Of the ordeal of separation, she said in closing, “I am inured, but not hardened to the painful portion. Shall I live to see it otherwise?”
Her letters were his great delight, he had assured her, so long as she did not complain, and she was determined to oblige. “I am wholly unconscious of giving you pain in this way since your late absence,” she wrote as the second winter approached. “If I complained [before], it was from the ardor of affection which could not endure the least apprehension of neglect.... Sure I am that not a syllable of complaint has ever stained my paper in any letter I have ever written since you left me.”
On Christmas Day, 1780, longing for him, she had written a letter he would not receive until nearly summer:
My dearest friend,
How much is comprised in that short sentence? How fondly can I call you mine, bound by every tie which consecrates the most inviolable friendship, yet separated by a cruel destiny, I feel the pangs of absence sometimes too sensibly for my own repose.
There are times when the heart is peculiarly awake to tender impressions, when philosophy slumbers, or is over-powered by sentiments more conformable to nature. It is then that I feel myself alone in the wide world, without any one to tenderly care for me, or lend me an assisting hand through the difficulties that surround me. Yet my cooler reason disapproves the ripening thought, and bids me bless the hand from which my comforts flow.
“Man active resolute and bold, Is fashioned in a different mold.”
More independent by nature, he can scarcely realize all those ties which bind our sex to his. Is it not natural to suppose that as our dependence is greater, our attachment is stronger? I find in my own breast a sympathetic power always operating upon the near approach of letters from my dearest friend. I cannot determine the exact distance when this secret charm begins to operate. The time is sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. The busy sylphs are ever at my ear, no sooner does Morpheus close my eyes, than “my whole soul, unbounded flies to thee.” Am I superstitious enough for a good Catholic?
A Mr. Ross [John Ross, a merchant from Nantes] arrived lately at Philadelphia and punctually delivered your letters. At the same time a vessel arrived from Holland and brought me yours from Amsterdam of the 25th of September, which Mr. Lovell was kind enough to forward to me. I have written to you largely since Davis [Captain Edward Davis of the Dolphin] arrived here, though not in reply to the letters brought by him, for old Neptune alone had the handling of them. He was chased [by British cruisers] and foolishly threw over all his letters into the sea, to my no small mortification.
How many of Adams's letters had indeed been lost to Neptune, there was no reckoning. But for reasons unknown—and perhaps unknown even to him—Adams appears to have been writing to her hardly at all. In the first half of 1781, to judge by the letters she received, he wrote only once in the first three months and briefly, then briefly again in April, to say he had taken a house in Amsterdam beside the Keizersgracht. Another letter followed in May, another in June, which made four letters in six months and all mostly matter of fact, except that once he wrote, “Oh! Oh! Oh! that you were here.”
He told her little of his work or about the boys—nothing, for example, of the fact that Charles had been severely ill at Leyden. It was as if all his concentration and energy were taken up by his dogged struggle. In the grip of constant uncertainty and stress—and having no successes to report—he preferred to keep silent. He was as preoccupied as he had ever been, and miserably unhappy; and in such a state of mind, as time would show, he was often disinclined to write to her. He abandoned his diary. Only to John Quincy, interestingly, did he pour forth in customary fashion, in letters filled with advice and affection.
• • •
IN THE TIME HE HAD SPENT with his eldest son since the voyage of the Boston, it had become clear to Adams that the boy was not only exceptionally bright, but capable of concentrated work to a degree well beyond his years, a judgment confirmed by Benjamin Waterhouse, who wrote of John Quincy bearing down on his lessons “with a constancy rarely seen at that age.” (There was no longer a problem of language for the boy, since university lectures were conducted in Latin.)
“You are now at a university where many of the greatest men have received their education,” Adams reminded him. He must attend all the lectures possible, in law, medicine, chemistry, and philosophy. He must make a study of all the departments and regulations of the celebrated university, “everything in it that may be initiated in the universities of your own country.” Yet when John Quincy asked if he might buy ice skates that winter, Adams consented without hesitation, explaining that skating should be considered a fine art. “It is not simple velocity or agility that constitutes the perfection of it, but grace.” Of riding, fencing, and dancing, he also approved, adding, “Everything in life should be done with reflection.”
He sent a gift of several volumes of Pope, and a fine edition of a favorite Roman author, Terence, in both Latin and French. “Terence is remarkable, for good morals, good taste, and good Latin,” Adams advised. “His language has simplicity and an elegance that make him proper to be accurately studied as a model.” On hearing that John Quincy's course of studies did not include Cicero and Demosthenes, Adams could hardly contain his indignation. John Quincy must begin upon them at once, he declared, “I absolutely insist upon it.” If forced to it, he would bring John Quincy back from Leyden and teach him himself.
Adams was writing about what he so dearly loved to the son he so dearly loved. That he was raising the boy to serve his country one day, there was never a question.
Latin and Greek were not all that mattered. John Quincy must neither forget nor fail to enjoy the great works of his own “mother tongue,” and especially those of the poets. It was his happiness, too, that mattered.
Read somewhat in the English poets every day. You will find them elegant, entertaining, and constructive companions through your whole life. In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it ever been recommended to you to read poetry?
... You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle hour.
“You will ever remember that all the end of study is to make you a good man and a useful citizen,” Adams said at the close of a letter in May. “This will ever be the sum total of the advice of your affectionate father.”
• • •
AT PARIS AND PHILADELPHIA all the while, movements were under way to dislodge John Adams as sole American peacemaker in Europe. Distressed by the mounting cost of the war, Vergennes was ready to see it concluded, and, if need be, to compromise with Britain on the question of American independence. Since he could not have the intractable Adams standing in the way, the French Foreign Minister sent specific instructions to La Luzerne to do whatever necessary to have Adams removed. La Luzerne, who had become a figure of conspicuous importance in Philadelphia, his influence with Congress as great as that of anyone, worked assiduously. With money to spend, he bribed at least one member of Congress, General John Sullivan, and possibly others besides.
Benjamin Franklin's letter of August 9, describing Vergennes's displeasure with Adams, had only recently arrived in Philadelphia and ignited sharp debate. On one side were those like Samuel Adams and James Lovell, who strongly supported John Adams's independent spirit and were unwilling that the United States give way always to the wishes of the French. On the other side stood those like John Witherspoon and young James Madison of Virginia, who trusted the French and believed French friendship and support of such critical importance that nothing should be allowed to put the alliance at risk, and who had little faith in John Adams's “stiffness and tenaciousness of temper,” as Witherspoon said in his clipped Scottish way.
Appearing before a congressional committee considering the “conduct of Mr. Adams,” La Luzerne stated the need for an American plenipotentiary who would “take no step without the approbation of his Majesty,” and who, furthermore, would
“receive his directions from the Comte de Vergennes.”
On June 15, 1781, after hours of argument, Congress agreed to be governed by the dictates of the French Court. John Adams's powers as sole peacemaker with Britain were revoked. He was not to be recalled, as Vergennes wished and as La Luzerne had nearly succeeded in bringing about. Instead, he was to be one of five commissioners, each representing a major section of the country—Adams for New England, Franklin for Pennsylvania, John Jay for New York, Jefferson for Virginia, and Henry Laurens for the Deep South. But with Jay in Spain, Henry Laurens locked up in the Tower of London, Jefferson unlikely to leave Virginia, and Adams tied down with his assignment in Holland, there remained only Franklin to serve as the American negotiator at Paris, exactly as Vergennes desired.
Further, it was determined in a secret session of Congress that the commissioners were to do nothing in the negotiations for peace “without [the] knowledge and concurrence” of the ministers of their “generous ally, the King of France.” Thus all decisions were subject to the approval of Foreign Minister Vergennes. In treating with the British, France was to have the final say, again exactly as Vergennes wished.
Congressman Thomas Rodney of Delaware, who had fought the measure, wrote that night to his older brother, Caesar. “I think it must convince even the French Court that we are reduced to a weak and abject state and that we have lost all that spirit and dignity which once appeared in the proceedings of Congress.”
A few weeks later, and again in secret session, on a motion from James Madison, Adams's second prior commission, to negotiate a treaty of commerce with Britain, was also revoked.
At Braintree, Abigail had picked up word that Franklin was “blacking” the character of John Adams. “You will send me by first opportunity the whole of this dark process,” she wrote straight away to James Lovell, and then let fly in a fury with her pen. Seldom in history has a wife so stoutly risen in defense of her “good man.”
Was the man [Adams] a gallant, I should think he had been monopolizing the women of the enchanter [Franklin]. Was he a modern courtier, I should think he had outwitted him in court intrigue. Was he a selfish, avaricious, designing, deceitful villain, I should think he had encroached upon the old gentleman's prerogatives.
“It needs great courage, sir, to engage in the cause of America,” she added, fiercely proud of her “Mr. A.”
He is a good man. Would to heaven we had none but such in office. You know, my friend, that he is a man of principle, and that he will not violate the dictates of his conscience to ingratiate himself with a minister, or with your more respected body.
Yet it wounds me, sir. When he is wounded, I bleed.
• • •
IN EARLY SUMMER 1781, Francis Dana received notification from Congress that he was to proceed from Holland to St. Petersburg to seek recognition of the United States by the government of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. As Dana spoke little French and would need secretarial help, he asked Adams if John Quincy might accompany him. It would be an expedition of nearly 1,200 miles to a capital city few Americans had ever seen. But Adams thought highly of Dana, the boy excelled at French, and the experience, Adams felt, would stand him well for the future.
At the same time, Adams decided that young Charles, whose health remained uneven and who had become desperately homesick for his mother, should return to her in the care of Benjamin Waterhouse, who was on his way back to Boston.
“I consented [to the departure of both boys]... and thus deprived myself of the greatest pleasure I had in life,” Adams later wrote. But before either departed, Adams himself was off to Paris, summoned by Vergennes to take part in discussions of a possible mediation of the war by Russia and Austria. Nothing was more abhorrent to Adams than the prospect of a truce determined by France and other European powers and he headed south gravely worried.
John Quincy was gone on a “long journey with Mr. Dana ... as an interpreter,” was as much as he reported to Abigail in a letter from Paris dated July 11, John Quincy's fourteenth birthday. Charles was coming home, he also told her, but how or when he did not say, as probably he dared not for the boy's safety. “He is a delightful child, but has too exquisite sensibility for Europe.” He himself was “distracted with more cares than ever,” he wrote, “yet I grow fat. Anxiety is good for my health, I believe.”
To Adams's immense relief, the discussions at Paris came to nothing, and by the month's end he was back in Holland in time to spend a few weeks with Charles. In mid-August, the eleven-year-old boy sailed on the South Carolina, which, after a troubled voyage, put in at La Coruña, Spain, where eventually he sailed on another American ship, Cicero, a privateer, and after more delays and adventures reached home at the end of January 1782, more than five months after leaving Amsterdam.
Adams was by then established in his commodious new residence in Amsterdam on the Keizersgracht. While not so grand as the houses along the Herengracht, the next canal nearer the center of the city, it was, as he had requested, perfectly “fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d'Amérique”—a fine, red-brick canal house five stories tall, with a handsome front door at the top of a short flight of stone steps. There was a deep garden to the rear and the view from the large front windows included a pretty little arched bridge that crossed the Keizersgracht at the nearby corner, at Spiegelstraat, or Looking Glass Street. In the sunshine of summer, the trees bordering the canal cast lovely shadows on the water and on the façades of houses on the opposite side.
But to Adams, absorbed in his work, the outlook was bleak. Try as he could, the Dutch seemed to care only for their own commercial self-interests. He wondered if they were a people deficient in heart.
On August 24, with the arrival of a packet of letters from Congress sent on by Franklin from Paris, Adams learned that his commission as peacemaker had been revoked and a new commission established. He tried to maintain a good front. “Congress may have done very well to join others in the commission for peace who have some faculties for it,” he wrote to Franklin. “My talent, if I have one, lies in making war.”
Exhausted, his sons gone, Francis Dana gone, and with no reason to think his mission to Holland anything but a failure, Adams fell ill. Nothing more was heard from him for six weeks.
• • •
THE ILLNESS, mild at first, grew steadily worse to the point that he lay near death in the house by the canal. Several leading physicians came and went. For several days he lost consciousness. Not until October was he able to draft a letter, to say he had fallen victim to a “nervous fever,” the common, if imprecise, term used by the attending physicians. His fullest description of what happened would be to Abigail, in a letter of October 9, when he was just barely able to hold a pen.
Soon after my return from Paris, I was seized with a fever, of which, as the weather was and had long been uncommonly warm, I took little notice, but it increased very slowly and regularly, until it was found to be a nervous fever of a dangerous kind, bordering on putrid. It seized upon my head in such a manner that for five or six days I was lost, and so insensible to the operations of the physicians and surgeons as to have lost the memory of them. My friends were so good as to send me an excellent physician and surgeon whose skill and faithful attention, with the blessing of Heaven, saved my life... I am, however, still weak, and whether I shall be able to recover my health among the pestilential vapors from these stagnant waters, I know not.
Writing a week later to the new president of Congress, Thomas McKean, Adams added that the doctors had administered the “all powerful [Peruvian] bark”—quinine—and that this, too, had helped to save him from a “nervous fever of a very malignant kind.” To his Dutch colleague Charles Dumas, Adams wrote that “my feet had well nigh stumbled on dark mountains,” and that he had recovered only through the “wondrous virtue” of Peruvian bark.
In medical texts of the time, “nervous fever,” or “slow nervous fever,” was defined as an “insidious and dangerous” malady
that began with listlessness, followed by chills, flushes of heat, “and a kind of weariness all over, like what is felt after a great fatigue.”
This is always attended with a sort of heaviness and dejection of spirit [wrote Dr. John Huxham, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh, in a treatise published in 1779]... the head grows more heavy, or giddy... the pulse quicker....
In this condition the patient often continues for five or six days.... About the seventh or eighth day the giddiness, pain, or heaviness of the head become much greater... and [this] frequently brings on delirium... Now nature sinks apace.
Most susceptible to the disease, it was thought, were those of “weak nerves,” or who had experienced a “long dejection of spirits,” or who had been “confined long in damp and foul air.”
Quite possibly Adams had fallen victim to malaria, which in the heat of summer could be rampant in European seaports. Later, he would tell Abigail that the fever had “burnt up” half his memory and half his spirits. Like headache, fatigue, chills, and hot flashes, a subsequent depression or “melancholia” is also characteristic of the disease, which was thought then to emanate from stagnant water or foul air, “miasma,” but, in fact, as would be learned a century later, is transmitted by mosquitoes.
But his “nervous fever” could also have been typhus, a disease characterized by high fever and delirium, and transmitted by lice.
That Adams's fatigue and “dejection of spirits” of that summer could have made him vulnerable to such a collapse is certainly possible. Notwithstanding his claim to Abigail to the contrary, anxiety was not at all good for his health. He himself would later say that excessive fatigue and anxiety concerning the state of his affairs in Holland, as well as the unwholesome damps of the night,” had brought him as “near to death as any man ever approached without being grasped in his arms.”