John Adams

by David McCullough

A chronic acquirer, Jefferson is not known to have ever denied himself anything he wished in the way of material possessions or comforts.

Later, unable to repay the advance, Jefferson would turn to private creditors and go still deeper in debt.

That the Adamses were able to make ends meet as they did, Jefferson attributed to what he regarded as an extremely “plain” style of life, and even more to Abigail’s management of expenses.

Faithfully, almost obsessively, he kept recording every purchase and expenditure, but it was as if somehow he could never bring himself to add up the columns.

At home, in his voluminous farm records, he never in his life added up the profit and loss for any year, and perhaps for the reason that there was almost never any profit.

There were weeks when he was buying books every day. In his first month in Paris, he could not buy them fast enough, and ran up bills totaling nearly 800 francs.

Nor was the book-buying spree to end. The grand total of books he acquired in France was about 2,000, but he also bought books by the boxful for Washington, Franklin, and James Madison.

Before he was finished, Jefferson would buy sixty-three paintings in France as well as seven terra-cotta busts for 1,100 livres by the greatest sculptor of the day, Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom, at the request of the Virginia legislature, Jefferson also commissioned to do a life-size statue of George Washington.

Though he could read French well enough, Jefferson was never to speak the language with the fluency Adams attained.

Then, in the last week of January, came crushing news from Virginia. His two-year-old daughter, Lucy, had died of whooping cough. Of six children, now only two remained alive.

TO THE DIPLOMATIC TASKS at hand, Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, the old Revolutionary trio, gave due attention, working steadily and in easy accord.

The American position was free trade, but very little interest was shown.

Ultimately, for all their efforts, only one commercial treaty would be negotiated, that with Prussia.

John and John Quincy customarily set off for a five- or six-mile walk in the Bois de Boulogne before getting down to work.

He had already seen more of Europe and Russia than any American of his generation. His French was virtually perfect. He was broadly read in English and Roman history.

She herself felt waves of extreme homesickness. A heavy snow falling over Paris filled her with emotion because it “looked so American.”

The time in France had made her love her own country more than ever.

It was requested that he be in London no later than the King’s birthday on June 4.

the British ambassador to France, the Duke of Dorset,

I was afraid they would gaze with evil eyes.

When another diplomat, assuming that Adams welcomed the change in assignment, remarked that no doubt Adams had a number of relatives in England, Adams took offense. No, he declared, he had no relatives there. “I have not one drop of blood in my veins but what is American.”

When Jefferson called on the aging Foreign Minister, he demonstrated perfectly why he would be so welcome at the French Court. “You replace Mr. Franklin, I hear,” said Vergennes. “I succeed,” said Jefferson. “No one can replace him.”

But it was the last time they were ever to see one another.

HIS MAJESTY THE KING of England and the new American minister to the Court of St. James’s were not without common interests and notable similarities. Like

Indeed, in England as in Europe it was generally thought that the experiment in democracy across the water had little chance of success.

With his appointment to the Court, Adams felt he had attained the pinnacle of his career, and, with the retirement of Franklin, he was now America’s most experienced diplomat.

But after further thought—and possibly on the advice of Abigail—he put the letter aside. It was never sent.

When the door opened, they proceeded, Adams, as instructed, making three bows, or “reverences,” one on entering, another halfway, a third before “the presence.”

between people who, though separated by an ocean and under different governments, have the same language, a similar religion, and kindred blood.

“The King listened to every word I said, with dignity but with apparent emotion,”

The circumstances of this audience are so extraordinary, the language you have now held is so extremely proper, and the feelings you have discovered so justly adapted to the occasion, that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of the friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister.

I will be very frank with you, I was the last to consent to separation; but the separation having been made, and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent power.

Beneath the polite English surface lay burning animosity,

That “world”—London of the 1780s—was a city grown all out of proportion, with nearly a million souls.

a spectacle illustrating Adams’s chief concern as ambassador, since none was American.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

With the exception of tradesmen and a few officials of the government, the British overall were decidedly cool toward the new American minister and his family—perfunctory, but no more.

And they did stare as Adams had worried they would, and not in a friendly way.

In truth, the American minister and his family were being pointedly ignored.

and Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia prominently displayed to one side.

The cost of living in London was higher even than in Paris, and to make matters worse, Congress had cut Adams’s salary by a fifth, from 2,500 to 2,000 pounds.

Worst of all was being patronized by the British.

Attacks on Adams in the press continued. He was called a nobody, ridiculed for having insufficient means to conduct himself in proper fashion.

The Public Advertiser reminded its readers that all so-called American patriots were cowards, murderers, and traitors, and described Adams as looking “pretty fat and flourishing” considering “the low estate he is reduced to.” In letters to the editor he was decried as a “pharisee of liberty,” an “imposter.” Every hireling scribbler was set to vilify them, wrote Abigail, who in her time in London acquired a dislike of the press that would last a lifetime.

OCCASIONS AT COURT grew increasingly tedious and strained for Adams and his family.

Particularly grating to Adams was the oft-spoken assumption among many of the British that sooner or later America would “of course” return to the British fold.

There is a strong propensity in this people [he wrote to Richard Henry Lee] to believe that America is weary of her independence; that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness; that no navigation acts we can make will be obeyed; no duties we lay on can be collected . . . that smuggling will defeat all our prohibitions, imposts and revenues. . . . This they love to believe.

Overall, the attitude toward America, he had come to realize, was hardly less hostile than it had been during the war.

“They hate us,” he wrote to a friend. One Englishman had declared in his presence, “I had rather America had been annihilated, than that she should have carried her point.”

Adams remained remarkably calm, nonetheless, conducting himself with model composure, and refusing to have any contact with Loyalists, with one exception.