John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  John Quincy left St. Petersburg on October 30, arriving in Stockholm three weeks later. He had a delightful time in the Swedish capital, staying out at masked balls until six in the morning, playing cards, dining with diplomatic friends of his father’s, paying court to attractive women. He had grown so accustomed to speaking French that he was now writing his diary in French. Though his father was urging him to come to Holland, the young man took a leisurely trip southward through Denmark and Germany. Perhaps he was hugely relieved to have escaped from his confinement in Russia. Beyond that, for the first time he was tasting the joys of adult life—with no nagging parents nearby. This was precisely what Abigail feared. But John Quincy was made of stern stuff; he made it through the courts of northern Europe without committing an indiscretion.

  John Quincy reached the Hague in April 1783, but his father was then in Paris. The boy remained in Holland, studying with a new tutor, Charles William Frederick Dumas, a family friend. His father sent a volley of letters, with the usual admonitions: improve your handwriting, keep up your journal, work on your Latin and Greek, write to your family, never be too wise to ask a question. Abigail wrote complaining that her son appeared to have forgotten about her existence: “Has the cold northern region frozen up that Quick and Lively imagination which used to give such pleasure to your Friends?” (This when she thought he was still in Russia.) The fact is that he didn’t write her very often, perhaps because he didn’t care for the lessons in comportment; on the other hand, he wrote much less frequently to Nabby, whom he adored. Life in the great capitals of Europe was a lot busier than it was on the farm in Braintree, and between one thing and another he didn’t find much time to write. But Abigail’s needling finally hit home, and John Quincy wrote back to say, “I must beg your pardon for having scratch’d out of your letter the words to be forgotten by my son, for I could not bear to think that such an idea should ever have entered the mind of my ever honoured mamma.” He was genuinely horrified at the accusation; never, throughout his life, would John Quincy Adams speak of either of his parents with anything save love and devotion.

  In the fall of 1782, John Adams had joined John Jay and Benjamin Franklin in Paris to negotiate the termination of the war with Great Britain. At the end of November they had reached an agreement that doubled the size of the infant nation, guaranteed navigation on the Mississippi and fishing rights on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland, and, above all, contained the stipulation that launched America into the world: “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States . . . to be free, sovereign, and independent states.” In the United States, the Treaty of Paris was deemed a tremendous victory. John Quincy Adams, who was himself to become America’s leading diplomat, always held out the treaty as a standard to judge himself by—just as his father’s career would be the standard by which he judged his own.

  John Adams remained in Paris in the ensuing months in order to sign the final version of the agreement. He rejoined his son in the Hague in July 1783 and returned with him to Paris the following month. John Quincy was now his father’s secretary and confidante. John wrote to Abigail to report, “He is grown a man in understanding and in stature as well”—though, at five foot seven, he was no taller than his father, who might have considered that quite tall enough. John Quincy had arrived just in time, for in September his father fell ill with a fever, and John Thaxter, who had been his constant companion, finally left for America. Adams’ doctor advised him to move out of the city for his health.

  In September, father and son removed to a grand if somewhat decayed villa in Auteuil, at the opposite end of the Bois de Boulogne from Passy, their former neighborhood. Very much the man about town, John Quincy frequented the theater, visited art collections, dined with the leading diplomats in Paris, and held long talks with the learned abbés he had met through his father. He also found his first true chum. John Quincy may have been a rare bird, but in Peter Jay Munro he found one of the same feather. Munro, also sixteen, was in Paris serving as the private secretary to his uncle, John Jay, a leading revolutionary and now, like John Adams, one of the tiny cadre of America’s infant diplomatic service. Jay had been part of the negotiating team on the Treaty of Paris. He and Peter, his ward, lived at Franklin’s home in Passy, where the Adamses had been before them. Peter Jay Munro was quite possibly the only other young man in the world whose experience of life so closely approximated John Quincy’s. The two learned and worldly diplomatic aides often met at Franklin’s home. They read Samuel Johnson’s Life of Pope together. They got into scrapes, to which they referred only obliquely. “I beg you would let me know,” John Quincy wrote from London, “whether your uncle or aunt know any thing about a certain foolish affair that happened once between you and me. I have my reasons for asking—tho’ I hope they don’t for it was a business of which we ought both to be ashamed.”

  The Paris idyll ended when John Adams’ doctor suggested a trip to England to restore his health. In October the two traveled to Calais and boarded a ship for Dover. Neither father nor son had seen London before, though of course each had spent their lives reading about it and hearing about it. They received a private visit to Buckingham Palace; the Boston painter John Singleton Copley, who had moved to London, arranged for them to visit the House of Lords to hear King George speak at the opening of Parliament. Like any other first-time tourist, they visited the British Museum, the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, the Eton School, and the factory that made the famous Wedgwood ceramics and plate ware. Of course they went to the theater.

  John Quincy had promised to give a running account to his friend Munro, whom he sometimes jocularly addressed as “Dear Moron.” Soon after arriving he wrote to declare that he had just seen “that wonderful, wonderful, wonder of wonders, Mrs. Siddons,” the brightest star of the London stage. “She out Garrick’s Garrick, Sir, cent per cent.” John Quincy was half-joking; he added parenthetically that while he was in England he would talk like the English. He used the letters to try out a new rakish persona that would have appalled his mother. “I go pretty often to the Plays here,” he wrote, “because, if there was no other enticement, than this, you are sure to find a number of fine Women there, it would be enough for me, for a long time; every evening I went, I was in Love, with a new Object.”

  John Quincy was also harkening to a poetic muse that would preoccupy him, and sometimes vex him, for the rest of his life. Embarrassed about his authorship, he sent verses to Munro with the mock pretense that he had read them in a newspaper or heard them on the stage. He wrote barroom ditties and satires in the manner of Alexander Pope and even a bit of doggerel on the hot air balloon, a recent invention. But in a few of the poems, he dropped the cool pose of the flâneur and wrote about his heart, or, rather, his desire. One began:

  Oh love, thou tyrant of the breast,

  Thou hast deprived me of my rest,

  Oh thou hast changed me quite,

  I lay me down upon my bed

  Chloë comes straight into my head

  And keeps me ’wake all night.

  John Quincy dropped hints about his crushes, almost certainly unrequited: “Alas! Alas! I have left her. Heaven knows when I shall see her again.”

  John Quincy adored London, telling Munro that it was “as much superior to Paris, in beauty and convenience, as the Sun to the Moon”—wider boulevards, sidewalks, splendid shops. But years of patriotic education had inoculated him against the bug that turned so many American visitors to London or Paris into permanent expatriates. He wrote to his cousin Elizabeth Cranch to say, perhaps hyperbolically, that he could think of no worse punishment than “to be condemned to pass my life in Europe.” He wrote to a friend that “my country has over me an attractive power which I do not understand.” Of course it wasn’t so hard to understand, since he was traveling across England with the most ardent of patriots and receiving letters from his equally zealous mother. In one, Abigail congratulated him on the fine delineations of Russia he had made in his ow
n letters and added, “Let your observations, and comparisons produce in your mind, an abhorrence of Dominion, and Power, the Parent of Slavery ignorance and barbarism.” Behold the empires that lie in ruins.

  John Adams’ health was still fragile, and in December he and his son visited the resort of Bath, where his doctor had suggested he go as a restorative. While there, the elder Adams received a message from home reporting that the expenses of war had exhausted the loans he had secured in Amsterdam; America could no longer pay its bills. Adams would have to return to Holland. He was in no condition for an ice-bound passage northward, and he felt there was little chance of success. Nevertheless, as he wrote in his journal, “no man knows what he can bear until he tries,” a sentiment that might have been translated into Latin in order to decorate the family coat of arms.

  On January 5, father and son put out to sea in a violent squall. Blown off course, they finally made landfall on the desolate strand of a peninsula at the southern edge of Holland. The sole inhabitant they encountered informed the party that they had landed four to six miles from the nearest town, with no conveyance available for the trip. Sick, miserable, and frozen to the core, John Adams prepared himself to die. But his son bore him up, as he had on their first Atlantic crossing. “He was in fine spirits,” John Adams wrote in a reminiscence many years later; “his gaiety, activity, and attention to me encreased as difficulties multiplied.” The father had come to depend on the son, even as John Quincy continued to look to his father for knowledge and guidance.

  The Adamses remained in Holland throughout the first half of 1784. In June, John Quincy returned to London on his own. Following his father’s instructions, he attended Parliament in order to hear the great orators of the day. This, too, was part of the republican education his father continued to map out for him. John Quincy sat through an interminable eleven-hour debate over the recent election in Westminster. But he offered his father characters of each of the heroes of the House of Lords, noting of Charles James Fox that “his ideas are all striking, but they flow in upon him, in such numbers that he cannot communicate them without difficulty.” Taking up the theme of public leadership, his father wrote back, “Whenever a great able and Upright man appears, there will be ever a Swarm of little, corrupt, weak or wicked ones, who will find among the people Such Numbers like themselves, as to form a body capable of obstructing, diverting and interrupting him.” The older Adams got, the more he would brood over this theme; his years as president would provide the final proof that the common herd of mankind envied and even despised great men. This conviction made him sympathetic, if not to aristocracy itself, then to the rule of a natural aristocracy of the best men. His son imbibed this dim regard for the wisdom of the common people, though he was never quite as dyspeptic as his father on the subject.

  The correspondence between the two Adamses had become increasingly an exchange of equals. But the older man was still very much the lawgiver. He instructed his son to continue with his translations into French of Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, a 462-page project he would complete that summer. He asked him to return to Holland so that they could learn Dutch together. And he offered his usual steady stream of advice: “Don’t fatigue yourself in traveling. Keep your mind easy and your body cool, your spirits cheerful and your humour gay.” Few men, he reminded him, had suffered as many vexations as he, and he had done his best to hew to his own maxims, though not always successfully. He was, at the same time, immensely proud of his son. He described John Quincy to Abigail as “the greatest traveller of his age, and without partiality, I think as promising and manly a youth as is in the world.”

  John Quincy rejoined his father in the Hague at the end of June. But soon he found himself hurrying back to England. For the last year, John Adams had been imploring Abigail to join him. The prospect of an ocean voyage terrified her, and much though she missed he husband, Abigail had grown quite accustomed to her vicarious roving through the instrument of books and menfolk. But she finally consented to come and to bring Nabby with her. On July 30, 1784, in a London hotel, John Quincy was reunited with his mother and sister after an absence of four years. All three of them must have shed many tears. Abigail and Nabby were much taken with John Quincy’s manliness and gravity. He had become, after all, a rather formidable young man. And he was handsome, with dark, shining eyes, a delicate mouth, and his mother’s narrow, finely tipped nose.

  Within weeks John Adams was summoned to Paris to negotiate treaties with France. The family arrived in mid-August and moved back to the villa in Auteuil. Whatever London’s superior virtues, it was Paris where John Quincy felt most at home. Paris had formed his taste and his manners. He haunted the Palais Royal, which the Duc de Chartres, cousin to Louis XVI, had begun to turn into a center of leisure and pleasure—a kind of proto-Times Square. “This place offers a vast fund of entertainment to the observor,” Adams wrote in his journal. “It is the most frequented walk in Paris at every hour of the day, and of the night too, you will never fail of finding company here, and it is very curious to see the different dresses and appearance of the people you find there.” He marveled at the Raphaels, Rembrandts, and Rubenses in the Duc’s gallery. (The Louvre, across the way, would not open for another eight years.) He indulged his love of theater both at the Comédie Française and the Théâtre des Variétés, a hastily improvised stage that specialized in knockabout farce. He was shocked that Racine and Corneille showed to empty houses, while “low buffoonery” packed the stalls. He ogled the dresses in the shop of Mademoiselle Bertin, the queen’s milliner. Here was a petticoat that cost a thousand guineas. Naval heroes’ reputations last months, he mused with the polished cynicism of a Paris courtier; Mademoiselle Bertin’s is imperishable. The French Revolution was only four years away, but King Louis XVI sat securely on his throne. Paris was a world of glittering trifles John Quincy deplored and loved to deplore. He was a precocious moralist.

  The great friend of this period of his life was Thomas Jefferson. The author of the Declaration of Independence had been sent to Paris to succeed Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson had suffered the shattering loss of his wife, Martha, as well as two of his children, and had come to Paris with his daughter, Patsy. He happily allowed himself to be adopted by the bustling, cheerful, embracing Adams family. He paid elaborate, if always proper, court to Abigail; worked daily with John; and became a mentor to young John Quincy, who hero-worshiped him. Jefferson had taken a modest house with a garden among the grand hotels de ville in the Cul-de-Sac Taitbout, just off the Chaussée D’Antin in the fashionable heart of Paris. John Quincy dined there almost every night, often in the company of luminaries like the Marquis de Lafayette or the naval hero John Paul Jones. In his diary he wrote of Jefferson “whom I love to be with because he is a man of very extensive learning and pleasing manners.” Young Adams was already so well connected that he could arrange to introduce Jefferson and the marquis to his friend Benjamin West, the celebrated portraitist.

  When he wasn’t amusing himself, John Quincy was working as his father’s secretary. The two began each morning with a long walk through the Bois before settling down to business with Jefferson and Franklin. At night, when the young man was home, they worked together, with the father helping the son prepare for Harvard. The elder Adams had contemplated enrolling his son at Oxford but had dropped the idea when he had learned that matriculants had to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. The very first article, “Of Faith in the Holy Trinity,” violated Adams’ own Unitarian convictions.

  It was, therefore, admission to Harvard for which John Adams set out to prepare his son. They read Greek and Latin together. They worked their way through algebra, plane geometry, decimal fractions, and even, the older man proudly reported in a letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, differential calculus, which he barely recalled from his own college days. Ordinary folk might sit by the fireside making goodly conversation; for the Adamses, supreme contentment required books and abstruse t
alk. Abigail evoked the scene in a letter to a friend: “The table is covered with mathematical instruments, and you hear nothing ’til nine o’clock but of theorem and problems bissecting and dissecting tangents and sequents.”

  John Adams, though as intellectually gifted as any of the leading figures of a remarkably gifted generation, was quite dazzled by his son’s intellect—not that he would risk turning his head by telling him so. “If you were to examine him in English and French poetry,” he told Waterhouse, “I know not where you would find anybody his superior.” He had translated vast passages from Virgil, Tacitus, Horace, Tully. Peter Jay Munro had written to him repeating the commonplace opinion that Virgil’s Aeneid was much the superior work to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and John Quincy used a series of letters to argue him into the ground on the subject. Rather than simply excerpt passages and insist upon their excellence, which might only have demonstrated his partiality, he cited a staggering array of English authorities on the merits of Milton’s poem—Addison, Dryden, Hume, the poet Thomson, and even Samuel Johnson, notorious for having written of Paradise Lost that “no man would have wished it longer.” And he sagely added a bit of advice—“never to decide a thing in your own mind upon hearsay alone but to examine things yourself and judge for yourself.”

  These, then, were the forces that shaped the life of this brilliant young cosmopolite. John Quincy Adams knew Europe and Europeans as few other Americans did, and perhaps none of his generation. He knew art, literature, theater, politics. He could comfortably converse with the most learned of men. He had sampled the pleasures—most of them—of European life. But he had also been trained from earliest childhood to believe that life was not about pleasure but about service and that it was the special destiny of an Adams to serve not just God, and not just the family, but the republic his father had helped usher into being. He had one foot in the European world that had nurtured him and another in the New England world to which he was returning. He wrote an epigram from Voltaire on the cover of his diary for 1785: “La molesse est douce, mais la suite est cruelle”—ease is delightful, but the consequence is cruel. The young man who swooned over Mrs. Siddons and traded jaded quips about dressmakers might well have become a dandy, but Adams’ foundations had been laid so solidly that no amount of frivolity could unsettle them.