John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  Adams’ friends back home considered his letters a bulwark against Jacobinism. Abigail arranged for the publication of some of his letters to her and to his father, usually without telling her son in advance. When Adams complained of misprints, Abigail turned to William Cranch, her nephew and the dear friend of her son, to see to the publication of excerpts, which she marked out with commas on the page. In other cases, she suggested that he choose “such passages as you conceive will tend to enlighten our Country men with respect to the views and intrigues of France.” By this means, Adams remained an active figure in the heated debates back home over French conduct, as well as a target for the poisoned shafts of Benjamin Bache and his ilk.

  Adams was an advocate for diplomatic as well as military preparedness. In the Farewell Address, President Washington had counseled that the United States have as little to do with Europe as possible consistent with maintaining good trade relations. For many Americans, this meant isolation. In a letter to his father in January 1798, Adams observed that France and Great Britain, and their respective partisans in America, had been eager to reinforce that view so as to remove the United States as an obstacle to their ambitions. In fact, he wrote, “the experience of the last six years has abundantly shewn how impossible it is to keep us disconnected with the affairs of Europe while we have such essential mercantile connections with the great maritime States, and the numerous injuries we have suffered alternately from both parties amply prove how essential it is to our interests to have other friends than either.”

  The mood in Europe grew steadily darker. In early November 1797, Murray, who heard the news from France long before Adams could, wrote to say that the Directory had rejected the three-man commission the president had sent. Adams and Murray agreed that the time had come to prepare for war. Their anxiety only increased when Murray learned, in January 1798, that France had issued a decree stating that any ship carrying cargo from England or its colonies would be deemed hostile; in addition, no ship that had entered an English port would be permitted to enter a French one. France’s goal was to bring England to its knees by choking off imports, and it was prepared to wreck the American economy in order to do so. Adams told Murray that France had left the United States with no real choice: we “must either bow down, as others have, or engraft a military spirit upon our national character and become a warlike people.” There may have been more of resentment than of prudence in this proposal; Adams was not always equal to the counsels of dispassion. He even proposed to Secretary Pickering that the United States sign a pact of armed neutrality with Prussia and others—a proposal Pickering scotched on the grounds that it would inflame England as much as France.

  Adams was a vehement man, but he rarely allowed his passions to conquer his sober judgment for long. Once this outburst of temper had subsided, he urged his father to adopt a policy of restraint. When Murray wrote to propose a coalition against France with England and neutral states like Prussia and Sweden—which didn’t sound much different from what Adams had proposed to Pickering—Adams cautioned him against it. He would not abandon neutrality, and he believed that the American people would accept a war only if France started one. He was prepared to continue working for a change in French policy.

  Then came the shocking news of the so-called XYZ affair. Agents of the French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, had demanded a bribe of 200,000 livres—a stupefying $250,000—from President Adams’ diplomatic team. The revelation of this outrage, in April 1798, provoked an explosion of popular emotion the likes of which America had never before seen. Town councils, merchant societies, and local militias drew up resolutions demanding a declaration of war. Congress approved funds for an expanded army and navy, suspended commerce with France and French possessions, and authorized the capture of French privateers. It was within this atmosphere of war hysteria that Congress passed—and President Adams readily signed—the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. Some French diplomats left before they could be expelled. Harvard canceled the annual French oration in its commencement exercise.

  Talleyrand’s contempt for diplomatic norms—or rather, for American diplomatic norms—confirmed everything John Quincy Adams believed about France, where revolutionary ideology masked the same gross cynicism that had obtained under the despised Bourbon monarchy. He was so furious about the XYZ affair that he wrote a letter to his mother full of minute details of the treachery, fraud, and avarice that lay behind it. And yet in June, Adams wrote to Pickering to say that, despite a furious and thoroughly disingenuous response by Talleyrand to the XYZ allegations, the Directory had “declared their desire to live at peace with the Americans,” and thus that he had some “feeble hope that a war may be avoided.”

  The Directory had been shocked by the bellicose American response to the scandal. In July, soon after he received word of the popular fury, Talleyrand sent a private envoy, Louis-André Pichon, to William Vans Murray with the message that France sought a reconciliation. The following month, Pichon showed Murray a conciliatory letter Talleyrand had written to Elbridge Gerry, the one American envoy who had remained behind in Paris to continue negotiating. The letter renounced the demand for a loan, made no mention of the bribe, and promised to end the attacks on American shipping in the French West Indies. Murray, who deferred to Adams as his diplomatic and intellectual senior even though he was six years older, wrote to him immediately with the latest news. In order to maintain secrecy, Murray had decided to tell only Adams and the president about Talleyrand’s clandestine diplomacy, though he did write to Pickering of the change in mood. On September 25, Adams wrote to his father to report “a great and important change” in France’s conduct toward the United States. The insolence and contempt of a year earlier had given way to moderation. The moral was perfectly clear to Adams: “In proportion as our spirit of resistance has become manifest, theirs of oppression and extortion has shrunk back.” Events had vindicated Adams’ faith in what today we would call “diplomacy backed by force.” Two weeks later, he wrote to Pickering to suggest that Murray be nominated as the new envoy to France.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1798, the Congress had passed, and President Adams had signed, one war measure after another. The president was expected almost daily to issue a declaration of war; Secretary of State Pickering insisted that France had left the United States no other choice. But in June, John Marshall, one of the diplomats Adams had sent to France, returned to the United States and reported the softening of the French position. The president learned of Talleyrand’s approach to Gerry and Pichon’s to Murray. Above all, he had read his son’s dispatches. The leading historian of the period concludes that John Quincy Adams’ private letters had persuaded President Adams that the Directory did not, as he had assumed, want war. (The president also learned that in August England had wiped out much of the French navy at Aboukir.) In a solemn address to Congress on December 7, 1798, the president declined to seek a declaration of war but also insisted that France must make the first move by sending a minister of its own.

  In mid-January 1799, Tom Adams, who had finally persuaded his brother to let him return home, reached Philadelphia and gave his father letters from both Murray and John Quincy confirming the French wish to avoid hostilities. That very day, the president told Secretary Pickering to prepare for new negotiations. And on February 18, Adams reversed course and announced that he had nominated Murray as minister to France, thus outraging the Federalist war hawks and delighting the pro-French Jefferson and the Republicans. It was an act of political courage by the president, one he recognized at the time might cost him the presidency by dividing his own party.

  Minister Adams continued to play an active role in diplomacy with France, conveying regular guidance to his friend Murray. Congress had insisted on sending two other emissaries, who reached France in early 1800. A new treaty with France was signed October 1, formally putting a peaceful end to the quasi-war. Adams watched in fascination as Napoleon recovered from t
he fiasco in Egypt, secured his control over France itself by naming himself first consul after the coup of Brumaire in late 1799, crushed the forces of Austria at Marengo, and smashed the second coalition that had formed against him. At first Adams had loathed Napoleon as a bloodsoaked Caesar, but he concluded, with the intellectual detachment so characteristic of him, that his temperament had evolved with his victories. To his mother he wrote that France was better off under Napoleon than it had been under the Directory and that Napoleon had put an end to their “plundering and barbarous decrees” against neutrals.

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, ADAMS WORRIED CONSTANTLY ABOUT money. He knew that public service would virtually pauperize him, as it had his father, and so depended on prudent investments to provide a cushion for his return. He had entrusted most of his funds to his brother Charles, who had not yet been admitted to the bar and who was living in New York with no fixed profession. But Charles seemed strangely apathetic. In the summer of 1797, a few weeks after marrying Louisa, John Quincy tartly asked his younger brother what, if anything, he had done with the $2,000 he had asked him to invest, and suggested he write with fewer personal details and more business matters. Adams’ sense of urgency only increased after he learned that his father-in-law would be a charge on him, not a support to him. He asked Charles to find him a house in Boston that could serve as a rental property; he was prepared to spend $5,000 and then to send another $800 to $1,000 for further investments. But he heard nothing.

  Charles had been a winning boy in a way that his older brother had never been. His parents doted on him, and he exchanged long letters with his father full of news and intellectual speculation. One of his missives began, “The Samaeens were a Sect of philosophers of India,” and went on to compare this Buddhist sect to the Hindu Brahmins. John Adams enjoyed the correspondence enormously and sent along his own speculations on political philosophy and science. But Charles had been a scapegrace at Harvard, accused of joining a group of boys who had run naked through the Yard. There was something scattershot about Charles, both in his reading and in his drifting life. In fact, he was something much worse than that, though no one seems to have known until it was too late. Charles was a faithless husband and an alcoholic who had frittered away John Quincy’s money in bad investments—thus the silence—and squandered his own funds as well, leaving his wife, Sally, and their two sons almost destitute. “I renounce him,” a bitter John Adams wrote when he learned the truth from Sally in the fall of 1800.

  On November 30, Charles died. He had been, in Abigail’s more charitable estimate, “no man’s enemy but his own.” John Quincy grieved when he heard the news, but he had already transferred his remaining funds to Tom, by now back in Boston. And in his fear for his future, he was remarkably stern with his far more level-headed brother, writing to say that he insisted on “regular, formal accounts of my property,” observing that he would put no store by promises rather than legal documents, and warning that “you will never think yourself entitled to betray my confidence because I am your brother, or to ruin me, because I cannot take the law of you.” Tom had demons of his own, but they would not reveal themselves for many years. He proved to be a responsible steward of his brother’s funds and a very reliable accountant. He put up with his brother’s lectures with perfect equanimity and perhaps secret amusement.

  Adams had grown heartily sick of the parties, balls, and vapid protocol that made up so much of court life. He had set projects for himself. He was learning German and had become deeply impressed with the cascade of books produced by the German publishing industry. He began reading the poetry of Christopher Martin Wieland, who wrote epics exploring Germany’s misty and medieval folk culture. Adams set himself the task of translating Wieland’s Oberon, which he considered the best of them (though he was dismayed to learn that an English translation already existed). He also worked on a translation of Juvenal’s Satires—translation was the way Adams taught himself languages and improved his skill in those he knew. At night he would read to Louisa from Chaucer or Alexander Pope’s Iliad.

  These years were a time of great physical suffering for Louisa. She had endured another miscarriage only three months after her first one. This one was equally agonizing for Louisa and terrifying for her husband, who sat by his wife’s bedside night after night, wringing his hands helplessly while an equally helpless doctor, who spoke neither English nor French, attended. In the summer of 1798, Louisa was standing by a window at a diplomatic supper and, happening to glance outside, saw a child crushed to death by a cart. She fainted and, when she miscarried yet again several days later, blamed the loss on her shock. At another ball in December 1799, Louisa’s friend Mrs. O’Farrill tripped on the carpet, fell, and broke her ankle. Louisa, standing a few feet away, fainted, and Adams and two other men placed her in the carriage to return home. For the next four hours, Adams wrote in his journal, she experienced “a continual succession of fainting fits and cramps amounting almost to convulsions.” Several weeks later she suffered another set of seizures. On January 9, Louisa had her fourth miscarriage. “I can only pray to God, that there may never again be the possibility of another like event,” Adams wrote. “A better hope, it were folly to indulge.”

  During the summers Adams took Louisa to the German countryside in the hopes of improving her health. In the summer of 1800 they traveled across the rugged eastern frontier known as Silesia (today’s southwestern Poland and northern Czech Republic). The province had very little to offer in regard to paintings or cathedrals, but every town had its own industry and artisans, and Adams made a thorough study of the region’s economy. In the first town he came to, Grunberg, just east of Frankfurt, six to seven hundred looms produced wool. Adams noticed that each of these small-scale operations carried out the entire process of manufacture—spinning, dying, weaving, pressing, and so on. Adams was attracted by a preindustrial economic logic. In one of a series of long letters he sent to Tom, in lieu of keeping a diary, he wrote:

  It is possible, for I cannot dispute the principles of Adam Smith, respecting the division of labor, that by the separation of all these single operations, the same quantity of industry, might produce a greater quantity of work’d materials, but it is very doubtful whether it would produce a competent subsistence to so many individuals. . . . The single workman, is thus placed altogether in the dependance of the great capitalist, and must of course become his drudge. Thus hundreds of laborious men will be compelled to groan and sweat under a weary life, for the sake of adding thousands more to the thousands of one merchant.

  Adams was fascinated by the pottery works, glassworks, and vitriol works he saw in the towns he passed through, and he described them at great length. He was endlessly curious about how things worked, including things that didn’t turn a profit. In Bunzlau he visited a carpenter who had built a machine representing the passions of Christ. It was so wondrous that it left Louisa in tears. But like his father, Adams was always on the lookout for practices Americans could adopt or benefits America could reap. He noted that Bohemian glass was so much cheaper than it was in England that it could be profitably exported to America despite the far greater transportation cost. One of the goals of the trip, he wrote, was to see whether America could lessen its dependence on English manufactures.

  Soon, however, he passed beyond the realms of commerce into a semi-legendary landscape. The minister climbed to four thousand feet in order to see a glacier. He rose at two A.M. to surmount the highest peak in the region, the Riesenkoppe, or Giant’s Head. From there he gazed in wonder across all of Silesia, Bohemia, and Saxony. For all his crotchets and complaints, Adams was, at thirty-three, still young, healthy, and enthusiastic. Louisa, however, began to fade; it became clear that she was pregnant once again. They cut short the trip and drove to Dresden and thence to Berlin. By this time, Tom had decided to have the so-called Silesian Letters published in the Portfolio, a new periodical he was associated with. Adams, as always, scoffed at the vanity production—and then,
having written thirty letters during his travels, wrote another twenty-four on the demography, geography, borders, languages, politics, history, ecclesiastical governance, educational system, universities, arts, and culture of Silesia. It was a slightly stupefying performance, and it demonstrated that Adams would have made a very good historian, if a much more literal-minded one than his grandson Henry.

  Louisa was still, miraculously, carrying the baby when the time came for her confinement in early 1801. The king ordered both ends of the Adams’ street sealed off, lest any sudden noise disturb her rest. The queen sent messengers daily to ask after Louisa’s health. She fell ill in January, recovered, and took a turn for the worse in March. But she survived and on April 12 gave birth to a son. Adams decreed that his name would be George, after George Washington, who had died more than a year before. With his typical hyperbolic regard for discretion and propriety, Adams informed his family by writing a long letter to Abigail about European and American affairs, and then noting, at the very end, “The day before yesterday, at half-past three o’clock afternoon, my dear Louisa gave me a Son.”

  ADAMS HIMSELF HAD VERY LITTLE WORK TO DO. IN JULY 1799, HE had concluded a maritime treaty with Prussia to supersede one signed in 1785. He had been instructed to reach a treaty agreement with Sweden, another neutral, but that never came off. He thought increasingly about returning home. But what was he to do there? As he wrote to his mother in the summer of 1800, he might want to stand for office in the state legislature or even Congress, but Charles had ruined his fortune. The thought of returning to the practice of law was abhorrent to him. Perhaps he would stay abroad if his father were reelected. He could wait until “party bitterness and rancor” had subsided, which perhaps was a roundabout way of saying “until my prospects improve.” Abigail gave him no comfort on that score; she wanted her eldest son home. “It is too long to be parted from those who have but a short leise of Life remaining to them, and to whom you are very dear,” she wrote.