John Quincy Adams (7 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.”

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

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.”
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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.”
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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.'”
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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.”
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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 ties 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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