John Quincy Adams Read Free Page A

sister Nabby, was dying from cancer, and as Billy and Kitty prepared to leave for America, the Adamses’ one-year-old, Louisa Catherine, came down with dysentery. A common disease in St. Petersburg, it gripped the baby in convulsions, fever, and dehydration for two months—then claimed her life.
    â€œAt twenty-five minutes past one this morning,” John Quincy sobbed over his diary on September 15, “expired my daughter Louisa Catherine, as lovely an infant as ever breathed the air of heaven.” 7 Louisa was out of the room when the baby died, but having nursed her daughter for nearly two months, she had spent her last emotions and, according to John Quincy, “received the shock with fortitude and resignation.” Two days later, he and his nephew accompanied the baby’s diminutive coffin to the
graveyard of the Anglican church, where John Quincy “saw her deposited in her last earthly mansion.” Louisa had caught a bad cold and was too sick to accompany her husband, who returned home in a state of near collapse. He tried to make sense of his loss, to explain the inexplicable:
    Perhaps an affectionate parent praying only for the happy existence of his child could wish no better for it than that it might be transported to the abodes of blessedness before it has lived to endure the pangs and sorrows inseparable from existence in the body. As life is the gift of God . . . it is our duty to be grateful for it. . . . We ought perhaps be no less grateful for the death of a tenderly loved child than for its life. . . . Had it pleased God to prolong the life of my darling infant, to what miseries, distress and sufferings might she not have been referred? . . . In the bosom of her Father and her God, she has no more suffering to endure. 8
    By spring of 1812, the American embargo had combined with Napoléon’s embargo to cripple British foreign trade and domestic industrial production. Factories and mills shut down, unemployment rose, and food prices soared. British exports dropped by one-third, and employers and workers united in demanding that Parliament restore good relations with the United States by ending depredations against American ships. On June 23, Parliament agreed. The Americans had at last won their long-running conflict with Britain’s parliament.
    But the victory came too late.
    It took a month or more for messages to cross the Atlantic, and unaware of Parliament’s decision, President Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain, citing impressment, the blockade of American ports, seizure of American ships, and incitement of Indians on the frontier as his reasons. On June 4, after three days of debate, the House agreed; the Senate followed suit two weeks later. Not knowing that the British had sued for peace, American troops charged into Canada along three fronts in northern New York: at the Saint Lawrence River, at Niagara in western New York, and farther west at the Detroit River.

    Just as American troops were invading Canada, war erupted in Europe when Napoléon ordered his 450,000-man Grande Armée into Russia. With Britain’s fleet in control of the Baltic Sea, Russian forces blocked the paths to St. Petersburg, funneling French troops westward onto the Russian steppes. Within weeks, the French had overrun Minsk and reached Smolensk—almost without firing a shot. After a fierce battle at Borodino, Russian troops retreated to Moscow, and after the civilian population had fled, the soldiers set the city afire, leaving nothing but smoldering ashes for the French army to plunder when it marched in on September 14.
    Only an occasional echo of battlefield explosions reached St. Petersburg, but the war nonetheless brought diplomatic activity to a halt and left John Quincy with almost nothing to do. Even the czar had left—to be with his generals at the front. John Quincy managed to score a last-minute diplomatic triumph, however, by coaxing the czar