DESPITE HER PAST FEELINGS, LOUISA CATHERINE JOHNSON ADAMS was certain about one fact as she heard the river ice crack that late afternoon in February 1815. She did not want to die as her carriage broke through the frozen Vistula River near Poland. More than that, she absolutely did not want to lose Charles.
“It required a violent effort in the horses to prevent the coach from upsetting on the bank,” she recorded of the near-death encounter.
Although the ice gave way, her drivers’ skill and the horses’ determination saved Louisa, seven-year-old Charles, Madame Babet, and her servants from icy deaths. “We got over and reached the other side of the river in safety.”
Shaken but relieved, they resumed their journey through this corner of Poland. Though the villages they passed were among the most filthy and beggarly that Louisa had ever seen, she was not fearful but grateful to be alive and en route toward Paris. She would do anything to feel the comfort of her husband’s embrace once again. Thankfully they traveled without incident or delay until reaching Poland’s border with Prussia.
“Here I had to wait three hours for horses, and the people were so much inclined to be impudent.”
Such rudeness was somewhat surprising. After all, the Prussians had abandoned the French army to join Alexander, his Cossacks, the Austrians, and the Swedes in pursuit of Napoleon. After winning the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in October 1813, the allies had pushed the French emperor and his regrouped army five hundred miles back to his Parisian power center. When Alexander marched triumphantly into Paris in March 1814, Bonaparte abdicated. King Louis XVIII reclaimed the throne for the Bourbon family. Napoleon went into exile at the Tuscan island of Elba in April 1814.
The sight of the Russian insignia on Louisa’s carriage window alarmed the Prussian border officer in spite of his country’s alliance with the czar.
“I was obliged to produce my letter and to inform the master of the house, that I should write immediately to the [Russian] minister of the interior, and complain of his conduct,” Louisa later wrote. Her threats to wield influence with Alexander’s government worked.
“The man appeared to be much alarmed, made a great many apologies, and said the horses should be ready immediately.”
There was a catch, of course. She would have to take two extra horses, six instead of four.
“He thought the carriage very heavy—This is an exaction to which travelers were constantly exposed, and to pay the tax was an absolute necessity if you wished to avoid delay.”
What would John have done in that moment? Could he have convinced the border guard that they needed only four horses? Was the agent taking advantage of her because she was a woman traveling without a male protector? She expected to encounter such hardships on this journey, but matters of business and monetary transactions unraveled her insecurity more than other challenges.
“I cannot rely [at] all on my own judgment more especially as I have never before been obliged to rely on myself,” she had complained with emphasis to John in a letter the previous summer.
She felt the same way now. Why did she have to make such a difficult journey alone? Everyone had abandoned her—her husband, their aides, her now married sister, and her chambermaid, Martha.
This was hardly the way she imagined escaping her so-called exile from Russia. So much in the past year had been beyond her control. Ever since John left her and Charles in April 1814—the same month that Napoleon went into exile—to travel to Göteborg, Sweden, he had promised to return to St. Petersburg as quickly as possible. During his absence, she'd tried to manage their finances by renting the cheapest place she could find. The apartment was too small, but she had done her best.
“Although I do everything in my power to lessen the expense, I am sure you will think me imprudent in the management of the house,” she worriedly wrote to John.
Louisa faced what everyone in St. Petersburg confronted: post-Napoleonic war inflation. Horses were three times more expensive. Dresses for formal events now cost sixteen hundred rubles, more than twice the amount she had paid years earlier when they arrived in St. Petersburg.
Much had changed since then. Too much.
The year 1813 did not immediately lead to John’s escape from exile as he originally told Romanzoff in June when he thought Madison was sending someone to replace him. Instead John waited for months in anticipation that Alexander’s offer to mediate a peace treaty between the United States and Britain would soon take place in St. Petersburg.
Madison initially responded by sending a two-man delegation to Russia. When Treasury Secretary Gallatin and Senator Bayard arrived in St. Petersburg in July 1813, John expected that one of them would replace him and that he, Louisa, Charles, Kitty, William, and Martha would return home on the same ship that brought Gallatin, Bayard, their families, and the son of Dolley Madison to Russia. He was wrong. Far from recalling him, President Madison instead named Adams along with Gallatin and Bayard as US negotiators for the mediation. He was wrong, too, about Gallatin’s usefulness to Madison at home. Gallatin had grown weary of the job of treasury secretary, especially when former minister to France John Armstrong became war secretary, an appointment Gallatin opposed. Because he was a naturalized American born in Sweden, Gallatin agreed with the president that his knowledge of Europe would make him useful abroad.
Madison also gave John the prestigious job of negotiating a separate trade agreement with Russia. They waited in St. Petersburg for word on whether the British would also accept the czar’s mediation and send delegates. For six months they knocked on Romanzoff’s door for an answer. The chancellor could give no official word. Then they discovered through informal channels that the British government had scoffed at Alexander’s offer but would not officially refuse it. Arrogantly ignoring the mediation option and insulting Alexander, the British foreign minister instead wrote Secretary Monroe and offered to negotiate directly with the United States but demanded that the talks take place on European soil. Nonetheless Russia’s pressure had pushed England to the peace table, which was a triumph and a result of John’s positive influence on Alexander and Romanzoff.
Madison accepted and appointed John along with Gallatin, Bayard, and two other distinguished Americans to treat for peace in hopes of ending the 1812 war with Britain. John left St. Petersburg, the city of his so-called exile, on April 28, 1814.
“With this prospect of a general peace in Europe I commenced my journey to contribute, if possible, to the restoration of peace to my own country.”
He traveled first to Göteborg, Sweden. He waited there for weeks, only to learn that the British government had changed the location and decided to send its representatives instead to Ghent, a city in the newly formed province of Flanders, also known as Belgium.
John and the Americans arrived in Ghent in July 1814, much sooner than their English counterparts, which gave Adams plenty of time to rest, recreate, and write. His correspondence to Louisa was as comforting as it was lengthy, full of flourishes and details. He chronicled what delighted him about art, literature, politics, and other subjects. One of his most poetic lines came after studying some paintings. “Upon the canvas I never look but for two things: beauty for the eye, and sentiment for the soul.”
She hoped he still looked at her the same way, but the longer their separation continued, the more her doubts grew. Their need for reunion with their children expanded into a need for reunion with each other.
Nevertheless, the letter he wrote to her on August 9, 1814, gave her the greatest hope yet of his imminent return: “As I have written [to the secretary of state] to ask again to be recalled from the Russian mission, we shall probably be there at all events until next spring.”
The joy of finally being reunited with George and John finally seemed on the horizon. The possibility of reunion with him was even closer.
“At present I do not think that the negotiation will be of long continuance,” he also wrote.
Although the British commissioners proclaimed to have “liberal and highly pacific” intentions at their first meeting with the US delegates on August 9, 1814, Adams doubted their seriousness about negotiating peace. He freely gave Louisa his reasons.
Over several weeks newspaper editors under the thumb of the British government had predicted there would be no peace as often as they had washed printing press ink from their hands. One gazette described the negotiations as a hopeless farce. Other theatrics also suggested that the British were not serious about the negotiations. In the closing session of Parliament, the prince regent claimed that he wanted peace with America. He also declared that, in the meantime, they would carry on the war “with increased vigor.”
As much as Adams wanted to return to his wife and children, he was fearful for his country’s future and its ability to maintain independence. The British were stalling, waiting to hear more news from the war on America’s shores. They believed that a significant British land victory in the fall of 1814 would bring Adams and his American colleagues to their knees.
“If they choose to play this game of chicanery they may, I know not how long. But if they will take no for an answer, we shall be released in two or three days.”
He was so confident that the British would break off negotiations by the first of September and he would return to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1814 that he asked Louisa to stop writing letters to him.
He miscalculated both assumptions.
As she continued her journey into Prussia in February 1815, Louisa pushed her postilions to drive as quickly as they could. They arrived at post houses late at night and left at daybreak the next morning. One day Louisa discovered just how traumatized Charles was from their close call on the Vistula River.
“We came suddenly upon a view of the [Baltic] Sea, and were apparently driving immediately into it, when Charles became dreadfully alarmed, and turning as white as a sheet, asked me if we were going into that great water.”
Assuring him that they would not be going into the sea, she mapped out their plan. They would travel inland in as few days as possible to Berlin. There they would rest, restock their supplies, and visit a few old friends. After that they would aggressively push toward Paris. However, as they continued, their servant Baptiste made her fearful.
“Baptiste . . . began to assume a tone not by any means agreeable, and I began to be somewhat uneasy.”
Not understanding her urgency, he may have disagreed with her insistence on pushing through the mountains when the roads looked dark and gloomy.
“I intimated to him that he might leave me as soon as he pleased, as I was in a country where I was very well known, as I had lived four years in Berlin, and was acquainted with the king and all the royal family.”
Baptiste’s “great desire was to return to his own country, and . . . he did not wish to leave me.” He wanted to get to France and “understood I had agreed to take him the whole way.”
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.