“If this had been the only action of my life, it would have been well spent,” Adams wrote to Abigail, hoping she would “Pardon the vanity.”
He was writing to her again and at length. He thought it unlikely that anyone would understand or appreciate the struggle and aggravation he had been through, the doubts, timidity, and hostilities he had had to contend with. “I have rendered a most important and essential service to my country here, which I verily believe no other man in the world would have done,” he confided. “I don’t mean by this that I have exerted any abilities here, or any action, that are not very common, but I don’t believe that any other man in the world would have had the patience and perseverance to do and to suffer what was absolutely necessary.”
Untrained in diplomacy and by temperament seemingly so unsuited for it, he had indeed succeeded brilliantly, as others and history would attest. He thought it no life for him — “I must be an independent man,” he reminded her — and possibly he was as ready to give it up as he claimed. (“A child was never more weary of a whistle than I am of embassies.”) But nothing he had done in the service of his country had given such satisfaction. No matter that the Dutch Republic was one of the “lesser theaters” of Europe, or that other events in which he had played a decisive part would rank higher in the balance. It had been his own path that he had taken, alone and in his own way. He had been ignored, ridiculed; he had very nearly died in the process. Yet he had persisted and succeeded.
Sometimes it was necessary to be “assuming,” he observed in a letter to Edmund Jenings. Had he followed the advice and exhortations he was subjected to, and suspended operations to request instructions, he would have been forbidden to proceed as he had and most likely Holland would have signed a separate peace with England. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”
Ironically, a letter was en route that June from Robert Livingston demanding to know why in his reports to Congress Adams had included nothing about the dockyards and arsenals of Holland, or the ships preparing for sea, or anything about the leading members of the Dutch government. “You have not repeated your private conversations with them, from which infinitely more is to be collected than from all the pamphlets scattered about the streets,” lectured Livingston, who had never set foot in Europe or served in a diplomatic role.
If they avoid your company and conversation it is a more unfavorable symptom than any you have mentioned, and shows clearly that your public character should have been concealed ‘til your address had paved the way for its being acknowledged. . . . None of your letters take the least notice of the French ambassador at The Hague. Is there no intercourse between you? If not, to what is it to be attributed?
The news that the Dutch Republic had recognized the United States did not reach Philadelphia until September, arriving by a Dutch ship named Heer Adams.
At noon, Tuesday, October 8, 1782, Adams arrived at the State House at The Hague to sign a treaty of commerce with the Dutch Republic. Deputies from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland stood waiting at the top of the stairs to escort him to the gilded Trèveszaal, or Truce Hall. With its elaborate frescoed ceiling and tall French doors overlooking a small lake and fountain, it could have been a chamber at Versailles, and as the ceremony proceeded ever so slowly, Adams had ample time to look about.
Finally, it was his turn, the treaty was signed and sealed, his work accomplished.
III
IN LATE SEPTEMBER, John Jay dispatched an urgent note to John Adams from Paris to report that the British emissary Richard Oswald had received a formal commission to treat with the United States on the matter of peace. Jay pressed Adams to come to Paris as soon as possible and cautioned that he “say nothing of this ‘til you see me.”
It was only with his treaty of commerce with the Dutch completed that Adams felt free to leave, but even then he seems to have been in no hurry to get to Paris. He hardly knew what to think about the prospect of making peace, he told Abigail. It could be “troublesome business,” “another furnace of affliction,” yet his spirits were high. “Yet I am very gay, more so than usual. I fear nothing. Why should I?”
The third week of October he started for Paris by carriage and six horses. With him were John Thaxter and an additional new secretary for the work at Paris, Charles Storer, a recent graduate of Harvard. Miserable weather slowed their progress. Unrelenting rain turned the road to a river of mud. The carriage broke down. But it was of Adams’s own choice that he lingered over a private collection of Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp, and an altarpiece by Rubens that he thought “beautiful beyond description.” Twenty-five miles north of Paris, he stopped again to tour the famous château at Chantilly, its stables and gardens, as though time were of no concern. It was a perfect autumn day that he would mark with a particularly lovely passage in his diary, revealing in a few lines the degree to which the hard-headed, intractable New Englander was, in the expression of the time, a man of”sensibility.”
While we were viewing the statue of Montmorency, Mademoiselle de Bourbon came out into the round house at the corner of the castle dressed in beautiful white, her hair uncombed, hanging and flowing about her shoulders, with a book in her hand, and leaned over the bar of iron, but soon perceiving that she had caught my eye and that I viewed her more attentively than she fancied, she rose up with that majesty and grace which persons of her birth affect if they are not taught, turned her hair off of both her shoulders with her hands in a manner that I could not comprehend, and decently stepped back into the chamber and was seen no more.
He reached Paris and the Hôtel de Valois that night. The following day, October 27, having bathed in a public bathhouse by the Seine and called for the services of a Parisian tailor and wigmaker, he was ready to take up his part in the negotiations.
Much had already transpired, as Adams learned from meetings with John Jay and a young American merchant named Matthew Ridley, whom Adams had met earlier in Holland and who, though he had no official role, seemed to know all that was going on.
Jay had arrived in Paris from Spain in June, and through most of the summer he and the British representative Richard Oswald had been in discussions centered on the recognition of American independence as a mandatory precursor to any talk of peace. Franklin had been absent from the talks, ill with the gout and bladder stones, and little progress was made. But in the last days of September, Oswald received word from London empowering him to treat with the ministers of the United States of America, not the American colonies, and at once the discussions took on a new air.
From their first meeting Jay and Adams found they were of like mind on most matters. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley wrote in his diary. “Mr. Adams is exceedingly pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley added after several more meetings. Jay, in his diary, recorded only of Adams that he “spoke freely what he thought.”
Jay was younger than Adams by ten years. Born to wealth and position in New York, tall, slim, and pale, he appeared somewhat haughty, carrying himself with a lift of the chin that made his hawk nose an even more pronounced feature. Like Adams, he had distinguished himself in the law and in Congress, where the two men had gotten along well enough, if frequently at cross purposes on issues. Jay, too, could be combative and stubborn, and as the descendant of French Huguenots, he had little liking for the Bourbon Court.
Jay refused to negotiate with the British until recognition of American independence was settled, and in so doing deliberately ignored the instructions of Congress to abide by the wishes of the French. Vergennes had wanted the discussions to proceed irrespective of the “point of independence.” Let independence wait upon the treaty, he had told Franklin. In fact, Vergennes had sent a secret envoy to London to hint to Lord Shelburne that France did not support all the demands of the Americans.
Apparently it was not until he reached Paris, not until his initial meetings with Jay, that Adams learned for the first time of the commission’s instruction
s from Congress to abide by the guidance of the French Foreign Ministry. Adams was outraged. America was not fighting a war for independence to be told what to do by the French. He wrote immediately to Robert Livingston to say he would rather resign than follow such instructions, and that he and Jay were “perfectly agreed” in their approach to the French.
I cannot express it better than in his own words: “to be honest and grateful to our allies, but to think for ourselves.” I find a construction put upon one article in our instructions by some persons which, I confess, I never put upon it myself. It is represented by some as subjecting us to the French ministry, as taking away from us all right of judging for ourselves, and obliging us to agree to whatever the French ministers should advise us to do, and to do nothing without their consent. I never supposed this to be the intention of Congress. If I had, I never would have accepted the commission, and if I now thought it their intention, I could not continue in it. I cannot think it possible to be the design of Congress. If it is I hereby resign my place in the commission and request that another person may be immediately appointed in my stead.
Disappointed with the cramped accommodations available to him this time at the Hôtel de Valois, Adams changed lodgings, moving to the Hôtel du Roi on the Place du Carrousel, between the Palais Royal and the Quai du Louvre, which was to remain his headquarters.
Through most of the fall Paris had been shrouded with dark skies, cold rain and fog, and the same grim weather continued, adding nothing to anyone’s spirits. For days Adams put off making contact with Franklin. After what Franklin had done to him, he told Matthew Ridley, he could hardly face the thought of going to Passy. When Ridley insisted he must, Adams agreed, but then, putting on his coat to leave, seemed to change his mind. It was only “with much persuasion [that] I got him at length to go,” Ridley wrote.
It would be the first time Adams had seen Franklin since Franklin had written his devastating letter to Congress on August 9, 1780. Exactly when Adams found out about the letter, or read its content, are not clear, but once, and apparently only once, he unburdened his pent-up fury, in a letter written earlier that summer to Edmund Jenings. At the root of Franklin’s behavior, Adams had convinced himself, was “base jealousy.” The possibility that his own feelings toward Franklin could have the same root cause seems not to have entered his mind.
His base jealousy of me, and his sordid envy of my commission for making a treaty of commerce with Great Britain have stimulated him to attempt an assassination upon my character at Philadelphia, of which the world has not yet heard, and of which it cannot hear until the time shall come when many voluminous state papers may be laid before the public, which ought not to be until we are all dead.
Still, Adams was determined not to let personal ire stand in the way of his duty regarding the work at hand.
That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow. As far as fate shall compel me to sit with him in public affairs, I shall treat him with decency and perfect impartiality.
To Abigail he boasted that he and Jay had held the line on the point of independence, refusing to “speak or hear before we were put on an equal foot.” Franklin, he told her, “as usual would have taken the advice of the C[omte] de V[ergennes] and treated without, but nobody would join him.” But in this Adams was both overstating his own part and being blatantly unfair to Franklin, who had supported the recognition of American independence since the beginning, before Adams ever arrived on the scene.
Adams called on Franklin at Passy the same evening that Ridley talked him out the door. He stayed several hours and seized the opportunity to speak frankly of his opinion of the French Court, as well as to praise Jay for his “firmness.” Franklin, wrote Adams afterward, “heard me patiently but said nothing.”
However deep-seated his animosity toward Franklin, Adams did truly treat him with decency and managed to work effectively with him as he had in times past. Adams, Franklin, and Jay met and dined in Paris the next day and would repeatedly again in the weeks to come. As days passed, Adams found himself even admiring the “old conjurer.”
The turning point came early, at one of the meetings prior to sitting down with the British negotiators, when Franklin, knowing the importance of a united front, told Jay and Adams, “I am of your opinion and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this [the French] Court.”
It was a brave decision. In direct conflict with their instructions from Congress, and at risk of alienating the French, they would ignore Vergennes. In his diary Adams described Franklin as “with us in entire harmony.”
FORMAL SESSIONS WITH THE BRITISH NEGOTIATORS began the morning of October 30 — Adams’s forty-seventh birthday — and continued into the last week of November, as snow fell on the city day after day, only to melt as fog set in. Starting at eleven each morning, the meetings took place at Jay’s lodgings at the Hôtel d’Orléans on the Rue des Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank; or at Adams’s Hôtel du Roi; or the Hôtel de Valentinois at Passy, to spare Franklin the ride into Paris in such weather; or at Richard Oswald’s quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite, also on the Rue des Petits-Augustins.
Henry Laurens, who had been released from the Tower of London in exchange for General Cornwallis, was suffering poor health from his captivity and would not appear for the negotiations until the very end. As secretary for the American commissioners, Franklin had selected his grandson, William Temple Franklin, a decision that did not please Adams, who thought John Thaxter better qualified. (Temple Franklin was twenty-two, the illegitimate son of Franklin’s illegitimate son, William, the former Tory governor of New Jersey who was living in London.) Also, among a half dozen other Americans who, like Matthew Ridley, were in and about the discussions, or dined with the negotiators as confidential matters were taken up, was Franklin’s friend and associate, the spy Bancroft, as well as the young hero the Marquis de Lafayette, who was home from the war in America.
Richard Oswald continued as chief negotiator for the British. Oswald, a Scot, was a merchant who had made a fortune in government contracts and the slave trade. Elderly, blind in one eye, he was favorably inclined toward the American point of view, and agreeable to the point of being unsuited for politics. But he was joined now by Henry Strachey, the undersecretary of state, sent by Lord Shelburne to stiffen Oswald’s resolve. Adams and Franklin had encountered Strachey once before, at Staten Island in 1776, at their meeting with Admiral Lord Howe, when Strachey, serving as Howe’s secretary, had kept notes. Adams, who spelled the name “Stretchey,” described him as an artful, insinuating man who “pushed and pressed every point,” while a young British career diplomat, Alleyne Fitzherbert, who served as an assistant, struck Adams as refreshingly without airs.
In fact, the British envoys were not particularly impressive. In ability, experience, and resolve they were hardly a match for Adams, Franklin, and Jay, who, having started from scratch as diplomats, had come a long way in their time in Europe.
In his diary Adams compared the situation between Britain and America to that of an eagle and a cat. The eagle, soaring over a farmer’s yard, sweeped and pounced on the cat, thinking it a rabbit. “In the air the cat seized her by the neck with her teeth and round her body with her fore and hind claws. The eagle finding herself scratched and pressed, bids the cat let go and fall down. ‘No,’ says the cat. ‘I won’t let go and fall. You shall stoop and set me down.’” The British, it appeared, were more ready to stoop and set America down than ever expected.
THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS to be dealt with, after acknowledgment of independence, were the boundaries of the United States, the right of navigation on the Mississippi River, debts, the interests of American Tories or Loyalists, and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a main point with Adams.
The Americans insisted that Britain cede all territory between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the Mississip
pi on the west, and to this the British agreed, thus at a stroke doubling the size of the new nation. The all-important right of the United States to navigation on the Mississippi was also settled.
On the question of private debts incurred by Americans to British merchants before the war, Franklin and Jay felt these had been counterbalanced by the American property confiscated or destroyed by the British army. But Adams strongly objected. Debts contracted in good faith should be paid, he insisted, and such a clause was included, though it would ultimately prove ineffective.
The British wanted compensation for the Loyalists. To Henry Strachey it was essential that such an article be included as proof to the thousands of American refugees that the British government, to which they had remained faithful, had not forgotten them. It was a point of view difficult for the Americans to accept, having, as they made clear, no sympathy for such people.
Strachey departed for London, taking the proposed articles for approval, and in the lull, Adams made his first visit to Versailles since his return to Paris. Vergennes, he had been informed by Lafayette, “took it amiss” that Adams had not been to see him.
Acutely sensitive to all that Vergennes had done to destroy his reputation with Congress, including enlisting Franklin to help make the case against him, Adams was no more eager to see Vergennes than he had been to see Franklin. He traveled the road to Versailles in a state of extreme apprehension, wondering, as he later wrote, whether he was to “hear an expostulation? a reproof? an admonition? or in plain vulgar English, a scolding? or was there any disposition to forget and forgive? and say all malice depart?”
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