IN EARLY MARCH OF 1815, LOUISA’S CARRIAGE PASSED VERY FEW houses as they traveled on a remote road to Küstrin, a town in the Prussian province of Brandenburg in Germany. Because of heavy rains, the dirt road sometimes became a muddy stream. Suddenly the carriage’s front wheel snapped, jolting to a chaotic stop. One of the drivers jumped down and studied the problem. He gave Louisa the bad news. The wheel was unsalvageable, broken into fragments.
“The evening was setting in, and they advised that one of the two should go to a small place that we had passed on the road, and get some conveyance for me; as the road was in such a state, it was impossible to walk.”
Seeing no other option, Louisa agreed. They waited and waited for what seemed like a thousand hours before one of the drivers returned with “a miserable common cart, into which we got.”
Baptiste led them to the last hut they passed. The shack had two rooms and a blacksmith shop.
“One woman made her appearance: dirty, ugly, and ill natured; and there were two or three very surly, ill-looking men.”
The men’s tongues were as salty with insults as their fingers were stained with soot from the blacksmith’s shop. Just as she had the night they became lost in the forest, Louisa allowed the intimidating Baptiste to take charge. Explaining their broken wheel, he asked for a vehicle to transport Louisa, Charles, and Madame Babet to the nearest town.
“They answered doggedly that they could do no such thing, but that if we chose to stay there, they could make a wheel, so that we could go on in the morning.”
What to do? Just as John had consulted with the captain of the Horace on their voyage to St. Petersburg years earlier, so Louisa now asked her two servants their opinion. The three of them devised a plan. They would spend the night at the shack, which had one available room. Because both servants were armed, they could split up, with one keeping watch at her chamber door and the other sleeping in the coach.
“According to this plan, I had my little boy’s bed brought in [from the carriage], and while he slept soundly, my woman and I sat up, neither of us feeling very secure in the [dis]agreeable nest into which we had fallen.”
Baptiste’s terse nature now worked in Louisa’s favor. No one tried to enter her chamber. Although she lost a night’s sleep, she didn’t lose any of her valuables—or her life, for that matter. The wheel was ready the next morning, and they left immediately.
“As I always had provisions in the carriage, we made out to eat something before we started, and at the next stage we took our coffee—Our wheel was very clumsy, and not painted, but it answered all the purpose to carry us through the famous road, which had been begun by Bonaparte from Küstrin.”
Once again nature became their worst enemy on the road. Mud slowed their progress, but eventually they reached Küstrin’s fortress, which was about fifty miles east of Berlin. Napoleon’s troops had burned the town on their retreat to Paris. House upon house “bore the mutilating stamp of war.”
They found tolerable lodgings, but were not allowed to sightsee at the fortress, which was famous for imprisoning Prussia’s king the previous century. Even though the French had torched this town, the local inhabitants held a far different opinion of the Grande Armée than Louisa expected.
“To my utter astonishment, I heard nothing but the praises of the gallantry of Napoleon, and his officers, and great regret at the damage done to this beautiful fortress.”
She quickly discovered the reason: economics. In spite of their burnt houses, the people blamed the Cossacks for the terrible road conditions. Napoleon had ordered a new road to be built in Küstrin, but when the Russians drove him away, they sabotaged construction for the grand road.
“The Cossacks! The dire Cossacks! were the perpetual theme, and the cheeks of the women blanched at the very name.”
While in Ghent, Adams thought about the destruction that towns across Prussia and other places had experienced. “There is scarcely a metropolis in Europe that has not been taken in the course of the last twenty years. There is not a single instance in all that time of public buildings like those being destroyed,” John had written to Louisa in early October 1814.
Because Napoleon had shattered so much of Europe, perhaps the British thought they could get away with burning Washington City. Adams wondered whether Washington’s destruction would eventually backfire on the British.
“The army of Napoleon did indeed blow up the Kremlin at Moscow, but that was a fortified castle, and even this act has ever been and ever will be stigmatized as one of the most infamous of his deeds.”
Many French newspapers described the burning of Washington as “atrocious.” This description forced London newspaper editors to defend their military’s actions by recalling “the most execrable barbarities of the French revolutionary fury.”
Louisa, too, had detected that the British diplomats in St. Petersburg were having trouble defending the burning of the US Capitol and the President’s House. “It is said that the destruction of our little capitol has produced such a sensation here that his little lordship [the British ambassador to Russia] has more than once been under the necessity of retiring from the soirées in which it has formed the topic of conversation.”
Adams kept his wife informed of the latest developments as he received them. The British also took the city of Alexandria, Virginia. Armstrong had failed to take the simple action of ordering militia to build earthen works to block the roads to Washington City from invasion. After President Madison confronted him, General Armstrong resigned.
“Armstrong defends himself as much as he defended Washington,” Adams wryly wrote.
John made another keen political observation, one that might affect his fortunes. Madison appointed Monroe to replace Armstrong as secretary of war. This meant that the coveted position of secretary of state was likely vacant. Perhaps Adams’s request for a recall might result in an honorable opportunity for him after all.
In the meantime his political fortune was directly tied to success in Ghent. Failure to get a treaty, and a good one, would prevent him from taking any other diplomatic post, much less the role of secretary of state. Worse, the war would continue, and America could be annexed by Britain.
The fall of Washington City initially gave the British the advantage at Ghent. Though much of Europe was appalled by the barbarism, Parliament was blind to their country’s falling status. Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, secretly expressed their strategy this way: “The forces under Sir Alexander Cochrane and General Ross were most actively employed upon the coast of the United States, creating the greatest degree of alarm and rendering the government very unpopular.”
He was correct. Americans blamed Madison for the destruction of their capital. One female innkeeper was so angry when she learned that Dolley Madison was taking refuge at her hotel, she threw her out and cursed at her.
Dolley had been queen of hearts in America. Her courage that day at the President’s House made her a legend. After learning at 3:00 p.m. that US forces had failed to hold back the British at Bladensburg, Dolley fled the President’s House. Before she left, however, she made a crucial decision. She asked her servants to remove Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington from the dining room wall before the British arrived. The portrait was a national treasure, a gift from Congress for the opening of the President’s House in 1800. She could not bear the idea of redcoats looting the house, taking the portrait, and then later parading Washington’s painting through the streets of London to prove their conquest of America. She received credit for saving the portrait.
Sacrificing most of her wardrobe, Dolley packed all the president’s cabinet papers, and possibly her husband’s notes from the Constitutional Convention, into one of the few remaining wagons in town. Once those were secure at another location, she fled with other Americans to roads leading to the countryside. Taking refuge at several places over the next few days and disguising herself with a farmer’s shawl, she waited until a messenger from her husband told her it was safe to return to Washington. A hurricane had driven out the redcoats.
Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, correctly guessed that James Madison immediately became an unpopular president. Though unknown at the time, Dolley’s heroism later made her a gem.
The prime minister believed the demise of Washington would be a game changer for the peace negotiations. At worst, the news would force the US commissioners to accept the new, lower boundary line proposed by the British to enlarge Canada and diminish the United States. At best, they would capitulate and hand the entire nation back to England, where they belonged.
“We may hope, therefore, that if the American government should prove themselves so unreasonable as to reject our proposals as they have been now modified,” Liverpool wrote, “they will not long be permitted to administer the affairs of the country, particularly as their military efforts have in no way corresponded with the high tone in which they attempt to negotiate.”
After news of the burning of Washington reached them in Ghent, the British commissioners issued a fifteen-page reply to their American counterparts.
John shared his frustration in a letter to Louisa: “It must indeed have been for some of my own sins or for those of my country, that I have been placed here to treat with the injustice and insolence of Britain, under a succession of such news as every breeze is wafting from America.”
Louisa, too, bewailed the thought of America being conquered: “The nature of our government, and the habits of the people, place us in a situation of such entire dependence on our own individual exertions, our persons, our children, our property are also so completely at stake.” She put her faith in patriotism. Just as Alexander showed, she hoped that “we just might hold up our heads and defy the brutality of our enemies.”
America needed a fleet of phoenixes to rise from the ashes and save the country.
“We left Küstrin to pursue our journey.”
As Louisa returned to the road in March 1815, she hoped the remaining fifty miles to Berlin would be uneventful, slowed only by the routine of showing passports at border posts. When they neared a particular spot, the drivers suddenly stopped.
“One of the postilions pointed out to us the small house, where that most lovely and interesting Queen Louisa of Prussia had stayed with her sick baby on their retreat from Berlin, after the French had taken possession of that city.”
While the driver told the story of the queen’s daring escape from Berlin, Louisa began to cry over the woman’s flight. Hearing of the queen’s ill infant understandably resurrected memories of Louisa’s daughter, whose grave she would never see again.
Queen Louisa had been the most influential woman in Prussia. She had supported, even insisted that her husband, Friederich Wilhelm III, declare war on Napoleon in 1806. When Bonaparte’s army decimated the Prussians, it was Queen Louisa who pleaded with the French emperor at the Peace of Tilsit to remember her people. She begged him to have mercy on the Prussians, calling upon her titles of wife and mother, not queen, as the basis for demanding humane treatment.
Saying she was an admirable queen and one of the most interesting women he had ever met, Bonaparte was impressed with her. Just as some Americans thought of Dolley Madison as the queen of hearts, so the Prussians embraced their Louisa as the queen of hearts. Though she died in 1810 at age thirty-four of a pulmonary embolism, she still reigned as the sentimental people’s queen of Prussia.
“My heart thrilled with emotion for the sufferings of one, whom I had so dearly loved, and I could not refrain from tears at the recital of her sufferings,” Louisa reflected.
As they entered Berlin in March 1815, she thought about Queen Louisa and others she had known as she beheld the city where she had lived fourteen years earlier as a newlywed with John. “Memory; how ineffably beautiful is thy power! Years had elapsed; affliction had assailed the heart, with its keenest pangs of carking grief; disappointment had thrown its mingled hues of fear and care,” she noted.
The past flooded her mind as she arrived at the hotel: “The carriage needed repairs, and our clumsy wheel to be painted, and Berlin was attractive to me—my poor and beloved George having been born there.”
George was now a teenager. Oh, how she missed seeing him grow into a young man! John had copied a letter from Abigail that reached him in Ghent.
“George’s growth has been very rapid in the year past that I believe he will not be more than an inch or two taller, his voice is changing, and John will insist that he is fifteen years old, and must have a razor in another year. John is short and stocky, full of spirit animation and fire, both of them longing to have you return, so does your affectionate mother,” Abigail wrote.
An American traveling to Ghent had recently seen their boys and gave John a firsthand report. “[He] said to me of our sons, ‘George, Sir, is a fine, tall, stout boy; but as for John, Sir, he is the very picture of you.’”
The update on her sons warmed Louisa’s heart. Now she was in the city of George’s birth. She and John had been happy together then. Berlin enchanted her because there she had first experienced “the luxuries, the pleasures, and the novelties of a court.”
As she settled into her hotel, Louisa confirmed a decision. Gone was the mantra to rest, not recreate, and then resume her journey. Instead she decided to stay in Berlin a week. She didn’t need that much time to repair her carriage, but she wanted to visit former friends by reliving her youth and “forgetting in the lapse of time and distance.” The hardships of the journey from St. Petersburg had changed Louisa. She needed the rejuvenation that only socializing with old friends could bring.
Did he love her as much as he had when they were newlyweds in Berlin? Their separation had brought out her worst insecurities in the fall of 1814. Early on in the negotiations, when John thought he would soon return to St. Petersburg, he confessed to her a secret passion. Adams longed to visit Paris, which he had not seen in nearly thirty years. Accompanying his father to the famous city gave him an education beyond books. Paris was to John what Berlin was to Louisa.
Perhaps aware of his wife’s fears, his desire to see his queen of hearts, however, was more paramount than Paris:
I had had no small temptation to return by the way of Paris, which is only thirty-six hours distance from me, but I am not making this tour of Brussels for my pleasure . . . what has pleasure to show that would compensate me for an obstruction of three days longer from my queen of pleasure? If I lengthen the journey upon my return, it will assuredly not be for amusement, or to gratify my personal curiosity.
But as the months rolled on with more delays in the negotiations, Louisa couldn’t help wondering whether she was still truly the queen of his heart. She found herself lured by the practices of Russian fortune-tellers. Superstition was as common in Russian social circles as snow under their slippers. Surely it couldn’t hurt to see if a deck of cards could tell her what she needed to know?
“Mr. Charles, who is very well, informed you that I lay the cards out to see when you will return,” she confessed to her husband in a letter that winter of 1814.
One card in particular made her worry, leading her to think that another female now attracted his fancy. “Pray tell me what fair lady it is that takes up so much of your attention? As I understand that it is the fashion of the place and as I know how essential it is to the diplomatic reputation to form this sort of intrigue it is impossible for you to lose so fine an opportunity,” she both partially teased and fished.
He responded to her that other diplomats often found distractions in a Delilah, but not him.
“Do not fancy I am jealous . . . it is pretty certain that we have no pretension to be so against the temptations that the world throws in your way, which I am sure are strong and mighty. God bless and speed you soon to the arms and heart of your faithful wife,” she assured him in a late December letter in 1814.
Playing with the cards seemed so harmless, but something about it haunted her too. Within a few weeks of asking John for reassurance, she found herself face-to-face with a real fortune-teller. Two nights before she left St. Petersburg, Louisa said good-bye to one of her best friends, Madame Colombi, the woman she had taken tea with years earlier instead of attending the ball. That incident nearly cost her a place on the empress mother’s invitation list. Louisa loved Madame Colombi: “She was a charming woman and was apparently attached both to my sister and myself.”
When she arrived at Madame Colombi’s house, she discovered that a Russian woman also joined them, but without an invitation. Colombi was too polite to turn this Russian countess away.
“Countess Apraxin was a fat coarse woman, very talkative, full of scandal, and full of the everlasting amusement so fashionable in Russian society, the bonne aventure.”
Countess Apraxin was also a fortune-teller.
“After tea she took the cards, and insisted as I was going a journey, that I should choose a queen, and let her read my destiny.”
Louisa had never seen this woman before or heard her name until that night. The woman was as pushy as she was fat. Unlike John’s encounter years earlier with the bearded lady at Laval’s party, at least this countess didn’t have a beard. Louisa consented and chose a queen. Then Countess Apraxin read her fortune. “She said that I was perfectly delighted to quit Petersburg.”
That was true. Just days earlier, when she said good-bye to the empresses at the palace, she could not conceal her happiness. She told them that Mr. Adams regretted not being able to take leave of them in person, but he expected to be recalled to America after finishing his business in Ghent. He would forever remember their graciousness during his time in their court. The empresses could tell that Louisa was thrilled to say good-bye.
“I delivered your message to the empress,” Louisa wrote to John, “and she said when a man sent so far for his wife, he had no intention to return. I am a poor diplomat for she saw joy, sparkle in my eyes and she had never seen a woman so altered in her life for the better.”
Though Countess Apraxin correctly assessed that Louisa was delighted to leave St. Petersburg, she could have easily detected her elation by watching her talk about her impending journey over dinner with Madame Colombi that night. The countess next predicted that Louisa would soon meet those from whom she had long been separated. That, too, was highly probable.
Then the countess added a warning. “That when I had achieved about half of my journey, I should be much alarmed by a great change in the political world, in consequence of some extraordinary movement of a great man which would produce utter consternation, and set all [of] Europe into a fresh commotion.”
Her prediction grew worse. “That this circumstance which I should hear of on the road, would oblige me to change all my plans, and render my journey very difficult—but that after all I should find my husband well, and we should have a joyous meeting.”
Louisa responded with great pretension. “I laughed and thanked her, and said I had no fear of such a circumstance, as I was so insignificant and the arrangements for my journey so simple, I was quite satisfied that I should accomplish it if I escaped from accidents, without meeting with any obstacles of the kind predicted; more especially as it was a time of peace.”
Departing, Louisa politely said good-bye to Madame Colombi and the countess, who hoped Louisa would remember her predictions.
“I responded I was certain I could never forget her—I note this because it is an amusing and undoubted fact, and I was called on to remember it every moment during the latter part of my journey.”
What Louisa didn’t know was that a king, not a queen, would be the final trump card in her quest for reunion with her husband and oldest sons.