By the second week of March, as Adams was preparing to leave for Quincy, word reached Philadelphia that the American frigate Constellation, under Captain Thomas Truxtun, had captured the French frigate L’Insurgent, after a battle near the island of Nevis in the Leewards, the first major engagement of the undeclared war at sea. Where would it all end, people were asking in Philadelphia. But Adams was anything but alarmed or displeased. Of Captain Truxtun he wrote, “I wish all other officers had as much zeal.”
