by James Traub
The essential components, then, of John Quincy Adams’ early education were a passion for knowledge and intellectual accomplishment, an abiding Christian faith, and an extraordinary awareness of the dramatic moment in history in which he was living. In the Adams household, the ancient, the divine, and the contemporary fused into a single reality and a single sense of calling.
By the time Johnny was seven, in 1774, “Pharaoh,” as Abigail called the British overlords, had begun to visit his plagues on the people of Boston, which is to say that the British quartered themselves in the town, requisitioned homes, and restricted movement into and out of the town. The population began to flee, and the little house in Braintree filled with soldiers and friends and sometimes complete strangers who told tales of privation and flight. By early 1775, Abigail lived in fear. Should the British attack, John wrote, “fly to the woods with our Children.” In the aftermath of the battles of Lexington and Concord, thousands of militiamen poured from the countryside into Boston and Cambridge. Johnny saw the soldiers and felt both the terror and the majesty. He watched his mother melt the family pewter to make bullets. And then came Bunker Hill, a catastrophe that at the same time felt like the lighting of a great fuse.
The Adamses were not simply playthings of history but makers of the national destiny. Abigail would read John’s letters to the children as they gathered around the fireside. Those letters pulsed with an awareness of the magnitude of the events unfolding before him; he wrote of the “awe” he felt at the Congress’ accomplishments. He wrote about General Washington and about Ben Franklin, strangely subdued but always pushing for the boldest measures. He sent them news of Thomas Paine’s rousing pamphlet “Common Sense,” which he thought overpraised. (Adams was convinced that the publication of his own letters calling for independence had done far more to influence public opinion than had Paine’s broadside—a decidedly minority opinion.) It was John Adams, perhaps more than any other individual, who defined the American revolution. A British spy once said that Adams had a talent for “seeing large things largely” (though not, he added tartly, “correctly”). He was a self-dramatizing figure at a moment of supreme drama. And his exploits filled his son’s mind and fired his imagination.
Johnny did not, of course, live in history. He was a boy growing up in the woods and fields of New England. During much of the year Braintree was blasted by the frigid winds sweeping in from the ocean, but in the summer it was heavenly. In summer, wrote John Quincy’s grandson Henry Adams of his own boyhood seventy years later, a child “rolled in the grass, or waded in the brook, or swam in the salt ocean, or sailed in the bay, or fished for smelts in the creeks, or netted minnows in the salt-marshes, or took to the pine-woods or the granite quarries, or chased muskrats or hunted snapping-turtles in the swamps, or mushrooms or nuts on the autumn hills.”
But Johnny knew that play was a luxury; he had a nagging conscience, and a sense of responsibility, at an early age. “My head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs play and trifles,” he confessed to his father just shy of his tenth birthday. “I wish Sir you would give me some instructions with regard to my time & advise me how to proportion my studies & my play in writing & and I will keep them by me, & endeavour to follow them.” Not just his parents’ sober instructions but his own immediate experience were making him grow up prematurely. He was the oldest boy in the household, and Abigail depended on him, for example, to ride the seven miles to Boston to drop off and pick up the precious mail.
John Adams finally came home from his labors in late November 1777. He was prepared to resume his legal career, which he had dropped four years earlier, leaving his family to survive on dwindling savings. But it was not to be. General Washington had won a smashing victory over Burgoyne at Saratoga in September and October, and American prospects had begun to look less grim than they had a year before; but the British had a vast advantage over the Americans in men and materiel, and victory seemed impossible without foreign—that is, French—help.
The Continental Congress asked Adams to go to France to replace Silas Deane, who had been negotiating for assistance and for recognition of American sovereignty, along with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee Jr.
Adams had no wish to leave home and certainly none to make an Atlantic crossing in the dead of winter. And he was less worried about being lost at sea than he was about being captured by the British, who, he was quite certain, would execute him as a traitor. But in December, when the Congress formally asked him to go, he agreed without hesitation, as was his habit. Abigail begged him not to go and then asked him to take her and the children. He refused. But when Johnny implored his father to let him come, Adams relented. And Abigail—Portia—agreed to a Roman sacrifice. She would surrender both husband and eldest son. She agreed that Johnny would profit from the experience. Abigail fretted that her boy would be trapped by the “snares and temptations” of the old world, but she acknowledged that “to exclude him from temptation is to exclude him from the World in which he is to live.”
John Quincy Adams would spend much of the next seven years of his life far from the world of bloodshed and heroism in which he had been raised; he would gain a knowledge of statecraft, of literature and philosophy, of painting and theater, which would have been impossible at home. He could have become a dandy and a snob; he did, in fact, become a formidable and rather imperious young man. But the patriotism drilled into his soul from birth would prove to be ineradicable.
CHAPTER 2
His Thoughts Are Always Running in a Serious Strain
(1778–1780)
IN ORDER TO AVOID DETECTION, JOHN ADAMS AND HIS SON SET out from Quincy in the dead of night. Adams knew that British spies were everywhere and would be watching the roads as well as the harbor. It was February 15, 1778. The Adams men walked in the moonlight to a spit of land called Moon Head, near Wollaston, the Quincy family seat. From then they would take a rowboat out to the Boston, the ship that would take them across the ocean. At Hoff’s Neck, not far from their destination, the travelers were accosted by an old woman—a remote Adams relation—who screeched, like a Shakespearean witch, “The Heavens frown, the clouds roll, the hollow winds howl!” The ten-year-old boy may have been spooked, but he was in the company of his all-knowing father, who sneered at superstition and dire auguries. They cinched their greatcoats against the biting cold and climbed aboard the rowboat.
Neither John Adams nor his son had ever sailed the ocean; even John, who had represented ships’ captains in court for years, had done virtually all his traveling by land. The mid-winter Atlantic crossing was thus an experience fraught with both mystery and peril. The Boston, a 504-ton frigate, was a fine ship with an experienced captain, Samuel Tucker. After setting off in a snowstorm, the ship put in at the port in Marblehead, about twenty miles to the north. There friends of the captain and crew came aboard and told hair-raising tales of the cruel treatment meted out to captives taken by British men o’war. John Adams grew increasingly impatient and nervous. On the eighteenth, the Boston took advantage of fair winds and sailed north. On the twentieth, it was chased by a British ship, rousing Adams’ fear of capture. He urged Tucker to fight with everything he had; the alternative was too horrible to contemplate. The Boston put all its guns out; every man waited for battle. And then, with the English warship steadily gaining, a tremendous storm hit.
Lashed by violent winds, the waves rose up mountainously and fell away in a terrifying abyss. The ship rolled and pitched like a cork, the cargo smashing against the hold, the mates falling and cursing. The sealed door to the powder room flew open, threatening to annihilate the ship with an explosion before it could be sent to the bottom by the flood. The noise from the wind, from the screaming of the ropes, from the straining of the timbers, which seemed about to crack into a thousand pieces, was so deafening that a man couldn’t hear a word shouted into his ear. A lightning bolt hit the mast, which splintered with a tremendous crack. For three days the storm raged
on. Adams and his son braced themselves against the bed of their stateroom to keep from splitting their skulls. And Johnny proved to his father that he was no ordinary boy. “Fully sensible of the Danger,” his father wrote, “he was constantly endeavouring to bear up under it with a manly courage and patience, very attentive to me, and his thoughts always running in a serious Strain.”
This was the first time that the boy had been alone with his father for a protracted period. More than that, it was perhaps the first time that he had ever seen his father, rather than simply heard about him, as a figure of authority among other men. Here was a new form of education for a boy at a very suggestible age. John Adams had spent the previous two years watching over the Continental Army, consuming vast amounts of military history and doctrine, serving on congressional committees and proposing reforms, growing impatient at failures of nerve and of command. He watched the routines of the Boston with the same acute and censorious attention to detail. As soon as the storm subsided, he made a list in his journal of everything wrong with the ship and its crew: the space between decks was too narrow and stifling; the deck held too many guns, making navigation slow and unsteady; the ship was filthy, the crew swore too much, and the meals arrived irregularly. Adams gave broad hints to the captain and found to his satisfaction that the decks were soon washed, swept, and aired. He was a man who wanted and expected responsibility.
Father and son shared a cabin and must have spent countless hours in conversation. John Adams was a man of bottomless curiosity who wanted to understand everything. He wondered about the Gulf Stream, which bore the ship forward and carried storms along its track. “What is the course of it?” he asked himself. “From what Point and to what Point does it flow? How broad is it? . . .” What were the fish that swam in the ship’s wake? And he yearned to know about the world to which he had been sent. What was the state of Europe’s armies, navies, and finance? How many ships did it have, with how many guns? What were the British plans? Adams never hesitated to talk to his son about the most grown-up subjects; Johnny listened and watched while his father’s restless mind turned over every riddle and mystery.
Most of the time, Adams was too seasick and too wet to focus on much of anything. Johnny, however, seemed delighted with the voyage. The elder Adams had brought a French grammar book with him, and he asked Nicholas Noel, a French doctor returning home, to teach his son the language. Johnny proved to be an eager student and made quick progress. Very much his father’s son, he pestered the captain to tell him the name of every sail and to explain how the compass worked. In mid-March, the Boston chased and seized the Martha, a British merchant ship with cargo said to be insured by Lloyd’s for 70,000 pounds—a thrilling moment for everyone. But the victory came with a cost: One of the Boston’s guns exploded; Barron, the sailor manning the gun, had to have his leg amputated. John Adams held Barron in his arms during the operation. Barron died two weeks later; his body was placed in a casket laden with shot. Everyone, Johnny included, stood solemnly on deck while Barron’s body was committed to the ocean with a prayer.
On March 28, six weeks after leaving, John Adams spied the Ile de Re, an island off the French coast, and then the great round towers that guarded the harbor of La Rochelle. A pilot arrived to guide the Boston to the port of Bordeaux. As they cruised down the Gironde, the river tapered, and on either bank they could see farmers and cattle. In Bordeaux, they were invited aboard a merchant ship for a splendid meal. The Adams took a chaise through Poitiers, Amboise, Tours, and Orleans. They reached Paris on April 8. John was once again pleased to see that his son seemed not the least worse for wear from the five-hundred-mile trip.
Several days later, they visited Benjamin Franklin at his home in Passy, at a chateau known as the Hotel de Valentinois. Silas Deane, whom Adams had come to replace, had just vacated the courtyard pavilion known as the Basse Cour, and Franklin invited the Adamses to lodge there. The newcomers could scarcely have done better: at that time, Passy was a charming village close to the Bois de Boulogne and a few miles from the center of Paris; the chateau itself sat on eighteen acres, which ran downhill to the Seine. (The house occupied a site near the current rue Singer.) The gardens surrounding their cottage were filled with acacia, linden, and chestnut trees. Here was nature tamed and beautified: not the hillocky, swampy farm in Braintree, with its chickens and cows, but the kind of delightfully arranged pastoral fashioned with an effortless elegance by a society devoted to artifice and rationality. Both father and son were thoroughly delighted.
Within a week, John Adams had installed Johnny in the private boarding academy of Monsieur Le Coeur, where Franklin had placed his grandson, Benjamin Bache (later the publisher of the Aurora, a notoriously anti-Adams newspaper). Monsieur Le Coeur taught dancing, fencing, music, and drawing, as well as French and Latin. His father was soon mortified to discover that his son “learned more French in a day than I could learn in a Week with all my Books.” (He did, however, say the same of his servant.) Within a month, Johnny was writing plausible letters in French. He described the austere routine in a letter to his mother: rise at six, study until eight thirty, breakfast and “play,” study from nine to twelve, dinner and play until two, study until four thirty, play until five, study until seven, supper, study, bed. He also showed her a new strain of seriousness. By now, he wrote—it was April 20—she would have heard of the treaty with France, “which I believe will rouse the hearts of the Americans exceedingly and also the desire of the English to make peace with us and of the Commissioners dispatched from England for that Purpose.”
Sometimes Johnny was allowed to join his father for excursions. He wrote to his cousin Billy Cranch that he had joined Dr. Franklin and his son, William Temple Franklin, and “other Gentlemen and Ladies” at a dinner at a chateau in Montmartre. He wrote to cousin Lucy Cranch that he had gone to the Comédie Italienne, where he had seen a succession of plays, among them Nymphs of Diana. “All the actresses,” he wrote, “had on white silk gowns with part of them dragging behind on the ground with a case of quivers at their backs.” Johnny loved the theater the way other boys love the circus. He wrote to Nabby that of all the amusements in Paris his favorite was “the Spectacles,” popular shows with song and dance. “Pappa won’t let me go to them as often as I wish,” he lamented. He enjoyed the opera and the Comédie, but, he added breathlessly, “the language the wit the passions the sentiment the oratory the poetry the manners the morals are at the French comedy.” He would become a lifelong connoisseur of the theater, in many languages.
Johnny took his cues from his father, and John Adams had been seduced by the French. Days after reaching Paris, he wrote to Abigail, “stern and haughty Republican as I am, I cannot help loving these People, for their earnest Desire, and their assiduity to please.” Adams was no killjoy. He found much about France beautiful and charming. The women were beguiling—all the more so because they made intelligent conversation. (He may have added this for Abigail’s benefit.) Johnny understood that he was allowed to be delighted. But he was not to surrender to this glorious fleshpot. His father was a stern and haughty republican; though his fondness for the French people never slackened, he began to find the opulence sickening. He yearned for the simple pleasures of home. And so, Johnny claimed, did he. In June, still a month shy of eleven years old, he wrote to his mother that he would “much rather be among the rugged rocks of my own native town than in the gay city of Paris.” He must have liked the sound of this noble sentiment, since he repeated it in a letter to brother Charles, and added, with startling sententiousness for a boy his age, “Your business & mine are upon the Same foundation to qualify ourselves to be useful members of Society & to get a living in the world.”
Johnny absorbed from his father not a mixed but a mingled message: Europe was wonderful, but virtue lay elsewhere. From Abigail, however, the message was more severe. At times Abigail could be sportive, even whimsical, but her fear of the snares of the old world and the heedlessness of youth—of yo
ung men, above all—darkened her already somber tone. “Improve your understanding,” she wrote in her first letter to Johnny, but bear in mind that learning “will be of little value and small Estimation, unless Virtue, Honor, Truth and integrity are added to them.” Let yourself be guided by religious sentiments and the precepts of your father, she went on, “for dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the ocean you have crossed, or any untimely death crop you in your infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.” This sentiment, shocking to our own ears, might have been stinging even to his.
John Adams was enormously proud of his son—of his French fluency, his intellectual growth, his gift for impressing adults—and he often said so to Abigail. “Your son is the joy of my heart,” he wrote. But Abigail seemed to worry that praise would go to the boy’s head. She reminded Johnny—unremittingly, it must have seemed to him—of the responsibilities he bore. If Providence had preserved him from death at sea, she wrote, then he must treat such mercy as a debt to be discharged: “in the first place to your Great Preserver, in the next to Society in general, in particular to your country, your parents and yourself.”