John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Warming to this theme, Abigail described precisely what he owed to each. She counseled him to practice self-scrutiny. By this Abigail did not mean, as a modern would, that he should sound the depths of his being in order to know what lies there, but rather that he should purge the “mist,” as she put it, which “Self love and partiality” cast before his eyes. “Whoever will candidly examine themselves,” she wrote, “will find some degree of passion, peevishness or obstinacy in their Natural tempers.”

  This was Enlightenment psychology: to know yourself was to learn to master the passions that threatened to eclipse reason. John Adams had mastered his “amorous nature” by recalling the stern precepts of his own parents. Abigail may have felt that Johnny was similarly constituted. “You my dear son are formed with a constitution feelingly alive,” she wrote, “your passions are strong and impetuous, yet with pleasure I have observed a frankness and generosity accompany your efforts to govern and subdue them.” Perhaps she felt that she needed to instill in her son the same contempt and horror of “libertinage” that Deacon John had imbued in her husband. Abigail promised to further expand on the subject of self-knowledge in subsequent letters.

  Johnny had largely internalized his parents’ admonitions. He wrote faithfully to his relatives; when he was home from school, he and his father sat around a table at the Basse Cour, each with his own ink and quill pen. His letters grew longer and more grave. He wrote to Charles and Tom listing all the French grammar books he was reading, including “one so rational, ingenious and curious that the book is as entertaining as a romance tho the subject is dry.” He began to grow into the finely balanced and rather elliptical prose style he was to master as an adult. In September 1778, two months past his eleventh birthday, he wrote to his mother about the consequences of keeping a journal, as his father had asked him to do: “Altho I shall have the mortification a few years hence, to read a great deal of my Childish nonsense, yet I shall have the Pleasure, & advantage, of Remarking the several steps, by which I shall have advanced in taste, judgement, & knowledge.” (Another year would pass before he would take his father’s advice.) A week later, he wrote to his two little brothers at home a very long letter setting out a suggested reading list of works in French.

  John Adams, meanwhile, was feeling idle and increasingly frustrated. The delegates had completed a treaty with France before Adams arrived, and the French seemed to be in no hurry to extend loans or any other form of assistance to the Americans. A month after arriving in Paris, Adams had written to the Continental Congress suggesting that they needed not three representatives but one. He probably hoped that the Congress would leave him there and order Franklin and Arthur Lee Jr. home. But in February 1779 Adams received word that the revolutionary government had decided instead to leave Franklin in Paris and order himself and Lee back home. He was more than ready to leave—save that he had finally learned to speak French quite comfortably, if not nearly as well as his son, and was feeling more and more at home.

  By this time, Johnny was out of school, and his father had very little to do. They took long walks together in the Bois de Boulogne. Adams took his son with him on his social calls. He kept him at his studies. John Adams had always believed in the pedagogic value of brute force labor. Now he gave Johnny French verbs to conjugate and instructed him to list every person in every tense, so that the boy might fill two sheets of paper on a single verb. He was laying down the habits of a lifetime.

  On June 17, the two set sail for Boston aboard a French frigate, the Sensible. Johnny, who had been tutored in French on the Boston, returned the favor by teaching English to France’s new ambassador to the United States, Anne-César, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and his secretary, François de Barbé-Marbois. His father found them one day in his stateroom, Johnny flanked by the chevalier and his secretary, the chevalier reading from Blackstone, Johnny “correcting the pronunciation of every Word and Syllable and Letter.” The boy, exclaimed the chevalier, “was the master of his own language like a professor.” The two, Adams wrote in his diary, “are in raptures with my son.”

  Six weeks later, Johnny was perched once again on the rugged rocks of Braintree. He planned on studying until he could be admitted to Harvard. (At that time, before the advent of widespread secondary schooling, Harvard and other colleges admitted students as young as fourteen.) The war with England had reached a stalemate, and John Adams’ services were still very much in demand. The town of Braintree named him as a delegate to the state constitutional convention, and Adams spent the next several months single-handedly drafting the Massachusetts constitution. This literary and legal masterpiece helped secure Adams’ reputation. The spirit of the great English liberal thinkers, above all John Locke, breathes through the work: The “body-politic . . . is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.” (Adams described his own work as “Locke, Sidney, Rousseau and de Mably reduced to practice.”) Here was the new American credo in a nutshell: the people covenant with one another, not with the king or clergy.

  In October, Adams received word that Congress had appointed him to return to France to negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain, though at that time peace was scarcely in the offing. Once again, though it must have broken Abigail’s heart, he immediately consented. Barbé-Marbois had written to Adams specifically suggesting he take Johnny, the precocious language instructor, with him. Adams wrote back to say that his son “had already learned to esteem and respect the French Nation,” but that the time had come for him to begin his education at home. And then, fatefully, he changed his mind. Adams decided to bring not only his eldest son but the nine-year-old Charles, along with John Thaxter, their tutor, and a private secretary, Francis Dana. On November 14, they returned to Europe on the Sensible. John Quincy would not return to America until he was almost eighteen.

  This time the boy brought with him a new piece of equipment: a diary. John Adams had kept a diary since youth and had urged his son to keep a journal of “the events that happen to me, and of objects that I see, and of Characters that I converse with from day to day.” Later on, Adams would buy five-hundred-page hard-bound volumes, but now he brought with him a small sheaf of papers bound by a string. (The string may have been looped through the pages later on.) On the front the twelve-year-old boy hopefully wrote, “JOURNAL BY ME.”

  The ship sprang a leak after only four days at sea, and ten days later the hole had grown so large that the passengers had to take turns manning a pump. In his journal, Johnny wrote of his own trip to the hold. After he was whacked in the skull by a beam, he drew the profile of a head with curvy lines, then a bird and stars.

  The Sensible limped into Ferrol, on the very northwest corner of Spain, almost a thousand miles from Paris, the first four hundred of which would take the Adams party on the rough, mountainous track along Spain’s northern coast. In twenty years of very hard traveling, John Adams wrote, “I never experienced any Thing like this journey.” But, he wrote, both Johnny and Charles had endured the five-week trip without complaint. Once in Paris, the Adams entourage took an elegant suite of rooms at the Hotel de Valois in the rue de Richelieu. The boys were soon enrolled at a school in Passy. Monsieur Pechigny’s academy was much as Monsieur Le Coeur’s but more rigorous: Johnny was learning Greek roots and grammar as well as Latin, geometry, and writing. His father thought the time had come to drop frivolous pursuits and wrote to Monsieur Pechigny asking that the boys be excused from fencing and dancing. Johnny was no longer a boy of ten, after all. Adams wrote to his son to tell him to pay special attention to Latin and Greek, and let math and geography, as well as writing and drawing, fall by the wayside. And by the way, he added, improve your penmanship: “Can’t you keep a steadier hand?”

  The family’s time in Paris turned out to be brief. John Adams had again found himself with nothing to do, since the British were not yet prepared to trea
t with the Americans. He decided to remove himself to Amsterdam, where he understood that pro-American feeling ran high and loans to the cash-starved revolutionary cause might thus be available. Adams enrolled the boys in the Latin School on the Singel, Amsterdam’s innermost canal. Since he didn’t speak Dutch, Johnny was placed in a class with younger children, which made him miserable. For perhaps the only time in his life, he misbehaved; the school’s rector wrote a letter to John Adams complaining of the “disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son,” who was “doing his best to corrupt his amiable brother.” John Adams promptly withdrew his children. A young American doctor, Benjamin Waterhouse, suggested that Adams send the boys to Leyden, a university town where he had just completed his medical training.

  Leyden was a sacred city in America’s mythos, for the Puritans who founded the Plymouth colony had left from there, having first fled from England to the more tolerant Dutch city. It was a medieval town of steeply gabled houses lining broad canals spanned by bridges. On one side of the Rapenburg Canal stood the great buildings that held the classrooms of the University of Leyden; the Rapenburg was Leyden’s finest street, lined on both sides of the canal with tall trees. Johnny and Charles lived with Dr. Waterhouse on a narrow, curving street known as Langebrug, across the canal from the university. Their house lay just behind the great brick mass of the Pieterskirk, the church at which the Pilgrims had worshiped.

  As soon as the canals froze, the whole city took to its skates, and in December Johnny wrote to his father asking for skates as well as breeches and boots for riding. It was, he pointed out, Christmas vacation. John Adams could be indulgent toward his eldest son, whom he had come to regard as something of a prodigy, but he would not relax the grip of instruction: you can have skates, he responded, so long as you “confine yourself to proper hours, and to strict Moderation.” And he admonished the boy that skating was not simply “Velocity or Agility,” but required mastery of the same principles involved with dancing and riding.

  Waterhouse secured a tutor—admirably versed in the classics, Thaxter reported to John Adams—to spend two hours a day teaching the boys Latin and Greek. Johnny kept at his own studies of the Old Testament in Greek. He attended public lectures in jurisprudence and natural philosophy at the university, at that time perhaps the foremost such institution in Europe. Thanks to his father, he had gotten to know Jean de Luzac, a highly regarded classical scholar and later the university rector. He was living in an increasingly adult intellectual world. He had the scholarly Thaxter for company, as well as Waterhouse, later one of America’s most prominent physicians.

  Johnny heard regularly from both his parents. His father wrote to say that the boy must begin reading the Roman historians and moralists—Sallust, Tacitus, Livy, and, of course, Cicero, the model of models. Another letter proposed Demosthenes, and still another, the English poets. Abigail admonished her son to comport himself as a gentleman: “I hope, my dear boy, that the universal neatness and Cleanliness, of the people where you reside, will cure you of all your slovenly tricks.” Now Abigail was writing to Charles as well, and the difference in her tone is striking. She gently chided her middle son not to let all the fuss people made over him go to his head. Charles was younger and more delicate, but also not so obviously a prodigy as Johnny.

  A modern reader, scrutinizing these letters to a teenage boy living far from home, searches in vain for expressions of love or words of gentle support—from one of them, at least. And it would not be correct to say that parents of that time were unable or unwilling to open themselves emotionally to their children in that way; Elizabeth Smith Shaw, for example, was much warmer in her letters than was her older sister Abigail. John Quincy Adams might have had a much happier life, and perhaps even been a better husband and father, had one of his parents offered him unconditional love and approval. But that wasn’t their way: both John and Abigail felt they could do their son no greater favor than holding him to the highest possible standards. John Quincy Adams, for better or worse, would have been the first to agree.

  CHAPTER 3

  As Promising and Manly a Youth as Is in the World

  (1781–1785)

  FOR THE FIRST THIRTEEN YEARS OF HIS LIFE, JOHN QUINCY Adams had been educated in the most direct and explicit way possible: first his mother and then his father had, in effect, opened up his head and filled it with fixed principles, stern admonitions, heroic characters, great ambitions. He had faithfully absorbed every syllable. And then, at what was still a very tender age, he was thrown into the world, and he began to profit from his own experience and observations. This premature self-reliance may account for the extraordinary certainty and assurance that would mark his later life.

  In June 1781, John Adams’ secretary, Francis Dana, learned that he had been appointed minister to St. Petersburg, with the goal of enlisting Russia in the American cause. Dana spoke little French, the universal language of diplomacy, and when the young man he had approached to serve as his secretary backed out, dreading the prospect of a sojourn in Siberia, Dana and John Adams agreed that Johnny would make the perfect aide.

  John Quincy Adams was not yet thirteen years old. Yet he had crossed the ocean twice with perfect equanimity, mastered French, studied at Europe’s greatest university, and learned to write with admirable fluency in two languages. He was a boy, but a remarkably steady and self-possessed one. His happy idyll in Leyden thus came to an abrupt end. He and Dana traveled eastward across Germany, from Cologne to Bonn to Frankfurt to Leipzig to Berlin, and then on through Poland and Latvia. Johnny made note in his diary of the quality of the roads, the soil, and the crops, just as his father would have wanted him to do. He seemed to take this epic journey very much in stride. He and Dana reached St. Petersburg on August 27, at the beginning of the Russian autumn. They took lodgings in the Hotel de Paris, an inn whose only luxury was its name.

  The tsarina, Catherine, who had famously sheltered Voltaire and Diderot, was thought to be “liberal” and thus at least potentially sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. In fact, Catherine abhorred republicanism and had no intention of disturbing her relations with Great Britain by according recognition to an American minister. Though Dana, to his great credit, tried every way he could to gain access to Catherine’s court, he might as well have tried to knock down the walls of the Hermitage Palace with his hands. His mission was doomed.

  Johnny was at first both impressed and intrigued by his new home. He wrote to Thaxter that St. Petersburg was far superior to Paris, both for the breadth of its streets and the elegance of its private buildings. He hoped to find a tutor to continue his studies, but as Dana wrote to John Adams, “Here there are neither schools, instructors, nor books.” The young man would have to educate himself. From the evidence of his letters and diaries, young Adams passed much of his fourteenth year sitting inside reading. He plowed through Hume’s six-volume History of England, tolling off the pages of each—503, 515, 472. . . . Then he read Macaulay’s three-volume history of England. He translated Cicero. He read Adam Smith. He tried to teach himself German. His father wrote, asking for details, as always: What are the houses built of? How high are they? What paintings does Russia have? And his son dutifully wrote back: brick and plaster, two to four stories . . . He wrote to Thaxter in French explaining the ingenious system by which Russians kept their houses warm.

  John Quincy was a diplomat in embryo. He paid close attention to Russia’s political order and described it in detail to his mother. “The Sovereign,” he wrote, “is Absolute, in all the extent of the word. . . . And the nobility have the same power over the people, that the Sovereign has over them. The Nation is wholly composed of Nobles and Serfs, or in other words, of Masters and Slaves.” The system, he wrote, is disadvantageous even to the sovereign, for the nobles continually rebel against absolute power. And even serfs who had grown immensely rich, he pointed out, were prepared to pay vast sums to obtain their liberty, for slavery is contemptible even when softened by wealth.
This was, of course, republican orthodoxy, and Abigail wrote back with a disquisition upon tyranny, showing how the Assyrians gave way to the Persians, the Persians to the Greeks, the Greeks to the Romans. (She must have been rereading Charles Rollins.) “Yet even this mistress of the world, as she is proudly stiled, in her turn, defaced her glory, tarnished her victories, and became a prey to luxury, ambition, faction, pride, Revenge and avarice.”

  That first winter, the temperature fluctuated between 20 and 30 degrees below zero, and a flu epidemic kept the city coughing. Nevertheless, Dana wrote to Adams to say that his son was in “high health.” Dana had undertaken to serve in loco parentis and reported that his young charge was busy translating Cicero’s Orations. “Do you think ’tis time for him to read history,” he asked, “and which shou’d you prefer?” Should he compose in French? Dana was loathe to part with his secretary and companion, but he wrote to Adams in May 1782, suggesting that the boy return to Leyden to resume his studies. Adams himself wished nothing more. He wrote to his son to report that Thaxter was going back to America, leaving him alone. John Quincy then wrote to his tutor saying he wished he could go with him, “car je suis tout à fait homesick.” He was, after all, barely a teenager. By the fall of 1782, he could find nothing to record in his diary save the weather and the name of his dinner companion—always an adult, since he seemed to know no one of his own age. He was bored out of his mind.