American Phoenix, Pt. 2 of 6, Goodbye, Boston Birches, #Russia
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.
Goodbye, Boston Birches
John Quincy Adams handled all the arrangements for their voyage to St. Petersburg, including packing and cataloging crates and crates of books, transferring his law cases to his brother Thomas, settling his finances, delivering his last lecture, resigning from Harvard, and drawing up his final will and testament.
“Every preparation was made without the slightest consultation with me,” she wrote in her diary.
Worst of all, John made the most important decision affecting her life and their marriage: he chose to leave their oldest boys behind in Boston with his parents.
“And even the disposal of my children and my sister was fixed without my knowledge until it was too late to change,” Louisa lamented over the human earthquake breaking up her family.
The plan was as carved in stone as an epitaph on a grave—Louisa’s. At least that’s how it felt to her.
The decision came just two weeks before their departure. On July 22 Abigail Adams dined with John Quincy in Boston. John Quincy took George with him so the youngster could return with his grandmother to Peacefield, the family homestead in Quincy. His father had named this estate Peacefield in 1796 as a reminder of the peace between England and America that he’d helped broker to end the Revolutionary War in 1783.
With such a name, Peacefield was a continual reminder of John Adams’s unsurpassable legacy. The younger John had been with his grandparents since July 4. Perhaps assuming that her boys would feel trapped by the ship on such a long ocean voyage, Louisa probably didn’t mind if they spent a few more days with their grandparents at the farm. The next day Adams and his father visited a local teacher, who agreed to educate George. Then he paid
Aunt Cranch and Uncle Cranch to board his sons at their nearby home. The senior Adams had known Richard Cranch for years. He attended Cranch’s wedding to Mary Smith in 1762. John later courted Mary’s young sister, Abigail, and married her in 1764. Because Abigail had maintained a close relationship with her sister, John Quincy knew his sons would be in good hands.
Thus, the Adams men implemented the plan. The older boys would stay behind in America under the care of their grandparents and great-aunt and great-uncle, while Louisa and toddler Charles accompanied Minister Adams to Russia.
“Judge Adams was commissioned to inform me of all this as it admitted of no change,” she documented of her brother-in-law’s role in giving her the news.
No matter the customs of the day dictating male-female decision making, Louisa felt betrayed. Perhaps she saw her marriage differently. Hadn’t he chosen the Genesis model to leave his family and cleave to her? Out of courtesy to her and her role as mother, why didn’t he consult her? If he loved her, why didn’t he tell her instead of sending Thomas? Was he cold? Cowardly? Or was his heart too sensitive to be the one to break the news to her?
Louisa pleaded. As in the case of death, no amount of mourning could change the outcome. Without recourse, legal or otherwise, she quickly descended into depression.
“O it was too hard! Not a soul entered into my feelings and all laughed to scorn my suffering at crying out that it was affectation.” Affectation means “pretension” or “pretending.”
How dare they insinuate her reaction was an act of theatrical emotion! She was experiencing the genuine heartache of a mother losing her children and her God-given responsibility to raise them. The Adams men knew of her previous losses. She was no Shakespeare. She was not drafting a drama or acting out a part but merely pouring out her heart.
She also knew that her in-laws had made similar sacrifices. John and Abigail had lived apart for most of the Revolutionary War. Abigail had cared for four children in Massachusetts while he served in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and later abroad.
The senior Adams knew all too well the temptations of European court life. He had witnessed the ways of the French court when he lobbied for the American cause. Perhaps forgetting the academic education John Quincy had received in Paris, he wanted to shield his grandsons from the depraved morals of similar circles. Or maybe the old man was simply prioritizing his lineage’s survival. If something happened to John, Louisa, and Charles on their travels, then at least the Adams line would continue through the male heirs left behind.
“On the 4 of August we sailed for Boston. I having been taken to Quincy to see my two boys and not being permitted to speak with the old gentleman alone, lest I should excite his pity and he allow me to take my boys with me.”
Louisa was permitted to say good-bye to her sons but not to her father-in-law. He couldn’t bear to hear the cracking of her voice as she tried to reassure George and John that she loved them. He couldn’t watch the torrent of tears streaming from her doe-like eyes. Her journal might have given him a heart attack, had he been privileged enough to read it.
“Oh this agony of agonies! Can ambition repay such sacrifices? Never!!” she wrote.
Her sons would grow tall and strong, like the birches of Boston, in her absence. As she bid adieu to America, Louisa’s paper diary proved her safest refuge for weeping. She wrote with abandon, as if the pages were her best friend. And they were. Here she felt safe to pour out her deepest feelings, her dark thoughts. No matter that others thought the choice was logical; she understandably lacked hope for her future and her sons.
“And from that hour to the end of time life to me will be a succession of miseries only to cease with existence,” she wrote. No reasonable arguments could erase reality. Louisa was being separated from her children against her will—a heartbreaking way to start a dangerous journey into the unknown.
With the conspiracy unraveled and the plan fixed, a captive Mrs. Adams and her husband bid adieu to America on August 5, 1809. Closing the door of their home at Frog Lane and Nassau Street, they traveled by carriage a little more than two miles to Gray’s Wharf, owned by William Gray. There they boarded the Horace, one of Gray’s merchant vessels assigned to take them all the way to St. Petersburg. Built in Durham, New Hampshire, in 1800, the Horace weighed 382 tons. They departed in this three-mast, square-sailed boat just as the church bells rang at one o’clock in the afternoon.
John feared they had already left too late. After Gray told him the waters leading to St. Petersburg could freeze as early as October, Adams decided to embark no later than the end of July. Several logistical delays stalled their departure. Finally, they had all they needed to set sail by August 5.
Fanfare followed them from the wharf. Ships in the Navy Yard saluted them. A garrison from Fort Independence marched and paraded as they passed. When the captain of a revenue cutter saw them, he sent an officer in a rowboat to extend well wishes for a safe intercontinental journey.
The crew of the six-gun Horace returned these salutes. Guided by fair wind supported by fresh breezes, they couldn’t have asked for a better bon voyage as they left the bonds and birch trees of Boston and sailed toward a Russian destination.
No sooner did she step onto the deck’s wooden planks than Louisa regretted leaving her oldest boys behind. Guilt consumed her faster than seasickness.
“A man can take care of himself—And if he abandons one part of his family he soon learns that he might as well leave them all—I do not mean to suggest the smallest reproach—It was thought right and judicious by wiser heads than mine but I alone suffered the penalty—They are known only to God,” Louisa recorded of her heartache.
This was her way of forgiving her father-in-law and husband, or at least an attempt at it.
Though he often hid his passions from public view, Adams was not indifferent to leaving his children behind; far from it.
“It is with a deep sense of the stormy and dangerous career upon which I enter; of the heavy responsibility that will press upon it, and of the unpromising prospect which it presents in perspective,” he wrote in his diary on July 5, 1809, after sending his acceptance letter to President Madison.
“My personal motives for staying at home are of the strongest kind; the age of my parents, and of the infancy of my children, both urge to the same result,” he reflected on why he ought to turn down the appointment.
Nevertheless, he could not say no to his country’s call. Because he believed the president’s motive was for the “welfare of the whole union,” he intended to devote all his powers to earning Madison’s trust.
He bade good-bye to his sons in a separate visit at his parents’ home.
Though he claimed he was too busy making preparations—and his diary is full of the many details he finalized before leaving—he may have hidden the truth from his journal. Knowing they were not unified in this decision, he likely couldn’t bear to accompany Louisa to Quincy and say good-bye together.
Worrying that they might not survive the voyage, he also implored “the blessings of Almighty God, upon this my undertaking . . . and prepared alike for whatever event his Providence destines for its termination.”
John Quincy, Louisa, and Charles were not the only players on this nautical stage set. Joining them was Catherine, nicknamed Kitty. The presence of Kitty, too, was forced upon Louisa. Of the seven daughters and one son in the Johnson clan, Louisa was second oldest; Kitty, the third youngest.
In preparing for the voyage, John asked Thomas for advice on what to do about his sister-in-law: “I also enquired of him if Catherine Johnson should not go with us.”
Thomas and John’s sister, Nabby, had accompanied their mother to England and France years earlier in 1784. Thomas agreed that Louisa would benefit from the company of an American female companion. Louisa most assuredly loved Kitty, but she did not want to parent her. With their father deceased and their mother impoverished, Kitty needed Louisa to take care of her. Thus, societal customs thrust Mrs. Adams into a chaperone for a very flirtatious woman in her early twenties on a ship filled with single men.
As planned from the beginning, nephew William Smith served as John’s secretary. Nine other men applied or inquired on behalf of a son or other male relative for the position of secretary to the new minister to Russia. While keeping his outer reserve in check, John was flattered by the attention.
Everyone wanted to accompany him to St. Petersburg except one person— his wife.
Though he couldn’t solve that problem, he found a way to satisfy the demand and fill a need. With permission from the secretary of state, he allowed a few of these men, those with the greatest character and loyalty to country, to go as attachés. John made sure, however, that they would not drain the US Treasury.
He informed them: “[T]hey should go altogether at their own expense and occasion no charge to the government.”
Three agreed: Francis Gray, Alexander Everett, and John Spear Smith.
Francis was Mr. Gray’s son. The richest man in America at the time, Gray owned the Horace among thirty or more ships. He was one of the few who had stood by Adams when he resigned in defeat from the Senate. He trusted John so much that he was willing to send his son with him to Russia. There Francis could see the Baltic trade world with his own eyes and return to Boston to steer the family business.
A recent graduate, Everett had been studying law under John’s tutelage at his Boston law office. Joining them later and traveling separately was John Spear Smith, nephew of secretary of state Robert Smith. Adams also brought with him two servants: Nelson, a free black domestic from Trinidad, and Martha Godfrey, Louisa’s chambermaid.
“Our voyage was very tedious—All but Mr. Adams and Mr. Smith very sick and as usual I having the whole care of the child, who suffered as much as any of us,” Louisa wrote from her nautical prison somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean.
The rolling of the boat as it rocked in the waves and winds was too much. At first the most common smell aboard ship was vomit, whose putrid fumes permeated their cabins as motion sickness got the better of them. No matter the delightful sighting of dolphins or the abundant catch of cod off the coast of Newfoundland—seasickness abounded.
Louisa became seasick the first time she traveled by ship with her husband. Leaving London in 1797 a few months after their wedding, the newlyweds crossed the North Sea toward the mouth of the Elbe River on their journey to Berlin, where Adams was to be a diplomatic minister. Back then she had an added excuse for her nausea; she was pregnant. Many disappointments had come since, but some things remained as constant as the stars. No matter her condition, beginning an ocean voyage still made her seasick; John always had the stomach of a seasoned sailor.
“I scarcely perceive that we are at sea,” John wrote.
Such thoughts were a sharp contrast to his wife’s. Their opinions were so opposite, they seemed to be taking different trips. To him, the open ocean was an oasis. He spent his days reading and scouring sermons, the Bible, and books on geography and fish.
“There is much time for study and meditation,” he observed. “The rest of mankind seem to be inhabitants of another planet.”
John played cards and daily recorded the temperature, latitude, and longitude as they crossed the Atlantic toward Scotland. He loved his thermometer so much that he called it his “amusement.” But he longed for more. He decided a celestial globe would have been an “agreeable companion” for such a voyage. Dating from ancient Greece, celestial globes depicted stars and constellations as they appear in the sky. These decorative ornaments were also useful for astronomical calculations.
What he really needed was a device to heal his wife’s heart and the foresight to turn around and take his boys with him.
In his journal John called the enterprise before him “perhaps the most important of any that I have ever in the course of my life been engaged in.”
He again implored the blessings of Providence on his mission, for the benefit of his country and family.
While John vanished into his books, an unwell, headache-prone Louisa poured herself into caring for Charles. Both were sick night and day. How did a two-year-old react to seasickness? Vomiting is unpleasant to anyone, but at least an adult knows what’s going on. Unlike a baby who spits up on occasion, a two-year-old is aware that something awful, uncomfortable, and frightening is happening.
As ill as her son was, Louisa was grateful just to be able to hug him. He was the last child she had.
“Broken hearted miserable, alone in every feeling; my boy was my only comfort,” she reflected.
Louisa carried one hope: this venture would be a one-act or two-act play at the most.
“I had thought that one year would have been the extent of my stay,” she later wrote.
If all went well and Russia’s emperor accepted her husband’s credentials, then she would remove her costume as a diplomat’s wife and return home in year to give a thousand kisses to George and John.
While hope of reunion kept Louisa sane, John focused on the immediate outlook. Though mindful of the difficulties of sea travel, he basked in the distinctive difference from this journey and the ocean voyages he undertook during the height of the American Revolution. Concluding that England had revoked its policies and now recognized American trade rights after recent negotiations, President Madison had recently reopened trade with England.
By June 1809 more than six hundred American merchant ships had embarked for Europe.
“The dangers of war . . . do not threaten us now,” John wrote of the policy change.
So he thought.
Wind direction is critical for a sailing ship’s success. Wonderful weather followed the Horace from Boston across the Atlantic, around Scotland, and into the North Sea. Their voyage progressed without interruption until they reached the Norwegian coast on September 17, 1809.
Although the day had started with a picturesque panorama of steep, rugged mountains, Louisa noticed they hadn’t passed a vessel since leaving the previous port. The sea was empty of ships. She soon discovered the reason when a tempest rolled in and stole the scenic show.
With shark-like speed, a storm seized the Horace and shook its sails. Clouds hovered. Heavy winds blew the ship across the water. Louisa described the swell or rising waves as “frightful.” The water seemed to climb as high as Norway’s nearby mountains before suddenly toppling the ship’s sides.
“It was dusk, the wind blowing in squalls like a gale with a very heavy sea,” Louisa recorded.
How did she keep Charles calm during the tempest and lightning flashes? This situation wasn’t pretend. These storms were real. While tightly hugging Charles, Louisa thought continually of the boys she had abandoned.
“If it was to do again nothing on earth could induce me to make such a sacrifice and my conviction is that if domestic separation is absolutely necessary, cling as a mother to those innocent and helpless creatures whom God himself has given to your charge.”
In the midst of this turbulence, she heard an explosion—cannon fire from a nearby brig. Captain Beckford responded by ordering his crew to hoist the colors. Within an hour the firing brig was within signaling distance and hailed the Horace. Beckford answered their questions with customary signals. The brig’s commander doubted that they hailed from Boston and were traveling to St. Petersburg on a diplomatic voyage. He twice signaled the Horace to send
Beckford to his ship. With no response, he reinforced his order by hurling a musket ball into the Horace’s side.
Beckford was hot. The brig had yet to show her colors. Such arrogance! He rightly feared his rowboat wouldn’t survive the storm’s swell. Ordering him to row to the brig was akin to expecting a modern skydiver to jump out of a plane in low visibility with twenty-mile-an-hour or stronger winds. Both are death wishes.
Not wanting a fight, Beckford and four sailors boarded the small boat and began rowing toward the brig. Within ten minutes they realized they couldn’t reach it and doubted they could safely return to the Horace. The rowboat was half full of water.
Suddenly a large wave crashed over the rowboat’s side. Louisa trembled as she heard them cry out that they “could not live.”