John Adams

by David McCullough

ON MONDAY, February 18, 1799, Adams made his move. Having consulted no one, and without advice from Abigail, he took the most decisive action of his presidency. Indeed, of all the brave acts of his career—his defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, his crossing the Atlantic on the Boston in the winter of 1778, the high risks of his mission to Holland—one brief message sent to the United States Senate was perhaps the bravest. It was carried by a courier to the second-floor Senate Chamber, where an astonished Vice President interrupted the business on the floor to read it aloud: Always disposed and ready to embrace every plausible appearance of probability of preserving or restoring tranquility, I nominate William Vans Murray, our minister resident at The Hague, to be minister plenipotentiary of the United States to the French Republic.