by Harlow Unger
Adams and his son slept together in a small space in the “’tween decks” on the double mattress he had brought aboard, beneath their own sheets and blankets and using bolsters for pillows.
As the main deck was almost constantly under water, the sea rolling in and out at the ports and scuppers, we were obliged to keep the hatchways down—whereby the air became so hot and so dry in the ’tween decks that . . . I could not breathe or live there. Yet the water would pour down whenever a hatchway was opened, so that all was afloat.4
Although the Boston was “overmetalled”—that is, the weight of her guns (five twelve-pounders and nineteen nine-pounders) was too great for her tonnage—the captain ordered her “to sail with the guns out,” Adams explained, “in order to be ready, and this . . . made the ship labor and roll so as to oblige us to keep the chain pumps as well as the hand pumps almost constantly going.” The weight of the gun barrels extending off the sides made the ship “wring and twist in such a manner as to endanger the masts and rigging.”5
Father and son had sought shelter in their bunk, when the storm slammed the ship with explosive wind bursts and they heard the terrifying crash from above. An officer appeared almost immediately “and told us that the ship had been struck with lightening and the noise we had heard was a crash of thunder . . . that the large mainmast was struck. . . . We lost sight of our enemy, it is true,” John Adams’s shaky hand penned his diary the next morning, “but we found ourselves in a dreadful storm. . . .
It would be fruitless to attempt a description of what I saw, heard and felt during these next three days. To describe the ocean, the waves, the winds, the ship, her motions, rollings, wringings and agonies—the sailors, their countenances, language, and behavior is impossible. No man could keep his legs, and nothing could be kept in its place. A universal wreck of everything in all parts of the ship, chests, casks, bottles &c. No place or person was dry. On one of these nights, a thunder bolt struck three men upon deck and wounded one of them. . . . He lived three days and died raving mad.6
Just as calm settled over the surrounding sea, a boy about John Quincy’s age—the son of Connecticut merchant Silas Deane—approached John Adams with a note that startled Adams by asking him to “take care of the child in his situation as you would wish to have done to a child of your own. It is needless to mention his youth and helplessness.”7 In effect, the note told Adams he was now the boy’s guardian. Although taken aback, Adams was well aware of the bonds that tied members of New England’s Christian elite to each other—especially their minor children. Even if unrelated and unacquainted, all felt a deep kinship through their common ties to Puritan founders, whose intermarriages left many, if not all, somewhat related—even when they did not know it.
Silas Deane’s brother, Barnabas, saw Adams’s departure as a good opportunity to divest himself of responsibility for raising his brother’s son Jesse, and he simply put the boy on board with a note charging Adams to deliver him to his father in France.
John Adams had no sooner read Deane’s presumptuous letter when another boy—eighteen-year-old William Vernon—handed him an even more presumptuous missive from a member of the Continental Navy Board. “I presume it is unnecessary to say one word in order to impress your mind with the anxiety a parent is under in the education of a son. . . . Therefore I have only to beg the favor of you, Sir, to place my son with such a gentleman whom you would choose for one of yours.” He asked Adams to find a merchant “either at Bordeaux or Nantes, of Protestant principles,” to teach him “general and extensive business,” and he enclosed “a gratuity of one hundred pounds sterling that may be given to a merchant of eminence to take him for two or three years.”8
“Thus,” Adams puzzled in his diary, “I find myself invested with the unexpected trust of a kind of guardianship of two promising young gentlemen, besides my own son.” It was fortunate for all the boys that Adams had started his professional life as a teacher and found “few things that have ever given me greater pleasure than the tuition of youth.”9 As it turned out, Jesse Deane was only a year older than John Quincy, and the two, each grateful to have found someone his own age, became inseparable shipboard companions.
Between storms and other crises at sea, Adams himself read French literature and put his son and Jesse Deane in the hands of the ship’s French surgeon, Nicholas Noël, who agreed to teach the boys French. To ease tension among the seamen, the captain allowed them to stage “frolics,” with all the men dousing each other with flour then dancing on the main deck. Adams suspected the captain ordered such “whimsical diversions in order to make the men wash themselves.”10
A more prized diversion came a month after they left Massachusetts, when “we spied a sail and gave her chase . . . and came up beside her.” To Adams’s shock, “She fired upon us . . . so that the ball went directly over my head.” Adams’s ship immediately turned broadside with her big guns aimed squarely at the other ship, which immediately surrendered, yielding a prize Adams estimated at £80,000. Half went to the owner of the Boston, 12 percent to the captain, and shares ranging from 1 to 6 percent to the ship’s officers and crew, depending on rank.
On March 29, 1778, six weeks after they had left Massachusetts, John Adams and his son sailed into the estuary leading to Bordeaux, when a pilot came aboard and announced that France and England were at war. On April 1, the Adamses set foot on shore with Jesse Deane, eighteen-year-old William Vernon, and Dr. Noël. Two American merchants, who regularly checked incoming cargoes, took the famed John Adams and his friends for a sumptuous lunch and a tour of the town, a visit to theater before tea and the opera in the evening. Adams marveled at the splendor of French grand opera. “The scenery, the dancing, the music,” he gasped. “Never seen anything of the kind before.”11
Adams placed young Vernon with one of the merchants, and on April 4, he set off with his son by carriage for Paris, along with Jesse Deane and a small retinue. Covering 150 miles in only two days, they reached Poitiers in west-central France. “Every part of the country is cultivated,” Adams remarked. “The fields of grain, the vineyards, the castles, the cities, the parks, the gardens, everything is beautiful. Yet every place swarms with beggars.”12
From Poitiers, they rode north to Tours, then east to Orleans and finally Paris, where they checked into an expensive hotel and John Adams put two tired little boys to bed. “My little son,” he wrote in his diary, “has sustained this long journey of nearly 500 miles at the rate of an hundred miles a day with the utmost firmness, as he did our fatiguing and dangerous voyage.”13
After meeting Benjamin Franklin in Paris, John Adams learned to his distress that Jesse Deane’s father, Silas, had left for America to present himself to Congress and dispute the charges made about him. Adams would now have to care for Jesse indefinitely.
Putting servants in charge of the boys, Adams followed Franklin on a whirlwind tour of diplomatic receptions at the Palais de Versailles and the châteaus of the ruling French nobility—the Duc de Noailles, the Marquis de Lafayette’s father-in-law; Prime Minister Comte de Maurepas; and Minister of Foreign Affairs Comte de Vergennes, who took Adams to meet King Louis XVI.
To eliminate the high cost of lodging, Adams moved into a furnished apartment in the Hotel Valentois, a château that Franklin was renting in Passy, then a small town between Paris and Versailles.c Franklin charged Adams no rent and gave him the use of his nine servants as well as his elegant carriage and coachman. Adams enrolled his son and Jesse Deane with Franklin’s grandson, nine-year-old “Benny” Bache, in a private boarding school that was near enough to allow John Quincy to spend Sundays with his father. Hardly an intimate occasion, Sunday dinners chez Franklin saw a small army of celebrated figures in the arts and government feasting on a galaxy of delicacies and fine wines from Franklin’s cellar of more than 1,000 bottles from renowned French vineyards.
“He lives in all the splendor and magnificence of a viceroy,” John Adams wrote of Franklin after one Sunday feas
t, “which is little inferior to that of a king.”14
In addition to Latin and French, the boys learned music, dancing, fencing, and drawing, and within a few weeks, John Quincy spoke fluent French, the universal language of the European upper classes and diplomats everywhere. Not as harsh as many such schools, Monsieur Le Coeur’s Pension began the school day at 6 a.m. and ended at 7 p.m. but included frequent periods for play to ease the strain of academic discipline.
“It was then that the idea of writing a regular journal was first suggested to me,” John Quincy recalled. As he wrote to his mother at the time, “My pappa enjoins it upon me to keep a journal or diary of the events that happen to me, and of objects that I see and characters that I converse with from day to day.” All but breathing his father’s thoughts and words, he told his mother,
I am convinced of the utility, importance & necessity of this exercise . . . and although I shall have the mortification a few years hence to read a great deal of my childish nonsense, yet I shall have the pleasure and advantage of remarking the several steps by which I shall have advanced in taste and judgment and knowledge. I have been to see the palace and gardens of Versailles, the Military School at Paris [École Militaire] . . . & other scenes of magnificence in and about Paris. . . .
I am, my ever honored and revered Mamma, your dutiful & affectionate son John Quincy Adams15
Benjamin Franklin invited John Adams and his eleven-year-old son, John Quincy Adams, to live in his château on the outskirts of Paris after Adams’s arrival as one of the American commissioners soliciting financial and military aid from the French government. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
His father’s mission to Paris would prove short-lived, however. After barely a month, John Adams wrote to Congress urging the appointment of Franklin as sole American envoy to France, saying that commissions inevitably generate too many internal frictions to make them effective in international diplomacy.
The Palais de Versailles, where Benjamin Franklin took John Adams to meet French foreign minister Comte de Vergennes.
“The public business has never been methodically conducted,” he grumbled, “and it is not possible to obtain a clear idea of our affairs.”16 He found his fellow commissioner Arthur Lee argumentative, sharp-tongued, and disagreeable, with a violent temper, and he considered Franklin a dissipated “charlatan,” posing as a philosopher without ever having studied philosophy or the great thinkers. Although Franklin was exceptionally generous, he was a confirmed sybarite, rising late in the morning and, according to Adams, “coming home at all hours.” Franklin, Adams concluded,
has a passion for reputation and fame as strong as you can imagine, and his time and thoughts are chiefly employed to obtain it, and to set tongues and pens, male and female, to celebrating him. Painters, statuaries, sculptors, china potters and all are set to work for this end. He has the most affectionate and insinuating way of charming the woman or the man that he fixes on. It is the most silly and ridiculous way imaginable, in the sight of an American, but it succeeds to admiration, fulsome and sickish as it is, in Europe.17
With Franklin pursuing his rich social life, few diplomatic reports had flowed from Paris to Congress, and Adams assumed the burden of combing through hundreds of accumulated documents and condensing them into a series of reports that left him with too little time to enjoy Paris or, for that matter, get enough sleep. All but dismissed by a loyalist acquaintance as “a man of no consequence,” the work-oriented Adams seemed “out of his element” in the world of diplomacy—especially in Paris.
“He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen and talk small talk or flirt with the ladies. In short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier,” one of his friends remarked.18 Adams himself admitted, “I am wearied to death with gazing wherever I go at a profusion of unmeaning wealth and magnificence. Gold, marble, silk, velvet, silver, ivory, and alabaster make up the show everywhere.”19
In March 1779, eleven months after they had arrived in France, John Quincy and his father were elated to begin their trip home to America, taking a coach from Paris to Nantes, where the Loire estuary empties into the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean. Franklin agreed to care for Jesse Deane and relieve John Adams of that responsibility.
Few ships sailed or docked on schedule in a world at war, and their ship, the Alliance, was not in port. The two Adamses spent the next seven weeks seeing the countryside, reading books, writing letters, attending theater, concerts, and operas, and visiting the castlelike home of Maryland merchant Joshua Johnson, his English wife, Catherine, and their three little girls. Adams had befriended Johnson’s brother, Maryland governor Thomas Johnson, at the Continental Congress, establishing a tie that would bind the two families for the rest of their lives.
On April 22, the Alliance arrived at Nantes, and the Adamses all but leaped aboard—only to be told to disembark. The vessel would not sail to America because the French government had assigned it to John Paul Jones’s squadron to harass British shipping in the English Channel. “This is a cruel disappointment,” Adams railed in his diary.
A few days later, the Adamses traveled westward along the southern shore of Brittany to the port of Lorient, where they were told they were more likely to find a ship bound for America. What they found were weeks of boredom in a town devoid of culture. The highlights of their stay were several dinners with John Paul Jones and a visit to his ship, the Bonhomme Richard—once a decrepit French ship that Jones had refitted with forty-two guns and renamed in Franklin’s honor.d
On June 17, three months after leaving Paris, John Quincy and his father boarded the French frigate Sensible in Lorient, along with the first French ambassador to the United States, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, and his aide, the Marquis François de Barbé Marbois. In what proved a smooth, uneventful crossing, John Quincy Adams displayed both his language skills and his pedagogical skills absorbed from teachers at his French school, as he succeeded in teaching the two French diplomats to speak serviceable English—in just eight weeks.
“The Chevalier de la Luzerne and Mr. Marbois,” John Adams beamed, “are in raptures with my son.”
I found them this morning, the ambassador seated on a cushion in our state room, Mr. Marbois in his cot at his left hand and my son stretched out in his at his right—the ambassador reading out loud in Blackstone’s Discourse . . . and my son correcting the pronunciation of every word and syllable and letter. The ambassador said he was astonished at my son’s knowledge; that he was a master of his own language like a professor. Mr. Marbois said “your son teaches us more than you. He shows us no mercy. We must have Mr. John.”20
The Sensible reached Boston at the beginning of August 1779, and John Adams had no sooner stepped ashore than his friends, neighbors, and family elected him to a special convention to draft a constitution for Massachusetts. The convention, in turn, asked him to draft the document himself, and drawing from his brilliant Thoughts on Government, he wrote most of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Beginning with a bill of rights, it placed all political power in the hands of the people and guaranteed such “natural, essential, and unalienable rights” as free speech, a free press, and free assembly. It also guaranteed free elections and the right of freemen to trial by jury and to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to keep and bear arms, the right to petition government for redress of grievances, and “the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties” and “of acquiring, possessing, and protecting their property.”21
When John Adams had blotted the ink at the end of his draft, word arrived from Congress that, based on his recommendations, it had dissolved the commission in Paris in favor of a single ambassador, but instead of Franklin, it voted unanimously to appoint him, John Adams, to fill the post.
Seventy-one days after landing in Boston, Adams and his son boarded the same ship that had brought them home, the Sensible, and sailed for Franc
e for the second time in a year.
“My habitation, how disconsolate it looks!” Abigail raged at her husband. “My table, I set down to it but cannot swallow my food. O why was I born with so much sensibility and why possessing it have I so often been called to struggle with it?”22
Adams, however, had not hesitated to accept the appointment, which he believed would allow him to negotiate peace with England and recognition of American independence. “Let me entreat you,” he pleaded with Abigail, “to keep up your spirits and throw off cares as much as possible. . . . We shall yet be happy. I hope and pray and I don’t doubt it. I shall have vexations enough. You will have anxiety and tenderness enough as usual. Pray strive not to have too much.”23
Knowing he would no longer live in Franklin’s orbit and being more familiar than before with Parisian life, John Adams brought his middle boy, ten-year-old Charles, as a companion for John Quincy, and Abigail’s cousin John Thaxter as a tutor and part-time guardian for both children. Thaxter had tutored John Quincy once before, while studying law at John Adams’s Boston law offices. Also traveling with Adams aboard the Sensible was the new legation secretary, Francis Dana, a Harvard graduate like Adams and a successful Boston lawyer. A Revolutionary War veteran, he had served five months at Valley Forge with George Washington. All were elated by the prospect of life in Paris except John Quincy, who had wanted to prepare for Harvard. Setting aside her own disappointment, Abigail tried to lift her son’s spirits: “These are the times in which a genius would wish to live,” she told him. “It is not in the still calm life . . . that great characters are formed. . . . When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.”24