John Adams

by David McCullough

Adams thought women superior to men overall, as Abigail knew, and he was sure she would wish to know his views on the educated women of France. To tell you the truth, I admire the ladies here. Don’t be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant. And their knowledge of letters and arts, exceeds that of the English ladies, I believe.

Had Franklin done no more than devise the lightning rod, Adams liked to say, it would have been sufficient reason for the world to honor his name.

He had wit at will. He had humor that, when he pleased, was delicate and delightful. He had a satire that was good-natured and caustic. Horace or Juvenal, Swift or Rabelais at his pleasure. He had talents of irony, allegory, and fable that he could adapt with great skill to the promotion of moral and political truth.

The man who, as Poor Richard, had preached “Early to bed, early to rise,” seldom rose before ten o’clock. (Adams found that by the time Franklin had finished breakfast he was able to receive only a few callers before it was time to depart for his midday dinner. Dinner over, Franklin often napped.) The man who had admonished generations of aspiring Americans to “Keep thy shop and thy shop will keep thee” seemed but vaguely interested in the day-to-day operations of the commission.

“A little neglect may breed great mischief,” Poor Richard had warned; Adams found more than a little neglect everywhere he turned. Public money was being spent, as Arthur Lee said, “without economy and without account.”

As time passed and his French improved, Adams further realized that Franklin spoke the language poorly and understood considerably less than he let on. Never verbose in social gatherings even in his own language, “the good doctor” sat in the salons of Paris, looking on benevolently, a glass of champagne in hand, rarely saying anything. When he did speak in French, he was, one official told Adams, almost impossible to understand. He refused to bother his head with French grammar, Franklin admitted to Adams, and to his French admirers this, with his odd pronunciation, were but another part of his charm, which only added to Adams’s annoyance.

Try as he might, Adams could never feel at ease in French society. Franklin, always at ease, never gave the appearance of trying at all.

Alexander was outspoken in his contempt for British policy toward America. He thought the war an appalling blunder and favored unlimited independence for the United States. Alexander, who was also a British spy, felt he could read Franklin’s mind perfectly. However, the new resident commissioner at Passy, John Adams, required closer study, and in an effort to inform London, Alexander provided an especially perceptive appraisal:

His knowledge of England and its constitution is [a] matter of real amazement to me. The most trite and common things as well as the more nice relative either to customs, manners, arts, policy, or constitution are equally known to him. He is an enthusiast, however, with regard to everything in this country [France] but the constitution and can conceive no country superior to it.

His understanding lies, I think, rather in seeing large things largely than correctly. . . . In the conduct of affairs he may perhaps be able to take so comprehensive a view as to render invention and expedient unnecessary, but were they to become necessary, I think he would fail in these—and I am not clear as to the first, or whether much of his reputation may not arise from a very firm and decisive tone suited to the times, with a clear and perspicuous elocution.

The war for American independence had set off a struggle for power in Europe. Britain and France were again at each other’s throats. There was no declaration of war, nor would there be one. “Yet,” Adams would rightly inform Samuel Adams, “there is in fact as complete a war as ever existed, and it will continue.”

If Franklin was slow to get under way in the morning, Arthur Lee found it impossible to arrive from Chaillot, only ten minutes away, earlier than eleven o’clock, by which time Adams, who rose at five, had been at his desk for hours.

Privately, he was distraught and painfully lonely. It had been more than three months since he left home and still there was no word from Abigail. He worried about her, longed for her, and in this felt still further removed from Lee, who had never married, and Franklin, whose wife was dead and who, when she was alive, had spent years apart from her with no apparent regret.

“There is, I imagine, no minister who would not think it safer to act by orders than from his own discretion,” wrote Franklin in a letter explaining why he and the other Americans in Paris had to decide matters on their own most all of the time. To receive an answer from an inquiry to Philadelphia could take six months.

There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation . . . is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral . . . that it is a duty and a virtue.

But this, he was quick to add, was a rule with definite limitations, “for there are times when the cause of religion, of government, of liberty, the interest of the present age of posterity, render it a necessary duty to make known his sentiments and intentions boldly and publicly.”

To Richard Henry Lee, he claimed his new status as a private citizen “best becomes me, and is most agreeable to me.” In truth, he was hurt and angry, and justifiably. He had been badly served by a Congress that told him nothing and showed no gratitude for all he had done. He felt himself strangely adrift, less able than ever in his life to sense what lay in store for him.

Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt—to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.

But then studying his own face in the mirror, Adams did not like what he saw. There was nothing exceptional about him, he concluded, writing in his diary. “By my physical constitution, I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” There was too much weakness and languor in his nature. “When I look in the glass, my eye, my forehead, my brow, my cheeks, my lips all betray this relaxation.” Yet he could be roused, he knew. “Yet some great events, some cutting expressions, some mean scandals, hypocrisies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into a rage a little like a lion.”

Lovell was a married man who, in five years in Congress, never once returned to Boston to see his wife and children. That he enjoyed the company of several women in Philadelphia was no secret there, but whether Abigail knew of this is not clear.

“I am, with an ardor that words have not power to express, yours,” he had closed a letter to Abigail, and though her wish that he be less stringent in his expressions of affection was entirely understandable, there was never a question about the depth of his feelings or his devotion to her.

Time and again when away, Adams would profess preference for the simple domestic life by Penn’s Hill above anything he knew; time and again, on reaching home, he would say that there and there only was everything he desired. It was a lifelong refrain, and his enjoyment now seemed to bear him out.

It was titled “A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Adams having chosen to use the word “commonwealth” rather than “state,” as had Virginia, a decision he made on his own and that no one was to question.

In fundamental ways, the form of government was very like what Adams had proposed in his Thoughts on Government, and again, as in Thoughts on Government, he called for a “government of laws, and not of men.” Founded on the principle of the separation and balance of powers, the Constitution declared in a single sentence that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts “the legislative, executive and judicial power shall be placed in separate departments, to the end that it might be a government of laws, and not of men.”

But it was the establishment of an independent judiciary, with judges of the Supreme Court appointed, not elected, and for life (“as long as they behave themselves well”), that Adams made one of his greatest contributions not only to Massachusetts but to the country, as time would tell.

In addition, notably, there was Section II of Chapter 6, a paragraph headed “The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.,” which was like no other declaration to be found in any constitution ever written until then, or since.

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.

“I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading,” Adams had written in his diary at age twenty-five, while still living under his father’s roof.

Preferring what Jefferson had written in the Declaration of Independence, the convention revised the first article of the Declaration of Rights, that all men were “born equally free and independent,” to read that all men were “born free and equal,” a change Adams did not like and would like even less as time went on. He did not believe all men were created equal, except in the eyes of God, but that all men, for all their many obvious differences, were born to equal rights.

The constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the oldest functioning written constitution in the world.

Then, in October, out of the blue, came word from Philadelphia that Adams had been chosen by Congress to return to France as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate treaties of peace and commerce with Great Britain, a position he had neither solicited nor expected. The decision had been virtually unanimous.

These are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. 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.

AA letter to JQA

[His] obstinacy . . . will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents . . . ~The Comte de Vergennes

Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right. ~John Adams

He was determined to go, and talk of difficulties had little effect. Indeed, for a man so constituted as Adams, such talk could well have been the deciding factor. “The season, the roads, the accommodations for traveling are so unfavorable that it is not expected I can get to Paris in less than thirty days,” he wrote in explanation to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington. “But if I were to wait for the frigate, it would probably be much longer. I am determined, therefore, to make the best of way by land.”

At first light, December 15, Adams, his sons, Francis Dana, John Thaxter, servants, Spanish guides and muleteers, and two additional Americans who had been aboard the Sensible, set off mounted on scrawny mules and looking, as John Thaxter noted, very like a scene from Don Quixote, and quixotic the whole undertaking turned out to be.

“We had nothing worth remarking today except we kept ascending,” wrote John Quincy on December 31. Another day’s journey was “almost perpendicular.” With encouragement from his father, the boy had started a diary, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong enterprise lasting sixty-eight years.

Everywhere he saw poverty and misery, people in rags. “Nothing appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy,” he noted sadly.

“We go along barking and sneezing and coughing as if we were fitter for a hospital than for travelers on the road,” wrote Adams, whose own strength and spirits began to give out.

The one compensation of the journey was the warmth of the welcome they received along the route. Spain by now had entered the war, but as an ally of France only. John Jay of New York, the American minister to Spain, had been in Madrid for a year, and his mission had proven hopeless, as the Spanish Court had no interest in recognizing the independence of the United States. Still, no representative of any government would have been treated with more courtesy and friendship than were Adams and his party in town after town, as he was to report proudly.

But it was because of no abiding fervor for American liberty that he had persuaded his young king to come to America’s aid. France was an absolute monarchy and Vergennes as stout a monarchist as could be found. His purpose, first, last, and always, was to weaken and humble Britain and, at the same time, expand French trade in America.

“Always keep in mind,” Vergennes would tell the Minister of Finance, “that in separating the United States from Great Britain, it was above all their commerce we wanted.”

“It is interest alone which does it,” he had once told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.” For Vergennes’s American policy he had a vivid image: “He means . . . to keep his hand under our chin to preven...

While all Paris might see Franklin as the authentic, homespun “natural” American, Vergennes knew better. It was precisely Franklin’s subtlety, his worldliness, that made him invaluable as a diplomat. Adams, on the other hand, was truly a provincial. Worse, he was a novice; and there was no telling the damage such a man might do.

At loose ends once again in Europe, and with no word from Congress, Adams was nonetheless determined to make himself useful. If nothing else, he could write—Adams would always write. Another man might have relaxed and bided his time, just as another man might have waited at El Ferrol for his ship to be repaired, rather than striking out over the mountains of Spain.

Let us treat them with gratitude, but with dignity. Let us remember what is due to ourselves and our posterity as well as to them. Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their wars and politics . . . America has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.

By late July, Adams had produced no less than ninety-five letters—more than Congress wanted, he imagined—and never knowing whether anything had been received.

The conflict between the appeal of the arts and the sense that they were the product of a luxury-loving (and thus corrupt) foreign society played heavily on his mind. Delightful as it was to stroll the gardens of Paris, enticing as were science and the arts, he, John Adams, had work to do, a public trust to uphold. The science of government was his duty; the art of negotiation must take precedence.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Timeless words

Peace was his dearest wish. But when ever would they see it? “The events of politics are not less uncertain than those of war.”