American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  “Today the impression [of Napoleon’s character] was of one sort, and the measure corresponded with it; tomorrow the impression would be of an opposite nature and the measure would follow that too,” Romanzoff told Adams.

  Caprice crowned Napoleon’s character. He was more chameleon than king. “To make them consistent was not in the nature of the man.”

  Napoleon failed to see that commerce concerned all humanity. Trade didn’t affect just the merchant class; it affected everyone regardless of rank and position. He was a crafty cupid, romantically luring his allies into a setup or trap.

  “But in truth, commerce is the concern of us all,” the count continued. “It is the very chain of human association.”

  Exports and imports were the foundation of peaceful relationships between nations. Gone was the isolation of previous centuries. The modern world of 1812 depended on free trade.

  “The Emperor Napoleon will never see it in this light, and so his commercial regulations and promises will never be systematic or consistent—you can place little dependence upon them,” Romanzoff huffed.

  John gave his opinion on France’s supposed better understanding with the United States. Napoleon was merely taking advantage of the situation. Officially reaching out to America was a pretense as long as French privateers continued to arrest American ships.

  “Tranquility is not in his [Napoleon’s] nature,” the count continued. “I can tell you, in confidence, that he once told me so himself.”

  Romanzoff then relayed a conversation he once had with Napoleon: “I was speaking to him [Napoleon] about Spain and Portugal, and he said to me, ‘I must always be going. After the Peace of Tilsit, where could I go but to Spain? I went to Spain because I could not go anywhere else.”

  Bonaparte’s motives were based on nothing more than wanderlust—the idea that he had to be going somewhere, he had to be conquering some place.

  “And now as perhaps there [Spain], he is not quite satisfied with his going, he may intend to turn against us, from the same want of any other place to go.”

  While he favored France over England in Russia’s foreign policy, the count distrusted Bonaparte. Like the comet overhead, Napoleon followed his own eccentric whimsical orbit. The farther he moved from his power source, his sun—Paris—the wider his trail of destruction. Both John and Romanzoff knew that Napoleon’s erratic star longed to move over Russia’s borders.

  45

  Interference

  “MY LOVELY BEAUTIFUL BABE IS VERY, VERY ILL,” LOUISA WROTE IN mid-February 1812.

  While war threatened Europe and the United States, John and Louisa faced a more intimate battle at home. Their six-month-old was suffering from something mysterious.

  “Ah! The fountain of her precious existence is sapped by these constant shocks, and I look at her with fear and trembling.”

  The convulsions were perhaps febrile seizures or epilepsy. Baby Louisa’s condition was evident to all who saw her tiny arms and legs tremble. The episodes came on suddenly and violently.

  “Everyone who sees her stops her in the street, and they all say that she is born for heaven.”

  Imagine hearing such dire predictions from total strangers. What audacity! What insensitivity! And what good did these statements do? Did they give Louisa hope? Hardly. They incited fear, which was already very real.

  The comet, the talk of war between France and Russia, the possibility of war between England and America, the loss of dear family members back home, and now the sight of her daughter’s tiny body suffering from shocks—all were too much.

  “The Russians are very superstitious, and I fear that with the impressions already made upon my weak mind during my four years residence in Berlin, I am too ready to fall into this error,” she worried.

  She had listened to the gypsy-like predictions of the Prussians. Would she now do the same of the Russian ladies?

  “Toward evening my babe was better—I am not naturally melancholy but my trials are heavy.”

  Russia was always cold in winter, but this year it was worse, likely a result of the comet’s atmospheric interference. The freeze exceeded all calculations, dipping as low as forty degrees below zero. No matter. Arctic Alexander was as comfortable as a polar bear.

  “The emperor said he had not seen me for a long time and he supposed we walked at different hours,” Adams wrote on March 3 of his recent walk on the quay where he met the czar. “I told him that I had adopted the practice of walking in the morning early, and sometimes saw His Majesty’s window open in very cold weather.”

  Alexander replied that he “always made it a rule to rise in the morning and dress with his window open.”

  John asked if he did “not suffer from the cold.”

  “On the contrary,” he said, explaining that the practice adjusted or “inured him better than anything to the cold.”

  Alexander recalled the heating habits of his grandmother Empress Catherine. She shut up the palace, which made the apartments so warm that they might as well have been growing flowers. Alexander did not find the confinement cozy. Just as a sea lion dives into arctic water with abandon, so the czar preferred the refreshing freezing chill on his bare skin in the morning, which made the cold more bearable when he took to the outdoors. So he thought.

  He then confessed another intimate personal habit to Adams. Years earlier the emperor had discovered he could not do as other men did in St. Petersburg. He could not wear flannel to keep warm. His skin was too sensitive.

  “He had then worn a flannel waistcoat, but he found it irritated and fretted the skin so much, and made him so delicate, that he could not endure it.”

  The royal doctor offered a remedy. Go without flannel. “A physician therefore advised him to leave it off, and told him that either he would die under the operation of the change, or would have his health much better.”

  The emperor joked that he left off the flannel, did not die from the cold, and his skin felt much better—no more blotchy red patches, hives, or itching.

  “You are not of my opinion about flannel?” Alexander teased John.

  No matter how harsh Russian or Boston winters, Adams could not do as the emperor did. He could not get dressed with the windows wide open, and he could not go outside without wearing his flannel vest, especially when taking a walk.

  “I had so long been in the custom of wearing it in winter that I believed if I should leave it off, I should die under the operation,” John joked.

  “But there are now many physicians here who think flannel is a bad thing for wear,” Alexander replied with a smile.

  Two weeks later, on March 19, 1812, the pair met again on a walk. This time Alexander turned their usual banter about the cold into a more significant revelation. He had recently seen an American businessman at the weekly review of Russian troops and wondered why the man would have come out to watch drills under such extreme weather conditions. Though the czar usually canceled the weekly troop review when the temperature dipped below freezing, times had changed. The troops marched under extreme cold conditions, and the US businessman had attended despite the frozen temperature.

  Knowing the American in question, John immediately tried to allay the emperor’s fears of spying. The man was a friend of one of the officers and nothing more. Alexander paused ominously.

  “And so it is,” revealed His Majesty, “after all, that war is coming, which I have done so much to avoid—everything. I have done everything to prevent the struggle, but thus it ends.”

  “But are all hopes vanished of still preserving the peace?” Adams asked.

  “At all events we shall not begin the war; my will is yet to prevent it; but we expect to be attacked.”

  “Then as Your Majesty has determined not to commence, I would fain hope it may still pass over without a war.”

  “I wish it may. But all indications are war,” he said.

  As many as eight regiments had already marched from St. Petersburg to the Polish border,
with others following two or three times a week. Adams appreciated the czar’s candor. In that moment Alexander confided in him as if he were a close friend or a member of his cabinet.

  Three weeks later, on April 9, John again encountered Alexander. “In my walk before dinner I met the emperor, who spoke to me of nothing but the weather—said we should have a very late spring.”

  Snow lingered in St. Petersburg, sprinkling spring with a frosty dust, another atmospheric interference by the comet. Alexander worried that natural disasters would follow. “That the floods would be extraordinarily high when the rivers would break up, the late snows having been so considerable. It had been snowing all morning,” John recorded.

  Unlike their recent exchanges, John noticed a change in the czar’s ruddy face that April day. Gone were humor and candor. Replacing them were brevity and solemnity.

  “The emperor is to leave his capital in two days to join his army. His manner today was graver and less cheerful than I have usually seen him.”

  Adams picked up his pen many times as April ended and May began in 1812. The Neva River was now open, which enabled him to again send letters by boat. Pressing on his mind were two matters: his responsibility to update his government and his urgent need to write his mother about his plans for his oldest boys.

  “Two days before His Majesty’s departure, Count Romanzoff sent me a note requesting me to call upon him the next morning, which I accordingly did,” he explained to Secretary of State Monroe in a letter dated April 28.

  Romanzoff confirmed Alexander’s departure to review the troops. The count was also going to the frontier. Some of the upcoming discussions at the emperor’s headquarters would involve America.

  “What was the precise state of the relations between the United States and France or England or both?” an urgent Romanzoff asked, adding that John should reveal only information that he had officially received from his government. The Russians had heard rumors of a treaty between the United States and France.

  Adams explained that no definitive arrangement had been agreed to with France. As far as England was concerned, Mr. Foster was in negotiations with Secretary Monroe.

  “I was perfectly sure it [a treaty] could not [happen], unless the revocation of the British Orders in Council should be one of its explicit conditions. If Mr. Foster is authorized to stipulate for the revocation of the orders, a treaty is possible,” John doubtfully explained.

  With a right to protect its commercial interests, the United States deserved free trade and actual acceptance as a sovereign nation.

  “And unless restored by the revocation of those Orders in Council I had no doubt that the United States would vindicate it by war. But I did not anticipate a declaration of war by the United States at present.”

  The Senate had begun preparations, passing a bill to raise twenty-five thousand men, though the enlistments were voluntary and not enforceable. John hoped that Britain’s prince regent would bring fresh perspective and perhaps some wisdom to the situation. After all, England and the rest of Europe were experiencing a famine. The United States was a great source of grain. The emerging power source was the prime minister. As long as one man lorded over the rest in England, John doubted the Orders in Council would be revoked, no matter how many Britons were starving.

  “I thought their existence now depended solely on that of Mr. Perceval, as prime minister of England.”

  “Did I think Mr. Perceval would remain prime minister?”

  “I believed he would.”

  “But as it is the nature of the serpent to sting, it is the duty of man to bruise his head for self protection,” he wrote his mother not long after relaying his conversation with Romanzoff in a letter to Monroe.

  With war looming, he needed to revoke the request he made of her: “In that case we shall have no access to or from the Baltic the present year, and I must at all events be disappointed in the wish of having my sons come to me.”

  After learning that Madison wanted him to stay in St. Petersburg, John had devised another plan. Because American ships so freely entered the Baltic the previous summer, his sons could travel to Russia in safety. Perhaps reunion was meant to happen in St. Petersburg. The politics of the pending wars now dashed his hopes.

  “I expressly requested in my former letters to you and to Mr. Gray that they [George and John] might not be sent, if we should have war with England.”

  The political drama was drawing toward its catastrophe. Under the circumstances, he could not possibly subject his sons to the terror of sailing through Europe on an American ship with a world at war. He didn’t need a sailor’s spy glass to study the horizon. John was now stuck in St. Petersburg and his sons stuck in Boston.

  “But as far as I can make up my mind, I am satisfied that my duties both to my country and to my family beckon me homeward.”

  How he longed to take over his sons’ education! He wanted his parents to meet their granddaughter and see how much Charles had grown. Baby Louisa was his most “precious engagement.” Nonetheless, from going home to bringing his sons to Russia, the prospect of war interfered with all his plans, hopes, and dreams.

  46

  Tomorrow

  JOHN VISITED COUNT LAURISTON ON JUNE 19. THE TWO HAD BANTERED several times the past few months. With each new conversation, Lauriston increasingly carped. Why wouldn’t Alexander negotiate? What was the reason for war?

  On this occasion, Adams found Lauriston as he had never seen him: physically unwell. His headaches were the size of Russia. Lauriston complained of both tremors in his head and the diplomatic dueling that precedes war.

  He was “soured and exasperated, principally by the refusal to allow him passports to go to Vilna.”

  Vilna was one of many ancient names for an East Prussian city, which is present-day Vilnius, Lithuania. The Russian government continued to deny the French ambassador’s request to leave Russia. Back then a passport was required to leave a country, a leftover practice from the French Revolution.

  John discovered even more interesting news from Lauriston. The French government had also denied Prince Kurakin, the Russian ambassador to France, a passport to leave Paris. Though the prince was highly esteemed by many, politics was behind the pretense. Adams fished for more news.

  “I asked him where Emperor Napoleon was.”

  Lauriston did not know.

  “Perhaps at Warsaw. He heard the Russians had concentrated their forces [there], because they said the Emperor Napoleon always attacks the center.”

  Lauriston then let his vehemence flow: “They think because he has done so before, he will do so again.” He chastised the Russians for thinking Napoleon would follow previous strategies: “But with such a man as that, they will find their calculations fail them. He will do something that they do not expect. He does not copy himself nor any other. He does something new.”

  All Adams could do was let Lauriston vent. Later he wrote his own assessment: “The facts show at once the extreme jealousy, suspicion, and distrust existing between the parties, and the reluctance they have to begin the war, with the anxiety on each side to throw the first act of aggression upon the other one.”

  During this time John did what he often did in the summer. He took advantage of the long hours of sunlight to read. He opened a collection of sermons by an English preacher. One on the topic of anxiety caught his attention.

  “My own disposition has in it too much anxiety,” he reflected. “And the experience of life has a great tendency to increase that propensity.”

  The sermon addressed the scriptural concept of “take no thought for tomorrow” and “do not worry about what he shall eat or drink.” These were tough principles for Adams.

  “A father of a family in this world must take thought of tomorrow—not for what he himself shall eat or drink, or wherewithal he shall be clothed, but for his wife and children.” Since becoming a husband and father, he had encountered “perpetual temptations and stimulations to waste
the means of provision bestowed upon me by the goodness of that Heavenly Father, who feeds the fowls of the air and who clothes the lilies of the field.”

  Focusing on the future—tomorrow—drove him to provide for his family. His fear of poverty outweighed his lust for lavishness. Just as Atlas held the world on his back, so Adams bore the responsibility to care for his family’s temporal needs. No matter how much he worried, life was beyond the power of his pen and purse.

  Never before were so many circumstances beyond his control at once, not at least since he had formed a family of his own. He understood what his mother and father had experienced during the American Revolution when chaos reigned. They couldn’t stop King George III from sending troops to Boston any more than John Quincy could stop Napoleon from threatening Russia or convince Britain's prime minister to revoke the Orders in Council.

  Most intimately of all, he couldn’t stop his daughter’s convulsions or his wife’s sobbing or find a way to return to America. He was now living in a so-called exile that was no longer practical or productive. The feeling of a wasted life glared brighter than the comet’s tail overhead. He felt more useless than ever.

  “What with all the thought that I do bestow, and all the precautions that I can take . . . frequent untoward events and unforeseen accidents disconcert all my prudence, and require new sacrifices of feeling, of pleasure, and even of indulgence, to [the] thought of tomorrow.”

  The sermon gnawed on his conscience and tugged on his sense of spiritual truth. He concluded that this passage did not suggest that man should abandon his responsibility to himself or his family. Quite the contrary. Instead these verses warned humans against excessive worry and promoted trust in Providence. Faith was all he had.