Papers of John Adams, volume 21

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Introduction

xi Descriptive List of Illustrations

Descriptive List of Illustrations

1. TENCH COXE, ENGRAVING BY SAMUEL SARTAIN, AFTER JEREMIAH PAUL, CA. 1854	37[unavailable]
“Mercy on him.! If possible,” John Adams later docketed a 15 June 1791 letter from Tench Coxe (below). Relations between the two men had not always been so strained. Since their first meeting in New York City on 7 May 1790, they often dined together and talked politics. When Adams and his wife, Abigail, moved to Philadelphia in 1791, he entrusted Coxe with handling his accounts and renting the Adamses a new home. During the vice president’s summers in Quincy, Coxe sent regular reports of government news and provided critical observations on the state of the U.S. economy and foreign trade (to Coxe, 19 June, 20 Aug., 13 Sept.; from Coxe, 20 Sept. 1791, 12 May 1792, 28 July, 8 Nov., all below).
Coxe (1755–1824), a Philadelphia-born merchant and political economist, was one of many who changed his political affiliation in the 1790s as the rise of party politics dominated the national discourse. While he supported the U.S. Constitution as the basis for a sound national economy, Coxe’s promotion of domestic manufacturing led him to oppose the Jay Treaty, since it did not supply compensation for U.S. property and enslaved persons seized by the British Army during the Revolutionary War. Coxe’s defection to the Democratic-Republicans and his electioneering for Thomas Jefferson in 1796 eventually soured his friendship with the vice president. Abigail Adams called Coxe “a Man of no sincerity of views or conduct, a Changling as the Wind blow’d a Jacobin in Heart.”
Philadelphia artist Jeremiah Paul (d. 1820) was trained by Charles Willson Peale. He began painting copies of engravings in the 1790s and later turned to creating portraits, miniatures, and signs. He made an oil painting of Coxe in 1795, and Philadelphia printmaker Samuel Sartain (1830–1906) made this engraving after 1854 (vols. 19:379, 389–391; 20:387; ANB ; Cooke, Tench Coxe , p. 155, 158, 278, 286, 376; AFC , 9:296; 12:368; Oxford Art Online).
Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
2. RED JACKET MEDAL, 1792	151[unavailable]
The longest letter in this volume is Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln’s 11 September 1793 account of his complex mission to negotiate for xii peace, land, and a commercial agreement with Native representatives in the Northwest Territory (below). John Adams found Lincoln’s insights highly valuable. In many ways, Lincoln’s report encapsulates the U.S. government’s diplomatic work with Native nations. President George Washington’s call for a more peaceful relationship with Native peoples on the western frontiers is expressed in this silver medal, which he presented to Seneca chief Red Jacket (1750–1830) during Red Jacket’s 1792 visit to Philadelphia. That call came, however, after U.S. troops suffered crushing defeats in 1790 and 1791 to Native forces. The subsequent wave of U.S. treaties with Native peoples included major cessions of land and unequal trade deals.
Red Jacket (Sagoyewatha) fought with the British Army during the Revolutionary War and earned fame for his incisive oratory. He was the principal Native negotiator during the Treaty of Canandaigua proceedings in 1794, securing roughly 4 million acres of land for the Senecas. He was not part of the Native group who met with Lincoln, for, as he confided to Timothy Pickering, he expected the talks to fail and incite war. He later persuaded the Iroquois to support the United States in the War of 1812 but expressed regret for fighting against the Grand River Iroquois. Near the end of his life, Red Jacket appealed for aid from President John Quincy Adams, who temporarily delayed the 1826 sale of Seneca land to the Ogden Land Company.
The Red Jacket medal, which shows the overlap of Native and U.S. life in the early republic, measures 6 ¾ by 5 inches. Created by an unknown artist, it features a Native man standing by a hatchet and smoking a peace pipe with Washington. The background image of a second Native man plowing with oxen signifies the adoption of western farming methods, and a pioneer cabin has replaced the longhouse. The medal’s reverse is engraved with a federal eagle clutching an olive branch and a sheaf of arrows in its talons. It bears the U.S. crest and a ribbon unfurls the motto E Pluribus Unum ( ANB ; Dicy. Canadian Biog. ; Jadviga da Costa Nunes, “Red Jacket: The Man and His Portraits,” The American Art Journal 12:6, 7 [Summer 1980]; Granville Ganter, The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket, Syracuse, N.Y., 2006, p. xxvii, 59; Mark Goldman, High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York, Albany, N.Y., 1983, p. 31–32).
Courtesy of the Seneca Iroquois National Museum and Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center.
3. “MARIE ANTOINETTE ON THE WAY TO THE GUILLOTINE,” BY JACQUES LOUIS DAVID, 1793	173[unavailable]
On 16 October 1793 a cart rolled through the streets of Paris carrying Marie Antoinette, the deposed queen of France, to her death. Since the execution of her husband, Louis XVI, nine months earlier, the 37-year-old monarch had been separated from her children and imprisoned in the Conciergerie. She endured a brief show trial that began on 12 October and heightened the popular hysteria xiii surrounding the Reign of Terror. The revolutionary tribunal called 41 witnesses and delivered a swift verdict. Marie Antoinette was found guilty of exhibiting moral failures, taking counterrevolutionary measures, and showing opposition to anticlerical legislation. Several sordid and personal charges also stuck. The tribunal blamed her for controlling Louis XVI’s actions, steering the family’s ill-fated flight to Varennes in June 1791, and allegedly committing incest with her son, Louis XVII.
John Adams keenly monitored the progress of the French Revolution, thanks to correspondents like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Brand Hollis, François Adriaan Van der Kemp, and his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, serving as a diplomat at The Hague. To the vice president’s mind, the royal executions marked a turning point for France, making the monarchy extinct and raising a republic in its place. Sensitive to the constitutional limits of his role, Adams was cautious about suggesting foreign policy shifts, but he knew that the loss held significant political consequences for the United States. As Jefferson recalled, at a 16 January 1793 meeting of the sinking fund commissioners, Adams told his colleagues that the French revolutionaries needed a viable constitution to stabilize the nation’s course, or “their successors would in their turn demolish, hang them, and make a new constitution, and so on eternally till force could be brought into place to restrain them” (to Tench Coxe, 25 April; from Jefferson, 30 Aug. 1791, and note 2; from Van der Kemp, 9 Feb. 1793, and note 2; from Jeremy Belknap, 24 Jan. 1795, and note 3; from JQA, 27 June, and note 6, all below; Jefferson, Papers , 25:63–64).
French artist Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) produced this pen-and-ink sketch, relying on the street view from his window. It measures 5 7/8 by 3 7/8 inches. David, who was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, voted in favor of the death penalty for Louis XVI. David portrayed Marie Antoinette as old and plain, with sharp features and wholly stripped of her royal finery. Her toothless mouth juts out in a final show of defiance (Schama, Citizens , p. 796, 798, 799; Luc de Nanteuil, Jacques-Louis David, N.Y., 1985, p. 31, 32, 69; Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David, N.Y., 1980, p. 109).
Courtesy of the Musée du Louvre, Paris.
4. BENJAMIN RUSH’S LANCET, CA. 1790	241[unavailable]
The yellow fever epidemic of 1793 ravaged Philadelphia, causing the deaths of an estimated 5,000 people in a few short months. Physician Benjamin Rush identified the source as rotting coffee on the city wharf. On 21 August he notified his wife, Julia Stockton Rush, that a contagious “malignant fever” had broken out on Water Street. Unaware that yellow fever was spread by mosquitoes, many doctors prescribed special diets, ice baths, airing rooms, and bloodletting to treat the disease. Some inhabitants built fires to burn away what they referred to as the “miasma,” while others, like John Adams’ colleagues in Congress and his son Thomas Boylston Adams, fled the city. Officials in New York and Boston instituted xiv quarantines to contain the infection, and George Washington considered temporarily relocating the federal seat. Bush Hill, once the Adamses’ residence in Philadelphia, was used as a hospital.
Rush saw waves of patients daily and slept only a few hours per night. He contracted yellow fever but recovered. Rush thought that the fever was inflammatory and that the best remedy was the lancet for bloodletting. He clashed with physicians who claimed that yellow fever was of foreign origin. Rush’s lancet, shown here, was a spring-loaded model of iron or steel, used to make an incision at either the elbow or the knee (vol. 20:10, 414; Sarah R. Riedman and Clarence Corleon Green, Benjamin Rush, Physician, Patriot, Founding Father, London, 1964, p. 204–205, 206, 207; AFC , 9:xiii, 447, 452, 458; Rush, Letters , 2:637, 638, 1114; Paul E. Kopperman, “’Venerate the Lancet’: Benjamin Rush’s Yellow Fever Therapy in Context,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 78:542, 563, 567 [Fall 2004]; Timothy M. Bell, “A Brief History of Bloodletting,” Journal of Lancaster General Hospital, 11:119 [Winter 2016]; from Tench Coxe, 3 Nov., and note 1, below).
Courtesy of the Dickinson College Archives & Special Collections.
5. BENJAMIN DEARBORN’S MUSIC-BOARD, 1794	283[unavailable]
“I have constructed the Music-Board which is presented herewith, for the benefit of the Blind; whereby all Notes and other necessary Characters in Music, with their Respective Stations on Lines or Spaces, are Readily Ascertained with great Precision, by a Touch of the Fingers,” Benjamin Dearborn wrote to John Adams on 19 August 1794 (MBA:General Records, Communications to the Academy—Bound, 1780–1810). Originally from Portsmouth, N.H., Dearborn (1754–1838) was an inventor, philanthropist, and instructor at the school that he founded, the Portsmouth Academy. He published children’s textbooks and promoted prison reform. He developed a precise balance scale, a method for making colored prints, and a perpetual diary. He wrote again to the vice president on 12 November 1794 and 9 November 1796 (MBA:General Records, Communications to the Academy—Bound, 1780–1810), sharing word of his inventions. In 1802 Dearborn unsuccessfully solicited Secretary of State James Madison to superintend the U.S. Patent Office.
Throughout his long presidency of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Adams often transmitted books, inventions, and news. He also submitted Dearborn’s method for printing musical notation, published in A Schedule for Reducing the Science of Music, Portsmouth, N.H., 1785, Evans, No. 44674. Dearborn subsequently tried to adapt the system for use by touch. He described a pine board that was 6 inches wide and 44 inches long, with thick brass wires used for the staff lines. Rather than creating raised rounded notes to trace, Dearborn employed staples with varying widths, notches, and leg lengths for the notes, rests, flats, sharps, and bars. Straight pegs, called “points,” measuring four-tenths of an inch long, stood for “pointing notes, and other purposes,” such as repeats. He represented time signatures via combinations of bent wires and points. Dearborn, who was elected as a member in 1793, provided the xv academy with a prototype (to John Lathrop, 1 Aug. 1791, note 1; to Benjamin Thompson, 11 Nov. 1796; from Samuel Latham Mitchill, 17 Aug. 1791; from Manasseh Cutler, 5 Feb. 1794; from Thompson, 12 July 1796, all below; Boston American Apollo, 4 Dec. 1794; Emma Forbes Waite, “Benjamin Dearborn: Teacher, Inventor, Philanthropist,” Old-Time New England, 52:44–47 [1951]; Madison, Papers, Secretary of State Series , 4:123).
Courtesy of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
6. “THE GRAND ATTACK ON VALENCIENNES BY THE COMBINED ARMIES UNDER THE COMMAND OF HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUKE OF YORK, 25 JULY 1793,” ENGRAVING BY WILLIAM BROMLEY, AFTER PHILIPP JAKOB LOUTHERBOURG II, 1801	303[unavailable]
In his 23 October 1794 letter to John Adams, diplomat John Quincy Adams opened his official reportage from Europe with the news that the French Army had seized Flanders and Brabant. This action wedged the Netherlands “between the army of an invading enemy, and those of allies equally terrible” (below). The vice president relied on his son’s updates on the Anglo-French war via dispatches like these, which arrived just as fortunes shifted. Although initially successful in the 1793 Flanders campaign, the British Army retreated north toward Amsterdam after a battering series of French counterattacks. Great Britain’s successful siege of Valenciennes, France, from 13 June to 28 July was merely a memory, preserved in a painting hung in a private collection.
London printers Valentine Green (1739–1813) and son Rupert (1768–1804) partnered with Swiss printer Christian Mechel (1737–1817) to hire French painter Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg II (1740–1812) to create this work. Born in Strasbourg, Loutherbourg was a member of the Académie Royale and the Royal Academy. Along with English caricaturist James Gillray, Loutherbourg visited the battlefield in Flanders in September. Loutherbourg sketched the buildings and landscape while Gillray focused on drawing the soldiers. In his painting, Loutherbourg depicts the British commander, Prince Frederick Augustus, Duke of York and Albany (1763–1827), surrounded by his officers, with the city of Valenciennes in the background. In April 1794 George III, king of Great Britain, enjoyed a private viewing of the eight-by-twelve-foot artwork, which showcased his second-eldest son’s military feat.
The Greens went bankrupt before they could fill subscriptions for the prints based on the painting. English engraver William Bromley (1769–1842) produced popular copies of the painting, including this 1801 print (from Tench Coxe, 11 Nov. 1793, and note 2; from John Brown Cutting, 29 July 1794, both below; Esdaile, Wars of the French Revolution , p. 104; Antony Griffiths, “The Contract for ’The Grand Attack on Valenciennes,’” Print Quarterly, 20:374, 378 [Dec. 2003]; Oxford Art Online; Peter Harrington, British Artists and War: The Face of Battle in Paintings and Prints, 1700–1914, London, 1993, p. 68, 69).
Courtesy of the UK Government Art Collection.
xvi
7. DETAIL FROM “A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES EXHIBITING POST ROADS & DISTANCES,” BY ABRAHAM BRADLEY JR., 1796	454[unavailable]
During several decades of public service, John Adams and his mail traversed the busy, muddy postal roads of the early United States. Between sessions in the Senate, the vice president “went pesting all the day long against the Post office,” hopeful for news from his wide circle of contacts and suffering sorely when he missed it. He was especially familiar with federal efforts to improve delivery, standardize routes, and draft regulatory legislation, which began with the Postal Acts of 1792 and 1796. Writing to Adams on 19 January 1797, U.S. postmaster general Joseph Habersham enclosed a new map designed to help. It displayed “the Post Offices and Roads, with a correct Table of all the Offices now established, and the distance of each Office from the present Seat of Government” (Adams Papers). Abraham Bradley Jr. (1767–1838), Habersham’s assistant, created the map in 1796. A longtime supporter of Adams and, later, John Quincy Adams, the Litchfield, Conn., lawyer served in his post until 1829.
Bradley’s map marked out cities, towns, ports, post and stage roads, and rivers. He added timetables to show how long it took for mail to cross the country. Four large sheets of various sizes were joined into a single map, and the center seam ran through Washington, D.C. The Philadelphia post office sold copies of the map for $3.50 to $5, depending on the finish. Mail delivery complaints continued, such as Joseph Priestley’s plea to Adams for an extension of service in Pennsylvania, as shown in the map detail here. Priestley explained that sending and receiving letters and packages remained costly, “so uncertain, and tedious.” On 29 February 1796 the residents of Georgetown, S.C., sent a similar petition to Adams, which he laid before the Senate on 1 April (from Priestley, 29 Nov. 1794, and note 1; from the Inhabitants of Georgetown, S.C., 29 Feb. 1796, both below; DNA:RG 46, Records of the U.S. Senate; AFC , 11:151 , 151 ; Philadelphia Gazette of the United States, 3 Oct.; ANB ).
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
8. UNITED STATES SENATE, RATIFICATION OF JAY TREATY, 24 JUNE 1795	459[unavailable]
As the first U.S minister to the Court of St. James, John Adams tried to negotiate a commercial treaty with Great Britain. The relatively weak powers of the Articles of Confederation to enforce foreign agreements at the state level, coupled with the intransigent attitude of the British ministry, led the exasperated Adams to call such an endeavor akin to “making brick without straw.” By 1794, the implementation of the U.S. Constitution cleared a path to compromise. John Jay concluded a workable, if highly controversial, trade deal that settled several issues lingering from the Anglo-American peace treaty negotiations. When the Jay Treaty reached the United States on 27 February 1795, George Washington called a special session of the Senate to consider it and offer advice.
Adams, returning to Philadelphia after a brief trip to Quincy, shared his perspective on the Jay Treaty ratification debates in his xvii private letters to wife Abigail from 8 to 26 June. As president of the Senate, he whinged about long hours spent sitting through arguments. Yet he was impressed with his colleagues’ scrutiny, observing: “The Treaty is of great Extent and Importance and will not be rejected nor adopted without a thorough Examination. I presume every Member will wish for such an Investigation as will enable him to render a Reason for his Vote whether Pro or Con.” The vice president did not participate publicly in the debates. In private, he spent at least one evening discussing the treaty with Jay, reflecting that the senators’ “deliberations have been temperate, grave, decent, and wise, hitherto and the Results judicious.”
On 24 June the Senate gave its advice and consent to the treaty, with the exception of Art. 12’s unfavorable terms regarding U.S. trade with the West Indies. Adams recorded the votes, writing “Aye” or “No” beside each senator’s name. He calculated the results of twenty to ten, confirming the required two-thirds majority (DNA:RG 46, Records of the U.S. Senate). Washington signed the treaty on 18 August. Adams fell ill one week later, writing to John Quincy: “The Treaty hurt me more than any one, for the Journey & a Dissentery were too much for me. at present I am better but not capable of much Exertion” (vols. 16:xxix–xxxi; 18:309; 19:xix; Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, New Haven, 1962, p. 51–52; from John Trumbull, 20 Nov. 1794, and note 1; to Thomas Jefferson, 5 Feb. 1795, and note 2, both below; AFC , 10:446, 450; 11:20; Miller, Treaties , 2:245–275).
Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.