JQA to CFA, 31 Dec. 1831; LCA to CFA, 1 Jan. 1832 (both in Adams Papers).

Along with his letter, JQA sent an order from the Navy Department to Midshipman Joseph Harrod Adams assigning him to the frigate United States, Commodore Patterson, scheduled to sail for the Mediterranean in April or May for extended service there.

Jared Sparks’ edition of The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (12 vols., Boston, 1829–1830) was reviewed in the American Quarterly Review, 10:417–443 (Dec. 1831). The review, without being anti-Franklin, is in large part a ringing defense of Jay’s and Adams’ position. In the course of an extended and cogent account of the negotiations in France, the reviewer writes of JA:

“Dr. Franklin ... describes Mr. Adams, ‘as always a great man, often a wise man, and sometimes absolutely out of his senses.’ With all the deference due to the sagacity of the veteran philos-215opher, we must say, that in relation to Mr. Adams’s conduct towards the Court of France, with regard to which this remark was made, and on the evidence contained in these volumes, the unfavourable part of this character seems to us wholly inappropriate.... Mr. Adams was a stern and a bold man, but with all the severity and rigour that characterized him, there seems to have been no incapacity for the refinements and courtesies of diplomatic intercourse, no insensibility to benefits conferred, and no reluctance gratefully to acknowledge them. He belonged to a peculiar class of revolutionary men. His was the temper of his earlier associates, ... men who ... knew that all they gained was to be gained at the sword’s point.... The most that can be said with regard to his feelings towards European allies, is, that he was not willing to sacrifice much to obtain what he knew his country could do without.... In relation to the importance of perfect fidelity to France, Mr. Adams’s opinions do not seem ever to have varied.... It was neither by whim or caprice, nor by any imaginary affront, that his good will seems to have been alienated.... It was his theory that friendly and mutually beneficial relations should be established with every government of Europe, and that their friendship, if not offered, should be solicited. The object of the French alliance he believed to be principally to have assistance in severing the bonds of our own colonial subjection, and when any thing occurred to countenance the suspicion that the primary was sacrificed for a secondary object, his pride as an American, his stern sense of duty as the representative of an independent community, impelled him to indicate the source of danger.... Every sentiment, erroneous or not, on the subject of the French connexion, expressed in this correspondence [with Vergennes, seems to have been the result of cautious deliberation, and patriotic impulses.”

The reviewer concludes his justification of the policy of Adams and Jay by noting that that policy became the touchstone of American foreign policy, characterizing it in the words JQA had used in his eulogy of President Monroe: “We have now, neither in the hearts of personal rivals, nor upon the lips of political adversaries, the reproach of devotion to a French or a British faction.... We have no sympathies but with the joys and sorrows of patriotism; no attachments but to the cause of liberty and man.” In doing so, the reviewer clearly intended to establish a lineage for American foreign policy extending from father to son, whom the reviewer characterized as “a living great man, himself the most distinguished of the diplomatists of our hemisphere.”

Edward Everett’s review of Rufus Anderson, Observations upon the Peloponnesus and the Greek Islands (Boston, 1830), appeared in the North Amer. Rev. , 34:1–23 (Jan. 1832).