by Harlow Unger
“We sat and looked at one another,” John Quincy wrote to his mother. “I could not speak. . . . How much more expressive this silence than anything we could have said.” After dinner, John Quincy and his uncle went to Cambridge to see John Quincy’s brother Charles, who had enrolled in Harvard six weeks earlier. In the days that followed, John Quincy visited his grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—as well as such illustrious family friends as former Massachusetts governor John Hancock. He impressed them all—with his height as much as his erudition. He had left Massachusetts as a boy and returned a young man of five feet seven and a half inches—a half inch taller than his father and far thinner.
“Cousin John is come,” his Aunt Mary wrote to her sister Abigail after his visit, “and brought with him in his own face such a resemblance of his papa and mama as I never before saw blended in one. And I am happy to perceive that it is not only in his person that he bears such a likeness to his parents. I have already discovered a strength of mind, a memory, a soundness of judgment which I have seldom seen united in one so young. His modesty is not the least of his virtues. . . . If his application is equal to his abilities, he cannot fail of making a great man.”38
Eventually, John Quincy had to face the inevitable, and on August 31, 1785, he went to Harvard to see its president, Reverend Joseph Willard. Although Harvard boasted America’s largest library, with 12,000 volumes, the jaded young Adams found the latter only “good, without being magnificent.” 39 He had, after all, studied in the Bibliothèque du roi, in Paris, with its more than 1 million books and 80,000 manuscripts. He was less than impressed, as well, with the president’s office and, indeed, with President Willard himself.
Raised in poverty after losing his father at the age of two, Willard was a mathematician with little appreciation for the romance of opera, music, and the grand arts that had formed so much of John Quincy’s education. He was a serious man—dour, with a deep distaste for the boy’s elegant clothes, his confident, worldly ways, and the ease with which he addressed older men as if they were social equals. Willard ran Harvard like a military institution, demanding that all who approached him—tutors and students alike—doff their hats when they passed. He banned wearing silk and limited student dress to coarse brown, olive, or black cotton jackets and pants called “homespun.” From the first, he resented John Quincy’s effervescent demeanor, enthusiasm, and joy. Even more, he resented the boy’s assumption that, as John Adams’s son, his admission to Harvard was a mere formality.
After asking John Quincy a few questions in Latin, then Greek, Willard scowled, then stunned the boy by telling him he was ineligible for admission to Harvard. It was the harshest blow he could possibly have delivered to the son of a Founding Father. Every man of note in Massachusetts history had gone to Harvard since its founding in 1634; eight of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were Harvard graduates, including John Quincy’s father and his cousin Sam Adams Jr. And now, with a few words, an undistinguished pedagogue, who had contributed nothing of note to his nation’s freedom, had shattered the hopes of a Founding Father’s son to complete his higher education, obtain a law degree, and assume the leadership of his country. He had crushed John Quincy Adams’s career before it could begin.
CHAPTER 4
“He Grows . . . Very Fat ”
Harvard president Joseph Willard so infuriated and humiliated John Quincy Adams that the boy would not even write about the interview in his diary, noting only that Willard “advised me to wait till next spring.” In fact, Willard had arbitrarily declared the boy unprepared for Harvard and urged him to study with a tutor over autumn and winter and to reapply in the spring. Willard told John Quincy that if he then passed the examinations, he could join the junior class in time for the last trimester of the academic year in April 1786.
John Quincy had never confronted arbitrary power before. Willard’s was not the face of evil as much as it was the face of unbridled authority over men’s lives, and John Quincy Adams despised it, would never forget it, and would fight it for the rest of his life. “Few men live long in the world,” he concluded, “without having suffered from baseness and wickedness in others.”1
Recognizing his impotence, Adams knew he had no choice but to obey Willard’s directive if he wanted to study at Harvard, and he went to live and study with his uncle, Reverend John Shaw, the Congregational minister in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Married to another of Abigail’s younger sisters, Shaw was a recognized scholar and approved tutor who had prepared many students for Harvard.
Harvard College, the “school of the prophets,” where John Quincy Adams, his father, grandfather, brothers, and sons received their higher education. Founded in 1636 as America’s first college, the original buildings burned and were replaced by Harvard Hall in 1675 (left), Stoughton Hall in 1699 (center), and Massachusetts Hall in 1720. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)
“My journal till now,” John Quincy realized, “has almost entirely consisted in an account of my peregrinations. . . . The events for the future will probably be a continual repetition . . . and will contain nothing that even I myself may desire to remember, but I shall surely have observations to make upon diverse subjects which it may be proper to commit to paper. And I can again employ the resource of sketching characters.”2
After years in Europe’s marbled halls, John Quincy found small-town New England social life unimpressive. “The way we have here of killing time in large companies appears to me most absurd and ridiculous,” he scrawled in his diary. “All must be fixed down in chairs, looking at one another like a puppet show and talking some common-place phrases to one another.”3 After dinner one day, the shallow conversations left him particularly annoyed:
I wonder how it happens that almost every kind of conversation that may be of any use to persons is excluded from polite company everywhere. Is it because the children of ignorance and folly are so much more numerous than those of thought and science that these must submit to imitate them?
“By the tyrannical law of custom,” he concluded, otherwise intelligent people “were obliged to talk nonsense.”4
John Quincy divided his time during the six months that followed between making notes in his diary about the girls he met and rereading Latin and Greek classics he had already studied in Europe. “I began this day to translate the Ecologues of Virgil,” he noted one evening—then added, “Peggy is about 20 years old and is called a beauty. Her face has a great deal of dignity . . . but when adorned with a smile is extremely pleasant.” 5 A few days later: “Miss Williams is tall and pretty . . . ,” and “Nancy is only 17. . . . Her shape is uncommonly fine and her eye seems to have magic in it. . . . Her heart is kind, tender and benevolent, and was she sensible of the pain she causes she would be the first to condemn herself.” He apparently dismissed all thoughts about girls the next day, spending “the whole day at my studies. . . . I read Watt’s Logic.” There was little in the curriculum—Latin, Greek, English, or French—that he did not absorb: all the available works of Homer, Plato, Virgil, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Terence, as well as John Locke and Alexander Pope—and the Bible.
As the end of his stay in Haverhill approached, he plunged into his first political controversy, confronting a group of Baptists and their minister who sought to end the town’s assemblies, or dances. “Superstition of some kind will prevail with mankind everywhere,” John Quincy raged.
Mr. Smith, the minister of the Baptist Society in this town, is violently opposed to dancing. It is in his mind of itself a heinous sin . . . and there are many people here so warped in prejudice that they are really persuaded they should incur the divine displeasure, as much by dancing as by stealing or perhaps committing murder. . . . How one of the more innocent and rational amusements that was ever invented can find so many opposers is somewhat mysterious. . . . There are many who are envious to see others amusing themselves. . . . However, the subscribers wisely take no notice . . . but go on their own way and despise all th
ese senseless clamors.6
Several days later, he made a point of attending an assembly of more than twenty couples, all but daring the Baptist minister to interfere. “I might make a number of sarcastic reflections upon the manner of dancing,” John Quincy reflected, “but I do not think it a matter of sufficient importance . . . to laugh at a person who cannot show the elegance of a dancing master.”7
On March 14, 1786, John Quincy left Haverhill to take his entrance examinations at Harvard. Three professors, four tutors, and the librarian—the entire Harvard faculty—joined President Willard in examining Adams to eliminate presidential prejudice as a factor. After he displayed his skills in Latin, Greek, mathematics, and philosophy, the frowning Willard conceded, “You are admitted, Adams.”
John Quincy Adams spent the next fifteen months at Harvard learning little he did not already know from a faculty he found haughty and “hard for me to submit to.”
It seems almost a maxim among the governors of the college to treat students pretty much like brute beasts. There is an important air and haughty look that every person belonging to the government assumes, which, indeed, it is hard for me to submit to. But it may be of use to me, as it mortifies my vanity and, if anything in the world can teach me humility, it will be to see myself subjected to the commands of a person that I most despise.8
His father had a much different perspective on Harvard: “Give me leave, my dear son, to congratulate you on your admission into the Seat of the Muses, our dear Alma Mater, where I hope you will find a pleasure and improvements equal to your expectations. You are now among magistrates and ministers, legislators and heroes, ambassadors and generals; I mean among persons who will live to act in all these characters. If you pursue your studies and preserve your health, you will have as good a chance as most of them, and I hope you will take care to do nothing now which you will in any future period have reason to recollect with shame or pain.”9
Harvard students did not impress John Quincy, however. One afternoon, he watched a group of sophomores turn wild from drink, then smash their tutors’ windows. “After this sublime maneuver,” he remarked, “they staggered to their chambers. Such are the great achievements of many of the sons of Harvard. . . . About two-thirds of the class are behind hand, and the rest are obliged to wait for them till they come up.”10
Harvard presented John Quincy with few intellectual challenges, and he graduated second in his class in July 1787, often skipping lectures to go fishing and occasionally dancing so late with Cambridge girls that he overslept and missed classes the next morning. He made friends with a few of the most academically advanced members of his class, learned to play the flute, joined the Handel Sodality, and oversaw the progress of his two younger brothers, Charles, a sophomore, and Thomas Boylston, a freshman.
In London, meanwhile, his older sister Nabby had married, and to John Quincy’s pleasant surprise, his mother reacted to the absence of small children in her household with newfound warmth and empathy for her adult offspring. “It is not in your power to remedy the evils you complain of,” she said in response to her son’s irritation with the Harvard faculty. “Whilst the salaries are so small, it cannot be expected that gentlemen of the first abilities will devote their lives to the preceptorship.”
Get all the good you can, and beware you do no ill to others. You must be conscious of how great importance it is to youth that they respect their teachers. Therefore whatever tends to lessen them is an injury to the whole society. . . . If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries, that you have never wanted a book, but it has been supplied to you; that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. My paper will allow me room only to add my blessing to you and your brothers from your ever affectionate A. Adams.11
As a principal speaker at his class graduation, John Quincy earned plaudits from alumni as well as classmates; even President Willard conceded in a letter to John Quincy’s parents, “I think he bids fair to become a distinguished character.”12
Although college life had isolated him, news of Shays’s Rebellion in Springfield, Massachusetts, permeated every corner of the land and awakened John Quincy to the woes facing American society. “The people are said to be discontented and to complain of taxation, of the salaries of public officers, and of debts public and private,” he wrote to his mother. “I suspect that the present form of government will not continue long. . . . The poor complain of its being oppressive. . . . The men of property think the Constitution gives too much liberty to the unprincipled citizen.”13
The “Constitution,” as John Quincy called it, was, in fact, the Articles of Confederation, which the states had signed during the Revolutionary War. The Articles recognized each state as sovereign and independent and left the Continental Congress impotent, with no power to levy taxes—even to pay its troops. Still unpaid at war’s end and beset by property taxes, farmers in western Massachusetts had rebelled. A former captain in the war, Daniel Shays, a farmer struggling to keep his property, convinced neighbors that Boston legislators were colluding with judges and lawyers to raise property taxes and foreclose when farmers found it impossible to pay. With that, he exhorted farmers, “Close down the courts! ”—and they did. Farmers marched across the state and shut courthouses in Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, Great Barrington, and, finally, Cambridge, where John Quincy and other Harvard students watched from the safety of their classroom buildings.
Hailed by farmers across the nation, the shutdowns ended foreclosures in most of Massachusetts. Determined to expand his success and seize control of state government, Shays led a force of five hundred men to Springfield to raid the federal armory. About 1,000 more farmers joined him, but as they approached the arsenal, soldiers unleashed a few artillery blasts that fell short of the approaching farmers but demonstrated the advantages of cannonballs over pitchforks. A militia from Boston then chased the farmers to their homes and captured most of their leaders, although Shays fled to safety in what was then the independent republic of Vermont.
As John Quincy had predicted, fears that Shays’s Rebellion would ignite a national uprising spurred Congress to urge revisions in the Articles of Confederation to strengthen federal government powers. On May 25, 1787, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met in Philadelphia and began writing a new constitution that created a new, more powerful federal government.
In the meantime, John Quincy went to Newburyport, about forty miles northeast of Boston, to study law with the renowned New England attorney Theophilus Parsons, who would later become chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. One of five Harvard men under Parsons’s tutelage, John Quincy enthused at first about “frolicks” with his friends, often serenading as “the bottle went round with unusual rapidity, until a round dozen had disappeared.” Nor did women escape his attention, although he rebelled at the popular pastime of so-called kissing games. “Tis a profanation of one of the most endearing demonstrations of love,” he railed in his diary. “A kiss unless warmed by sentiment and enlivened by affection may just as well be given to the air as to the most beautiful or the most accomplished object in the universe.”14 He said he much preferred singing “good, jovial, expressive songs such as we sang at college.”15
While studying law he began writing poetry, a pastime that quickly became a passion—indeed, one so serious that he considered abandoning his studies and returning to Paris to study literature and become a full-time poet.
“Around her face no wanton Cupids play,” he wrote in a poem he called “A Vision”—part of a collection of satirical portraits of nine of his women friends.
Her tawny skin defies the God of Day.
Loud was her laugh, undaunted was her look,
And folly seemed to dictate what she spoke.16
He did, of course, study some law, but a prodigious reader like John Quincy consumed so much law so quickly that he filled the rest of his time reading history, including “about fifty pages a day” of Edward Gibbon’s six-volume epic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Although his studies of law proved satisfying, ordinary practice—wills, deeds, and bankruptcies—bored him to distraction. “God of heavens!” he complained poetically. “If those are the only terms upon which life can be granted to me, Oh! Take me from this earth before I curse the day of my birth.”17
After John Quincy’s parents learned of their son’s growing disenchantment, John Adams felt it was time for him and Abigail to resume their roles as parents, and he wrote to Secretary of State John Jay to end his assignment in Britain. In fact, both Adamses were homesick and missed their boys. They had not seen John Quincy in three years. Four years had passed since John Adams had last seen Charles—then a boy of fourteen—and nine years since he had seen Thomas, who was seven at the time. Charles was now eighteen, Thomas sixteen, and both were in trouble for participating in student riots at Harvard.
On June 17, 1788, John and Abigail Adams landed in Boston. John Adams had not set foot in America for nine years, and Governor John Hancock led Boston—indeed all of America—in welcoming him. Next to George Washington himself, and perhaps Benjamin Franklin, Americans held John Adams in highest esteem. Hancock invited him and Abigail to stay at Hancock House, his lavish mansion on the summit of Beacon Hill overlooking the Common and the rest of Boston. Charles and Thomas rushed over from Harvard to join them, and John Quincy arrived from Newburyport for their first family reunion in nearly a decade.