But neither the Reverend Price's friendship nor William Herschel's reception was representative. With the exception of tradesmen and a few officials of the government, the British overall were decidedly cool toward the new American minister and his family—perfunctory, but no more. And they did stare as Adams had worried they would, and not in a friendly way. “The English may call the French starers,” wrote Nabby to John Quincy, “but I never saw so little civility and politeness in a stare in France as I have here.” To Jefferson, with whom she had commenced regular correspondence, Abigail described the atmosphere as “not the pleasantest in the world.” In truth, the American minister and his family were being pointedly ignored.
Their “society” was confined almost entirely to other Americans living in London, or to such openly avowed friends of America as Richard Price. A few of the Americans were acquaintances from Boston, like the aspiring young architect Charles Bulfinch. Jefferson's aide, William Short, came on errands from Paris, and the duplicitous Dr. Edward Bancroft showed up, affable as always. Whether Bancroft was serving still as a spy for the British government is not known, though in all likelihood he was.
Friendliest and most helpful were the American painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, who introduced the family to their proteges, young Mather Brown of Boston and John Trumbull of Connecticut, a veteran of the Revolution. A rage for painters and painting had seized the household, Nabby reported excitedly to John Quincy, after Mather Brown set up his easel at Grosvenor Square to do portraits of all three of the Adamses. Her delight was extreme. (The young man was so striking-looking as to be commonly spoken of as “handsome young Brown,” as though that were his name.) Brown's portrait of her was quite “tasty,” she thought. Wearing a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons and feather, she sat with her hands in her lap, looking directly ahead, a lovely, poised, somewhat wistful young woman at the threshold of adulthood. Her father was charmed, it was “her exactly,” he said.
For his own portrait Adams posed at his writing desk, with quill and paper in hand, and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia prominently displayed to one side. Adams believed his strongest attributes were, as he said, “candor, probity, and decision,” but these he failed to find in the face that looked back from the finished canvas, and he expressed disappointment. In Brown's portrait, he appeared composed, leaner than Copley had portrayed him, and reflective. It was a fine study of an eighteenth-century gentleman of consequence, but nothing about the pose or the expression gave any suggestion of his characteristic alertness and vitality, or sense of humor—let alone “candor, probity, and decision.”
Brown's rendering of Abigail was thought “a good likeness,” but the painting would ultimately disappear.
Meantime, West and Copley in particular opened doors for Adams in London as did no one else. “I did not ask favors or receive anything but cold formalities from ministers of state or ambassadors,” he would explain. “I found that our American painters had more influence at Court to produce all the favors I wanted.”
“Economies” remained a constant concern. The cost of living in London was higher even than in Paris, and to make matters worse, Congress had cut Adams's salary by a fifth, from 2,500 to 2,000 pounds. A dinner guest from Scotland would describe a meal with the Adamses as “good” but “plain,” while Jefferson, visiting later, would be astonished by how “very plain” they lived. Writing to Mercy Warren after the first year in London, Adams would confide, “I am driven to my wits' end for means.”
Lavish entertainment of the kind expected of an ambassador to the Court was out of the question. But then neither did the Adamses have any great desire for London society. She was too old-fashioned, Abigail said, for keeping company with “midnight gamblers and titled gamesters,” whose way of life she had seen something of and may have enjoyed more than she was willing to admit. At a party given by the Swedish ambassador, pressed to fill an empty place at one of the card tables, she won four games straight.
Worst of all was being patronized by the British. One of the few British women to call on Abigail since the move to Grosvenor Square, the wife of a member of Parliament remarked, in an effort to make conversation, “But surely you prefer this country to America?” British prejudice toward the French struck Abigail as ludicrous, now that she had lived in France, and made her realize how greatly she disliked prejudice in any form. But then unexpectedly, she was brought up short to find it in herself.
Having read and loved the plays of Shakespeare since childhood, she was thrilled by the chance to see an actual stage production. The great English tragedienne Sarah Siddons, who had come out of retirement the year before, appeared in Macbeth for the first time and was acclaimed a triumph. That Mrs. Siddons then appeared in Othello, making the transition from Lady Macbeth to Desdemona, was declared the mark of genius, and the Adamses were among the glittering audiences that filled the Drury Lane for both productions. To Abigail, Mrs. Siddons was brilliant but miscast as Lady Macbeth. It was in Othello, as Desdemona, that she was “interesting beyond any actress I had ever seen.”
Yet to read of Desdemona in the arms of a black man was, Abigail found, not the same as seeing it before her eyes. “Othello [played by John Kemble] was represented blacker than any African,” she wrote. Whether it was from “the prejudices of education” or from a “natural antipathy,” she knew not, “but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona.” Othello was “manly, generous, noble” in character, so much that was admirable. Still she could not separate the color from the man. Filled with self-reproach, she affirmed that there was “something estimable” in everyone, “and the liberal mind regards not what nation or climate it springs up in, nor what color or complexion the man is of.”
Attacks on Adams in the press continued. He was called a nobody, ridiculed for having insufficient means to conduct himself in proper fashion. The Public Advertiser reminded its readers that all so-called American patriots were cowards, murderers, and traitors, and described Adams as looking “pretty fat and flourishing” considering “the low estate he is reduced to.” In letters to the editor he was decried as a “pharisee of liberty,” an “imposter.” Every hireling scribbler was set to vilify them, wrote Abigail, who in her time in London acquired a dislike of the press that would last a lifetime.
From Paris, where he was well supplied with London papers, Jefferson expressed astonishment at such slanders, as well as admiration for Adams's fortitude. “Indeed a man must be of rock who can stand all this,” he wrote to Abigail. “To Mr. Adams it will be but one victory the more.” Then, in a rare revelation of inner feeling, a confession of weakness such as he seldom made to anyone, Jefferson told her:
It would have ill suited me. I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but [made] irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post. These are weaknesses from which reason and your counsels will preserve Mr. Adams.
Possibly, he postulated, it was “the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character unsusceptible of civilization.”
He had been taken up by the Paris “literati,” he reported happily, and acquired a larger, more expensive house for himself. Located at the corner of the Champs-Elysées and the Rue de Berri, the newly built Hôtel de Langeac had twenty-four rooms, an indoor toilet, and a “clever garden.”
Not satisfied with it as it was, Jefferson proceeded to redesign and reconstruct much of the house to suit his fancy, thus adding further to the expense and despite grave concern over his own private finances.
To his brother-in-law, Francis Eppes, who was managing his affairs at home, Jefferson wrote, “The torment of mind I endure till the moment shall arrive when I shall owe not a shilling on earth is such really as to render life of little value.” But what could he do? He could not sell any more of his land, he wrote: he had sold too much as it was, and land was his only provision for his children. “Nor,”
he added, “would I willingly sell the slaves as long as there remains any prospect of paying my debts with their labors.”
Had Jefferson been as forthcoming with Adams as with his brother-in-law, Adams, the farmer's son, would have had no argument with Jefferson's faith in land as the only true wealth. But that Jefferson could so matter-of-factly consider selling off his slaves—not freeing them—and so readily transfer the burdens of his own extravagances to the backs of those he held in bondage, would have struck Adams as unconscionable, and would no doubt have been a serious test of his respect, if not affection, for the man. But such matters as these Jefferson never mentioned or discussed with Adams.
Meanwhile, he and Abigail exchanged shopping requests. Jefferson purchased French shoes and lace for her, and hunted down French dessert platters of a kind she had her heart set on for her dining table. For her part, Abigail was to pick out a dozen English shirts for him, a tablecloth and napkins sufficient for a seating of twenty. “But when writing to you,” he declared at the close of one letter, “I fancy myself at Auteuil and chatter on till the last page of my paper awakes me from my reverie.”
• • •
OCCASIONS AT COURT grew increasingly tedious and strained for Adams and his family. “Do you go out much for a walk,” the King kept inquiring of Abigail and Nabby at each and every reception, though the King, they thought, at least dissembled better than the Queen, whose countenance, said Nabby, was “as hard and unfeeling as if carved out of an oak knot.”
Particularly grating to Adams was the oft-spoken assumption among many of the British that sooner or later America would “of course” return to the British fold.
There is a strong propensity in this people [he wrote to Richard Henry Lee] to believe that America is weary of her independence; that she wishes to come back; that the states are in confusion; Congress has lost its authority; the governments of the states have no influence; no laws, no order, poverty, distress, ruin, and wretchedness; that no navigation acts we can make will be obeyed; no duties we lay on can be collected... that smuggling will defeat all our prohibitions, imposts and revenues.... This they love to believe.
There was indeed “a new order of things arisen in the world,” Adams emphasized to another correspondent at home, but British statesmen refused to comprehend this. Overall, the attitude toward America, he had come to realize, was hardly less hostile than it had been during the war. “They hate us,” he wrote to a friend. One Englishman had declared in his presence, “I had rather America had been annihilated, than that she should have carried her point.”
Much of this he and Abigail attributed to “venom” spread by American Loyalists in London. One vehement figure, Harrison Gray, once the treasurer of Massachusetts, said in a letter to the press that if it were left to him, he would have John Adams hanged.
Adams remained remarkably calm, nonetheless, conducting himself with model composure, and refusing to have any contact with Loyalists, with one exception. Taking the initiative, he hunted up his old friend Jonathan Sewall, whom he had not seen since the day they bid farewell at Casco Bay in what seemed a lifetime before. Adams rode to Sewall's London lodgings, and as Sewall wrote afterward, it was a memorable reunion. “When Mr. Adams came in, he took my hand in both his, and with a hearty squeeze, accosted me in these words, ‘How do you do, my dear old friend?’ Our conversation was just such as might be expected at the meeting of two old sincere friends after a long separation.”
They talked for two hours. Neither had changed his views on the Revolution, nor his enmity for the side the other had chosen, though apparently nothing of this was said. Through the years of the war Sewall had taken heart from every American defeat, every report of dissension in the American army, and from the news of Benedict Arnold's return to his proper allegiances. Like many Loyalists living in exile in England, Sewall had had a difficult time getting by. Exiled from their homeland, unappreciated in their adopted country, most Loyalists had a hard life.
Sewall had grown bitter and resentful. His hatred of New England patriots was worse than ever: “those sanctified hypocrites,” he called them, those “rebellious, ungenerous, ungrateful sons of bitches.” Suffering bouts of melancholia, he had largely withdrawn from life, seldom leaving his rooms. Noticeably aged, he lived only for his two sons, he confessed to Adams, and for their sakes planned to remove to Canada.
Adams urged Sewall and his wife, Esther Quincy, to come and take a family dinner at Grosvenor Square, and “in a way so friendly and hearty,” wrote Sewall, that he almost complied, but could not, would not.
“Adams has a heart formed for friendship, and susceptible to its finest feelings,” Sewall continued in his account of the reunion. “He is humane, generous and open, warm in his friendly attachments, though perhaps rather implacable to those he thinks his enemies.” Clearly, Adams did not regard Sewall as his enemy.
Each felt he knew the other as well as he knew any man, and privately Adams thought Sewall, in 1774, had tragically sacrificed principle for position, while Sewall, as he wrote, thought Adams's own “unbounded ambition” was at fault; this and “an enthusiastic zeal for the imagined or real glory and welfare of his country” had overcome Adams's better self, “his every good and virtuous social and friendly principle.” With some understandable resentment perhaps, Sewall concluded that Adams had gone as far as his ambition would take him, and further that he was ill suited for his present role.
He is not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts. His abilities are undoubtedly equal to the mechanical parts of his business as ambassador; but this is not enough. He cannot dance, drink, game, flatter, promise, dress, swear with the gentlemen, and small talk and flirt with the ladies; in short, he has none of the essential arts or ornaments which constitute a courtier. There are thousands who, with a tenth of his understanding and without a spark of his honesty, would distance him infinitely in any court in Europe.
For all the warmth of the reunion, the expressions of brotherhood, the two hours were difficult. Adams came away deeply saddened. He would forever think of Sewall as one of the casualties of the war. According to Adams, when Sewall died in New Brunswick a number of years later, it was of a broken heart.
• • •
OF THE MULTIPLE ISSUES in contention between Britain and the new United States of America, and that John Adams had to address as minister, nearly all were holdovers from the Treaty of Paris, agreements made but not resolved, concerning debts, the treatment of Loyalists, compensation for slaves and property confiscated by the British, and the continued presence of British troops in America. All seemed insoluble. With its paper money nearly worthless, its economy in shambles, the United States was desperate for trade, yet without the power or prestige to make demands, or even, it seemed, to qualify for respect. British complacency was massive. The British saw no cause for haste in fulfilling any of the agreements with their poor, weak, former adversary. Nor were they the least inclined to lessen or jeopardize in any way their primacy at sea. British reluctance to be accommodating was quite as great as the American need for equitable resolutions. The British continued to exclude American vessels from both Canada and the West Indies, as well as from Britain. Further, no American products could be shipped anywhere within the British Empire except in British vessels.
To Adams the first priority must be to open British ports to American ships. But his efforts came to nothing, while at home, under the Articles of Confederation enacted in 1781, Congress was without power to regulate commerce. It was thus a sad and humiliating situation.
Adams went repeatedly to Whitehall to meet with Lord Carmarthen. He called at 10 Downing Street for an exchange with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, the younger, who was all of twenty-four years old, who never stopped talking and impressed Adams not at all. Whatever Adams proposed, whatever inquiries he made to the Ministry, he received no answers. Long days and nights were spent reporting to Foreign Secretary Jay and composing memorials to Carmarthen.
One particularly important memorial, calling for the withdrawal of British garrisons from the Northwest, as agreed in the Treaty of Paris, went unanswered for three months. When at last Carmarthen replied, it was to say only that this violation of the treaty was no different from the failure of Americans to pay the debts due British creditors.
Adams was hardly surprised. From his first meeting with Pitt, he had been convinced that Britain would never willingly give up the forts, any more than they would open the way to American trade with the West Indies.
When Adams talked of “commercial reciprocity,” the British thought him naive. Like Jefferson, Adams believed in free trade in theory, but faced with British intransigence, he began losing hope of ever attaining such an agreement and cautioned Jefferson, “We must not, my friend, be the bubbles of our own liberal sentiments.” Presently, the picture no brighter, he told Jefferson that if the British Court refused to act a reasonable and equitable part, the United States should enter into “still closer and stronger connections with France.”
Commercial relations with France, however, were no more promising than with Britain. Jefferson, who was as dedicated to close ties with the French as ever Franklin had been, had thus far succeeded in attaining a single agreement, one whereby American whale oil would be admitted to French markets, and this for a limited time only. Since the end of the war, the French, for their part, had attained nothing like the flourishing American trade that Vergennes had imagined. The demand for French goods in America was low and not likely to improve. When in a meeting with Lord Carmarthen, Adams summoned all his old intensity to warn that the attitude of the British, if continued, would inevitably strengthen commercial ties between the United States and France, it had no effect whatever. He saw no hope, Adams reported to Jefferson.