John Adams, the first United States envoy to the Netherlands, could have been the prototype for an American in Europe. When he arrived on the Continent in 1778, two years after the Colonies declared independence from England, the 42-year-old New England farmer, lawyer, and leader of the Revolution had never traveled farther from home than Philadelphia. Devout, straightforward, and plainspoken, he had no experience with diplomacy. A friend remarked that he couldn’t dress, couldn’t dance, wasn’t subtle, was “not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts.”
While Europeans found him unsophisticated, he predictably found them smooth and hypocritical. He loved European culture, particularly the theater, but had the usual American complaints: the English were chilly, the Dutch cheap, and the French didn’t wash. If he and his wife Abigail were alive today, it’s hard not to see them standing on the Dam in white sneakers, holding up a map.
John Adams was one of America’s Founding Fathers, a passionate advocate of revolution and self-governance, one of the architects of the Declaration of Independence. He would go on to become America’s first vice-president and second president. But compared to the tall, patrician war hero George Washington, the Enlightenment intellectual Thomas Jefferson, and the inventor and libertine Ben Franklin, the idealistic, hardworking, monogamous Adams has always seemed a little dull. There are no poems or legends about him. He never got his picture on a coin or bill.
Historian David McCullough, in his best-selling biography “John Adams,” has not only rediscovered Adams, he has brought him back as a politician for our time. The truth is, Americans like to see themselves in white sneakers. Like Adams, they prefer to think of themselves as forthright, practical, not too concerned with appearances. Besides, what better consolation for Americans in the Clinton and Bush years than a thoroughly honest president who never told a lie, had an affair, or otherwise blotted his copybook?
McCullough is the author of several books of what might be called “Dad’s birthday” history, including biographies of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. A highly readable writer, he finds in Adams not only a hero but a surprisingly page-turning subject. The book opens with two lonely travelers on horseback in the snow, then goes on in that style, making the most of the adventures the era offered: storms at sea, engagements with the enemy, and passionate debates in the Continental Congress, where Jefferson recalled that Adams, in his final argument for independence, spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”
Born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, near Boston, Adams was a fourth-generation American who deeply felt his connections with his Puritan forebears. (In Holland, he was moved to tears to see the Pilgrims’ church in Leyden.) He was also an ambitious young lawyer with a broad knowledge of Greek, Roman, French, and English philosophy and political thought. That knowledge would help him draw up a constitution for the new State of Massachusetts—a document that became a model for America’s constitution. Idealistic and not without vanity, the young Adams saw the law as a way to fulfill his lofty dreams: “to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice.”
At the same time, he had a literary side that he indulged in journals and constant correspondence. This is what makes Adams such a great biography subject: what he lacks in color, he makes up for many times over in openness. He wrote frank, likeable letters to his many friends and colleagues. He wrote more pedantic letters, full of advice, to his four children, including his eldest son, the later president John Quincy.
Most of all he wrote to his wife a remarkable figure in her own right. Abigail Adams was a a sort of Hillary or Michelle avant la lettre, and with her John had a lifelong love affair. While he was away on political business, for months or years at a time, she ran the farm, cheered for the Revolution, and kept up her own correspondence with Adams’s political colleagues. While they were together, she was his most important political adviser.
He was a family man, and when he came to Holland he brought with him his two eldest sons, then 13 and 11. This may have been unwise: while John Quincy thrived as a diplomat brat, Charles Adams was homesick, or perhaps felt he couldn’t live up to his parents’ high expectations. (Charming but feckless, he eventually drank himself into an early grave.) Adams ultimately spent two years in Amsterdam, trying to persuade the States-General to grant political recognition to the United States.
Though he liked the practical-minded Dutch better than the French or English, getting them to commit was a frustrating exercise: They were already smuggling arms to the Colonies but didn’t want war with England. He succeeded only after the British Army’s dramatic surrender at Yorktown. Adams never knew whether it was his efforts or the British loss that made the difference, but the Dutch recognition, and a line of credit from Dutch banks, changed the course of history. To a friend he wrote, “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”
As president (1797-1801) he was less successful. Back in America, he was now seen as “corrupted” by Europe, particularly in his desire for a strong central government. McCullough praises his political judgment: before anyone else, Adams predicted the French Revolution was going to go sour. As president he managed to avert a war with France, assessing, correctly, that the French threats were not serious. But he served only one term before he was defeated for re-election by the charismatic Jefferson.
Above all else, McCullough’s Adams is a dedicated public servant, the man who wrote, “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” McCullough gives us an old-fashioned study of moral principles, a portrait of the courage and perseverance of a Great Man. He sticks closely to Adams’s own experience, never turning aside for long to examine the people and events in his shadow. One reason the book is such a lively read is that McCullough hardly ever stops to speculate or ask difficult questions.
“John Adams” stands in dramatic contrast to another recent work of history, Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” In that book, Gordon-Reed chronicles the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and life partner Sally Hemings, her family (she was his late wife’s half-sister), and her six children, probably all fathered by Jefferson. Because Sally Hemings lived on the margins of history and left no written record, Gordon-Reed’s book is nothing but shadows and questions.
Yet the two kinds of history—Great Men and little lives—don’t cancel each other out. It’s fascinating to read in “The Hemingses of Monticello” about the figures in the wings, the women and enslaved people who were still waiting for their War of Independence. But the single-minded focus of “John Adams” takes nothing away from McCullough’s achievement.
John Adams Slept Here
David McCullough’s “John Adams” has inspired several new Adams projects since its publication in English in 2001. In 2008, it was made into a 7-part TV miniseries starring Paul Giamatti as John and Laura Linney as his steadfast and politically savvy wife Abigail. Visitors to the Adams home near Boston can watch performers re-enacting the lives of John and Abigail. And in the Netherlands, too, Adams has become easier to trace. Although the first American embassy in the world, on the Fluwelen Burgwal in The Hague, has been demolished, the house Adams rented on Keizersgracht 529 in Amsterdam was marked with a plaque in 2004.
In 2005, the John Adams Institute, Amsterdam’s independent center for American culture, published a small Dutch-language book called “John Adams in Holland.” With essays by Hella S. Haasse and others, it goes into more detail on Adams’s adventures in the Netherlands. Adams had a strong influence on the Dutch Patriots, including his friend Joan Derk van der Capellen, an idiosyncratic champion of equal rights and democracy. In 1782, Adams was invited by the Frisian Patriot movement to celebrate the Fourth of July in the university town of Franeker, with fireworks and parades. Friesland was the first of the Dutch provinces to vote in favor of recognizing the United States, and this would have been one of the world’s first Fourth of July parties. But Adams was too busy to come.
Nothing much ever came of the Dutch democratic movement. Van der Capellen died in 1784. An uprising in 1787, two years before the French Revolution, was suppressed, not by the ineffectual stadtholder Willem V, but by his wife, Princess Wilhelmina, and her brother, the King of Prussia, at the head of the Prussian Army. Eight years later, in 1795, the Dutch Patriots established the short-lived Batavian Republic and invited France to occupy the Netherlands. By 1815, over 20,000 Dutch conscripts had died in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Napoleon had closed the university at Franeker, the British had gained control of the Dutch settlements in Sri Lanka and South Africa, and the Netherlands had become what it had never been in all its history: a monarchy.
If Adams, who loved astronomy, had gone to Franeker, he would almost certainly have met the patriot and amateur astronomer Eise Eisinga. But he missed his chance.
Published in shorter form in Trouw, April 25, 2009. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001; Amsterdam: Ambo, 2009). Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Hella S. Haasse, and Willebrord Nieuwenhuis, John Adams in Holland 1780-2005 (Amsterdam: John Adams Institute/Cossee, 2005).