John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  As they continued to ride westward from Berlin, Louisa began to pass through the remnants of war. In Leipzig, she found herself crossing a vast field pitted with bones and the shreds of boots and clothing—the reminders of an appalling battle between Napoleon and an allied force in October 1813 in which perhaps a hundred thousand men had died. Worse still, she began hearing rumors of the return of Napoleon. At Frankfurt, both Baptiste and her servant, terrified of being impressed into Napoleon’s army, refused to proceed, nor would any able-bodied men agree to take their place. Louisa and Charles Francis and Babet proceeded westward, toward they knew not what, in the company of Dupin, a fourteen-year-old boy.

  At Baden, they found wagonloads of troops rushing past them to the border. At the eastern bank of the Marne, Louisa found herself among a crowd of coarse women—camp followers of the imperial guards. She had caught up with the rear of a military detachment. The women cried, “Tear them out of the Carriage; they are Russians, take them out and kill them.” At that moment, soldiers seized the horses of Louisa’s carriage and trained their guns on the postilions. Babet went pale with fear. At that moment, a group of officers rode up, and Louisa explained—in her perfect French—that she was the wife of an American minister. Now the soldiers were shouting, “Vive les Americains!” Louisa, on advice from the commanding officer, shouted back, “Vive Napoleon!,” and waved her handkerchief. Charles Francis sat upright in the carriage in a state of utter terror—“like a marble statute.” Babet, the maid, was close to nervous collapse. The French officer strongly advised Louisa to assume an air of complete calm. By this time, she had had a good deal of experience feigning confidence. She waved and smiled and brought off the imposture with aplomb. The officer escorted her to an inn, where the landlady, after much conversation, agreed to take them in so long as they sat in a darkened room behind a locked door.

  Dupin informed his mistress that a rumor was abroad that Louisa was the sister of Napoleon—a rumor he had artfully encouraged by shrugging and looking cryptic whenever asked. And so, at last, Louisa proceeded, unhindered, into Paris through the Saint-Martin gate and down the rue de Richelieu to the Hôtel du Nord. And there, at eleven at night on March 23, she found her husband. Whatever either of them felt at that moment, neither wrote a word about it.

  Louisa did not keep a contemporary record of her trip but pieced it together from memory many years later, in 1836. That forty-day, two-thousand-mile odyssey through the wreckage of post-Napoleonic Europe had made her a different person; she had confronted dangers on her own for the first time and had taken responsibility for her own life and the lives of others who depended on her. There was barely a trace of the “maudlin hysterical fine Lady” whom she supposed that the Adamses had once taken her for. She had, above all, surprised herself. In her “Narrative of a Journey from Russia to France,” she wrote in her usual tone of self-abnegation that “it may perhaps at some future date serve to recall the memory of one, who was—and show that many undertakings which appear very difficult and arduous to my Sex, are by no means so trying as imagination forever depicts them.” Louisa was—a painfully modest claim that poignantly summed up her struggle to preserve her own individuality, her distinctive self, amid a life she never would have chosen and perhaps could not fully accept.

  ON APRIL 5, ADAMS RECEIVED NOTICE FROM PRESIDENT MADISON that he had been appointed as the minister to England. (His father had served as minister before him; his son, Charles Francis, would hold the job during the Civil War.) That put an end, though not an immediate one, to his delightful holiday in Paris. On May 16, he and Louisa took a carriage for Le Havre and from there boarded a ship to London. Abigail and John had learned of the appointment in early March and had immediately resolved to send George and John to their father, as they had promised to do. Both grandparents were devastated; for well over five years they had cared for the boys as their own. John Adams put his grandsons on board ship in the company of an old friend, Samuel G. Perkins, a colleague on the Harvard Board of Trustees. Adams, age eighty, felt very much in loco parentis. When his grandsons had been at sea for a little over two weeks, he wrote them with the kind of advice he had sent to his own son decades earlier: “Remember your youth and inexperience, your total Ignorance of the great World, be always modest, ingenious, teachable, never assuming or forward, treat all People with respect; preserve the Character of youthful Americans, let nothing unbecoming ever escape your lips or your Behaviour. You have Characters to Support, Reputations to acquire; I may Say, you have the Character of your Country, at least of its Childhood and youth to Support.” And always carry a notebook, a pen, and ink.

  On May 25, John Quincy and Louisa arrived at their hotel in Cavendish Square, and found George and John already there. Louisa fainted—twice. George had recently turned fourteen and at five feet five and three-quarter inches—John Quincy’s exacting measurements—he was barely an inch shorter than his father. He was a diffident boy, bookish and quiet. John was small for an eleven-year-old—four foot five—and impetuous. Neither was remotely as disciplined as their iron-willed father or for that matter as their little brother; they had, after all, grown up with their aunts and uncles and grandparents. John Quincy put the two younger boys in a boarding school and began to prepare George for entrance to Harvard. He had George read to him from the Bible in French while he himself followed along in Latin; then they would switch, and John Quincy would read from the French. He put George to work translating Gibbons’ journals into French, which must have been extremely slow and unpleasant-going, given George’s very imperfect command of the language.

  Peppery old John Adams wrote from Quincy with dire warnings about his son’s new post, as if it were once again 1783 and the fate of the nation hung on diplomacy. “My son! You are now in the most difficult and dangerous situation that you ever was in. You will be courted by Dissenters by Republicans, by Courtiers. Reserve! Reserve! Of which I know not whether your nature is capable, will be indispensable.” The old warhorse had been roused by the whiff of grapeshot. “I shall write to you incessantly,” he said. And he did, generally in the same melodramatic key. But it was unnecessary: the son had vastly deeper stores of reserve than his rash father ever had. In any case the new minister would have a more tumultuous relationship with his own colleagues than he would with his British counterparts. When it came time to sign the final version of the Treaty of Ghent, Adams insisted that the United States and Great Britain alternately affix their names first at every point in the treaty, so that neither could claim precedence over the other. Clay and Gallatin, pragmatists both, were mystified at Adams’ vehemence about what appeared to be a strictly symbolic issue. Adams viewed this formal equality as a matter of national honor. He prevailed, and ever after the United States and Great Britain signed their treaties according to this principle of alternation.

  Adams was much busier than he had been during the endless winters of St. Petersburg, when he had indulged his mania for weights and measures. He had his family about him, a vast weight of correspondence, an active social life, and regular sessions with the foreign minister, Viscount Castlereagh, and the Earl of Bathhurst, the secretary of war and the colonies. He and Bathhurst tried to reach a solution to the problem of fishing and drying the catch on the Grand Banks. In the end, the issue was transferred to Washington.

  With Castlereagh, Adams had a vast agenda to discuss, and the two met regularly. Along with Prince Metternich, Castlereagh was the great diplomat of the age. He was an Olympian figure—“cold, but not entirely repulsive,” as Adams put it in his diary. Unlike with Count Rumiantsev, Adams had a relationship with Castlereagh that was strictly professional, but both men were professionally dispassionate and deeply versed in the arts of diplomacy, and they worked without friction. On January 22, 1816, Adams sent the viscount a long letter dilating on the issues they needed to discuss. Two days later, they met for four hours at Castlereagh’s home. In order both to ensure that he did not neglect to raise an agenda item and
to recollect them all afterwards—for he did not take notes or bring a secretary with him—Adams mentally assigned each subject a heading, the first beginning with A and the last with J. In his journal he was able to recreate the conversation, and thus preserve it for himself, in extremely fine detail.

  Adams spoke to the foreign minister about, among other things, impressment, the return home of destitute American sailors, concerns that the British were instigating the tribes in Canada, alleged British intrigues in the South, and the obligation of Great Britain to repatriate stolen property—that is, slaves who had been sold in the West Indies. Adams wrote elsewhere that “a living, sentient being, and still more, a human being, was to be regarded in a different light, from the inanimate matter, of which other private property might consist.” But in this instance the British regarded the slaves as chattel, and Adams raised no objection to treating them as such. (The issue remained unresolved.) Adams proposed joint demilitarization of the Great Lakes. Castlereagh agreed. The following year, the two sides would sign a treaty formalizing the agreement—“the first instance of reciprocal naval disarmament in the history of international relations,” according to the diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis.

  But actual diplomacy took up only a small fraction of Adams’ time. He found that he was inundated by Americans bearing introductions from friends and relatives back home. And a steady stream of “projectors” found their way to his doorstep. Only thirty-five years had passed since James Watt had begun to build his new steam engine, helping to inaugurate the Industrial Revolution. The great age of invention was now under way, and its capital was London. Inventors appeared to be united in the belief that America would welcome a man with an improvement in hand and make him rich. These men applied to the American minister for advice, for introductions, and for money.

  Adams had been fascinated by scientific discovery ever since he and his friends in Boston had performed experiments with Leyden jars a decade earlier; he listened with more attention than might be expected from a minister with a busy schedule. There was the gentleman who had invented the “seaman’s friend”—a life jacket, made from cork, which for some reason the British Admiralty had declined to buy; Captain Johnson, an alleged friend of Robert Fulton, who had perfected a torpedo system to use with Fulton’s steamship that would send the Barbary pirates to the bottom; the author, apparently a “lunatic,” who had dropped off a book on Chinese astronomy; and the geniuses who had perfected eight inventions, including “a new method for bleaching Cotton Canvas and all vegetable substance.” Two gentlemen Adams viewed as harmless frauds, Studley and Service, spoke to him “unintelligibly” of their innumerable inventions, including gaslights and “iron pavements.” When they returned several weeks later with an expanded list, Adams drily observed to them that “the Iron Pavement was omitted.”

  Most of these projectors were chemists, but some were mechanics. A Dr. Busby detained Adams for an hour with his explanation of “a machine or Carriage to travel or transport merchandize by land, with a velocity equal to one hundred miles an hour.” It was to be used on “the iron railways now used in this Country.” (Steam engines already operated on tracks in quarries but would not be used to move public passengers until 1825.) “He is,” Adams wrote in his journal, “one of the numerous class of inventors who are mad with regard to their main objects and sober in all calculations of detail.”

  Adams soon feared that he would be overwhelmed by distractions. In late July 1815, he and Louisa and the boys moved out of London to Little Ealing, a rustic seat eight miles west of Hyde Park. There, by a delightful irony, they moved into Little Boston House, a fine home located on the property of the Jacobean Boston Manor. Little Boston was a rarefied version of his home at Quincy. “The house we have taken,” he wrote in his journal, “is not large but neat and elegant and fitted up with all that minute attention to comfort which is so characteristic of English domestic life. We have a coach house and stable, fruit and kitchen garden.” The garden, “though small,” Adams wrote, “is laid out with taste and elegance, with forest-trees, fruit-trees, shrubs, Plants, herbs, kitchen vegetables, and flowers in profusion. It is a little paradise, vocal with the harmony of every feathered songster of the Spring.”

  Adams kept a small office on Craven Street, between the Strand and the St. James Embankment on the Thames. Nabby’s younger son, John Adams Smith, was now serving as Adams’ secretary and performed his duties with far greater professionalism than had his older brother, the rakish William Stephens Smith. Adams was thus able to spend much of his time in Little Ealing, taking the charming walk into London when necessary. He got to know his neighbors. Dr. Nicholas, the headmaster of the Great Ealing School, which John and Charles Francis attended, lived only about a mile away and often invited the Adamses to elegant dinners with the local gentry. Ellen, the eldest Nicholas daughter, played the harp and sang charmingly, as Louisa Johnson had once done.

  Adams was about as serene as he would ever be, but by this point in his life he was often suffering from some form of physical affliction—rheumatism in his hands or an intense sensitivity in his eyes, a problem he shared with his father. He teared up all the time, which would have been embarrassing for any public man but was all the more so for one who tried to turn a stoic and impersonal face to the world. In late 1815, Adams feared he would go blind. The pain was so overwhelming that he could not sleep and could not bear even wan light. His eyes swelled and discharged a fluid that made his lids stick together. Adams’ doctor applied six leeches to his eyes, and the bleeding briefly reduced the swelling. But the pain returned, to the point where Adams became almost delirious. “It seemed to me,” he wrote, “as if four hooks, were tearing that side of my face into four quarters.” Finally, after about a week, the swelling, and the agony, subsided. He could read again—but he couldn’t write, for he had bought a pistol to show the boys how to shoot, and the report had injured his hand. For several weeks he had to dictate his journal to Louisa.

  BY THE TIME THEY HAD BEEN IN LONDON FOR A YEAR, THE AMERICAN minister and his wife, for all that they professed to prefer the comforts of home, had become fixtures on the social scene. One day in the summer of 1816 Adams recorded the blizzard of invitations that had landed on his doorstep: “Before leaving home I had received a Card of invitation from Lord Castlereagh to dinner, next Friday the 12th. instant, and a Card for Mr. and Mrs. Adams, of Mr. Penn at Home this Evening. At the Office I found a Card of invitation, from the Lord Chamberlain to Mr. and Mrs. Adams, to a Dress Party, a Ball, at the Prince Regent’s, on Friday next, to have the honour of meeting the Queen. A Card to Mr. and Mrs. Adams, of the Marchioness Dowager of Lansdowne, at Home, Sunday, the 7th. to meet the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, and a Card to the American Ambassador, of the Countess of Jersey at Home, on Monday the 8th.”

  Adams generally socialized in an aristocratic rather than mercantile setting. But he also got to know the more boisterous arrivistes of the City. He was taken up by the lord mayor of London, Matthew Wood, a druggist from Exeter. (Then and now, the lord mayor has little real power, and the post generally goes to a wealthy man of business who can afford to entertain liberally.) Wood held dinners at the drop of a hat: to celebrate Easter, to felicitate the Duke of Wellington, to bring together the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, of which he was a member. Wood must have taken a shine to the American minister, for Adams was usually the only foreign minister at these events and sometimes the only government official, domestic or foreign.

  Wood was in the habit of drinking from a great gilded cup, delivering a suitably orotund toast, passing it to his wife to do the same, and so on down the company. Adams in turn would deliver an elaborate toast to England. He became a student of the toast. Whether at the lord mayor’s or some other celebratory function, Adams, once he sussed out that a toast was expected, would revolve his thoughts in his head while the conversation bubbled around him—indeed, while talking—though somehow he was still able to recall the convers
ation in great detail the following day. At a dinner for the Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress, Adams, after apologizing that he was very much at a loss for words, launched into a long and lavish address that rose to a thunderous peroration: “Gentlemen, the sublime language of your immortal Poet, who asked a Kingdom for a Stage, Princes to act, and Monarchs to behold the swelling Scene, is not large enough for the purposes of your Institution. Your Theatre, is not a single kingdom, but the whole habitable globe.” And so on. The former Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory had found a delightful outlet for his gifts.

  The Adamses remained at Little Boston House, and very happily so. Adams had begin to relax his iron grip on the children’s education. Abigail, knowing him all too well, wrote to warn against “overplying the constitution of our children with studying,” and he wrote back to say, “The great and constant of them all, including George, is to escape from study, and to this effort I have given up all opposition as vain.” Adams took long walks with the boys and read up on astronomy, his new passion. He reread his journals back to 1809 with the hope of producing an index, for he often consulted the journals when trying to recall a meeting or a conversation from the past. He visited his good friend Benjamin West, then almost eighty, who was reworking the monumental painting Death on a Pale Horse. He went to see a cricket match on the splendid lawn of another friend, Mr. Copland.

  Adams, who seemed to move from one obsession to another, now caught the poetry bug, which held him in thrall during the autumn and early winter of 1816. He worked up an ode to fortitude in the manner of Gray, which he felt slightly less mortified by than he had by the romantic material he had written before. He began writing an epistle in the style of Pope. He lay awake at night making rhymes, and he wrote verses in his head while in the carriage to London. What would he do with it? He would dedicate it to his mother. Sometimes he felt ashamed of his labors, but he couldn’t commit them to the fire: “I argue to my own heart that my great purpose is to give pleasure to my Parents; especially to my Mother.” Within two weeks, the epistle had grown to five or six hundred lines. He took time out to write verses for Ellen Nicholas’ birthday, which she had specially requested. When they were finished, he dispatched John to the Nicholas household to deliver them in person. Finally, at the end of December, he concluded that the epistle was too bad to be sent to Quincy; no record remains of the work.