Adams Family Correspondence, volume 14
Editorial Note
“To morrow morning we set out upon our tour into Silesia, where you shall accompany us if you please,” John Quincy Adams wrote to his brother Thomas Boylston Adams on 16 July (above). So began a fourteen-week journey by John Quincy and Louisa Catherine Adams through what is now southern Poland and southern Germany. John Quincy promised to chronicle the trip in a series of letters, adding that should the first one prove “tiresome” Thomas Boylston should reseal it and send it to Abigail Adams, whose “mother’s heart will fill it with all the interest of which it may be destitute in itself” (No. I, below).
It was a good time for the Adamses to travel. John Quincy had little diplomatic business to attend to after the successful negotiation of the Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1799. He hoped some of the information conveyed in his letters might prove valuable to the U.S. government: “I presume those parts of them, which relate to commerce & the manufactures will meet the eye, & as far as proper the attention of the President” (No. III, below). Rather than a boon to diplomacy, the tour proved a rare hiatus from public life, one he called “a period during which I have lived in a blissful ignorance of politics, & news” (JQA to William Vans Murray, 15 Sept. 1800, LbC, APM Reel 134).
The trip was also intended to benefit the health of Louisa Catherine, who had suffered a fourth miscarriage a few months earlier. John Quincy told his father-in-law, Joshua Johnson, that they traded the unhealthy Berlin summer for “a long and fatiguing journey, though into a country calculated by the variety of entertainment which it would afford to amuse 307 the mind, to make the time seem short, and to turn weariness itself into pleasure” (10 Dec., below). Louisa Catherine, once again pregnant, gamely undertook some of the more arduous excursions, even as she experienced bouts of illness. After indisposition kept her from a sunrise ascent of the Giant’s Head mountain, John Quincy voiced his surprised pleasure when on the descent “who should we meet but Louisa, whose headache had left her as the day advanced, & who after coming so far had determined not to return & leave the most important object upon our tour unseen” (No. IV, below). The single letter from Louisa to her father printed here is her only extant correspondence during the trip. She provides her perspective on cities and towns visited, calling one “old and dirty” but describing another as “the most romantic and beautiful spot I ever beheld” (No. VIII, below).
John Quincy's Silesia series comprises 28 letters in two
sets: seventeen written while he traveled and eleven composed after his
return to Berlin. Daily events of the trip are narrated in the letters from
the road, which are numbered 1 to 17 and span the dates 20 July to 24
September; eight of them are printed here. In writing these John Quincy
often referred to a travel account by Johann Friedrich Zöllner, whom he had
met in Berlin in February: Briefe über Schlesien,
Krakau, Wieliczka, und die Grafschaft Glatz auf einer Reise im Jahr
1791, 2 vols., Berlin, 1792–1793, a copy of which with Charles
Francis Adams’ bookplate is in John Quincy’s library at the Adams National
Historical Park. He resumed the Silesia series from his desk in Berlin on 20
December 1800 and completed it on 17 March 1801, writing letters numbered 19
to 29, a single example of which is printed here. This second group details
the history, economy, culture, and literature of Silesia. Much of the
information is drawn from Karl Ludwig von Klober und Hellscheborn, Von Schlesien vor und seit dem Jar MDCCXXXX, 2
vols., Freiburg, 1785, also with Charles Francis’ bookplate at the Adams
National Historical Park. Between the two sets of correspondence, on 3
December John Quincy wrote a letter to his brother numbered 18, but as it is
primarily on other subjects the editors chose to print it at its date,
below.
The letters John Quincy and Louisa Catherine wrote from Silesia provide a portrait of the people and places of central Europe at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Although the region in the summer of 1800 had not entirely escaped recent political, social, and economic upheaval, it was near the end of a period of relative stability. The Adamses explored a land still entrenched in a feudal past, a way of life the Napoleonic Wars and industrialization would soon sweep away. The lives of inhabitants of all socioeconomic classes were a favorite subject, described in portraits of peasants, soldiers, innkeepers, mountain guides, artisans, and merchants. They also commented at length on the natural world, using the language of the sublime and picturesque in writing about mountains and waterfalls in vivid detail. The sunrise from the Giant’s Head is one example, with John Quincy describing “the borders of the horison at the east gradually reddening” before “the great luminary arose in all his glory from the low cloud” (No. IV, below). The Adamses’ servants, Tilly Whitcomb and Elizabeth 308 Epps, accompanied them on their excursions and also made occasional appearances in the letters.
John Quincy’s secretary, Thomas Welsh Jr., remained in
Berlin while the Adamses traveled, and the minister sent his letters to
Welsh, who copied them into Letterbook No. 10 before sending them on to
Thomas Boylston in the United States. Thomas Boylston then offered his older
brother’s letters for publication to friend Joseph Dennie Jr., who sought
material for his upcoming Philadelphia literary magazine, the Port Folio. Thomas Boylston informed John
Quincy of his plan in a 26 October letter, not found, and wrote again on
6 December that
he would go ahead and provide Dennie with “copious extracts” of the letters
(below). John Quincy responded on 27 December that he had no objection to
their publication, although he added, “There will undoubtedly be some
passages in the letters not proper for publication, & I can safely
depend upon your discretion for omitting them” (LbC, APM Reel 134). William
Vans Murray wrote a letter to John Quincy while he was still on tour
suggesting that the letters be published, advice that prompted him to
continue the series after his return to Berlin. In his response, John Quincy
made it clear that he too had mulled publication, but he demurred. After
receiving the first numbers of the Port Folio
he again asserted that the letters were intended as private: “Their
publication was no plan of mine— I wrote them to my brother for the
amusement & information of my most intimate relations, without an idea,
that they would ever be printed— My brother allowed them to be published,
without waiting for my consent, but presuming justly upon my approbation”
(Murray to JQA, 10 Oct. 1800, Adams Papers; JQA to
Murray, 30 Oct.; 17 March 1801; 7 April, LbC’s, APM Reel 134).
Dennie published the letters in the Port Folio in an anonymous series titled
“Journal of a Tour through Silesia.” The author was an exceptional travel
writer, Dennie told his readers in the first issue: “It will be obvious to
every intelligent reader that it has been made by no vulgar traveller, but
by a man of genius and observation” (Port
Folio, 1:1 [3 Jan. 1801]). John Quincy wrote to Thomas Boylston on 21
March 1801 (Adams Papers)
that while he was “truly gratified by the terms of approbation with which he
introduces the Silesian letters,” Dennie should refrain from praise in
future issues. The letters appeared in 44 of the first 45 weekly issues
dated 3 January to 7 November 1801, with thirteen letters appearing in
single issues, fourteen serialized in two installments, and one split
between three. Dennie numbered the published installments from I to
XLIV.
None of the recipient’s copies of the Silesia letters have been found. The letterbook transcriptions are presented here for the first time, providing the full letters without redactions of personal information, sensitive political opinions, and accounts of current events in Europe that were excised from the printed version and are described in the notes below. While the redacted material is not voluminous, it is of significant interest, including John Quincy’s comments on Abigail’s anticipated reaction to the letters, his suggestion that nuns in a Silesian convent feared that Louisa 309 Catherine and Elizabeth Epps were “turkish men in disguise,” his description of a weaver’s recognition of the name Adams, and his statement that “every american patriot” ought to favor greater economic independence for the United States (Nos. I, II, and III, all below). Readers should keep in mind that Welsh was an imperfect copyist, with misspellings attributable to him rather than John Quincy. John Quincy’s Diary for the period, D/JQA/24, APM Reel 27, should also be consulted.
In addition to their publication in the Port Folio, an unauthorized edition of the
Silesia letters was published in London in 1804 as John Quincy Adams, Letters on Silesia, Written during a Tour through
that Country in the Years 1800, 1801, the first book that
attributed authorship to him. A review in the Edinburgh Review criticized the “son of the American president”
for a work that displayed a “want of originality.” John Quincy expressed
misgivings about the London publication, writing in his Diary that he had
spoken too freely about public figures in Europe who could read the letters.
German and French translations followed that also credited John Quincy as
the author: Briefe über Schlesien: Geschrieben auf
einer in dem Jahre 1800 durch dieses Land unternommenen Reise,
transl. Friedrich Gotthelf Friese, Breslau, 1805, and Lettres sur la Silésie: Écrites en 1800 et 1801,
durant le cours d’un voyage fait dans cette province, transl. J.
Dupuy, Paris, 1807.
The Silesia letters of John Quincy and Louisa Catherine
Adams offer insight into their lives during a rare period away from the
demands of diplomacy and court life. The correspondence, too, provides an
invaluable view of a region on the cusp of cultural transformation as
chronicled by erudite travelers with an eye for telling detail
(JQA to Joseph Pitcairn, 29 July 1800, OCHP:Joseph Pitcairn Letters;
JQA to Welsh, 6 Aug., LbC, APM Reel 134; Kirsten Belgum, “The
Culture of Borrowing: Transnational Influence in Travel Writing around
1800,” Studies in Travel Writing, 19:19, 26
[2015]; Walter J. Morris, “John Quincy Adams’s German Library, with a
Catalog of His German Books,” Amer. Philos. Soc., Procs.
, 118:328, 330 [13 Sept. 1974];
D/JQA/27, 13 Feb. 1800, 20 Sept. 1804, APM Reel 30; Linda K.
Kerber and Walter J. Morris, “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and
the Port Folio,” WMQ, 23:454, 458–459 [July
1966]; S. D. Stirk, “John Quincy Adams’s Letters on Silesia,”
NEQ
, 9:485–499 [Sept. 1936]; Edinburgh Review, 5:180, 181 [Oct. 1804]).
o:1.
As I have bespoke your company, upon our journey into Silesia, I begin this letter at our first resting station from Berlin— Hitherto we have indeed seen little more than the usual Brandenburg sands, & 310 perhaps you will find our tour as tiresome as we have found it ourselves— I cannot promise you an amusing journey, though I hope it will prove so to us;1 & if at the sight of this my first letter on this occasion, you think it looks too long, & appears likely to prove tiresome, seal it up, unread, & send it to Quincy, where a mother’s heart will fill it with all the interest of which it may be destitute in itself—Will give life to the narrative, & spirit to every remark.— My letters to you on this tour will be in the form & serve as the substitute of a journal— They will of course be fragments written at different times & places, nay perhaps in different humours— Therefore make up your account, to receive patiently all my tediousness, or as I said before, bestow it all upon my mother, to whom in that case you may consider all my future letters untill we return to Berlin, & numbered in a series from this, as addressed.
On Thursday the 17th:
instt. we left Berlin just after
three in the morning, & arrived here at about nine the same
evening— The distance is ten German miles & a quarter, which you
know is a very long day’s journey in this country— In the course of
a few years it will be an easy journey of eight hours; for the
present king, who has the very laudable ambition of improving the
roads through his dominions, is now making a turn pike road like
that to Potsdam, the whole way hither; as yet not more than one
German mile of it is finished, & the rest of the way, is like
that which on every side surrounds the Tadmor of modern times—2 As we approach within
a few miles of Frankfort, the country becomes somewhat more hilly,
& of course more variagated & pleasant than round Berlin;
but we could peceive little difference in the downy softness of the
ground beneath us, or in the needles of
the pines within our view— Part of the country is cultivated as much
as it is succeptible of cultivation, & here & there we could
see scattered spires of wheat, rye, barley & oaths, shoot from
the sands, like the hairs upon a head almost bald— We came through
few villages, & those few had a miserable appearance— A meagre
composition of mud & thatch composed the cottages, in which a
ragged & pallid race of beggars reside; yet we must be unjust
& confess that we passed by one nobleman’ seat, which had the
appearance of a handsome & comfortable house.
We arrived here just in time to see the last
dregs of an annual fair, such as you
have often seen in the towns of Holland, & as you know are
customary in those of Germany— But we hear great complaints against
the minister Struensee, for having ruined the value of the fair, by prohibiting the sale of
foreign wollen manufactures, which 311 have heretofore been the most essential articles of sale at this
fair—3 This
prohibition is for the sake of encouraging the manufactures of this
country; a principle, which the government pursues on all possible
occasions— They are not converts to the opinions of Adam Smith,
& the french oeconomists concerning the balance of trade, &
always catch with delight at any thing, which can prevent money from going out the country. Of this
disposition we have seen a notable instance in the attempts lately
made here for producing sugar from beets, of which I believe you
heard something while you were here, & about which much has been
said & done since then. At one time we were assured beyond all
question, that one mile square of beets would furnish sugar for the
whole Prussian dominions— The question was submitted to a committee
of the Academy of Sciences, who after long examination &
deliberation reported, that in truth, sugar, & even brandy,
could be produced from beets, & in process of time might be
raised in great quantities; but that for the present it would be
expedient to continue the use of sugars & brandies such as had
been in use hitherto— Since this report we have heard little, or
nothing of beet sugar.4
This is an old Town, pleasantly situated, &
containing about twelve thousand inhabitants, of which a quarter
part are Jews— It is therefore distinguished by those peculiarities,
which mark all European towns, where a large proportion of
Israelites reside, & to express which I suppose resort must be
had to the Hebrew language— The english at least is inadequate to
it; for the word filth conveys an idea
of spotless purity in comparison to the jewish nastiness— The
garrison of the town consits of one regiment— There is likewise an
University here, & by the introduction of a letter from Berlin
we have become acquainted with two of the professors—5 The number of the
students is less than two hundred; & of them, one hundred &
fifty are students of Law, ten or fifteen of Divinity, & not
more than two, or three, of medicine— The library, the museum, &
the botanical garden, the professors tell me, are all so miserable
that they are ashamed to show them.
The banks of the Oder on one side are bordered
with small hills, upon which at small distances, are little summer
houses with vineyards at which during summer, many inhabitants of
the town reside— On the other side the land is flat, & the river
is restrained from overflowing only by a large dyke, which has been
built since the year 1785— At that time the river broke down the
smaller dyke, which had untill then existed, & overflowed the
country to a 312 considerable extent— Prince Leopold of Brunswick, a brother of
the present reigning duke, was then colonel of the regiment in
garrison here, & lost his life in attempting to save some of the
people, whom the inundation was carrying away— You have probably
seen prints of this melancholy accident, & there is an account
of it in the last editions of Moore’s travels. (I mean his first
work.) There is a small monument erected in honor of the prince,
upon the spot where the body was found.6 It was done by the
free masons of this place; of which society he was a member— But
there is nothing remarkable in it— There is likewise in the burying
ground a little monument, or rather tombstone, to Kleest, one of the most celebrated
German poets, whom his countrymen call their Thomson— He was an
officer in the service of Frederic the second, & was killed at
the battle of Cunersdorf, a village distant only a couple of miles
from this place.7
Just at the gate of the town, there is a spring of mineral water, at which a bathing house has been built with accommodations for lodgers— This bath has been considerably frequented for some years past; & the physicians of the town say that the waters are as good as those of Freyenwalde. I am willing to believe them as good as Toplitz; for my faith in mineral waters in general was not much edified by the success of our tour there last summer.8
Still at Frankfurt— We had left Berlin, without
being fully aware of the precise nature of the journey we had
undertaken, & had not thought of taking with us furs, &
winter cloathing for a tour in the dog days— But one of the
professors, whose acquaintance we have made here, has formerly gone
the same journey, and from his representations, we have been induced
to send back to Berlin for thick cloathing, & this circumstance
has prolonged our stay here, a couple of days more than we at first
intended— Yesterday we took a ride of three, or four miles to the
country seat of a Mr de Schöning, the
Landrath of the circle— The functions of his Office are
to collect the territorial taxes within a certain district called a
circle, which is a subdivision of
the province— You know the importance & extent of this title of
Rath, or councillor, in the constitutions of the German states— It
is a general name designating every officer in all the subordinate
parts of the administration; & sometimes a mere honorary title,
which Frederic the second by way of joke once granted to a person,
upon condition, that he should
never presume to give any council— For
the principle upon which the name is founded is, that 313 the person holding the title
gives the king occasionally, council; & the first part of it
usually designates the particular department in which he gives
it—
Mr Schöning & his
lady received us with great kindness & hospitality—9 From the neighbouring
of their house, & on our return we had the pleasure of agreable
prospects of the town, the river & the country beyond it; though
this has not much variety, nor any thing remarkably striking.
Not far beyond Mr
Schöning’ house is a canal, joining the Oder to the Spree, by means
of which a water communication is established between the Baltic
& the North Sea; there is likewise a similar canal between the
Oder & the Vistula.— Frederic the second made several of these
junctions of rivers during his reign, & some had been made by
his predecessors. Their benefit in facilitating the intercourse
between the several parts of Germany, & of all with Poland would
be still greater than it is, if it were not counteracted by that
mutual jealousy, which bars the passages between the dominions of
neighbouring & rival princes—
At a distance of about two German miles from this, resides Count Finkenstein of Madlitz, a son of the venerable old Minister of State, who died last winter; & whose lady & daughters you have seen at Berlin— He was formerly President of the judicial tribunal at Cüstrin, but was dimissed by Frederic the second, on the occasion of the Miller Arnold’s famous law suit—An instance in which the great king from mere love of justice, committed the greatest injustice, that ever cast a shade upon his character— His anxiety upon that occasion to prove to the world that his in his courts of justice, the beggar should be upon the same footing of right as the prince, made him forget that in substantial justice the maxim ought to bear alike upon both sides, & that the prince should obtain his right as much as the begger— Count Finkenstein, & several other judges of the court at Cüstrin, together with the high chancellor Fürst, were all dismissed from their places for doing their duty, & persisting in it, contrary to the will of the king, who substituting his ideas of natural equity in the place of prescriptions of positive law, treated them with the utmost severity, for conduct, which ought to have received his fullest approbation.— Since that time Count Finkenstein has lived upon this estate of his, cultivating his farm, & in the converse of the Muses; we have not had time & opportunity during our stay here to visit him; he & his family being at this time absent from his seat; but we are told that no lands in the province are in so 314 flourishing a condition as his; & as he unites the pursuits of literature with those of farming, he has published a translation of Theocritus in German verse—10 We propose to continue our Journey this day as far as Crossen—
Your’s—11
LbC in Thomas Welsh Jr.’s hand (Adams Papers);
internal address: “T B. Adams. Esqr:”;
APM Reel
134.
The remainder of this sentence and the portion of
the final sentence of the paragraph following “tediousness” is
omitted in the Port Folio, 1:1–2 (3
Jan. 1801).
Tadmor was the ancient name for Palmyra, an oasis in the Syrian desert northeast of Damascus.
The St. Margaret fair was held for two weeks in
July in Frankfurt an der Oder, one of three annual fairs in the city
that were among the most important markets in Europe. Imported goods
sold at the fair were subject to protective bans, a centerpiece of
the economic policies of Karl August von Struensee (1735–1804),
Prussia’s minister of finance (J. R. McCulloch, A Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, and
Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation, rev.
edn., London, 1838, p. 576; J. G. Fichte, The Closed Commercial State, transl. Anthony Curtis Adler,
Albany, N.Y., 2012, p. 213).
In 1747 Prussian chemist Andreas Sigismund
Marggraf discovered that sugar could be extracted from beets. His
student Franz Karl Achard perfected the process, and in 1799 a panel
of Prussian chemists presented Frederick William III with a loaf of
beet sugar. In the same year Achard published his work “Procédé
d’extraction du sucre de bette,” Annales de
chimie, 32:163–168 (An. VIII, 30 brumaire [21 Nov. 1799]),
and the report prompted Frederick William III to establish a
beet-sugar factory at Cunern, Silesia (now Konary, Wolów, Poland)
(Henry Keller and others, Report of the
Senate Committee on the Beet-Sugar Industry in Minnesota,
St. Paul, Minn., 1897, p. 7).
Viadrina University operated in Frankfurt an der
Oder from 1506 to 1811, after which it was moved to Breslau (now
Wrocław, Poland). JQA carried a letter from a Mr.
Ditmar in Berlin to Johann Gottlob Schneider (1750–1822), a
classical philologist. Schneider then introduced him to Karl
Dietrich Hüllmann (1765–1846), a historian (Hans N. Weiler,
“Conceptions of Knowledge and Institutional Realities: Reflections
on the Creation of a New University in Eastern Germany,” Oxford Review of Education, 20:431
[1994]; D/JQA/24, 18 July 1800, APM Reel 27;
Johann Heinrich Merck, Briefwechsel,
ed. Ulrike Leuschner and others, 5 vols., Göttingen, Germany, 2007,
1:419; Brockhaus’
Konversations-Lexikon, 17 vols., Leipzig, 1892–1897).
Prince Leopold of Brunswick (1752–1785) was the
younger brother of Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick. The
prince’s drowning on 27 April 1785 was noted in John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in France,
Switzerland, and Germany, 6th rev. edn., 2 vols., London,
1786, 2:80 (vol. 9:306; Hoefer, Nouv. biog.
générate).
Ewald Christian von Kleist (b. 1715), a poet and
Prussian Army officer, was wounded during the Battle of Kunersdorf
in 1759. He died on 24 Aug. in Frankfurt an der Oder, where a
monument marks his grave. Kleist’s best known work, the 1749 “Der
Fruhling,” was inspired by James Thomson’s The Seasons (Peter Clive, Schubert
and His World: A Biographical Dictionary, Oxford, 1997;
Franz Adolph Moschzisker, A Guide to German
Literature, 2 vols., London, 1850).
JQA and LCA visited the mineral springs at Töplitz, Bohemia (now Teplice, Czech Republic), from 24 July to 9 Sept. 1799, for which see vol. 13:539.
Baron Carl Heinrich von Schöning (1750–1824)
resided at Lossow, five miles south of Frankfurt an der Oder, and
served as administrator of the Lubusz district. Schöning was twice
married, first to Charlotte von Beerfelde and then to her sister
Amalie (D/JQA/24, 21 July 1800, APM Reel 27; Rolf
Straubel, Biographisches Handbuch der
Preussischen Verwaltungs- und Justizbeamten 1740–1806/15, 2
vols., Munich, 2009).
Count Friedrich Ludwig Karl Finck von
Finckenstein (1745–1818) was the son of Prussian statesman Count
Karl Wilhelm Finck von Finckenstein (b. 1714), who died on 3 315 Jan. 1800 after more than
sixty years of diplomatic service. Count Friedrich was married to
Caroline Wilhelmine Albertine von Schönburg-Glauchau (1748–1810),
and their daughters were Henriette (1774–1847) and Louise
(1779–1812). He served with Prussian chancellor Carl Joseph von
Fürst on a tribunal at Küstrin (now Kostrzyn, Poland) judging the
case of Christian Arnold, which was heard from 1774 to 1779. Arnold,
a miller, and his wife, Rosine, sought redress when their property
was confiscated for nonpayment of a lease after a neighboring
nobleman diverted their millstream. The tribunal ruled against the
Arnolds, but Frederick II intervened, reversed the ruling, and
dismissed the judges. A decade later, Count Friedrich published a
German translation of Theocritus, Arethusa;
oder, die Bukolischen Dichter des Altertums, Berlin, 1789
(Deutsche Biographie, www.deutsche-biographie.de; Ludwig Achim von
Arnim, Werke und Briefwechsel, ed.
Heinz Härtl, Ursula Härtl, and others, 40 vols., Berlin, 2000–2014,
32:1083; David M. Luebke, “Frederick the Great and the Celebrated
Case of the Millers Arnold (1770–1779): A Reappraisal,” Central European History, 32:379,
381–383, 387 [1999]).
JQA’s second letter in the series
was dated 23 July 1800 (LbC, APM Reel 134) and described
textile manufacturing at Crossen (now Krosno Odrzańskie, Poland) and
Grünburg (now Ziel ona Góra) and commented on women’s fashions. The
letter was printed in the Port Folio,
1:9–10 (10 Jan. 1801).