WHILE THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT POSTED HANDBILLS ASSURING St. Petersburg residents that they were safe from invasion, the loss of Moscow was too serious to ignore. Rest would not come until the enemy within became the enemy expelled.
“About noon this day a report of cannon fire from the fortress announced that important and pleasing intelligence from the armies had been received,” Adams recorded on October 27.
Mr. Harris discovered the reason for the victorious salutes and hurried over to the Adams residence to tell his boss the good news. Moscow was back in Russian hands. A corps under the leadership of General Wintzingerode retook the city, though the French captured Wintzingerode. At noon the palace summoned John, the other diplomats, and the Russian nobility to a Te Deum celebration. That night residents lit lanterns on their doorsteps, illuminating the city in celebration. The Moscow victory was sweeter than any French wine but with a far more satisfying aftertaste. Hope for ultimate victory lingered.
“The passions of almost all the politicians whom I now see and hear are concentrated upon the head of one man. It seems almost universally to be considered that the destinies of mankind hang upon his life alone,” John wrote after dining at the home of Mr. Krehmer, one of his few friends left in town. Everywhere Adams went, he heard about the desire to kill Napoleon. Everyone had an opinion.
“I know not how it has been with former conquerors during their lives, but I believe there never was a human being who united against himself such a massive execration and abhorrence as this man has done.”
John now had little business to occupy him. He occasionally conversed with Count Romanzoff, who had returned from the battlefield. Until he heard from President Madison or Secretary Monroe on the US acceptance or rejection of the czar’s offer to mediate the war with England, John did not have much to do. With the Orders in Council repealed, he mulled over what now mattered the most in making peace with England: the practice of impressment, the moral cause behind the war.
He picked up a book on philosophy, whose English author had been a strong advocate for abolishing the slave trade. Though the trade itself had ceased five years earlier, the practice of slavery continued.
“The trade is beyond question an abomination, disgraceful to the human character,” John reflected, hoping that slavery would be outlawed one day.
Like his father and mother, Adams abhorred slavery. His family managed their Massachusetts farms with tenants and paid laborers, not slaves. The practice of impressment bothered him just as much as slavery. Impressment was the act of forcibly taking someone into military service. It was one thing for the British to compel lads from the English countryside into wearing the redcoat uniform; it was another to take Americans from US ships and force them to turn their coats from blue to red.
“[F]or the impressment of seamen is to all intents and purposes a practice as unjust, as immoral, as base, as oppressive and as tyrannical as the slave trade.”
While he admired the author’s abolitionist views, he saw hypocrisy too. Adams wrote:
Yet the same members of the British Parliament, who have been the greatest zealots for abolishing the slave trade, are not only inflexible adherents to the practice of impressments among their own people, but are now waging a rancorous war against the United States to support the practice of their officers in impressing men from American merchant vessels on the high seas. Every particle of argument [that] can bear up against the slave trade bears with equal force against impressment.
He would never forget the forlorn looks of his countrymen trapped in Kristiansand, Norway, on his ocean voyage to St. Petersburg three years earlier. Those merchants had lost their cargo and ships, but they had not lost their identity as American citizens. They had not been captured by the British and impressed into His Majesty’s navy. But many sailors had. Likewise he would never forget the fear in the eyes of the lad from Charleston, who was nearly taken from the Horace by an English officer.
By 1812 the British had impressed as many as nine thousand American citizens. Now many of these same Americans were being forced to fight against the country of their birth or of their adoption. Such injustice! This crime was the strongest proof that US sovereignty was in name only. The king of England may have lost America during the Revolutionary War, but he had found a way to enslave US independence nonetheless, suppressing it through impressments. If independence depended in part on John Adams in 1776, actual independence now depended in part on John Quincy Adams and the War of 1812.
The mind can be a dark place. Louisa’s psyche became her worst enemy, plaguing her with ideas she had never entertained. Her depression took a dangerous turn.
“My thoughts have been so very gloomy that I have refrained from writing some time, and I dare not commit to paper all that passes in my mind,” she wrote in her journal in early November. Though she tried to “fly from them,” her efforts were in vain.
Depression deepened. Nightmares haunted her. Her mind tapped her visual memory of her daughter and other deceased loved ones and twisted them into horrific scenes. As long as her eyelids were closed, these visions seemed as real as her bed: “My babe’s image flits forever before my eyes and seems to reproach me with her death.”
Louisa blamed herself: “Necessity alone induced me to wean her and in doing it I lost her.”
She couldn’t help wondering what would have happened had she continued to nurse. Did weaning baby Louisa too early lead to her sickness and dysentery? One dream took Louisa to a house where she'd lived as a child. Her daughter was there, and so were her deceased father and sister Nancy.
“I was playing with my babe, who appeared in full health, when I was suddenly called by my father, who was sitting in the next room with a party of gentlemen to beg that I would go down into the cellar to fetch him some wine.”
Feeling afraid, she agreed but asked Nancy to go with her.
“We descended a flight of steps which appeared to lead to a deep vault, and at the bottom of the stairs, I stumbled and fell over a body newly murder’d from which the blood still appear’d to stream. I arose with difficulty and looked for my sister who seem’d to stand as if immovable and as if just risen from the grave not withstanding my terror.”
Instead of running up the stairs to tell her father about the murder, Louisa took him some wine. “Methought I got three bottles and carried them to my father, who upon examining them told me that they were bottles of Port which was entirely spoilt.”
Nightmares are often strange narratives. “With the usual inconsistency of dreams, I got over all these painful impressions and was as at first playing with my child who was all life and animation.”
In another dream, a storm sparked vivid flashes of lightning toward the heavens. “I was left alone in indescribable terror. I fell upon my knees and implored the mercy of heaven.”
Then the thunder and lightning suddenly ceased. “And I raised my eyes and beheld as it were a stream of fire which extended completely across the heavens in which was distinctly written ‘be of good cheer[;] thy petition is granted’—I fell flat upon my face in a swoon and awoke.”
Soon the desire for death left her dream world and became real.
“I struggle in vain against the affliction that consumes me, and I feel that all my wishes center in the grave,” she wrote. “I am a useless being in this world . . . surely it is no crime to pray for death. [I]f it is wickedness, I implore thy mercy, O Lord, to cleanse my heart and to teach me to bear my trials with fortitude.”
Depression deeply impressed Louisa’s mind, overtaking her longtime yearning to be reunited with George and John. “My heart is buried in my Louisa’s grave, and my greatest longing is to be laid beside her, even the desire of seeing my beloved boys gives way to this idea [of] cherished hope.”