John Quincy Adams (13 page)

John Adams had no sooner posted his letter when news arrived that made him regret having written it, and trembling with excitement, he quickly scratched out a second letter to his son:

Impressed by young Adams's writings, Washington had first considered naming him U.S. District Attorney for New England, but after reviewing the young man's early experiences with his father and Francis Dana in Europe and recognizing his command of French, Dutch, and German as assets possessed by few Americans in government, he decided to send John Quincy to Holland. The assignment would not require critical decisions, but it would put John Quincy in a key listening post in Europe's swirling diplomatic cosmos—a perfect assignment for a young diplomat with John Quincy's credentials.

At first, John Quincy believed that his father had arranged the appointment, and he writhed with anger, disgust, and shame. He soon learned, however, that his appointment “had been as unexpected to him [his father] as to myself and that he had never uttered a word upon which a wish on his part could be presumed that a public office should be conferred upon me.” Indeed, the elder Adams knew nothing of Washington's decision until notified by Secretary of State Randolph three days before the Senate confirmation. After reassuring himself that Washington had appointed his son solely on the basis of the young man's qualifications, John Adams let his pride pour onto the pages of a letter to his son, saying that the appointment was “the result of the President's own observations and reflections . . . as proof that sound principles in morals and government are cherished by the executive of the United States and that study, science and literature are recommendations which will not be overlooked.”

When he had emptied his mind, heart, and soul of advice, Adams concluded,

Her son's appointment moved Abigail as much as it had her husband, and, unable to contain her excitement, she wrote to Martha Washington “acknowledging the honor conferred . . . by the President.”

John Quincy Adams closed his law office and plunged headlong into the world of diplomacy and government. To his delight, he found himself mixing, as he had in his youth, with some of the world's most celebrated
political figures, at one moment engaged in discussions with the President of the United States and the secretary of state; at another, meeting with Treasury Secretary Hamilton or Secretary of War Henry Knox; then sharing tea with such visiting dignitaries as the enigmatic Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, or more simply Talleyrand.

Born an aristocrat, Talleyrand had been a French Catholic bishop before discarding his clerical robes and renouncing the church in favor of secularism and revolution. A member of the revolutionary National Assembly, he went to England as a special emissary of the Jacobins but paid a few too many visits to the lavish London quarters of the Duc d'Orléans, pretender to the French throne. When Talleyrand returned to France, Jacobins accused him of royalist collaboration, and he fled the guillotine for America, having only just arrived when he met John Quincy. Although he fully expected a presidential reception worthy of his aristocratic lineage, Washington refused to see him because reception of exiled aristocrats might be seen as a public rebuff of the French revolutionary government. Talleyrand twisted the President's rejection into a deep hatred of all things American—even the women, whom he described as “adorable at fifteen, faded at twenty-three, old at thirty-five, decrepit at forty or forty-five, losing their shape, their teeth and their hair.” He would soon direct his hatred for America toward John Quincy's father.
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John Quincy spent the rest of the summer of 1794 studying State Department documents and meeting with Secretary of State Randolph. Randolph told John Quincy to stop in London on his way to The Hague and deliver a trunk load of documents for former chief justice John Jay, the former secretary of state, who was negotiating a new treaty with Britain. Relations between the two nations had soured since they had signed the 1783 peace treaty, whose terms both Britain and the United States had openly violated. American state courts were first to violate them by blocking collection of prerevolution debts by British merchants and payment of compensation to loyalists for confiscation of their properties and estates. The British, in turn, retaliated by refusing to abandon
military posts in the Northwest Territory in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and, worse, inciting Indian attacks on American settlers in the area. Relations between the two nations deteriorated still more after the outbreak of war between England and France provoked the British navy to seize neutral ships trading with France and the French West Indies. By April 1794, when Washington sent John Jay to England, the British had seized more than 250 American ships and impressed hundreds of American sailors into the British navy.

Unnerved by the prospect of being alone and all but friendless in Holland for three years, John Quincy asked his brother Thomas Boylston—the youngest of the three Adams boys—to come to Europe with him as an aide. Thomas had graduated from Harvard, studied law, and passed his bar exams in Philadelphia, where he had planned to open a law office. Their mother Abigail was delighted with John Quincy's offer to his younger brother. “I have always wished that your brother might have an opportunity of going abroad,” she wrote to John Quincy, “and as you are inclined to have him accompany you, I think . . . you may be mutually beneficial to each other, and it will not be so solitary to you. I will not take my own personal feelings into the question. Whatever may be for the benefit of my children I acquiesce to.” Abigail began to cry as she pleaded, “Let me hear from you by every . . . “She then crossed out the word “every” and wrote “post”—“Let me hear from you by the post.”

Shaken by the prospect of losing her oldest and youngest sons, she added, “I have a request to make of you and your brother. If there is a miniature painter . . . sit for your likenesses . . . and give them to Mr. Anthony to set with a lock of each of your hairs to be put on the back together with your names. . . . You must spare time for it if possible.”
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John Quincy attended to every detail but the portraits as he prepared to leave for Europe. His father sent him one last message of advice. “The post at the Hague,” he enthused to his son, “is an important diplomatic station which may afford many opportunities of acquiring political information and of penetrating the designs of many cabinets in Europe.”

On September 17, 1794, twenty-seven-year-old John Quincy Adams, an independent man at last, departed for Europe. His father sent him and Thomas a farewell note:

Strengthened by his father's blessing, John Quincy sailed off to help guide his nation's destiny as one of the first ministers of its embryonic foreign service, but the storms of war blackened the seas ahead and seemed to bode ill for his mission to keep America free of foreign intrigues and war.

The entire world seemed aboil as John Quincy Adams's ship bounded into the dark Atlantic toward Europe. As he and his brother saw their native land slip over the horizon, war and revolution engulfed the world. Behind them in America, rebel torches had set skies aglow in western Pennsylvania to protest a federal tax on whiskey. Congress had imposed it without the consent of the states—much as Parliament had imposed the stamp tax without the consent of the colonies thirty years earlier in 1765. Adding to the turmoil, Indian tribes had swept across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, attacking white settlements. Although Britain had ceded the territory to the United States after the Revolutionary War, British troops had remained and fostered the Indian attacks to harass the new American government and provoke its collapse.

In Europe, meanwhile, the revolutionary zeal of Maximilian Robespierre's Jacobins had metamorphosed into insanity, with Robespierre striding into the Convention, or national assembly, and demanding the arrest and execution of every member. By then, the number of widows
and orphans created by the guillotine had reached staggering proportions; they and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who had gone into hiding to escape the blade suddenly emerged en masse and marched to the Convention doors roaring, “À bas Robespierre!” (“Down with Robespierre!”). Facing the same fate on the guillotine whether or not they continued to shy before Robespierre's schizophrenic screams, a handful of Convention delegates summoned the courage to demand his arrest and that of each of his terrorist confederates. To the surprise of all, the rest of the Convention stood and shouted their agreement. Puzzled soldiers in the Convention hall looked at each other, then sided with the delegates and led the psychotic Norman lawyer away in chains. The following day, July 28, 1794, troops loyal to the Convention carted Robespierre, his brother, and twenty of his political allies to the guillotine for execution. The guillotine claimed the heads of seventy more Robespierre confederates the following day. Although the French people celebrated by massacring hundreds more Jacobins across the nation, the slaughter did not end the famine that gripped the nation, and the new revolutionary government that took over from Robespierre—a five-man Directory that included Corsican general Napoléon Bonaparte—proclaimed an end to private property.

“The earth belongs to no one; its fruits belong to every one,” declared François Noël Babeuf. “There is but one sun, one air for all to breath. Let us end the disgusting distinctions between rich and poor . . . masters and servants, governor and governed.”
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As the poor rose in rebellion and joined equally deprived soldiers in rioting, Napoléon rallied them to his banner, assuaging their anger and hunger with promises of rich pastures across French borders: “You have no shoes, uniforms, shirts and almost no bread,” he called out to his followers.

At Napoléon's command, French revolutionary armies poured into neighboring Dutch, Austrian, German, and Italian territories, pillaging farmlands, villages, and towns. Royal armies seemed helpless.

“The war has not been very favorable to the glory of sovereigns,” John Quincy said, observing the obvious.
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Thomas Adams wrote to his mother to calm her fears. “Holland will negotiate the most favorable terms with the French that they can, but it scarce admits a doubt that the French will be able to impose what terms they please. It will not be a pleasant thing to reside in that country at this period, but . . . we may chance to escape molestation.”
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