John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  Does he read the newspapers? The events of this war should not pass unobserved by him at his years.

  As he reads history, you should ask him what events strike him most. What characters he esteems and admires? Which he hates and abhors? Which he despises?

  Treachery, perfidy, cruelty, hypocrisy, avarice, &c &c should be pointed out to him for his contempt as well as detestation.29

  Adams insisted that his son master Greek, “the most perfect of all languages,” and that he read the original text of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Besides pressing him to meet his father’s academic demands, Abigail constantly reminded John Quincy of his family heritage and his father’s achievements as a scholar, lawyer, and legislator, as well as his courage in defying British rule and risking death by serving in the Continental Congress. John Quincy responded with bold displays of his own courage that added to his mother’s pride.

  “Master John,” Abigail reported to her husband, “cheerfully consented to become ‘post-rider,’” venturing alone on horseback past British troop encampments to carry family news between Braintree and Boston.

  “As the distance was not less than eleven miles each way,” John Quincy boasted, “the undertaking was not an easy one for a boy barely nine years old.”30

  Abigail’s demands, discipline, expectations, and hectoring—along with fears generated by war—took a toll on the boy, however, often leaving him depressed and convinced he would never match the achievements of his “Pappa.” Abigail read and reread her husband’s letters from Philadelphia exhorting his son to achieve “great and glorious deeds.” The letters insisted that scholarship be central to the boy’s life to ensure his achieving his father’s ambition to “become a wise and great man.”31

  “At ten years of age,” John Quincy recalled later, “I read Shakespeare’s Tempest, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear.”

  There was also a small edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I believe I attempted ten times to read and never could get through half the book. . . . I was mortified, even to the shedding of tears, that I could not even conceive what it was that my father and mother admired so much in that book, and yet I was ashamed to ask them an explanation. I smoked tobacco and read Milton at the same time, from the same motive—to find out what was the recondite charm in them which gave my father so much pleasure. After making myself four or five times sick with smoking, I mastered that accomplishment . . . but I did not master Milton. I was thirty when I first read Paradise Lost with delight and astonishment.32

  Following his success placing George Washington in command of the military, John Adams’s erudition and quick legal mind raised him to leadership in Congress—perhaps higher than he wanted. By summer’s end in 1775, he was sitting on ninety committees, serving as chairman of twenty-five, and by his own admission, he was “worn out”—and longed for his wife and children.

  “My dearest friend,” he wrote to Abigail. “I have some thoughts of petitioning for leave to bring my family here. I am a lonely, forlorn creature. . . .”

  I want to walk with you in the garden—the Common—the Plain—the Meadow. I want to take Charles in one hand and Tom in the other and walk with you, Nabby on your right and John upon my left, to view the corn fields, the orchards, &c. Alas, poor imagination. How faintly and imperfectly do you supply the want of originality and reality.33

  Abigail longed for John as much as he longed for her. She too began her letters “My Dearest Friend.”

  My anxiety for your welfare will never leave me but with my parting breath. ’Tis of more importance to me than all this world contains. The cruel separation to which I am necessitated cuts in half the enjoyments of life; the other half are comprised in the hope that what I do and what I suffer may be serviceable to you and the little ones and our country.34

  In August, John Adams learned that his thirty-four-year-old brother, Elihu, had died of dysentery at his army camp, and reports from Boston about troop outrages left him worried about his family’s safety. He pleaded with Abigail to “fly to the woods with our children” in the face of danger. John Quincy tried assuaging his father’s fears with a pledge to defend the family and the family home.

  “John writes like a hero,” Adams wrote back to Abigail, “glowing with ardor for his country and burning with indignation against her enemies.”35

  Adams surprised his wife in December by appearing at the farm unexpectedly—only to surprise her even more, four days later, by leaving for Watertown, Massachusetts, to report to the Provincial Congress. He returned home three weeks after that—then left for Philadelphia almost immediately, with hardly a moment for John Quincy and the other children.

  By then, Abigail was so lonely for her husband that she grew angry, asking bluntly, “Shall I expect you or do you determine to stay out the year?” After he left, she decided to cease writing him after one last message. “I miss my partner,” she admitted. “I have not felt in a humor to entertain you with letters. If I had taken up my pen perhaps some unbecoming invective might have fallen from it. . . . Our little ones whom you so often recommend to my care and instruction shall not be deficient in virtue or probity if the precepts of a mother have their desired effect, but they would be doubly enforced could they be indulged with the example of a father constantly before them.”36

  “I cannot leave Congress, without causing injury to the public,” her husband snapped,37 but then reiterated his loneliness for her and his family. “I never will come again without you if I can persuade you to come with me,” he promised. “Whom God has joined together ought not to be put asunder so long with their own consent. We will bring master Johnny with us.”38

  In the spring of 1776, Adams and the Continental Congress learned that George Washington’s Continental Army had forced the British to evacuate Boston on March 17. Adams and the others cheered as Virginia’s Richard Henry Lee then resolved that the United Colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.” Congress postponed voting on the resolution until July 1 to permit Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to prepare a formal Declaration of Independence. Congress approved it without dissent on July 4.

  Adams subsequently achieved still greater prominence by writing a document he called Thoughts on Government, which, by the end of the year, had served as the basis for constitutions in nine states. Adams’s Thoughts on Government called for establishment of republican governments, each with an executive and a bicameral legislature with separate, clearly defined powers.

  In June 1777, a month before his tenth birthday, John Quincy wrote to his father, whose long absence and exalted position had transformed him into a distant, godlike fantasy in the boy’s imagination. Although he was ahead of most students twice his age, his mother’s hectoring convinced him he was falling short of his father’s expectations.

  Dear Sir: I love to receive letters very well; much better than I love to write them. I make a poor figure at composition, my head is much too fickle, my thoughts are running after birds eggs, play and trifles, till I get vexed with myself. Mamma has a troublesome task to keep me steady, and I own I am ashamed of myself. I have but just entered the 3d volume of Smollett, tho’ I had designed to have got it half through by this time.

  John Quincy pledged to devote more time to reading and promised to write again in a week “and give a better account of myself.”

  I wish, Sir, you would give me some instructions with regard to my time & advise me how to proportion my studies & my play . . . and I will keep them by me & endeavor to follow them. I am, dear Sir, with a present determination of growing better, Yours.39

  Early in winter 1778, the French government became the first foreign nation to recognize the United States’ independence. By then, John Adams was chairman of Congress’s Board of War and Ordnance—in effect, the nation’s secretary of war. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to Abigail of his intention to re
tire from government and return home “to my practice at the bar.” After four years in Congress, he realized, he had left too many debts unpaid, and, with money depreciating, “I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years’ industry.”

  My family was living on my past acquisitions which were very moderate. . . . My children were growing up without my care in their education, and all my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years have not been sufficient to pay a laboring man upon my farm. Some of my friends . . . suggested to me what I knew very well before, that I was losing a fortune every year by my absence.40

  With her husband gone for all but four of the previous twenty-four months, Abigail had taken a dominant role in the Adams household. When a smallpox epidemic swept into Boston, she confronted the dreaded disease by taking her children and sixteen relatives to Boston to submit to inoculation with live infected serum. Although she and John Quincy emerged unscathed, the vaccine left eleven-year-old Nabby ill for several days and six-year-old Charles so sick he needed weeks to recover. She also oversaw the farm, farmhands, and household servants, as well as the buying and selling of lands.

  “I have supported the family!” she complained to her husband.

  Late in 1777, John Adams arrived home before Christmas to what he called “a blissful fireside, surrounded by a wife and a parcel of chattering boys and girls”—and a stack of letters from potential clients promising lucrative fees to take their cases. After he had left for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to take one such case, a letter from Congress staggered Abigail: Congress had appointed her husband a commissioner to France to replace Connecticut’s Silas Deane and to join Benjamin Franklin and Virginia’s Arthur Lee in soliciting financial aid from the French government.

  “Dr. Franklin’s age alarms us,” explained Massachusetts congressman James Lovell, and because they suspected Arthur Lee of spying for England, “We want one man of inflexible integrity on that embassy.”41 As for Deane, Congress had recalled him after receiving an accusation that he had embezzled congressional funds intended for arms purchases.

  Abigail was furious and tried to reverse the appointment with an irate letter to Lovell: “How could you contrive to rob me of all my happiness?” she demanded.

  You who so lately experienced what it was to be restored to your family after a painful absence from it. . . . I have often experienced the want of his aid and assistance in the last three years of his absence, and that demand increases as our little ones grow up, three of whom are sons and at this time of life stand most in need of the joint force of his example and precepts. And can I, Sir, consent to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?42

  The prospect of another long separation from her husband terrified her. Even if he survived the dangerous transatlantic winter voyage, he faced summary hanging for treason, without trial, if a British ship captured his vessel. Who would support their family if he failed to return, she demanded to know. With their family’s finances already in a “very loose condition,” John Quincy and her other children, she wailed, faced “growing up in poverty without ever knowing their father.”43

  Knowing her husband would never refuse his country’s call, Abigail decided to ask him to take the entire family with him to France. And when he returned from Portsmouth, he surprised her by agreeing enthusiastically—only to learn a few weeks later that Congress lacked funds for the family’s passage and living expenses overseas.

  John Adams was no more eager to leave his family than Abigail was to see him go, and to John Quincy’s dismay, his parents decided he should accompany his father on the voyage. His presence would not only ease some of his father’s loneliness for his family but allow John Adams and his firstborn to reforge father-son bonds and give John Adams greater influence over his son’s development. Foreign travel would also enhance John Quincy’s education and accelerate his evolution into the “wise and great man” his parents expected him to become. John Quincy hated the idea at first. Instead of romping with friends at school, he faced possible drowning at sea or capture and impressment in the British navy—or worse, by pirates. Just as dismal were the prospects of endless days of incessant study under constant watch and criticism by his scholar-father, whom he hardly knew and whose impossible success his parents expected him to emulate or surpass.

  “My dear son,” Abigail tried to console him, “It is a very difficult task for a tender parent to bring her mind to part with a child of your years going to a distant land nor could I have acquiesced in such a separation under any other care than that of the most excellent parent and guardian who accompanied you.”

  Let me enjoin it upon you to attend constantly and steadfastly to the precepts and instructions of your father as you value the happiness of your mother and your own welfare. You are in possession of a natural good understanding and of spirits unbroken by adversity and untamed. Improve your understanding by acquiring useful knowledge and virtue such as will render you an ornament to society, an honor to your country, and a blessing to your parents.44

  Preparations for an eighteenth-century transatlantic voyage were not simple and, indeed, needed all the efforts of John and Abigail Adams and their children. In the absence of passenger ships, travelers usually had to bribe captains of cargo or naval vessels to take them aboard, then pay more bribes to obtain sheltered sleeping quarters. Congress, however, had ordered—and agreed to pay—the captain of the frigate Boston to transport John Adams to Europe. Like passengers on other ships, however, Adams still had to bring his own provisions for a voyage of unpredictable length and hardships. Transatlantic crossings could last thirty to sixty days, depending on prevailing winds and possible detention by enemy naval vessels or privateers. Apart from the clothes they would need at sea and in France, John and John Quincy Adams bought and carried aboard

  a bushel of corn meal, thirty pounds of brown sugar, two bottles of mustard, two pounds of tea, two pounds of chocolate, six live chickens, a half-barrel of “fresh meat,” five bushels of corn, a barrel of apples [a precaution against scurvy], six small barrels of cider, “a fat sheep,” a ten-gallon keg of rum; three dozen bottles of Madeira wine, thirty bottles of port wine [water and milk were unsafe to drink], fourteen dozen eggs, seven loaves of sugar, a box of wafers, and a pound of pepper . . . and . . . three reams of paper, two account books, twenty-five quills; a dozen clay pipes; two pounds of tobacco, two mattresses, two bolsters [as pillows], and £100 in silver currency of various denominations stuffed in shoes.45

  Not making preparations easier or more pleasant were warnings from well-meaning relatives, friends, and neighbors about everything from seasickness to pirates, privateers, and English gunboats. All knew that if the British captured John Adams, they would hang him and impress young John Quincy.

  On the day of departure, family members and friends escorted Adams and his son from their door to water’s edge on Quincy Bay, where a barge bobbed about under thickening clouds, waiting to take them to their ship.

  On February 13, 1778, John Adams and his son John Quincy ignored the ominous warnings of a hysterical relative who shrieked of “threatening signs” in the sky and sea; with their servant, they climbed aboard the Boston and set sail for France. Six days out, John Quincy and his father saw the three British frigates materialize on the horizon, speeding under full sails to capture the Boston and its famous passenger. The captain told John Adams that “his orders were to carry me to France . . . to avoid fighting if he could, but if he could not avoid an engagement he would give them something that should make them remember him. . . . Our powder, cartridges and balls were placed by the guns and everything made ready to begin the action.”46

  John Quincy watched his father “encourage the officers and men to fight to the last.” He knew his father intended “to be killed on board the Boston or sunk to the bottom in her rather th
an be taken prisoner.”47

  By nightfall on the second day of the chase, the British frigate chasing the Boston was no closer, and as the winds picked up and reached hurricane force, John Quincy and his father went to bed. Suddenly, they heard a thunderous crash above as the hurricane’s wind rocked the ship. John Adams clasped his boy in his arms and prayed: he was ready to die for his country, but asked God to spare his little son.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Seeds of Statesmanship

  From the first, the Boston seemed doomed.

  “The wind was very high,” John Adams noted as they lost sight of the Massachusetts coastline. “The sea very rough . . . the snow so thick the captain thinks he cannot go to sea. . . . All is yet chaos on board. His men are not disciplined.”1 With British gunboats poised on the horizon, the Boston rolled almost helplessly and threatened to send Adams sliding across the deck. He kept a tight grip on the rail with one arm and wrapped the other around his ten-year-old son.

  “I confess,” he said to himself, “I often regretted that I had brought my son, [but] Mr. Johnny’s behavior gave me a satisfaction that I cannot express. Fully sensible of our danger, he was constantly endeavoring to bear it with manly patience, very attentive to me and his thoughts constantly running in a serious strain.”2

  Adams looked at the oncoming gunboats and wondered how they would survive if the British overtook them—until the sting of a crashing wave made him question how they would survive if the British did not overtake them. “The constant rocking and rolling of the ship made us all sick. Half the sailors were sick. I was seized with it myself this forenoon. My servant Joseph Stevens and the captain have both been very bad.” Adams waxed philosophic for a moment and analyzed the causes of “mal de mer” as stemming from “the effect of agitation combined with a variety of odors from coal, stagnant water, and those parts of the ship where sailors slept—often unwashed for days. There is the same inattention to the cleanliness of the ship and the persons and health of the sailors,” Adams complained, “as there is at land of the cleanliness of the camp and the health and cleanliness of the soldiers. The practice of profane cursing and swearing . . . prevails in a most abominable degree.”3