John Quincy Adams (17 page)

Although John Quincy kissed her later and put the incident behind him, Louisa never forgot it. Decades later, the wound still festered, as she recalled her husband's response. Louisa's pallor, however, continued to provoke “teasing about my pale face” at court. Months after the first incident, she again applied a touch of rouge and “walked boldly forward to meet Mr. Adams. As soon as he saw me, he requested me to wash it off, while I with some temper refused,” and John Quincy left without her. Louisa went on her own to dine with friends, and when John Quincy met her at the end of the evening, “we returned home as good friends as ever.”
⁹
John Quincy never explained his uncharacteristically hurtful behavior.

Between Louisa's illnesses, John Quincy attempted to negotiate extending a treaty of amity and commerce with Prussia for another ten years. Benjamin Franklin had negotiated the original treaty, but by the time John Quincy Adams appeared in Berlin, the status of the United States had changed. Now a trading nation of consequence and all but out of debt, the United States had become a valuable trading partner, and the Prussians eagerly renewed their ties—on John Quincy's birthday, July 11, 1799.

The treaty renewal, however, came at just the wrong time for both countries. The French Directory's foreign minister, Talleyrand, had just proclaimed what he called France's “natural right” to give law to the world and recover the colonial empire of the 1750s that France had lost to Britain in the Seven Years War. French troops swept across the Rhineland, Switzerland, Italy, Venice, Dalmatia, and the Ionian Islands, and French warships wreaked havoc on Anglo-American trade in the Caribbean and on the Atlantic. By the time John Adams assumed the presidency, the French had seized 340 American ships—more than half the American merchant fleet, with cargoes valued at more than $55 million. Hundreds of American seamen languished in prison chains in Brest, Bordeaux, and the French West Indies. Insurance rates on American cargoes soared and threatened to price American exports out of world markets. After France rejected Charles Pinckney as America's new ambassador, President Adams and the Federalist-controlled Senate threatened war.

“France has already gone to war with us,” the President bellowed. “She is at war with us, but we are not at war with her.”
¹⁰

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives, however, demanded that Adams send a mission to France to try to heal the rupture—much as Washington had sent John Jay to Britain three years earlier, in 1794, to heal relations with that nation. In the fall of 1797, Adams sent Republican Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts and Federalists John Marshall of Virginia and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, a cousin of Charles Pinckney. When they arrived in France, three intermediaries told the Americans that the Directory expected the same fealty and remunerations as “the ancient kings of France” and that to begin negotiations they would have to pay a tribute of $250,000 in cash to Talleyrand and arrange a loan to the French government of $12.8 million.
¹¹

“No!” Pinckney shouted. “Not even six pence! We are unable to defend our commerce on the seas, but we will defend our shores.”
¹²
In April 1798, Marshall and Pinckney abandoned their mission. “There is not the least hope of an accommodation with this government,” Pinckney declared.
¹³
Talleyrand insisted the three American envoys had “twisted the meaning of honest conversations.”
¹⁴

By then, John Quincy had been sending a stream of vital intelligence reports to both his father and the secretary of state, gleaned in part through clever banter with the French minister to the Prussian court—“the citizen Caillard, whom I had formerly known as secretary of the French legation in St. Petersburg.”
¹⁵

“The fleet from Toulon,” he wrote in one report to the secretary of state, “is said to have arrived in Corsica. . . . Its destination is Alexandria in Egypt. . . . The Danish chargé d'affaires told me that . . . by his last accounts from Copenhagen, they were expecting the arrival of the Russian fleet. . . . He said that . . . they were substantially in a state of war with France.”
¹⁶
And in another report, he warned the secretary of state that a group of French agents masquerading as the “
friends of liberty
. . . threatens the United States with a speedy revolution.”
¹⁷
When William Vans Murray,
who replaced John Quincy in The Hague, complained that foreign agents had deciphered his coded letters to the secretary of state, John Quincy warned that “your private letters to the secretary of state cannot escape the inspection of persons not entitled to them. . . . Everything leaks out, either through treachery or ungovernable curiosity or misplaced confidence.”
¹⁸

Outraged by French government conduct toward his envoys, President Adams asked Congress for funds to strengthen American defenses, arm merchant ships, build a navy, and prepare for war. When Republicans insisted on proof of French government demands for bribes, the President sent them the dispatches he had received from Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry, describing their encounters with the men who had solicited bribes but identifying them as only “X,” “Y,” and “Z.” When Republicans scoffed at the allegations, John Quincy's intelligence work exposed the three mystery men as the shady Swiss financier Jean Conrad Hottinger; another Swiss-born banker from Hamburg, Monsieur Bellamy; and Lucien Hauteval.

“Z, or Hauteval,” John Quincy wrote, “I knew very well when long before the establishment of the French Republic he called himself Monsieur le Comte d'Hauteval.”

As Federalists had hoped, the XYZ dispatches—and John Quincy's revelations of their identities—muffled Francophile voices in Congress and across America. Even Abigail Adams put aside her Anglophobia and
recognized that “the olive branch tendered to our Gallic allies . . . has been rejected with scorn. . . . Public opinion is changing here very fast, and the people begin to see who have been their firm unshaken friends, steady to their interests, and defenders of their rights and liberties.”
²⁰

Abigail was prescient. The XYZ dispatches provoked a frenzy of war fever and violent anti-French demonstrations. Mobs attacked the home of John Quincy's schoolmate, the fanatically pro-French
Aurora
editor Benjamin Franklin Bache, and across the nation, town after town formed militia companies to serve the nation. More than 1,000 young men in Philadelphia marched to the President's house and volunteered to fight the French. President Adams came out to address them, dressed incongruously in full-dress military uniform complete with sword—and a scabbard that was too long for his stature and scraped the ground. Abigail greeted another group wearing a flowerlike device radiating bows of black ribbon that Federalists immediately converted into a black cockade to symbolize their opposition to the tricolor cockade of the French Revolution.

“Every black cockade will be another Declaration of Independence,” wrote the editor of Boston's
Columbian Centinel
. Within days, Abigail's black cockade had sprouted on the hats of the President, his cabinet members, and every “good American” man, woman, and child across the land.

“I will never send another minister to France,” President Adams proclaimed to Congress at the end of June 1798, “without assurances that he will be received, respected and honored as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”
²¹

Federalists and Republicans alike held their collective breath as they awaited the President's request for a declaration of war against America's former ally. Instead, he asked Congress to create a Department of the Navy and authorize acquisition of twelve ships with up to twenty guns each. He asked for an embargo on all trade with France, and once Congress supported his requests, he ordered the navy to seize French privateers and other raiders in or near American waters. Congress authorized the President to call 80,000 state militiamen to active duty, and the President appointed George Washington commander in chief. The aging Washington
immediately named Alexander Hamilton inspector general and second in command.

“I am happy . . . to express my warm and cordial participation in the joy which all true Americans have felt . . . by your acceptance of the command of her armies,” John Quincy wrote to the former President.

To the President's delight, construction and refitting of American warships proceeded faster than expected, and by the end of October, the navy had launched three frigates, armed more than 1,000 merchant ships, and cleared American coastal waters of French marauders. With offshore shipping protected from French assault, the President ordered the U.S. Navy to “sweep the West India seas” of French ships. Although the French had captured more than eight hundred American vessels by then, in fewer than four months after the embryonic U.S. Navy went to sea, it had captured eighty-four French ships. American squadrons gained control of Caribbean waters, and on February 9, 1799, Captain Thomas Truxton's
Constellation
scored the first major victory in the quasi-war, engaging and capturing the French navy's big frigate
Insurgente
off the island of Nevis.

America's naval success stunned Talleyrand and the Directory. France was already suffering from the embargo that had closed American markets to important French exports, such as wines, brandies, silks, linen, and porcelain, while British ships prevented French ships from carrying sugar and other essentials from the French Antilles back to France. French fortunes were declining dramatically on other fronts as well. Napoléon and his forces had invaded Egypt, and on August 1, 1798, a week after French
troops marched into Cairo, Admiral Horatio Nelson's British fleet surprised and annihilated the French fleet of 55 warships and 280 transports at Aboukir Bay, near Alexandria. The French army was trapped in Egypt.

“The present situation of France,” John Quincy reported to his father, “has produced a great and important change in her conduct toward us. It is no longer an overbearing minister of external relations [Talleyrand] who keeps three ministers waiting five months without reception . . . attempting to dupe and swindle them by his pimping spies. . . . No longer a self-imagined conqueror . . . prescribing tribute as the preliminaries to hearing claims for justice.”
²³
John Quincy told his father that the French government now seemed determined “to effect a reconciliation with the United States”—and with good reason: plague had killed half the French army in Egypt, and Napoléon had abandoned the rest of his troops and secretly sailed away in the dead of night for France with a handful of trusted aides. Within a year, invading English forces would force the ill-fated French expeditionary force in Egypt to lay down its arms and surrender. In the meantime, France suffered a similar humiliation in Ireland when a British fleet trapped and captured nine French warships and transport vessels carrying a French invasion army into Donegal Bay.

As the aura of French invincibility began to dissipate, Russia organized alliances to halt French expansion in Europe. An Anglo-Russian army landed in Holland, while another Russian force joined the Austrians and pushed French forces out of the Bavarian and Italian Alps, Switzerland, and the Rhineland. In Tuscany, Italian patriots rebelled and sent French forces fleeing northward, while slaves in what is now Haiti staged a massive rebellion, butchering more than 10,000 French troops, 3,000 French civilians, and the army's commander in chief, Napoléon's brother-in-law. In France proper, royalists staged a massive counterrevolution in the western and central provinces. Besieged from all directions and stripped of revenues from foreign plunder, France faced economic collapse unless Talleyrand could restore the flow of supplies and foodstuffs from her former ally, the United States.

Under pressure from the rest of the Directory, Talleyrand ordered American seamen and other Americans released from prison, reopened French ports to American ships, and ordered an end to French attacks on American ships. He issued a formal invitation to peace talks that conspicuously included President Adams's own words to Congress, pledging that “whatever plenipotentiary the government of the United States might send to France to put an end to the existing differences between the two countries would be undoubtedly received with the respect due to the representative of a free, independent, and powerful nation.”
²⁴

Sensing a sharp increase in official European respect for the United States, John Quincy urged his father to accept Talleyrand's invitation, and his father sent a new group of peace commissioners to Paris.