John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  For all that, he heaved a sigh of relief when he learned in April that his father was to be appointed minister to London, because of course he would have to stay. To return to America, to train for the law, would mean long years and donkey labor before he had distinguished himself. A new strain of self-reflection permeated his diary. Starting on his new life, he wrote, was “a prospect somewhat discouraging for a youth of my ambition; for I have ambition, though I hope its object is laudable.” On the other hand, what laudable ambitions could he satisfy in London or Paris? He could not give way to molesse. In the very same diary entry he wrote, “I am determined that so long as I am able to get my own living in an honourable manner, I will depend on no one.” Better to die than to live as a dependent. So he must return home, he must go to Harvard, he must study law, as his father wished. John Quincy Adams would not question the stars; he always accepted, perhaps all too readily, the tyranny of “must.” In mid-May he boarded a carriage for the Breton seaport of L’Orient, “with such feelings as no one that has not been separated from persons so dear can conceive.” Two weeks later, accompanying seven hunting dogs he was to deliver to George Washington as a gift from the Marquis de Lafayette, he set sail for New York.

  CHAPTER 4

  You Are Admitted, Adams

  (1785–1788)

  BETWEEN THE AGES OF TWELVE AND SEVENTEEN, JOHN QUINCY Adams had lived the life of a prince in a fairy tale. Now the romance had come to an end, and he had been deposited back home to live with his own people and to find his level among them. He was excited and frightened by the prospect in equal measure. He had brought with him from Europe a rather lofty idea of himself and his standing, but his self-image would take a battering in the new world of his peers. Adams would be a less self-confident man at twenty-two than he had been when he arrived in New York at eighteen.

  The America to which Adams returned in the summer of 1785 was, of course, an independent nation; New York was the seat of its government. And the young man belonged to one of the first families of the new nation. On his second morning in town he breakfasted with Richard Henry Lee, the president of the Confederation Congress. Lee insisted that Adams stay at his home while the young man was in New York. He met with the Massachusetts delegation to Congress and dined with the Virginia delegation. John Adams had had to bull his way into the realm of public affairs by sheer force of talent and ambition; his son was welcomed there as by right. He would struggle against a status he felt he had not earned.

  Adams had crossed the Atlantic with Jacques Le Ray de Chaumont, the son of his former host at the Hotel Valentinois in Passy, who was going to visit a family farm near Albany. Chaumont suggested they travel northward by horse rather than stage or ship. Adams thought this would be a fine way “to form some opinion of the country, and to make some acquaintance which may be of use hereafter.” He bought a horse, and the two young men set off for New England, speaking French. He was struck, as so many Europeans were, by the American character. Even fifty miles from New York he noticed “bluntness, and an assurance” he hadn’t found in the more aristocratic capital city. He was appalled by the provincialism of townsfolk who knew nothing of the world ten miles away, and was shocked to find a woman of low standing—a woman whose like no gentleman in Holland would consent to be seen with—in “the best Company in the city.” Young Adams was a parvenu in his own country.

  John Quincy reached Boston on August 25 and then proceeded on to Braintree. Whatever doubts he still felt about the decision to leave Europe, he was overwhelmed with emotion at his return home after an absence of six years. He went first to the home of the Cranches: Abigail’s sister Mary; her husband, Richard; and their two daughters, Lucy and Betsy. They stared at one another, so overcome that at first none of them was able to speak. He stopped off at his parents’ home, now deserted. He couldn’t bear to stay or even to describe his feelings in his journal. Yet life had warped him out of the provincial orbit of Braintree. The Cranches were mightily impressed, and slightly terrified, by the world traveller in their midst. Mary wrote to Abigail to say, “he enters into characters with a penetration that astonishes me. If I had anything in my disposition that I wish’d to hide, I would not be acquainted with him. He is formed for a Statesman.” She could, she said, get nothing done when John Quincy was in the room, since she stared and stared, seeing first his mother, then his father, in his countenance.

  The time had come for John Quincy to arrange his future. He rode back to Cambridge to meet with President Joseph Willard of Harvard and secure his enrollment. He had always been considered an exceptionally erudite young man, as indeed he was, but President Willard, a stickler’s stickler, found his Greek rather scanty—as in fact it was—and suggested he find a tutor and return in March to be examined for admission in the spring semester. From Harvard’s point of view, Adams was not ahead of his peers, as he had supposed, but behind them. This was a stinging blow to an ego that, until then, had received a good deal of gratification. It appeared that his merits were not quite so self-evident in America as they had been in Europe. The young scholar was sent to study under his other uncle, the Reverend John Shaw, in Haverhill. He traveled there, about forty miles to the north, the following week.

  The Haverhill of 1785 was a much livelier place than Braintree, then little more than a crossroads with outlying farms. Haverhill was the county seat and commercial capital of Essex County, near the current border with New Hampshire. Situated on the Merrimack River, Haverhill was a mill town and manufacturing center, with a prosperous class of merchants who could afford to keep the Reverend Shaw in a fine parsonage house. At “Assembly” every two weeks the citizens would gather for talk and dancing, and young people could socialize at parties held at a rotating series of homes.

  Before he left England, John Quincy had struck a bargain with Nabby that each would send the other letters with their doings, as well as their innermost thoughts. Whether because Nabby had no interest in his bookish flights or because he was quickening to life in his new setting, John Quincy wrote with little of the sententiousness that had given his missives from Europe such precocious gravity. He told his sister whom he had dined with, whom he had met, who was rumored to have a fancy for whom, who was getting married. Mostly he wrote about girls. Haverhill was filled with alluring young women. The boys and girls would go dancing and sleigh-riding—for now winter had arrived—and shyly show their poems to one another. Peggy White asked the young swain to write something in her “Poetry Book,” and he quickly produced a quatrain invoking the Muse “to sing your praises as the Poets use.”

  At the same time, Adams really did buckle down. Until now, his haphazard studies had been left largely to his own taste and that of his tutors. But the habits his father had drilled into him had made hard work second nature, while his mother’s perpetual evangelizing on the virtues of self-mastery had made the young man proof against distraction—as least as proof as a young man could be.

  The Shaws were delighted to have the young scholar board with them. Elizabeth raved about his modesty, his perfect manners, his genius, and his uncanny resemblance to his father. Elizabeth was not only a deeply reflective but also a very gentle soul, and she came to find her supremely worldly nephew rather intimidating: he appeared to harbor a dim view of almost everything and everyone. In a letter to Nabby, Elizabeth declared that John Quincy was “exceedingly severe upon the foibles of Mankind,” and particularly upon those he felt were “degrading, and debasing themselves beneath the Rank, which the God of Nature assigned them, in the Scale of Being.” Apparently the young man still had more of the European courtier in him than the American republican.

  In a later letter to Abigail, as he was leaving for Harvard, Elizabeth sounded a note of grief at his departure, but added that the young man “was rather peculiar in some of his opinions, and a little to decisive, and tenacious of them.” This may have been a reference to an argument that broke out when he insisted to the Reverend Shaw, with an undergraduate’
s scorn for pious convention, that “Self was the ultimate motive of all actions, good, bad, or indifferent.” Adams admitted in his diary that his vehemence “has made persons suppose that I was obstinate and dogmatickal.” He vowed to “think more upon the subject.” Over the years, he would think about this a great deal without becoming a jot less vehement.

  There was more than a little bit of intellectual vanity in this insistence on arguing his elders into submission. And Adams had a temper: He could be cool and correct in his manners but passionate in dispute. His father was thought obstinate and pedantic, and in this, as in so much else, he was his father’s son. The young man had a lofty opinion not so much of himself as of the standards, moral and intellectual, to which people should be held, and he found much of the world wanting. And unlike his father, he was especially harsh on the female sex, whom he found, in general, silly and vain. Nabby felt that she had to rebuke him from London: “A Gentleman, who is very severe against the ladies, is also upon every principle very impolitick. His Character is soon established, for a Morose severe ill-natured fellow.” And she reminded him that young women were not to blame for their haphazard education. Adams knew that, but he couldn’t help comparing the educated and worldly young women he knew in Europe to the chatterboxes he met in Haverhill. A more playful man might have been more tolerant of frivolity, but Adams wasn’t very playful at heart. “Most of our damsels are like portraits in crayon,” he wrote in his diary, “which at a distance look well, but if you approach near them, are vile daubings.”

  ON MARCH 15, 1786, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS SUBMITTED TO AN examination by President Willard and the rest of the Harvard faculty—four tutors, three professors, and the librarian. Adams was asked to construe three stanzas from Horace and a passage from the Iliad, then quizzed on the works of Locke, on Euclid, and on geography. President Willard asked him to translate several English sentences into Latin. The president then disappeared for fifteen minutes, returned and said, “You are admitted, Adams.” This was Adams’ first exposure to the bizarre rules the humorless Willard had imposed on the college. Undergraduates could be addressed only by their surname; the use of “Mister,” much less a given name, was a punishable infraction. So was walking in the yard with a hat, save in inclement weather. President Willard did agree to waive the young man’s tuition in recognition of his father’s public service (and perhaps also his scant income as a diplomat).

  The Harvard of 1786 was not a terribly impressive place, at least compared to a great university like the one Adams had attended at Leyden. The only important scholar, John Winthrop, a professor of natural philosophy whom John Adams had greatly admired, had retired in 1779. The school was otherwise much as it had been in the elder Adams’ day, or indeed in 1720. Two buildings, Harvard Hall and Massachusetts Hall, fronted on the street. (The wall that now separates the campus from the town had not yet been built.) Two other buildings, Holden Chapel and Hollis Hall, sat farther back in the yard, which otherwise consisted of scattered trees and several rickety outbuildings. Each of the four classes had forty to fifty students. Undergraduates wore a uniform of blue-gray coat, waistcoat, and breeches. (Trousers of olive, black, or nankeen—a pale yellowish cloth—were also permitted.) Sophomores wore buttons on their cuffs, and freshmen did not. Students’ daily life was largely regulated by the tutors, most of them recent graduates of the college who had imbibed the spirit of contempt for the undergraduate from their own tutors. These martinets, as one historian later put it, “regarded the undergraduates as inmates in a reformatory.”

  And yet within a few weeks Adams knew that he had been right to leave Europe for Harvard. The Cranches had helped him move a few sticks of furniture from Braintree to Cambridge; cousin Lucy had taken him shopping for a few additional items. Adams liked his roommate and their digs on the third floor of Hollis; he liked his classes, and he loved the fellowship of his classmates. The one thing this privileged young man had never had was peers. He was good at befriending strangers; he had been doing it for most of his life. Within a few weeks he was able to write to his father that he had gotten to know every one of his classmates and complained that the separation among the four classes was so rigid that he had found it almost impossible to meet students above or below him. (His father wrote back in his typical vein of arduous self-improvement: “Find out who are the best scholars and drop in upon them frankly. Observe what books lie upon their tables.”) He joined social clubs, including the A.B. Club, where he read essays, and Phi Beta Kappa, which at the time had an elaborate initiation rite and a secret handshake. Later he would join the Greek Club, the Music Sodality, and the Society, which held dances. He taught himself to play the flute.

  No one in Adams’ class, and possibly no one in his generation, had been exposed to the great world of Europe as he had been. He had mingled with royalty, great thinkers, and beautiful women; he spoke perfect French. And his father was one of the nation’s most renowned figures. But Harvard didn’t care. Adams was not rich, and he did not carry a great name, like Hancock. He was very smart and very well-read, but so were several of his classmates. He was not a leader of his class; when it came time to elect a president and vice president, he was not chosen (though, to be fair, he was a newcomer). That was fine with him; he was seeking fellowship, not social distinction. He was a young man of average height, indifferent in his dress and grooming, sometimes overbearing in argument but otherwise even-tempered, serious in his conversation but alive to foibles and absurdities, a good listener who held his tongue more than was normal for a young man with a deep fund of conversation. He was happy just to be accepted as part of the group.

  Adams spent his free time doing what students do—sitting around and talking. He deeply admired several of his classmates, liked most, and despised a few. He set himself the task of producing character sketches of them—all forty-six, produced in alphabetical order over a period of months, listing the birth date and home of each. Few of them escaped unscathed from Adams’ harsh judgment. Of James Sever, whose family, like Adams’, would later give its name to a Harvard building, he wrote, “His genius is very good, but he is devoid of all moral principles.”

  Despite President Willard’s elaborate body of rules, the undergraduates embarked on regular rampages. The sophomore class was notoriously rowdy. A few days after Adams had settled in, a group of them got drunk and smashed the tutors’ windows. Harrison Gray Otis, a contemporary and long-time friend of Adams and of the Adams family, was then a senior and describes being constantly fined for disorderly behavior, including playing ball and drinking on the Sabbath. Adams was no prude, and he enjoyed the bottle as much as his friends did, but his ingrained respect for rules kept him to the straight and narrow. The only thing he appears ever to have been fined for was oversleeping and arriving late for six A.M. prayers. He was, on the other hand, exceptionally slovenly, even for a college student. At the end of his first semester, his aunts, uncles, and cousins paid him and Charles, then a freshman, a visit in their rooms. While Charles was quite neat, John Quincy was covered with “learned dirt,” as his cousin Betsy Cranch put it. They removed his filthy gown in favor of a clean one, and, Betsy reported to Abigail, “I took my Scissors and put his Nails into a decent form.”

  The bulk of the day was taken up with public lectures and classes led by tutors, known as “recitations.” Then as now, students often did their homework secretly during lectures while the professor droned on. Adams attended lectures in Greek, in divinity, in Locke—his metaphysics rather than his politics—and in experimental philosophy. He was especially fascinated by this last class, which focused on optics, astronomy, and physics. Harvard had a modest assemblage of scientific instruments in the Philosophy Cabinet upstairs in Harvard Hall—along with collections of stuffed birds and preserved fish—and at times Mr. Williams, the professor of experimental philosophy, permitted his students to look through a microscope, or a camera obscura, causing a stampede of excitement.

  The academic feature Ada
ms most enjoyed was debate, known as forensics. The debates were often held in Holden Chapel, which could accommodate the whole undergraduate body of 160. It was the ideal training ground for a future legislator and public orator. If Adams took a part, he would copy his entire argument into his journal—the closest thing we have to his college papers. He took himself too seriously to relish arguing against his own convictions and was always relieved when he was assigned the side that coincided with his views. He was gratified to be given the affirmative on the question, “Whether the immortality of the human soul be probable from natural Reason.”

  Adams’ argument is lucid and occasionally ingenious, if recognizably undergraduate. “Man,” he said, possesses a body as animals do and is thus susceptible to bodily ills, as animals are. Only his reason distinguishes him from the beasts. “It is therefore natural to conclude,” he asserted, “that the factor which we alone possess . . . is totally independent of the body. And if so, I know of no reason to suppose that it began with the body, or that it will end with it.” Adams had the intellectual honesty to pose a serious counter to his own claim. If, he posited, we suppose that reason is not an intrinsic human attribute but rather extends in an infinite gradation from Newton to insects, must we not grant an immortal soul to the beasts? It was, he conceded, hard to “distinguish aright.”