American Phoenix

by Jane Cook

  She could understand the source of his anxiety. He had marched with Napoleon across the very country where they were traveling. Baptiste was one of thousands of prisoners of war. Traveling toward Paris likely resurrected difficult memories. No matter. He needed to uphold his part of their bargain.

  “The performance of this agreement depended on his good behavior, and . . . if he was diligent and attentive, I should have no wish to part with him,” she emphasized.

  Louisa kept a watchful eye on Baptiste the rest of the day. He “was much more respectful; but there was something threatening in his look, that did not please me, but I was afraid to notice it.”

  Once again she must worry about the thief within.

  Months earlier in St. Petersburg, Louisa had fretted about another problem. After receiving several letters from John in the summer of 1814, she realized that leaving Russia had been good for him. His spirits were lighter. Each letter seemed happier than the one before. Was it the warmer weather? Was it because he was out of Russia? Or, dare she admit, was he happier living apart from her?

  Curiosity and insecurity got the best of her. She asked the question, framing it as a jest. He did not take her suggestion as a joke because he had also noticed that Louisa’s letters reflected a lighter spirit than their recent time together. He could hear the amusement in her voice when she wrote that Mr. Bailey, a top British diplomat, had asked to dance with her at the annual Peterhof soirée.

  “Mr. Bailey said he would astonish the world and show them that the English and Americans had entered into an alliance, by dancing a polonaise with me. We were followed by the emperor, who seemed diverted by it, and spoke to him when the dance ended.”

  Worse, perhaps the emperor, freshly returned from Paris, had noticed her again and tried to take advantage of John’s absence.

  “The excursions and entertainments will, I flatter myself, have a favorable affect on your health and spirits,” Adams responded in a letter to her. His tone was either sincere, sarcastic, or both.

  She confronted the conflict: “Really mon ami I think you cannot complain as you acknowledge that you received pleasure from the information that I was becoming more contented with my situation.”

  Calling their separation a cruel disappointment, she regretted suggesting that she was happier without him: “I should never even in jest had hinted that I could live happily without you. There are some wounds which are not easy to heal, and forgetfulness is not my best quality.”

  Though he had promised to return to her in September 1814, the British continued stalling instead of breaking off the negotiations as he had expected. Disappointed, Louisa understood the politics behind it. Her situation was a paradox, a Plato’s beard. She could best understand the reason for their separation by what didn’t exist—peace. As much as she longed for his return to St. Petersburg, as much as she yearned to embrace him, she hoped he would succeed at Ghent, both for his sake and America’s. She didn’t want the negotiations to fail. They needed peace, for without it, their beloved country, friends, and family would lose their freedom and way of life.

  “I am fully sensible of the difficulty of your situation and should most sincerely rejoice to hear that any hope of a settlement could be entertained,” she wrote.

  The irony was obvious. The sooner he returned to her in St. Petersburg, the more likely that failure marked the peace process, and the horrible war would continue. Mustering strength, she sought to encourage him. “But when events are totally out of our power, is it wise to suffer ourselves to be so much depressed? This is a lesson which you taught me when I was deeply suffering under the heavy loss I had sustained,” she wrote, recalling his role in helping her to accept baby Louisa’s death and overcome her depression.

  The strength of her soul now emerged, revealing a healed woman who was far less depressed and self-absorbed than the near-suicidal person of 1812 and 1813. Time, truth, and trust had brought healing to her. In time she was able to accept the truth that she was not responsible for her daughter’s death. John’s decision to ask for a recall and return to Boston allowed her to trust that someday soon she would be reunited with her boys.

  John’s departure from St. Petersburg in April 1814 gave her a new test, forcing her to stand alone and represent America without him. The responsibility of caring for Charles by herself drew her out of the final stage of depression. Her son depended on her alone, and she could not let him down. Now she must also be strong for John.

  “The situation of our country is dreadful, but we must hope that it will mend, and trust in that great power, to whom all is easy, and who could preserve us from the dangers which so heavily threaten,” she wrote.

  While Adams’s spirits were springlike in Ghent, he missed his wife. He longed to tell her about the details of the peace talks, to share his deepest fears with her. He needed her. Taking a risk that spies might read his correspondence, he made a decision to share with her as much as he could about the negotiations.

  Though he wanted to, he could not reveal the details of the British demands, such as their insistence on lowering the US-Canadian boundary line with Maine and Minnesota belonging to the British, creating a wide buffer zone for native tribes—such as the Missouri tribes—and prohibiting the US Navy from operating on the Great Lakes. Yet he could at least share with her the process and how he felt about it. He promised to write what he could about the negotiations but asked for her discretion—and pretense—if need be.

  “You will now, my dearest friend, receive in the most exclusive confidence whatever I shall write to you on the subject—say not a word of it to any human being until the result shall be publically known.”

  He could not afford for her to leak any word about the peace talks to any foreign diplomat or government official in Russia. She should not discuss his letters even with Mr. Harris, whom Adams had left as the American chargé d’affaires.

  Her husband, the man who had failed to trust her judgment and made the erroneous decision to leave their sons behind in Boston, now believed in her capabilities so much that he was willing to risk telling her secrets about the negotiations. He did so because he loved her, needed her support, and valued her opinions.

  Though his trust in her warmed her heart, the colder the weather grew, the more she longed for his presence too. She especially felt his absence when she was sick. Headaches were frequent. She remembered those moments when he would come and kiss her hand while she was ill. Now her palms were empty.

  “I most sincerely wish I could find an opportunity to go home,” she wrote, referring to America. If circumstances didn’t change soon, she was prepared to take matters into her own hands.

  Loneliness got the better of her in St. Petersburg, where she also lost her sister’s companionship and Martha’s service. Kitty and William had married on February 17, 1813. They, along with their infant daughter and Martha Godfrey, later left St. Petersburg and traveled to Western Europe with plans to return to America.

  Tired of waiting for John to return to her in St. Petersburg in December 1814, she offered another option: “My troubles never end until you return, and if it does not soon happen, I shall be tempted to decamp from here whether you like it or not.”

  After traveling a few weeks in the winter of 1815, Louisa concluded that spring would have been a better time to journey through war-torn Russia, Poland, and Prussia:

  “The season of the year at which I travelled; when earth was chained in her dazzling, brittle but solid fetters of ice, did not admit of flourishing description, of verdant fields, or paths through flowery glebes.”

  She could have waited until summer to make her journey. Being in exile with John had been hard enough for five years. Remaining in exile without him had been so unbearable that she risked the woes of winter to reach him.

  As she traveled toward Berlin in late February 1815, she often looked out the window of her carriage. In those moments when Charles and Madame Babet were asleep, she had time to think and
stare at the dull landscape. “Everything around us looked blank and dreary.” Instead of green fields and forests, she beheld “the fearful remnants of men’s fiery and vindictive passions; passively witnessing to tales of blood and woes.”

  Before her were the graphic consequences of war, which silenced the tongues of thousands of men. The people on the road rarely smiled. The dirt on their faces matched their forlorn emotions. Without saying a word, the men and women of Prussia bore the story of devastation and despair.

  At one stop she received an invitation to attend the theater. She would have gone if she “had not been unprotected by a gentleman.” She dared not take the risk to socialize at night or walk the streets with people desperate enough to steal her money.

  Frequent rain now often delayed her. At one town the cold rain became so strong that she had to wait until three in the afternoon before proceeding. She then persevered into the countryside, where they passed “houses half burnt, a very thin population; women unprotected, and that dreary look of forlorn desertion.”

  The sight of charred walls was common. Fire had destroyed many Prussian properties. Indeed, it was a very distant fire that suddenly changed the fate of the American peace prospects at Ghent—and her husband’s success—in the fall of 1814.

  53

  American Phoenix

  He seems to think himself a mere Phoenix.

  —JOHN WESLEY, 1775

  CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY TELLS THE STORY OF A BIRD WHO BURNS ON a funeral pyre ignited by the sun before rising again from its own ashes to live a new or resurrected life. The bird, which The Oxford English Dictionary describes as “resembling an eagle but with sumptuous red and gold plumage,” is known as a phoenix.

  When the Old Testament prophet Isaiah described the idea of rebirth, he also used the image of an eagle: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”

  In the early days of Christianity, Clemens Romanus, revered as Pope Clement I, is said to have used the story of the phoenix to help Romans understand and accept the resurrection of Christ. Centuries later, in 1674, English minister John Flavel had used the two images this way: “Faith is the phoenix grace, as Christ is the phoenix mercy.”

  Since his failure in the US Senate, Adams had needed a phoenix, a personal rebirth to lift him from the ash heap of failure and launch him to new heights of respect, wisdom, honor, and accomplishments. Succeeding in Russia was the beginning of that resurrection, while treating for peace at Ghent just might seal it.

  What he didn’t realize in the fall of 1814 was that his country had just experienced a death by fire that would force the American phoenix to rise again as an eagle soaring higher, more independent, and freer than ever before.

  The British commissioners were stalling at Ghent in hopes of receiving news of a victorious battle. To be sure, English newspapers reported that thousands of men had recently sailed for America with the intention to “humble the Yankees and reduce them immediately to submission.”

  John rightfully feared that terrible news would soon arrive. “It is impossible that the summer should pass over without bringing intelligence which will make our hearts ache; though I hope and trust that nothing will or can happen that will break the spirit of our nation,” he confided to Louisa in a letter.

  She was just as worried. Her thoughts immediately turned to their boys in Boston. “Your fears of bad news from America in the autumn fill me with alarm, and I open all your letters with trembling, lest I should find some horrid circumstance relating to our families or friends.”

  She, too, had read reports of British threats against US cities. For eighteen months British squadrons burned and terrorized the inhabitants of Chesapeake Bay towns in Maryland and Virginia. “You are hereby required and directed to destroy and lay waste such towns and districts upon the coast as you may find assailable,” Supreme Commander British Admiral Alexander Cochrane wrote his officers when he issued a blockade of the entire US coast in July 1814.

  “That proclamation of Cochrane’s is always present to my imagination and the consequences which may result from it,” Louisa wrote to John.

  What also worried both Adamses were the attitudes of their countrymen and women. Americans had yet to show the same fighting spirit that their fathers and mothers had demonstrated during the American Revolution. Even a victory, such as the US Army’s capture of Fort Erie in Canada in July 1814, revealed laziness and hesitance.

  “When our landsmen have struck one lucky blow, they seem to think they have conquered the world, and have nothing left to do but to slumber upon their laurels,” John complained in a letter to Louisa.

  Their replies on such topics depended on the speed of the postal service, which turned their letters around in about twenty-five days. Louisa responded to her husband’s concerns by hoping that a new leader would emerge: “Alas, there are a few Washingtons in the world.”

  Both knew that the political infighting between the Federalists and the Republicans had strangled the country. Some Federalists wanted New England to secede and become part of England again, sentiments British minister Augustus Foster and others like him fostered. One of the greatest threats to America’s success in the War of 1812 was the war within. Infighting between the political parties threatened to destroy America as much as the British army, so it sometimes seemed. Louisa took comfort when she heard that the war had one good effect: the parties were coming together.

  “There is a report in town, said to be very late from America, that the feds [Federalists] are all come round and are determined to support this [Madison’s] government. I hope this is true, [as] our own internal discord must do a more serious injury than a foreign war as it paralyzes every effort of the government,” Louisa astutely observed.

  Her patriotism grew with each newspaper account that she read of the US war. “I could almost wish I were a man in these times for I feel that sort of ardor and enthusiasm in the cause, which I think in a man would produce great things.”

  She looked to an eternal source for hope: “The melancholy situation of our country warrants almost any degree of apprehension, and we have no resources but the mercy of a divine Providence, which is ever ready to support us through great calamities, when our faith is sincere.”

  The bad news literally arrived in John’s bedchamber, when messenger and brother-in-law George Boyd burst through Adams’s Belgium hotel door early in the morning on October 7, 1814. Married to one of Louisa’s younger sisters, Boyd was fresh off the boat, having traveled as a government agent across the Atlantic to deliver the urgent—but now six-weeks-old—news to the US commissioners.

  Under the leadership of Admiral Cochrane, Admiral George Cockburn, and General Robert Ross, a royal fleet of more than fifty ships had arrived in waves in the Chesapeake Bay in July and August 1814. Though his spies told him that the British had no cavalry and could not attack without one, Madison worried that an invasion was imminent.

  What was mysterious, however, was the destination of the redcoats. Would the British launch their attack against Baltimore or Washington City? Boasting America’s third-largest population, with more than forty six thousand residents, Baltimore was the more lucrative take for its commercial value. In contrast Washington City had very few buildings. It was a very small town, characterized only by the President’s House, the US Capitol, a few taverns, and some townhomes. However, the classical Greek architecture of the two major public buildings symbolized a fledgling new republic.

  Secretary of War General Armstrong bet on Baltimore. With a small standing army, dependence on local militias, and a failure by Congress to authorize a draft of soldiers, Armstrong did not have the resources or federal authority to defend both cities. New England judges earlier rebuffed the federal government’s attempt to call up state militia from Massachusetts and Connecticut. Knowing the Federalist sentiment for secession, the governors of both
states refused to comply with the president’s wishes.

  On July 1, 1814, Madison told his cabinet that he was requesting the War Department to create a new military district of fifteen thousand men to defend Washington City. In a follow-up memo to Armstrong the next day, he wanted the militia “in the best readiness for actual service in case of emergency.” Though Madison had requested that the governors of nearby states Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania call up their militias, Armstrong waited weeks to notify the governors. The secretary of war also told a Washington City leader, who was worried about a British invasion of the capital city, that he doubted the British would come there. “No, no! Baltimore is the place, Sir; that is of so much more consequence.”

  By delaying the president’s orders, Armstrong defied the president’s orders.

  On that early morning of October 7, 1814, Boyd delivered the bad news to Adams. The British army and Marine Corps had burned Washington City, including the President’s House and the US Capitol.

  “The newspapers contain a great variety of details respecting the fall of Washington and the destruction of buildings and of property, public and private, effected by the enemy,” Adams gravely wrote to Louisa.

  In the years to come, more would be known as historians gathered information from eyewitnesses. Acquiring horses for the officers by stealing them from Maryland farmers, the British marched four thousand marines and soldiers toward Washington City. Admiral Cockburn convinced a wavering General Ross that they could and must invade Washington. Why make it this far without taking their capital? The British approached Bladensburg, Maryland, around noon on August 24, 1814. On the other side of the river was a similar-numbered US force of militia and regulars, far from the fifteen thousand the commander in chief had requested on July 1. President Madison and his cabinet attended the battle in hopes of cheering the men to victory. Madison became the first and only US president to witness a battle from the field.