John Adams - SA (53 page)

At home in Massachusetts, meantime, John Quincy had been denied admission to Harvard until he completed several months of tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw at Haverhill. But then in March 1786, John Quincy, too, had become a “son of Harvard.”

He must not study too hard, Adams cautioned kindly. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was an inquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors; manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables.... Ask them about the late war ... or fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

That his own exceptional, eldest son, with the advantages he had, could one day play a part in bringing about such a “memorable change,” he had every confidence.

When Elizabeth Shaw wrote that as agreeable as John Quincy might be in company, he could be in private conversation “a little too decisive and tenacious” in his opinions, Abigail responded with a strong letter of motherly advice to the young man. “Watchfulness over yourself was called for, lest his knowledge make him arrogant.

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. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

By now Charles, too, had entered Harvard, at age fifteen. More outgoing than his older brother, Charles was thought to be too easily distracted from his studies. Where John Quincy required a warning against the perils of the midnight lamp, Charles needed reminding that such a lamp existed.

Remembering so much that went on in his own days at Harvard other than classwork and studies, Adams wrote affectionately to his second son, “You have in your nature a sociability, Charles, which is amiable, but may mislead you. A scholar is always made alone. Studies can only be pursued to good purpose by yourself. Don't let your companions then, nor your amusements, take up too much of your time.”

*   *   *

ADAMS WAS HIMSELF spending increasing amounts of time alone, working intently and seldom to good purpose, he felt. The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued. Lord Carmarthen readily agreed that by the Paris Treaty His Majesty's armed forces were to depart from the United States “with all convenient speed,” but, as he liked also to point out, the same treaty stipulated that creditors on either side “shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling of all bonafide debts.” “I flatter myself, however, sir,” Carmarthen told Adams, “that whenever America shall manifest a real determination to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain will not hesitate to prove her sincerity.”

For Adams, who had argued emphatically at Paris for full repayment of American debt and had never deviated from that view, American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake. When word reached London that some states, including Massachusetts, had passed laws against compliance with the treaty, Adams was appalled. Any such suspension of British debts, however colored or disguised, was a direct breach of the treaty, he wrote in a fury to Cotton Tufts, who had become a member of the Massachusetts Senate. “Our countrymen have too long trifled with public and private credit.” He would make good on all outstanding debt to British creditors, and if the British posts in America were not then immediately evacuated, he would declare war.

But he had written this when “wroth and fretted.” War was the last thing he wanted. Any war now would be calamitous for the United States and must be avoided at almost any cost, he wrote another day.

What was implicit in all “oratorical utterance” from Whitehall, Adams knew, was that to the British there was as yet no proper American government and so it would be pointless to undertake serious transactions until such existed. To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

In an exchange of letters between London and Paris, meantime, he and Jefferson considered the question of whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates or wage war with them. Jefferson recommended war as more honorable and proposed that an American fleet be built. Adams agreed in principle and promised, “I will go all lengths with you in promoting a navy.” Like Jefferson, he detested the prospect of paying bribes. But given that there was no American navy at present and that it would be years most likely before Congress voted such a resolution, Adams thought it sensible to pay the money. “We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever,” he told Jefferson, who willingly deferred to Adams's judgment. Later in January 1787, they would sign a pact with Morocco, whereby the United States, like France and Britain, agreed to pay for protection.

*   *   *

EAGER FOR A BREAK from the doldrums of summer in London, with Parliament in recess and “everyone fled from the city,” the Adamses decided to see some of the English countryside. With Nabby and Colonel Smith, they set off for a weeklong excursion to Essex. Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.” Still, the trip was a welcome departure—and for Abigail especially—and even more welcome was the wholly unexpected journey that followed immediately afterward.

Adams was needed at The Hague to exchange ratification of the treaty with Prussia, the one European trade agreement that he and Jefferson, for all their efforts, had succeeded in accomplishing. The treaty, signed in July 1785, had been ratified only that May of 1786, so late that unless it were signed within a matter of weeks, it would expire. Since Prussia had no minister in London or Paris, but only at The Hague, Adams was needed there without delay or the treaty would come to nothing. Jefferson excused himself from attending, saying it was on too short notice.

“As this presents a good opportunity for seeing the country
[Holland]
,” Abigail wrote happily, “I shall accompany him.” In fact, they were both extremely pleased to be going. Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that meant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

They were gone five weeks, stopping first at The Hague for the signing ceremony on August 8, then moving on at a pace sufficient to see just about everything—Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht—with Abigail supplying colorful comment in her letters. “Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions. (“Rouge is confined to the stage here,” she reported approvingly to Nabby.) She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it. In its stillness, she felt the same wave of emotion that had moved Adams to tears on his first visit. At the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, by contrast, the “buzz” of business being transacted reminded her of nothing so much as “the swarming of bees.”

The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us... The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”

At Utrecht they witnessed the swearing in of new magistrates of the city, as a result of major constitutional reforms enacted by the Patriot party. It was a ceremony conducted, as Adams wrote, “in the presence of the whole city,” and it moved him profoundly. To John Jay he would claim it to be the first bearing of fruit of the American Revolution in Europe.

*   *   *

THE AUTUMN OF 1786 produced no improvement in relations with the British, whose icy civility Adams found all the more galling after the respect and affection he had been shown in Holland. Yet his spirits were high, his health excellent. Besides, he and Abigail knew by then that they were to become grandparents. Nabby was pregnant, her baby expected in April. Not even the news from home of an uprising of aggrieved farmers in western Massachusetts seemed to distress Adams.

Shays's Rebellion, as it would come to be known, after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army, was in protest of rising taxes and court action against indebted farmers who, in many cases, were losing their land in the midst of hard times. The insurgents had prevented the sitting of the state supreme court at Springfield. But thus far there had been no violence.

“Don't be alarmed at the late turbulence in New England,” Adams counseled Jefferson. “The Massachusetts Assembly had, in its zeal to get the better of their debt, laid on a tax rather heavier than the people could bear.” He was confident all would be well and concluded prophetically, “This commotion will terminate in additional strength to the government.”

Inexplicably, correspondence from Jefferson had dwindled to a standstill. On returning from Holland, Abigail had found but one letter waiting, this only to say he did not understand her proposed trade of her son for his daughter, and to relate again his delight in the French. (“They have as much happiness in one year as an Englishman in ten.”) After that there had been no further word. A letter to Adams concerning whale oil, sent in late September, was written and signed for Jefferson by his aide, William Short. Then at the end of October came a brief note to Adams, awkwardly written by Jefferson with his left hand.

“An unfortunate dislocation of my right wrist has for three months deprived me of the honor of writing to you,” he at last explained to Abigail before Christmas. But his reason for writing was to tell her that his eight-year-old daughter Polly was on her way to London by ship from Virginia, in the care of a nurse, and that he had taken the liberty to tell those who arranged the voyage “that you will be so good as to take her under your wing till I can have notice to send for her.”

What Jefferson said nothing of was that he had been spending as much time as possible through August and September with a beautiful young woman named Maria Cosway. Born of English parents but raised in Italy, she was the wife of a wealthy, dandified English artist, Richard Cosway, and was herself an artist. She was fluent in several languages, musical, slim and delicate, with sparkling blue eyes and a mountain of fashionably dressed blond hair that made her several inches taller than her tiny, almost dwarf-like husband. The Cosways were a bright fixture in London society, and Abigail and Nabby are known to have met her on at least one social occasion.

Maria was twenty-six years old, Jefferson forty-three, and the attraction of each to the other was instantaneous. If not in love, Jefferson was wholly infatuated. Wishing only to be with her, he canceled every social engagement he could. As he would tell her, “Lying messengers were dispatched into every corner of the city with apologies.” He bought tickets to the theater, the opera; they rode through Paris in Jefferson's carriage behind a pair of fine new horses, and strolled the gardens at Marley, near Versailles. Sometimes, Richard Cosway was with them, more often they were alone.

Whether it was on a walk in the Cours-la-Reine, as commonly said later, that Jefferson dislocated his wrist, attempting to impress her by vaulting a fence, is not certain. But the accident put an end to their outings, and the pain of the injury was excruciating. For a month Jefferson was virtually confined to his house, and by early October the Cosways had returned to London.

Struggling to write with his left hand, he labored over a carefully composed letter to her in which he described a debate between “Head” and “Heart,” a conventional literary device of the day, and by the end of twelve pages it appeared “Head” was the winner. In any case, when Maria Cosway returned to Paris the next summer, Jefferson showed noticeably less interest in her.

To his friends the Adamses, he said nothing of any of this and possibly they never knew. But then, as the news of Shays's Rebellion grew more alarming, an exchange of views on the subject set Abigail and Jefferson sharply in opposition for the first time.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed from reports of the “tumults” in Massachusetts that the new nation was already breaking apart. To the British, accounts in the newspapers only confirmed what they had been predicting all along, while to many Americans who little understood the suffering of the Massachusetts farmers, and this included Abigail, the situation was an outrage, intolerable. “For what have we been contending against the tyranny of Britain,” she asked, writing to Mary Cranch, “to become the sacrifice of a lawless banditti? ... Will my countrymen justify the maxim of tyrants, that mankind is not made for freedom?”