by James Traub
Adams’ father had always advised him to speak less and listen more; the son was better suited by temperament to follow this counsel than was the father. Adams continued writing “Characters,” but now his subject was not his fellow undergraduates but the political and military leaders of the Batavian Republic. He wrote with the ripening insight of a man of the world. Of France’s great generals, like Charles-François Dumouriez and the Comte de Custine, Adams wrote, “Each of them too hastily concluded themselves to be the pivot upon which the affairs of the world were to turn, and neither had the talent to disguise or conceal the opinion.” By contrast, General Jean-Charles Pichegru, who had risen through the ranks to become commander of French troops in Holland and one of France’s most brilliant soldiers, “has learnt wisdom from the example of their fate, and covers himself with a mantle of humility.” Like many another eighteenth-century moral critic, Adams saw vanity everywhere he looked. He noted that Mr. Scholten, a senior Dutch government official, “values himself much upon his frankness and sincerity; upon his disregard of ceremony, and contempt of the little complaisances usual in Society.” At bottom, though, Scholten was “jealous, suspicious, timid, vain and above all selfish.”
Adams filled his journal with minute descriptions of exchanges with his diplomatic colleagues, often including long verbatim passages of table talk. Only rarely did he engage in the painful self-reflections common in his earlier years. His absorption in his work may have helped cure his self-absorption. Or perhaps he had come to feel that those tortured passages belonged to his youth; now he was a professional and a public servant. What he heard and saw mattered more than what he felt. He came to think of his journal (which he now kept in a five-hundred-page hardbound volume) as a fragment of the historical record. He recorded an endless story he had heard about Silas Deane, the highly controversial American minister to France whom John Adams had been appointed to replace in 1778, explaining that it was “a testimony from the first hand of a circumstance which will be doubtless noticed in the General History of America.”
Still, Adams could never leave off his exhortations to himself, nor hold himself to a standard lower than the one he applied to others. On the front page of a new volume of his journal, begun in March 1795, he wrote out in Greek a line from The Odyssey: “Be thou also bold, / And merit praise from ages to come.” Beneath that he wrote out a very different sentiment from Francis Bacon: “Be it rather your ambition to acquit yourself in your proper station, than to rise above it.” And underneath that he penned seven Latin mottoes, including “Know thyself,” from Solon, and “Measure is best,” from Cleobulus. He appears not to have been conscious of the contradiction between blazing ambition and humble resignation—attributes that in him lived uneasily alongside one another. In his heart, as he had once written, he was not conscious of an “unworthy” ambition, yet he recognized that his ambition was “constant.”
Adams could not complain of his treatment in Holland. The new French masters accorded him the elaborate respect due to the representative of the American republic, and a perfectly Francophone one at that. The Dutch submissiveness to their new masters contributed to an overall air of peace and harmony. Since Adams had little business to transact, he spent much of his day reading the paper, taking walks, and enjoying endless palaver with the aristocratic gentlemen who served as ministers from Europe’s courts. He was especially fond of Baron de Bielefeld, the Prussian minister, and the baron’s son, who served as Russia’s chargé d’affaires. “We talked much of the rights of man,” Adams recorded in his journal after a conversation with the latter, “the origin and foundation of human society, and the proper principles of government.” During the fifteen years he would spend as a diplomat, Adams would never tire of the intellectual curiosity and sense of play that he found among these gentlemen of leisure. These bookish hours were the reward he enjoyed for enduring the cold formality of court dinners, a frequent sense of powerlessness, and embarrassment about his inability to reciprocate for the lavish entertainments he received.
Adams spent much of his day writing letters. Tom served as his secretary, a task that mostly involved making copies of the minister’s correspondence. Unlike his older brothers, Tom had never been to Europe before, and his own social ambit was limited by the fact that he spoke no Dutch and scant French, and spent the first year or so of his time in Holland becoming fluent in the latter. Tom was not quite twenty-two when he arrived in Europe for the first time, and he deferred without apparent qualms to his gifted and formidable older brother. He had never rebelled against family rules, as Charles had in marrying Sally Smith. He was wry, genteel, amiable, undemanding.
Adams was to write some of the most brilliant dispatches in the history of American diplomacy. His initial flights, sent to Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, provided vivid detail of the dismantling of the Dutch republic, of the internal squabbles that beset the “patriotic party” opposing French control, of the growing reach of the new “revolutionary” States-General. They were extremely formal in tone, yet infused with Adams’ distinctive combination of rhetorical balance and polemical fire, which gave the color of supreme reason even to the most extreme conclusion. Adams observed that the Dutch republic had been “irretrievably ruined,” and then tolled off the evidence in rolling periods of Augustan prose:
With a commerce stagnated, with manufactures scarcely extant, with public payments suspended, with a country which has just suffered the invasion of an enemy, and the most destructive protection of an ally, subjected at once to ravages of war and the ruin of inundations . . . with a dominant party discordant among themselves and a national character timid, irresolute, averse to sacrifices and considering property as the most precious of all human blessings, the most sanguine Patriot can discover in the future destiny of this country nothing but subjection, aggravated by the recollection of its former glories, and wretchedness, embittered by the memory of its former opulence.
When Adams wrote to his father, by contrast, he went on at much greater length—the letters sometimes ran to three thousand words or more—and with a very different texture: rambling and speculative, intensely political as well as philosophical, sardonic, and utterly incisive. In these letters, rather than in the formal works of political philosophy his father had produced, Adams began to articulate a coherent worldview. He had always braced himself for the worst; he was, if anything, inclined too much toward pessimism. This habit of mind made Adams an astringently realistic figure. He had the quality, very rare in a man as young as he was, of never confusing what he wished to be true with what he believed to be true. And as he was disinclined to believe that the world would be governed by his own wishes, so he was unimpressed with the fine ideals professed by statesmen. States, he believed, acted out of hardheaded calculation of interest.
Surveying the entire continent from his perch in the Hague, the young minister wrote his father that “the prophecy of Rousseau, that the ancient monarchies of Europe cannot last much longer, becomes more and more infallible. . . . From the moment the great mass of the nations in Europe were taught to inquire, why is this or that man possessed of such or such an enjoyment at our expense, and of which we are deprived, the signal was given of a civil war in the social arrangement of Europe, which cannot finish but with the total ruin of their feudal constitutions.” His prediction was, of course, several generations premature, though he certainly was right about the direction of history. But while any ardent enthusiast of the French Revolution might have seen the sweep of events as Adams did, he went on to write that “the arts, the sciences and the civilization of Europe” would probably perish along with the feudal constitutions. He understood, that is, that injustice would provoke revolution, but he abhorred the chaos and the democratic leveling he saw in France, and which he supposed would be the universal pattern of anti-monarchic uprisings.
But Adams was not being paid to prognosticate remote events. The United States maintained a rigorous posture of neutrality towar
d all states; the great question for American statesmen in the mid-1790s was how America could cling to its principled position amid French ambitions and the alignments and realignments forming among European nations to check those ambitions. In 1793, the revolutionary leader Danton had declared that France would expand to its “natural boundaries”—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Rhine. The French had often used such grandiose language, but the revolution had produced a fresh burst of nationalism. That same year the National Assembly had voted a levée en masse—universal conscription, which allowed the French to muster a massive army of eight hundred thousand. A French army had marched into the Low Countries in late 1792, and England had responded by declaring war several months later. By the middle of 1795 France had expelled Austria from Belgium and Holland, and pushed eastward to the left bank of the Rhine. Even as the French Revolution erupted in a series of aftershocks, with Danton swallowed by the Terror in 1793, and Robespierre and the notorious Committee of Public Safety drowned in the ocean of blood they had themselves unleashed the following year, the French army continued on its path of conquest.
The clash of French and English ambitions, and the combination of French supremacy on land and English domination of the seas, would keep Europe locked in war for the next two decades. Neither of the great powers could dominate Europe by itself, so both continually sought to build coalitions against the other, with the result that European politics between 1792 and 1815 was a vast canvas of alignments and treaties and proclamations of neutrality forever being erased and reconstituted, with loyalties fixed by perpetually recalibrated national interests. France and England could exhaust one another but not decisively defeat one another. And as one historian has written, “both parties entered the war without a concept of peace”—without, that is, a settlement the other could live with.
The United States wished only to stand apart from the bloody whims of Europe’s kings and revolutionists, but it did not have that luxury. Both the French and the English economies depended heavily on trade with the United States. Both, therefore, feared an American alliance with the other, and each tried to undermine American relations with the rival power. England, with its vastly superior navy, sought to block French trade with the United States and with the French colony at Santo Domingo; France depended more on its political influence in the United States. Americans continued to resent high-handed English treatment and harbored a reservoir of good will toward France, which had come to its rescue during the American Revolution and had then fomented a revolution of its own. This, in turn, accounted for the friendly reception Adams had received when he had arrived in Holland. But throughout this period the United States and Great Britain had been negotiating a treaty to finally settle claims outstanding from the Revolutionary War; that was why Adams had been carrying documents to John Jay.
In November 1794, the two sides signed Jay’s Treaty, which called for the withdrawal of British troops remaining at prerevolutionary forts and referred other disputes to arbitration. The United States, in exchange, agreed to sacrifice the principle that neutral ships had the right to carry noncontraband goods in time of war. The United States and France had enshrined “the freedom of the seas,” as it was known, in their own treaty of 1778. In effect, the United States was permitting England to block shipments to France, but not the other way around. The treaty also made possible the full restoration of trade relations and diplomatic amity between the countries—a disaster for France. The French were outraged when they received news of the treaty in early 1795.
In a letter to his father in May 1795, Adams reflected on the relationship between France’s fortunes on the Continent and its designs on America. After describing the subjection of Holland, he suggested that “the policy of the French government at present is to make use of the United States, as they are now making use of these Provinces . . . as a passive weapon in her hands against her most formidable enemy.” The wars of the last few years, though successful, had left France exhausted and eager to sign an advantageous peace with its enemies—Austria, Russia, and England. In order to do so, France needed to enlist the remaining states on its own behalf. France feared that Jay’s Treaty would move the United States from neutrality to the English side of the board. Since the treaty had not yet been formally ratified by either side, France still had a chance to drive a wedge between them. What subterfuges would it deploy? And if the treaty were ratified despite its best efforts, would France turn from friend to enemy, as the pro-French faction in Congress claimed?
At this point in the correspondence, Adams paused to explain to his father that in his letters to Secretary of State Randolph he had “scarcely hinted” at the ideas he was about to express. They were, after all, his own “speculations.” Adams predicted that if the United States ratified Jay’s Treaty, “perhaps a coolness on the part of France will again be discernible, but from which no ill consequences whatever are to be dreaded.” The reasons, he suggested, were that France depended on American goods, France always responded to “the degree of firmness or of acquiescence discovered on our part,” and “our friendship and neutrality must be more agreeable and advantageous to them than a state of variance.”
In short, French interests dictated acceptance, no matter the rhetoric that might accompany it. But the treaty was very unpopular at home, in part because of the agreement to sacrifice freedom of the seas. If the Senate failed to ratify, “the French will exert themselves for the purpose of hurrying us into a war” against Great Britain. France, that is, would see a chink in the American commitment to neutrality and seek to exploit it. In such a contest, he suggested, the partisans of France at home and abroad “will promise wonders from their co-operation . . . and the final result of the whole matter will be, that all this tender sympathy, this amiable fraternity, this lovely coalescence of liberty, will leave us the advantage of being sacrificed to their interests, or of purchasing their protection upon the most humiliating and burdensome conditions.” Edmond-Charles Genêt had given the United States all the experience it should need of this species of diplomatic perfidy.
Adams was not generously disposed toward either France or England, but also not antipathetic to either. This made him far more reliable than James Monroe, America’s minister to France, who was considered so partial to the French that he would later be recalled from his post. Thomas Pinckney, the minister to England, was then in Spain negotiating a treaty of amity. The country’s only other diplomats resided in Spain and Portugal. Adams thus served as one of the few reliable sources of information about Europe, and by far the most penetrating. A Federalist senator, Uriah Tracy of Connecticut, described Adams as “unquestionably the most intelligent, and at the same time most industrious man, we have ever employed in a diplomatic capacity.”
John Adams was in the habit of showing his son’s correspondence to President Washington. The president, who had been resisting domestic pressure from Jefferson and others to forge a closer alliance with France and who remembered John Quincy Adams as the brilliant young polemicist who had come to his defense during the dispute with Genêt, found much to like in the correspondence. Young Adams had provided strong justification for his own policy. And he said so to John Adams. In late June 1795, a very proud Vice President Adams wrote to his son, “I have no language to express to you the pleasure I have received from the satisfaction you have given to the President and the Secretary of State, as well as from the clear, comprehensive and masterly accounts in your letters to me of the public affairs of nations in Europe.” That summer, the president, perhaps aware of the three-year promise John Quincy had tried to extract from his father, wrote to the senior Adams, “Mr. J Q Adams Your Son must not think of retiring from the walk he is now in. His prospects if he continues in it are fair and I shall be much mistaken if in as short a period as can be expected, he is not found at the head of the Diplomatique Corps.” He singled out the May 22 letter, which, he noted, “discloses much important information and political foresight.” Both par
ents wrote to their son to convey this presidential imprimatur.
At the time Adams was writing, most Americans were far more worried about England, their traditional enemy, than they were about France, their great ally from the Revolutionary War. In order to block trade with France, English warships were intercepting American shipping; in order to replenish a navy racked by desertion, the English were impressing the far-better-paid American sailors into service. War with England seemed far more likely than war with France. Many Americans relished the prospect. But Adams wrote to his father to say that his countrymen vastly underestimated British naval strength as well as financial power. And he wrote to his friend Daniel Sargent to say that even justified outrage was no grounds for a war that would be bound to prove ruinous: “If resentment were a good or a safe foundation for policy measures, few Americans perhaps would be disposed to go farther than I should. But of all the guides that a nation can follow, passion is the most treacherous, and prudence the most faithful.” Years abroad had cured Adams of the American habit of thinking about the world in romantic terms and habituated him to the blunt European language of raison d’état.