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Chapter 6: John Adams in Europe: A Provincial Cosmopolitan Confronts the Metropolitan World, 1778–1788
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131 To take a Walk in the Gardens of the Palace of the Tuilleries, and describe the Statues there, . . . would be a very pleasant Amusement, and instructive Entertainment, improving in History, Mythology, Poetry. . . . But I could not do this without neglecting my duty.—The Science of Government it is my Duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take [the] Place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.—I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary,Tapestry and Porcelaine. —john adams to abigail adams, after may 12, 1780 For John Adams scholars, as well as many historians of American culture, the passage quoted above is among the most celebrated of all Adams’s declamations . One of its most striking features is its highly accurate prediction of the history of the Adams family, and to a lesser extent of America as a whole, over the next century and beyond. But in its immediate context the words project a different image: Adams’s determination, under the cover of a sincere appeal to the demands of his current diplomatic obligations, to deny himself an intimate acquaintance with the Europe in which he had already spent the better part of two years and in which he knew he would probably spend several more. Adams’s reluctance to embrace European culture and society is evident from his first arrival in France, in April 1778, to his final departure from John Adams in Europe A Provincial Cosmopolitan Confronts the Metropolitan World, 1778–1788 richard a. ryerson s Richard A. Ryerson 132 England just ten years later.His heavy workload partly explains this,as does his embarrassment at his rudimentary conversational French. And despite his diffidence,Adams did make several new friends in France,Holland,and England; in London he even attended the theater.Yet Adams never sought to engage the Europe that was right in front of him, and he never felt that he needed to, for at least three reasons. First,Adams,a fifth-generation New Englander whose family had never moved more than ten miles from their initial settlement, retained enough of the moral rectitude of his small-town Puritan forebears to be more than a little uncomfortable with the social and sensuous aspects of European culture: Paris salons and the theater, the ostentatious display of the wealthy, and “Musick, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.” He did not flatly reject this metropolitan world—indeed he sincerely professed an admiration for the fine arts—but he kept it at more than arm’s length. This refined elegance would be appropriate for his grandsons—not his sons, who would be too busy studying mathematics and naval architecture—but it was not for him. A related motive for Adams’s deliberate avoidance of a full exposure to European high society was his conviction, common to many Americans of his day,including some envoys and merchants raised as far south as Virginia, that the aristocratic culture of France and England was morally inferior to the simplicity of American life and potentially destructive of American values. There is a fine irony in this conviction: beginning in the 1790s and continuing well into the twentieth century, several of Adams’s countrymen charged him,especially as a political thinker,with having been corrupted by European aristocracy. Yet Adams had a more personal reason for standing back from the Europe of his own day. Of all America’s early diplomats, indeed of all the Founding Fathers, Adams had the most profound knowledge of the Europe of the mind and of the ages. When he first sailed for France, his mastery of European history, political science, and the law from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century was unparalleled in America, and it only became deeper and broader during his stay in Europe,especially after his diplomatic burdens lightened in France and then England after 1783.However Europeans or Americans may have judged the effectiveness of Adams’s mission in Europe,he was convinced that he already knew everything about contemporary Europe that he needed to know,and far more than any other American. What happened to Adams in his European decade is the story of a man...