Chapter Five

Unalterably Determined

[His] obstinacy will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents.

—The Comte de Vergennes

Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.

—John Adams

TWO DAYS OUT FROM BOSTON, in a stiff northeast wind, the Sensible, with 350 people on board, sprang a leak. A pump was put immediately in service, yet the leak grew worse day by day.

There was no sign of British cruisers, which to Adams were the worst of evils; but then the second week, off the Grand Banks, the wind began blowing from the northwest, the sea to run high. For one endless, miserable day, in howling winds, the old frigate labored under foresail only. A “very violent gale,” recorded Adams, who, in order to write, had to get down on his cabin floor on hands and knees.

By the time the storm passed, the ship was leaking so badly that two pumps had to be manned day and night, unrelenting work in which all hands took part, passengers as well, including John Quincy. The situation was alarming. In the event of another storm or an encounter with the enemy, the captain explained, they would have no chance. The only choice was to make for the nearest friendly port, for Spain, “with all the sail the ship could prudently bear.”

The Sensible labored slowly across the ocean, until finally, on the morning of December 8, 1779, running with the wind, she reached El Ferrol, on Spain's rocky northwestern tip. It had been a closer call than anyone liked to think. In less than an hour at anchor at El Ferrol, with the pumps stopped, there were seven feet of water in the hold.

“We have had an escape again,” Adams began in a letter to Abigail from shore. “One more storm would very probably [have] carried us to the bottom of the sea,” added John Quincy in his report to his mother.

Faced with the prospect of being marooned for weeks while repairs were made, Adams inquired about proceeding overland. The distance to Paris was 1,000 miles. The journey, east across Spain and over the Pyrenees to the French border, was one of extreme difficulty, he was warned, and never more so than in winter. But to sit still and wait again as he had in France, to let circumstance rule, or the whims or priorities of others, were not in his nature. He was determined to go, and talk of difficulties had little effect. Indeed, for a man so constituted as Adams, such talk could well have been the deciding factor. “The season, the roads, the accommodations for traveling are so unfavorable that it is not expected I can get to Paris in less than thirty days,” he wrote in explanation to the president of Congress, Samuel Huntington. “But if I were to wait for the frigate, it would probably be much longer. I am determined, therefore, to make the best of way by land.”

At first light, December 15, Adams, his sons, Francis Dana, John Thaxter, servants, Spanish guides and muleteers, and two additional Americans who had been aboard the Sensible, set off mounted on scrawny mules and looking, as John Thaxter noted, very like a scene from Don Quixote, and quixotic the whole undertaking turned out to be. Adams was exhausted before the journey began. In the week since landing he had hardly slept a night, so horrific was the torment of fleas and bedbugs, Spain's “enemies of all repose,” as he said.

At the old city of La Coruña provisions were gathered. Three ancient calashes—clumsy, brightly painted two-wheeled carriages—were also added to the caravan, these remarkable for their cracked leather seats and broken harness patched together with rope and twine and pulled by mules with tiny, tinkling bells tied about their necks. As the calashes proved more uncomfortable than the mules, Adams, Dana, and Thaxter chose to go by mule most of the way.

We carried bread and cheese, meat, knives and forks, spoons, apples and nuts [Adams would write]. Indeed, we were obliged to carry... our own beds, blankets... everything that we wanted.... We got nothing at the taverns but fire, water... and sometimes the wine of the country.

From La Coruña, their route passed through Betanzos, once the capital of the kingdom of Galicia, then Lugo, Astorga, Burgos, and Bilbao. “There is the grandest profusion of wild irregular mountains I ever saw,” Adams wrote. But the roads proved worse even than he.had imagined, so rocky and treacherous it was necessary to go by foot a great part of the journey.

“We had nothing worth remarking today except we kept ascending,” wrote John Quincy on December 31. Another day's journey was “almost perpendicular.” With encouragement from his father, the boy had started a diary, the beginning of what was to be a lifelong enterprise lasting sixty-eight years.

To the Americans the wretchedness of the Spanish people, the squalor of the wayside taverns, were appalling. “Smoke filled every part of the kitchen, stable, and other part[s] of the house, as thick as possible so that it was... very difficult to see and breathe,” Adams recorded at one tavern. “The mules, hogs, fowls and human inhabitants live ... all together,” he wrote of another overnight accommodation. Everywhere he saw poverty and misery, people in rags. “Nothing appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy,” he noted sadly.

There were days of rain, fog, and snow, mountains that went endlessly on and on, mountains like “a tumbling sea.” The boys were sick with colds. Francis Dana became so ill there was a question whether he could continue. “We go along barking and sneezing and coughing as if we were fitter for a hospital than for travelers on the road,” wrote Adams, whose own strength and spirits began to give out. He had never known a worse undertaking, he fumed in his diary. Given the choice of his first crossing on the Boston, or this, he would prefer the former with all its horrors. But only to Abigail, in a letter written at Bilbao, did he concede that he had made a mistake coming overland.

The one compensation of the journey was the warmth of the welcome they received along the route. Spain by now had entered the war, but as an ally of France only. John Jay of New York, the American minister to Spain, had been in Madrid for a year, and his mission had proven hopeless, as the Spanish Court had no interest in recognizing the independence of the United States. Still, no representative of any government would have been treated with more courtesy and friendship than were Adams and his party in town after town, as he was to report proudly.

At last in January, two weeks into the new year 1780, the travelers crossed the frontier at St. Jean de Luz and by nightfall arrived at Bayonne. Leaving Spain, Adams regretted only that he had had no time for a detour to see the famous pilgrimage cathedral of Santiago de Compestela, and that he had to part with his mule, “as he was an excellent animal and had served me well.”

Heading on by post chaise, he and his party were in Bordeaux in another few days, and despite fog and icy roads reached Paris on February 9, travel-worn but in “tolerable” health, nearly two months after departing from El Ferrol, three months after setting sail from Boston. A letter from Abigail filled with worry was waiting for him at the Hôtel de Valois on the Rue de Richelieu, which he planned to make his address this time.

• • •

LOSING NO TIME, Adams enrolled the boys the next morning in the boarding school at Passy, then called on Franklin. At Versailles the day after, accompanied by Franklin and Francis Dana, Adams “had the honor to wait on” the aged Prime Minister of France, Jean-Frederic Phelypeaux de Maurepas, who was as old nearly as the century, older even than Franklin; as well as the Minister of Marine, Gabriel Sartine; and the all-important Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes.

In Franklin's estimate, the “disposition” of the Court to the American cause was as favorable as it had ever been, and Adams came away from these initial discussions feeling even more sanguine. He had never heard the French Foreign Ministry “so frank, explicit, and decided,” he stressed in a letter to Congress. Most encouraging was the talk of French naval support, and from all that he heard, he grew increasingly optimistic. The largest French fleet yet was preparing to sail. Four thousand troops under General Rochambeau were soon to depart.

“The French Court seemed to be now every day more and more convinced of the good policy, and indeed the necessity, of prosecuting the war with vigor in America,” Adams informed James Warren. “They have been making great preparations accordingly, and are determined to maintain a clear superiority.”

The one annoyance was Vergennes's apparent displeasure over Adams's mission. Adams offered a letter of explanation, saying he had been chosen by Congress as minister plenipotentiary to negotiate a peace with Great Britain, as well as a treaty of commerce. It was the wish of Congress, as a way to save time, that an authorized American envoy be present in Europe to treat with the ministers of the other powers the moment peace became possible. Further, it was the wish of Congress—as well as his own—to take no steps without consulting the ministers of his Most Christian Majesty.

Adams asked whether, “in the present circumstances of things,” the British should be made aware of the purpose of his mission, and suggested that an official announcement be published such as had already appeared in the Journals of Congress.

His letter was written on February 12. In reply, February 15, Vergennes insisted that nothing be said of the matter until Conrad Gerard, the French minister to America who had been replaced by La Luzerne, arrived back in Paris, and explained Adams's instructions from Congress. In the meantime, Adams was told, “It is the part of prudence to conceal your eventual character [as peacemaker] and, above all, to take the necessary precautions that the object of your commission remain unknown to the Court of London.”

Adams was astonished and deeply insulted. It was no affair of Gerard's to explain his instructions. It was also inconceivable that the British did not already know the nature of his business. The London papers had already carried news of his arrival in Europe and that he had come to “hear and receive any proposals of peace” from Great Britain. And as Vergennes was known to employ a veritable army of spies, he was hardly groping in the dark on such matters.

The proud, immensely shrewd French Foreign Minister had become one of the great figures of eighteenth-century Europe by dint of exceedingly hard work and by making himself a consummate man of the world. French support for the American war was his policy and he its champion from the start, despite the fearful drain it imposed on the treasury of France. There was thus no one more deserving of American gratitude. But it was because of no abiding fervor for American liberty that he had persuaded his young king to come to America's aid. France was an absolute monarchy and Vergennes as stout a monarchist as could be found. His purpose, first, last, and always, was to weaken and humble Britain and, at the same time, expand French trade in America.

“Always keep in mind,” Vergennes would tell the Minister of Finance, “that in separating the United States from Great Britain, it was above all their commerce we wanted.”

Adams had no illusions about what determined the actions of nations. “It is interest alone which does it,” he had once told Congress, “and it is interest alone which can be trusted.” For Vergennes's American policy he had a vivid image: “He means ... to keep his hand under our chin to prevent us from drowning, but not to lift our heads out of water.”

As polite as Adams remained, Vergennes neither liked nor trusted him. He found Adams's manifest integrity unsettling; Adams's emphatic patriotism appealed not at all. The Foreign Minister was a man accustomed to deference, and exceedingly fond of having his way. Preferring to deal only with the ever obliging Franklin, he dreaded the prospect of Adams meddling in what he, Vergennes, regarded as his exclusive domain, the power politics of Europe. While all Paris might see Franklin as the authentic, homespun “natural” American, Vergennes knew better. It was precisely Franklin's subtlety, his worldliness, that made him invaluable as a diplomat. Adams, on the other hand, was truly a provincial. Worse, he was a novice; and there was no telling the damage such a man might do.

Vergennes's professed need to see the instructions Gerard was bringing was disingenuous, since Gerard had long since sent Vergennes a summary of Adams's instructions, in a dispatch from Philadelphia the very day they were adopted by Congress.

“The delicacies of the Comte de Vergennes about communicating my powers [to Britain] are not perfectly consonant to my manner of thinking,” Adams wrote to Congress. Were he free to follow his own judgment, he would pursue a “bolder plan.” But in the face of the Foreign Minister's directive there seemed little he could do. Franklin volunteered no support, nor did Adams ask for it.

At loose ends once again in Europe, and with no word from Congress, Adams was nonetheless determined to make himself useful. If nothing else, he could write—Adams would always write. Another man might have relaxed and bided his time, just as another man might have waited at El Ferrol for his ship to be repaired, rather than striking out over the mountains of Spain.

Through that spring in Paris and on into summer, with able assistance from Francis Dana and John Thaxter, Adams produced letters by the score, reports, newspaper articles—a great outpouring of “intelligence” surpassing in quantity even his most ambitious literary efforts of other years. Determined to improve European understanding of the American cause, he became, with Vergennes's sanction, his own office of information and propaganda, supplying anonymous articles to the Mercure de France, a weekly journal edited by Edme-Jacques Genet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. “I can assure you of his [Vergennes's] pleasure in giving his approval to publish in the Mercure everything that shall come from such a good pen,” wrote Genet, who tried tactfully to convince Adams he would do better with his French readers if he were not quite so long-winded.

In addition, Adams turned out articles tailored for publication in the British press, these to be placed by an American in London named Edmund Jenings. Another American agent in London, Thomas Digges, was recruited to keep Adams supplied with items gleaned from the London papers. Jenings and Digges were somewhat shadowy figures who may have been double agents like Edward Bancroft, but Adams trusted both, relied heavily on them, and the system worked with great efficiency. Digges's reporting especially was fast and accurate. His dispatches, sent to C. F. Hoochera, a favorite bookseller of Adams's on the Pont Neuf, were addressed to Ferdinando Ramon San, a name Adams borrowed from one of the muleteers on the trek across Spain.

Adams and Dana got along well. In accepting the appointment as secretary, Dana had insisted that he be considered Adams's equal, a colleague, not an employee, and Adams, who had agreed, proved as good as his word. No less the New Englander than Adams, Dana was equally ill suited to trifling away his time. They were of like mind on most matters, including the underlying motives of the Comte de Vergennes.

Between times, on his own, Adams maintained correspondence with James Warren, James Lovell, Elbridge Gerry, Samuel Adams, and Benjamin Rush. And he wrote periodically to Vergennes, affirming his faith in the French-American alliance and passing along what little news from America came his way.

But much the greatest part of the outpouring was to Congress. From his rooms on the Rue de Richelieu, Adams issued almost daily correspondence, writing at times two and three letters a day, these addressed to President Samuel Huntington and filled with reports on British politics, British and French naval activities, or his own considered views on European affairs. In a letter dated April 18, he gave as clear-headed an appraisal as Congress was to receive from anyone in Europe.

Although I am convinced by everything I see, and read and hear, that all the powers of Europe... rejoice in the American Revolution and consider the independence of America in their interest and happiness... yet I have many reasons to think that not one of them, not even Spain or France, wishes to see America rise very fast to power. We ought therefore to be cautious how we magnify our ideas and exaggerate our expressions of the generosity and magnanimity of any of these powers. Let us treat them with gratitude, but with dignity. Let us remember what is due to ourselves and our posterity as well as to them. Let us above all things avoid as much as possible entangling ourselves with their wars and politics... America has been the sport of European wars and politics long enough.

With still no response from Congress, after some forty-six letters, he kept steadily on. “I have written more to Congress since my arrival in Paris than they ever received from Europe put it all together since the revolution[began],” he told Elbridge Gerry without exaggeration. Franklin by contrast rarely wrote a word to Congress. By late July, Adams had produced no less than ninety-five letters—more than Congress wanted, he imagined—and never knowing whether anything had been received.

“I am so taken up with writing to Phil[adelphia] that I don't write to you as often as I wish,” he told Abigail, to whom he had already written twenty times or more.

He saw his sons as often as he could and tried to keep watch on their progress at school. “Can't you keep a steadier hand?” he admonished John Quincy in response to a hurried scrawl from the boy listing his course of study. It was essential to learn to write well, Adams lectured. When another letter from John Quincy arrived, this beautifully executed on lightly penciled guide lines, Adams wrote at once to praise him and say how pleased he was. But unable to resist giving further advice, he told him to waste no time learning to do flourishes with his pen. “Ornaments of this kind, if not done with great skill, are worse than none,” declared Adams in his notably plain hand.

Living at the center of Paris, he was able to see more of the city than ever before. The busy Rue de Richelieu was one of the most fashionable streets and the Hôtel de Valois, at 17 Rue de Richelieu, a premier residence. John Quincy would remember it as “magnificent.” Close by were the gardens of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries, which, with their statuary, Adams thought beautiful beyond compare. On days when the boys could be with him, they walked the gardens and much of the city. He took them on his rounds of the bookshops on the Left Bank. They toured the Jardin du Roi, with its celebrated natural history displays. How long would it be, Adams wondered, before America had such collections.

“There is everything here that can inform understanding, or refine the taste, and indeed one would think that could purify the heart,” he wrote of Paris to Abigail. Yet there were temptations. “Yet it must be remembered there is everything here, too, which can seduce, betray, deceive, corrupt and debauch,” and in order to see to his duties, he must steel himself.

The conflict between the appeal of the arts and the sense that they were the product of a luxury-loving (and thus corrupt) foreign society played heavily on his mind. Delightful as it was to stroll the gardens of Paris, enticing as were science and the arts, he, John Adams, had work to do, a public trust to uphold. The science of government was his duty; the art of negotiation must take precedence.

Then, in a prophetic paragraph that would be quoted for generations within the Adams family and beyond, he wrote:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

How Americans deported themselves in Europe was a serious matter, Adams's convictions stemming more from patriotism than prudishness. So much more was at stake than one's own pleasure.

When a young New England merchant named Elkanah Watson, the son of a friend, wrote to inquire what sort of manners he should cultivate in anticipation of touring Europe, Adams's answer went far to explain his own conduct under the circumstances and the kind of guidance he was giving his sons.

You tell me, sir, you wish to cultivate your manners before you begin your travels... permit me to take the liberty of advising you to cultivate the manners of your own country, not those of Europe. I don't mean by this that you should put on a long face, never dance with the ladies, go to a play, or take a game of cards. But you may depend upon this, that the more decisively you adhere to a manly simplicity in your dress, equipage, and behavior, the more you devote yourself to business and study, and the less to dissipation and pleasure, the more you will recommend yourself to every man and woman in this country whose friendship or acquaintance is worth your having or wishing. There is an urbanity without ostentation or extravagance which will succeed everywhere and at all times. You will excuse this freedom, on account of my friendship for your father and consequently for you, and because I know that some young gentlemen have come to Europe with different sentiments and have consequently injured the character of their country as well as their own both here [and at home].

The boys were getting on splendidly, he assured their mother. Her “delicate” Charles was “hardy as flint,” “speaks French like a hero.” “He is a delightful little fellow. I love him too much.”

Yet as before, Adams remained reluctant to profess his love for her, though it was from the heart that he wrote:

May Heaven permit you and me to enjoy the cool of the evening of life in tranquility, undisturbed by the cares of politics and war—and above all with the sweetest of all reflections that neither ambition, nor vanity, nor any base motive, or sordid passion through the whole course of great and terrible events that have attended it, have drawn us aside from the line of duty and the dictates of our consciences. Let us have ambition enough to keep our simplicity, our frugality, and our integrity, and transmit these virtues as the fairest of inheritance to our children.

Peace was his dearest wish. But when ever would they see it? “The events of politics are not less uncertain than those of war.”

• • •

JOHN ADAMS WAS NOT UNSYMPATHETIC to the concerns of the Comte de Vergennes and the Foreign Ministry. Nor was he ever so obtuse about French sensibilities and the importance of maintaining good relations with France as his detractors would later charge. “The Court here have many differences to manage as well as we,” he wrote understandingly to Samuel Adams, “and it is a delicate thing to push things in this country.” While he believed candor essential in dealing with the French, “harshness,” he knew, was sure to ruin even the fairest negotiations with them.

His great worry, as he reported to Congress, was that the French were growing tired of the war. In fact, as Adams was unaware, Vergennes had privately informed his king of a “need” for peace, while to a friend he expressed but “feeble confidence” in the Americans. Further, Adams correctly suspected it was the French intention, once the war was ended, to keep America poor and dependent—“Keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” He saw acutely and painfully the dilemma of the French Alliance. Without French help, the United States could not win the war, yet it was purely for their own purposes that the French were involved.

Still, he felt no difficulty in dealing with Vergennes. Nor, interestingly, was he distressed with Franklin. In voluminous correspondence with members of Congress and in his private writings, Adams had not a complaining or disrespectful word to say about Franklin, nothing of the bitter disdain expressed in letters the year before.

But there now followed a chain of events that were to culminate in a serious rift with both Vergennes and Franklin. Probably it was inevitable.

On June 16, as had become routine, Adams sent Vergennes some latest items of news from America, these concerning the American currency. Three months before, on March 18, 1780, desperate to curb rampant inflation, Congress had resolved to devalue the dollar. It was a matter about which Vergennes already knew and, in passing along the information, Adams volunteered no opinion of Congress's policy. A few days later, however, Adams was summoned to Versailles for a discussion of the issue, during which he candidly voiced his approval of what Congress had done. Vergennes was as polite as always. “The conversation was long... very decent and civil on both sides,” Adams would recall. But again Adams was telling the Foreign Minister what he already knew, since Adams had earlier expressed his views to Chaumont, who lost no time reporting the conversation to Vergennes.

Vergennes's situation was more complicated than Adams knew. There was dissension within the Foreign Ministry. The aged Prime Minister, Maurepas, was secretly making peace gestures to the British, and implying that the French might give way on support for American independence.

The easiest, most prudent step for Vergennes would have been to let the matter of the dollar cool for a while. Normally he would have taken it up with Franklin, the properly accredited minister to the Court, with whom he had never known the least discord. But it appears that he saw his chance. Having found no way to control Adams, he could now at last be rid of him.

In an official letter of June 21, Vergennes informed Adams that France opposed any revaluation of the American currency unless an exception were made for French merchants. He portrayed the measure as an act of bad faith on the part of America, implying it could have serious consequences to the alliance, and he called on Adams to request Congress to “retrace its steps and do justice to the subjects of the King.”

If Vergennes was setting a trap—as it seems he was—Adams obliged by stepping into it, and perhaps knowingly. In a characteristically spirited, unambiguous letter, Adams made the case for revaluation and for no preferred treatment for French merchants, his purpose being to make clear his own views and those, he was sure, of Congress and the American people. “I thought it my indispensable duty to my country and to Congress, to France and the Count himself, to be explicit,” he would say.

Revaluation was a necessity, he wrote. Congress had no other choice. And since most French merchants who dealt in armaments and military supplies had been paid in European currencies, they had little cause for complaint. Besides, their profits had been substantial. But the crux of the matter was that, in justice, no foreign merchant could possibly be granted better treatment than American merchants. It was that simple. “Foreigners, when they come to trade with a nation, make themselves temporary citizens, and tacitly consent to be bound by the same laws.”

The letter was undoubtedly what Vergennes expected from Adams, and all that he needed—a written statement from Adams showing him to be in direct opposition to French policy and thus a threat to relations between France and America.

Adams, however, took this first real exchange of views with the aloof Foreign Minister as a long-awaited opportunity to broaden discussions on matters of more importance. The prospect of greater French military involvement in the war in America that had looked so promising earlier, appeared to have faded. While the army of Rochambeau had been sent to aid Washington, French warships had sailed not for the United States, as expected, but for the West Indies. Whatever the size of the armies of Washington and Rochambeau, Adams wrote emphatically, victory in America and an end to the war there would never come so long as the British were masters of the sea. The critical need was for a grand strategy whereby a French fleet would be deployed along the coast of the United States, to bottle up the British armies in the port cities where they were concentrated. Further, Adams argued, to keep a superior naval force on the coast of North America was “the best policy” for France, even were France to consider her own interests alone.

In another letter, raising again the naval question, Adams said he was “determined to omit no opportunity of communicating my sentiments to your excellency, upon everything that appears to me to be of importance to the common cause.”

But Vergennes had had enough. On July 29, in a crushing reply, he ended any further communication with Adams. He would henceforth deal only with Franklin, he announced, and in a pointedly undiplomatic conclusion, informed Adams, “Le Rot n'apas eu besoin de vos sollicitations pour s'occuper des interets des États-Unis.” “The King did not stand in need of your solicitations to direct his attention to the interests of the United States.”

A full set of Adams's letters were then delivered to Franklin, with an accompanying note from Vergennes saying, “The King expects that you will lay the whole before Congress.” At the same time, a dispatch from the Foreign Minister went off to Philadelphia directing La Luzerne to see what could be done to have Adams recalled.

Franklin wrote a letter of his own to Congress, which he need not have. He could have merely forwarded the Adams letters as Vergennes requested and said little or nothing. But Franklin, too, it seemed had had enough of Adams. His letter was dated August 9, 1780, and while mild in tone and not entirely unfair in judgment, it was, as Franklin knew perfectly, a devastating indictment. Vergennes could not have wished for more, which may well have been Franklin's intent. “Mr. Adams has given extreme offense to the court here,” it began.

... having nothing else wherewith to employ himself, he seems to have endeavored to supply what he may suppose my negotiations defective in. He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in expressions of gratitude to France; for that she is more obliged to us than we to her; and that we should show spirit in our applications. I apprehend that he mistakes his ground, and that this court is to be treated with decency and delicacy. The King, a young and virtuous prince, has, I am persuaded, a pleasure in reflecting on the generous benevolence of the action in assisting an oppressed people, and proposes it as a part of the glory of his reign. I think it right to increase this pleasure by our thankful acknowledgements, and that such an expression of gratitude is not only our duty, but our interest. A different conduct seems to me what is not only improper and unbecoming, but what may be hurtful to us. Mr. Adams, on the other hand, who at the same time means our welfare and interest as much as I do or any man can do, seems to think a little apparent stoutness and greater air of independence and boldness in our demands will produce us more ample assistance...

Mr. Vergennes, who appears much offended, told me yesterday that he would enter into no further discussions with Mr. Adams, nor answer any more of his letters... It is my intention, while I stay here, to procure what advantages I can for our country by endeavoring to please this court.

Not for months was Adams to learn what Franklin had done. Nor was he to see Franklin or Vergennes again for an even longer time. For as Franklin also reported to Congress, Adams had by then departed Paris for Holland to see, as he told Franklin, “whether something might be done to render us less dependent on France.”

• • •

IT WAS NOT HIS IDEA ALONE, or contrary to American intent. The prospect of securing financial help from the Dutch Republic had been talked about in Congress and at Paris for some time. The Dutch had been smuggling arms to America in quantity since before the French had become involved. More even than their French counterparts, Dutch merchants had grown rich in the trade, and so it seemed a reasonable prospect that Dutch money might also be available. Congress had considered sending a minister to Holland even before Adams left on his initial mission to France, and in his first months at Paris, he had reported that there was more friendship for America in Holland than generally understood. In advance of his second mission to Europe as peacemaker, Congress debated assigning Adams the additional task of negotiating a Dutch loan, but after concluding that a “distinct appointment” made better sense, named its former president, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, to seek a loan of $10 million. But Laurens was unable to depart for months to come, not until the summer of 1780.

Franklin, for his part, expressed strong disapproval of any such overt “suitoring” for alliances, preferring, as he said, that America, “a virgin state, should preserve the virgin character” and “wait with decent dignity for the applications of others.” Apparently he saw no contradiction with his own “suitoring” at the Court of Versailles, or the irony that he, of all people, would preach the preservation of a “virgin character.”

Adams, who had never lost interest in Holland, strongly disagreed, and from reports gathered since his return to Paris, he surmised that the chances for financial help from the Dutch were better than ever. He tried to convince Franklin and Vergennes of the need for a reconnaissance of the Low Countries, but without success. It was only when the strain of relations with Vergennes reached the breaking point that Vergennes acquiesced and provided Adams with the necessary passports, relieved to be rid of him.

With no support or consideration from either Vergennes or Franklin, Adams's position in Paris had become untenable. He longed for a change of scene. Above all, he longed to accomplish something, and was very quickly on his way to Amsterdam.

The venture was entirely of his own making. He went as a private citizen only, without authority, and, as it happened, wholly unaware that in June Congress had decided he should pursue exactly such a survey until Henry Laurens arrived. Optimism in Congress on the subject was as great as Adams's own.

For Adams, ever the independent man, it was a role of the kind he most loved—setting forth on his own against the odds in the service of the greatest of causes. For he genuinely believed the fate of the Revolution hung in the balance.

He removed his sons from the school at Passy and on July 27, accompanied by the servant Stephens, they were on their way north by coach, traveling fast over good roads to Compiegne and Valenciennes, through the finest farmland Adams had ever seen, at the height of one of the most abundant summers France had known. “The wheat, rye, barley, oats, peas, beans, and several other grains, the hemp, flax, grass, clover... the vines, the cattle, the sheep, in short everything upon this road is beautiful,” observed the farmer from Braintree happily.

The boys, free from school and again in their father's company, felt a lift of spirits to match his own. “We passed by Mons, which is a city and a very pretty one,” wrote thirteen-year-old John Quincy. “I never saw a more beautiful one in my life.”

They rolled through Brussels and Antwerp. At Rotterdam, on a Sunday, attending services at an English church, they listened as the English preacher prayed that “a certain king” might have “health and long life and that his enemies might not prevail against him.” Praying silently on his own, Adams asked that George III “be brought to consideration and repentance and to do justice to his enemies and to all the world.”

From Rotterdam they continued by horse-drawn canal boat to Delft, then The Hague, the Dutch seat of government. On the approach to Amsterdam that evening the giant canvas sails of immense windmills turned ceaselessly on all sides, a spectacle such as they had never seen.

Holland was as far north as Adams had ever been in his travels and about as different from France as a place could be. Holland, the name commonly used for the Seven Provinces of the Netherlands (of which Holland was the richest and most populated province), had particular appeal to Americans. It was the tiny, indomitable republic which, in 1648, had formally won its independence from Spain, the mightiest empire of the time, after a war and truce that stretched over some eighty years. Like the United States, the Dutch Republic was born of war, and for more than a century had survived and prospered between two of the great, interminably warring powers of Europe, France and England. Adams would liken it to a frog hopping about between the legs of two battling bulls.

As America faced the challenge of a continental wilderness, Holland faced the North Sea. The extraordinary ingenuity and industry of the Dutch in wresting land from the sea were legendary. Still the actual spectacle of all that had been contrived and built, the innumerable canals, bridges, dams, dikes, sluices, and windmills needed to cope with water, to drain land, and hold back the sea—and that all had to be kept in working order so that life could go on—made first-time visitors stand back in awe, and New Englanders especially, knowing what they did of inhospitable climate and limited space. Francis Dana, when he arrived later, wrote of the Dutch living in a world made by hand. “The whole is an astonishing machinery, created, connected, constantly preserved by the labor, industry, and unremitting attention of its inhabitants at an expense beyond calculation.”

Amsterdam alone had more than 500 bridges arching its web of canals. The pride of the city, its Town Hall, a massive structure of cut stone, stood, as almost every visitor was informed, on 13,659 wooden piles.

Predominantly Protestant, Holland was known for its tolerance, for allowing religious freedom to thousands of European Jews, French Huguenots, and other Christian sects. To New Englanders it was very nearly sacred ground, as the place where the English separatists known as the Pilgrims had found refuge in the seventeenth century, settling at Leyden for twelve years before embarking for Massachusetts.

The seventeenth century had been the Golden Age of the Dutch. In one of the most astonishing upsurges of commercial vitality in all history, they had become the greatest trading nation in the world, the leading shipbuilders and mapmakers. Amsterdam, the busiest port in Europe, became the richest city in the world, and with their vast wealth, the Dutch became Europe's money lenders.

In the arts and letters, it was the age of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and van Ruysdael; of the poet Joost van den Vondel, of Grotius in theology and maritime law, Spinoza in philosophy. In the liberal atmosphere of seventeenth-century Holland, the French philosopher Rene Descartes found refuge and freedom to publish. John Locke, from whom Adams, Jefferson, and other American patriots drew inspiration, had published some of his earliest works while a political refugee in Amsterdam.

The Golden Age was long past by the time Adams arrived—Dutch maritime power and Dutch prestige were acknowledged to be “in decline”—yet business was thriving and visitors were struck by signs of Dutch prosperity on all sides. Amsterdam remained the commercial center of Europe. Its immense harbor thronged with shipping. “Wherever the eye ranges, masts and sails appear,” wrote an English traveler. “Bells are sounding and vessels departing at all hours.”

Beside the city's broad, tree-lined main canals, row upon row of elegant brick grachfenkuizen (canal houses) proclaimed the wealth of its merchant citizenry as did nothing else. Four and five stories tall, they were much alike in the Dutch manner, with stepped or bell-shaped gables and tall, sparkling windows of Dutch plate glass, which was considered something quite special. “The verdure of the trees reflecting strongly upon large windows which are kept bright and free of dust, add infinitely to their luster and magnificence,” wrote a visiting American. The homes of the wealthiest families, the grandest houses of all, numbering in the hundreds along the Herengracht and the Keizersgracht (the Gentlemen's Canal and the Emperor's Canal), were as fine as any of the great city houses of Europe. And more even than the elegant façades, the interiors and furnishings of such houses—the marble floors, chinaware, leather-bound books, maps, and huge ebony-framed portraits of the merchants themselves or of their Golden Age patriarchs—bespoke generations of accumulated wealth and unrivaled position.

Commonly described as a kind of northern Venice, Amsterdam had none of the architectural grandeur of Venice and was subject to long, dank North Sea winters. Also, by late summer, the season when Adams arrived, many of the canals turned putrid-smelling, and “so laden with filth,” an English woman wrote, “that on a hot day the feculence seems pestilential.” Indeed, the Dutch climate was widely understood to be dangerous to the health. “Amsterdam fever” was a well-known and dreaded malady. Visitors who stayed too long could expect to be ill, it was said, though young James Boswell of London had written that one ought to experience no difficulty if one ate well, drank well, dressed properly, and took exercise. Of Amsterdam, however, Boswell had little to say beyond that it was a place where he could patronize brothels unobserved.

Adams found the city densely crowded and teeming with foreigners—French, English, and Americans, commercial agents, sea captains, journalists, tourists, and spies. In smoky cafés Dutch merchants and bankers drank coffee, pulled at clay pipes, and talked incessantly to all hours. The talk was open, spirited—an atmosphere made to order for Adams—and rife with high-blown speculation, most of which struck him as amusing, as he told Franklin in a friendly letter written soon after his arrival.

One says America will give France the go by. Another that France and Spain will abandon America. A third that Spain will forsake France and America. A fourth that America has the interest of all Europe against her. A fifth that she will become the greatest manufacturing country and thus ruin Europe. A sixth that she will become a great and ambitious military and naval power, and consequently terrible to Europe.

Suspicious that there were too many Englishmen, and thus too many possible spies, in the hotel where he and the boys were staying, Adams found modest lodgings with an elderly widow, a “Madame La Veuve du Henry Schorn, of de Achterburgwal by de Hoogstrat,” as he would give the new address.

To get his bearings he was out and about, walking the canals, studying the buildings, circumventing the entire city by foot, meeting people, glad to return to useful work. Through all his life Adams would be happiest when there was clear purpose to his days.

“Papa went out”; “Papa went out to dinner”; “Papa went out to take a walk,” recorded John Quincy.

Adams knew no one, but from all that he saw and heard, and after meetings with a number of prominent Amsterdam bankers—Henrik Hooft, Jan de Neufville and son, Jacob and Nicholas van Staphorst—he grew highly optimistic. A “considerable” loan was entirely possible, he reported to Congress. Moreover, there was no better place in Europe in which to gather information or from which to circulate it.

In an exuberant letter to Abigail, he called Holland “the greatest curiosity in the world.” He doubted there was any nation of Europe “more estimable than the Dutch, in proportion.

Their industry and economy ought to be examples to the world. They have less ambition, I mean that of conquest and military glory, than their neighbors, but I don't perceive that they have more avarice. And they carry learning and the arts, I think, to a greater extent.

His only concerns were that the air was “not so salubrious” as that of France, and that the Dutch knew little at all about America, which he found astonishing.

When on September 16, Francis Dana turned up from Paris with the news that Congress had given Adams authority to work on securing a Dutch loan until Henry Laurens appeared, Adams notified John Thaxter to pack everything at the hotel in Paris and come at once. John Quincy and Charles were enrolled in Amsterdam's renowned Latin School, and Adams set to work. All his energy, zeal, stubborn determination, and his idealism, qualities that had seemed ill-suited at Versailles, were now to be brought to bear. In little time he cultivated an amazing range of friends among the press and in intellectual and financial circles, a number of whom were Jews who, Adams later said, were among the most liberal and accommodating of all.

He made a study of Dutch ways and temperament, read deeply in Dutch history, searching out ever more volumes in Amsterdam's numerous well-stocked bookshops. He struggled to learn the language, and in what seemed an equally daunting task, to fathom the complexities of the Dutch system of government.

Between times, he kept campaigning by mail for an American navy, his determination perhaps reinforced by a new appreciation of all that commerce at sea had meant to the Dutch. “If I could have my will, there should not be the least obstruction of navigation, commerce, or privateering,” Adams wrote to Benjamin Rush, “because I firmly believe that one sailor will do us more good than two soldiers.” To Congress he declared emphatically, “A navy is our natural and only defense.”

In October, events took an unexpected turn, when word came from London that Henry Laurens, on his way to Amsterdam, had been captured at sea by a British man-of-war. Charged with high treason, Laurens was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, with “orders that no person whatever speaks to him,” as Adams's London contact Thomas Digges reported. A sack containing Laurens's confidential papers had been thrown overboard from his ship too late and the British had hooked it from the sea. Among the papers was the draft of a proposed secret treaty between America and the Netherlands, a document of no real significance, but one the British were happy to use as a pretext for a show of angry indignation and threats of war, a possibility the Dutch dreaded as they did no other.

With the responsibility of securing a loan now squarely on his shoulders, and the likelihood of peace no nearer than before, Adams settled in for the long haul.

At home the war in the South was going badly. Charleston had fallen to the British. At Camden, South Carolina, General Horatio Gates had suffered a devastating defeat in a battle in which American soldiers had fled like sheep. Nearly 1,000 Americans had been killed and a thousand more captured. Gates had been a favorite general officer of the Congress and of Adams, and it had been one of the most disastrous defeats of the war.

But there must be no softening of resolve, Adams declared. “I think I see very clearly that America must grow up in war,” he wrote to Congress. His own central task was to convince the Dutch that America would accept no outcome short of complete, irrevocable independence. Without that insurance, there would be no Dutch loan. Of this Adams was now absolutely certain.

This country had been grossly deceived. It has little knowledge of the numbers, wealth, and resources of the United States, and less faith in their finally supporting independence, upon which alone a credit depends. They also have an opinion of the power of England vastly higher than the truth. Measures must be taken with great caution and delicacy to undeceive them.

With his phenomenal capacity for work—an attribute not lost on the industrious Dutch—he produced materials of every kind in an all-out effort to “undeceive” them, while at the same time providing Congress with some of the most astute political reporting of his diplomatic career. Help came from a number of his new Dutch friends, “people of the first character,” as he said, who saw in the American struggle for independence hope for all humanity, and who, as Adams would long contend, never received the recognition they deserved.

Charles W. F. Dumas was a Dutch radical and friend of Franklin, a schoolmaster, linguist, and man of letters. Older than Adams by nearly fifteen years, he served faithfully as a translator and expert source of information.

John Luzac of Leyden, a lawyer, scholar, and editor, published in his Gazette de Leyde a steady variety of material supplied by Adams, including the first European translation of the new Massachusetts Constitution, which was to have an important effect in the Netherlands. In little time Luzac and Adams became the closest of friends.

Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a Dutch nobleman, had been the first and most prominent figure in the country to champion the American cause, and he greatly admired Adams's determination. Van der Capellen knew the majority of the Dutch sympathized with the American Revolution, but astutely he advised Adams that only American success in the war would enlist Dutch credit, for all the expressions of good will and interest he would hear.

At The Hague, as Adams came to understand, there was little sympathy for the American cause, nor much hope for decisive action. The government of the country, maddeningly complicated to anyone unfamiliar with it, seemed devised intentionally to foster inertia. It was a republic, but with no real executive power, only a symbolic head of state, the hereditary Stadholder, William V, Prince of Orange, who was related to the British royal family and personally devoted to the status quo. As Adams explained to Congress, sovereignty resided in the national assembly, Their High Mightinesses, the States-General. Yet even they were but the deputies of the “regents” in the cities, a very select group of great influence. Thus, as Adams wrote, the true power lay in the cities and in Amsterdam in particular. “The burgomasters of Amsterdam... who are called the regency, are one integral branch of the sovereignty of the seven United Provinces, and the most material branch of all because the city of Amsterdam is one quarter of the whole Republic, at least in taxes.”

Not until the government at The Hague took it upon itself to recognize the United States would anyone in the government be permitted to receive Adams officially. In actual practice nearly all would shun him. This being the case, it seemed only sensible to concentrate his efforts in Amsterdam, as both the money and the real political power were there.

But as Adams found, Dutch talk of financial support and an actual Dutch loan were decidedly different matters, his initial high expectations to the contrary. “No [banking] house that I have as yet thought it prudent to apply to dares to undertake the trust,” he told Congress. The Netherlands had been too long allied with Britain, as a matter of commercial advantage. Dutch prosperity depended in large measure on British support for Dutch trade on the high seas. Dutch banks, moreover, held substantial loans to Britain. Hence, there was extreme reluctance to take any step, do anything rash, that might upset the British.

That November of 1780 the situation was further compounded by more dispiriting news from America. In September General Benedict Arnold had conspired to commit treason, to turn over the fortress at West Point to the British, and when found out, defected to the enemy. As Baron van der Capellen reported to Adams, Arnold's treachery, on top of the loss of Charleston and Gates's defeat at Camden, left Dutch confidence shattered. “Never has the credit of America stood so low,” he told Adams, who advised Congress to “depend upon no money from hence.”

All professions of Dutch friendship for America were but “little adulations to procure a share of our trade,” and now even they had vanished like a vapor, as had his own prior exuberance and admiration for the Dutch.

• • •

A HARD NORTH SEA WINTER set in to match Adams's mood. Days were bitterly cold and raw, with darkness descending at four in the afternoon and the air of Amsterdam thick with chimney smoke. With the canals frozen, thousands of skaters took to the ice, a spectacle that provided what little cheer Adams found in life.

His health was suffering. He worried about his sons. At the Latin School, because he spoke no Dutch, John Quincy had been placed with elementary students. The boy grew restless and disheartened. The rector of the school thought him impertinent and merited a thrashing, as he informed his father. Adams's response was exactly what his own father's would have been. “Send the boys to me this evening,” he answered. He had no wish to see his children subjected to such “littleness of soul,” he explained to Abigail in a letter in which he gave vent not only to his indignation at the schoolmaster, but at what he had come to see as a decidedly unattractive side to the Dutch character that he had no desire to see rub off on his sons. “The masters are mean-spirited wretches, punching, kicking, and boxing the children upon every turn,” he wrote.

No longer did he see the Dutch as “examples to the world,” but perceived now, bitterly, “a general littleness arising from the incessant contemplation of stivers and doits [pennies and nickels], which pervades the whole people.” Frugality and industry were virtues everywhere, but avarice and stinginess were not frugality.

The Dutch say that without a habit of thinking of every doit before you spend it, no man can be a good merchant or conduct trade with success. This I believe is a just maxim in general. But I would never wish to see a son of mine govern himself by it. It is the sure and certain way for an industrious man to be rich. It is the only possible way for a merchant to become the first merchant or the richest man in the place. But this is an object that I hope none of my children will ever aim at.

Through a young American named Benjamin Waterhouse, a student of medicine at the University of Leyden, Adams arranged for tutors for the two boys, and the opportunity for them to attend lectures at the university.

Such was the turmoil of Amsterdam that Adams now found it impossible even to arrange meetings. “Very few dare to see me,” he reported. Searching desperately for a sign that all was not lost, the best he could come up with was the popularity of new songs full of patriotic resentment toward the English. A woman who sang one such song on an Amsterdam street corner sold six hundred copies in an hour, he informed Congress. But the hard truth was that after five months in the Dutch Republic, Adams had yet to meet a single government official of any importance.

In December, the veteran British ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Joseph Yorke, began openly threatening the Dutch, setting off something very like panic. “War is to a Dutchman the greatest of evils,” Adams wrote. “Yorke is so sensible of this that he keeps alive a continual fear of it.” At year's end, “the high and mighty” Yorke abruptly departed and Britain commenced an undeclared war on Dutch shipping.

Convinced he must now gain recognition of American independence and arrange a Dutch-American alliance—and thus only, he had concluded, could he obtain a loan—Adams pressed Congress for greater authority. As winter progressed, his new commission arrived; Congress had designated him minister plenipotentiary to the Dutch Republic, which provided all the authority to be wished for.

Through February and March, despite the weather, Adams kept on the move, traveling back and forth between Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, conferring with as many of his Dutch friends and contacts as possible. Again, as at Paris, the question was the timing of a formal announcement of his new powers.

Advised that his Amsterdam lodgings were too “obscure” for his new position, and that his effectiveness was being hurt by talk of this, Adams arranged for an American firm in Amsterdam to “hire” a suitable house—“the best house that is to be had at as cheap a rate as may be,” he wrote—and to have it furnished “decent enough for any character in Europe to dine in with a republican citizen.” In lengthy correspondence on the matter, he specified that the house be “large, roomy, and handsome, fit for the Hôtel des États-Unis d'Amérique.” He would need two manservants and a “good cook” (whether male or female he did not care). A “genteel carriage” would be required, as well as a coachman, and Adams was particular that the livery be in the Paris mode: deep blue coat and breeches, scarlet cape and waistcoats. (He also wanted the clothes returned when the time came for the servants to leave.) This was “new work” for him, he added, having never set up housekeeping before.

At Versailles, meanwhile, the Comte de Vergennes was writing to his ambassador at Philadelphia to say that Adams, in his role in the Netherlands, had become an embarrassment, an observation that La Luzerne was expected to pass along to his numerous friends in Congress. Especially distressing to Vergennes was the thought of Adams ever having any say in a peace settlement. “[He] has a rigidity, an arrogance, and an obstinacy that will cause him to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents...”

• • •

BY ESTABLISHED DIPLOMATIC FORM, no emissary ever proclaimed his mission—his “public character”—until the government to which he was accredited was ready to receive him. To do otherwise was deemed not only appallingly bad form but altogether impractical.

By the time spring came, Adams had decided what he must do, no matter the diplomatic niceties. “America... has been too long silent in Europe,” he wrote to Francis Dana. “Her cause is that of all nations and all men, and it needs nothing but to be explained to be approved.”

Adams was by then at Leyden, settled temporarily with his sons, John Thaxter, and Benjamin Waterhouse, the medical student, in a house on a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, the city's famous cathedral on the opposite side of the Rapenburg Canal from the university. It was the old quarter where the Pilgrims had lived during their years at Leyden, a connection deeply felt by Adams. A deacon at the cathedral would later relate, “Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.”

On April 19, 1781, six years to the day from the battle of Lexington and Concord, Adams completed and signed a sixteen-page memorial, addressed to “Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries.” A strong, even passionate appeal for cooperation, it began by affirming that the American people were “unalterably determined” to maintain their independence and that if ever there was a “natural alliance,” it would be between the two republics of the Netherlands and the United States. He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained. Indeed, so close were the two republics in history, religion, and government, Adams declared, “that every Dutchman instructed on the subject must pronounce the American revolution just and necessary or pass a censure upon the greatest actions of his immortal ancestors.” And if such noble sentiments were not reason enough for a Dutch-American bond, there was “the great and growing interest of commerce,” the “circumstance which perhaps in this age has stronger influence than any other in the formation of friendships between nations.

It may not... be amiss to hint that the central situation of this country, her extensive navigation, her possessions in the East and West Indies, the intelligence of her merchants, the number of her capitalists, and the riches of her funds, render a connection with her very desirable to America; and, on the other hand, the abundance and variety of the productions of America, the materials of manufacturers, navigation, and commerce, the vast demand and consumption in America of the manufactures of Europe... cannot admit of a doubt that a connection with the United States would be useful to this republic.

Adams was acutely aware of the magnitude of the step he was taking. By breaking the rules of diplomatic convention—by embarking on his own on what he called “militia diplomacy”—he was, he knew, risking ridicule and enmity, and, in the event that things went sour, disgrace. His entire mission was at stake, and who could say what the consequences would be at home if it were to fail. “But wise men know,” he would write, “that militia sometimes gain victories over regular troops, even by departing from the rules.” It was the militia, after all, who had humiliated the British regulars at Lexington and Concord, on that earlier April 19.

For a man of such strong feelings and great inner tensions, these were days of extreme stress, during which he remained uncharacteristically silent, as Benjamin Waterhouse would recall in a telling description of Adams the morning he set off for The Hague, nine miles distant.

I never shall forget the day and the circumstances of Mr. Adams's going from Leyden to The Hague with the memorial to their High Mightinesses, the States-General.... He came down into the front room where we were—his secretary, two sons, and myself—his coach and four at the door, and he, full-dressed, even to his sword, when with energetic countenance and protuberant eyes, and holding his memorial in his hand, said to us in a solemn tone, “Young men! Remember this day, for this day I go to The Hague to put seed in the ground that may produce good or evil—God knows which”—and putting the papers in his side pocket, he stepped into his coach and drove off alone, leaving us, his juniors, solemnized in thought and anxious, for he had hardly spoken to us for several days before—such was his inexpressible solitude.

At The Hague, Adams called first on the French ambassador, the young Duc de La Vauguyon, to inform him of his plan to present the memorial as soon as possible. La Vauguyon, a plump and personable young man whom Adams genuinely liked, spent the next several hours trying to dissuade him, urging that at the least he wait for an opinion from Vergennes. Adams refused. When, the following morning, La Vauguyon appeared at Adams's hotel to renew his plea, Adams again refused. He knew perfectly well that Vergennes would decide against him, Adams said, and there was no time to be lost.

“What!” said the Duke [according to Adams's later rendition of the scene]. “Will you take responsibility of it upon yourself?”

“Indeed, monsieur le Duc, I will; and I think I alone ought to be responsible, and that no other ambassador, minister, council, or court ought to be answerable for anything concerning it....”

“Are you then determined?”

“Determined, and unalterably determined, I am.”

On Friday, May 4, 1781, at the Binnenhof, the Inner Courts, at The Hague, Adams called on the Baron van Lynden van Hemmen, president of the States-General for that week, and presented his memorial. And with the energetic help of Dumas and Luzac, Adams had already arranged for its publication in English, French, and Dutch, which was no less important. Thousands of printed copies were made immediately available. Newspapers were provided with the full text. In little time it appeared throughout Europe.

That accomplished, Adams could do no more but wait for a reaction from the Dutch government. They “will deliberate and deliberate and deliberate,” he wrote in despair, little imagining how right he was.

• • •

HE HAD BEEN AWAY from home now for more than a year, leaving Abigail to face two winters without him, the first of which had been the most severe in forty years.

Her letters had never stopped, one season to another, though they arrived sporadically and were nearly always five or six months out of date. She wrote to him about the war and the severe weather. Sadly she related the deaths of his brother Peter's wife, Mary, and of his mother's husband, John Hall. His mother, she wrote, “desires her tenderest regards to you, though she fears she shall not live to see your return.”

Other letters were taken up with businesslike requests for trade goods, as Adams was again supplying her with regular shipments. She ordered silk gloves, ribbon, thread, fans, common calico, and handkerchiefs. “Handkerchiefs will turn to good account for hard money,” she reminded him. Only once did she request something for herself, a green umbrella from Paris.

As she herself acknowledged, she found it impossible to write a short letter, and to John Quincy and Charles came pages dispensing vigorous, motherly exhortations. Strive to excel, she urged Charles. Anything worth doing was worth doing well, she reminded them. Learning was not attained by chance, but “must be sought for with ardor.” She missed her boys more than she could express, and worried more than ever once she learned of the move to Holland, “a country so damp, abounding in stagnant water, the air of which is said to be very unfriendly to foreigners.”

She tried to keep an even balance in her outlook, she told John. “I am not suddenly elated or depressed. I know America capable of anything she undertakes with spirit and vigor.” No effort was too great for peace, no cost too dear, she wrote, and he must never doubt that his own part in serving that end meant everything to her.

My whole soul is absorbed in the idea. The honor of my dearest friend, the welfare and happiness of this wide, extended country, ages yet unknown, depend for their happiness and security upon the able and skillful, the honest and upright discharge of the important trust committed to him. It would not become me to write the full flow of my heart upon this occasion.

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.”

More than a month would pass before Adams felt reasonably well again, and some symptoms of the fever would drag on, or recur long afterward, another characteristic of malaria. Six months later he would write of his “fever” and “feeble knees”; a year and a half later, he would tell Abigail the consequences of “Amsterdam fever” were still plaguing him.

In addition, others in the house—Thaxter, Stephens, and another of the servants—were stricken in the same way, which did little to improve the atmosphere. Adams would describe Stephens, a robust man who had never been ill, as “almost shaken to pieces” by fever, “reduced almost to a shadow.” In all, it was as low a time as Adams ever knew.

His first letter to anyone, even before his letter to Abigail, was to Franklin on October 4, and in John Thaxter's hand. Only Adams's signature was his own. Having explained his long silence, he again stressed his acceptance of the new five-man peace commission, claiming he had actually been consoled by the change during the weeks when it appeared he might have nothing more ever to do with commissions of any sort. Particularly, he had been thinking about Jefferson and was eager to know if Franklin had any further word.

Have you any information concerning Mr. Jefferson, whether he had accepted the trust? Whether he has embarked, or proposes to embark? I saw a paragraph in a Maryland paper which expressed apprehension that he was taken prisoner by a party of horse [cavalry] in Virginia?

In reply, Franklin expressed sincere concern for Adams's health, and said that while he had no further information on Jefferson, he very much doubted the truth of the story of his having been taken prisoner.

In mid-October, so low he could see no hope or purpose in anything, Adams wrote as downhearted a letter as any he ever sent to Congress. His efforts to raise money were “useless,” his health wretched, his life in Europe so “gloomy and melancholy” and of such little use to the public “that I cannot but wish it may suit with the views of Congress to recall me.” It was, as he doubtless knew, a request Congress would ignore.

Gradually his strength returned, his outlook improved. If nothing else, he could take his new reduced status as peace commissioner gallantly, put a good face on the matter, show no anger or disappointment, no animosity toward Congress or toward Franklin, and he urged Abigail to do the same. “Don't distress yourself... about any malicious attempts to injure me in the estimation of my countrymen. Let them take their course and go the length of their tether,” he wrote. “The contemptible essays made by you-know-whom will only tend to their own confusion.... Say as little about it as I do.”

He longed for his “dearest friend.” “What a fine affair it would be if we could flit across the Atlantic as they say the angels do from planet to planet. I would dart to Penn's Hill and bring you over on my wings.”

“Ah my dear John, where are you?” she was writing at home at almost the same time. “Two years, my dearest friend, have passed away since you left your native land.” She was buying land in the new state of Vermont, she told him, a retreat in the woods where they could retire from the vexations and hazards of public life. In fact, she was well on the way to accumulating more than 1,000 acres in Vermont. “Do you not sometimes sigh for such a seclusion?” she asked.

There was talk of a future role for him in Massachusetts politics, but she had no such ambition. “I know the voice of fame to be a mere weathercock, unstable as water and fleeting as a shadow.” Yet she did have pride, she conceded. “I know I have a large portion of it.”

Her Vermont plans interested him not at all. “God willing I will not go to Vermont,” he would write. “I must be within the scent of the sea.”

• • •

AT THE END OF NOVEMBER came sensational news. On Friday, October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virginia, by Chesapeake Bay, the British General Cornwallis had surrendered his army to a combined American and French force under Washington and Rochambeau.

It was as decisive a defeat of the British as Saratoga and made possible by the arrival of Admiral de Grasse with the French West Indies fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. The British had been trapped, just as Washington would have been on Long Island early in the war had the British fleet been able to close off the East River. More than 7,000 British troops had put down their arms, more even than at Saratoga.

To many on both sides of the Atlantic, it presaged a quick end to the war. In America, in the first flush of victory, Washington was hailed as “the deliverer” of his country; in London the British Prime Minister, Lord North, exclaimed, “Oh, God! It's all over.”

Adams received “the glorious news” at Amsterdam the night of November 23. He was elated and took untold satisfaction from the knowledge that French sea power after all had proved decisive. It had been nearly three years since he told Vergennes that nothing would so guarantee a “speedy conclusion” to the war as a powerful French fleet in American waters, and now it had come to pass exactly as he had said.

Adams did not see Yorktown as the end of the struggle, however. The British still occupied major ports, including New York, and there would be no peace, he was sure, as long as a single company of British soldiers were at liberty anywhere in the United States. But if Yorktown did not mean an end to the war, it changed everything in Holland, as Adams saw at once. The chance to achieve his goal of Dutch recognition and financial support would never be better—Dutch merchants had no wish to be on the losing side.

Still “feebled” in health, he immediately met with the Duc de La Vauguyon and by mid-December could happily report to Congress that the French ambassador himself had said it was time Adams “demanded” an answer to his memorial of April, and do all in his power to secure a Dutch loan. “He thinks that I may now assume a higher tone, which the late Cornwallization will well warrant.”

As the new year commenced, Adams was at The Hague audaciously demanding a “categorical answer.” The president of the week, Bartholomeus van den Santheuvel, reported Adams's inquiry to Their High Mightinesses, the States-General, and so the question of American independence and Dutch-American relations became a matter of political debate throughout the country.

Adams then, in effect, took his case to the people of the Netherlands, calling for citizen petitions to the government for the recognition of the United States, and at the moment when popular sentiment against Britain was strongly on the rise. He went personally to the individual residences at The Hague for the delegations of eighteen cities in the province of Holland, each of which, as he explained to Congress, could be considered an independent republic. At every house, the reception was the same—approval, affection, esteem for the United States. Clearly, the campaign that he and his collaborators—Luzac, Dumas, van der Capellen—had launched to educate the Dutch people about the United States and its cause had not been in vain.

Nor did the collaborators cease to press for action. Van der Capellen in particular warned that alienating the Americans could damage trade with them and that it would be quite unwise to offend any further someone of such rectitude and importance as John Adams. “I know the unflinching character of Mr. Adams,” he wrote. “I know that it has been a sore point, and I shudder for the consequences if we embitter a man of his influence, one of the principal founders of American freedom.”

With the outlook brighter than it had ever been, Adams began receiving communications from Robert R. Livingston, who had been newly elected by Congress as the first Foreign Secretary—a choice the French ambassador, La Luzerne, boasted with some exaggeration to the Comte de Vergennes that he himself had arranged. Strongly allied with those in Congress who were well disposed toward the French, Livingston regarded Adams as imprudent and considered his April 19 memorial to the Dutch Court “a ridiculous display.” In November he demanded that Adams explain his actions, and in a tone bound to infuriate Adams.

We learned from Mr. Dumas that you have presented your credentials to the States-General. We are astonished that you have not written on so important a subject and developed the principles that induced you to declare your public character before the States were disposed to acknowledge it.

In a vigorous response, dated February 26, Adams recounted and explained his conduct in detail. The memorial had been exactly what the situation called for. The opposition of the Duc de La Vauguyon at the time had only confirmed the necessity of it. As for criticism of his own vanity or of his “militia diplomacy,” he wrote: “The charge of vanity is the last resort of little wits and mercenary quacks, the vainest men alive, against me and measures that they can find no other objection to... I have long since learned that a man may give offense and yet succeed.”

It was a remarkable letter—lucid, knowledgeable, and candid, if flagrantly self-congratulatory. Warming to the subject of his memorial, he portrayed it as the great catalyst for turning the entire point of view of the Dutch and thus affecting all Europe. But then he recovered himself, and with appealing self-deprecation evoked a favorite image from Aesop:

“What dust we raise,” said the fly upon the chariot wheel. It is impossible not to prove that this whole letter is not a similar delusion to that of the fly.

On February 26, 1782, the northern province of Friesland voted to instruct its delegates in the States-General to move formally to receive John Adams as minister from the United States. “Friesland is said to be a sure index of national sense,” Adams reported to Robert Livingston. “I am told that the Friesians never undertake anything but they carry it through.”

Certain that full Dutch recognition was at hand, Adams and Charles Dumas purchased what they anticipated would be the American embassy at The Hague, a “large elegant” house on the Fluwelen Burgwal—Street of the Velvet Makers—beside one of the city's most beautiful canals.

“Your humble servant has lately grown much into fashion in this country,” Adams reported to Abigail, having at last genuinely good news for her. “Some folks will think your husband a negotiator, but it is not to be, it is General Washington at Yorktown who did the substance of the work, the form only belongs to me.”

• • •

ON MARCH 20 IN LONDON, in a dramatic appearance in the House of Commons, Lord North resigned, to be succeeded by Lord Rockingham, a friend of America whose earlier Ministry had repealed the Stamp Act. In a great shift of government, Charles James Fox, who was known to favor immediate recognition of American independence, became Foreign Secretary and to the post of Secretary of Colonial Affairs was named Lord William Shelburne, who, though he opposed American independence, sent a retired Scottish merchant named Richard Oswald to Paris to sound out Benjamin Franklin on the prospect of negotiations.

In the Netherlands the tide turned on March 28, when the Province of Holland recognized American independence. In rapid order the other provinces followed suit.

On Friday, April 19, a year to the day since Adams presented his memorial, the States-General resolved that “Mr. Adams shall be admitted and acknowledged in the quality of ambassador of the United States to Their High Mightinesses.” When, the following day, Adams came to the assembly to present his letter of credence, it was as sweet a moment of triumph and vindication as he had ever known.

On Monday, April 22, at the Huis ten Bosch Palace at The Hague, Adams was received by His Most Serene Highness the Prince of Orange, William V, and his wife Princess Wilhelmina in a ceremony of formal recognition. The day after, as Adams took particular pleasure in informing Robert Livingston, the French ambassador “made an entertainment for the corps diplomatique in honor of the United States, at which he introduced their minister to all the foreign ministers of this Court... and the Duc de La Vauguyon more than compensated for the stiffness of some of the others by paying more attention to the new brother than to the old fraternity.”

All but speechless with pleasure, Adams heard the Spanish ambassador praise him for his determination and spirit, saying he had “struck the greatest blow that has been struck in the American cause, and the most decisive. It is you who have filled this nation with enthusiasm. It is you who have turned all on their heads.” The tribute was one Adams would quote repeatedly in letters, and understandably, given his elation and the spirit of the moment.

The American minister became the toast of the Dutch Republic. Poems and songs were written in celebration of American independence; engraved portraits were published of the American heroes Washington and Adams. La Vauguyon, in a letter to Vergennes, reported that everywhere the recognition of America and the reception of Adams as envoy “arouses the liveliest transports of joy.”

In May, Adams took up residence and put out a flag at the United States House, as he called it, the first American embassy anywhere in the world.

Yet for all this, his efforts to obtain Dutch financial help became no easier; and for all his own abundant self-satisfaction in the part he had played, he appreciated how much else had influenced the outcome. “The resolution which has taken place in this nation,” he told Edmund Jenings, “is the result of a vast number and variety of events, comprising the great scheme of Providence.... When I recollect the circumstances, I am amazed, and feel that it is no work of mine.”

• • •

AT LAST, on June 11, 1782, Adams negotiated with a syndicate of three Amsterdam banking houses—Willink, Van Staphorst, and De la Lande & Fynje—a loan of 5 million guilders, or $2 million at 5 percent interest.

It was not the $10 million Congress had expected Henry Laurens to secure, but it was an all-important beginning. It was money desperately needed at home and a foundation for American credit in Europe.

“If this had been the only action of my life, it would have been well spent,” Adams wrote to Abigail, hoping she would “Pardon the vanity.”

He was writing to her again and at length. He thought it unlikely that anyone would understand or appreciate the struggle and aggravation he had been through, the doubts, timidity, and hostilities he had had to contend with. “I have rendered a most important and essential service to my country here, which I verily believe no other man in the world would have done,” he confided. “I don't mean by this that I have exerted any abilities here, or any action, that are not very common, but I don't believe that any other man in the world would have had the patience and perseverance to do and to suffer what was absolutely necessary.”

Untrained in diplomacy and by temperament seemingly so unsuited for it, he had indeed succeeded brilliantly, as others and history would attest. He thought it no life for him—“I must be an independent man,” he reminded her—and possibly he was as ready to give it up as he claimed. (“A child was never more weary of a whistle than I am of embassies.”) But nothing he had done in the service of his country had given such satisfaction. No matter that the Dutch Republic was one of the “lesser theaters” of Europe, or that other events in which he had played a decisive part would rank higher in the balance. It had been his own path that he had taken, alone and in his own way. He had been ignored, ridiculed; he had very nearly died in the process. Yet he had persisted and succeeded.

Sometimes it was necessary to be “assuming,” he observed in a letter to Edmund Jenings. Had he followed the advice and exhortations he was subjected to, and suspended operations to request instructions, he would have been forbidden to proceed as he had and most likely Holland would have signed a separate peace with England. “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

Ironically, a letter was en route that June from Robert Livingston demanding to know why in his reports to Congress Adams had included nothing about the dockyards and arsenals of Holland, or the ships preparing for sea, or anything about the leading members of the Dutch government. “You have not repeated your private conversations with them, from which infinitely more is to be collected than from all the pamphlets scattered about the streets,” lectured Livingston, who had never set foot in Europe or served in a diplomatic role.

If they avoid your company and conversation it is a more unfavorable symptom than any you have mentioned, and shows clearly that your public character should have been concealed 'til your address had paved the way for its being acknowledged.... None of your letters take the least notice of the French ambassador at The Hague. Is there no intercourse between you? If not, to what is it to be attributed?

The news that the Dutch Republic had recognized the United States did not reach Philadelphia until September, arriving by a Dutch ship named Heer Adams.

At noon, Tuesday, October 8, 1782, Adams arrived at the State House at The Hague to sign a treaty of commerce with the Dutch Republic. Deputies from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland stood waiting at the top of the stairs to escort him to the gilded Trèveszaal, or Truce Hall. With its elaborate frescoed ceiling and tall French doors overlooking a small lake and fountain, it could have been a chamber at Versailles, and as the ceremony proceeded ever so slowly, Adams had ample time to look about.

Finally, it was his turn, the treaty was signed and sealed, his work accomplished.

• • •

IN LATE SEPTEMBER, John Jay dispatched an urgent note to John Adams from Paris to report that the British emissary Richard Oswald had received a formal commission to treat with the United States on the matter of peace. Jay pressed Adams to come to Paris as soon as possible and cautioned that he “say nothing of this 'til you see me.”

It was only with his treaty of commerce with the Dutch completed that Adams felt free to leave, but even then he seems to have been in no hurry to get to Paris. He hardly knew what to think about the prospect of making peace, he told Abigail. It could be “troublesome business,” “another furnace of affliction,” yet his spirits were high. “Yet I am very gay, more so than usual. I fear nothing. Why should I?”

The third week of October he started for Paris by carriage and six horses. With him were John Thaxter and an additional new secretary for the work at Paris, Charles Storer, a recent graduate of Harvard. Miserable weather slowed their progress. Unrelenting rain turned the road to a river of mud. The carriage broke down. But it was of Adams's own choice that he lingered over a private collection of Rubens altarpiece at Antwerp, and an altarpiece by Rubens that he thought “beautiful beyond description.” Twenty-five miles north of Paris, he stopped again to tour the famous château at Chantilly, its stables and gardens, as though time were of no concern. It was a perfect autumn day that he would mark with a particularly lovely passage in his diary, revealing in a few lines the degree to which the hard-headed, intractable New Englander was, in the expression of the time, a man of “sensibility.”

While we were viewing the statue of Montmorency, Mademoiselle de Bourbon came out into the round house at the corner of the castle dressed in beautiful white, her hair uncombed, hanging and flowing about her shoulders, with a book in her hand, and leaned over the bar of iron, but soon perceiving that she had caught my eye and that I viewed her more attentively than she fancied, she rose up with that majesty and grace which persons of her birth affect if they are not taught, turned her hair off of both her shoulders with her hands in a manner that I could not comprehend, and decently stepped back into the chamber and was seen no more.

He reached Paris and the Hôtel de Valois that night. The following day, October 27, having bathed in a public bathhouse by the Seine and called for the services of a Parisian tailor and wigmaker, he was ready to take up his part in the negotiations.

Much had already transpired, as Adams learned from meetings with John Jay and a young American merchant named Matthew Ridley, whom Adams had met earlier in Holland and who, though he had no official role, seemed to know all that was going on.

Jay had arrived in Paris from Spain in June, and through most of the summer he and the British representative Richard Oswald had been in discussions centered on the recognition of American independence as a mandatory precursor to any talk of peace. Franklin had been absent from the talks, ill with the gout and bladder stones, and little progress was made. But in the last days of September, Oswald received word from London empowering him to treat with the ministers of the United States of America, not the American colonies, and at once the discussions took on a new air.

From their first meeting Jay and Adams found they were of like mind on most matters. “[Mr. Adams] is much pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley wrote in his diary. “Mr. Adams is exceedingly pleased with Mr. Jay,” Ridley added after several more meetings. Jay, in his diary, recorded only of Adams that he “spoke freely what he thought.”

Jay was younger than Adams by ten years. Born to wealth and position in New York, tall, slim, and pale, he appeared somewhat haughty, carrying himself with a lift of the chin that made his hawk nose an even more pronounced feature. Like Adams, he had distinguished himself in the law and in Congress, where the two men had gotten along well enough, if frequently at cross purposes on issues. Jay, too, could be combative and stubborn, and as the descendant of French Huguenots, he had little liking for the Bourbon Court.

Jay refused to negotiate with the British until recognition of American independence was settled, and in so doing deliberately ignored the instructions of Congress to abide by the wishes of the French. Vergennes had wanted the discussions to proceed irrespective of the “point of independence.” Let independence wait upon the treaty, he had told Franklin. In fact, Vergennes had sent a secret envoy to London to hint to Lord Shelburne that France did not support all the demands of the Americans.

Apparently it was not until he reached Paris, not until his initial meetings with Jay, that Adams learned for the first time of the commission's instructions from Congress to abide by the guidance of the French Foreign Ministry. Adams was outraged. America was not fighting a war for independence to be told what to do by the French. He wrote immediately to Robert Livingston to say he would rather resign than follow such instructions, and that he and Jay were “perfectly agreed” in their approach to the French.

I cannot express it better than in his own words: “to be honest and grateful to our allies, but to think for ourselves.” I find a construction put upon one article in our instructions by some persons which, I confess, I never put upon it myself. It is represented by some as subjecting us to the French ministry, as taking away from us all right of judging for ourselves, and obliging us to agree to whatever the French ministers should advise us to do, and to do nothing without their consent. I never supposed this to be the intention of Congress. If I had, I never would have accepted the commission, and if I now thought it their intention, I could not continue in it. I cannot think it possible to be the design of Congress. If it is I hereby resign my place in the commission and request that another person may be immediately appointed in my stead.

Disappointed with the cramped accommodations available to him this time at the Hôtel de Valois, Adams changed lodgings, moving to the Hôtel du Roi on the Place du Carrousel, between the Palais Royal and the Quai du Louvre, which was to remain his headquarters.

Through most of the fall Paris had been shrouded with dark skies, cold rain and fog, and the same grim weather continued, adding nothing to anyone's spirits. For days Adams put off making contact with Franklin. After what Franklin had done to him, he told Matthew Ridley, he could hardly face the thought of going to Passy. When Ridley insisted he must, Adams agreed, but then, putting on his coat to leave, seemed to change his mind. It was only “with much persuasion [that] I got him at length to go,” Ridley wrote.

It would be the first time Adams had seen Franklin since Franklin had written his devastating letter to Congress on August 9, 1780. Exactly when Adams found out about the letter, or read its content, are not clear, but once, and apparently only once, he unburdened his pent-up fury, in a letter written earlier that summer to Edmund Jenings. At the root of Franklin's behavior, Adams had convinced himself, was “base jealousy.” The possibility that his own feelings toward Franklin could have the same root cause seems not to have entered his mind.

His base jealousy of me, and his sordid envy of my commission for making a treaty of commerce with Great Britain have stimulated him to attempt an assassination upon my character at Philadelphia, of which the world has not yet heard, and of which it cannot hear until the time shall come when many voluminous state papers may be laid before the public, which ought not to be until we are all dead.

Still, Adams was determined not to let personal ire stand in the way of his duty regarding the work at hand.

That I have no friendship for Franklin I avow. That I am incapable of having any with a man of his moral sentiments I avow. As far as fate shall compel me to sit with him in public affairs, I shall treat him with decency and perfect impartiality.

To Abigail he boasted that he and Jay had held the line on the point of independence, refusing to “speak or hear before we were put on an equal foot.” Franklin, he told her, “as usual would have taken the advice of the C[omte]de V[ergennes] and treated without, but nobody would join him.” But in this Adams was both overstating his own part and being blatantly unfair to Franklin, who had supported the recognition of American independence since the beginning, before Adams ever arrived on the scene.

Adams called on Franklin at Passy the same evening that Ridley talked him out the door. He stayed several hours and seized the opportunity to speak frankly of his opinion of the French Court, as well as to praise Jay for his “firmness.” Franklin, wrote Adams afterward, “heard me patiently but said nothing.”

However deep-seated his animosity toward Franklin, Adams did truly treat him with decency and managed to work effectively with him as he had in times past. Adams, Franklin, and Jay met and dined in Paris the next day and would repeatedly again in the weeks to come. As days passed, Adams found himself even admiring the “old conjurer.”

The turning point came early, at one of the meetings prior to sitting down with the British negotiators, when Franklin, knowing the importance of a united front, told Jay and Adams, “I am of your opinion and will go on with these gentlemen in the business without consulting this [the French] Court.”

It was a brave decision. In direct conflict with their instructions from Congress, and at risk of alienating the French, they would ignore Vergennes. In his diary Adams described Franklin as “with us in entire harmony.”

• • •

FORMAL SESSIONS WITH THE BRITISH NEGOTIATORS began the morning of October 30—Adams's forty-seventh birthday—and continued into the last week of November, as snow fell on the city day after day, only to melt as fog set in. Starting at eleven each morning, the meetings took place at Jay's lodgings at the Hôtel d'Orléans on the Rue des Petits-Augustins on the Left Bank; or at Adams's Hôtel du Roi; or the Hôtel de Valentinois at Passy, to spare Franklin the ride into Paris in such weather; or at Richard Oswald's quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite, also on the Rue des Petits-Augustins.

Henry Laurens, who had been released from the Tower of London in exchange for General Cornwallis, was suffering poor health from his captivity and would not appear for the negotiations until the very end. As secretary for the American commissioners, Franklin had selected his grandson, William Temple Franklin, a decision that did not please Adams, who thought John Thaxter better qualified. (Temple Franklin was twenty-two, the illegitimate son of Franklin's illegitimate son, William, the former Tory governor of New Jersey who was living in London.) Also, among a half dozen other Americans who, like Matthew Ridley, were in and about the discussions, or dined with the negotiators as confidential matters were taken up, was Franklin's friend and associate, the spy Bancroft, as well as the young hero the Marquis de Lafayette, who was home from the war in America.

Richard Oswald continued as chief negotiator for the British. Oswald, a Scot, was a merchant who had made a fortune in government contracts and the slave trade. Elderly, blind in one eye, he was favorably inclined toward the American point of view, and agreeable to the point of being unsuited for politics. But he was joined now by Henry Strachey, the undersecretary of state, sent by Lord Shelburne to stiffen Oswald's resolve. Adams and Franklin had encountered Strachey once before, at Staten Island in 1776, at their meeting with Admiral Lord Howe, when Strachey, serving as Howe's secretary, had kept notes. Adams, who spelled the name “Stretchey,” described him as an artful, insinuating man who “pushed and pressed every point,” while a young British career diplomat, Alleyne Fitzherbert, who served as an assistant, struck Adams as refreshingly without airs.

In fact, the British envoys were not particularly impressive. In ability, experience, and resolve they were hardly a match for Adams, Franklin, and Jay, who, having started from scratch as diplomats, had come a long way in their time in Europe.

In his diary Adams compared the situation between Britain and America to that of an eagle and a cat. The eagle, soaring over a farmer's yard, sweeped and pounced on the cat, thinking it a rabbit. “In the air the cat seized her by the neck with her teeth and round her body with her fore and hind claws. The eagle finding herself scratched and pressed, bids the cat let go and fall down. ‘No,’ says the cat. ‘I won't let go and fall. You shall stoop and set me down.’ ” The British, it appeared, were more ready to stoop and set America down than ever expected.

• • •

THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS to be dealt with, after acknowledgment of independence, were the boundaries of the United States, the right of navigation on the Mississippi River, debts, the interests of American Tories or Loyalists, and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, a main point with Adams.

The Americans insisted that Britain cede all territory between the Appalachian Mountains on the east and the Mississippi on the west, and to this the British agreed, thus at a stroke doubling the size of the new nation. The all-important right of the United States to navigation on the Mississippi was also settled.

On the question of private debts incurred by Americans to British merchants before the war, Franklin and Jay felt these had been counterbalanced by the American property confiscated or destroyed by the British army. But Adams strongly objected. Debts contracted in good faith should be paid, he insisted, and such a clause was included, though it would ultimately prove ineffective.

The British wanted compensation for the Loyalists. To Henry Strachey it was essential that such an article be included as proof to the thousands of American refugees that the British government, to which they had remained faithful, had not forgotten them. It was a point of view difficult for the Americans to accept, having, as they made clear, no sympathy for such people.

Strachey departed for London, taking the proposed articles for approval, and in the lull, Adams made his first visit to Versailles since his return to Paris. Vergennes, he had been informed by Lafayette, “took it amiss” that Adams had not been to see him.

Acutely sensitive to all that Vergennes had done to destroy his reputation with Congress, including enlisting Franklin to help make the case against him, Adams was no more eager to see Vergennes than he had been to see Franklin. He traveled the road to Versailles in a state of extreme apprehension, wondering, as he later wrote, whether he was to “hear an expostulation? a reproof? an admonition? or in plain vulgar English, a scolding? or was there any disposition to forget and forgive? and say all malice depart?”

What followed came as a total surprise. Invited to dine, Adams was made much of by both the Comte and Madame la Comtesse, who insisted he sit at her right hand and was “remarkably attentive” to him. Vergennes was overflowing with friendship. “The Comte, who sat opposite, was constantly calling out to me to know what I would eat and offer me petits gâteaux, claret and Madeira, etc., etc.,” Adams recorded. Never had he been treated with such respect at Versailles, and he was pleased beyond measure. “Good treatment makes me think I am admired, beloved... So I dismiss my guard and grow weak, silly, vain,” he had once written in his youth, in the throes of painful self-evaluation. Now he was in the full embrace of people who, as he said, made compliments a form of art. “French gentlemen.... said that I had shown in Holland that Americans understand negotiation as well as war.... Another said, ‘Monsieur, vous etesle Washington de la négotiation.’

“It is impossible to exceed this,” Adams continued in an effusive account in his diary that he was to regret having written. Somehow, perhaps by his own error, these pages from the diary, or “Peace Journal,” as he called it, would be included with a report that went off to Philadelphia and were later read aloud in Congress to mock Adams for his abject vanity.

But what he wrote in the diary and how he responded to the moment were different matters. In the midst of such attentions, he kept his head. When Vergennes pressed for inside information on the course of the negotiations, Adams told him nothing. Nor did the pleasure he found in being so welcomed and fussed over by those who for so long had treated him with condescension or contempt, divert him even a little from the conviction that the way of the European powers and their leaders had never been and never would be to the benefit of the United States. When, another day, Richard Oswald charged Adams with being afraid of becoming the tool of the powers of Europe, Adams replied, “Indeed, I am.”

“What powers?” says he. “All of them,” says I. “It is obvious that all the powers of Europe will be continually maneuvering with us, to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power... I think it ought to be our rule not to meddle, and that of all the powers of Europe not to desire us, or perhaps even to permit us, to interfere, if they can help it.”

In the meantime, the Comte de Vergennes, through an emissary, had been letting the government in London know confidentially of his opposition to most of the American claims, and to his ambassador in Philadelphia he had written that France does not feel obliged to “sustain the pretentious ambitions” of the United States concerning either boundaries or fisheries.

• • •

ADAMS WAS AT HIS BEST in the final days of negotiations.

On November 25, Henry Strachey returned from London and the talks resumed at Oswald's lodgings at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite. Only two points remained to be settled: recompense for the Loyalists and American fishing rights on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. Adams preferred that nothing be said of the Loyalists. Franklin was especially vehement in insisting that they receive no special treatment. In the end, after a “vast deal of conversation,” the United States promised the Loyalists nothing. It was left that the individual states be requested to provide some form of compensation for property they had confiscated, a gesture that would prove largely meaningless.

Another day Henry Laurens appeared, like a stark reminder of the pain inflicted by a war that had still to end. To the lingering torments of his time in the Tower had been added the news that his son, Colonel John Laurens, had been killed in an unimportant action on a nameless battlefield in South Carolina almost a year after Yorktown. Laurens's one contribution to the proceedings was to provide a line to prevent the British army from “carrying away any Negroes or other property” when withdrawing from America. Oswald, who had done business with Laurens in former years, when they were both in the slave trade, readily agreed.

It was the argument over the fisheries that nearly brought negotiations to a halt when Adams, once again “unalterably determined,” refused to accept any compromise that would impair New England's ancient stake in the sacred codfish. With the same vitality he had once brought to the courtrooms of Massachusetts and the floor of Congress, he championed the right of American fishermen, citing articles from treaties past and explaining in detail the migratory patterns of the cod, not to say the temperament of seafaring New Englanders. “How could we restrain our fishermen, the boldest men alive, from fishing in prohibited places?” he asked.

Then, just as agreement seemed near, Henry Strachey proposed to amend the line specifying the American “right” of fishing to read “liberty” of fishing, to which young Fitzherbert declared the word “right” to be “an obnoxious expression.”

The moment was one made for Adams. Rising from his chair, smoldering with indignation, he addressed the British:

Gentlemen, is there or can there be a clearer right? In former treaties, that of Utrecht and that of Paris, France and England have claimed the right and used the word. When God Almighty made the Banks of Newfoundland at 300 leagues distant from the people of America and at 600 leagues distance from those of France and England, did he not give as food a right to the former as to the latter. If Heaven in the Creation have a right, it is ours at least as much as yours. If occupation, use, and possession have a right, we have it as clearly as you. If war and blood and treasure give a right, ours is as good as yours. We have been constantly fighting in Canada, Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia for the defense of the fishery, and have expanded beyond all proportion more than you. If then the right cannot be denied, why then should it not be acknowledged? And put out of dispute?

It was settled—almost. Article III of the treaty would read, “It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank.” However, on the matter of taking fish along the coast of Newfoundland and “all other of his Britannic Majesty's Dominions in America,” the people of the United States were to have the “liberty,” which, insisted the British negotiators, amounted to the same thing.

“We did not think it necessary to contend for a word,” wrote a more mellow John Adams years afterward.

By the end of the day there was agreement on everything. Dining that evening at his hotel with Matthew Ridley, Adams was in high spirits. Asked if he would have fish, he laughed and declined, saying he had had “a pretty good meal of them” already that day.

Adams generously praised his fellow negotiators. Franklin, he told Ridley, had performed “nobly.” But to Jay belonged the greatest credit, Adams said. Jay had played the leading part, Adams felt then and later, never failing to give Jay credit.

The following day, Saturday, November 30, 1782, all parties made their way through still another damp Paris snowfall, again to Oswald's quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite for the signing of the preliminary treaty. Oswald was first to fix his name, followed by the four Americans in alphabetical order.

In effect, the Americans had signed a separate peace with the British. They had acted in direct violation of both the French-American alliance and their specific instructions from Congress to abide by the advice of the French foreign minister. To Adams there was no conflict in what they had done. The decision to break with the orders from Congress, and thus break faith with the French, had been clear-cut, the only honorable course. Congress had left them no choice. Congress had “prostituted” its own honor by surrendering its sovereignty to the French Foreign Minister. “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.”

To Franklin fell the unpleasant duty of breaking the news to Vergennes, and fortunately so, as in the parlance of diplomacy, it was a “delicate” moment.

As expected, Vergennes was extremely displeased, though “surprised” was the word he chose. “I am at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct, and that of your colleagues in this occasion,” he wrote formally to Franklin. What had been signed, Franklin emphasized, were preliminary articles only. Nothing had been agreed to that ran contrary to French interests, and, of course, no peace could take place until the French and British concluded their talks and the definitive treaty was signed by all parties. Franklin apologized if he and his colleagues had been guilty of neglecting a point of “bienséance “(propriety), but this was from no want of respect for the King, “whom we all love and honor.”

Then, with a cleverness of the kind he excelled in, Franklin included an afterthought. The English, he said, were now flattering themselves that they had divided the Americans from the French. So it were best that this “little misunderstanding” be forgotten and thereby prove the English mistaken.

Further, with amazing bravado, Franklin asked Vergennes for a loan of 6 million livres.

In truth, Vergennes thought well of the work done by the Americans at the negotiating table. He had no serious objections to the preliminary articles. Indeed, he thought Franklin, Jay, and Adams had obtained considerably more from the British than he had thought possible. “The English buy peace rather than make it,” he remarked contemptuously to a French colleague. The “little misunderstanding” was “got over” in a matter of days and Vergennes agreed to the loan.

In a letter to Livingston that he never sent, Adams would later contend that Franklin would not have signed the treaty without the knowledge of Vergennes—that Vergennes, in fact, had been in on the whole thing. But Adams, exhausted in “strength and spirits,” had by then succumbed to one of his spells of gloom during which he was incapable of seeing either Franklin or Vergennes in any but the darkest light.

It was not until late the following summer that the final, or definitive, Treaty of Paris was signed, and in the intervening time Adams fell once again into a black mood. Again, and with good cause, he felt Congress had forgotten him. He had received no expressions of gratitude or praise for what he had done, nor any sign of what, if anything, Congress had in mind for the future. To Abigail he described the “sharp fiery humors which break out in the back of my neck and other parts of me and plague me as much as the uncertainty in which I am in my own future destiny.”

It was that summer, in a letter of July 22, 1783, to Robert Livingston, that Franklin described Adams in words that were never to be forgotten: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

In the first week of September the peacemakers convened to sign the definitive treaty. Henry Laurens was absent. Thus it was Adams, Franklin, and Jay who represented the United States at the ceremony at the Hôtel d'York on the Rue Jacob, and who signed their names in that order, along with a new representative of King George III, David Hartley.

In fixing his signature to the document, Adams, as he often did, put a little dash or period after his name, as if to say “John Adams, period.”

The all-important first sentence of Article I declared, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States ... to be free, sovereign and independent states.”

“Done at Paris,” read the final line, “this third day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty three.”

The mighty Revolution had ended. The new nation was born.

• • •

IT HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, eight years since Lexington and Concord, seven since the Declaration of Independence, and more than three years since John Adams had last left home in the role of peacemaker.

To Thomas Jefferson, Adams would one day write, “My friend, you and I have lived in serious times.” And of all the serious events of the exceedingly eventful eighteenth century, none compared to the arrival upon the world stage of the new, independent United States of America. Adams's part in Holland and at Paris had been profound. As time would tell, the treaty that he, Franklin, and Jay had made was as advantageous to their country as any in history. It would be said they had won the greatest victory in the annals of American diplomacy.

• • •

FOR HIS OWN PART, for the time being, Adams knew for certain only that he was exhausted and intended never again to be separated from Abigail for any extended period for as long as he lived. “You may depend upon a good domestic husband for the remainder of my life, if it is the will of Heaven that I should once more meet you,” he wrote. And this, he told her, was a promise not lightly made. Whether he should come to her, or she to him, or how soon that could be, remained to be seen.