by Harlow Unger
Both parents enthused over their son’s career. “Your rising reputation at the bar,” John Adams wrote to his son, “your admired writings upon occasional subjects of great importance, and your political influence among the younger gentlemen of Boston sometimes make me regret your promotion and the loss of your society to me.” He signed it, “With a tender affection as well as great esteem, I am, my dear son, your affectionate father John Adams.” Abigail ended her letter with the hope that “you will not omit any opportunity of writing to her whose happiness is so intimately blended with your prosperity and who at all times is your ever affectionate Mother Abigail Adams.”6
Although John Quincy’s ship developed leaks “like a water spout,” he and his brother landed safely in Dover on October 14, less than a month after leaving Massachusetts. As their coach from shipside reached London Bridge, however, “we heard a rattling . . . a sound as of a trunk falling from the carriage. My brother immediately alighted and found the trunk of dispatches under the carriage. . . . Our driver assured us that the trunks could not have fallen unless the straps had been cut away.” The incident left John Quincy shaken:
Entrusted with dispatches of the highest importance . . . to negotiations between the two countries, with papers particularly committed to my care because they were highly confidential by the President of the United States . . . with what face could I have presented myself to the minister for whom they were intended? . . . The story would be resounded from one end of the United States to the other.7
John Quincy Adams, at twenty-nine, sailed to Europe to assume the post his father had once held as American minister to Holland. (AFTER A PORTRAIT BY JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY; NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORICAL PARK)
His memoirs go on interminably, as he relived the incident and postulated how “the straps were cut by an invisible hand.”8 Adams was immensely relieved to deliver the trunk to John Jay’s quarters the next morning, along with papers for Thomas Pinckney, the American minister plenipotentiary in Britain.
Far from being in “a situation of small trust and confidence,” as he had feared when he accepted his assignment in Holland, John Quincy Adams spent the next three days helping to determine the fate of his nation with Chief Justice John Jay and U.S. ambassador to England Thomas Pinckney, former governor of South Carolina. Together they put the finishing touches on a treaty that would set the course of Anglo-American relations—and, indeed, much of the Western world—for the foreseeable future.
Jay had arrived in London four months earlier, on June 6, and obtained the British government’s agreement to exclude noncontraband goods from the ban on American trade with France and the French West Indies. He had also won three other major concessions: withdrawal of British troops behind the Canadian border from the Northwest Territory, limited resumption of American trade with the British East and West Indies, and establishment of a most-favored-nation relationship between the two nations, with preferential tariffs for each. Both sides agreed to set up a joint commission and accept binding arbitration to settle British and American financial claims against each other. The treaty made no mention of two issues that had long provoked American anger toward Britain: impressment of American sailors into the British navy and failure to compensate southern planters for thousands of slaves the British had carried away during the Revolutionary War. The slave issue lay behind the fanatical southern support for France and the willingness—indeed, eagerness—of southerners to join France in war against Britain.
Although Jay had hoped to win concessions on both issues, he recognized that Britain had little incentive to yield on either. Aside from her economic and military power, Britain had scored an important naval victory over the French fleet that left British warships in full command of the Atlantic Ocean, with no need to cede privileges to weaker nations.
“As a treaty of commerce,” John Quincy concluded, “we shall never obtain anything more favorable. . . . It is much below the standard which I think would be advantageous to the country, but with some alterations which are marked down . . . it is preferable to a war. The commerce with their West India Islands . . . will be of great importance.”9
John Quincy left with his brother for Holland on October 29, arriving in The Hague two days later and settling into their official quarters. He had effectively established himself as American minister by January 19, 1795, when General Charles Pichegru, commander of the French Army of the North, marched into the Dutch capital with a contingent of 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers. Their arrival caused so little disruption that John Quincy’s brother Thomas went to theater the following evening with the American consul general, Sylvanus Bourne. A day later, John Quincy went with Thomas and Bourne to the French authorities, who told them “they received the visit of the citoyen ministre of a free people, the friend of the peuple français with much pleasure. That they considered it tout à fait une visite fraternelle.”l
The substance of the business was that I demanded safety and protection to all American persons and property in this country, and they told me . . . that all property would be respected, as well as persons and opinions. . . . They spoke of the President, whom, like all Europeans, they called General Washington . . . that he was a great man and they had veneration for his character.10
General Pichegru had served with French forces in the American Revolution and was true to his word, doing nothing to interfere with John Quincy’s activities or those of other Americans in Holland. Despite the presence of French troops, The Hague proved to be exactly what Secretary of State Edmund Randolph and President Washington had anticipated—a listening post in the heart of Europe, and for John Quincy Adams, it proved the perfect first post in the diplomatic service. His academic training combined with his knowledge of languages and an extraordinary memory to accumulate names, descriptions, and thinking of dozens of diplomats from everywhere in Europe, along with invaluable military and political intelligence from warring parties and other sectors of the continent. “Dined with the French generals Pichegru, Elbel, Sauviac,” the pages of his journal disclose, “and a Colonel . . .
“ . . . the Dutch general Constant and a colonel Comte d’Autremont . . .
“ . . . the minister of Poland Midleton . . .
“ . . . the Prussian secretary Baron Bielefeld . . .
“ . . . the Russian minister . . .
“The French made use of balloons during the last campaign in discovering the positions of their adverse armies . . . Pichegru and the other generals assured us on the strongest terms that it was of no service at all. . . . ‘Oh! yes,’ said Sauviac, ‘the effect was infallible in the gazettes.’”11
John Quincy spent as many as six hours a day writing reports, which included twenty-seven letters to the secretary of state from November 1794 to August 1795 and ten long, explicit letters to his father, the vice president. He emerged as one of Europe’s most skilled diplomats and America’s finest intelligence gleaner. He prophesied that while Britain and France wore each other down in war, America would grow and prosper. “At the present moment, if our neutrality is preserved,” he predicted, “ten more years will place the United States among the most powerful and opulent nations on earth.”12
John Quincy’s reports elated his father. “Never was a father more satisfied or gratified,” Vice President John Adams wrote to John Quincy in the spring of 1795, “than I have been with the kind attention of my sons.”
Since they went abroad, I have no language to express to you the pleasure I have received from the satisfaction you have given the President and secretary of state, as well as from the clear, comprehensive, and masterly accounts in your letters to me of the public affairs of nations in Europe, whose situation and politics it most concerns us to know. Go on, my son, and by a diligent exertion of your genius and abilities, continue to deserve well of your father but especially of your country.13
In addition to visits, dinners, and other social events with diplomats and French officers, John Quincy con
tinued his studies, reading histories of every European state while adding Spanish to the three other languages he was able to read and speak. “The voice of all Europe,” he discovered, had hailed President George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation. Although it had not attracted much attention initially, it quickly established a new principle of international law as well as American constitutional law. Although rules abounded governing relations between warring nations, the world had ignored the rights of neutrals until George Washington raised the issue.
“The nations that have been grappling together with the purpose of mutual destruction,” John Quincy wrote, “are feeble, exhausted, and almost starving. Those that have had the wisdom to maintain neutrality have reasons more than ever to applaud their policy, and some of them may thank the United States for the example from which it was pursued.”14
As the end of his first year in the diplomatic service approached, John Quincy was quite content with his new career. Although he called Holland “insignificant” in comparison to diplomatic posts in Paris and London, he told his father that it was “adequate to my talents . . . without being tedious or painful . . . and leaves me leisure to pursue a course of studies that may be recommended by its amusement or utility. Indeed, Sir, it is a situation in itself much preferable to that of . . . a lawyer’s office for business which . . . is scarcely sufficient to give bread and procures more curses than thanks.”15
To his surprise, John Quincy’s next set of State Department orders emanated from a new secretary of state—Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts, whom Washington had named to replace John Randolph. Randolph had resigned following charges he had accepted bribes from the French government. For John Quincy Adams, the appointment was not unpleasant. Born in Salem, Pickering was a Harvard graduate and lawyer, a staunch Federalist who had served with distinction in the Revolutionary War and as postmaster general before becoming secretary of war early in 1795.
Pickering asked John Quincy to travel to London in the absence of American minister Thomas Pinckney to execute the formal exchange of signed copies of the Jay Treaty with the British government. Pinckney had gone to Spain to negotiate a treaty giving Americans navigation rights on the Mississippi River.
When the terms of the Jay Treaty became known in America in March 1795, Washington loyalists hailed Jay for averting another brutal war with England and forcing Britain to deal with the United States for the first time as an equal and independent sovereign state. But as Washington and Jay both knew it would, the treaty provoked a storm of controversy over what it did not accomplish—especially among advocates for states’ rights, Francophiles, and Anglophobes, all of whom attacked the treaty as pro-British. Washington loyalists in the Senate, however, outnumbered opponents, and the Senate ratified the treaty on June 24—ironically, just as Jay himself slipped away from the fray over foreign affairs by winning election as governor of New York.
By then, the savagery of the French Revolution had eroded popular support for the French in America, while the Jay Treaty with Britain was producing economic benefits. In the West, Britain’s troop pullback into Canada had ended the flow of arms to hostile Indians. Without British military support, the Indians ceded most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan to the United States, ending Indian forays in the West and opening the vast Ohio and Mississippi river valleys to American settlement. Meanwhile, Thomas Pinckney won Spain’s agreement to free Mississippi River navigation for Americans and to allow them to deposit goods in New Orleans for export overseas. Elated by the prospects of a western economic boom, Americans quickly forgot their objections to the Jay Treaty.
Although John Quincy had set out for England on October 20 to exchange copies of the signed treaties, ill winds and a variety of dockside misunderstandings prevented his reaching London until November 11, by which time Pinckney’s secretary had completed the transaction. All that remained was the ceremonial presentation of the document to the king. Early in December, British undersecretary of foreign affairs George Hammond, a cunning and vicious anti-American whom John Quincy knew from the 1783 Paris peace talks, summoned Adams to his office. Although Hammond had been England’s first minister to the United States in 1791 and had married a Philadelphian, his efforts to undermine the American government seemed to know no bounds. He lost no time trying to trap John Quincy in an indiscretion by asking if he had heard of the President’s “intending to resign” in the wake of the Genet affair.
“No!” John Quincy replied simply and sharply.
“What sort of a soul does this man suppose I have?” John Quincy confided to his diary that night. “He talked of Virginians, the southern people, the Democrats, but I let him know that I consider them all in no other light than as Americans.” He asked whether Pinckney had worked out an agreement with Spain, then hammered John Quincy with rumors of a political revolt against George Washington. John Quincy deftly parried Hammond’s thrusts.
“All governments have their opposition who find fault with everything,” John Quincy said nonchalantly. “Who has better reason to know that than you in this country?” he smiled condescendingly. “But in America, you know, opposition speaks in a louder voice than anywhere else. Everything comes out; we have not lurking dissatisfaction that works in secret and is not seen, nothing that rankles at the heart while the face wears a smile so that a very trifling opposition makes a great show.”16
“Hammond is a man of intrigue,” John Quincy reported in his diary. “His question whether Mr. Pinckney has signed the treaty in Spain, implies at least that he knows there was a treaty to sign. . . . If I stay here anytime, he will learn to be not quite so impertinent.”17 Adams surmised that Hammond was either intercepting his mail or having him followed. He determined to be more discreet in what he did, said, and wrote.
In fact, Hammond’s intelligence was better than John Quincy’s—and even better than that of Vice President John Adams. On January 5, a month after Hammond had met with John Quincy, John Adams wrote to Abigail, “I have this day heard news that is of some importance. It must be kept a secret wholly to yourself. One of the ministry told me that the President was solemnly determined to serve no longer than the end of his present period. . . . You know the consequence of this to me and to yourself. Either we must enter into ardors more trying than any ever yet experienced or retire to Quincy, farmers for life. I am . . . determined not to serve under Jefferson. . . . I will not be frightened out of the public service nor will I be disgraced in it.”18
Far from expressing joy at her husband’s thinking, Abigail quoted a warning from Charles Churchill’s epic poem Gotham:
You know what is before you: “the whips and scorpions, the thorns without roses, the dangers, anxieties and weight of empire”—and can you acquire influence sufficient as the poet further describes: “to still the voice of discord in the land”?19
The day after meeting with Hammond, John Quincy presented his credentials to King George III before addressing him with prepared remarks: “Sir. To testify to your majesty the sincerity of the United States of America in their negotiations, their President has directed me . . . ” and he went on to give the king a copy of the Jay Treaty along with a letter from President Washington.
“To give you my answer, Sir,” the king responded with a typically noncommittal royal reply, “I am very happy to have the assurances of their sincerity, for without that, you know, there would be no such things as dealings among men.”20
In France, however, the Directory responded angrily to the Jay Treaty, insisting it was a violation of “the alliance which binds the two peoples.” The French recalled their ambassador, and when the American government retaliated by recalling ambassador James Monroe, the French ordered seizure of all American ships sailing into French waters, with confiscation of all cargoes and imprisonment of American seamen for ransom.
While waiting for Pinckney’s return to London, John Quincy went to hear debates at the House of Commons and visited Joshua Johnson, the wealthy Ma
ryland merchant who lived near the Tower of London in a lavish brick mansion, where he also served as American consul. Staffed by eleven servants, Johnson’s home was a center of opulence and hospitality for visiting diplomats and other dignitaries. John Quincy had first met Johnson in 1781 as a fourteen-year-old, when he and his father were in Nantes, awaiting passage to America after John Adams’s first diplomatic assignment in Paris. Johnson’s three oldest daughters—barely more than infants when John Quincy first met them—had blossomed into attractive young ladies. Burdened with four other, younger girls and a young son, the Johnsons were eager to marry off their three oldest, and they welcomed the son of America’s vice president with great warmth. They invited him to their oldest daughter’s birthday ball, where John Quincy “danced till 3 in the morning” and found “Mr. Johnson’s daughters pretty and agreeable. The oldest performs admirably on the pianoforte; the second, Louisa, sings; the third plays the harp.”21
Evidently enchanted by the three girls, he spent part of almost every succeeding day or evening in January with the Johnsons, playing cards, walking in the park, and accompanying them to theater, concerts, and balls. Although the Johnsons expected he would marry their oldest daughter, John Quincy surprised the entire family on February 2, 1796, by telling twenty-year-old Louisa Catherine, the Johnsons’ second daughter, that he intended to marry her.
Louisa was beautiful, cultured, and fluent in French, the language of diplomats. Musically talented, elegant in dress, bearing, and manners, she was quiet and respectful in the presence of gentlemen and a lively conversationalist when appropriate. And she was comfortable among the rich and powerful. For John Quincy, a rising star in the diplomatic world, Louisa Catherine Johnson, the English-born daughter of an American diplomat, seemed a perfect match.