Pierre Berton's War of 1812 (101 page)

All three are distinguished public servants, but none more distinguished than the leader of the delegation, John Quincy Adams, an old Russia hand who has been Minister Plenipotentiary here in
St. Petersburg since 1809. Son of the second president of his country, a former senator, he has only recently turned down a confirmed appointment to the Supreme Court.

See him now, standing rigidly beneath the vaulted dome (for, as one of his colleagues has ruefully observed, no one sits down in a Russian church)—a short, stout figure of forty-six, the humourless face as chilly as the Russian winter, the high, bald pate gleaming like polished marble. If he is impatient with the interminable ceremony he gives no sign; yet for Adams this is time pirated from intellectual inquiry. He begrudges every wasted moment, does his best to stay out of society’s grasp, rises before six, beds down early, feels a sense of overpowering guilt if he cannot spend at least five hours daily in reading and study. He gobbles up everything: science, philosophy, the classics, the Bible. No night passes in which he does not set out the minutiae of the day in a voluminous journal. In this exhaustive work every official gesture is recorded along with his own reading and observations—everything save his deepest, most intimate emotions. Gazing at the sky one frosty November night in 1813, he observes a constellation that he cannot identify, marks down the position on a slip of paper, leafs through Lalande’s
Astronomy
, discovers to his discomfiture that it is the constellation Orion—one familiar to every schoolboy.
Mortification!
To be ignorant of something he should have known thirty years before! He must, of course, record his own humiliation in his journal: “I am ashamed at my age,” he writes, “to be thus to seek for the very first elements of practical astronomy.”

To James Ashton Bayard, standing next to him, Adams is the coldest of fish: “He has little talent for society and does [not] appear to enjoy it. His address is singularly cold and repulsive. His manners are harsh and you seldom perceive the least effort to please anyone.” These first impressions, expressed a few days after his initial encounter with Adams, have hardened during the ensuing months, exacerbated no doubt by Bayard’s own ill health (a concomitant of the wretched Russian weather) and his increasing homesickness.

As senators, Bayard and Adams were political opponents and, in a sense, still are. Bayard, a Federalist, was originally opposed to the
war but, unlike some of his colleagues, supported the government once the declaration was made. He knows that the war—“a hopeless project”—has been tearing his country apart and feels it his solemn duty “not to refuse to the government any means in my power which could aid in extricating the Country from its embarrassments.” Of the three envoys he is the least sophisticated—a tall, greying senator from Delaware, ill at ease in court circles, unable to make small talk in diplomatic French, unaccustomed to the finger-bowl etiquette of multi-course banquets.

The third member of the trio, Albert Gallatin, is Bayard’s direct opposite, an alert and cultured Genevan who has served his adopted country as Secretary of the Treasury for almost thirteen years. He is fluent in French, witty, and has no trouble fitting into the Russian social routine, which, beginning as it does at two in the afternoon and ending at two or three the following morning, encourages the kind of late rising that is anathema to Bayard and Adams. Yet Gallatin is no lie-abed. Of the three, his mind is the sharpest, his diplomatic talents the most polished. He is about to turn fifty-three, a swarthy, compact figure with a flat, forthright face and a prominent nose. Nor has his career reached its peak: more than three decades of public service lie before him.

Gallatin and Bayard share apartments in the same building—the best rooms in the city—but each man keeps to himself, the two scarcely speaking except on official business, each going his own way in a separate carriage. On this Christmas night, with the
Te Deum
finally at an end, Bayard makes his way to Adams’s quarters to pour out his resentment at his fellow lodger, who he imagines has adopted a superior air toward him. Gallatin, at the moment, is in a curious position. He has only recently learned that the Senate has refused to ratify his appointment as envoy. Though the Russians continue to treat him as a diplomat, he is, in fact, only a private citizen. Bayard does not trust him. He is convinced that Gallatin, on his return to Washington, will blame the failure of the peace negotiations on the Senate’s rejection.

Adams does not yet know it, but Bayard has been making equally
unkind remarks about him, Adams, in private. After six months in the Russian capital, Bayard is at the end of his tether. At first it was all very novel, very entrancing. The orphan boy from Philadelphia, sought out with his colleagues for special treatment by his Russian hosts (“a rare act of civility not heretofore experienced by any Foreigner”), was subjected to a glittering circuit of architectural wonders—palace after palace, church after church, museum after museum. There were country weekends in dazzling châteaux, theatre parties, operas, recitals, and, above all, banquets where under glistening chandeliers he rubbed shoulders with dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, princes and princesses, never at ease with the gold and silver plate, never certain of which arm to offer to what lady. He quickly tired of all this magnificence: “There is nothing so homely in my own Country, the sight of which would not please me better.…”

As Bayard’s exile lengthened, the social circus palled the more. The waters of the Neva brought on attacks of diarrhea. The Russian women began to look unattractive. Their dress he found tasteless, their dinners laborious; the weather was “gloomy and detestable” and the people “as cold as their climate in its most frosty season.”

For Gallatin, who moves easily among the nobility—staying for supper at the homes of his hosts, playing endless games of Boston, strolling through the gardens with the ladies, joking in his exquisite French—the long wait is just as frustrating. He has not come here to socialize but to try to end a war that neither side wants to continue.

Yet it does continue, for there is the matter of national honour. The Americans have no intention of asking the British to discuss peace terms; they must never be seen to come on bended knee! On the contrary, they hope to get a good deal more out of the peace agreement than they originally expected. James Monroe, the American Secretary of State, believes that the United States can annex all or most of Canada as it has recently acquired Louisiana. It would be, he argues, in Great Britain’s best interests because she would no longer have to bear the expense of supporting her North American colonies. The Americans, in fact, are prepared to offer advantages in trade as part of the bargain.

But all this depends on the British accepting the mediation that Alexander I, Emperor of Russia, has happily extended. There is the rub. It has long been obvious to the three envoys that the British have no intention of accepting the offer—have, indeed, officially rejected it. From the British point of view, the war in North America is a family quarrel to be settled directly between the belligerents without the interference of a foreign potentate. The Americans have already been made aware of this, but until they hear
officially
—from the Tsar himself—it would be a breach of protocol to leave the country, a rebuff to a friendly nation. And so the war goes on; men die in the mud of Crysler’s Farm and the swamps of Châteauguay; women and children shiver, homeless, in the snows of Newark and Buffalo; farm boys cough out their lives in the tattered tents of French Mills.

The situation is complicated by the war in Europe, the difficulty and slowness of communication, the byzantine manoeuvrings of the Russian court, and the Emperor’s own vain, wistful fancy that, in the end, the British may come round. The envoys have never met Alexander; he is hundreds of miles away, his days fully occupied with the problem of Napoleon. Their only contact with the Russian Emperor is through his foreign minister, the courtly Count Romanzoff, who is, unfortunately, so out of favour with his royal master that he is not always aware of what is going on.

The envoys have been trapped in the sunless Russian capital since July. Now it is January and still no word from the Tsar of all the Russias—a sign of poor Romanzoff’s fall from grace. The delay is maddening. A letter takes two months to reach Washington; that means a four-month hiatus before any report can be acknowledged. News of the war is obtained tardily from the English newspapers. In the American view, these are dreadfully biased, although it has not been possible to disguise the magnitude of Barclay’s defeat on Lake Erie. But the Americans have yet to learn of Wilkinson’s disastrous attempt on Montreal or of the attacks along the Niagara frontier.

Gallatin, who now considers himself a private citizen no longer bound by official etiquette, is determined to leave as soon as possible. Bayard wants to leave with him—an intention that offends
Adams’s sense of protocol. Adams is also irked to learn that the pair are planning to visit the Emperor Alexander at Frankfurt and then proceed to London, apparently to sound out the British on the subject of direct peace talks. The fact that the two have concocted the plan behind his back annoys him almost as much as the plan itself. For Adams is convinced that neither man can do any good by going to England “unless our Government has totally changed its principles.”

The rock on which any peace negotiations must founder, in Adams’s view, is the matter of impressment. The forcible seizure of British deserters from American ships on the high seas is the only remaining reason for this savage border war. Madison has explicitly told his envoys that the question of impressment cannot be set aside. But the British have flatly announced that they will refuse to discuss it. After their weary internment in the Russian capital, both Gallatin and Bayard have softened on the matter. Their inclination now is to yield; it seems the only way peace can be obtained.

Meanwhile, Adams helps Bayard prepare a note to Count Romanzoff that will allow him to leave the country without creating an international incident. He is determined to depart on the twenty-first—six months to the day after his arrival. Delicate negotiations follow; more “notes”—the mortar of diplomacy—are exchanged. On the eighteenth a note arrives from the Count indicating that if Bayard sends another note asking for an audience of leave, he can immediately quit Russia. “No words can express my joy,” he scribbles in his diary. Off goes the note on the twentieth. Back comes another on the twenty-first: the Empress Mother will receive him on the twenty-third.

On that day, a Sunday, the dowager receives him. They discuss the war, agree on the hope that it will not last long.
We know you are against the war
, the Empress murmurs … 
and that you should be glad of
. He presses his lips to her wrinkled paw, bows his way out, moves on to the apartments of the Grand Dukes Nicholas and Michael and the Grand Duchess Ann, nibbles at their outstretched knuckles. Finally, he is free.

The following day, a little procession takes off for the west—Bayard in a four-horse calèche, Gallatin in a four-horse carriage, six servants bringing up the rear in a six-horse landau. Somehow Gallatin’s carriage becomes separated on leaving the city, runs into a snowbank, and is stalled for several hours. Bayard trots on. It will be May, and the start of a new campaign along the embattled border, before the two reach London.

John Quincy Adams is relieved to see the last of them. In his view, three heads are not better than one. The endless, niggling arguments over the precise phrasing of diplomatic notes is such that one took an entire week to compose; Adams is convinced that he could have done it alone in two hours. “In the multitude of counsellors there is safety,” he has noted, “but there is not despatch.” It is a portent of things to come.

In the frustrating months of waiting, Adams, the clear thinker, the scientific dabbler, the cool logician, has come perilously close to paranoia, half-convinced that his two colleagues, who make a habit of going directly to Count Romanzoff, are conspiring behind his back, trying to manoeuvre him out of the peace negotiations—a suspicion reinforced by their joint trip to London. Now a few days after their departure, the consul, Levitt Harris, comes to him to report what Bayard has been saying behind his back. The alleged remarks are scarcely damaging, but they fuel Adams’s own suspicions that Bayard has also been turning Gallatin against him. He tells Harris that he hopes “never again to be placed in relations which would make it necessary to associate with Mr. Bayard.” It is a vain fancy. When peace negotiations finally begin the two men will find themselves colleagues once more. But many months will pass and much blood be spilled before that becomes a reality.

YORK, UPPER CANADA, FEBRUARY 15, 1814

In the charred capital, His Honour, the President of the Legislative Council and Administrator of the Province, is pleased to open the session of both houses with what the official proceedings will describe
(as always) as “a most gracious speech.” The setting is new—Jordan’s Hotel and Tavern must do duty as a public edifice now that the Parliament Buildings lie in ashes—and so is the President himself, who has come down from Kingston for the occasion.

He is Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond, an unknown quantity to the handful of legislators assembled to hear him (their number depleted by capture and disaffection). They know, of course, that he is a Canadian, the first native-born general officer to take command of both the army and the civil government. He is forty-two, a New Brunswicker who has been a soldier since the age of seventeen. He must have military talent: he rose from lieutenant to colonel in just three years. His regiment, the famous 8th or King’s, saw bloody action in Holland and continued to distinguish itself under its Canadian leader in the West Indies, the Mediterranean, and Egypt.

Since 1811, Drummond has been Sir George Prevost’s second-in-command in Canada. Clearly he is made of sterner stuff than the despised Sheaffe or the easy-going De Rottenburg. But is he another Brock? He is certainly as handsome as Brock—with his angular, chiselled face, his thin aristocratic nose, and his dark, tight curls. (Does he use a curling iron in the fashion of the time?) John Strachan, the armchair general, who is not a member of the legislature but whose long shadow hangs over it, has reservations. Drummond, Strachan finds, is an excellent man “and a very superior private character,” but somehow he lacks Brock’s panache. “He seems to be destitute of that military fire and vigour of decision which the principal commander of this country must possess in order to preserve it.…”