by Harlow Unger
“France has already gone to war with us,” the President bellowed. “She is at war with us, but we are not at war with her.”10
The Republican majority in the House of Representatives, however, demanded that Adams send a mission to France to try to heal the rupture—much as Washington had sent John Jay to Britain three years earlier, in 1794, to heal relations with that nation. In the fall of 1797, Adams sent Republican Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and Federalists John Marshall of Virginia and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, a cousin of Charles Pinckney. When they arrived in France, three intermediaries told the Americans that the Directory expected the same fealty and remunerations as “the ancient kings of France” and that to begin negotiations they would have to pay a tribute of $250,000 in cash to Talleyrand and arrange a loan to the French government of $12.8 million.11
“No!” Pinckney shouted. “Not even six pence! We are unable to defend our commerce on the seas, but we will defend our shores.”12 In April 1798, Marshall and Pinckney abandoned their mission. “There is not the least hope of an accommodation with this government,” Pinckney declared.13 Talleyrand insisted the three American envoys had “twisted the meaning of honest conversations.”14
By then, John Quincy had been sending a stream of vital intelligence reports to both his father and the secretary of state, gleaned in part through clever banter with the French minister to the Prussian court—“the citizen Caillard, whom I had formerly known as secretary of the French legation in St. Petersburg.”15
“The fleet from Toulon,” he wrote in one report to the secretary of state, “is said to have arrived in Corsica. . . . Its destination is Alexandria in Egypt. . . . The Danish chargé d’affaires told me that . . . by his last accounts from Copenhagen, they were expecting the arrival of the Russian fleet. . . . He said that . . . they were substantially in a state of war with France.”16 And in another report, he warned the secretary of state that a group of French agents masquerading as the “friends of liberty . . . threatens the United States with a speedy revolution.”17 When William Vans Murray, who replaced John Quincy in The Hague, complained that foreign agents had deciphered his coded letters to the secretary of state, John Quincy warned that “your private letters to the secretary of state cannot escape the inspection of persons not entitled to them. . . . Everything leaks out, either through treachery or ungovernable curiosity or misplaced confidence.”18
Outraged by French government conduct toward his envoys, President Adams asked Congress for funds to strengthen American defenses, arm merchant ships, build a navy, and prepare for war. When Republicans insisted on proof of French government demands for bribes, the President sent them the dispatches he had received from Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, describing their encounters with the men who had solicited bribes but identifying them as only “X,” “Y,” and “Z.” When Republicans scoffed at the allegations, John Quincy’s intelligence work exposed the three mystery men as the shady Swiss financier Jean Conrad Hottinger; another Swiss-born banker from Hamburg, Monsieur Bellamy; and Lucien Hauteval.
“Z, or Hauteval,” John Quincy wrote, “I knew very well when long before the establishment of the French Republic he called himself Monsieur le Comte d’Hauteval.”
I was present at the performance of mass after the head of Louis XVI was cut off, at which the said Hauteval thundered out the ‘Domine salvum fac regem’ with as much devotion and enthusiasm as if he had been ready to suffer martyrdom for the cause. I know not how many millions of livres he assured us he had lost by the revolt of the blacks in St. Domingo. He had been a member of the colonial assembly . . . been obliged to flee the island. . . . The next I heard of him was in Paris in 1796 when and where he . . . had been trying to get appointed Minister of France to the United States.19
As Federalists had hoped, the XYZ dispatches—and John Quincy’s revelations of their identities—muffled Francophile voices in Congress and across America. Even Abigail Adams put aside her Anglophobia and recognized that “the olive branch tendered to our Gallic allies . . . has been rejected with scorn. . . . Public opinion is changing here very fast, and the people begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests, and defenders of their rights and liberties.”20
Abigail was prescient. The XYZ dispatches provoked a frenzy of war fever and violent anti-French demonstrations. Mobs attacked the home of John Quincy’s schoolmate, the fanatically pro-French Aurora editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, and across the nation, town after town formed militia companies to serve the nation. More than 1,000 young men in Philadelphia marched to the President’s house and volunteered to fight the French. President Adams came out to address them, dressed incongruously in full-dress military uniform complete with sword—and a scabbard that was too long for his stature and scraped the ground. Abigail greeted another group wearing a flowerlike device radiating bows of black ribbon that Federalists immediately converted into a black cockade to symbolize their opposition to the tricolor cockade of the French Revolution.
“Every black cockade will be another Declaration of Independence,” wrote the editor of Boston’s Columbian Centinel. Within days, Abigail’s black cockade had sprouted on the hats of the President, his cabinet members, and every “good American” man, woman, and child across the land.
“I will never send another minister to France,” President Adams proclaimed to Congress at the end of June 1798, “without assurances that he will be received, respected and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”21
Federalists and Republicans alike held their collective breath as they awaited the President’s request for a declaration of war against America’s former ally. Instead, he asked Congress to create a Department of the Navy and authorize acquisition of twelve ships with up to twenty guns each. He asked for an embargo on all trade with France, and once Congress supported his requests, he ordered the navy to seize French privateers and other raiders in or near American waters. Congress authorized the President to call 80,000 state militiamen to active duty, and the President appointed George Washington commander in chief. The aging Washington immediately named Alexander Hamilton inspector general and second in command.
“I am happy . . . to express my warm and cordial participation in the joy which all true Americans have felt . . . by your acceptance of the command of her armies,” John Quincy wrote to the former President.
However much to be regretted is the occasion which has again summoned you from your beloved retirement, there is every reason to hope that the spirit of firmness and dignity which your example has so powerfully contributed to inspire and maintain will either obviate the necessity of another struggle for our independence or once more carry us victoriously and gloriously through it.22
To the President’s delight, construction and refitting of American warships proceeded faster than expected, and by the end of October, the navy had launched three frigates, armed more than 1,000 merchant ships, and cleared American coastal waters of French marauders. With offshore shipping protected from French assault, the President ordered the U.S. Navy to “sweep the West India seas” of French ships. Although the French had captured more than eight hundred American vessels by then, in fewer than four months after the embryonic U.S. Navy went to sea, it had captured eighty-four French ships. American squadrons gained control of Caribbean waters, and on February 9, 1799, Captain Thomas Truxton’s Constellation scored the first major victory in the quasi-war, engaging and capturing the French navy’s big frigate Insurgente off the island of Nevis.
America’s naval success stunned Talleyrand and the Directory. France was already suffering from the embargo that had closed American markets to important French exports, such as wines, brandies, silks, linen, and porcelain, while British ships prevented French ships from carrying sugar and other essentials from the French Antilles back to France. French fortunes were declining dramatically on other fronts as well. Napoléon and his forces had
invaded Egypt, and on August 1, 1798, a week after French troops marched into Cairo, Admiral Horatio Nelson’s British fleet surprised and annihilated the French fleet of 55 warships and 280 transports at Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria. The French army was trapped in Egypt.
“The present situation of France,” John Quincy reported to his father, “has produced a great and important change in her conduct toward us. It is no longer an overbearing minister of external relations [Talleyrand] who keeps three ministers waiting five months without reception . . . attempting to dupe and swindle them by his pimping spies. . . . No longer a self-imagined conqueror . . . prescribing tribute as the preliminaries to hearing claims for justice.”23 John Quincy told his father that the French government now seemed determined “to effect a reconciliation with the United States”—and with good reason: plague had killed half the French army in Egypt, and Napoléon had abandoned the rest of his troops and secretly sailed away in the dead of night for France with a handful of trusted aides. Within a year, invading English forces would force the ill-fated French expeditionary force in Egypt to lay down its arms and surrender. In the meantime, France suffered a similar humiliation in Ireland when a British fleet trapped and captured nine French warships and transport vessels carrying a French invasion army into Donegal Bay.
As the aura of French invincibility began to dissipate, Russia organized alliances to halt French expansion in Europe. An Anglo-Russian army landed in Holland, while another Russian force joined the Austrians and pushed French forces out of the Bavarian and Italian Alps, Switzerland, and the Rhineland. In Tuscany, Italian patriots rebelled and sent French forces fleeing northward, while slaves in what is now Haiti staged a massive rebellion, butchering more than 10,000 French troops, 3,000 French civilians, and the army’s commander in chief, Napoléon’s brother-in-law. In France proper, royalists staged a massive counterrevolution in the western and central provinces. Besieged from all directions and stripped of revenues from foreign plunder, France faced economic collapse unless Talleyrand could restore the flow of supplies and foodstuffs from her former ally, the United States.
Under pressure from the rest of the Directory, Talleyrand ordered American seamen and other Americans released from prison, reopened French ports to American ships, and ordered an end to French attacks on American ships. He issued a formal invitation to peace talks that conspicuously included President Adams’s own words to Congress, pledging that “whatever plenipotentiary the government of the United States might send to France to put an end to the existing differences between the two countries would be undoubtedly received with the respect due to the representative of a free, independent, and powerful nation.”24
Sensing a sharp increase in official European respect for the United States, John Quincy urged his father to accept Talleyrand’s invitation, and his father sent a new group of peace commissioners to Paris.
With the massive retreat of French troops, central Europe grew safe for travel, and after Louisa had recovered from still another miscarriage, she and John Quincy left Berlin in mid-July for a three-month vacation in the Silesian countryside, with stops in Toplitz and Dresden along the way. John Quincy sent his brother Thomas an astonishing forty-three pages of beautifully written letters, which Thomas forwarded to a Philadelphia literary weekly, Port Folio, for publication. They later appeared in London as an elegant 387-page book titled Letters from Silesia, by “His Excellency John Quincy Adams.” Translated into French, they also appeared in Paris to great acclaim. Although John Quincy’s literary ambitions centered on poetry, he suddenly emerged as a renowned author of magnificent prose.
When the Adamses returned to Berlin, they learned to their astonishment that Napoléon had returned from Egypt and landed at Saint-Raphaël on the south coast of France near present-day Cannes, setting off joyful street demonstrations in Paris. He marched into that city a week later to the cheers of tens of thousands, and the French army, its spirits revived by his return, forced the Anglo-Russian forces to withdraw. A month later, Napoléon masterminded a coup d’état that left him in sole control of the French government. He retained Talleyrand as foreign minister, ordering him to negotiate an immediate peace with the United States and restore trade relations. On September 30, 1800, the French and American governments signed a new treaty of peace and amity that respected American rights—and independence—under the Neutrality Proclamation that George Washington had issued seven years earlier.
New England Federalists, however, were furious, having already geared up their shipbuilding facilities to build the new navy. War had generated wealth for New Englanders for nearly a century of perennial Anglo-French conflicts. When Secretary of State Pickering, already at odds with the President over other issues, added his voice to the cry for war, President Adams dismissed him for insubordination, and Pickering returned to New England harboring a bitterness for John Adams that would affect the entire Adams family for years to come—especially John Quincy. John Adams named Virginia’s John Marshall to replace Pickering as secretary of state.
With little left to do on the diplomatic front in Berlin, John Quincy Adams and Louisa spent much of the winter dining and dancing at royal dinners and balls. John Quincy used his spare moments to plunge into translations of German literature, including the epic poem Oberon, a medieval legend about a fairy king, and the fables of Christian Gellert.m Free of any tension-producing diplomatic obligations, the Adamses thrived in the relaxed gaiety of the winter social season, and when Louisa found herself pregnant again, she actually blossomed for a change—eating heartily at holiday dinners and often dancing into the morning hours at royal balls. For the first time ever, she joined her husband on his vigorous, five-mile walks each day. As she approached term, the king banned all traffic in the street in front of the Adams home to ensure quiet, and the queen sent a servant to wait on Louisa.
Until Louisa’s pregnancy, John Quincy had seldom attended religious services, but in the winter of 1801, he added daily Bible reading to his routine after the sudden death of a young army officer at an otherwise joyful, turn-of-the-century New Year’s party on December 31, 1799. The young man fell to the floor in mid-sentence, without a final cry or gasp.
It was at first supposed he had only fainted. A surgeon and physician were called in and every expedient possible was used to bring him to life, in vain. I came away . . . to prevent the story from coming too abruptly to my wife . . . and when the fact that the youth was certainly dead had become unquestionable, the scene that ensued was dreadful—faintings, hysteric fits, convulsions, and raving madness marked the shock of this calamitous accident. . . . I passed the period between the two centuries in communion with my own soul and in prostration to the being who directs the universe, with thanksgiving for his numerous blessings in the past times.25
John Quincy feared the young man’s death was an omen of worse things to come, and a few days later he learned that his nation’s revered leader, George Washington, had died two weeks earlier, on December 14, 1799. For once, it was Louisa who had to calm and comfort her husband when the news arrived.
In the days that followed, John Quincy discovered and studied the sermons of John Tillotson, archbishop of Canterbury from 1691 to 1694 and advocate of simpler, more comprehensible terms that eschewed obscure metaphors. A contemporary of John Locke, he called for reconciliation between Christian faiths and emphasized morality. John Quincy embraced Tillotson’s thesis, reading and rereading the ten volumes of Tillotson’s sermons for the rest of his life. As he began to embrace religion, however, he had no idea that American Federalists, infuriated by federal property taxes, had split ranks and allowed Thomas Jefferson’s Democrat-Republicans to strip his father of the American presidency.
With his former secretary of state, Boston’s Timothy Pickering, calling for secession, New England Federalists had turned against the President. “The five States of New-England,” Pickering ranted, “can have nothing to fear . . . [from] instituting a new . . . nation of New-Eng
land, and leav[ing] the rest of the Continent to pursue their own imbecile and disjointed plans, until they have . . . acquired magnanimity and wisdom sufficient to join a confederation that may rescue them from destruction.”26
After counting the Electoral College votes in 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson and former New York senator Aaron Burr Jr. had each won seventy-three votes, while John Adams had garnered only sixty-five. Ironically, Adams would have easily won reelection if Hamilton and Pickering had not divided the Federalists, shunting sixty-four Federalist votes to Pinckney. It was a politically fatal defeat for the President and suicide for the Federalist Party, which would never again field a viable candidate for national leadership.
The tie vote in the Electoral College sent the decision to the House of Representatives, which elected Jefferson President on the thirty-sixth ballot, on February 17, and relegated Burr to political obscurity as vice president. In two of his last acts in office, President John Adams named Secretary of State John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and to prevent possible dismissal and humiliation of his son when the Republicans took control of the Department of State, he recalled John Quincy from Berlin, ending his seemingly unobstructed rise to national leadership.
