John Adams

by David McCullough

March 18, 1780,

In an official letter of June 21, Vergennes informed Adams that France opposed any revaluation of the American currency unless an exception were made for French merchants.

The letter was undoubtedly what Vergennes expected from Adams, and all that he needed—a written statement from Adams showing him to be in direct opposition to French policy and thus a threat to relations between France and America.

On July 29, in a crushing reply, he ended any further communication with Adams.

this court is to be treated with decency and delicacy.

It is my intention, while I stay here, to procure what advantages I can for our country by endeavoring to please this court.

Not for months was Adams to learn what Franklin had done. Nor was he to see Franklin or Vergennes again for an even longer time. For as Franklin also reported to Congress, Adams had by then departed Paris for Holland to see, as he told Franklin, “whether something might be done to render us less dependent on France.”

The prospect of securing financial help from the Dutch Republic had been talked about in Congress and at Paris for some time.

The venture was entirely of his own making.

From Rotterdam they continued by horse-drawn canal boat to Delft, then The Hague, the Dutch seat of government.

On the approach to Amsterdam that evening the giant canvas sails of immense windmills turned ceaselessly on all sides, a spectacle such as they had never seen.

Adams would liken it to a frog hopping about between the legs of two battling bulls.

“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.”

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.

Amsterdam remained the commercial center of Europe.

Of Amsterdam, however, Boswell had little to say beyond that it was a place where he could patronize brothels unobserved.

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.

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.

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.

He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.

At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British.

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.

Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters.

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.

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.

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.

November of 1780

In September General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British, and when found out, defected to the enemy.

No longer did he see the Dutch as “examples to the world,” but perceived now, bitterly, “a general littleness arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits [pennies and nickels], which pervades the whole people.” Frugality and industry were virtues everywhere, but avarice and stinginess were not frugality.

But the hard truth was that after five months in the Dutch Republic, Adams had yet to meet a single government official of any importance.

“War is to a Dutchman the greatest of evils,”

As winter progressed, his new commission arrived; Congress had designated him minister plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic, which provided all the authority to be wished for.

“America . . . has been too long silent in Europe,” he wrote to Francis Dana. “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained to be approved.”

“Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.”

On April 19, 1781,

He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained.

On Friday, May 4, 1781, at the Binnenhof, the Inner Courts, at The Hague, Adams called on the Baron van Lynden van Hemmen, president of the States-General for that week, and presented his memorial.

How many of Adams’s letters had indeed been lost to Neptune, there was no reckoning.

. . . You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.

AT PARIS AND PHILADELPHIA all the while, movements were under way to dislodge John Adams as sole American peacemaker in Europe.

On June 15, 1781, after hours of argument, Congress agreed to be governed by the dictates of the French Court. John Adams’s powers as sole peacemaker with Britain were revoked.

IN EARLY SUMMER 1781, Francis Dana received notification from Congress that he was to proceed from Holland to St. Petersburg to seek recognition of the United States by the government of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia.

help, he asked Adams if John Quincy might accompany him.

Adams was by then established in his commodious new residence in Amsterdam on the Keizersgracht.

Try as he could, the Dutch seemed to care only for their own commercial self-interests. He wondered if they were a people deficient in heart.

Exhausted, his sons gone, Francis Dana gone, and with no reason to think his mission to Holland anything but a failure, Adams fell ill. Nothing more was heard from him for six weeks.

Quite possibly Adams had fallen victim to malaria, which in the heat of summer could be rampant in European seaports.

He himself would later say that excessive fatigue and anxiety concerning the state of his affairs in Holland, as well as the “unwholesome damps of the night,” had brought him as “near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms.”