”
Had the emperor not bought their house, the empress would not have asked these questions.
Such was the trouble with royalty. With thousands of servants to take care of their every need—including lighting lamps for fireworks—the imperial family could not possibly understand that John’s greatest fear at Peterhof that night was the lightning bolts back home—that Louisa had gone into labor.
As was the custom, Adams could not leave the party until the czar retired. Miss Gourieff, a Russian noblewoman, noticed Louisa’s absence. He then confessed his desire to return to St. Petersburg as soon as the emperor retired rather than stay to enjoy the overnight accommodations as the other diplomats preferred.
“Miss Gourieff told me that if I returned home this night I should find the bridges raised but I thought she was joking.”
Though keeping his reserve, Adams was surprised that the Russian government would keep the bridges upright on the night of the Peterhof party. He hoped she was mistaken.
Very often dinner is the last event at an imperial evening. Because the diplomats were expected to spend the night, they were invited to tour the gardens again. For nearly two hours Adams found himself obliged to ride around the garden in a court carriage. Finally, at a quarter past one in the morning, the emperor released them.
“The daylight was already beginning to return,” John observed, noting that many lamps were already extinguished.
Within fifteen minutes of arriving at his overnight lodgings, he had packed his trunk and was ready to depart. He boarded his carriage and ordered his postilions to drive straight home. He quickly understood why the imperial family provided overnight lodging for the diplomatic corps. Partygoers packed the route back to St. Petersburg.
“The lines of carriages on the road were almost uninterrupted from Peterhof to the city gate, and they were often two or three in front. I passed upwards of two thousand, as I presume on the road, and during the first half of the way great multitudes of persons returning on foot.”
Finally, by a quarter of four in the morning, he saw the river.
“On arriving at the lower bridge, I found, as Miss Gourieff had told me, that it was raised.”
By this time he had been away from Louisa for more than eighteen hours. Once again he needed the out-of-time invention of the telephone. Had he a telephone or access to a telegraph, he could have stayed in reasonable contact with his wife throughout the day. He rode over to the upper drawbridge, which was also impassable.
“I now learnt, and not without concern, that they raise both bridges every morning at two o’clock, to let the vessels pass through, and that they are kept raised for two to three hours.”
All he could do was wait and worry about his near-term pregnant wife at home without him.
“If we have a war with England, I may perhaps find it difficult to get home, but I suppose a passport for myself and family would be obtainable,” he'd earlier strategized in a letter to Thomas dated July 31, 1811.
Though he'd heard about the horror from an English newspaper, the outcome was the same regardless of who fired the first shot. The USS President, a fifty-four-gun American frigate, and the Little Belt, a smaller, twenty-two-gun British sloop of war, had engaged in battle off the North Carolina coast on May 16, 1811.
After accepting Napoleon’s pretense of revoking the Berlin and Milan decrees, Madison had reinstated the embargo against Britain in November 1810. The English responded by sending more warships to America’s coast and increasing the practice of impressment. On May 1, 1811, British sailors from the HMS Guerriere took captive an American sailor from a US brig sailing near New York and impressed him into the British navy.
Outraged about the latest Guerriere incident, the secretary of the navy had ordered the USS President to patrol the coast and prevent more kidnappings. The President’s captain had kept a close watch on Little Belt when it came within its view in the waters near North Carolina. Claiming the Little Belt fired the first shot and initially thinking it was the Guerriere, he ordered the President’s crew to fire. Nine British Little Belt sailors were killed and more than twenty were injured, while only one American was injured. The battle had escalated tensions between the two governments.
“A war appears to be inevitable, and I lament it, with the deepest affliction of heart and the most painful anticipation of consequences,” John continued in his letter to Thomas, observing that a war between the United States and Great Britain would do great political and financial damage. It would divide the states along party lines and strike a blow to the already depressed economy.
Jefferson’s embargo had merely delayed war, not prevented it. Not since the Revolution had the American people been tested so much. The English hated the French because they considered France a superior power. They hated America merely because the United States had beaten them years earlier. Yet more than jealousy consumed the passions of Parliament, King George III, and his son, the prince regent. England loathed America more than France because of its commercial potential, which was as vast as the western frontier and likely to surpass Britain’s trade capabilities in the future.
In response to this latest incident, a squadron of five British ships of the line carrying a regiment sailed for America to “humble” the Yankees.
“Whether it be of mere menace or direct hostility, I trust the spirit of my country will prove true to itself. But it opens in either case a prospect before [us], at least as formidable as that of 1775 and 1776 was to our fathers,” John said.
He confessed to Thomas that their time had come. They must follow their father’s example from the American Revolution. They must stand firm for freedom and live loudly for liberty: “The school of affliction is, however, as necessary to form the moral character of nations as of individuals. I hope that ours will be purified by it.”
Adams also urgently needed a telephone to be able to quickly communicate with Secretary of State James Monroe, his new boss. He desperately needed some questions answered. What should he do if Russia officially resumed trade with England? The possibility seemed more likely now that the Portuguese Bezzaras had arrived in Russia on an English ship. Of greater concern was outgoing Secretary of State Robert Smith. Was he coming to take John’s place in St. Petersburg as the newspapers reported?
Perhaps more than any correspondence with his brother or boss, he desperately needed to speak to his father. Since his first diplomatic assignment to the Netherlands in 1794, Adams had written appropriate but stifled official correspondence. In contrast his letters to his father were far more frank, flowing with a high tide of emotion and details. Even when his father was president and his boss’s boss, Adams gave blunt assessments on the extremists in the Federalist Party and other topics but hid them from his superior, the secretary of state. Now, not even the yet-to-be invented telegraph would fix the miscommunication between Adams and his father over the Supreme Court nomination. They needed to talk.
John continued to receive correspondence from his family and friends, begging him to accept the high-shelf Supreme Court appointment. Even though he knew his father wrote his letters before receiving his son’s initial explanation, his father’s pleas and expectations bothered him.
Years earlier, on April 23, 1794, about a month before President Washington officially appointed John Quincy to his first diplomatic post, Vice President Adams had given his son a warning against settling for mediocrity: “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you, if your success is médiocre.” His letter continued more sternly: “And if you do not rise to the head not only of your profession, but of your country it will be owing to your own laziness, slovenliness, and obstinacy.”
No wonder John Quincy continued to fret in his diary year after year that he had accomplished nothing worthwhile with his life. No wonder he could not fully embrace his successes. No wonder he pushed harder. Such painful past admonitions combined with fresh correspondence from his father drove John to write another letter in late July 1811 to free his conscience over declining the Supreme Court nomination.
“When I came to Russia my moti
ve doubtless in the opinion of many was ambition,” he explained to his father, noting that “more than one of my friends wrote and spoke to me of it as of an exile.”
Adams confessed that he viewed the Russian mission with disadvantage: “I knew equally well that it was going straight away from the high road of ambition, and, so far as related to political prospects, retiring into obscurity.”
He had accepted his St. Petersburg post out of duty: “My real motive was perfectly simple. The constitutional organ of my country had assigned this to me as my proper post. I saw no reason sufficient to induce me to refuse it.”
Now the same constitutional organ called him home to the US Supreme Court, but a different kind of duty led him to decline. How he longed to have a long talk with his father from the porches of Peacefield. The best technology available to him was a pen and paper. And he used it with fervor.
“How does it appear to you?” he continued about the Supreme Court post with unveiled emotion: “You welcome it as the means to procure my return, and because it would remove me from the tourbillon of politics. But yet you specially wish me to accept, because parties are splitting up, because one secretary is out and another in; because the governor and senate of Massachusetts are Republican; because all was uncertainty from Europe and a special session of Congress was expected.”
Something else crashed over John’s mind like ocean waves, growing taller each time the idea hit him. The more he thought about it, the less he wanted to be on the Supreme Court. He candidly confessed that he did not believe the appointment would protect him from political commotion. Instead his opinions might cause the very tidal wave his father thought he could avoid with a lifetime judicial appointment. John then made one of the most astonishing declarations for an American attorney. He admitted that he opposed the idea of common law.
