American Phoenix, “I fear the emperor of #Russia is half an American.” Part 1 of 6: Fireworks
Excerpts from my book American Phoenix, about John Quincy and Louisa Adams, who forged a relationship with the tsar of Russia to save American independence during the War of 1812.
Were the US & Russia Ever Friends?
“I fear the emperor of Russia is half an American.” While no one in the mainstream media would say this today about Vladimir Putin, this shocking phrase was privately written by a British prime minister to describe America’s friendship with Russia at the end of the War of 1812.
Russia has returned to the forefront of US headlines in 2022, from the Russia-Ukraine war to Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into those involved in the fabricated Trump Russia collusion dossier.
Americans’ perception about Russia is based on the events of the past century. No American alive today remembers when Russia was an imperial or royal power. For centuries, Russia was led by an emperor known as the czar until 1917, when the Bolsheviks killed the czar and his family in the Bolshevik Revolution. Russia subsequently became the Soviet Union, a communist regime.
Many Americans today remember Russia as America’s top nuclear foe during the Cold War that followed the American, Soviet, and British alliance in World War II to stop fascist Germany and Italy. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was signed in 1949 by the United States and 11 other nations “to create a pact of mutual assistance to counter the risk that the Soviet Union would seek to extend its control of Eastern Europe to other parts of the continent.”
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to the break-up of the Soviet Union. Since then, in the shadow of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, the relationship between the United States and Russia has been confusing and inconsistent. The expansion of NATO to include 30 nations, including former Soviet countries along with other factors, have continued tensions between the United States and Russia.
In contrast, however, America’s relationship with Russia started out very differently than it is now or has been over the past 100 years. In fact, a US president turned his political career around after turning Russia from a foe to a friend. I wrote about this in a book called American Phoenix.
Russia’s Empress Regnant, Catherine the Great, refused to officially recognize American independence during the American Revolution because Russia was allied with Great Britain. That changed in 1809, when a down-on-his luck politician, John Quincy Adams was sent to Russia as the first high-ranking US diplomat received by Russia.
Adams had lost his seat in the Senate in 1808 and his political enemies decided to get rid of his influence on domestic politics by sending him to Russia. John Quincy’s heartbroken wife Louisa went with him after her in-laws, former President John Adams and Abigail Adams, forced her to leave two of her three children behind in Boston.
Despite viewing his assignment as an “honorable exile,” John Quincy Adams saw Russia as an opportunity to strengthen America, which was barely a power in 1809 much less a superpower. The world was under threat by a new world order as defined by Napoleon.
Allied with Russia in 1809, Napoleon was a soaring global power threatening England and Europe. England was still hostile to America. Britain was conducting an economic trade war against America while also attacking US sovereignty by kidnapping American sailors and denying their citizenship. America was a country in name only. That had to change. In order to survive, America had to thrive economically through fair trade on the world stage.
Adams knew that an American alliance with Russia’s czar, Emperor Alexander, would put pressure on France and England to change their policies against the US.
John Quincy, along with Louisa, were so successful in turning Russia’s Alexander into an ally that the British prime minister declared in 1815, “I fear the emperor of Russia is half an American.”
As if their stories were designed for cinema, John Quincy and Louisa Adams were also both personally transformed by their experience in Russia from 1809 to 1815. John Quincy transformed from a down-on-his-luck politician into a statesman on track to become president. He turned Russia from a foe into a US ally. How he did this is a testament to the American character and Adams's commitment against corruption. John Quincy Adams is the only US president to leverage diplomatic success with Russia into a successful road to the presidency.
Likewise, Louisa changed from a powerless mother into a woman who would make life-or-death decisions to save her youngest child from Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and to be reunited with her other children.
American Phoenix is both a story about nationalism versus globalism and a personal story of two heroic individuals who deeply loved each other and loved their country. Their Russian destination changed US destiny.
In a six-part series, this American Phoenix Substack series will feature excerpts from American Phoenix, which I encourage you to buy on Amazon. Enjoy!
Journey Begins
Boston, July 4, 1809
Fireworks
Let fame to the world sound America’s voice;
No intrigue can her sons from their government sever;
Her pride is her Adams—her laws are his choice,
And shall flourish till liberty slumbers forever.
Then unite, heart and hand, Like Leonidas’ band,
And swear to the God of the ocean and land,
That ne’er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves,
While the earth bears a plant or the sea rolls in its waves.
—“The Boston Patriotic Song” also called “Adams and Liberty”
As Americans celebrated their independence on July 4, 1809, Louisa Adams learned she was going into captivity. At the same time John Quincy Adams realized his political resurrection just might become a reality—so he secretly wished.
John had planned to spend Independence Day quietly at his parents’ home in Quincy, just outside Boston. A few days before the nation’s birthday, he received an invitation to attend the Bunker Hill Association dinner instead. As a down-on-his-luck politician turned Harvard professor and local attorney, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to mingle with five hundred of Boston’s most prominent men and veterans. He accepted.
Former president John Adams acquiesced. He rode to Boston early the morning of July 4 to meet his son so they could attend the morning’s official festivities together. John’s Boston home was located at the corner of Frog Lane and Nassau Street, which today are Boylston and Tremont Streets. Not far from the Central Burying Ground, his house, which he bought in 1806, was part of an expanding metropolis. The town of Boston, America’s fourth largest city, would soon boast a population of more than thirty-three thousand in the 1810 US census, up from twenty-five thousand in 1800.
Adams lived in a trade town known for its harbor and commerce, not agriculture. His neighbors made candles, shoes, saddles, clocks, watches, and bells, among many other products. Belonging to Suffolk County, Bostonians now produced more than one million gallons of “distilled spirits made from molasses” and more than six hundred thousand gallons of beer each year. They also made eleven thousand fur hats and ten thousand spectacles.
While many Boston tradesmen preferred to travel by carriage or horseback, Adams and his father enjoyed walking. The pair likely discussed the happenings of the past few days as they strolled down the street and turned to pass the tombstones. John might have talked about how boring life had been recently in the city, as he revealed in his diary a few days earlier when June 1809 came to a close:
“A multitude of little occupations distract my attention and my time to such a degree that I can scarcely observe any of my intended purposes. . . . But instead of reading with [eight-year-old] George, I pass my time until breakfast in arranging books and assorting pamphlets, or writing upon transient topics. I seldom get to my office until 11 or twelve o’clock, and pass most of my afternoons at home. . . . George’s instruction and my own have almost entirely failed.”
He probably told his father about the most significant occupation of his time: attending the district court, which was hearing cases from the Embargo Act. The proceedings only reminded them of why John was now a professor and attorney in Boston and not a senator in Washington. John Quincy’s support of Jefferson’s embargo ultimately had forced him to resign his US Senate seat a year earlier, in 1808. The senior John Adams understood his son’s dilemma. Returning to private life was as embarrassing as it was boring.
While they walked through the mall toward Beacon Hill, the younger Adams may have broken the unexpected news to his father. He had learned of it the night before, after he accompanied Louisa and her younger sister Kitty to a dinner party at a friend’s home.
“After I came home, about 10 in the evening a couple of boys came to my house,” he reported in his diary of the tap on his door, which was unusual unless accompanied by a cry of fire.
More mysterious was the mission behind the knocking.
John explained that the boys “left me with a National Intelligencer of 28 June, requesting me after I should have looked over it, to send it to the Palladium Office.”
Founded in 1800 by publishers who supported Jefferson’s administration, the National Intelligencer was a prominent Washington City newspaper. The editors of the New England Palladium and other Boston newspapers often reprinted national news from the latest Intelligencer, which usually arrived in Boston several days after publication. Adams was naturally curious. Someone thought he needed to read the National Intelligencer at 10:00 p.m. before Boston’s leaders gathered the next day to hear orations commemorating July 4. He quickly discovered why.
“I found in it a paragraph that on the day before, that is, the 27th of June, the Senate had confirmed the nomination of John Quincy Adams, as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of St. Petersburg [Russia].”
Minister plenipotentiary was an official title for the highest-ranking diplomatic position available to a US envoy at the time. His mission was to establish diplomatic ties with Russia and represent the entire US relationship with the mammoth nation.
After attending President James Madison’s inauguration in March 1809, John concluded that Madison, who had been Jefferson’s secretary of state, was as likely to nominate him for a domestic administration position as Boston’s Federalists were to select him again for the US Senate.
Though he was a reserved man, John’s letters to his parents frequently revealed his deeper opinions and feelings, which he often concealed from official letters on similar topics to government officials. Because he was close to his father, he most likely shared his conflicting opinions and emotions about the appointment that day and the surprising timing.
The duo probably discussed the cons of accepting the nomination as they walked tirelessly through the Boston Common. Both knew John could promote his personal popularity more with the Federalists by refusing the position because it was offered by Madison, a Jeffersonian Republican.
They felt some disappointment, too, because both believed he could have contributed more at home than abroad. They also knew the truth: John’s retirement to private life did not shelter him from “the most virulent and unrelenting” persecution by their enemies. Perhaps that alone was reason enough to say yes to the St. Petersburg mission.
As they passed key sights, such as the artillery preparing to launch fireworks later that night, they may have discussed the greater significance of the appointment. At the time the US government boasted only “sixty consuls” serving throughout the world. Though a large number, these low-ranking consuls enjoyed little influence over their foreign hosts. Breadth did not equal depth and certainly not power or overwhelming support. Only three other nations had accepted an American envoy at the higher rank of minister: England, France, and Portugal. The only diplomatic rank higher than minister was ambassador, and America didn’t have any of those.
In 1809 the United States was largely a country in name only, with minimal recognition that was often dismissed as England’s long-lost prodigal. Not only was it not a superpower, but it was hardly a power at all.
However, if Russia’s czar accepted an American minister’s credentials— which had never been done before—then the United States would possess official diplomatic ties with the largest country in Europe. On top of that, a true trade alliance with Russia just might force England to abandon its abusive commerce policies against the United States. An alliance with Russia would prove to France’s Napoleon once and for all that the United States was no longer a child of Great Britain but a grown-up in its own right. America deserved to be treated as an independent nation. In order to survive, America needed to thrive.
The arguments in favor of accepting Madison’s nomination may have soared higher as the two easily climbed Beacon Hill to the State House. The senior Adams would have instantly seen the honor of his son serving as the president’s top representative to Russia.
The younger Adams looked to “the vague hope of rendering to my country, some important service, as intended by the mission.”
Topping the list for saying yes was his duty to obey the call of his country.
They both knew the reality that John Quincy faced. Though he could live comfortably the rest of his life as a lawyer and professor, his ambition, like his father’s, longed for the public stage. This was the biggest opportunity to do so, the last chance to resurrect his dead political career. Not only that, but serving abroad as one of the nation’s top diplomats could also lead to future service on the public square, whether as secretary of state—or, maybe, just maybe—an even higher position back home.
The Adams pair arrived at the State House, whose dome was originally painted gray, not glittering gold as it later became. Both were buoyed by John’s sudden change of fortune. They knew word of his appointment would spread throughout Boston just as quickly as the artillery would shoot fireworks from the mall. What could be better than revealing John’s new appointment to their friends, Boston’s selectmen, and government leaders during the city’s revelry of reflections on the American Revolution?
They entered the State House’s Senate chamber. From there they processed with the governor, state representatives, senators, and other guests to the Old South Church, where they listened to the town oration commemorating independence and liberty.
John Quincy recorded: “While in the church, and immediately after the delivery of the oration, Mr. Shaw gave me several letters, one of which was from the secretary of state, enclosing the commission to St. Petersburg.”
Just the day before, he had visited attorney William Smith Shaw, his cousin on his mother’s side. Shaw most likely received Adams’s commission and letters from the nation’s capital after Adams left his office; otherwise John wouldn’t have been so surprised when the boys brought him the National Intelligencer later that evening. Because Shaw had served as a private secretary to the senior Adams when he was president, he remained loyal to his kin and maintained ties to Washington City. Included in the packet was a letter from John Quincy’s friend, Ezekiel Bacon, a Massachusetts congressman.
“So far as your public sentiments and conduct may have an influence on the public mind, your friends would certainly have preferred that the theater of your employments should have been on American ground,” the congressman wrote. “Though your friends will not probably accede to the position that it was the best thing, yet they will very readily agree that it was a very good thing.”
Bacon put it bluntly.
“A mission to the court of St. Petersburg is, to a man of active talents, somewhat like an honorable exile.”
Indeed it was.
After the morning ceremonies, John and his father parted ways for the rest of the day. While the senior Adams returned to his son’s home, John walked with a friend in the parade to the Bunker Hill dinner.
John loved the parade. If anyone dared heckle him, which was always a possibility among the embargo-hating merchants, he didn’t record it. Instead, he was caught up in the ambience and pageantry of a Boston Independence Day celebration.
“The procession, with various emblems of agriculture, commerce and manufacturers, and consisting of about 500 persons, including those militia companies went through the town, over Charles River bridge, to Bunker Hill, where a dinner was prepared under an arbor covered with a tent and four rows of tables for the company.”
The grand feast was complete with pastry and an endless number of toasts to Boston, independence, and the nation.
News of his appointment spread quickly. His friend Mr. Austin approached him with an urgent suggestion. His son would be glad to serve as his secretary in St. Petersburg.
“But the application was too late,” the flattered Adams commented. Included in the packet of papers that Shaw gave him just hours earlier was a letter of application from William Steuben Smith, the twenty-two-year-old son of John’s older sister Nabby. Smith wanted to serve as John’s private secretary. Adams already had Smith in mind, but smiled at the compliment Austin paid him by inquiring for his son.
John had one more brief obligation to fulfill before returning home.
He and his friend left Bunker Hill so he could “pay a visit to young republicans assembled at the Exchange Hotel.”
Though far from a declared member of Jefferson’s party, this former Federalist knew the political benefits of a bipartisan Independence Day celebration.
“We stayed there only a few minutes to reciprocate salutations and give toasts after which we retired.” Then it was time to face his wife.
Louisa loved music. She was an accomplished and passionate pianist, singer, and harpist. Five nights earlier, she had entertained her husband and sister after dinner. Neither she nor John Quincy documented the songs she played that late June evening. She would have been familiar with the era’s most popular music, including “The Boston Patriotic Song,” also called the “Adams and Liberty” song.
Through lyrics such as “Let fame to the world sound America’s voice. No intrigue can her sons from her government sever” and “her pride is her Adams, his laws are her choice,” Robert Treat Paine Jr. of Massachusetts paid tribute to President Adams in 1799. Paine’s father, Robert Treat Paine Sr., was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and member of the first Continental Congress with Adams. Like many other songs, this was sung to a popular English melody, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” the tune later adopted for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” whose lyrics had yet to be written.
Because it was Independence Day, Louisa may have dressed in a fashionable red or blue Empire-style dress with a high waistline under her bosom and a white linen wrapper around her shoulders. With her light brown hair piled high on her head in Grecian style, she may have played this and several other patriotic songs on that Fourth of July, which she spent at home with Kitty. Both watched intently over Charles, Louisa and John’s youngest son. Not quite two years old, he was recovering from the measles. Between his large ears was a cherubic oval face dotted with spots.
Their oldest son was George, a tall, slim lad resembling Louisa. He was spending as much time as he could that summer in leisure, except when his father insisted that they read together or he practice his penmanship, expectations the eight-year-old struggled to meet.
She likely kept a most observant eye on their middle son, John, the spitting image of his father. John was celebrating his sixth birthday that day. He was also mischievous. A few days earlier he had run away, forcing Adams to spend an entire afternoon walking Boston’s cobblestones and searching until he found him.
Exactly how she learned about her husband’s nomination that July 4 is a bit of a mystery.
“This day the news arrived of Mr. Adams’s appointment to Russia,” she wrote.
John may have given her the news. Or her father-in-law may have told her when he returned to her home from the morning’s oration after his son received the official paperwork from Shaw. Another possibility is that she found out accidentally. Mr. Everett, one of John’s law students, may have broken the news when he dropped a letter by their house that day. Like Mr. Austin at Bunker Hill, as soon as Everett heard of Adams’s appointment, he wanted to be the first to apply for the position of secretary.
When Everett gave her his letter of request to pass along to her husband, Louisa may have wondered: Secretary? For what? Imagine the hurt she felt if she found out through someone other than her husband. Regardless of who told her, the news was as hard to take as hearing of someone’s death.
“I do not know which was the more stunned with the shock,” she recorded in her diary, comparing her distress to Kitty’s ashen face.
Any joyful singing was instantly replaced with melancholy shock. The idea of moving a family of five to Russia and enduring a sixty-day or longer ocean voyage was enough to make anyone wallow in the tune of a funeral dirge.
Louisa was not surprised to hear about the appointment. Rather, she was shocked because the possibility of John’s going to Russia had died an absolute death months earlier. The US Senate had considered him for the post earlier in the year. The senators had not only rejected his nomination but also passed a resolution against the idea. In the minds of the senators, sending any diplomat to Russia—much less one holding the high rank of minister plenipotentiary and also named Adams—was a waste of money and time.
What could a faraway place like Russia possibly offer when America’s foreign troubles rested squarely with England and France?
Declining a nominee is one thing; refusing to appoint anyone is the same as shoveling dirt on a grave. Such tombstone opposition understandably lured Louisa into completely releasing her worries about moving to St. Petersburg. Someone found a way to resurrect the mission. But who?
That person was none other than Emperor Alexander, Russia’s czar. When he followed through on his promise to send an envoy to the United States, Congress had no choice but to act quickly in return. In June 1809 President Madison could not accept the credentials of the recently arrived Russian chargé d’affaires or look him in the eye without making good on the US government’s promise to send an envoy to Russia in kind.
The news was a stunner for other reasons too: party politics. By this time a two-party political system was firmly anchored in America. The term federalist initially characterized supporters of the new US Constitution in 1787. When the first federal administration began two years later, political “parties were generally deplored.” Many thought a republican government should avoid a party system. As a result “President George Washington was able to exercise nonpartisan leadership during the first few years of the new government.”
Disagreements over fiscal policies and the French Revolution split Washington’s administration, pitting treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton against secretary of state Thomas Jefferson, among others. The Federalists became a solid party by 1796 and elected vice president John Adams to the presidency. Jefferson founded another party, the Republican Party, which was later called the Democratic-Republican Party and Jeffersonian Republicans.
This party eventually became today’s Democratic Party. John Quincy Adams did not refer to this party as Jeffersonian Republicans or Democratic-Republicans. He used the terms Federalists and Republicans. Though similar in name to Jefferson’s party, the modern Republican Party grew out of an anti-slavery movement embodied by Abraham Lincoln.
Despite John’s dropping by the Republican celebration that day, Louisa knew her husband was far from a sold-out supporter of the party that had defeated his father. Yet he was no longer a devoted Federalist, either. A politician without a party, Adams was as independent as a boulder between two intersecting streams.
John was aware that the Senate’s prior rejection of the post and his nomination had greatly relieved his anxious wife.
“I believe you will not be much disappointed at the failure of the proposition to go to Russia,” he understatedly, if not sarcastically, wrote to her in March 1809 from the nation’s capital, where he presented arguments to the Supreme Court for a legal case. He strategically leveraged the proceeding’s timing to attend Madison’s inauguration and ball with Louisa’s oldest sister, Nancy, and her husband, who lived on K Street. This gave him an opportunity to see if any other nomination from Madison was possible. It was not.
In that same March 1809 letter, John wrote that he had little “expectation of that or any other appointment; and although I feel myself obliged to the president for his nomination, I shall be better pleased to stay at home than I should have been to go to Russia.”
His lack of interest buried the possibility even further. Now he was singing a different but patriotic tune, one of duty and acceptance. All this—Adams’s attitude, the political dynamics, and the Senate’s reversal—left Louisa feeling betrayed.
“I had been so grossly deceived, every apprehension lulled—And now to come on me with such a shock!” she wailed.
The timing was ironic. While celebrating Independence Day, Mrs. Adams discovered that she would soon be shackled into a type of diplomatic captivity.
John could not decline the opportunity to serve his country, especially after his failure in the Senate. What would people think? He could not show any hesitation or coolness to the idea.
“I have determined to go,” he confided to a friend in Congress. “I have yet acquiesced in the judgment of those to whom the Constitution has left it, and who have thought best to place me abroad.”
Two constitutional organs now called him to duty: the president and the Senate. He could not decline the post any more than he could an appointment to the US Supreme Court. Adams’s ambition prevented him from saying no.
“The public service, to a man of independent patriotism, is neither to be solicited nor refused,” he later reflected.
Regardless of feeling deceived, deep in her heart, Louisa knew the truth. Madison had made a wise choice. Her husband was the most qualified citizen to represent the United States in Russia. More than anyone else, he had the experience, skills, and intellect to succeed there.
She also understood the stresses of diplomatic life. Her path had first crossed with Johnny Adams’s when they were children. Johnny and his father had visited Louisa’s family in Nantes, France, in 1779 before the Adams duo returned to America. Louisa and Johnny had met again in London in 1783 when she was eight years old. He was sixteen.
Louisa didn’t get to know John Quincy the man until years later, in London in 1795. By the time he met Louisa again, he was living on his own. He had caught the attention of President Washington, who was so impressed with young John’s grasp of international affairs that he named him minister in residence to the Netherlands. Adams later traveled to London for the temporary assignment of exchanging ratifications for a treaty. There he spent many hours at the Johnson household. She was twenty; he was twenty-eight. Assuming at first that he was interested in her older sister Nancy, Louisa felt free to be herself.
She played the piano, sang, and revealed her other passions. They fell in love and married two years later.
When the senior Adams became president in 1797, he appointed his son as minister to Prussia. For four years John Quincy and Louisa enjoyed the pleasures and challenges of diplomatic life in Berlin. Their early marriage was set against a backdrop of parties and pretension. They saw both the wickedness and wellspring of European courts. When John Adams lost the presidential election to Jefferson in 1800, the curtain closed on John Quincy’s court life in Berlin. Not wanting to give Jefferson the chance to fire or embarrass his son, President Adams recalled Minister Adams from Europe. John and Louisa exited the diplomatic stage and returned home in 1801.
By the time of her husband’s Russian appointment in July 1809, Louisa was sufficiently past her newlywed days. The Declaration of Independence was thirty-three years old; Louisa, thirty-four. She was too old to be seduced by the romance of court life.
“I had passed the age when courts are alluring.” So she thought.
Louisa knew, too, that if her husband represented America well in Russia, he might reverse his political fortunes at home, something he longed to do more than he would ever admit.
No Independence Day is complete without fireworks, which was how Louisa and John concluded their day. Adams returned to their house about 10:00 p.m., only to discover that his father had already taken his son John back to Quincy—perhaps to give the recent runaway the freedom to roam on an open farm. Everyone else went to a neighbor’s home to watch the fireworks from the rooftop.
“They [the fireworks] were principally from the gun house, and the rockets sent up, came down in blazing paper and burning sticks upon a house itself and several of the neighboring houses and yards including mine—in a manner which I thought dangerous,” John observed.
What neither John nor Louisa realized at the time was another hazardous possibility. The fireworks between them were just beginning, as intense and equally threatening to their home, marriage, and romance as those blazing paper sticks. “No accidents of fire however ensued,” he recorded of the literal fireworks.