Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  From the outset Adams had problems being a diplomat at Versailles, the most elegant and protocol-laden court in all of Europe. As his former friend Jonathan Sewall pointed out in 1787, Adams was “not qualified, by nature or education, to shine in courts.” Adams, of course, Sewall admitted, was quite capable of handling “the mechanical parts of his business” as a diplomat; but, said Sewall, this was “not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier.”34

  And the lack of those arts and ornaments soon began to tell. Adams became more and more ill at ease amid the opulence and manners of the French aristocracy. He especially found it difficult to converse with learned French women. They terrified him and made him feel inferior. He realized that a person “must be of a Strange Disposition, indeed, who cannot be happy at Paris, where he may have his Choice, of all the Pleasures, Amusements and Studies, which human Life affords.” Nevertheless, as a stern republican, he increasingly felt out of place. “The Richness, the Magnificence, and Splendor” of Paris and Versailles, he said, were “beyond all description.” But he found little pleasure in beholding the grandeur of all the buildings, gardens, paintings, and sculptures. They were, he said, simply “Bagatelles, introduced, by Time and Luxury in Exchange for the great Qualities and hardy manly Virtues of the human Heart. . . . The more Elegance, the less Virtue in all Times and Countries.”35 This was certainly not a view that Jefferson shared.

  Because Adams mistrusted Franklin, who did have the arts of a courtier, he never appreciated the extraordinary contribution that Franklin made to the American cause. No one but Franklin could have extracted from the French monarchy loan after loan in support of the Revolution. But all Adams could see was a celebrity who was lazy and not up to the responsibilities of his commission. Adams couldn’t get the old man to attend meetings, make decisions, or even sign important documents that Adams had prepared. Adams admitted that Franklin was “a Wit and Humourist.” “He may be a Philosopher, for what I know, but he is not a sufficient Statesman, he knows too little of American affairs or the Politicks of Europe, and takes too little Pains to inform himself of Either. He is too old, too infirm too indolent and dissipated, to be sufficient for the Discharge of all the important Duties” he had to fulfill. This was bad enough, but Franklin also revealed that he might be an atheist who didn’t believe in a future state—something that horrified Adams. And to make matters worse, Franklin deferred to the French too often and allowed for too much French influence over American affairs.36

  Adams particularly resented all the attention Franklin received from the French, especially from the women. Knowing only American women whose manners were “universally characterized at that time by Modesty, Delicacy and Dignity,” he was puzzled by the behavior of the French ladies. They had, he lamented, “an unaccountable passion for old Age”—which explained the remarkable “Privilege” his “venerable Colleague” enjoyed with them. His Puritan sensibilities were scandalized by the flirting that took place between Franklin and the French women, especially with Anne-Louise de Harancourt Brillon de Jouy, Franklin’s wealthy and beautiful neighbor. In the presence of her elderly husband, Madame Brillon would sit on Franklin’s lap, stroke his hair, and call him “Cher Papa.” Adams couldn’t get over the fact that a “very plain and clumsy” woman who was often present in the company was not the friend of Madame Brillon, as he had assumed, but was actually the mistress of Monsieur Brillon. “I was astonished,” he recalled, “that these People could live together in such apparent Friendship and indeed without cutting each others throats. But I did not know the World.”37

  The Massachusetts Yankee never got used to that world. The society of the French aristocracy, he found, “disgusts and shocks me more and more.” It was slight and superficial, “a mere conformity to the fashion.” Despite all its external politeness, that world of courtiers, he said, lacked real friendship and affection; instead, it was “full of Jealousy, Envy, revenge and rancor,” a “deadly poison to all the calm felicity of Life.”38

  When Jefferson went to France, he would have a somewhat different take on both Franklin and this French world.

  • • •

  ADAMS KEPT URGING his colleagues in the Congress that the mission ought to be in the hands of a single minister, which he hoped would be himself.39 Yet he continued to yearn to return to his farm and his law practice. Besides, he realized that his relationship with Abigail was suffering. Worrying that his letters might be intercepted by the British, he wrote far fewer of them to Abigail, only once every two or three weeks. Abigail was lonely and she too wrote far fewer letters than she had earlier.

  Finally, in September 1778, Congress agreed to have only a single minister plenipotentiary in France, but unfortunately for Adams, it selected Franklin, mainly because France insisted upon it. Congress offered no clear directions for what Adams was to do. As he confided to Abigail, he was “left kicking and sprawling in the Mire,” a victim of “total Neglect and Contempt.”40 Like Jefferson, he was criticized for his actions as a public official. The Congress seemed to include him in its censure to the commissioners for squabbling and factional fighting. But instead of being hurt, he was angry. He sent off a spate of letters to colleagues in the Congress, defending his actions as a commissioner and demanding access to the congressional journals. He told Abigail that he was coming home. “I will draw Writs and Deeds and harrangue Jurys and be happy.”41 He finally left France in June 1779 and arrived in Boston in August, just in time to participate in a convention called to write a constitution for Massachusetts.

  Adams had not completed his drafting of the Massachusetts constitution when he learned that October that Congress had assigned him to Paris to negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain, a process in which it was expected America’s great ally France would be very much involved. He was eager to accept the appointment. Because his earlier mission had not gone well, he wanted to show the world that he was capable of diplomacy. He urged his disconsolate wife “to keep up your Spirits and throw off Cares as much as possible.” The most he could promise her was that “We shall yet be happy.”42 After an absence in Europe of nearly eighteen months, he had been home only a little over three months. This time he took both John Quincy, now twelve, and his seven-year-old son, Thomas, with him to Europe.

  He began his assignment in 1780 full of suspicion of the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister. Vergennes, who thought Adams simple and naïve, with “so little Experience in the World,” advised him to put off trying to negotiate peace with the British.43 Adams, “having nothing else here wherewith to employ himself,” as Franklin ruefully told the Congress, decided to try “supplying what he may suppose my Negociations defective in.” Adams thought that Franklin was entirely wrong in the deferential way he approached the French. “He thinks as he tells me himself,” reported Franklin in August 1780, “that America has been too free in Expressions of Gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her: and that we should shew Spirit in our Applications.”44 Unfortunately, in a series of undiplomatic letters, Adams said many of the same things directly to Vergennes, who became so angry with Adams’s bumptious manner that the Frenchman ceased communicating with him; in fact, he tried to get Congress to recall Adams, or failing that, to appoint a “colleague capable of containing him.”45

  With little to do in Paris, Adams took off to Holland, negotiated loans and a treaty of amity and commerce with the Dutch republic, and became America’s first minister to the Netherlands. Getting the Dutch to diplomatically recognize the United States was his greatest diplomatic achievement.

  • • •

  IN JUNE 1781 CONGRESS ASSIGNED the peace negotiations with Britain to a commission composed of Adams, Jefferson, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and Franklin.46 Jefferson declined the initial invitation to be a member of the peace commission, but when the appointment was r
enewed in November 1782, he readily accepted. His wife had died that September and he welcomed the chance to relieve the burden of his grief. But because of winter ice and the threat of a British fleet, he was unable to get away. Then, with news of a provisional treaty in February 1783, his mission was suspended.

  Since Jefferson could not join the peace commission, he was instead elected as delegate from Virginia to the Confederation Congress. He soon discovered that not only was the Congress having difficulty gathering a quorum (even to ratify the peace treaty with Britain), but its members who did attend were “afflicted with a morbid rage of debate.” How could it be otherwise, he said, since the Congress was filled with lawyers “whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, & talk by the hour?” Unlike Adams, who was notoriously garrulous, Jefferson preferred “to listen.” One way to lose friends, he said, was to engage in public debates.47

  Adams ruefully agreed. “Few Persons,” he said, “can bare to be outdone in Reasoning or declamation or Wit, or Sarcasm or Repartee, or Satyr, and all these things are very apt to grow out of public debate.” These things anger people, so much so that in time “a Nation becomes full of a Mans enemies, or at least of such as have been galled in some Controversy, and take a secret pleasure in assisting to humble and mortify him.” Adams never got over the feeling that all his eloquence and speech making in public assemblies had not brought him fame comparable with that of others. “Examples of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson,” he said, “are enough to shew that Silence and reserve in public are more Efficacious than Argumentation or Oratory.”48

  Despite the verbosity of his fellow congressmen, Jefferson accomplished a great deal during the few months he spent in Congress. He drafted two dozen or more papers and reformed the coinage system, substituting the dollar and decimal units in place of the English pounds, shillings, and pence. Jefferson enjoyed nothing more than the challenge of bringing order out of numbers. His later reports as secretary of state on uniform weights and measures led an Englishman to write him, saying, “I believe you are the first nation that ever produced statesmen who were natural philosophers.”49

  Jefferson also wrote the Ordinance of 1784, which shaped expansion across the American continent for the next century. Eager to ensure that the new nation would not have colonies, Jefferson established the principle that all new states would be admitted to the Union on an equal basis with the existing states. If he had had his way, the new states in the West would not have had slavery either. His provision to prevent the extension of slavery in the West after 1800, he said, lost by the vote of a single state. This provision, he later told the French philosophe Jean Nicholas Démeunier, who was writing encyclopedia entries on America, “would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment!”50 An exaggeration, no doubt, but typical of Jefferson when he was writing about slavery to French liberals.

  During his service in the Congress, Jefferson impressed everyone. His obvious intelligence, his range of knowledge, his cool and polite demeanor, his unusual serenity, and his willingness to work hard solidified his reputation as a prominent national statesman. Nothing seemed beyond his grasp, and in taking on all his numerous responsibilities he never seemed ruffled or stressed.

  • • •

  AT THE SAME TIME, ADAMS IN EUROPE was behaving in exactly the opposite manner. He was always nervous and passionate, never cool or serene. He worried about everything, about his salary and whether expenses should be charged to his personal account or that of the United States, about whether he should accede to Vergennes’s request and leave Holland and return to Paris, about how to respond to a Russian-Austrian plan for mediating the war between Britain and her enemies, about the way in which he was being treated by the Congress. The stress became unbearable, and in late August 1781 he collapsed with what he later described as “a nervous Fever, of a very malignant kind, and so violent as to deprive me of almost all Sensibility for four or five days.” For six weeks Adams wrote no letters and carried on no business. Although his debilitating illness probably came from physical causes, the strain of work must have increased his vulnerability to disease.51

  By the time Adams recovered, he had to deal with the peace commission of which he was one of five members, the increase in personnel explicitly designed to dilute his contentious influence. But because Jefferson declined the appointment and Laurens was captured at sea by the British and imprisoned in the Tower of London, the peace negotiations were left in the hands of just Franklin, Jay, and Adams—a combination that sparked Jefferson’s interest. Although he had not seen Adams since their days together in the Continental Congress, he knew what he was like. As Jefferson confided to his friend James Madison, he wondered how his former colleague would act in the peace negotiations. “He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English. To whom will he adhere?” Although Jefferson knew that Adams lacked “taste”—by which he meant judgment or a sense of appropriateness—he hadn’t realized how vain he was. Nevertheless, he admitted that Adams did have “a sound head on substantial points,” and he had “integrity,” and conceded in a backhanded compliment that Adams would be a useful member of the peace commission. “His dislike of all parties, and all men, by balancing his prejudices, may give the same fair play to his reason as would a general benevolence of temper.” Jefferson’s conclusion said it all: “honesty may be extracted even from poisonous weeds.”52

  As one of the peace commissioners, Adams had been as obstreperous as Jefferson feared. He trusted no one, especially the French and their toady Franklin. He thought that Vergennes “means to keep us down if he can—to keep his Hand under our Chin, to prevent Us, from drowning, but not to lift our Heads out of Water.”53 Although Congress had instructed the commissioners to follow French advice and opinion in the peace negotiations, Adams and Jay decided to deal directly with the British without consulting Vergennes, and to Adams’s surprise Franklin agreed. Adams said Congress could never have meant to bind the hands and feet of its ministers to the French government. “Those Chains I will never wear. They would be so galling to me that I could not bear them.”54

  Franklin’s patience was worn down by Adams’s undiplomatic behavior, and in a letter to Robert Livingston, the secretary of foreign affairs, he finally and famously characterized Adams as someone who “means well for his Country, is always an honest Man, often a Wise One, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”55 Actually Jefferson’s description of Adams in his letter to Madison anticipated the nub of Franklin’s characterization by several months. Fortunately for the friendship, Adams never saw Jefferson’s letter to Madison, but he did see Franklin’s portrayal of him soon after it was written. Elbridge Gerry had sent it to Abigail, who passed it on to her husband. This “private Stab to the Reputation of our Friend,” as Gerry described the comment to Abigail, deepened Adams’s hatred of Franklin.56

  For all of his intelligence and learning, Adams was easily mocked, and he was often his own worst enemy. In February 1783 he wrote the president of the Congress suggesting that the United States immediately appoint a minister to Great Britain. He then described in great detail the qualifications of such a minister, qualifications that fit himself to a T: The minister “should have an Education in classical Learning, and in the Knowledge of general History, ancient and modern. . . . He should be well versed in the Principles of Ethicks; of the Law of Nature and Nations; of Legislation and Government; of the civil Roman law; . . . and in the Letters, Memoirs, and Histories of these great Men who have heretofore shone in the Diplomatick Order, and conducted the Affairs of Nations and the World.” Finally, “he should be of an Age to possess a Maturity of Judgment arising from Experience in Business—He should be active, attentive, and industrious; above all he should possess an upright Heart and independent Spirit
.”57

  After drawing this “picture of a fit character in which his own likeness is ridiculously and palpably studied,” as Madison, a member of the Congress, derisively put it to Jefferson, Adams surprisingly recommended John Jay for the position. Yet Adams added, in an embarrassing display of wounded pride in what was after all an official report to the Congress, that if Jay was in fact appointed an “Injustice must finally be done to him, who was the first Object of his Country’s Choice.” By “the first Object” he obviously meant himself, and as Madison’s comment on this “long and curious epistle from Mr. Adams” suggested, everyone in the Congress knew it. Since he had been charged with negotiating a commercial treaty with Britain, Adams believed he was already de facto minister to the Court of St. James’s.58 In fact, as he told his friend Charles Dumas, the indefatigable United States agent at The Hague, he thought he had “an incontestable Right to be Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Great Britain.”59

  • • •

  WHEN JEFFERSON FINALLY had another opportunity to get to Europe and renew his friendship with Adams in person, he soon developed a less sardonic and more favorable attitude toward his former colleague. In May 1784 Congress elected him minister plenipotentiary to join Adams and Franklin in a commission to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce with sixteen European nations. All three commissioners shared an enlightened liberal view of international commerce. They hoped that “the increasing liberality of sentiments among philosophers and men of letters, in various nations,” as Adams put it, might lead to “a reformation, a kind of protestantism, in the commercial system of the world.”60