John Quincy Adams (24 page)

John Quincy and Louisa Adams were enjoying life in Russia too much to leave, and he still hated the thought of devoting his entire life to the law. As he told his brother Thomas, “I am conscious of too little law even for practice at the bar, still less should I feel myself qualified for the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.”

After John Quincy turned down the Supreme Court nomination, two of his law students decided to return home to America, freeing the Adamses of two responsibilities. On July 11, John Quincy celebrated his forty-fourth birthday; two weeks later, he and Louisa celebrated their fourteenth wedding anniversary; and two weeks after that, on August 11, Louisa gave birth to a baby girl.

“My child!” Louisa cried joyfully “A daughter! The first I was ever blessed with. . . . My sister went and announced her birth to her father and he soon came in to bless and kiss the babe.”
²

The birth of a girl enthralled John Quincy as much as it did Louisa. “I think this will convince you,” he wrote playfully to his mother, “that the climate of St. Petersburg is
not
too cold to produce an American.”

In an Anglican service on September 11, “my little babe was christened,” Louisa wrote, “and she was named after
me
by her father's special desire contrary to my wish.” Although the czar offered to be the little girl's godfather, John Quincy declined discreetly for a myriad of religious, political, and logistical reasons.

In the ecstasy of watching her baby grow, Louisa wrote, “O she grows lovely. Such a pair of eyes!! I fear I love her too well.”
³

The renewed joys of fatherhood combined with watching the mysterious mother-daughter bond to make John Quincy long for his sons. “My dear boys are never out of my thoughts,” he wrote to his brother Thomas. “Your account of George's rapid improvement in learning to read was a banquet to my soul. There are so many things that I want them to learn that I can scarcely wait with proper patience for the time when they ought to be taught them.”
⁴

The birth of his daughter seemed to him “the proper time” to change the tone of his daily letters to his children. “I want to write to my son George upon subjects of serious import,” he said, “but I . . . find my ideas so undigested and confused.” His heart wanted to tell his eleven-year-old that he loved him, but his Puritan mind could only express that love as his father had—with guidance: “I advise you, my son, in whatever you read and most of all in reading the Bible to remember that it is for the purpose of making you wiser and more virtuous.”

Writing to his son made John Quincy regret having rejected the Supreme Court appointment. His rash decision would mean remaining in Europe, apart from his boys, indefinitely. He wrote to his parents declaring, “I can no longer reconcile either to my feelings or to my sense of duty their absence from me. I must go to them or they must come to me.”
⁶

In the spring of 1811, Secretary of State Robert Smith resigned. From the first, he had proved himself incompetent and all too cozy with the British ambassador, who promised an end to the British blockade of American ports if President James Madison ended the embargo on British trade. After Madison responded accordingly, the British government repudiated their minister and recalled him from the United States, leaving an embarrassed President puzzling whether to reimpose the embargo and risk plunging the nation into another recession.

President Madison dismissed Smith and appointed James Monroe secretary of state. Experienced in foreign affairs, Monroe had represented the nation in both Britain and France and, next to John Quincy, was the nation's foremost European affairs expert. The appointment, however, outraged New England's Federalists, who accused Madison of perpetuating the “Virginia dynasty” by giving Monroe an office that had become the stepladder to the presidency. Federalist newspapers called Madison and Monroe James I and James II. The British were even less pleased. Monroe was as outspoken a Francophile as his mentor Jefferson, and the British responded to his appointment by attacking an American ship within sight of New York and impressing a seaman. Under orders to protect American ships, the frigate
President
countered by attacking the British ship
Little Belt,
killing nine and wounding twenty-three. When the new British minister demanded an explanation, Monroe replied angrily that American ships had as much right to
recover
impressed seamen as British ships had to
impress them in the first place. He then renewed American demands that Britain cease depredations on American shipping and respect the rights of neutral ships carrying noncontraband.

When the British refused, Congress declared British impressment and ship seizures an affront to the nation's rights and honor. On April 1, 1812, Madison went to Congress and requested a sixty-day reinstatement of the embargo on British trade; ten days later, Congress authorized him to prepare for war and call up 100,000 militiamen for six months' service.

War fever was infecting Europe as well. After Russia refused to cease trading with Britain, Napoléon ordered French troops to the Russian border. Fearful of an imminent invasion, foreign diplomats sent their wives and daughters home from St. Petersburg, leaving Louisa Adams and her sister Kitty as the only foreign ladies in the diplomatic corps—and Kitty as the only target for the czar's amorous glances. In mid-January 1812, however, the Adamses—and the czar—noticed a decided change in Kitty's demeanor. She was pregnant—not by the czar, but by John Quincy's nephew Billy Smith, Nabby's son. John Quincy was irate, and after he had a “very solemn conversation” with his nephew, Smith married Kitty Johnson in a private ceremony at the Adams house in early February.

Tragedy marred their marriage from the start, however, and seemed to envelop the rest of the family. Kitty's baby was stillborn. Then the two newlyweds learned that Billy's mother, John Quincy's older sister Nabby, was dying from cancer, and as Billy and Kitty prepared to leave for America, the Adamses' one-year-old, Louisa Catherine, came down with dysentery. A common disease in St. Petersburg, it gripped the baby in convulsions, fever, and dehydration for two months—then claimed her life.

“At twenty-five minutes past one this morning,” John Quincy sobbed over his diary on September 15, “expired my daughter Louisa Catherine, as lovely an infant as ever breathed the air of heaven.”
⁷
Louisa was out of the room when the baby died, but having nursed her daughter for nearly two months, she had spent her last emotions and, according to John Quincy, “received the shock with fortitude and resignation.” Two days later, he and his nephew accompanied the baby's diminutive coffin to the
graveyard of the Anglican church, where John Quincy “saw her deposited in her last earthly mansion.” Louisa had caught a bad cold and was too sick to accompany her husband, who returned home in a state of near collapse. He tried to make sense of his loss, to explain the inexplicable:

By spring of 1812, the American embargo had combined with Napoléon's embargo to cripple British foreign trade and domestic industrial production. Factories and mills shut down, unemployment rose, and food prices soared. British exports dropped by one-third, and employers and workers united in demanding that Parliament restore good relations with the United States by ending depredations against American ships. On June 23, Parliament agreed. The Americans had at last won their long-running conflict with Britain's parliament.

But the victory came too late.

It took a month or more for messages to cross the Atlantic, and unaware of Parliament's decision, President Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain, citing impressment, the blockade of American ports, seizure of American ships, and incitement of Indians on the frontier as his reasons. On June 4, after three days of debate, the House agreed; the Senate followed suit two weeks later. Not knowing that the British had sued for peace, American troops charged into Canada along three fronts in northern New York: at the Saint Lawrence River, at Niagara in western New York, and farther west at the Detroit River.

Just as American troops were invading Canada, war erupted in Europe when Napoléon ordered his 450,000-man Grande Armée into Russia. With Britain's fleet in control of the Baltic Sea, Russian forces blocked the paths to St. Petersburg, funneling French troops westward onto the Russian steppes. Within weeks, the French had overrun Minsk and reached Smolensk—almost without firing a shot. After a fierce battle at Borodino, Russian troops retreated to Moscow, and after the civilian population had fled, the soldiers set the city afire, leaving nothing but smoldering ashes for the French army to plunder when it marched in on September 14.

Only an occasional echo of battlefield explosions reached St. Petersburg, but the war nonetheless brought diplomatic activity to a halt and left John Quincy with almost nothing to do. Even the czar had left—to be with his generals at the front. John Quincy managed to score a last-minute diplomatic triumph, however, by coaxing the czar to give America's Robert Fulton “the privilege for the term of fifteen years” to build and sail steamboats between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt and along navigable Russian rivers whenever the war permitted.
⁹

Without food or other resources in Moscow for the approaching winter, the French had to retreat. On October 19, however, swarms of mounted Cossacks thwarted the French about-face with fierce hit-and-run attacks. Darting in and out of snow gusts like ghosts, the Cossacks slaughtered French troops at will and left every farm and village along the way in ashes, without a grain of wheat, stick of wood, or shred of canvas to nourish, warm, or shelter a Frenchman. The “scorched earth” strategy left the French nothing to harvest but cold, hunger, and death. With surviving French troops in full flight, Napoléon abandoned them on December 3 and fled to Paris. Only about 20,000 of his half million troops survived their long retreat. John Quincy described the disaster to his mother:

The slaughter of the French army convinced John Quincy more than ever of the wisdom of America's policy “not to involve ourselves in the inextricable labyrinth of European politics and revolutions. The final issue . . . is not yet completely ascertained, but there is no longer a doubt that it must be disastrous in the highest degree to France.”
¹¹

Although they lacked the magnitude of the French invasion of Russia, American incursions into Canada in 1812 proved just as futile. In the West, the British forced 2,200 American troops to surrender without firing a shot in Detroit, ceding control of Lake Erie and the entire Michigan Territory to the British. To the east, some six hundred American troops in western New York crossed into Canada and seized the heights above the Niagara River, only to face a devastating counterattack by 1,000 crack British troops, who forced the American commander to send for help. New York militiamen, however, refused to cross into Canada, saying their terms of service required them to defend only New York State and no other states or foreign territories. As the British savaged the little American legion, survivors fled back into New York.

Farther to the east, just north of Lake Champlain, the largest of the three American forces faced similar humiliation when another group of New York militiamen refused to cross into foreign territory to the north.