John Quincy Adams Read Free Page B

to give America’s Robert Fulton “the privilege for the term of fifteen years” to build and sail steamboats between St. Petersburg and Kronstadt and along navigable Russian rivers whenever the war permitted. 9
    Without food or other resources in Moscow for the approaching winter, the French had to retreat. On October 19, however, swarms of mounted Cossacks thwarted the French about-face with fierce hit-and-run attacks. Darting in and out of snow gusts like ghosts, the Cossacks slaughtered French troops at will and left every farm and village along the way in ashes, without a grain of wheat, stick of wood, or shred of canvas to nourish, warm, or shelter a Frenchman. The “scorched earth” strategy left the French nothing to harvest but cold, hunger, and death. With surviving French troops in full flight, Napoléon abandoned them on December 3 and fled to Paris. Only about 20,000 of his half million troops survived their long retreat. John Quincy described the disaster to his mother:
    Of the immense host with which he [Napoléon] invaded Russia, nine-tenths at least are prisoners or food for worms. They have been surrendering by ten thousands at a time, and at this moment there are at least one hundred and fifty thousand of them in the power of Emperor Alexander.
From Moscow to Prussia, eight hundred miles of road have been strewed with French artillery, baggage wagons, ammunition chests, dead and dying men . . . pursued by three large regular armies of a most embittered and exasperated enemy and by an almost numberless militia of peasants, stung by the destruction of their harvests and cottages. . . . It has become a sort of by-word among the common people here that the two Russian generals who have conquered Napoléon and all his marshals are General Famine and General Frost. 10
    The slaughter of the French army convinced John Quincy more than ever of the wisdom of America’s policy “not to involve ourselves in the inextricable labyrinth of European politics and revolutions. The final issue . . . is not yet completely ascertained, but there is no longer a doubt that it must be disastrous in the highest degree to France.” 11
    Although they lacked the magnitude of the French invasion of Russia, American incursions into Canada in 1812 proved just as futile. In the West, the British forced 2,200 American troops to surrender without firing a shot in Detroit, ceding control of Lake Erie and the entire Michigan Territory to the British. To the east, some six hundred American troops in western New York crossed into Canada and seized the heights above the Niagara River, only to face a devastating counterattack by 1,000 crack British troops, who forced the American commander to send for help. New York militiamen, however, refused to cross into Canada, saying their terms of service required them to defend only New York State and no other states or foreign territories. As the British savaged the little American legion, survivors fled back into New York.
    Farther to the east, just north of Lake Champlain, the largest of the three American forces faced similar humiliation when another group of New York militiamen refused to cross into foreign territory to the north.
    Out at sea, America’s little navy—twelve fast and highly maneuverable ships—had better results. The forty-four-gun frigate Constitution demolished Britain’s thirty-eight-gun Guerrière off the coast of Nova Scotia in only thirty minutes, killing seventy-nine British sailors and losing only
fourteen of her own. Other American ships humiliated Britain’s navy off the coasts of Virginia and Brazil. Captain Stephen Decatur’s United States captured a thirty-eight-gun British frigate near the Madeira Islands off the African coast and brought her all the way back across the Atlantic Ocean to New London, Connecticut, as a prize of war. Complementing the tiny American navy were five hundred privateers, which