John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  These were shocking sentiments, and the fact that Jefferson had chosen to associate himself with so radical a program provoked a fear that the growing horrors of the French Revolution, including the tumbrels and the guillotine, could cross the ocean. The tension between individual rights—the sovereignty of each citizen—and the powers of institutions like the legislature and the presidency, to which citizens had delegated some portion of their sovereignty, had run through the debates over the federal constitution. In 1788, James Madison wrote to Jefferson, “America has less to fear from a powerful government; It is much more to be dreaded that the few will necessarily be sacrificed to the many.” Jefferson, of course, thought otherwise; he had come to be seen as the head of one faction, and John Adams as the other.

  John Quincy Adams had inherited his father’s horror of the mob, to which had been added the experience of years spent in the courts of Europe. In Shays Rebellion he had seen an insurrection against legitimately constituted authority, and he had recoiled. Paine’s call for general revolution struck him as a form of madness. In the first of his ten Publicola letters, Adams ridiculed the idea that “that which a whole nation chuses to do, it has the right to do.” It may have the power to do what it wishes but not the right, for the people have delegated some of their rights to their representatives. Republics do not need violent revolutions in order to reform themselves precisely because they have representative institutions that can do so. In his fourth letter, Adams observed that the colonists had rebelled against England only after suffering sixteen years of oppression from a contemptuous power located three thousand miles away. Did the very fact of living under a monarchy mean that the English people themselves were similarly afflicted? He defended the English constitution and assailed the savagery of the new French government. And of Paine’s claim that the mob could become a force for liberty, he wrote, “They are altogether incapable of forming a rational judgment either upon the principles or the motives of their own conduct.”

  It was a brilliant performance: tightly argued, elegantly composed, and dripping with scorn. The essays were reprinted in London, Glasgow, and Dublin; they provoked a response in France. It was universally agreed that the author was John Adams; a Philadelphia magazine even claimed to have uncovered secret communications between Adams and Edmund Burke. Jefferson himself was certain of Adams’ authorship, as was Madison. When the latter finally learned the truth, he claimed not to be surprised, writing, “There is more of method also in the arguments, and much less of clumsiness and heaviness in the style, than characterize his [John Adams’] writings”—a backhanded compliment to the son. The Publicola essays marked Adams as a powerful warrior in the Federalist camp.

  Adams also began to emerge, very hesitantly, as a public speaker. His father had urged him to attend town meetings in Boston, appending a list of fourteen things he could learn there, including “the machines, Arts and Channels by which Intelligence and Reports are circulated throughout the town.” He had dutifully begun doing so and then found himself called on to participate. He argued in favor of a petition to separately incorporate North Braintree as the town of Quincy, and the motion was carried. Henceforth, the Adamses would hail from Quincy. He was asked to speak in favor of police reform, but his nerves failed him in front of the crowd—“700 men who looked as if they had been collected from all the Jails on the Continent,” he wrote to Tom. The Boston town meeting was a pure democracy: measures carried by majority consent of those gathered. The spectacle, Adams wrote, in a vein his father would have understood very well, confirmed his “abhorrence and contempt of simple democracy as a Government.”

  Boston was subject to fits of puritanical moralizing, and when, in late 1792, an ordinance was passed prohibiting theatergoing, Adams stood in opposition. He loved the theater, and he recoiled at any attempt to impose private morality on the public. He even defended actors who had mounted a play in defiance of the law, arguing in a published essay that this species of civil disobedience was justifiable when legislation violated individual rights. Apparently a little bit of Tom Paine was tolerable in a just cause. Nevertheless, the town council refused to change the law. Adams later wrote to his father that he ought to keep away from politics, since “my sentiments in general are as unpopular as my conduct relative to the town police or to the theatricals.” He added, in a touch that must have gladdened his father’s heart, “I have no predilection for unpopularity as such, but I hold it much preferable to the popularity of a day, which perishes with the transient topic upon which it is grounded.”

  But Adams was drawn to controversy, on large topics as well as small. In April 1793, Edmond-Charles Genêt, a minister sent by the French revolutionary government, arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, and set about recruiting American volunteers to help in France’s wars against England and Spain. Genêt received a hero’s welcome. Many Americans saw the French Revolution as Paine did—as the next step in the progress of the republican principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. “Democratic societies” sprang up around the country; enthusiastic supporters solemnly planted the Tree of Liberty symbolizing the French cause. The butchery of the Terror had not yet occurred, and American enthusiasts of the French Revolution dismissed the violence against real and imagined defenders of the old order (including the execution of the king) as minor excesses. Thomas Jefferson wrote, with Tom Paine’s nonchalance in the face of mayhem, that “the random violence and careening course of the French Revolution were, part of a lamentable but passing chapter in a larger story of triumphant global revolution.”

  Genêt was acting in open defiance of American policy, for President Washington had declared American neutrality in France’s wars. Genêt nevertheless outfitted privateers to attack British ships, manned them with American sailors, and began seizing the cargo of captured merchant vessels. Washington, outraged, revoked Genêt’s accreditation and nullified Genêt’s appointment of an equally obstreperous vice consul. Genêt then raised the stakes yet further by insisting that the Constitution gave the president no such rights over ambassadors and took his case to the American public, sending a volley of letters to newspapers and state bodies.

  Everything about the affair was bound to outrage John Quincy Adams. The French Revolution was the defining ideological event of his youth. Men took sides, and Adams’ own scorn for the revolutionary cause had only hardened as the most fanatical faction of the Jacobins gained power in mid-1793. Genêt had insulted President Washington and trifled with the Constitution. And his sympathizers were drawn from the ranks of the Republicans, an increasingly coherent force of opposition both to Washington and to his own father. Adams sprang to the attack in letters to the Colombian Centinel, written under the name Marcellus in late April 1793. He warned of the danger of being drawn into Europe’s wars. “It is our duty,” he wrote, “to remain, the peaceable and silent, though sorrowful spectators of the sanguinary scene.” The imagery of Americans as “spectators” of European affairs, if emotionally engaged ones, would recur in Adams’ writings in years to come. The United States had national interests that had to supersede sympathy with any and all foreign causes.

  Adams wrote additional letters in November and December, after Genêt’s worst provocations. His sails filled with patriotic fury. The Constitution, he pointed out, specifically arrogated to the president the power to treat with diplomats and to Congress the right to regulate foreign affairs. This “petulant stripling”—Genêt was four years Adams’ senior—had thus insulted both America’s beloved founder and its government. The annals of diplomacy furnished no comparable instance of audacity or impudence. Was Genêt a minister or an insurrectionary? Plainly he hoped to turn one faction of the people against another and ultimately to conquer America for France by dividing it. But it was just as certain that Genêt would fail, for, as Adams wrote in a splendid peroration, “perish the American, whose prostituted heart could forsake the genuine purity of our national worship, and offer at a foreign shrine
the tribute of his slavish adoration!”

  This time Adams’ writing had an effect far beyond what he could have imagined. The citizens of Boston invited him to give the July 4 oration. President Washington soon learned the identity of the author who had so stoutly defended him, his powers, and the Constitution itself. Washington also shared Adams’ convictions about the dangers of extranational loyalties, a subject that was to become the great theme of his Farewell Address. Adams was an authority on international law with a deep knowledge of Europe and European affairs. He was the son of the vice president. He was, in short, precisely the kind of young man whom the president would like to have in his government.

  A job became available when Washington appointed his minister in Holland as the new representative to Spain. On May 29, 1794, the president nominated John Quincy Adams to be minister to the Hague. His father, acutely aware of John Quincy’s sensitivities, wrote that the nomination was “the result of the President’s own observations and reflections,” and not his own influence. This appears to have been true, but the nomination was also the realization of the great hopes both Adamses held for their eldest son and the life for which they had so assiduously trained him. He had become the man they had hoped for. “I have often thought he was more prudent at 27 than his father was at 58,” John wrote to Abigail that spring.

  Adams was shocked at the offer—and not happily so. In his journal he wrote, “I had laid down as principle, that I would never solicit for any public office whatever.” People would say that he had been singled out not for his talent but for his family name. The fact that this might not actually be true scarcely mattered; reputation depended not only on what a man did but on what he was seen to have done. At the same time, he knew very well that he could not refuse a request from the president. And the offer must have piqued his own ambition, which until that moment had been scantily nourished. He hesitated for several weeks before traveling to Philadelphia to be briefed by Secretary of State Edmund Randolph. His background reading included six folio volumes of his father’s diplomatic correspondence from Europe, which he regarded as a precious storehouse of wisdom. While in Philadelphia he dined with Joseph Fauchet, Genêt’s successor, who sought to persuade him that England was seeking to forge a European alliance that would menace not only France but the United States. Adams was noncommittal but reflected that, as a growing commercial power, the United States would willy-nilly become England’s great rival and thus need the support of France. This was also his first experience of the perpetual campaign by each of the two great powers to enlist the United States against the other.

  In July, Adams wrote an anguished letter to his father. He was, he felt, taking a post of “nominal respectability and real insignificance” thanks to which he would be “elevated to a public station much beyond my own wishes and expectations.” And this artificial elevation would lead in turn to an equal, and humiliating, descent when he returned from his assignment to find his peers far ahead of him in the practice of law. He was mortified by the prospect of leaving friends and family. All of this, which his father might well have seen as ingratitude and even unmanly whining, was prelude to a request: he sought a prior understanding that if he were no longer needed after three years, he could return home. His father made no such commitment.

  On September 17, Adams sailed for Europe on the Alfred. He was accompanied by his brother Tom, whom he had persuaded to join him as diplomatic secretary. His thoughts were melancholy. His friend Nathaniel Frazier, Mary’s cousin, and Daniel Sargent, later Mary’s husband, had gone with him as far as the Boston lighthouse. He looked back at their boat until he could see it no longer. “When it got out of sight,” he wrote, “I did not, but could have, turned my eyes and wept.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I Shall Be Much Mistaken If He Is Not Soon Found at the Head of the Diplomatique Corps

  (1794–1795)

  WHEN THE ALFRED, A SHIP SO LEAKY HE DESCRIBED IT AS an “eggshell,” made landfall in England on October 14, 1794, Adams’ life as a professional and public man, the life for which his parents had long prepared him, finally began. It’s telling that he resumed keeping his journal the day he boarded the ship: he recorded the changes of weather, the fish and the birds he had seen, the endless games of cards, the tedium, the “self-conceit” of a captain whose “intellectual and convivial powers were below the level of mediocrity.” Perhaps Adams remembered that he had first begun keeping a journal when he boarded a ship for France at age twelve. But his return to Europe after an absence of twelve years offered, not boyish adventure, but a sense of new beginnings, of setting out on life’s path. Over the next seven years—before he returned home—his life would intersect with history. His penetrating diplomatic correspondence would make him America’s most important observer of European affairs at a time when the great powers threatened the new nation’s very existence. And his sense of America’s place in the world would help shape the foreign policy of both President George Washington and President John Adams.

  Adams’ return to European soil did not begin auspiciously. He had been entrusted with secret documents for John Jay, then negotiating a treaty with England. Just as his carriage reached London Bridge, Adams heard a thump and saw, to his unspeakable horror, that the trunk containing the documents was gone. It had been lashed to another carriage traveling in front, and now it was nowhere to be seen. Both vehicles stopped, and Tom, scrambling around in the darkness, found that the trunk had lodged, intact, beneath their own carriage. The brothers concluded that the straps had been cut—perhaps, Adams thought, by English spies. His mind reeled in horror. What if the documents had found their way to the British negotiating team? And what if his enemies back home then learned of his ruinous carelessness? “What a field for the aspersions of malice!” Far better to have perished beneath the waves. He was so distraught that he drove straight to Jay’s home to deliver the papers, though it was the middle of the night. Always inclined to doubt his own capacities, Adams was reminded of his inexperience before he even took up his post.

  Adams reached the Hague, the seat of Dutch government, on October 31. This was, of course, another capital he knew intimately, both from his father’s time and from his own period studying nearby, in Leyden. He rented an apartment on the Hofstraat, immediately behind the great stone hulk of the Binnenhof, the seat of Dutch government. Adams would pass much of his time in the Hague there and in the homes of his fellow ministers, most of which would have been located in the same quarter. He took long walks along the city’s canals, across its parks, and into the woods beyond. The Hague was neat, orderly, and attractive, like all Dutch cities, but it was not a great commercial capital, like Amsterdam, or an intellectual center, like Leyden. Adams was not terribly impressed with its booksellers or its theaters. His social life revolved around the diplomatic community, and he became close friends with the ministers of Prussia and Portugal, as well as with the French officials who held the country in a tight grip.

  Adams had arrived in Holland at a climactic, and ruinous, moment in Dutch history. American patriots had once harbored a strong sense of kinship for the United Provinces, as the country was called, for over the last century the provinces had functioned as a republic under the loose control of an executive known as the stadtholder. Both John and Abigail had urged their son to read the history of Holland in order to understand how republics evolved and survived. But the Dutch had long since lost the capacity to defend themselves and had come to rely on the support of England and the Hapsburgs. The French revolutionary army had attacked the Low Countries in 1792 and again in 1794; Austria could not, and England would not, come to the provinces’ defense. The great Dutch cities were surrendering to France literally as Adams arrived. In May 1795, the provinces signed the ruinous Treaty of the Hague, agreeing to pay France 100 million guilders as well as an enormous loan and to pay for the upkeep of a French army of twenty-five thousand troops.

  Adams found himself living in the midst of a natio
nal pantomime. France was in many ways a traditional expansionist power, but it rationalized its behavior in explicitly revolutionary terms. Two years earlier, the National Assembly had declared that “it will grant fraternity and assistance to all people who wish to recover their liberty” and had instructed the nation’s generals to act accordingly. The French, that is, invaded neighboring countries in an early version of the doctrine we now call “democracy promotion.” France renamed Holland the “Batavian Republic,” and both the French rulers and the Dutch subjects agreed to pretend that it was just such an entity. Adams was not fooled. In his diary he jotted down a quote from Laurence Sterne: “Disguise thyself as thou wilt, Slavery! Still thou art a bitter draught.” He happened to be in Amsterdam in mid-January when the capital city capitulated—to a force of twenty-five to thirty French hussars. By that evening, patriotic orange had largely disappeared from the city, replaced by the French flag and the tricolor cockade. Adams took himself to the theater, as he often did, and found himself watching a ballet featuring the Tree of Liberty. Everyone stood and applauded. He was, he felt, in an occupied city.

  For Adams, a fervent believer in the cause of republicanism, the scene was invested with a terrible pathos. In Holland he saw a people who had lost the will to defend themselves. “A state of lifeless imbecility characterizes this people,” he wrote to his father. The Dutch had fallen prey to faction, a destiny that both father and son feared for their own nation. Each faction had yoked itself to a foreign benefactor. Adams learned in a history of Holland that after William II, the Prince of Orange, had married Mary, the daughter of Charles I of England, in 1641, the royal party had allied itself with England; the opposition had sought the aid of France. The disease of dependence had seeped into the national bloodstream like a poison: over time the Dutch had allowed their once formidable navy to rot in order to demonstrate themselves incapable of harm. And now the patently moderate Dutch had even begun to catch the French contagion of radicalism. Patriotic clubs arose in every Dutch city, each vying with the other for revolutionary fervor. The Rotterdam club marched on the city council demanding the arrest of members of the old regime, who surrendered rather than face mob violence. Adams thus saw for himself the madness of the populist passion that Thomas Paine and the Jacobin sympathizers back home had celebrated. He felt anew America’s great good fortune in being able to stand apart from Europe’s violence and turmoil. And he recognized that liberty would mean nothing without the force required to repel predators.