by James Traub
It was France whose power and ambition was growing in the middle of the 1790s, and it was France whose designs triggered Adams’ fears for his fragile republic. With the twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte taking command of the Army of the Alps in late 1795, the French soon overran much of Italy, forcing Austria to retreat there as it had in the north. Adams saw that France’s goal was to block all trade between the Continent and England; if France could win the United States to its side as well, it might starve the English into submission. He was deeply disturbed by the news that the House of Representatives had refused to appropriate funds to pay off private prewar debts to England, as Jay’s Treaty stipulated, for the British would then refuse to abandon their Western forts, in which case France would put into place its scheme of manipulating American public opinion into ending neutrality. He knew how this sounded, and he told his father that he ought not think that “my imagination is apt to raise phantoms and then tremble before them.” Adams was a Cassandra: like the mythological figure, his dire warnings often proved accurate.
One of Adams’ great themes was that professions of neutrality meant nothing to France. The French were trying to provoke European neutrals like Sweden into a war that would ultimately help France build a coalition against England. Napoleon was snatching up allegedly neutral Italian states like Tuscany. The danger France posed to the United States was less outright aggression than political and ideological subversion. He wrote to his father, but not to Thomas Pickering, who had replaced Edmund Randolph as secretary of state, about French designs on American politics. He viewed both Thomas Paine and James Monroe as French agents seeking to weaken the cause of American neutrality. He reacted with alarm to the news that George Washington would not stand for a third term. The French, he feared, would fill the vacuum with their own partisans. At one point he even wrote his father that France was hatching a plot to remove George Washington and put in his place a Directory such as now ruled France itself.
Adams was actually more measured than the most fanatically anti-French Federalists back home, and in calmer moods he could reassure friends that Thomas Jefferson, should he become president, could be trusted to stand up for American interests. But he still feared the influence of the Jacobin faction, which he viewed as a virtual fifth column. President Washington had recalled Monroe in the summer of 1796, but in December the Directory had refused to receive Monroe’s replacement, Charles Pinckney, a Federalist. Adams stormed over this indignity, and over Monroe’s flattering farewell speech to the Directory. The Directory, he explained to his father, had fallen into the hands of a virulently anti-American bloc. He wished that someone back home would sound the alarm, as he had done with Genêt. Adams knew very well that his father was showing his letters to Washington, and perhaps he hoped that this one would galvanize the president to action.
Adams worried deeply about Washington’s decision to step down, even though doing so made room for his own father to succeed him as president. He believed that only Washington had the standing to trump both domestic factions and preserve neutrality. He wrote to his brother Charles to say that America’s political dependence on France, and commercial dependence on England, endangered its freedom: “Every hour of neutrality now has a tendency to extricate us from both these shameful dependencies.” America was dependent because it was still a weak state compared to England and France, with a much smaller population and economy and no standing army or navy. But the balance of power was shifting in America’s favor. The new nation needed nothing but time to achieve the magnificent destiny made possible by its remote position, its size, and its fertility. If Washington’s “system of administration now prevails,” he wrote to a friend, “ten more years will place the United States among the most powerful and opulent nations on earth.” And if not? The United States would turn into Europe—“a parcel of petty tribes at perpetual war with one another,” with each tribe enjoying the hypocritical support of Europe’s rival powers—just as he had written in the May 22 letter to his father.
In the course of dozens of letters to the State Department, to his father, and to influential friends, Adams had articulated the essential Federalist worldview. In so doing, he had furnished hard evidence for the general proposition that America should not, under any provocation or temptation, surrender its commitment to neutrality. These views were to find their most famous expression in President Washington’s Farewell Address, a written text published in September 1796. Washington warned of “permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others.” And he added, “If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when . . . we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected.” The speech was largely written by Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, who was himself a leading exponent of the doctrine of neutrality. Many others, including John Adams himself, fully shared those convictions. But all of these men had read John Quincy Adams’ diplomatic correspondence, whose ideas had mingled with their own. As a witness to events abroad that all of them followed closely and anxiously, Adams was able to provide firsthand evidence of the perilous consequences of forsaking neutrality. Young though he was, Adams played a crucial role in the forging of the first generation of American foreign policy.
CHAPTER 7
A Young Lady of Fine Parts and Accomplishments
(1795–1797)
DURING HIS TIME IN HOLLAND, ADAMS SAID LITTLE ABOUT his feelings in either his letters or his journals. But in a letter to Abigail in late 1795 he asked plaintively, “Can a widowed heart, an heart which at the monition of parental solicitude and tenderness, has offered up at the shrine of worldly prudence the painful sacrifice of an ardent affection . . . can such a heart readily submit to the controul of other bonds?” Could he, that is, ever love again? Adams had finally put that ardent affection behind him, he said, but the intensity of his suffering “was never known but to myself.” It was a terrible accusation to have flung at his mother, though couched in the form—a form Adams himself would have consciously accepted—of filial obedience and “worldly prudence.”
Abigail must have felt the sting, for she wrote back to say that she understood his pain at the decision, which had been “your father’s wish”—a case of selective amnesia on her part. Perhaps, she said, Providence had intervened, for the public service he had provided the nation had required him to be single. But she assured him that his power to love could be rekindled. And she added, in a wan and perhaps desperate effort at reassurance, that Mary would surely remain single as long as he did and might still be available, if less beautiful, when he returned.
At the time Adams wrote the letter he was in Rotterdam, waiting to leave for London. In mid-October he had received a note from Secretary of State Pickering ordering him to England to oversee the formal ratification of Jay’s Treaty. Jay had gone home, Thomas Pinckney was away, and a senior American diplomat was necessary to solemnize the event. Adams left Tom behind in the Hague to represent the United States. He then spent three incredibly frustrating weeks waiting for a ship to be able to sail from Rotterdam. Worse still, he had forgotten to bring a good novel.
Adams’ restiveness may have eaten away at his always frail self-esteem, for he responded to his father’s letter about the president’s high esteem for his abilities by declaring that “undeserved estimation is still more dangerous than flattery.” He felt burdened, he went on, by “the magnitude of the trust, and my own imcompetency” (emphasis in the original). He was, he said, perfectly content with his insipid post at the Hague, which was “adequate to my talents” and left him free time to pursue his studies. He wished no further advancement. The young man who spotted vanity everywhere had so fortified himself against this folly that he responded to praise with a paroxysm of self-abasement. But this was no mere show: Adams’ fear of failure was far more vivid than his hopes of success. He was the same young man
who had imagined a lynch mob gathering at news that the state papers he carried for John Jay had fallen into the enemy’s hands.
By the time Adams reached London, the treaty had been signed. He had no real business, but since Pinckney was still en route from Spain he remained in London as the senior American diplomat present. He was bewildered by the treatment he received from officials in the Foreign Office—not because it was harsh, but because it struck him as unduly solicitous. Lord Grenville, the foreign minister, insisting on addressing him as “Minister Plenipotentiary,” when he was only the resident minister in Holland. (Grenville had perhaps understandably used the title borne by John Jay, treating Adams as Jay’s stand-in.) Pinckney was America’s minister in England, but Grenville’s secretary, Hammond, insisted that the English would much prefer Adams himself, son of the vice president and former minister. Flattery, of course, put Adams on his mettle. “If I stay here any time,” he growled in his journal, “he will learn to be not quite so fond, nor yet quite so impertinent.” He even wrote to Grenville insisting that he be addressed by his proper, more modest title. No doubt the British were trying, in their own way, to gain Adams’ loyalty and thus counteract French influence in America. Hammond also insisted that George Washington was about to be impeached over his support for Jay’s Treaty. Adams’ intemperate reaction may have perplexed his hosts and limited his own diplomatic effectiveness.
Soon after the New Year of 1796, Adams began visiting the home of Joshua Johnson, a wealthy expatriate merchant who served as American consul in London. The Johnson household, in Coopers Row, facing the Tower of London, had been a social hub for Americans when John Adams was minister; Adams had picked up his mail there. By this time, Pinckney had returned to London, and Adams had very little to do save amuse himself. Soon he was spending every evening at the Johnson parlor, chatting with the three eldest daughters, Nancy, Louisa, and Caroline (there were seven in all and one son), and listening to them sing and play airs on the harp. Apparently Abigail had known his heart better than he himself had.
Adams was a good catch for one of the Johnson girls, who had been forbidden to consort with Englishmen. He was a handsome young man with delicate features, dark eyes, and the high brow thought to bespeak intelligence. His expression had not yet taken on the grim fixity of later years. He was urbane and impossibly learned, the son of the vice president of the United States and a revered founder of the republic, and he appeared to have a fine career before him. At the same time, he was not wealthy, and he was too formidable, too correct, too solemn to be charming. He dressed badly, as befits a man who was vain of his lack of vanity. He was prone to bouts of silence. He was possibly the kind of man whom parents like more than daughters do. Indeed, Adams’ manner was so correct, and so oblique, that no one could be sure which girl he thought he was courting. The Johnson family assumed that it was Nancy, the eldest. Actually, Adams had taken a shine to Louisa, who was just shy of her twenty-first birthday when they met.
The Johnsons, though not from Boston, were the right kind of family. Joshua came from old Maryland stock; his brother had served as governor of the state and later as a justice of the Supreme Court. A merchant, he had moved to London in 1771 and earned his fortune in the trans-Atlantic trade. There he met Catherine Newth, a pretty, gregarious, working-class girl of perhaps fifteen. Louisa later wrote that her mother and grandmother were “not of maids the strictest,” while her mother’s father had a character “very indifferent.” In fact, Louisa was illegitimate: church records show that her parents did not marry until she was ten. There is no evidence that Louisa knew that, though her sometimes imperious insistence on the respectability and gentility of her family may have been exacerbated by her anxiety about her mother’s origins.
During the Revolutionary War the family moved to Nantes; Louisa had grown up speaking French. She had attended Catholic school, where she absorbed a lifelong fondness for Catholic ritual. She was a sickly child, prone to bouts of melancholy, easily bored by routine, proud, and a bit headstrong. Once the family returned to London after the colonies gained their independence, Louisa had lived an insular life, her every want attended to by adoring parents and a bevy of liveried, bewigged servants. Her father doted on her, and she on him; he would not go to sleep until she sang him a song.
Louisa had been raised to be a fine, if useless, ornament; she was dark-eyed, pale, delicate, and petite. She rarely left home. She had sat quietly while her parents entertained American diplomats like Thomas Pinckney and John Jay; she herself knew next to nothing about the great world of politics and diplomacy. She read a great deal, and not just the pulp novels of the day; unlike Adams, she had fallen in love with Paradise Lost at a young age. Louisa had briefly had a beau who worked in her father’s office, but he had returned to the United States. She did not think of herself as the family beauty. She had grown accustomed to watching the social action rather than participating in it, and she had developed a habit of keen observation and a gift for mild satire, in the English fashion. It had not at first crossed Louisa’s mind that the latest visitor was planting himself in the parlor on her account. For that very reason, she wrote later, she was able to be far more relaxed with this slightly terrifying young man than she would otherwise have been.
Adams’ diary had become terse and cryptic again by this time, perhaps because the tenor of his life was now private rather than public. In late January the Johnsons threw a ball for Louisa’s twenty-first birthday, and he stayed until three in the morning. “Very agreeable evening,” he wrote. A week later he recorded “a partial explanation with one of the ladies”—presumably, Louisa—“which gave some satisfaction.” Two weeks later he was “displeased with several trifling incidents” and displeased with himself for “suffering such things to possess an influence over me.” And he still couldn’t bring himself to propose. He obviously found Louisa very attractive and perfectly marriageable, but he was not impelled by headlong passion, as he had been with Mary Frazier. Perhaps Adams really did have a widowed heart: he had erected a shrine to Mary that Louisa was powerless to topple.
By the end of January Adams was telling himself that “some end must be put to the present state of things.” But still he hesitated. In mid-March he noted a “partial conversation with Louisa.” At the end of the month he wrote to his mother hinting that he was thinking of marriage. The Johnson family must have been prepared to exercise a great deal of patience with so reputable a suitor, but by mid-April they had become so exasperated that Mrs. Johnson “demanded an explanation.” Adams finally professed his wish to marry Louisa, though it was scarcely the done thing to plight one’s troth to a young lady’s mother. Adams was so flustered, or so unsure of his own intentions, that his diplomatic skills had deserted him. Three days later he proposed to Louisa, and she accepted.
What was all the hemming and hawing about? Adams may have doubted his own feelings. He might have worried that a hothouse plant like Louisa would not flourish in Yankee New England, or that the Johnson family’s lack of demonstrated patriotic loyalty would sit ill with his parents. Perhaps he had grown comfortable with his bachelorhood. What he certainly talked about, though, was money. Adams was convinced that he could not support a family on the $4,500 salary he received as minister. Mr. Johnson was rich, but that could not figure in the calculations of so fiercely independent a figure as Adams. The young envoy assumed that he would be going home to resume his legal career in a year or so—that was the bargain he had tried to strike with his father—and he wanted Louisa to wait until then. He would return to Holland; she would stay in London. He had made much the same request of Mary Frazier, and she had refused. Louisa and her parents reluctantly accepted. And then life went on as before.
The certainty of marriage did not mellow Adams’ character. He had begun to dress better in response to Louisa’s chaffing on the subject, but when she complimented him on his clothes, he sternly informed her that the woman he married must not interfere in his dress. In that ca
se, said Louisa, dropping his arm and crossing the room to her mother, you are free to find someone more compliant. Adams may have been shocked to see that this self-contained young woman had not only a mind, but a will, of her own. He quickly apologized, but Louisa did not forget. Many years later, she wrote, in her own journal, “Thus it was with me there was a sense of unnecessary harshness and severity of character presented to my view which often led me to fear something I knew not what, and cast a damp upon my natural spirits which I never overcame.”
ADAMS WAS BACK IN THE HAGUE BY THE BEGINNING OF JUNE 1796. After the social whirl in London, life in Holland was rather slow but, he noted in his journal, “infinitely better suited to my taste.” Nearing thirty, Adams was evolving a new and rather bearish view of himself. “I was not formed to shine in company,” he wrote, “nor to be delighted with it.” As a young man he had, in fact, shone in company and probably enjoyed it more than he would admit to himself; now, with marriage and family life looming, he seemed to have wished that younger man away or perhaps forgotten that he had ever existed. The new Adams would be diligent, disciplined, scholarly; he would wake earlier and write more. He noted his daily schedule: rise at six; read “books of instruction” until nine; breakfast; read the papers and translate Dutch state papers until eleven or twelve; dress, write letters, and attend to other business until two or three; walk until three thirty; dine until five; read “works of amusement” until eight or nine; walk again; light supper, cigar, and bed by eleven. Adams would keep these monthly accounts of his daily schedule for much of the rest of his life—a spur to self-improvement and a reminder of discarded resolutions.
