John Quincy Adams

by Harlow Unger

  Having only just turned twelve, John Quincy saw no advantages to being either a hero or a statesman, but his parents were raising him to be both, and he knew he had little choice but to try to fulfill their ambitions. Although he had made several false starts at keeping a diary, he now began again in earnest. He had no way of knowing then, but his new diary would become an addictive, lifelong pastime and evolve into one of the greatest personal histories of the times ever recorded by an American. He left no doubt of its design on the title page:

  A

  Journal by Me

  JQA

  His journal’s opening words were far more prophetic than either he or his mother could realize at the time: “1779 November Friday 12th. This morning I took leave of my Mamma.”25

  Three days of savage storms in the North Atlantic split the ship’s seams, and as water seeped through the hull, the captain ordered all adults to take turns working pumps, each of them enduring four hour-long shifts per day. Even twelve-year-old John Quincy manned a pump until he fell to the floor exhausted. On December 9, 1779, the ship came within sight of the northwestern coast of Spain, and abandoning plans to sail to Bordeaux, the captain put into the tiny port of Ferrol. Less than an hour after the men stopped pumping, seven feet of water had filled the hull of the ship.

  “One more storm would very probably have carried us to the bottom of the sea,” John Quincy wrote to frighten his mother and demonstrate his heroism in having manned the pumps.

  Although they were safely ashore, gale-force winds and relentless rain made further travel by sea impossible—on any ship. They now faced crossing the all-but-impenetrable Pyrenees to reach France, over dangerous roads and mountain trails where highwaymen lurked behind every bend, ready to assault unsuspecting travelers. John Adams organized a mule train with thirteen mules and three old carriages that John Quincy said had been “made in the year one.” Adams hired two local muleteers, one to guide them, the other to take up the rear, and he bought himself a set of pistols.

  “We set out like so many Don Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s,” John Quincy scrawled in his diary at the end of the first day. When they reached Coronna near the base of the Pyrenees, they dined at the house of the French consul, then lodged at a local inn. Heavy rains pinned them down until the day after Christmas, when they began their trek through the Pyrenees and what John Quincy called “the worst three weeks I ever passed in my life.”

  The roads in general are very bad. . . . The streets are filthy and muddy. . . . The lodgings I will not try to describe, for it is impossible . . . chambers in which anybody would think a half dozen hogs had lived there six months. . . . As for the people, they are lazy, dirty, nasty, and in short I can compare them to nothing but a parcel of hogs.26

  Making their trip even worse, they all contracted “violent colds,” developed fevers, and, according to John Adams, “went along the road, sneezing, coughing in all that uncomfortable weather . . . and indeed were all of us more fitted for the hospital than for travelers. . . . The children were sick. Mr. Thaxter was not much better. . . . I was in a deplorable situation. I knew not where to go or what to do. . . . I had never experienced anything like this journey. . . . In my whole life, my patience was never so near being totally exhausted.”27

  Although rain and snow slowed travel, it apparently discouraged highwaymen as well as ordinary travelers. The Adamses encountered none and escaped the Pyrenees on Sunday, January 15, 1780, when Adams, his sons, and his aides reached the Spanish port city of Bilbao—and the luxurious home of merchant Joseph Gardoqui. After several days recuperating, they set off in comfortable carriages and reached Paris on February 9, settling into the posh Hotel de Valois on the rue de Richelieu, in the heart of the city. A day later, Adams enrolled both boys in a boarding school, where John Quincy resumed his studies of Latin and Greek, geography, mathematics, drawing, and writing. To his delight, he reunited with Jesse Deane, whom Franklin had taken under his care while the boy’s father, Silas Deane, was in America.e

  Once Abigail Adams learned that her son was safe and in school, she wrote pleading for a word from him.

  My dear Son,

  Writing is not a la mode de Paris, I fancy, or sure I should have heard from my son; or have you written and have I been so unfortunate as to lose all the letters which have been written to me for this five months. . . . Be dutiful my dear son.28

  John Adams, meanwhile, took up his duties as American ambassador, writing Foreign Minister Comte de Vergennes at Versailles, “I have now the honor to acquaint you that . . . the United States Congress did me the honor to elect me their Minister Plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace with Britain and also to negotiate a treaty of commerce with that kingdom.”29

  To Adams’s consternation, Vergennes responded to his every effort to promote peace negotiations with objections couched in diplomatic niceties. Although Adams could not know it at the time, Vergennes had no intention of fostering peace between the Americans and their former overlords. Intent on weakening Britain enough to permit French reconquest of Canada, Vergennes planned on providing the Americans with enough military aid to prolong the American Revolution indefinitely and sap the military strength of both sides—without allowing either to win. As an autocratic monarchy, France had no interest in promoting the rights of man or independence for Adams’s self-governing republic.

  Frustrated by Vergennes’s diplomatic obstructions, Adams decided to go to Amsterdam to enlist financial help from the Dutch government “to render us less dependent on France,” as he explained to Congress.

  Once there, Adams enrolled the boys in the city’s famed Latin school, but the headmaster found their inability to speak Dutch too great an impediment, and Adams withdrew them. At the suggestion of a friend who was studying medicine at the University of Leyden, Thaxter took John Quincy and Charles to that city, rented lodgings, then enrolled in the university himself and took the boys with him to lectures. He tutored them intensively until each of them—first John Quincy, then Charles—acquired enough knowledge to enroll in the university as full-time students, despite their ages.

  “You have now a prize in your hands indeed,” the proud father told his older son, who had turned thirteen. “If you do not improve to the best advantage,” he cautioned the boy, “you will be without excuse. But as I know you have an ardent thirst for knowledge and a good capacity to acquire it, I depend on it, you will do no dishonor to yourself nor to the University of Leyden.”30

  Abigail was equally proud. “What a harvest of true knowledge and learning may you gather from the numberless varied scenes through which you pass if you are not wanting in your assiduity and endeavors. Let your ambition be engaged to become eminent, but above all things, support a virtuous character and remember that ‘an honest man is the noblest work of God.’”31 Still a mother, however, she did not neglect maternal concerns: “I hope, my dear boy, that the universal neatness and cleanliness of the people where you reside will cure you of all your slovenly tricks and that you learn from them industry, economy, and frugality.”32

  Slovenly though he may have been, thirteen-year-old John Quincy was scholarly to a degree that astonished many accomplished university professors and caught the attention of Jean Luzac, a prominent lawyer, history scholar, and editor of the influential Gazette de Leyde. He became great friends with the boy, who scored his first diplomatic triumph by introducing Luzac to his father. Their encounter turned Luzac into Holland’s most outspoken advocate of Dutch financial aid to the Americans and produced substantial loans to the Americans and eventual recognition of American independence.

  In early summer 1781, Congress appointed Francis Dana minister to the court of Empress Catherine II in St. Petersburg to seek Russian recognition of American independence. Though a fierce autocrat, Catherine pretended to embrace social progress, when, in fact, she had reduced Russia’s free peasantry to serfdom. Some members of Congress hoped commercial interests might encourage her to establish diplomatic tie
s to the New World and encourage other neutral nations to follow suit. Oddly, the otherwise brilliantly educated Dana spoke no French, which was the language not only of international diplomacy but of everyday social inter-course among the Russian aristocracy. Taken by John Quincy Adams’s erudition, social maturity, and language skills, Dana invited the boy, who was still fourteen, to serve as his secretary and interpreter, and John Quincy, eager for independence and in awe of working with a veteran of Valley Forge, accepted. It was an incredible choice, but Dana—like most people who talked with John Quincy—often forgot he was talking to a mere boy. John Quincy was remarkable, and Dana believed it would take too long to find and transport to Europe another American—of any age—to serve as a more effective secretary of legation.

  John Quincy Adams, seen here at sixteen, a year after having gone to St. Petersburg, Russia, as American minister Francis Dana’s translator and legation secretary. (NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)

  “This morning, brother Charles and I packed up our trunks,” John Quincy wrote in his diary on June 28, 1781, “and I went to take leave of our riding master.” Unlike his older brother, Charles had been unhappy in Europe and was returning to his mother in America. John Quincy Adams was about to turn fifteen and begin life on his own—in the service of his country as a foreign diplomat. A devoted scholar by then, he would not leave without copying some of his favorite works to take with him. In the days before his departure, he copied Alexander Pope’s “Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day” and “Universal Prayer,” as well as “Mr. Addison’s Tragedy of Cato.” American patriots—none more than George Washington—cherished the Roman statesman Cato’s noble sentiments: “What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country.”f33

  On the day of his departure, John Quincy made this entry in his diary: “Saturday, July the 7th, 1781: This morning we packed up everything to go on a journey.” The boy diplomat closed his journal, slipped it into his coat, and embarked on the beginning of what would be a lifelong adventure of service to his country.34

  CHAPTER 3

  The Land of Lovely Dames

  For the first time during his extensive travels, John Quincy found his 2,000-mile midsummer journey from Holland to St. Petersburg free of threats to life or limb. Although he missed his father and brother, he seemed composed, wore a pleasant expression, and proved an amiable companion to Francis Dana, who, at thirty-eight, was twenty-four years older than his “secretary.” The journey proved instructive for both.

  “The tradesmen always ask the double of what a thing is worth,” John Quincy complained, “and if you have anything made, you will certainly get greatly cheated if you do not make the bargain beforehand.” In Catholic Palatine, he found that “Protestants can not own houses or farms,” and across the Rhine from Cologne, he fell on “a village inhabited by Jews. A nasty, dirty place indeed. . . . In Frankfurt am Mein . . . there are 600 Jewish families who live all in one street which is shut up every night and all day Sundays, when the gates are shut.”1

  On July 25, he reached Berlin, which he called “the handsomest and the most regular city I ever saw,”2 but he criticized the king, who “treats his people like slaves.” They found conditions worse when they crossed into Poland, where, for the first time in his life, John Quincy encountered slaves. “All the farm workers are in the most abject slavery,” he noted with disgust. “They are bought and sold like so many beasts, and are sometimes even changed for dogs or horses. Their masters have even the right of life and death over them, and if they kill one of them they are only obliged to pay a trifling fine. [The slaves] may buy [their freedom], but their masters . . . take care not to let them grow rich enough for that. If anybody buys land, he must buy all the slaves that are upon it.”3

  Panoramic view of St. Petersburg, where fifteen-year-old John Quincy Adams spent the winter of 1782 as secretary and translator for American minister Francis Dana. The palatial buildings in the center include the famed Winter Palace and the then new Hermitage, in which Catherine the Great housed her art collection. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  On August 27, 1781, John Quincy and Dana reached St. Petersburg and settled in the luxurious Hotel de Paris, near the Winter Palace. “The city of Petersburg,” he wrote to John Thaxter in Paris, “is the finest I ever saw. It is by far superior to Paris, both for the breadth of its streets, and the elegance of the private buildings.”

  To Dana’s dismay, Russian foreign ministry officials refused to receive him or even recognize his presence. His notes went unanswered, and sentries refused him entry through the palace gates. In frustration, he turned to the French chargé d’affaires for help, but Foreign Minister Comte de Vergennes at Versailles had sent instructions not to aid the Americans. The French diplomat exuded warm words and pledged to help, but stunned Dana by suggesting that the American’s reliance on a child as his secretary and interpreter might compromise his status.

  Massachusetts-born and Harvard-educated Francis Dana served at Valley Forge with George Washington before becoming an American diplomat and the first American envoy to Russia. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Not long thereafter, stunning news arrived of George Washington’s remarkable victory at Yorktown. Although Dana was certain the American triumph would open doors at the Winter Palace, weeks passed without success. As winter’s paralyzing deep freeze enveloped the Russian capital, John Quincy had nothing to do but study. Although their lodgings were warm enough, temperatures outside dropped to levels that made venturing into the fresh air foolhardy. “The thermometer at night,” John Quincy noted in early February 1782, “was 15 degrees below freezing.” It fell to twenty-five below, then twenty-eight below. “Stayed at home all day.”4

  By then, his diary entries had shrunk to a sentence or two, noting only the temperature and his decision to remain inside and read. Both he and Dana were idle most of the time, with no diplomatic work or contact with Russian authorities. It was fortunate that St. Petersburg had at least one bookshop with English-language works, and both John Quincy and Dana purchased an enormous quantity. Before the end of winter, John Quincy had read—among other things—all eight volumes (more than five hundred pages each) of David Hume’s History of England, Catherine Macaulay’s eight-volume The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, William Robertson’s three-volume The History of the Reign of Charles V, Robert Watson’s two-volume The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, Thomas Davies’s Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, and the two-volume landmark work in economics by Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. He also restudied Cicero’s Orations and John Dryden’s Works of Virgil, copied the poems of Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison—and learned to read and write German.

  “I don’t perceive that you take pains enough with your hand writing,” his father growled in response. “When the habit is got, it is easier to write well than ill, but this habit is only to be acquired in early life.” Adams ended his letter more warmly, however: “God bless my dear son and preserve his health and his manners from the numberless dangers that surround us wherever we go in this world. So prays your affectionate father, J. Adams.”5

  Crestfallen at his father’s response to his studies, John Quincy did not reply for a month, and when he did, he wrote in French to make it difficult for the elder Adams to read. Adams answered acerbically, “It is a mortification to me to find that you write better in a foreign language than in your mother tongue.” Adams was, however, worried about his son—an adolescent, all but alone in a foreign land, with no companions but a middle-aged man and a pile of books.

  “Do you find any company?” John Adams wrote. “Have you formed any acquaintances of your own countrymen? There are none I suppose. Of Englishmen you should beware. . . . My dear boy, above all preserve your innocence.”6 He grew more anxious as the winter progressed without John Quincy’s gaining any substantial diplomatic experience.
“I am . . . very uneasy on your account,” he wrote in mid-May. “I want you with me. . . . I want you to pursue your studies at Leyden. . . . Your studies I doubt not you pursue, because I know you to be a studious youth, but above all preserve a sacred regard to your own honor and reputation. Your morals are worth all the sciences.”7

  John Quincy finally admitted to himself—and to his father—“I have not made many acquaintances here.” Although he had “as much as I want to read,” he longed for companions his own age. In addition, the crushing poverty, deprivation, and lack of freedom in Russian life—and the oppressive slavery he witnessed—left him depressed. “Everyone that is not a noble,” he lamented, “is a slave.”8

  His father responded by urging John Quincy to return to Holland. Adams had succeeded in winning Dutch recognition of American independence and had moved to The Hague as American minister plenipotentiary.

  Although eager to rejoin his father, John Quincy was enjoying his independence and took a long, circuitous route back to Holland through Scandinavia and Germany. After three weeks exploring Finland (then a part of Sweden), he reached Stockholm, and ignoring his father’s exhortations on the importance of preserving his innocence, John Quincy Adams plunged into Swedish life for nearly six rapture-filled weeks.

  “I believe there is no country in Europe,” he exulted, “where the people are more hospitable and affable to strangers or more hospitable . . . than the Swedes. In every town, however small it may be, they have these assemblies [dances] . . . to pass away agreeably the long winter evenings. . . . There, one may dance country dances, minuets or play cards, just as it pleases you, and everybody is extremely polite to strangers.” Years later, he recalled, that “the beauties of the women . . . could not be concealed. . . . The Swedish women were as modest as they were amiable and beautiful. To me it was truly the ‘land of lovely dames,’ and to this hour I have not forgotten the palpitations of heart which some of them cost me.”9