John Adams - SA (35 page)

Holland was as far north as Adams had ever been in his travels and about as different from France as a place could be. Holland, the name commonly used for the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (of which Holland was the richest and most populated province), had particular appeal to Americans. It was the tiny, indomitable republic which, in 1648, had formally won its independence from Spain, the mightiest empire of the time, after a war and truce that stretched over some eighty years. Like the United States, the Dutch Republic was born of war, and for more than a century had survived and prospered between two of the great, interminably warring powers of Europe, France and England. Adams would liken it to a frog hopping about between the legs of two battling bulls.

As America faced the challenge of a continental wilderness, Holland faced the North Sea. The extraordinary ingenuity and industry of the Dutch in wresting land from the sea were legendary. Still the actual spectacle of all that had been contrived and built, the innumerable canals, bridges, dams, dikes, sluices, and windmills needed to cope with water, to drain land, and hold back the sea—and that all had to be kept in working order so that life could go on—made first-time visitors stand back in awe, and New Englanders especially, knowing what they did of inhospitable climate and limited space. Francis Dana, when he arrived later, wrote of the Dutch living in a world made by hand. “The whole is an astonishing machinery, created, connected, constantly preserved by the labor, industry, and unremitting attention of its inhabitants at an expense beyond calculation.”

Amsterdam alone had more than 500 bridges arching its web of canals. The pride of the city, its Town Hall, a massive structure of cut stone, stood, as almost every visitor was informed, on 13,659 wooden piles.

Predominantly Protestant, Holland was known for its tolerance, for allowing religious freedom to thousands of European Jews, French Huguenots, and other Christian sects. To New Englanders it was very nearly sacred ground, as the place where the English separatists known as the Pilgrims had found refuge in the seventeenth century, settling at Leyden for twelve years before embarking for Massachusetts.

The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch. In one of the most astonishing upsurges of commercial vitality in all history, they had become the greatest trading nation in the world, the leading shipbuilders and mapmakers. Amsterdam, the busiest port in Europe, became the richest city in the world, and with their vast wealth, the Dutch became Europe's money lenders.

In the arts and letters, it was the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and van Ruysdael; of the poet Joost van den Vondel, of Grotius in theology and maritime law, Spinoza in philosophy. In the liberal atmosphere of seventeenth-century Holland, the French philosopher Rene Descartes found refuge and freedom to publish. John Locke, from whom Adams, Jefferson, and other American patriots drew inspiration, had published some of his earliest works while a political refugee in Amsterdam.

The Golden Age was long past by the time Adams arrived—Dutch maritime power and Dutch prestige were acknowledged to be “in decline”—yet business was thriving and visitors were struck by signs of Dutch prosperity on all sides. Amsterdam remained the commercial center of Europe. Its immense harbor thronged with shipping. “Wherever the eye ranges, masts and sails appear,” wrote an English traveler. “Bells are sounding and vessels departing at all hours.”

Beside the city's broad, tree-lined main canals, row upon row of elegant brick grachfenkuizen (canal houses) proclaimed the wealth of its merchant citizenry as did nothing else. Four and five stories tall, they were much alike in the Dutch manner, with stepped or bell-shaped gables and tall, sparkling windows of Dutch plate glass, which was considered something quite special. “The verdure of the trees reflecting strongly upon large windows which are kept bright and free of dust, add infinitely to their luster and magnificence,” wrote a visiting American. The homes of the wealthiest families, the grandest houses of all, numbering in the hundreds along the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht (the Gentlemen's Canal and the Emperor's Canal), were as fine as any of the great city houses of Europe. And more even than the elegant façades, the interiors and furnishings of such houses—the marble floors, chinaware, leather-bound books, maps, and huge ebony-framed portraits of the merchants themselves or of their Golden Age patriarchs—bespoke generations of accumulated wealth and unrivaled position.

Commonly described as a kind of northern Venice, Amsterdam had none of the architectural grandeur of Venice and was subject to long, dank North Sea winters. Also, by late summer, the season when Adams arrived, many of the canals turned putrid-smelling, and “so laden with filth,” an English woman wrote, “that on a hot day the feculence seems pestilential.” Indeed, the Dutch climate was widely understood to be dangerous to the health. “Amsterdam fever” was a well-known and dreaded malady. Visitors who stayed too long could expect to be ill, it was said, though young James Boswell of London had written that one ought to experience no difficulty if one ate well, drank well, dressed properly, and took exercise. Of Amsterdam, however, Boswell had little to say beyond that it was a place where he could patronize brothels unobserved.

Adams found the city densely crowded and teeming with foreigners—French, English, and Americans, commercial agents, sea captains, journalists, tourists, and spies. In smoky cafés Dutch merchants and bankers drank coffee, pulled at clay pipes, and talked incessantly to all hours. The talk was open, spirited—an atmosphere made to order for Adams—and rife with high-blown speculation, most of which struck him as amusing, as he told Franklin in a friendly letter written soon after his arrival.

One says America will give France the go by. Another that France and Spain will abandon America. A third that Spain will forsake France and America. A fourth that America has the interest of all Europe against her. A fifth that she will become the greatest manufacturing country and thus ruin Europe. A sixth that she will become a great and ambitious military and naval power, and consequently terrible to Europe.

Suspicious that there were too many Englishmen, and thus too many possible spies, in the hotel where he and the boys were staying, Adams found modest lodgings with an elderly widow, a “Madame La Veuve du Henry Schorn, of de Achterburgwal by de Hoogstrat,” as he would give the new address.

To get his bearings he was out and about, walking the canals, studying the buildings, circumventing the entire city by foot, meeting people, glad to return to useful work. Through all his life Adams would be happiest when there was clear purpose to his days.

“Papa went out”; “Papa went out to dinner”; “Papa went out to take a walk,” recorded John Quincy.

Adams knew no one, but from all that he saw and heard, and after meetings with a number of prominent Amsterdam bankers—Henrik Hooft, Jan de Neufville and son, Jacob and Nicholas van Staphorst—he grew highly optimistic. A “considerable” loan was entirely possible, he reported to Congress. Moreover, there was no better place in Europe in which to gather information or from which to circulate it.

In an exuberant letter to Abigail, he called Holland “the greatest curiosity in the world.” He doubted there was any nation of Europe “more estimable than the Dutch, in proportion.

Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don't perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and the arts, I think, to a greater extent.

His only concerns were that the air was “not so salubrious” as that of France, and that the Dutch knew little at all about America, which he found astonishing.

When on September 16, Francis Dana turned up from Paris with the news that Congress had given Adams authority to work on securing a Dutch loan until Henry Laurens appeared, Adams notified John Thaxter to pack everything at the hotel in Paris and come at once. John Quincy and Charles were enrolled in Amsterdam's renowned Latin School, and Adams set to work. All his energy, zeal, stubborn determination, and his idealism, qualities that had seemed ill-suited at Versailles, were now to be brought to bear. In little time he cultivated an amazing range of friends among the press and in intellectual and financial circles, a number of whom were Jews who, Adams later said, were among the most liberal and accommodating of all.

He made a study of Dutch ways and temperament, read deeply in Dutch history, searching out ever more volumes in Amsterdam's numerous well-stocked bookshops. He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.

Between times, he kept campaigning by mail for an American navy, his determination perhaps reinforced by a new appreciation of all that commerce at sea had meant to the Dutch. “If I could have my will, there should not be the least obstruction of navigation, commerce, or privateering,” Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush, “because I firmly believe that one sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.” To Congress he declared emphatically, “A navy is our natural and only defense.”

In October, events took an unexpected turn, when word came from London that Henry Laurens, on his way to Amsterdam, had been captured at sea by a British man-of-war. Charged with high treason, Laurens was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, with “orders that no person whatever speaks to him,” as Adams's London contact Thomas Digges reported. A sack containing Laurens's confidential papers had been thrown overboard from his ship too late and the British had hooked it from the sea. Among the papers was the draft of a proposed secret treaty between America and the Netherlands, a document of no real significance, but one the British were happy to use as a pretext for a show of angry indignation and threats of war, a possibility the Dutch dreaded as they did no other.

With the responsibility of securing a loan now squarely on his shoulders, and the likelihood of peace no nearer than before, Adams settled in for the long haul.

At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British. At Camden, South Carolina, General Horatio Gates had suffered a devastating defeat in a battle in which American soldiers had fled like sheep. Nearly 1,000 Americans had been killed and a thousand more captured. Gates had been a favorite general officer of the Congress and of Adams, and it had been one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.

But there must be no softening of resolve, Adams declared. “I think I see very clearly that America must grow up in war,” he wrote to Congress. His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence. Without that insurance, there would be no Dutch loan. Of this Adams was now absolutely certain.

This country had been grossly deceived. It has little knowledge of the numbers, wealth, and resources of the United States, and less faith in their finally supporting independence, upon which alone a credit depends. They also have an opinion of the power of England vastly higher than the truth. Measures must be taken with great caution and delicacy to undeceive them.

With his phenomenal capacity for work—an attribute not lost on the industrious Dutch—he produced materials of every kind in an all-out effort to “undeceive” them, while at the same time providing Congress with some of the most astute political reporting of his diplomatic career. Help came from a number of his new Dutch friends, “people of the first character,” as he said, who saw in the American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.

Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters. Older than Adams by nearly fifteen years, he served faithfully as a translator and expert source of information.

John Luzac of Leyden, a lawyer, scholar, and editor, published in his Gazette de Leyde a steady variety of material supplied by Adams, including the first European translation of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was to have an important effect in the Netherlands. In little time Luzac and Adams became the closest of friends.

Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a Dutch nobleman, had been the first and most prominent figure in the country to champion the American cause, and he greatly admired Adams's determination. Van der Capellen knew the majority of the Dutch sympathized with the American Revolution, but astutely he advised Adams that only American success in the war would enlist Dutch credit, for all the expressions of good will and interest he would hear.

At The Hague, as Adams came to understand, there was little sympathy for the American cause, nor much hope for decisive action. The government of the country, maddeningly complicated to anyone unfamiliar with it, seemed devised intentionally to foster inertia. It was a republic, but with no real executive power, only a symbolic head of state, the hereditary Stadholder, William V, Prince of Orange, who was related to the British royal family and personally devoted to the status quo. As Adams explained to Congress, sovereignty resided in the national assembly, Their High Mightinesses, the States-General. Yet even they were but the deputies of the “regents” in the cities, a very select group of great influence. Thus, as Adams wrote, the true power lay in the cities and in Amsterdam in particular. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam... who are called the regency, are one integral branch of the sovereignty of the seven United Provinces, and the most material branch of all because the city of Amsterdam is one quarter of the whole Republic, at least in taxes.”

Not until the government at The Hague took it upon itself to recognize the United States would anyone in the government be permitted to receive Adams officially. In actual practice nearly all would shun him. This being the case, it seemed only sensible to concentrate his efforts in Amsterdam, as both the money and the real political power were there.