by Jane Cook
“In this way we journeyed; the soldiers presenting their bayonets at my people with loud and brutal threats every half hour.”
For miles Louisa saw nothing but intoxicated men and women lining the road. All she could hear were loud chants of “Down with King Louis” and “Live Napoleon.”
“At twelve o’clock at night we reached the post house—General Michell spoke to the lady, and she refused to take me. At length he awakened her sympathy, and she consented, provided I would consent to stay in a dark room; have my people concealed; and my coach stowed away in some place where it could not be perceived.”
Louisa agreed to the conditions. The room was comfortable. Though a fire warmed them, they could hear drunken soldiers rambunctiously and noisily coming and going all night from the crowded house. While Charles fell asleep, her nurse had not recovered from the eventful day.
“Madame Babet really appeared to have lost her senses—She clasped her hands continually; while the tears rolled down her cheeks, crying out, that she was lost! for the Revolution was begun again, and this was only the beginning of its horrors.”
Louisa left the next morning, taking her time and remembering the Irish adage that the longest way round was the shortest way home. They arrived at Chatillon that night, where she and Dupin picked up on some interesting intelligence. From one person, Dupin learned that Louisa was the subject of a captivating rumor.
“He told me that in consequence of my being almost the only traveler on the road going towards Paris; that a whisper was abroad, that I was one of Napoleon’s sisters going to meet him.”
Dupin merely shrugged and smiled at the suggestion, leaving the truth a mystery. At this post they also received stern advice. “I had better not go on to Paris, as there were forty thousand men before the gates; and a battle was expected to take place.”
In her heart Louisa knew what she wanted to do: press forward.
“This news startled me very much, but on cool reflection, I thought it best to persevere, as I was traveling at great expense, and I was sure if any such danger existed Mr. Adams would have come to meet me, or by some means have conveyed intelligence to guide my course.”
After consulting with Dupin, she relaxed. He agreed with her. The best plan was to push toward Paris. After all, Louisa was now Napoleon’s sister.
Not long after Louisa heard of a pending battle at the gates of Paris, John went to the theater. When he came out, he saw a great bonfire burning in the Palais Royal garden. The columns were now covered with Napoleon’s proclamations to the French people and the army. Declaring that their complaints had reached him in exile, Napoleon was ready to answer their call for the government of their choice, the only legitimate one. He had crossed the sea to resume his rights, which he fervently believed were theirs.
“The crowd of people in the arches and gardens was considerable, and the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur’ frequent,” Adams noted. “But although the Palais Royal is not a quarter of a mile distant from the Tuileries, I did not know that Napoleon had actually arrived while I was at the theater.”
The next morning he received confirmation of the switch. Without a major battle at the gates of Paris, Napoleon had indeed returned—but quietly. The gate guards accompanied their emperor into the city.
“The front of their helmets and the clasps of their belts were still glowing with the arms of the Bourbons, the three flower de luces. There appeared to be much satisfaction among the soldiers.”
That night Adams attended the opera. The change was obvious there too. “The royal arms were removed from the curtain of the royal box, and the imperial eagle had taken their place.”
The cries were now ‘Vive l’Empereur.’”
John had never heard of such a peaceful coup, much less witnessed one.
Napoleon declared that he would arrive in Paris without firing a shot. He wanted his invasion to appear as a rightful return to power, not larceny.
With Bonaparte resting at the Tuileries, John was anxious more than ever to embrace his wife and son and receive instructions from President Madison.
Louisa and her entourage traveled to Meaux, where she once again heard about the atrocities of the Cossacks. Then they resumed their route.
“I was again on my way to Paris . . . when I observed a man on horse back, who appeared to be making prodigious efforts to overtake us.”
The man kept signaling them to stop. Louisa told the drivers to keep driving. “My courage was fast oozing out, when by some accident the postilions slackened their pace.”
The man came closer and closer to her carriage. Then he was alongside her. “He came up very politely, and informed me, that for the last half hour he had been apprehensive that the wheel of my carriage would come off, and that he had been fearful I should meet with a bad overset.”
They thanked him, and he rode off. Given all they had experienced, the incident was humorously anticlimactic.
“[We] arrived in perfect safety and without molestation at the gates of Paris; and descended at eleven o’clock at the Hotel du Nord Rue de Richelieu—Mr. Adams not returned from the theatre; but he soon came in, and I was once more happy to find myself under the protection of a husband.”
Though happy and joyous, the reserved Adams described their reunion with understated relief: “When I returned home I expected to have found my wife’s carriage in the yard, and was disappointed—but had scarcely got into my chamber when she arrived.”
With a long-awaited warm and rapturous embrace, the fourth act on their Shakespearean drama was finally over.
“[He] was perfectly astonished at my adventures; as everything in Paris was quiet, and it had never occurred to him that it could have been otherwise in any other part of the country.”
As sweet as their reunion was, the best—the encore—was yet to come.
Epilogue
THE BIRCHES OF BOSTON
THE HOUSE OF COMMONS WAS QUITE FULL THAT SUMMER DAY OF June 28, 1815. Whatever the mild temperatures outside, the heat inside was hot. The issue was something that would never be debated by the US House of Representatives. The question before the House of Commons was whether to give a duke six thousand pounds of sterling for his marriage to a princess. From their stiff-backed benches and red-covered cushions, the white-wigged lords debated the pros and cons of the matter.
Unnoticed were the visitors in the gallery above them, which included a man and a fine, tall youth. With the sun reflecting on their faces through Westminster’s stained-glass Gothic windows, they sat and watched the debate. The man joyfully pointed out the finer points of rhetoric used by the lords to argue their position. To this pair, the outcome made absolutely no difference. The process—and how different it was from America—was far more important. Greater than that, they were happy just to be together.
John Quincy Adams took his son George with him to the chamber that day. The moment was an education for both. For Adams, watching the debate gave him further insight into the ways of the British Parliament, which would prove invaluable to him as the newly appointed minister from the United States to Great Britain. For George, it was finally a chance to do something he had waited six years to experience: spend one-on-one time with his father.
“If we go to England, I beg you to send my sons George and John there to me,” Adams had written his mother on December 24, 1814, no sooner had the ink dried on his Treaty of Ghent signature.
Within ten days of Louisa’s arrival in Paris, he received official word of his new assignment. “Mr. Gallatin is appointed minister to France, Mr. Bayard to Russia, and myself to England.”
Madison had appointed him to the same position his father had held years earlier. His title was envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary of the United States of America at the Court of His Royal Highness the Prince Regent of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Adams was pleased with the honorable appointment because it gave him an opportunity to fix many of the unresolved trade problems
left over from the Treaty of Ghent negotiations.
In the days after her arrival, Louisa and John enjoyed Paris like a pair of newlyweds. They spent their time taking in the sights and accepting special invitations, such as the annual demonstration of the French Academy and mass at Tuileries chapel.
They went to the theater and watched a performance of Hector. Although they didn’t see him, Napoleon was in the house that night. The actors paid him homage by leading the audience in cheers of “Vive l’Empereur.”
Adams also visited the new minister of foreign affairs for France. He was not surprised that Napoleon appointed Monsieur de Caulaincourt to the position. The pair reminisced like old friends, with Caulaincourt giving John credit for his great triumph in Russia—which in part had been the French ambassador’s downfall.
“The emperor of Russia did manifest here at Paris some interest in your favor,” Caulaincourt communicated to his American friend of the czar’s influence.
That same day Adams saw a crowd gathered under Napoleon’s apartment at the palace. While talking with his officers, the French emperor occasionally appeared at the window. That was John’s only glimpse of the infamous dictator. “I saw him, but not distinctly enough to recognize his features.”
Caulaincourt also provided John with a passport so he could leave France for England when the time came. John, Louisa, and Charles traveled to London in mid-May 1815. They took up residence in a country house outside the city.
Within a month, Napoleon’s short return to power, a mere one hundred days, ended. At the Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, Britain’s Duke of Wellington deftly defeated Napoleon and his troops by cutting off Bonaparte’s famed Imperial Guard. This time the French ruler’s exile was permanent. He was sent to an island much farther away than Elba—St. Helena, off the coast of Africa. The admiral responsible for burning the White House, George Cockburn, oversaw napoleon's exile.
George and John arrived in London after traveling on a ship from Boston. Adams delighted in overseeing their education, which now included visits to sessions of Parliament and Greek texts taken from his own library.
“The forty-eighth year of my life has closed, and I this day enter upon the forty-ninth,” Adams added to his diary on July 11, 1815. “It has in relation to public affairs been the most important, and in my private and domestic relations one of the most happy years.”
That summer they enjoyed their garden, perhaps ripe with cucumbers and other vegetables. With his brothers and father, Charles likely planted the cucumber seeds that he had saved at his father’s suggestion. They were a reunited family. In August they moved to Boston House on Boston Lane in Ealing, a London suburb. The boys attended a nearby boarding and day school. Louisa finally was able to give George and John a thousand kisses and become their mother once again.
Public service was more important to John Quincy Adams than anything else. His purpose in life, his very existence, was to be useful to mankind. His success in Russia and his role in securing the Treaty of Ghent qualified him to become secretary of state in the administration of President James Monroe. He was the mind behind the Monroe Doctrine, which boldly proclaimed the end of Europe’s claims to the New World. His weights-and-measurements obsession that had started in Russia became a published book, turning his calculations into US trade standards.
In 1825 he became president of the United States, which made his father proud. Though Abigail died in 1818, his father lived to see his son reach the pinnacle of his career by serving as head of his country. The senior Adams died the following year on July 4, 1826, fifty years after issuing the Declaration of Independence as a member of the Continental Congress.
Among John’s finest presidential accomplishments were trade treaties. He was responsible for adding more commerce treaties to the United States than any other president prior to the Civil War. His trade treaties included those with Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the Hanseatic cities, Austria, and Brazil, among other countries.
Adams is the only US president who resurrected a dead political career by way of a diplomatic post to Russia. John’s honorable exile, as Ezekiel Bacon termed it, to pre-Soviet Russia is important because his story was a microcosm of the story of the United States at the time. What he needed most in his life were honor, dignity, and the respect of his peers. What the United States needed most in the years leading to the War of 1812 were honor and acceptance by other nations. Everything about America—its government, economy, and people—needed the respect and recognition of other nations. In order to survive as a country, America needed trade to thrive around the world. The United States needed to prove that it was no longer a child of England but a bona fide adult—a separate, independent, and sovereign nation with excellent exports.
The sacrifices John made and his willingness to be a loud advocate for US free trade earned him the honor and respect he so badly needed and deserved back home. His influence—and Louisa’s—with Alexander elevated America’s status on the world stage, forcing the British to the peace table. Had John accepted Madison’s offer to the US Supreme Court, he likely would not have negotiated the Treaty of Ghent, which once and for all secured US sovereignty. The War of 1812 was the second war of American independence with Britain—and thanks to John Quincy and Louisa Adams and others—it was also the final one. The war resurrected the United States from the ashes and turned the Adamses into American phoenixes.
Years later in 1836, Louisa wrote a narrative about her journey to Paris from St. Petersburg. The sacrifices she made for her husband, children, and the United States could never be repaid. Though she kept a diary in St. Petersburg, she regretted not writing in a daily journal while on her journey. She decided there might be some value, particularly to the cause of the female sex, in writing a narrative of her travels through post-Napoleonic Europe in 1815.
“When I retrace my movements through this long, and really arduous journey, I cannot humble myself too much in thankful adoration to the Providence which shielded me from all dangers, and inspired me with that unswerving faith which teaches to seek for protection from above.”
Louisa noted that she visited Madame Babet two months after their arrival in Paris. Seized with a brain fever, perhaps a form of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a depressed Madame Babet had not recovered from their perilous travels. Louisa saw the contrast between her and Babet immediately and gave thanks to God for bringing her through her exile and harrowing journey: “I was carried through my trials by the mercy of a protecting Providence; and by the conviction that weakness of either body, or mind, would only render my difficulties greater and make matters worse.”
Louisa’s desire to champion female virtues and capabilities came alive once again as she wrote her narrative: “A moral is contained in this lesson—If my sex act with persevering discretion, they may from their very weakness be secured from danger, and find friends and protectors: and that under all circumstances, we must never desert ourselves.”
Louisa did not think of herself as young or beautiful. She believed that character was more important than both. As a mother she had been willing to make any sacrifice to ensure her son’s safe arrival in Paris and to be reunited with John and their oldest sons in England: “I had others under my protection to whom the example of fortitude was essential; and above all the object which drew me on, was the re-union with my beloved husband, and alas, with my now departed children.”
Both George and John had died by 1836, the year she chronicled her journey from St. Petersburg to Paris. John Adams II became the first son of a president to marry in a ceremony in the White House. He married his cousin Mary Catherine Hellen, Nancy’s daughter, on February 25, 1828. Mary had been previously engaged to George, whose delay of their marriage led her to break off their engagement. By this time George had graduated from Harvard, passed the bar, practiced law, and served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Despite George’s accomplishments, Mary married John instead. Fourteen month
s later, in 1829, George died in a fall from the steamship Benjamin Franklin in Long Island Sound. Regardless of whether the incident was an accident or intentional, his death at age twenty-seven was tragic and heartbreaking, especially to his parents and family. Within two weeks they learned of his illegitimate child by a chambermaid who worked for a longtime friend of the family’s.
Expelled from Harvard, John made a home for Mary and their family in Washington. He studied law under his father and served as his private secretary during the first two years of John Quincy’s presidency. Afterward he earned a living operating the flour mill owned by his father on Rock Creek in Washington. He struggled with alcoholism and died in 1834 at age thirty-one.
As Louisa reflected on her life when she concluded her narrative, she chose to focus on the blessings, not the immense hurts. “Years have rolled on: but memory recurs with delight to the past!”
Topping the list of those blessings were grandchildren. Mary gave birth to Mary Louisa Adams in December 1828. Lacking a midwife, Louisa helped her daughter-in-law to deliver another daughter in 1830. Mary named her Georgiana Frances after her two uncles. Louisa doted on her two beautiful granddaughters as well as the seven grandchildren that came through Charles.
Unlike his brothers, Charles lived a long life. He married Abigail Brown Brooks in 1829. They honored his parents with the names of their first two children. Abigail gave birth first to a daughter, Louisa Catherine, in 1831, and then a son, John Quincy, in 1833. She also bore Charles, Henry, Arthur, Mary, and Brooks.
Inheriting his father’s love of the written word and public service, Charles served three years in the Massachusetts House and two years in the Massachusetts Senate. He moved to the national stage in 1858, where he was a Republican member in the US House of Representatives for three years. In 1861 President Lincoln appointed him as minister to England, the post held by his father and grandfather. Charles served as America’s top representative in London until 1868.
