AT Dover, in October 1783, father and son stepped onto English soil. The two latest generations of American Adamses were in the homeland of their ancestors and their language. John Adams was thrilled to find himself on the corner in London where John Street and Adams Street met. But they were also on soil where, only a year before, they could not have walked without arrest, subject to the penalties of treason. And yet, despite seven years of war, they felt, as did most Americans, the close connection between British and American culture.
Dashing around London as fast as good horses and a carriage could take them from one famous sight to another, they visited St. Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the British Museum, and the Royal Academy, then Windsor, Bath, Oxford, and Cambridge, where the new astronomical observatory made a great impression on John Quincy. They attended art galleries and theaters. At Westminster Abbey, John Quincy was overwhelmed with “Awe and Veneration” at the monuments to the great poets, especially the inscriptions, the quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the invocation “O rare Ben Jonson.” At Drury Lane and Covent Garden, he reveled in every sort of play, from Shakespeare to Tom Thumb. His theater of the mind became a theater of the stage. The monuments to great warriors struck a different chord, for how much to love and how much to hate England was both a personal and a political negotiation. With his father, he attended the opening of Parliament. The king “made his most gracious speech from the Throne: All the Peers were in their Robes which are scarlet and white: the King’s and the Prince of Wales’s were of purple velvet.” His father years later published an account of their reception on entering the lobby of the House of Lords. The usher appeared “in the room with his long staff, and roared out with a very loud voice, ‘Where is Mr. Adams, Lord Mansfield’s friend!’ I frankly avowed myself Lord Mansfield’s friend, and was politely conducted to my place.” That distinguished jurist had not too long before told “that same house of lords, ‘My Lords, if you do not kill him, he will kill you.’” It was great political theater, and a lesson for John Quincy about the conduct and courtesies of international relations: an enemy today can become a friend tomorrow.
At Dover, as if empowered by finding himself on the soil of his native language, John Quincy wrote his earliest extant poem, without rhyme and in irregular iambic pentameter:
There is a cliff whose high and bending head
Looks fearfully on the confined deep—
How dizzy ’tis to cast one’s eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air,
Seem scarce so gross as beetles. . . .
The fishermen that walk upon the beach
Appear like mice, and yon tall anchoring bark
Diminished to her cock; her cock a buoy,
Almost too small for sight. . . . I’ll look no more
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
With an exuberant eye that was both proud and self-critical, he disparaged his own poem to Peter Jay Munro, John Jay’s sixteen-year-old nephew, who had accompanied his famous uncle to Paris. In December, the Adamses visited “Twickenham, formerly the Residence of ALEXANDER POPE,” John Quincy’s favorite author next to Shakespeare. At the theater and with text in hand, he thrilled to Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, King Henry VIII, and Measure for Measure. He particularly noticed the difference between the styles of acting in Paris and London. That English audiences reacted so emotionally to the famous Mrs. Siddons’ performance of Isabella in Measure for Measure surprised him. “A young lady, in the next box to where we were,” almost fainted. She “was carried out. I am told that every night Mrs. Siddons performs this happens to some persons. I never heard of anything like it in France.” His love of Shakespeare, though, did not prevent him from being critical; this was the start of his practice of making even genius subject to analysis. His standards were rational and moral. From the start, he had a strong sense of language as the place at which all literary criticism begins. Noble as Hamlet is, he wrote to Peter Munro, “I am told that every night Mrs. Siddons performs, foolish things in it which can come out of the head of man. Only think of the following line, O woe is me! I have seen what I have seen, seeing what I see! . . . for a person in deep distress, is it not most pitiful, and it is full of puns and Quibbles. . . . But here I am plaguing you with a criticism of a play; which I suppose you think I might as well leave; for if you wanted a criticism you would make it yourself.” Munro disagreed but acknowledged that he could provide his own insights. “I am not a severe critic,” John Quincy responded. “As to my proving by a Line in Julius Caesar, the meaning of others in Othello, it is not more, nor (I may say) so much, as what all the able Commentators my predecessors have done, and therefore I have great Reason in so doing: I explain a Passage in an Author, by another in the same Author.” With youthful enthusiasm, they argued about the meaning and effectiveness of phrases in Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Julius Caesar.
Although Hamlet’s exile to the land of madness was an ironic theatrical joke, the young American recognized that the reality was a different matter. Father and son visited Bedlam, the hospital for the insane. They saw “a great number of fools and madmen, but as that is no more than what we see every day in the Street, and in Society,” he observed, “there is no Necessity of my giving you a detailed account of the poor wretches I saw there.” Was England mad; were its leaders self-destructive, its people imprisoned in poverty, many of the poor literally driven crazy? To American visitors, it seemed possible. France’s support of the United States made it undesirable for visiting Americans to take notice of conditions there. Few Americans, even longtime residents, foresaw the revolution that was on the near horizon. Joshua Johnson, who had fled from England to the safety of France and now had returned to London, where the Adamses visited him at his Tower Hill home, typified the American businessman, equally comfortable in both countries. Francophiles saw in Great Britain what they were conveniently blind to in France. Even Americans who embraced their English origins viewed Britain as a nation divided between a rich, all-powerful elite and an impoverished population groaning under the burden of an unequal distribution of wealth and the taxes that wars of empire created. Civil liberties were repressed. Beggars lined London streets. In the countryside, hovels predominated. To the Adamses, revolution in Britain seemed a distinct possibility, a new order to be formed on the American style of republican government. Until then, they felt it was likely that the rulers of Britain would find new occasions and means of making war on the United States.
Still, on this first visit to London, John Quincy’s spirits were so buoyant that he copied for Munro’s amusement a comic drinking song about the heavy-boozing “Old Toby,” the clay of whose body had been transformed into a brown jug that was “Now sacred to friendship, to mirth and mild ale, / So here’s to my lovely sweet Kate of the vale.” He slyly explained that he had his own “sweet Kate.” Why did he go to the theater so often? he rhetorically asked Munro. “I go pretty often to the play here, because, if there was no other enticement than this, that you are sure to find a number of fine women there, it would be enough for me. For a long time, every evening I went, I was in love with a new object.” He did acknowledge that there was a particular object of his infatuation. “Mr. Joshua Johnson, Great Tower Hill; London. That’s all I have to say. . . . P.S. Alas! . . . I am in a desperate Situation: I sometimes think of hanging, shooting, or drowning myself for—I won’t tell you what for.” The Johnsons entertained handsomely; Joshua was now the American consul in London, a nonpaying position of financial advantage to an American businessman, and the Adamses used his Cooper’s Row home as their mailing address. John Quincy did not say who at Tower Hill he was in a passion about. Johnson’s eldest daughter, Nancy, was ten; his next oldest, Louisa Catherine, eight. Perhaps Johnson’s beautiful twenty-six-year-old wife, Catherine, was the object of momentary infatuation. Maybe it was at least partly a tease and a joke to entertain Munro. “Alas! Alas! I have left her. Heaven knows when I shall see her again,” he wrote in January 1784 from The Hague. In another letter, he confessed that it was “entirely a joke, and to have something to say; for there is not a female in England, that would give me a half hour’s pain, if I never were to see her again.”
But an untitled poem that he wrote in early 1784 and sent to Munro suggests that, amid the joking, posturing, and exaggeration, there was indeed someone in London to whom he felt enough attraction to evoke poetic language to express his feelings. The myth of the Judgment of Paris provides part of the conventional frame of a ten-stanza poem about an impassioned lover of a beautiful woman who does not return his feelings. The object of his desire is called Chloe, one of the names of Demeter, a Greek goddess of fertility, and a popular name in eighteenth-century English poetry.
1. Oh love, thou tyrant of the breast,
Thou hast deprived me of my rest,
Oh thou hast changed me quite,
I lay me down upon my bed
Chloe comes straight into my head
And keeps me ’wake all night.
2. Or, when sleep comes to soothe my cares
Chloe again to me appears
How charming does she seem!
And then I think my Chloe’s kind;
But soon I wake and straight I find
That all was but a dream.
BY 1783 IT had been decided that Abigail and Nabby would sail to England. Adams desperately wanted to have his wife with him. He missed his only daughter, who was now of an age to come out fully into the world. That issue had arisen with an uncomfortable twist. Nabby had been pursued by and fallen in love with Royall Tyler, a young Boston lawyer from a successful family. Adams, who learned about it at the beginning of 1783, had reason to be suspicious of the man’s character. Tyler’s reputation was that of a carouser and ladies’ man. “He is but a prodigal son,” he wrote to his wife, “and though a penitent, has no right to your daughter, who deserves a character without a spot.” There were indications that Abigail had been encouraging the courtship. “I am so uneasy about this subject, that I would come instantly home, if I could with decency.” But since he could not, then his family must come to him, at least his wife and daughter. They would then all return to the United States together the next year, unless Congress appointed him to another European position, which he hoped would not happen. Thirteen-year-old Charles and eleven-year-old Thomas would stay with Abigail’s sister Elizabeth and her husband, John Shaw, who would tutor them. “Will you come to me this fall and go home with me in the spring? If you will,” Adams wrote from London, “come with my dear Nabby.” Whatever the cost and trouble, “I am so unhappy without you that I wish you would come. . . . I am determined to be with you in America or have you with me in Europe, as soon as it can be accomplished consistent with private prudence and the public good.” If his encouragement to her to sail would come too late for them to leave that summer, travel in the fall, he urged.
Finally, in June 1784, mother and daughter sailed from Boston, accompanied by two servants. Assuming that they had left months before, Adams did not write. By July, he was almost distraught and wrote to Abigail as if she were still at Braintree. “I have been in constant and anxious expectation of hearing of your arrival in London. Your letters encouraged me to hope and expect it, otherwise I should have been with you at Braintree before now. . . . My own opinion is that you had better stay. I will come home . . . and leave politics to those who understand them better and delight in them more.”
John Quincy stayed at The Hague through the spring of 1784, plunging back into his Latin and Greek studies. “I am still here in my Solitude,” he wrote to Peter Munro, “and have got quite accustomed to it. . . . I don’t regret the amusements of the great cities. Was it not for the desire I have of seeing you, and enjoying your company, I should not have the least inclination of returning to Paris.” He was not “in the merriest mood.” If he did not have the distraction of an excellent library, he would “almost despond.” The Hague “is one of the prettiest Places, in the world. . . . Yet I had rather be almost anywhere else . . . there is no such thing as Sociability.” Money is all everyone seemed to care about. “I scarcely know a person of my age in the whole place.” In response to Munro’s criticism, he defended his poem about Chloe, word by word, line by line, and now assured him “for certain [Chloe] is a real living person.” Books and ideas helped the days to pass quickly. As he read the Roman historians, he had no doubt about their lessons for American life. He and Munro “differed in opinion upon the subject of Julius Caesar. . . . You thought him a great and a good man; carried away by his ambition. I regarded him and I do still, as a tyrant, and as a bold audacious villain, whose determination was to enslave his country, no matter by what means. I find that his whole life was a continuing encroachment upon the liberties of his country.”
When Munro disagreed with John Quincy’s claim that Paradise Lost was as great a poem as the Aeneid, the young critic vigorously defended his view, arguing the importance of a balance between original thought and respect for the opinion of acknowledged authorities. But an independent mind came first. Munro seemed to John Quincy to have little of it. “I will give you the opinion I have formed myself of the two Poems. . . . I am pretty well acquainted with both; for I have read Paradise Lost attentively; and within the last four months I have translated that whole Poem into writing with my own hand, and therefore I hope you will allow me to have a Sentiment of my own upon that matter, and I declare I think Paradise Lost . . . very near if not quite equal to the Aeneid.” He advised Munro “never to decide a thing in your own mind upon hearsay alone but to examine things yourself and judge for yourself. . . . For why in the name of Heaven, should not men be capable of as great things now as they were two thousand years ago?”
Great things were on his mind but so was discretion, which he valued. As a sixteen-year-old much in the company of adults, he had early on developed a standard of discretion often at odds with his temperament. On the one hand, spontaneity and frankness were natural to him. On the other, he was aware that, though frankness could be an asset, masking one’s views and feelings was sometimes a strategic necessity. He realized that there were always people ready to use his own words against him, and that the mask of convention could protect him from attack. He did not want to be different. He wanted to be better, to be an embodiment of the highest fulfillment of the New England values into which he had been born. And those values, as they had developed, emphasized free speech and original thought under the guidance of discretion and a due respect for other people. Originality of mind was consistent with conservatism. With Munro he could be uninhibitedly himself. But he reminded Munro twice “not to let my Opinions when they are contrary to the common ones be known to anyone but yourself.”
WELL BEFORE HIS mother was at sea, John Quincy was on his way to London to meet her and Nabby on the assumption that they had sailed at least a month earlier. His father had important business in Amsterdam and could not come. John Quincy’s instructions were to meet his mother and sister in England, make travel arrangements, and hasten them to Holland for the long-desired reunion. But the slowness of delivery and the possible loss of letters made it partly a comedy of the unknown. Delighted to leave The Hague, he arrived in London a little after the middle of May 1794. While waiting for their arrival, he had the pleasure of hearing the twenty-four-year-old arch-Tory William Pitt, the youngest prime minister ever, and his opponent, the radical, pro-American Whig James Fox, in Parliament. He soon heard William Burke addressing the House for over two hours, criticizing the king for having dissolved the previous Parliament, an attack on arbitrary royal authority that any American patriot would have admired. When an American captain brought news that there had been talk of a wedding “in our family,” John Quincy thought it likely, he wrote to his father, that “we shall not have the pleasure of seeing my sister here.” It seemed reasonable to conclude that both ladies were still in Braintree.
A disappointed John Quincy returned to the Netherlands and resumed his studies, only to learn toward the end of July that his mother and sister had landed in England three days earlier. Nabby and Tyler had decided on a trial year’s separation; they would be married on her return. John Quincy was immediately dispatched to London. “I send you a son who is the greatest traveler of his age,” John Adams wrote to Abigail, “and . . . I think as promising and manly a youth as is in the world.” On July 30, Abigail’s servant came running into their hotel room. “‘Young Mr. Adams is come.’ ‘Where where is he,’ we all cried out?” “I drew back not really believing my eyes—till he cried out, ‘Oh my mamma! and my dear sister.’” Nothing but the eyes at first sight appeared as the boy he once was. “His appearance is that of a man, and in his countenance the most perfect good humor.” Adams was overjoyed with the news of their safe arrival. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” Traveling as quickly as he could, he was in Abigail’s arms on August 7, after four and a half years of separation. He learned from her that Congress had appointed him, with Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, a commissioner to negotiate treaties of commerce with all the major European states. Jefferson was in London as well. It was John Quincy’s first meeting with the forty-one-year-old Virginian.
The beauty of the late summer countryside impressed the Adamses as they drove from Calais to Paris, where Adams and Jefferson, Franklin’s replacement, were to begin negotiating treaties with various European states. Nabby and her brother renewed their friendship, big sister now with a little brother who had become an impressive young man. In the middle of August 1785, they settled into a grand house in suburban Auteuil, four miles west of Paris. Abigail was overwhelmed by its size and luxury, less so by Paris. She had come from the small, stoic houses of New England and the stringency of wartime Massachusetts. London she had thought beautiful and elegant—not semifeudal Paris, “a horrid dirty city. . . . But where my treasure is here shall my heart go,” she wrote to her sister Elizabeth, and her treasure had to be in Paris for the time being. She soon partly adjusted to the attractions of French life for people of rank and means, which included dinners (some of which the Adamses hosted); court occasions at Versailles; and the theater, which they went to frequently, sometimes to Abigail’s discomfort at the immorality of the French stage. Even the comparatively latitudinarian John Quincy noted in his diary that the plays in Paris “almost universally are very indecent.” The public taste “seems to be entirely corrupted.” Fascinated by a balloon ascension he had seen the previous year, he saw another well-publicized launching. “I heartily wish they would bring [the] balloon to such a perfection, as that I might go to N. York, Philadelphia, or Boston in five days time.” Pomp and ceremony got on his nerves. Religious superstition seemed absurd. Standing in a shop, he heard the tinkling of a bell that signified that a priest was on his way to administer last rites. All those present but he fell on their knees and “began to mutter prayers and cross themselves.”
The Adamses’ social circle in Paris was large and delightful, especially for Nabby, who was introduced to a social life she had not experienced before. John Quincy had one old friend from his Passy days, Franklin’s grandson Benjamin Bache. But he envied the good fortune of his closest Paris friend, Peter Jay Munro, who had returned to America, and looked forward to his own return, though no date had been set. All the Adamses were on easy terms with the diplomatic corps, with Franklin’s American and French circle at Passy, with wealthy and accomplished Americans in Paris, with the French friends of America, particularly the Marquis de Lafayette and his wife, and especially with Jefferson. They were uneasy, though, with the proliferation and hierarchy of servants, the code of legitimated theft by servants and shopkeepers, the lack of a serious work ethic, and the frivolous use of time, energy, and money that characterized the French upper class. At Carnival time, John Quincy noticed that the government encouraged diversions and entertainment in the Paris streets, even hiring people to wear masks and run about. “Thus does this government take every measure imaginable to keep the eyes of the people shut upon their own situation: and they really do it very effectually.” An actor at a play he was attending made an indirect reference to the king that was menacingly hostile. “I shall never forget the effect of this incident upon my reflections at the time.” That spring, John Quincy made note of Beaumarchais’ criticism of the king in The Marriage of Figaro and his consequent imprisonment. He had to be thinking that something potentially explosive was in the air.
The Jefferson and Adams families were on familiar, come-anytime terms. Without a son, Jefferson took a special interest in John Quincy. They talked about books, philosophy, history, and the Latin and Greek authors the young man was studying. In carriage rides, on walks, at one another’s homes, they were regularly together. John Adams was delighted to have Jefferson as a colleague and friend. On political matters, he seemed to John Quincy “a man of great judgment.” When Jefferson discoursed about his native Virginia, he told his eager young listener that tobacco was a soil-destroying crop, which should be replaced by wheat, and that “the blacks . . . are very well treated . . . [and] increase in population more in proportion than the whites.” Lanky, freckled, with reddish-blond hair, Jefferson was a combination of Virginia courteousness and an ideological iron fist. Shy and uncomfortable in large groups, he was charming and relaxed in personal conversation. Adams and Jefferson had been colleagues in Philadelphia, with hardly a difference between them on the issue of independence. Like the Adamses, Jefferson had an unshakable American patriotism. He and Adams, both well educated and widely read, having worked closely and well before, were to work closely and well for much of the next year. Jefferson would remain in France, replacing Franklin early the next year as the U.S. minister there. But John Adams’ days in Paris were numbered, as he learned in April 1785. In early February, Congress, after divisive rivalries and split votes, had appointed him the first American minister to the Court of St. James’s. Abigail was to return to London, the city to which she had taken an immediate liking. John Quincy, if all went well, would soon be on his way home.
THE LONELY EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD felt every bump of the bad road from Paris to the coast. He had not been home for five and a half years. He had been away for seven of his eighteen years and had become, oddly enough, in his father’s resonant phrase, “the greatest Traveller, of his age,” having spent long periods in Amsterdam, The Hague, St. Petersburg, and Paris; crossed the Atlantic four times; and traversed by mule, horse, carriage, and sled the abysmal roads of Spain, Germany, Russia, and Sweden, and the better roads of France and the Low Countries. He had traveled at least fifteen thousand miles. He wanted very much to go home. He was leaving because he and his parents believed that if he did not leave, he would not be able to identify himself fully enough or be identified by others as an American. It was a given that every Adams male had to earn his own living. If it were to be done as an American, it had to be preceded by an American education. It was also a firm Adams family belief that John Adams had gone into public service at considerable financial sacrifice. The family thought it likely that John Quincy would follow in his father’s footsteps. But whether it was to be the law or government, they agreed that it was essential he return to America, despite the pain of separation. Fifty years later he wrote in his diary that “my return home in 1785 from Auteuil, leaving my father when he was going on his mission to England, decided the fate and fortunes of my after-life. It was my own choice, and the most judicious choice that I ever made.” It was to some great degree, he believed, a testimony to the power of attachment to one’s native place, of a primal and emotional patriotism, beyond rational explanation. At Harvard, he would meet young men of his own age “and form connections in early life amongst those with whom he is to pass his days,” as Abigail wrote to her friend Mercy Warren. “My son has made a wise choice.”
Aboard the Courier de l’Amérique bound from Lorient to New York City, he had the amusing though irksome charge of supervising the care of seven greyhounds, a gift from Lafayette to George Washington. On the evening of May 25, 1795, they sailed into the night sky. When John Quincy awakened, “we had nothing but the sea, and the azure vault bespangled with stars, within our sight.” He was seasick for four days as the ship rocked in calm weather, without any breeze at all. He feared that the voyage would be a long one. One of the ship’s officers seemed barely competent, the result, he believed, of the French practice of making government appointments strictly by birth and favoritism. By day, the rocking of the ship kept him from much reading or writing. He had pledged that he would keep a daily diary, which he would afterward share with Nabby. He focused on the weather and on character sketches of his fellow passengers. At night, fear of fire mandated that the ship sail in darkness. With only five passengers, social life was limited. The personality of a Dutch merchant who had traveled the world impressed on John Quincy that “every nation seems to have a peculiar characteristic, which nothing can efface: whether it is owing to education, or to the nature of the different climates, I cannot tell. I rather think to both.” He stopped short of self-analysis, but he noted that the sailors “prefer being mistaken, to being right by the information of another.” They sailed into tropical summer weather, then northward. He had wanted to be on American soil by July 4, “the greatest day in the year, for every true American,” and wrote from memory into his diary lines from a favorite poem by James Thomson that, in John Quincy’s mind, identified America as the place where liberty will survive despite its loss everyplace else. On July 4, they were still at sea. Seven weeks after sailing from Lorient, they finally sighted land. Guns were fired off Sandy Hook for a pilot to come aboard as the Courier de l’Amérique waited for the tide to turn. John Quincy was soon walking on Manhattan streets.
THE YOUNG MAN who spent three midsummer weeks in New York had a distant resemblance to the eleven-year-old boy who had sailed to Europe six years before. Introduced as someone of importance, he was indeed a young man with a pedigree and credentials, the son of the first American minister to the Court of St. James’s, with powerful friends like Jay and Jefferson and Franklin. In the small world of American politics, that meant a great deal. John Quincy’s share in this patronage society was small and fragile. But it made his weeks in New York a pleasurable whirl of dinners, at one of which he met Tom Paine. He had letters to deliver, especially to the newly appointed secretary for foreign affairs, his father’s good friend, John Jay. With Jay, he visited the Dutch minister, and soon he was introduced to Elbridge Gerry and Rufus King, two Massachusetts delegates; James Monroe of the Virginia delegation; Henry Knox, the secretary of war; and George Clinton, the governor of New York. He accepted the invitation of the president of Congress, Richard Henry Lee, to board at his home. His days were filled with parties, walks, and excursions. “I have been introduced . . . to almost all the members of Congress,” he wrote to his father, “and to a great number” of New Yorkers. He knew that attentions were paid to him for his “father’s sake.”
But he was also of special interest for what he had to say about Europe, as if he were an authority. Members of Congress were eager for news from London about what steps the British were taking to implement the peace treaty. Its terms required that they evacuate their forts on the northwestern frontier, but they apparently were being reinforced. The British had decided not to evacuate without good faith evidence that American debtors were repaying British merchants for debts incurred before the war, which the treaty also required. A crisis seemed at hand. Various states had passed laws freeing American debtors from any legal obligation to pay. In London, John Adams quickly became aware that no progress would be made on settling outstanding issues until the anti-repayment laws were repealed, but state legislatures and American businessmen opposed repeal. Foreign policy conflicted with domestic pressures. “The politicians here wait with great impatience to hear from you,” John Quincy wrote to his father, summarizing the political situation as if he were writing a diplomatic dispatch.
Having overstayed his time in New York, he was already too late to be home in time for the Harvard commencement, an entertaining holiday for those in the Boston area with connections to the college. “You will perhaps think I had better be at my studies,” John Quincy wrote to his father, “and give you an account of their progress, than say so much upon politics. But while I am in this place I hear of nothing but politics.” Accompanied by a recent French-American acquaintance, he made his way northward and eastward on poor roads, having been persuaded that he would have a better chance to see the country by road than from the packet from New York to Providence. At New Haven, he delivered a letter to Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, whom Jefferson had described as “an uncommon instance of the deepest learning without a spark of genius.” Since the country did not have a developed postal system, John Quincy was sometimes given letters to be delivered along his route. In exchange, he had convenient introductions to notable people who provided hospitality, which slowed his pace. “I am very impatient to get home to Boston,” he wrote to his sister. At Hartford, he delivered a letter from his father to the poet and lawyer John Trumbull, who had been Adams’ law student. Crossing into Massachusetts, he was pleasantly surprised when “the mistress of the tavern where we dined told me my name.” She said “she knew me from my resemblance to my father who had passed several times this way.”
On August 25, 1785, having been on the road for ten days, he finally reached State Street in Boston. At Cambridge, he embraced his brother Charles, a member of the new freshman class, and other family members. “I shall not attempt to describe the different sensations I experienced in meeting after so long an absence the friends of my childhood, and a number of my nearest and dearest relations. This day will be forever . . . deeply rooted in my memory. . . . It has been one of the happiest I ever knew.”
Everything at first seemed vivid in the light of the present moment, enriched by comparison between six years before and now. “No person who has not experienced it,” he noted, “can conceive how much pleasure there is in returning to our country . . . when it was left at the time of life that I did. . . . The most trifling objects now appear interesting.” His aunt Mary noticed that he was “quite a stranger in his own country,” an exotic bird to himself and others, a young American who had spent so much of his boyhood in Europe. But he had little difficulty relearning his American self. Fifty years later, he commented in his diary, “There is a character of romantic wildness about the memory of my travels in Europe from 1778 to 1785, which gives to it a tinge as if it were the recollection of something in another world.” Over the next weeks he visited aunts and uncles, his extended family, and the Adamses’ social world. He was deeply moved when he entered the family home at Braintree in which his father had been born, now occupied by Aunt Mary and Uncle Richard Cranch. He was accompanied by Royall Tyler, who was boarding with the Cranches and studying law. “It reminded me of the days of my childhood, most of which were passed in it, but it looked so lonely and melancholy without its inhabitants.” He “went to the library, and looked over the books, which are in good condition; only somewhat musty and dusty, which shows that their owner is not with them.” Like his father, he had become a lover and collector of books, gratified even by their feel and smell. His father’s books without his father made him miss his father all the more. But John Quincy floated with pleasure in the ambience of the family that he had not seen for so long, including his brothers and especially his paternal grandmother. She asked him over and over again, “When will they return? . . . I could only answer with a sigh.” As he sat at meeting, listening to Reverend Anthony Wibird, it all seemed so familiar that it was as if he “had heard him every week” since he had left Braintree. Looking at the congregation, he recognized only some of the faces.
The president of Harvard, who questioned him about what Greek and Latin texts he had studied, advised him “to wait till next spring before I offer, and then enter for three months in the junior Sophister class.” He had not read, let alone mastered, all the texts required for admission. Soon he was on the road to Haverhill to submit himself to the tutelage of his uncle, Reverend John Shaw, at whose home he would live. His thirteen-year-old brother Tom, also preparing to qualify for Harvard, was already Shaw’s pupil. John Thaxter, who had opened a law practice in Haverhill, introduced John Quincy to various local families, especially those in which there were young ladies. Seventeen-year-old Nancy Hazen, an orphan adopted by a former Haverhill resident, lived with the Shaws. Slender, of medium height, with dark hair and good features, she had blue eyes that sparkled “with natural Wit, sweet sensibility, and the most perfect good humour,” Elizabeth Shaw had written to her sister Abigail the previous year, assuring her that Charles was too young to be in danger. John Quincy’s cousin Elizabeth Cranch lived close by, at the home of Leonard White, who was also preparing for Harvard. Elizabeth’s brother William divided his time among Harvard, Braintree, and Haverhill. Another attraction was Royall Tyler. Soon Tyler and John Quincy were having long conversations. But at the same time, a letter breaking off Nabby’s engagement was on its way across the Atlantic, something Tyler may have sensed coming.
Between May 1785, when John Quincy had sailed from Lorient, and August, Nabby felt she had increasing reason to end her engagement. Through the spring and summer she was disappointed, bewildered, and then pained that not one letter from her fiancé arrived. Word came from the Cranches implying that Tyler was behaving erratically and unreliably. He had boasted that he had not written to Nabby. He failed to deliver letters that she had sent him to pass along to others, and did not mail letters that people had asked him to mail to her. If his judgment in small matters seemed poor, what could be expected of him in large ones? Was he being irrationally possessive or manipulative? Or was this his way of expressing ambivalence? It was all worrying and suspicious. Had she made a mistake? Nabby asked herself. In late May, soon after John Quincy’s departure, she met the newly arrived secretary to the legation, William Stephens Smith, a thirty-year-old Princeton graduate and former Revolutionary War officer. Within weeks he approached Abigail about his interest in Nabby. In consultation with her parents, she decided to break her engagement to Tyler. That she had a new suitor in the wings was an advantage but not a precipitating factor, though she saw Smith daily if only because he worked in the building that Adams had bought to serve as the first American legation and the minister’s residence. In December, the month in which Smith formally asked for permission to marry Nabby, Tyler announced that he was going to London to explain everything and reestablish the engagement.
Meanwhile, John Quincy had ample opportunity to fall in love with Nancy Hazen. The infatuation kept him in minor turmoil for some months. In New York, he had enjoyed meeting lovely women and made note in his diary of their attractions, especially expressing interest in why he found one type more attractive than another. Did blondness and fair skin appeal to him more than dark hair and complexion? He came to no conclusion. But he strongly preferred women who were modest, engaging, and unblemished by vanity. It is “rather a dangerous situation,” his cousin Elizabeth wrote to Abigail. “He tells me that his heart is wonderfully susceptible, that he falls in love one moment and is over the next.” He felt passionate but ambivalent about Nancy. She already had a number of suitors, of which he was not one, and he had neither means nor desire for a formal relationship. “She either treats her admirers too well or too ill,” he noted. He continued to rate the qualities of many of the local ladies, though “Miss Nancy” was most frequently in his company and on his mind. Much of the rest of his mind and time was devoted to Latin and Greek studies. Harvard was more important than Nancy, though he struggled with his feelings, his reason at variance with his heart. In London, Nabby met a beautiful Swedish lady whom she had reason to think, she wrote teasingly, had been someone who had made her brother’s heart flutter. “I have heretofore more than once,” he confessed to his diary, “been obliged to exert all my resolution to keep myself free from a passion which I could not indulge, and which would have made me miserable had I not overcome it. I have escaped till now more perhaps owing to my good fortune than to my own firmness, and now again I am put to trial. . . . I never was in greater danger.”
In mid-November 1795, he felt enough endangered to hope that Nancy would indefinitely extend a week away, for when “the passions are high and the blood is warm, it is impossible to make a choice with prudence necessary upon such an occasion,” and imprudence could lead to fatal error. “May it be my lot, at least for ten years to come, never to have my heart exclusively possessed by any individual of the other sex.” Affairs were out of the question; parental and societal disapproval would be restrictive and severe. And Nancy, even if she had had a special interest in John Quincy, who had neither a profession nor means, would not have considered him suitable. Unintentionally, she helped him overcome his passion. He soon felt “in much better spirits” than “for a considerable time. . . . I am now fully satisfied that I have nothing to fear. . . . I never saw Nancy coquet it quite so much,” he noted. “She seemed really determined to outstrip herself.” Infatuation faded; friendship commenced, and he began to worry about Nancy’s imprudence and her welfare. He comforted himself with a poem, “To Delia,” written in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets of the sort he so much admired in Pope’s poetry, with the same moral as The Rape of the Lock. He had, he told his sister, a rage for rhyming.
Let poets boast in smooth and labored strains
Of unfelt passions and pretended pains.
To my rude numbers, Delia now attend,
Nor view me, as a lover, but a friend. . . .
I, whom neither love nor passion blind,
Seek the unfading beauties of the mind.
The conventional lesson was neatly expressed:
For all the gifts that nature can impart
Are vain without the virtues of the heart.
And his own heart was at issue:
The flames of passion seek not to excite
Unless you wish that passion to requite.
Bad things happened, he warned, to cruel and reckless women who raised passions without regard to the consequences. Did he give Nancy the poem to read? Did she respond?
He began three months of redoubled effort at his studies. “His candle goeth out not by night,” Aunt Elizabeth wrote to Nabby. “I really fear he will ruin his eyes.” He focused on Virgil, Horace, Homer, Xenophon, Greek grammar, the Greek New Testament, geography, a logic textbook, and Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding. That Harvard required Locke’s Essay, which denied the existence of innate ideas, marks how far it had already distanced itself from Calvinist orthodoxy. “I am very much inclined to think him right. It has been said that his argument to prove that the existence of a God is not an innate idea may be injurious, but they make no alteration in the reality.” God can be seen in his creation, in nature, so the argument that each human being is born with the knowledge that God exists seemed unnecessary to John Quincy. What he found conclusive and indisputable was that justice and virtue are not innate in human beings. They needed to be taught, as he had been by his parents, society, and his own efforts. And, he concluded, the multiplicity of religious sects in New England was a good thing. The more there were, the less likely that any one of them could dictate to others. They all seemed to him more or less equally good and bad. And the idea of a divinity who condemned people to everlasting hell “for what they could not in any measure help or prevent” was abhorrent. It was a view he never changed. The purpose of religion was to help and comfort people, not to condemn them. Its teachings should be predominantly ethical and practical, not theological. And “whatever a man’s religious principles,” it was “impolite and improper for him to ridicule the general opinion.”
On New Year’s Eve 1785, he consoled himself with the thought that, whatever his errors of the past year, at least he did not have to reproach himself “with vice, which it has always been my principle to dread, and my endeavor to shun.” In February, Nancy moved to another welcoming home in the neighborhood. “Her going away has given me pleasure, with respect to myself; as she was the cause of many disagreeable circumstances to me. There was a time when I was sensible of being more attached to her than I should wish to be to any young lady.” Still, he liked her, except for her vanity. They parted as friends, though in mid-February, when she and John Thaxter came for dinner, he recognized that he could never quite make up his mind about her. That night she seemed a less admirable person than he had sometimes thought and always wanted her to be. None of that mattered now.
In mid-March 1786, in clear mild weather, he mounted his horse, crossed the river by flatboat on a path cut through the ice, and rode to Cambridge. The next day he was examined, orally at first, before the president, four tutors, three professors, and the librarian, almost the entire Harvard faculty. He may not have noticed that it was the Ides of March. There were some questions he could not answer at all. He was put briefly to the test of Locke and Isaac Watts’ Logic, for which he was prepared, and of some geography questions for which he was not; and was asked to construe three stanzas of Latin poetry and some lines of Homer. Then, in another room, he was asked to translate in writing a paragraph from English into Latin. When he was done, the president took it and returned fifteen minutes later, “marching as the heroes on the French stage do,” and said, “You are admitted, Adams,” as an upper junior, with a waiver of fees out of respect to his father’s service to his country.
ON MARCH 22, 1786, the night sky over rural Cambridge was emblazoned with “the most extraordinary northern lights” John Quincy had ever seen, so bright that in a night without moonlight he could read ordinary print outdoors. In a world in which the alternatives for reading were daylight or candlelight, it was a moment of pleasurable wonder. It also illumined a college world that he found both enlightened and provincial. He sized up President Joseph Willard quickly: a man of great pomposity and vanity who insists that “there are no misters among the undergraduates. . . . He calls them Sir” and declines to speak to the two undergraduates who live in his house. John Quincy was addressed as “Sir Adams.” The incompetence of most of the tutors, recent graduates, made them targets of John Quincy’s sharp tongue. “Your brother is exceedingly severe upon the foibles of mankind,” Elizabeth Shaw wrote to Nabby. “And if anyone says to him, Mr. Adams you are too satirical—Not more severe than just,” he replies.
His attraction to satire and irony had its dangers. On the one hand, he could not help making fun of pretension and vanity. On the other, those he satirized had virtues. His passion for fairness required that he provide an objective assessment. Willard, the butt of ridicule for being stiff and pedantic, was also “esteemed and respected for his learning.” John Quincy also needed to take into account that a sharp tongue could be counterproductive. It could be witty, intelligent, and literary as practiced by some of the writers he most admired, from the Roman satirists to Pope and Swift. But it also had an abrasive edge, a critical deflation that could give its targets pain. For a young man intent on making his way in a highly socialized world, a sharp tongue would make enemies. And it would make rough the path to either the bar or government service. “I have already come to the resolution of showing all the respect and deference to every member of the government of the College that they can possibly claim,” he wrote to Nabby, “but to you I can venture to give my real sentiments, such as arise spontaneously in my mind, and that I cannot restrain.” And he could also give them to his diary. He was, though, then and much more so later, to think of his brief time at Harvard as a turning point in his life. “My short discipline of fifteen months . . . was the introduction to all the prosperity that has ever befallen me, and perhaps saved me from early ruin,” he wrote fifty years later.
That he was argumentative required finding a balance between deference to elders and self-assertion. He gave high value to reason and evidence. But with more experience of the world beyond Boston than most of his elders, and already widely read, he had a high regard for and stubborn adherence to his own views. In private, he was often vigorously outspoken. “He had imbibed some curious notions,” Aunt Elizabeth wrote to his mother, “and was rather peculiar in some of his opinions, and a little too decisive and tenacious of them.” But, she assured Abigail, “in company Mr JQA was always agreeable, pleasing, modest, and polite, and it was only in private conversations that those imperfections of youth were perceivable.” Sensible Aunt Elizabeth, who loved and cherished him, knew him well. She was, though, at best an unreliable prophet. He might change some particular tactics but not his personality. Over time, he learned enough control of his argumentative stubbornness to use it as an effective tool of negotiation. And he learned to use his satiric skills masterfully in political debate, especially in his congressional career. But he often struggled not to use them disadvantageously. His aunt’s prophetic eye was not totally partisan when she observed that in John Quincy, “I see the wise politician, the good statesman, and the patriot in embryo.” And for those with whom he did not put on a public face, he had a warmth and openness that caused Aunt Elizabeth to shed tears of regret at his departure from her home in March 1786. “I wish Mr JQA had never left Europe,” she wrote to her sister, “that he had never come into our family. Then we should not have known him. Then we should not have been so grieved. Then we should not have this occasion of sorrow.” There may have been more than a touch of drama in this letter for the pleasure of her sister. But Elizabeth was sincere.
What Adams most valued about Harvard was that it gave him the opportunity to reenter American life. He was, though, soon aware of its limits. More so than he had anticipated, it was provincial. The small faculty was less talented than he had expected, more learned than communicative, and almost always dictatorial. Most faculty members were Christian clergymen; the tilt was in the direction of liberal Congregationalism. The system was based on lectures; students were required to parrot back what they had read and recite their translations from Latin and Greek. A good memory and diligent preparation were great assets. The schedule required early morning communal prayer. At Haverhill, John Quincy had gotten used to studying late into the night. Now it made more sense to rise early, the start of a lifelong pattern. He soon got a taste of the full regimen, lectures and recitals in Latin, Greek, Euclid, Locke, Hebrew, religion, and science. He was comfortable with numbers and mechanical devices, with barometers and record keeping. The sky above and the weather below fascinated him. More than any other subject, astronomy excited him. The night sky always compelled his attention. “Mathematics and natural philosophy are studies so agreeable,” he wrote in his diary, “that the time I devote to them seems a time of relaxation.” Professor Williams closed the science course with lines from Pope’s Essay on Man, “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose Body, Nature is, and God, the Soul,” marrying liberal Christianity with the eighteenth-century scientific worldview. What John Quincy equally valued was the atmosphere of collegial community, of which he had had almost none in his European years.
Sometimes the community functioned in unattractive ways. “It seems almost . . . a maxim among the governors of the College,” Adams observed, “to treat the students pretty much like brute beasts.” Morale suffered. Resentments built. “If anything . . . can teach me humility, it will be to see myself subjected to the commands of a person that I must despise.” Rivalries among classes and students encouraged practical jokes and fistfights. High spirits, rowdiness, and mob judgment led to smashed windows and broken furniture. Soon after his arrival, the sophomores “assembled . . . some of them got drunk . . . then . . . broke a number of windows . . . and after this sublime maneuver staggered to their chambers. Such are the great achievements of many of the sons of Harvard.” His parents’ standards kept him to the straight and narrow. “Drunkenness is the mother of every vice,” he noted in his diary, alcohol the fuel that drove asocial acts. Wine, which appealed to John Quincy who had learned in Europe the attraction of moderate amounts, sometimes sent him tipsy to bed. But his internal monitor kept that to a minimum, especially during his year of hard study in 1786–1787. Warnings and advice came from Abigail. He was well out of Europe because the temptation to vice would be less in America, but young men always needed to be advised against drink and sex. The first would lead to the second. Then came gambling, which seemed to Abigail a national preoccupation in England, along with lying and scandal. At Harvard, they were companionable sports. Abigail particularly worried that Charles would be tempted. Would John Quincy stand guard over his brother? What the Adamses most feared was personal dissoluteness. For their nation, they feared that prosperity would sap the new country’s moral rectitude, its dedication to the principles of the revolution.
Vacations were spent mostly at Haverhill and Braintree, except for the Christmas holiday of 1786. Since there was an acute shortage of wood, Harvard started the vacation early. John Quincy got permission to stay on campus, where, despite the chill, he read and studied. The quiet and solitude appealed to him. Crowded conditions at Braintree kept him from studying or sleeping. The boys “make such a noise in the morning as would make you laugh,” Mary Cranch wrote to her sister. “In Charles,” Elizabeth Shaw wrote, “I behold those qualities that form the engaging, the well accomplished gentleman, the friend of science, the favorite of the Muses, and the Graces, as well as of the ladies.” Abigail might have seen in this assessment, disguised as a compliment, things to be concerned about. “In Thomas . . . I discern a more martial, and intrepid spirit . . . a love of business . . . indefatigable in everything.” In both cases, Elizabeth Shaw proved a poor prophet.
From the start, it seems as if Abigail and John Adams put more intensity into and raised higher hopes for their eldest son than for his brothers. Charles was already at Harvard when John Quincy arrived, and Thomas enrolled the next year. Neither was particularly studious. A friend reported to Abigail that at Haverhill John Quincy was “as studious as a hermit.” The brothers hunted and fished at Haverhill and Braintree. At the Shaws’, they slept together in one large bed, companionable siblings in a world in which beds were often shared. In July 1786, Thomas entered as a freshman. Their cousin and friend Billy Cranch studied shoulder to shoulder with John Quincy. “If you [were] to see them all together it would give you great pleasure,” Mary Cranch wrote to her sister. “Four more promising youths are seldom seen, may nothing happen to blast our hopes!”
NO MATTER ITS flaws, Harvard was, in John Quincy’s view, “upon a much better plan” than any university he had seen in Europe. It took seriously its mission to teach morals and civic responsibility; its commitment was to the values and welfare of the new republic. After all, the purpose of education was to train men to be effective stewards of their own lives and civic leaders in religion, law, and government. The good life for the individual and nation depended on the inseparability of moral conduct and character; on honorable conduct; on respect for piety, learning, and the law; on discipline and hard work; on unshakable patriotism; and on everything else that John Adams had taught his son to associate with Christian and republican virtue. The test was conduct, not catechism, and to the extent that many of his fellow students failed it, John Quincy hoped that some of them would eventually do better. Such was human nature, not to be condemned but to be educated and encouraged into improvement. Parentage counted, but training was crucial, and the opportunities Harvard provided for betterment became the grounds of his gratitude. Despite the rote nature of the curriculum and the inadequacy of the tutors, he flourished in his refusal to make the institution’s flaws an obstacle to his own progress. And he embraced its main strengths: the science, mathematics, and philosophy courses, and the system of essay preparations on set topics for oral presentation and debate, usually about moral choices and civic responsibilities. He could already write with expressive facility and a high level of precision and energy. His diary kept the synergy flowing between his mind and pen. He now needed to combine these talents into cohesive and persuasive structures, and to learn how to give them effective oral expression.
In April 1786, he heard his first forensic disputation, a set assignment on “the question of whether a democratical form of government was the best.” The entire class participated, seriatim, one arguing that it was best, the next the contrary. “This is one of the excellent institutions of this University,” John Quincy wrote to his sister. The question put to him in his first disputation was “whether the immortality of the human soul is probable from natural reason.” He had been assigned the affirmative. “But it so happens that whatever the question may be, I must support it.” In an essay on the widespread belief that death liberates the human soul from its body, he invoked the example of “the enslaved African, bending under the weight of oppression and scourged by the rod of tyranny,” who “sighs for the day when death shall put a period to his woes, and his soul again return to be happy in his native country.”
There was an unleashed energy about John Quincy’s studiousness startling even to his family and more so to his Harvard contemporaries. He aimed to study at least six hours a day in addition to classes. This was partly a rebound from his desultory European years, partly an effort to emulate his father, for whom he had unbounded admiration, even to the extent, his aunt Elizabeth remarked, of imitating his posture and walk. And he had inherited his father’s tendency to gain weight, though Abigail took some credit for this feature also. Exercise, she urged, to keep the fat off. He had been trained from early on to believe not only that he had a great future but that success depended upon his unremitting efforts. “Near as we are to Boston,” he told his father, “I have been there only once. . . . A person who wishes to make any figure as a scholar at this University must not spend much time, either in visiting or in being visited.” There was another price to be paid. Some of his classmates resented him. That he was the son of the famous John Adams did not help. He wanted to be liked, but he wanted more to be successful. He also worried that his ambition had the potential to be self-destructive. If he reached too high, he might too readily fall. Ambition was neither a Christian nor a republican virtue, and merit should be its own reward. It should not need to tout itself. Unfulfilled ambition might gnaw at the spirit and body. Fulfilled ambition, however, might attract resentment. Honors and rewards should search out deserving men, not be sought after. It was a view that father and son shared, always in principle if not in performance. Having been bred to be ambitious, John Quincy tried to make his ambition as little visible as possible.
But his work ethic and his talents made him unusually noticeable. Attracted to music, he learned to play the flute. There were two elite societies at Harvard, each with ten or so members. Both held regular meetings, requiring the preparation of written essays on set subjects for oral presentation and debate. John Quincy was elected to the small Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter in June 1786. The A.B. Club, a local creation, also met regularly in student rooms, for collegiality and intellectual stimulation. He rarely missed meetings of either, part of a select company that included his closest college friends, his cousin Billy Cranch, Leonard White from Haverhill, and James Bridge from Maine. At Phi Beta Kappa, he had his competitor for class honors, Nathaniel Freeman; Moses Little from Newbury, bright and engaging, became a friend; James Forbes was youthful and unfocused but charming; and Henry Ware was the tutor with whom he roomed during his first term. One of the prices he paid for keeping his nose to the grindstone was self-sacrifice. “It is against the law for me to look at a young lady until [graduation],” he joked to his sister, “and then I suppose it will be too late.” But the law was observed in the breach. Young ladies were particularly plentiful in Boston, where he dined occasionally at the home of Francis Dana.
In the spring of 1786 he wrote for the A.B. Club an argument in favor of education and civilization, a topic that elicited from him the remark that “ideas of happiness appear always to be local, and always adapted to the situation of men.” For Phi Beta Kappa he wrote an essay on “whether civil discord is advantageous to Society.” It was, he proposed, an advantage in a republic to have an organized opposition to the governing party. “Which so ever of the Party is at the head of the government is sensible that the other will take advantage of every error, every mistake, and even every ill success that may attend the administration; and will consequently make more exertions to preserve and increase the favor of the people in general than if it was perfectly secure in power.” There is no indication that he had been assigned the affirmative. He apparently assumed that both parties would be honest and honorable in placing the country’s welfare before their own. Before an audience of almost four hundred, he and Billy Cranch debated “whether inequality among the citizens is necessary for the preservation of the liberty of the whole.” Mary Cranch reported to her sister that “they did not either of them speak loud enough. . . . Other ways they performed well.” Over the next year, John Quincy addressed more than a dozen such subjects, from the power of music and poetry to whether Christianity had been a force for good.
His heart and mind seemed especially engaged with the nature of the love between Shakespeare’s Desdemona and Othello on the topic “whether love or fortune ought to be the chief inducement to marriage.” He had strong feelings about the issue. Although Othello was in every other way a perfect play, making a black man the object of Iago’s jealousy and of Desdemona’s love seemed to him an unrealistic and undesirable transgression of racial boundaries. And to present Desdemona’s betrayal of her father’s authority in positive terms seemed reprehensible. It was a view of the play he was to return to and develop at length later in his life. It perplexed him that his revered Shakespeare could confound what he and his contemporaries believed the normative understanding of race and marriage. Blacks deserved the freedom that all humans deserved, and slavery was detestable. But physical attraction between whites and blacks, let alone marriage, broke sacred codes of nature. It rose to the level of the repellent. And, he argued, nature had not intended men to marry entirely for love. Youthful passion over time inevitably diminished. It alone could not sustain a marriage. Neither wealth nor passion should be the chief pursuit in selecting a wife. The sustaining bond ought to be “mutual esteem.” And “the only difference between mutual esteem and love is that the one is founded only upon reason, to which the other is diametrically opposed.” He charmingly confessed, though, that he was not “obstinately attached” to these views, “and should any arguments be produced sufficient to convince me that they are erroneous, I shall retract them without hesitation.”
He was also learning how to write. He had no need to give thought to the importance of that—it was a given. Good writing and good character were connected. Anyone with the ambition to contribute to knowledge, society, and country needed to add skill to talent, and to learn how to write effectively in a variety of genres. That required discipline, training, and persistent effort. At Harvard, he learned to write essays. By the time he graduated, the level was high: effective sentences, substantial paragraphs, precise word choice, a range of literary and other sources to draw on, a sense of overall structure, and a firm grasp of logical progression in a prose that was increasingly fluent, firm, and persuasive. At the same time, he could not keep away from poetry, some of it emotionally expressive, some humorous or satiric. Good prose style had no genre limitations, as he had been educated to see, especially under the influence of his parents, talented and skillful letter writers. By the late 1780s, John Quincy had learned to be a masterful letter writer too. He had some of his mother’s spontaneous fluency and expressiveness, and he learned from his parents and his reading the varieties of personal and formal tones that the letter as a genre allowed. His diary, though, often embodied his writing at its best. There, in privacy, he could express himself spontaneously. It was a record of daily life, but it was also an analysis of self and society, of what he thought, of who he was, and of what other people seemed to him to be. It was a work in progress, extendable to the limits of his life, to become a repository of poems, prayers, pen portraits, self-analysis, descriptions of places and travel, accounts of political events and ideas, notes on family life, and thoughts and speculations about religion and philosophy.
The pen portraits of some of the classmates he liked are precise, expressive, finely balanced, and mostly laudatory. “William Cranch of Braintree was 17 the 17th of last July. The ties of blood, strengthened by those of the sincerest friendship, unite me to him. . . . Our sentiments on most subjects are so perfectly similar that I could not praise his without being conscious of expressing a tacit applause of my own.” Those of classmates he disliked are even more riveting examples of his skill. “Solomon Vose of Milton Suffolk C, was 20 the 22d of February; a vain, envious, malicious, noisy, stupid fellow, as ever disgraced God’s creation; without a virtue to compensate for his vices, and without a spark of genius to justify his arrogance; possessing all the scurrility of a cynic with all the baseness of a coward.” Joseph Jackson “was 19 the 27th of last October. His countenance is of a brown inexpressive cast, and his face is as perfect a blank as his mind. His eyes are black, and always in an unmeaning stare. He is extremely dull of apprehension, and possesses no other talent that that of pouring forth with profusion the language of Billingsgate. If I was called to point out the smallest genius in the class, I should show him: if the most indolent and negligent student, he would be the man; but at the same time I must do him the justice to say he is not vicious; and when all the faults which the man has may be attributed to nature, perhaps we ought not to find fault with him. Died. August 1790.” That John Quincy went back to this diary entry some years later to provide the finality of the date of Jackson’s early death emphasizes just how self-consciously literary his relationship to his diary was.
IN EARLY JULY 1787, twenty-year-old John Quincy wandered alone in the churchyard in Braintree, rambling through high grasses waving in the breeze. He attempted to read “the inscriptions which love and friendship have written on the simple monuments.” Suddenly he was “startled by a rustling noise.” Looking around, he noticed “a large snake” slithering through the bending grass. “I pursued him but he soon found his hole into which he slipped and escaped my pursuit. Was it the genius of the place? . . . If it were a gentle spirit, some more amiable shape than that of a serpent might have been assumed; some shape which might engage the affections, and call forth the soft and pleasing passions.”
There were ungentle spirits in public places and in John Quincy’s thoughts. For almost a year, the nation had been confronting the rebellious actions of farmers in western Massachusetts. They believed themselves more heavily taxed and oppressively ruled by elite American legislators in faraway cities than they had been by the British colonial government. Money was tight: taxes were high, personal and war debts pinched, government costs considerable. Led by Daniel Shays, they disobeyed laws, pilloried tax collectors, prevented judgments against debtors, and defied state and federal law, borrowers in rebellion against lenders. The snake of “Don’t Tread on Me” had been reborn as a rebellion against the downside of self-rule, the American objection to paying the cost of state and national governance. In the fight between those who had money and made the laws and those who had debts, the debtors felt powerless except to respond with violence. Massachusetts was the battleground.
In September 1786, when riots broke out in the Berkshires, the governor urged the government to quell them immediately. In Boston, which feared it was the ultimate target, the militia vowed to defend the city, the state government to crush the rebels. A rumor spread that thousands were coming to attack the courts and the legislature. “Where this will end time alone can disclose,” Adams wrote in his diary. “I fear it will not be before some blood is shed . . . a civil war, with all its horrors.” Like his family and his class, he had no doubt of who or what was at fault. “The people complain of grievances . . . the court . . . the Senate, the salaries of public officers, the taxes in general, are all grievances because they are expensive: these may serve as pretences, but the malcontents must look to themselves, to their idleness, their dissipation and extravagance. . . . These have led them to contract debts, and at the same time have rendered them incapable of paying them.” At Harvard, students, reviving a Revolutionary War Latin tag that meant “as much for Mars as for Mercury,” drilled and paraded in the college yard. Although John Quincy did not join, he shared the view that the rebellion had to be crushed. By December, government troops made various arrests. In January 1787, reinforcements marched westward to repulse an attack on the arsenal at Springfield. The rebels were killed, captured, or dispersed. Shays fled to New Hampshire.
The rebellion, though successfully repressed, left a strong impression on the minds of Adams and his contemporaries. Could the interests of different groups in society be reconciled peacefully? Would disparities in wealth create unsustainable tensions? Would the nation be rational and prosperous enough to create a system of sound money? Would a standing army be necessary to ensure obedience to the law and respect for the country’s institutions? Could the thirteen colonies be sustained as a single nation? And could the work ethic, the abhorrence of debt, and the commitment to progress through self-improvement, which Adams believed to be the essence of the New England character, also prove to be the character of the country as a whole? If not, the snake that slithered through the grass would cast dark, even poisonous shadows on the nation’s future.
As commencement day approached, what would come next was much on John Quincy’s mind. Harvard had “engaged” his affections. It had provided for a year and a half a “guardian spirit” that would accompany him wherever he should find himself in the future. It had provided a protected space for study “without the avocations of business or the hurry of life.” The coming separation from four or five of his classmates “saddens very much the anticipation of commencement, when we must part, perhaps forever. . . . We shall never meet again, all together.” Whatever he would do next would not be, he believed, as congenial as what he was leaving. “Here void of every care, enjoying every advantage for which my heart could wish, I have passed my time without the perplexities with which life is surrounded.” Already he was anticipating a future in which, with mingled pleasure and pain, he would remember his college days. He projected himself into a future in which he would relive the depression that he was feeling in the present. In his bleak mood, he noted, “these disagreeable reflections haunt me continually and embitter the last days of my college life.”
In London, his parents believed that his commitment should be to the law. That was the road to self-sufficiency. John Quincy accepted that as a given, but not with enthusiasm. The clergy was out of the question. He had no interest in business or medicine. The notion of being his father’s law student was attractive and would save fees. But, though John and Abigail yearned to return to America as soon as possible, Adams’ recall had been delayed for at least another year. And whether he would be asked to continue in government service or be allowed to return to private life remained an open question. Adams made inquiries for his son, and John Quincy looked around. A three-year clerkship in Francis Dana’s law office in Boston had seemed attractive, though the young man worried that Boston’s attractions might undercut his concentration. When Dana, in March 1787, suffered a stroke from which he would never fully recover, that avenue was closed, though Dana proved well enough over the next decades to continue his law practice and to serve as chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. “To me, he has been a second father,” John Quincy wrote of his traveling companion on the journey to Russia. He spent some days and nights at the Dana home, attempting to be of help. “I was shocked at seeing him; pale, emaciated and feeble, he scarcely looks the same man he was three weeks ago.” Theophilus Parsons, the thirty-seven-year-old Newburyport lawyer who had participated with John Adams in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1779 and was soon to have a distinguished judicial career, was another possibility. He had been mentioned to John Quincy the previous year. “I should be very glad to study with him,” he wrote to his father, who approved of Parsons. They met at a dinner at Dana’s in June, a month before graduation, and Parsons seemed “a man of great wit, as well as of sound judgment and deep learning.” Cotton Tufts, Abigail’s Boston cousin who handled the Adamses’ financial affairs, negotiated the details. By the end of June, John Quincy’s apprenticeship had been arranged. He was to spend much of the next three years in Newburyport.