To get his bearings he was out and about, walking the canals, studying the buildings, circumventing the entire city by foot, meeting people, glad to return to useful work. Through all his life Adams would be happiest when there was clear purpose to his days.
“Papa went out”; “Papa went out to dinner”; “Papa went out to take a walk,” recorded John Quincy.
Adams knew no one, but from all that he saw and heard, and after meetings with a number of prominent Amsterdam bankers — Henrik Hooft, Jan de Neufville and son, Jacob and Nicholas van Staphorst — he grew highly optimistic. A “considerable” loan was entirely possible, he reported to Congress. Moreover, there was no better place in Europe in which to gather information or from which to circulate it.
In an exuberant letter to Abigail, he called Holland “the greatest curiosity in the world.” He doubted there was any nation of Europe “more estimable than the Dutch, in proportion.
Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don’t perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and the arts, I think, to a greater extent.
His only concerns were that the air was “not so salubrious” as that of France, and that the Dutch knew little at all about America, which he found astonishing.
When on September 16, Francis Dana turned up from Paris with the news that Congress had given Adams authority to work on securing a Dutch loan until Henry Laurens appeared, Adams notified John Thaxter to pack everything at the hotel in Paris and come at once. John Quincy and Charles were enrolled in Amsterdam’s renowned Latin School, and Adams set to work. All his energy, zeal, stubborn determination, and his idealism, qualities that had seemed ill-suited at Versailles, were now to be brought to bear. In little time he cultivated an amazing range of friends among the press and in intellectual and financial circles, a number of whom were Jews who, Adams later said, were among the most liberal and accommodating of all.
He made a study of Dutch ways and temperament, read deeply in Dutch history, searching out ever more volumes in Amsterdam’s numerous well-stocked bookshops. He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.
Between times, he kept campaigning by mail for an American navy, his determination perhaps reinforced by a new appreciation of all that commerce at sea had meant to the Dutch. “If I could have my will, there should not be the least obstruction of navigation, commerce, or privateering,” Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush, “because I firmly believe that one sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.” To Congress he declared emphatically, “A navy is our natural and only defense.”
In October, events took an unexpected turn, when word came from London that Henry Laurens, on his way to Amsterdam, had been captured at sea by a British man-of-war. Charged with high treason, Laurens was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, with “orders that no person whatever speaks to him,” as Adams’s London contact Thomas Digges reported. A sack containing Laurens’s confidential papers had been thrown overboard from his ship too late and the British had hooked it from the sea. Among the papers was the draft of a proposed secret treaty between America and the Netherlands, a document of no real significance, but one the British were happy to use as a pretext for a show of angry indignation and threats of war, a possibility the Dutch dreaded as they did no other.
With the responsibility of securing a loan now squarely on his shoulders, and the likelihood of peace no nearer than before, Adams settled in for the long haul.
At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British. At Camden, South Carolina, General Horatio Gates had suffered a devastating defeat in a battle in which American soldiers had fled like sheep. Nearly 1,000 Americans had been killed and a thousand more captured. Gates had been a favorite general officer of the Congress and of Adams, and it had been one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.
But there must be no softening of resolve, Adams declared. “I think I see very clearly that America must grow up in war,” he wrote to Congress. His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence. Without that insurance, there would be no Dutch loan. Of this Adams was now absolutely certain.
This country had been grossly deceived. It has little knowledge of the numbers, wealth, and resources of the United States, and less faith in their finally supporting independence, upon which alone a credit depends. They also have an opinion of the power of England vastly higher than the truth. Measures must be taken with great caution and delicacy to undeceive them.
With his phenomenal capacity for work — an attribute not lost on the industrious Dutch — he produced materials of every kind in an all-out effort to “undeceive” them, while at the same time providing Congress with some of the most astute political reporting of his diplomatic career. Help came from a number of his new Dutch friends, “people of the first character,” as he said, who saw in the American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.
Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters. Older than Adams by nearly fifteen years, he served faithfully as a translator and expert source of information.
John Luzac of Leyden, a lawyer, scholar, and editor, published in his Gazette de Leyde a steady variety of material supplied by Adams, including the first European translation of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was to have an important effect in the Netherlands. In little time Luzac and Adams became the closest of friends.
Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a Dutch nobleman, had been the first and most prominent figure in the country to champion the American cause, and he greatly admired Adams’s determination. Van der Capellen knew the majority of the Dutch sympathized with the American Revolution, but astutely he advised Adams that only American success in the war would enlist Dutch credit, for all the expressions of good will and interest he would hear.
At The Hague, as Adams came to understand, there was little sympathy for the American cause, nor much hope for decisive action. The government of the country, maddeningly complicated to anyone unfamiliar with it, seemed devised intentionally to foster inertia. It was a republic, but with no real executive power, only a symbolic head of state, the hereditary Stadholder, William V, Prince of Orange, who was related to the British royal family and personally devoted to the status quo. As Adams explained to Congress, sovereignty resided in the national assembly, Their High Mightinesses, the States-General. Yet even they were but the deputies of the “regents” in the cities, a very select group of great influence. Thus, as Adams wrote, the true power lay in the cities and in Amsterdam in particular. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam . . . who are called the regency, are one integral branch of the sovereignty of the seven United Provinces, and the most material branch of all because the city of Amsterdam is one quarter of the whole Republic, at least in taxes.”
Not until the government at The Hague took it upon itself to recognize the United States would anyone in the government be permitted to receive Adams officially. In actual practice nearly all would shun him. This being the case, it seemed only sensible to concentrate his efforts in Amsterdam, as both the money and the real political power were there.
But as Adams found, Dutch talk of financial support and an actual Dutch loan were decidedly different matters, his initial high expectations to the contrary. “No [banking] house that I have as yet thought it prudent to apply to dares to undertake the trust,” he told Congress. The Netherlands had been too long allied with Britain, as a matter of commercial advantage. Dutch prosperity depended in large measure on British support for Dutch trade on the high seas. Dutch banks, moreover, held substantial loans to Britain. Hence, there was extreme reluctanc
e to take any step, do anything rash, that might upset the British.
That November of 1780 the situation was further compounded by more dispiriting news from America. In September General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British, and when found out, defected to the enemy. As Baron van der Capellen reported to Adams, Arnold’s treachery, on top of the loss of Charleston and Gates’s defeat at Camden, left Dutch confidence shattered. “Never has the credit of America stood so low,” he told Adams, who advised Congress to “depend upon no money from hence.”
All professions of Dutch friendship for America were but “little adulations to procure a share of our trade,” and now even they had vanished like a vapor, as had his own prior exuberance and admiration for the Dutch.
A HARD NORTH SEA WINTER set in to match Adams’s mood. Days were bitterly cold and raw, with darkness descending at four in the afternoon and the air of Amsterdam thick with chimney smoke. With the canals frozen, thousands of skaters took to the ice, a spectacle that provided what little cheer Adams found in life.
His health was suffering. He worried about his sons. At the Latin School, because he spoke no Dutch, John Quincy had been placed with elementary students. The boy grew restless and disheartened. The rector of the school thought him impertinent and merited a thrashing, as he informed his father. Adams’s response was exactly what his own father’s would have been. “Send the boys to me this evening,” he answered. He had no wish to see his children subjected to such “littleness of soul,” he explained to Abigail in a letter in which he gave vent not only to his indignation at the schoolmaster, but at what he had come to see as a decidedly unattractive side to the Dutch character that he had no desire to see rub off on his sons. “The masters are mean-spirited wretches, punching, kicking, and boxing the children upon every turn,” he wrote.
No longer did he see the Dutch as “examples to the world,” but perceived now, bitterly, “a general littleness arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits [pennies and nickels], which pervades the whole people.” Frugality and industry were virtues everywhere, but avarice and stinginess were not frugality.
The Dutch say that without a habit of thinking of every doit before you spend it, no man can be a good merchant or conduct trade with success. This I believe is a just maxim in general. But I would never wish to see a son of mine govern himself by it. It is the sure and certain way for an industrious man to be rich. It is the only possible way for a merchant to become the first merchant or the richest man in the place. But this is an object that I hope none of my children will ever aim at.
Through a young American named Benjamin Waterhouse, a student of medicine at the University of Leyden, Adams arranged for tutors for the two boys, and the opportunity for them to attend lectures at the university.
Such was the turmoil of Amsterdam that Adams now found it impossible even to arrange meetings. “Very few dare to see me,” he reported. Searching desperately for a sign that all was not lost, the best he could come up with was the popularity of new songs full of patriotic resentment toward the English. A woman who sang one such song on an Amsterdam street corner sold six hundred copies in an hour, he informed Congress. But the hard truth was that after five months in the Dutch Republic, Adams had yet to meet a single government official of any importance.
In December, the veteran British ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Joseph Yorke, began openly threatening the Dutch, setting off something very like panic. “War is to a Dutchman the greatest of evils,” Adams wrote. “Yorke is so sensible of this that he keeps alive a continual fear of it.” At year’s end, “the high and mighty” Yorke abruptly departed and Britain commenced an undeclared war on Dutch shipping.
Convinced he must now gain recognition of American independence and arrange a Dutch-American alliance — and thus only, he had concluded, could he obtain a loan — Adams pressed Congress for greater authority. As winter progressed, his new commission arrived; Congress had designated him minister plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic, which provided all the authority to be wished for.
Through February and March, despite the weather, Adams kept on the move, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, conferring with as many of his Dutch friends and contacts as possible. Again, as at Paris, the question was the timing of a formal announcement of his new powers.
Advised that his Amsterdam lodgings were too “obscure” for his new position, and that his effectiveness was being hurt by talk of this, Adams arranged for an American firm in Amsterdam to “hire” a suitable house — “the best house that is to be had at as cheap a rate as may be,” he wrote — and to have it furnished “decent enough for any character in Europe to dine in with a republican citizen.” In lengthy correspondence on the matter, he specified that the house be “large, roomy, and handsome, fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d’Amérique.” He would need two manservants and a “good cook” (whether male or female he did not care). A “genteel carriage” would be required, as well as a coachman, and Adams was particular that the livery be in the Paris mode: deep blue coat and breeches, scarlet cape and waistcoats. (He also wanted the clothes returned when the time came for the servants to leave.) This was “new work” for him, he added, having never set up housekeeping before.
At Versailles, meanwhile, the Comte de Vergennes was writing to his ambassador at Philadelphia to say that Adams, in his role in the Netherlands, had become an embarrassment, an observation that La Luzerne was expected to pass along to his numerous friends in Congress. Especially distressing to Vergennes was the thought of Adams ever having any say in a peace settlement. “[He] has a rigidity, an arrogance, and an obstinacy that will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . .”
BY ESTABLISHED DIPLOMATIC FORM, no emissary ever proclaimed his mission — his “public character” — until the government to which he was accredited was ready to receive him. To do otherwise was deemed not only appallingly bad form but altogether impractical.
By the time spring came, Adams had decided what he must do, no matter the diplomatic niceties. “America . . . has been too long silent in Europe,” he wrote to Francis Dana. “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained to be approved.”
Adams was by then at Leyden, settled temporarily with his sons, John Thaxter, and Benjamin Waterhouse, the medical student, in a house on a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, the city’s famous cathedral on the opposite side of the Rapenburg Canal from the university. It was the old quarter where the Pilgrims had lived during their years at Leyden, a connection deeply felt by Adams. A deacon at the cathedral would later relate, “Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.”
On April 19, 1781, six years to the day from the battle of Lexington and Concord, Adams completed and signed a sixteen-page memorial, addressed to “Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries.” A strong, even passionate appeal for cooperation, it began by affirming that the American people were “unalterably determined” to maintain their independence and that if ever there was a “natural alliance,” it would be between the two republics of the Netherlands and the United States. He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained. Indeed, so close were the two republics in history, religion, and government, Adams declared, “that every Dutchman instructed on the subject must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary or pass a censure upon the greatest actions of his immortal ancestors.” And if such noble sentiments were not reason enough for a Dutch-American bond, there was “the great and growing interest of commerce,” the “circumstance which perhaps in this age has stronger influence than any other in the formation of friendships between nations.
It may not . . . be amiss to hi
nt that the central situation of this country, her extensive navigation, her possessions in the East and West Indies, the intelligence of her merchants, the number of her capitalists, and the riches of her funds, render a connection with her very desirable to America; and, on the other hand, the abundance and variety of the productions of America, the materials of manufacturers, navigation, and commerce, the vast demand and consumption in America of the manufactures of Europe . . . cannot admit of a doubt that a connection with the United States would be useful to this republic.
Adams was acutely aware of the magnitude of the step he was taking. By breaking the rules of diplomatic convention — by embarking on his own on what he called “militia diplomacy” — he was, he knew, risking ridicule and enmity, and, in the event that things went sour, disgrace. His entire mission was at stake, and who could say what the consequences would be at home if it were to fail. “But wise men know,” he would write, “that militia sometimes gain victories over regular troops, even by departing from the rules.” It was the militia, after all, who had humiliated the British regulars at Lexington and Concord, on that earlier April 19.
For a man of such strong feelings and great inner tensions, these were days of extreme stress, during which he remained uncharacteristically silent, as Benjamin Waterhouse would recall in a telling description of Adams the morning he set off for The Hague, nine miles distant.
I never shall forget the day and the circumstances of Mr. Adams’s going from Leyden to The Hague with the memorial to their High Mightinesses, the States-General. . . . He came down into the front room where we were — his secretary, two sons, and myself — his coach and four at the door, and he, full-dressed, even to his sword, when with energetic countenance and protuberant eyes, and holding his memorial in his hand, said to us in a solemn tone, “Young men! Remember this day, for this day I go to The Hague to put seed in the ground that may produce good or evil — God knows which” — and putting the papers in his side pocket, he stepped into his coach and drove off alone, leaving us, his juniors, solemnized in thought and anxious, for he had hardly spoken to us for several days before — such was his inexpressible solitude.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 179