“The Sentiments of my Heart as they Rise”
With the tedious eight-week journey behind him, John Quincy accepted the invitation of Richard Henry Lee, the president of Congress, to stay with him. He had at first excused himself but with repeated offers—he “press’d it on me, with so much politeness, that I did not know how to refuse.” Such attentions embarrassed him, “yet they give me more pleasure, than they would, if I was myself the object of them,” he wrote Nabby on July 19.1
John Quincy had no illusions about his popularity. Since his arrival every moment of his time had been taken up. He had a great number of letters to deliver—to Mr. Jay at Number 8, Broadway, and to Governor Clinton among others—and an even greater number of visits to make. He had been introduced at different times to almost all the members of Congress; he had walked, talked or dined with a great spectrum of leaders of the day, including with François Barbé-Marbois, the French diplomat (whom he had tutored in English during their voyage together in 1779 on La Sensible); with Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish chargé d’affairs; with Pieter Johan van Berckel, the Dutch minister (whom he had known in Rotterdam); with the Reverend John Witherspoon, president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton); with Elbridge Gerry and Rufus King, the Massachusetts delegates to Congress. He had also attended the city’s largest church, St. Paul’s, just off Broadway between Partition and Vesey Streets, which he found quite unlike its namesake in London—akin to comparing Alexander the Great and the virtually unknown apostle Alexander the Coppersmith.
And then there was his encounter with the “most curious” General Robert Howe, commander of the southern department of the Continental Army. On August 5, General Howe attended one of President of Congress Lee’s weekly dinners, after which guests were invited to sing songs. That evening after the general failed to find his voice, he had cried out, “give me that madeira to revive me, for I have been flattening my voice by drinking burgundy.” And sure enough, after his glass, John Quincy told Nabby he sang “Once the gods of the Greeks” very well.2
To his father he wrote about the crisis of the day, which concerned trade and disagreement over “An Act for the Regulation of Navigation and Commerce,” prohibiting all exportation from Massachusetts to British vessels and restricting all British vessels to three ports, Boston, Falmouth (later Portland, Maine) and Dartmouth. Although generally considered a necessary measure, John would be hearing from the president of Congress who was much against it. On rereading his letter he added, “you will perhaps think I had better be at my studies, 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. When I get home I shall trouble my head very little about them,” he promised.3
Soon it was time to think of how he would travel to Boston, by boat or stage, and money, of course, was a consideration. He finally decided—friends told him it was the best way to see the country and meet people who might be of use to him afterward—on horseback. Carriages were dangerous, and if he could find a proper horse, on good terms, he could buy one and sell it in Boston for close to his purchase price.
He ended up bargaining with the Dutch minister, who wanted 50 pounds. He offered 40 and settled with Mr. van Berckel for 45, a bad buy as it turned out, as the horse threw a servant early on in the trip, and, wrote John Quincy, “stumbles considerably.” Ten miles out of New York, on August 14, he wrote Nabby fearing his parents would think this venture by horseback “an imprudent, headless scheme.” But he insisted his parents should know everything he had done—“I may commit faults, but I will not add to them, by concealing them.”4
His companion on the journey was the son and namesake of Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the French aristocrat, supporter of the American Revolution, and John Adams’s recent landlord in Auteuil. The two young men—Chaumont traveling by carriage—were slowed frequently by powerful heat but also encountered pleasant surprises. Middleton, Connecticut, situated on the banks of the Connecticut River, deserved the poet’s songs as much as ever the Rhine, the Danube, or the Tiber did; heading toward Hartford there were some of the most beautiful prospects he had ever seen.
On delivering a letter to Dr. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, John Quincy recalled Mr. Jefferson’s assessment of him as “an uncommon instance of the deepest learning without a spark of genius.” Nevertheless, John Quincy found him “very civil,” although the university library was neither as large nor as elegant as his Papa’s.5
Past Springfield, the mistress of the tavern at which they dined called him by name because of his resemblance to his father, who had stopped there many times. At Worcester, where his Papa had studied law, the appearance of the town pleased him very much. Arriving in Boston on August 25, 1785, the young men found a room to share at Mrs. Kilby’s in State Street.
Of course, he realized that “the absence of two of the best parents in the world and of a sister on whose happiness my own depends, can certainly be compensated by nothing.” But he also wrote: “No person who has not experienced it can conceive how much pleasure there is in returning to our country after an absence of 6 years especially when it was left at the time of life, that I did, when I went last to Europe. The most trifling objects now appear interesting to me.”6
John Quincy immediately went in search of brothers, uncles, aunts, cousins, his grandmother, friends, colleagues, acquaintances and, so it seemed, his earlier life. At day’s end, he wrote most movingly: “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 too deeply rooted in my memory, to require any written account of it. It has been one of the happiest I ever knew.”7
And yet, alongside his great pleasure, John Quincy also found reentry bewildering and sometimes sad. His first visit was to his mother’s Uncle and Aunt Smith. Their 15-year-old daughter came to the door and though John Quincy knew her, she did not recognize him. He then tracked his uncle to his store and to his pleasure was immediately recognized. Dinner with his Uncle Cranch and cousins was strained but not unhappy. “We sat, and look’d at one another; I could not speak, and they could only ask now and then a question concerning you.” And yet he was quite content: “How much more expressive this silence, than any thing we could have said.” He trusted Nabby would not think him too sentimental for going to Cambridge to see his brother Charles, now a student at Harvard. His aged, honored Grandmamma Adams gave him the most heartfelt welcome of all. But her repeated question, “When will they return?” in reference to his family, was one he could only answer with a sigh.8
Sunday at church he was surprised that the Reverend Anthony Wibird’s voice, looks and manner seemed so familiar to him, as though he had heard him every week during his long absence from Braintree. Looking around the meeting house, he knew every face over 30 but scarcely anyone under 20. The same was true of his relatives. He might have been in the company of his cousin Billy Cranch a hundred times without having even the most distant suspicion of who he was, though he would have known his aunt and uncle at first sight anywhere.
That afternoon, after church, his courage faltered. “No object ever brought to my mind such a variety of different sensations” than visiting his family’s home and his birthplace. He did not stay two minutes, “nor would it give me the least pain, was I forbidden to enter it again,” he told Nabby, “before your return.” He did look over his father’s library, found the books in good condition, only somewhat musty and dusty “which shows that their owner is not with them.” It reminded him of the days of his childhood, most of which were passed there, “but it look’d so lonely, and melancholy without its inhabitants, as to draw a deep sigh from my breast.” A month later he again visited the house, spent three hours there, and told Nabby: “There is something to me, awful in the look of it now. All within is gloomy, and sad, and when it will look more pleasant—oh! I must not think of that.” In truth, he very much feared it will be “a long, long time before, I shall see you again. I dare not tell our friends here, my real thoughts on the subject.”9
On Wednesday, August 31, he rode on to Cambridge, looked around Harvard, admired several exceedingly fine portraits done by Mr. Copley, and found the library “good, without being magnificent.” He then paid a visit to the president of Harvard, Joseph Willard, who advised, as anticipated, further studies in Greek and Latin in preparation for his entrance the next spring. A week later he was on his way to Haverhill to the home of the Shaws for a three-month tutorial.10
Just before sunset, he reached Haverhill, a town of about 33.3 square miles, and a population of about 2,400, thriving on farming, fishing, shipping and shipbuilding, and a number of tanneries. The Shaw family’s white-columned house, the parsonage of the First Parish Church of Haverhill, lay near the top of the hill on Main Street. He detailed for Nabby his reunion with their 13-year-old brother Tommy, last seen at age 6. Reverend Shaw had taken John Quincy around to Tommy’s room and called out, “Here’s somebody wants to see you.” His announcement had been greeted with silence. Three minutes passed without a word until at last Mr. Shaw had prodded Tommy: “Don’t you know this person?” “I believe I do,” said Tom, “I guess it’s brother John.” So you see, John Quincy told Nabby, rather cheerfully, “I could not remain long incog.” His good friend John Thaxter was also in attendance, but “of course [he] knew me.”11
Nor did recognition of her esteemed nephew pose a problem for his Aunt Elizabeth, who wrote to her sister Abigail: “The long looked for, the modest, the manly, the well accomplished youth, is come at last. And had he needed any thing to have made him doubly welcome to our house, but his own agreeable behaviour, the evident credentials he bears in his eyes, about his mouth, and in the shape of his face of being the son of my excellent, and much loved brother and sister, would alone have gained him a most hearty reception.”12
And further, she told his mother, “Never was there a youth that bore a greater resemblance to both parents,” given his “father’s luster and the mother’s bloom.” His mannerisms—“his head inclined on his left shoulder, one eye half shut, and his right hand in his breeches pocket”—strongly recalled the happy days she had spent with them early in their marriage.13
By October 1 John Quincy felt settled but found his studies far more arduous than he had counted on. Greek was to be “the grand object” that claimed his greatest attention. He was to master nearly all of the New Testament and between three and four of the eight volumes of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, plus five or six books of Homer’s Iliad. More secure in Latin, he had already done part of Horace’s four books of lyric poetry. In English, he had to study Watts’s Logic: Or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry After Truth and John Locke’s Human Understanding, and something in astronomy.
Given the formidable task ahead, he felt obliged to ask Nabby for a temporary suspension of their agreement to write frequently, at least until he got to Cambridge. He planned to do little socializing in Haverhill, and he anticipated a continual sameness in the days ahead, which meant that he should have little of interest to write her. Still, he would set apart half an hour two days a week to write at least something.
Studying through the winter, progress was painfully slow at times. Getting through 100 verses in the Old Testament was relatively easy, though it was time-consuming to look up the vocabulary. But the more he read in both Greek and Latin, the more deeply he admired both the classic and the lyrical poets. He felt rewarded for all his pains in making the acquaintance of Virgil and in Horace he found many “noble sentiments.” The Latin lines copied into his diary may have had deep personal resonance for him; in translation, they read, “Cease to ask what the morrow will bring forth, and set down as gain each day that fortune grants!”14
Initially, on arriving at the Shaw home, John Quincy had been glad his trunks were delayed: the lack of decent clothes provided him with an excuse to refuse invitations. He was not eager to make new acquaintances given his experience of the last eight years: no sooner had he made friends, he had been obliged to leave them, probably never to see them again. As a result, his heart, “instead of growing callous by a frequent repetition of the same pain, seem’d to feel every separation more than any of the former ones.” Not for the first time he declared himself “really weary of this wandering, strolling kind of life” and vowed to “form few new acquaintances, have few friends,” but such as he might—quoting Hamlet—“Grapple to my heart with hooks of steel.”15
In spite of his intense resolve, he did make new friends with members of a prosperous Haverhill family, the Whites; he enjoyed his first Thanksgiving celebration, a recently established custom determined by the governor of Massachusetts on December 15, and seemed a bit disappointed that Christmas, “a great and important day among Roman Catholics and the followers of the Church of England,” was not observed in this country, nor anywhere, he believed, by the dissenters.16
Nevertheless his preparation for Harvard was his first priority. Unforeseen interruptions were inevitable, but where he could help it, he remained focused. His Aunts Mary and Elizabeth were keenly aware of their nephew’s motivation and commitment. Both women were sympathetic, but only to a point. They frankly disapproved of his sleeping habits. Elizabeth wrote that her nephew was not quite so fleshy—she had written “fat” in the initial draft—and wasn’t prey to distractions; to the contrary, “he was too much engaged to suffer any thing but sickness or death to impede his course.” Mary, in the same sentence that she assured Abigail that Cousin John, as she called her nephew, had not lost his studious disposition by coming to America, also told her sister that she was almost afraid to let her children visit Haverhill this last vacation lest they interrupt him. And because he never retired before one o’clock in the morning, she feared “he would wear out both body and mind.”17
Had Aunt Mary been privy to her nephew’s diary, she would have learned that he could not study in the morning because the household was so busy, “but that when every body else in the house was in bed, I have nothing to interrupt me”—hence the late hours.18
Predictably, given the realities of his life in Haverhill, John Quincy admitted to an “impatient state of mind.” Early on he had fretted about how to continue with his journal, facing as he did a continual repetition of one day like another. But then he decided that his approach would be different: “Little narrative, and the most part of what I write will be observations.” It was to be the same with his letters, in which with disarming, if not reckless, candor, he would dramatize not only his “family values,” but his moral, emotional and philosophical struggles to bridge the transition from a worldly life abroad to the confines of “so small and retired a town as this.”19
From the start, he confided to his cousin William Cranch that he could appear content in person or in print when “I have it not at heart.” Haverhill was not the place for politics or local public affairs. Nor was the climate helpful. Wintry weather began within a month of his arrival, cheerless gray days of pouring rain and chilling cold reminiscent of St. Petersburg. On a snowy, stormy day in November, he recalled “The cherish’d fields / Put on their winter robe of purest white”—lines from James Thomson’s poem called “Winter”—“I am not fond of seeing this robe.”20
As for the locals, they were really persuaded they should incur divine displeasure as much by dancing—violently opposed as a heinous sin by the Baptist minister Mr. Smith—as by stealing or committing murder. John Quincy despaired over this mysterious tendency to take exception to rational amusements by minds “disposed to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.”21
His world had shrunk. The family he lived with presented as perfect an example of happiness as he had ever seen, but their demeanor differed from his. “Variety is my theme, and life to me is like a journey, in which an unbounded plain looks dull and insipid.” Left far behind across the ocean were conversations with diplomats and princes about state affairs. In Haverhill “The way we have here of killing time, in large companies, appears to me, most absurd and ridiculous. All must be fixed down in chairs, looking at one another, like a puppet show, and talking some commonplace phrases to one another.”22
And “talk of the follies and fopperies of Europe”—there even young ladies of fortune were given an excellent education before they were introduced into the world. In Haverhill, young ladies without fortunes or titles thought it beneath them to know anything but to dance and were taught that if they could “talk nonsense very fluently, and sit very straight and upright five hours together in one chair, they will be most accomplished women.” For the most part, “our damsels are like portraits in crayons, which at a distance look well, but if you approach near them, are vile daubings.” He hesitated to continue: “you will think I am too severe,” he told Nabby, “but it is certainly too often the case with our young women.”23
Even more challenging than small-town life was his tantalizing infatuation with another of his Aunt and Uncle Shaw’s boarders, the 17-year-old Nancy Hazen. Nancy had an eye that seemed “to have a magic in it,” and a “fine natural genius . . . so long employed upon trifles” that they almost were a part of her, he wrote his sister. Rather short but well-proportioned, with a very fair complexion, she was not a beauty but had in her countenance something uncommonly interesting. As to her character, he had not seen enough of it in October 1785 to define it precisely, but after further acquaintance he would know more.24
Meanwhile, he could say that she lost her father when she was very young, which had been her great misfortune. She had boarded for a considerable time in Boston and was drawn very young into a mindless social whirl. He did not doubt that she would be much more universally admired than she was, had she been well-educated. Lacking that benefit, she was instead celebrated by a parcel of fops. He was nevertheless obsessed by Nancy Hazen, granting that “Nature has been liberal to her in mind, and person, though her foibles were probably owing to education.”25
Even as days passed, he persisted in his argument: “Oh! that our young Ladies were as distinguish’d for the beauty of their minds, as they are for the charms, of their persons! But alas! too many of them are like a beautiful apple, that is insipid, or disgusting to the taste.” At this point he admitted he might sound too extreme and supposed he heard his sister cautioning him to “Stop, stop, young man. . . . It ill becomes you, at your age, to set up, as censor of the conduct of the ladies . . .”26
Which was “True my Sister,” he conceded. “I will own I am wrong, and had I not made a resolution, to give you my most secret thoughts, I would restrain the indignation, which I cannot prevent from rising in my breast, when I see the best gifts of Nature neglected or abused.”27
Still, in the privacy of his diary he showed no such restraint, at once jealous and protective: “Afternoon and evening out, as indeed she always does . . . She seems to have engrossed the attention of almost every youth in Haverhill . . . the girl has surely something bewitching in her for she treats them all very ill.” When she was unwell after having had one of her teeth drawn, John Quincy wished she could be persuaded to take care of them: “the want of proper attention to the teeth, is an universal failing in this country, very hurtful both to the beauty and the health of our ladies.”28
On an afternoon in the company of both cousin Lucy Cranch and Nancy, he was struck by their essential differences: “You know how serious, how prudent, how thinking your cousin is,” he told Nabby. Nancy, by contrast, “is as gay, as flighty, and as happy as you could wish to see a person.” He added, two days later: “Miss H(azen) I have mentioned before; her form is very pretty, her wit agreeable, her ruling passion vanity.”29
By November, John Quincy admitted his impatience, discontent, and bleak spirits. At first he supposed that his demanding schedule of study—some days he did not even get outside—might explain his melancholy state. But, truthfully, he had to recognize another cause of his suffering. He was hopelessly in love and knew that “When our reason is at variance with our heart, the mind cannot be in a pleasing state.” He recognized the symptoms, regretted the inconvenience. An ardent young man, and a lonely one, he knew he had 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.”30
Obviously schooled on his mother’s precepts on the subject of choosing the right mate, this issue was uppermost in his mind. Having known men, undoubtedly those he had met abroad—“of great sense and experience who fell into fatal errors, when discretion should have guided their actions”—he feared with passions high and the blood warm that it was impossible to make a prudent choice.31
He hoped for at least another decade “never to have my heart exclusively possessed by an individual of the other sex.” Passions, he declared, were “the jaundice of the mind.” Finishing his letter to Nabby at two in the morning, he noted in his diary that he then burned his fingers on the lighted candle and bruised his toes in the darkness. Worst of all, he had affronted Miss Nancy earlier by speaking somewhat too abruptly.32
With two months to endure before his departure for Cambridge and Harvard, his plight over Nancy Hazen ended rather abruptly. On February 9, according to his diary: “Miss Nancy finally left us, this afternoon; and is going to board at Mr. Israel Bartlett’s. Her going away has given me pleasure, with respect to myself; as she was the cause of many disagreeable little circumstances to me.”33
His attraction to Nancy can hardly have sat well with a young man who had described his priorities to his sister as follows: “Study for years and years to come, is to be my only mistress, and my only courtship that of the Muses. These sentiments, which my parents and dearest friends have always inculcated in me, and which my own reason and inclination confirm, will, I have no doubt, be lasting.”34
John Quincy did not mention—he may not have known—that Nancy had left at his aunt’s request. As Elizabeth Shaw explained in answer to Nabby’s inquiry about the young woman her brother had referred to at some length: “The frequent Assemblys occasioned her being out at so late hours as made it very inconvenient.” In America, late hours were considered “as greatly prejudicial to health, and as incompatible with the peace and good order of families. . . . Any deviation from those good and wholesome rules, would be viewed as more criminal in our family than in others. This with some other things made me feel very desirous that she should remove her lodgings.”35
“Nature had indeed been very bountiful to this young lady,” she continued, “and lavished her favors almost with too liberal a hand.” At the first acquaintance she seemed made “to engage all Hearts, and charm all Eyes. . . . She had a qui[c]k wit, a fine flow of spirits, and good humor, a lively imagination and an excellent natural capacity.” Yet with all these endowments, at least in Elizabeth Shaw’s estimation, Nancy found it utterly impossible to establish “those sentiments of sincerity, delicacy, and dignity of manners, which I consider as so essential to the female character.” The banishment of Nancy Hazen was undoubtedly motivated by his aunt’s urge to protect her nephew from any romantic attachments. She had great hopes for her nephew but felt “His time is not yet come. . . .”36
On the last day of January, John Quincy made this terse notation: “about two months longer, will put an end to my residence here, and I shall then rejoice, for more than one reason.” Almost from the start he had minded living in the clergyman’s strictly regimented establishment: breakfast at 8, dinner at 1, prayers at 9 and retirement a short time after. The severity of such a schedule, he thought, would discourage people inclined to the study of divinity in America from following that profession and, he predicted, “will lessen the number very greatly in a little time.”37
But there was more to his disillusion with the Shaw household. He discovered that his aunt had read his diary, and concluded he “could not be induced to live long in such a situation, to be suspected and spied, and guarded” no matter how good his relatives’ motives and wishes for his welfare.38
His aunt was equally alarmed by what she found in the course of invading her nephew’s privacy. Aunt Elizabeth wrote to Nabby of finding extensive records of the sensitive discussions taking place in the household: “These journal[s] of [h]is are a continual spy upon our action.” And the spy’s offense at being spied on was keener because of the judgments rendered. Aunt Elizabeth “was never half so afraid of any young man in my life,” because John Quincy was “so exceedingly severe upon the foibles of mankind.”39
He was certainly merciless about the foibles of women. One day she had mentioned to him some lines of Matthew Prior about the female sex, “Be to their Virtues very kind, be to their Faults a little Blind,” and “do you believe it,” she asked Nabby, he had placed them in his journal “in a most satyrical point of view.” When called on this point, John Quincy innocently claimed “my aunt thinks as I do.” And so, she had concluded, “he finds a fine shelter for himself, under my wing.”40
In a real sense, Elizabeth was not far off the mark. Her concern for him was genuine, if intrusive. She warned that “His candle goeth not out by night” and she feared he would ruin his eyes. She deeply appreciated his “high sense of honor” and “great abilities well cultivated” through his travels. “In him I see the wise politician, the grand statesman, and the patriot in embryo.”41
Elizabeth and her husband would feel John Quincy’s absence more than that of any pupil who had ever lived with them. If she were to speak plainly, she wrote to her sister, she wished “Mr. JQA had never left Europe . . . that he had never come into our family. Then we would not have known him. . . . Then we should not have been so grieved” at his departure. He used to read to her on some evenings, which always gave her pleasure. His comments were good, he was respectful of the author and “in company Mr. JQA was always agreeable, pleasing, modest, and polite.” It was only in private conversation that the imperfections of youth “were perceivable,” for he did have some rather peculiar opinions and was a little too decisive and tenacious about them. In fact, his brother Thomas had said to him one day, “I think brother you seem to differ most always from every one else in company.”42
One evening, on the subject of courtship and self love, John Quincy had argued that “Self was the ultimate motive of all actions, good, bad, or indifferent” and maintained his position, contradicting his uncle to the point that Mr. Shaw questioned why he should so firmly take issue with his elders.43
In retrospect, John Quincy thought the charge was partly true. He feared he was too tenacious, making people suppose he was “obstinate, and dogmatical, and pedantic.” But in self-defense, he wrote in his diary, he had only wished “to own my thoughts,” not to impose them on others. While he did not believe it impolite to think differently from a person older than himself, he recognized the discourtesy in openly combating his uncle’s opinion. Grown sour on the subject, “Reverence for age,” John Quincy supposed, “is one of the most important and necessary qualities a young man can have: and a deference to their sentiments, ought, apparently to be shown to ones elders, even though, they were absurd and ridiculous.” Obviously dissatisfied with this notion, he had added “N.B. To think more upon this subject.”44
While meticulous in his diary entries, in preparing for his entrance exams, John Quincy went for months without writing his sister. He began again as soon as he was done, waxing cynical about a process in which it was not necessary to know anything but what was found in a certain set of books—which some of the best scholars, after having taken their degrees, forgot and could not have qualified for a place back in the freshmen class. He had not, since the first of January, left the Shaw house four hours a week, Sundays excepted, but now he would write more often.
On March 14, John Quincy had ridden half a mile up the river where a path for the boat was cut through the ice and arrived at Cambridge a little after sunset. The next day, between nine and ten, he was examined in Latin, Greek, logic, geography, and mathematics before President Willard, four tutors, three professors, and a librarian.45
“After they had done with me, they laid their wise heads together to consult whether I was worthy of entering this University, the president came marching as the heroes on the French stage do, and with sufficient pomposity said: ‘Adams, you are admitted.’” And though he had already resolved to show all the respect and deference to every member of the government of the college that they could possibly claim, it would be different with Nabby, to whom he could give his real sentiments, “such as arise spontaneously . . . and that I cannot restrain.”46
His candid opinion of President Willard was less than flattering. Though a man of great learning who promoted the honor and interest of the university, Willard had “little knowledge of mankind.” Exceedingly stiff and pedantic, he was even ridiculous at times, especially in refusing to call any undergraduate by any but his surname. John Quincy concluded his report to Nabby rather benignly: “he is often laughed at for affecting so much importance, yet he is esteemed and respected for his learning.”47
One week later John Quincy returned to see Harvard’s president, “as he had commanded me. Said he, speaking with an emphasis upon every syllable, ‘Adams, you may live with Sir Ware, a Bachelor of Arts.’” John Quincy was quite delighted, as Ware, who had graduated from Harvard and was now a schoolteacher in town, was “very much esteemed and respected in college and had an excellent chamber” which he was very fortunate to share with him, as it was “more agreeable and less expensive than living in college.”48
On learning of his son’s “Admission into the Seat of the Muses, our dear alma mater,” John Adams was elated and hoped, he wrote from London: “you will find a pleasure and improvements equal to your expectations. You are now among magistrates and ministers, legislators and heroes, ambassadors and generals, I mean among persons who will live to act in all these characters. . . . You are breathing now in the atmosphere of science and literature, the floating particles of which will mix with your whole mass of blood and juices. Every visit you make to the chamber or study of a scholar, you learn something.”49
The immediate reality was different. John Quincy had spent the evening of his acceptance in the college with the sophomore class at what was called a “high-go.” They had gathered in the room of one of its members, some of whom got drunk, then went out and broke the windows of three tutors, and after this sublime maneuver, staggered to their chambers. Unimpressed, John Quincy noted in his diary that “Such are the great achievements of many of the sons of Harvard, such the delights of many of the students here.”50
But soon he was a complete convert to the college, founded in 1636. John Quincy followed in the tracks of three generations of Quincy men, and of his father. His brother Charles had already been admitted; his brother Thomas wasn’t far behind. Despite some reservations, he reassured his father that he was “strongly confirmed in your opinion, that this university is upon a much better plan than any I have seen in Europe.”51