If Adams had consciously intrigued for a rupture between France and Russia, he could have invented no means so effective as to cause the Czar’s interference with Napoleon’s control of Denmark; but Adams’s favor was far from ending there. The winter of 1809–1810 passed without serious incident, but when spring came and the Baltic opened, the struggle between France and the United States at St. Petersburg began in earnest. Adams found himself a person of much consequence. The French ambassador, Caulaincourt, possessed every advantage that Napoleon and Nature could give him. Handsome, winning, and in all ways personally agreeable to the Czar, master of an establishment more splendid in its display than had been before known even at the splendid court of St. Petersburg, he enjoyed the privilege, always attached to ambassadors, of transacting business directly with the Czar; while the American minister, of a lower diplomatic grade, far too poor to enter upon the most modest social rivalry, labored under the diplomatic inferiority of having to transact business only through the worse than neutral medium of Roumanzoff. Caulaincourt made his demands and urged his arguments in the secrecy that surrounded the personal relation of the two Emperors, while Adams could not even learn, except indirectly after much time, what Caulaincourt was doing or what arguments he used. Already in April, 1810, Adams reported[323] to his Government that the commercial dispute threatened a rupture between France and Russia. On one hand, Napoleon’s measures would prove ineffectual if Russia admitted neutral vessels, carrying as they would cargoes more or less to the advantage of England; on the other, Russia must become avowedly bankrupt if denied exports and restricted to imports of French luxuries, such as silks and champagnes, to be paid in specie. Russia, at war with Turkey and compelled to maintain an immense army with a depreciated currency, must have foreign trade or perish. Napoleon wanted nothing better than to cripple Russia as well as England, and was not disposed to relax his system for the benefit of Russian military strength. During the summer of 1810 he redoubled his vigilance on the Baltic. Large numbers of vessels, either neutral or pretending to be neutral, entered the Baltic under the protection of the British fleet. Napoleon sent orders that no such vessels should be admitted. June 15 Denmark issued an ordinance prohibiting its ports to all American vessels of every description, and August 3 another to the same effect for the Duchy of Holstein. July 19 a similar ordinance was published by Prussia, and July 29 Mecklenburg followed the example. The same demand came from Caulaincourt to the Czar, and the French ambassador pressed it without intermission and without disguising the dangers which it involved to the peace of Europe. Alexander’s reply never varied.