25 April 2001
I want to say at the start how pleased and proud I am—and it came as a surprise to me—to find that I'm also speaking tonight to the [Naval Academy] class of 2001, the great class of 2001.
Admiral Ryan, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very full season for me. I have a book coming out in a matter of weeks that I've been working on for six years. And I also have two of my prior books, The Great Bridge and Mornings on Horseback, being reissued by Simon and Schuster in hardcover, as so-called Simon and Schuster Classics.
As a requirement in the reissuing of those books, I was asked to write a new introduction for each. My wife, Rosalie, and I were in New York and the editor called and said that she needed the new introductions right away. I happen to have a copy of The Great Bridge with me, but I had no copy of Mornings on Horseback. So I went over to the big Barnes and Noble on Fifth Avenue to find a copy of Mornings on Horseback. It being a very large, well-stocked store, I found a copy and went up to buy it. And if you've been in that big store on Fifth Avenue, or some of the other Barnes and Nobles, you know that there'd be five or six or seven people at the checkout counter, and you line up—twenty, thirty people at a time, at 10:30 in the morning.
I was in the line, which snaked back and forth, holding my book with the jacket cover against my leg. And as I moved along in the line, I noticed a man staring at me. After awhile, he got up so the S curve of the snake put us right side by side. And in a not very quiet voice, he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder and said, "I've always wondered what an author buys when he goes to a bookstore." And he wanted to see the cover. And I then explained to him, as I just have to you now. And he went, "Oh yeah, sure, sure."
But to be invited to come here to Annapolis—given the importance of this institution, the people in the audience, and particularly the people in the blue seats around us—is a great privilege and a great honor, and I feel a real responsibility. I'm going to try to say some things tonight that I feel very much on my mind as a consequence of my work on my book. As far as I know, some of what I'm about to say has never been said before. If you find it interesting, and particularly if you find it provocative, I will be enormously rewarded.
"We live, my dear soul, in an age of trial. What will be the consequence, I know not."— John Adams, 1774. The hardest thing in the world, and maybe the most important thing of all in writing history, teaching history, is to convey the fundamental truth that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. Nobody ever knew how anything was going to come out, anymore than we do now. The tendency when one is taught history, when one writes history, is that this followed this, followed that; therefore that's the way it was preordained. And it never, ever was. They did not know what was going to happen next, what the outcome of this very dangerous path they were taking—to stage a revolution against the most powerful nation in the world—was going to mean for them, for the nation, and for them individually.
And John Adams's wife—his marvelous wife, Abigail—wrote back to him, "You cannot, I know, nor do I wish to see you an inactive spectator. We have too many high-sounding words and too few actions to correspond with them."
On March 23rd, in Philadelphia, in Independence Hall—in the same room where the Declaration of Independence was voted on, months before the Declaration of Independence—the Congressmate took a momentous step, as the delegates resolved to permit the outfitting of privateers, "armed vessels," to prey "on the enemies of the United Colonies;" a move roundly supported and led by the delegate from Massachusetts, John Adams.
In his advocacy of sea defenses, he stood second to none, then and later. The previous fall, he'd urged the creation of an American Fleet; the first American to do that in Congress, which to some like Samuel Chase, alas of Maryland, had seemed the maddest idea in the world. The fight began on the floor and it was not until October 13th that finally the building of two small swift-sailing ships was voted by Congress, and thus the beginnings of a new navy.
It was John Adams who drafted the first set of rules and regulations for the new navy, a point of pride for him, as long as he lived. Indeed, in the twenty-five years that John Adams served his country, and especially as president, in his advocacy of a strong navy he was second to none.
Now, imagine if you will, a very bitter-cold day in Massachusetts; during which the snow is blowing, the wind is howling, and two figures are seen coming down a beach called Howe's Neck, still a rather bleak and windswept stretch of ocean shore. One is a man, a rather stout, short fellow. They're all bundled up, of course—hats pulled down. The other's a little boy, John Quincy Adams, ten years old. And he and his father are about to sail for France in the midst of the Revolutionary War.
It's two years later, 1778. John Adams has been dispatched, has been told he must sail to France to meet with Franklin to help cement a relationship with France; and to encourage French investment, French financing of our battle for freedom and independence, and to supply arms and maybe actual military force.
There's every reason in the world why Adams shouldn't go. It's the dead of winter; nobody ever went to sea on the North Atlantic in those days in the dead of winter, if it could possibly be avoided. He was also sailing, of course, in the midst of war, and British ships were out there just laying for somebody trying to escape. Boston was full of spies, and as a consequence, it was unsafe for him to board the new frigate, Boston, which had been recently commissioned. And so, therefore, it was arranged that they would pick him up off the shore about dusk, and take him out to the ship. He had never been to sea. He'd lived his whole life within a mile of the sea. He once said he hoped he never would have to live where he couldn't smell the sea. But he'd never been on a boat, never been farther out than Cohasset Rocks, where he went fishing from time to time.
And he was taking this little boy, his son, because his wife, Abigail, was sure that this was one of the great chances for this young man to have experiences such as nobody of his generation would ever be able to claim. And, of course, John Quincy Adams is going to become president and going to become the president who recommends the establishment of a naval academy. John Quincy Adams's drawings of the ships that he sailed on are wonderful, still preserved in the Massachusetts Historical Society; along with his little boyhood diary and the diary that his father kept on this voyage, this momentous voyage.
John Adams was to sail the Atlantic, brave the Atlantic; travel farther in the service of his country, during and after the Revolution, than any major figure of his time. And John Adams took this chance because of what he felt in his heart. He had every reason not to go. Adams was leaving his wife, children, friends, his home, his livelihood, everything he loved. He was risking his life and that of his small son; risking capture, and who knew what horrors and indignities as a prisoner; all to begin new business, for which he felt ill-suited, knowing nothing of European politics or diplomacy, and unable to speak French, the language of diplomacy. He had never, in his life, laid eyes on a king or queen, or the foreign minister of a great power; never set foot in a city of more than 30,000 people. At age forty-two, he was bound for an unimaginably distant world apart, with little idea of what was in store, and every cause to be extremely apprehensive.
But with his overriding sense of duty, his need to serve, his ambition, and as a patriot fiercely committed to the fight for independence, he could not have done otherwise. There was never really a doubt about his going. If he was untrained and inexperienced in diplomacy, so was every American. If unable to speak French, he could learn. Fearsome as the winter seas might be, he was not lacking in courage. And besides, the voyage could provide opportunity to appraise the Continental Navy at first hand, a subject he believed of the highest importance. And for all he may have strayed from the hidebound preachments of his forebears, Adams remained enough of a puritan to believe anything worthy must carry a measure of pain.
"The wind was very high and the sea very rough," he would record in his diary. "But by means of a quantity of hay in the bottom of the boat, and good watch coats, in which we were covered, we arrived onboard the Boston about 5:00, tolerably warm and dry. Continuing winds and steep seas kept the ship at anchor in the roadstead for another thirty-six hours. Then once under way, on a morning with the temperature at 14 degrees, the ship went only as far as Marblehead, where a sudden snowstorm blotted out all visibility. And nearly two days passed before Captain Tucker would put to sea. The weather was no warmer, but fair at last, and the wind out of the northwest, exactly what was needed to clear Cape Cod on a broad reach. The date was Tuesday, February 17th, 1778."
Captain Tucker was all of thirty years old; thirty years old, in command of a brand new American frigate, taking a very important American across the ocean, through the enemy, to deposit him in France, which was his only mission. Furthermore, he had to consult with this landlubber before making any major decision. And Adams was onboard not very long before he was bustling all about, telling the young captain how things should be spruced up and put in better shape; which Tucker, who was a very salty and likeable man, took in stride. He'd been at sea since he was eleven years old, which was not uncommon in that day. He was a very seasoned and experienced seaman.
The Boston was a 24-gun ship, 114 feet on deck. It was filled with people, many of them French officers returning from the Revolution back to France, and some young naval officers as well as the crew. It was a terrible trip. Almost everything that could go wrong, went wrong. And what's so important about this voyage—which has, to my mind, been sadly neglected by historians and biographers—is that later on, Adams told Thomas Jefferson that this voyage, this journey, was a metaphor for his whole life.
And among things it revealed was that Adams loved action. He loved leadership. He was very distraught when they had days of good sailing; it bored him tremendously. He started wishing that they might take captive of a British ship, which might possibly have a London newspaper on it that he could read. He was not favorably impressed by the sea. When Abigail's turn came for her to cross, she loved it. She responded to it in almost a biblical language.
They were hit by a storm that blew them more than 200 miles off course; hit by lightning, which struck very near to where the powder was stored, split the mainmast, killed one man onboard, and injured about twenty more. They also had a run-in with a British merchantman, the Martha, during which there was a regular sea fight. Adams was ordered to go below by Commander Tucker. And in the midst of what was going on, with shot firing everywhere—some of it hitting the ship, some of it hitting the mast not far above the heads of everybody—Captain Tucker saw Congressman John Adams standing there with a rifle, accoutered, as Tucker later said, "as one of my Marines." He wanted to be in the fight. And Tucker later testified before a Navy board, in no uncertain terms, about the valor, the courage of John Adams.
The voyage, I think, also prepared Adams for the realities of war. One young naval officer was severely injured when a cannon exploded in a test operation. And Adams and the captain held this young man in their arms, clutched him in their arms, while a French surgeon onboard amputated the leg in what we would call the very crude fashion of the day.
John Adams was not a sunshine sailor. He was there when he was needed. He was brave, he was honest, he was irascible, he was vain, he was stubborn. He could be maddeningly independent in his views, and he was brilliant. He had humor. And he was very farseeing. He, almost alone, of the members of Congress in that day, foresaw that this was not going to be a quick and easy war, as most of the politicians foresaw; as Thomas Paine foresaw, for example, in Common Sense. He saw it was going to be long, costly, difficult, and an uphill struggle the whole time.
Now, as important as all the many things that John Adams did was to fight with all he could to get the French to commit their navy to the Revolution. Late that same summer of 1778, there was a French naval expedition under Admiral d'Estaing; combined with an American land assault against the British at Newport, Rhode Island. And it was a fiasco. It was a failure. And when the news reached France, Adams characteristically went to Vergennes and demanded that the French do more. It was the belief of both Adams and Franklin that this was their most important assignment, and it turned out to be their most important undertaking together.
"Nothing would bring the war to a more speedy conclusion," Adams wrote—this is in a paper submitted to the French government—"more effectively than sending a powerful fleet sufficient to secure naval superiority in American waters. Such a naval force, acting in concert with the armies of the United States, would in all probability take and destroy the whole British power in that part of the world," which is exactly what happened at Yorktown. The armies of Rochambeau and Washington on land, in combination with the arrival at exactly the right time of the French Fleet, captured Cornwallis in a bag. And while the war wasn't ended at Yorktown, as many people seem to believe, it was nonetheless pretty well decided. It was as important, or a more important victory, than was even Saratoga.
When Adams kept pressing Vergennes for still more and more naval support—refusing to go along with Franklin, who he saw as being too pliant, too determined to agree with anything and everything that the French wished or decided—Vergennes wrote an angry response, saying of Adams, "His pedantry, stubbornness, and self-importance will give rise to a thousand vexations."
Adams wrote in reply, "Thanks to God, that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right."
Now, shift forward to the year 1798, a different time, a different prospect for America. The country has formed. The struggle to keep the union is paramount in every thinking American's mind. It wasn't just that we won the war and suddenly this wonderful new country just blossomed; it was a very precarious, difficult time, particularly after Washington retired and Adams became president. Adams was, of course, our first vice president. But he was also the first and only president in our history who ever had the daunting task of succeeding George Washington; a role that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for almost any man.
Now, you ask most Americans, "Did the United States, at any period since the French and Indian War, ever go to battle with France?" and they would say no. But, of course, as I know most of you realize, we fought a very real but undeclared war with France, at sea, during John Adams's administration. It was a war taken with the utmost seriousness, and was expected to become a larger war. To be sure, there were many in America who wanted it to become a larger war. And it was politically expedient for those in the Federalist Party, particularly, if there were a war. The opposition, the Republicans, led by Madison and Jefferson, were all together against any war with France because they were greatly enamored with France, because of the Revolution.
John Adams, I should point out, was the first—if not the first, certainly one of the first and certainly the most outspoken—of all Americans to say that this French Revolution is going to lead to hideous bloodshed and will eventually give rise to a dictatorship; again, exactly what happened. The concurrent voice—saying much the same thing, as I'm sure you know—Edmund Burke, in England. They were saying much the same thing at exactly the same time.
Adams was determined to make peace. I must emphasize that. His position always was to make peace with the French. The problem was the old problem of impressment; the problem of the French seizing ships worth thousands and thousands of dollars, rise in insurance rates, all the usual problems. And the problem, of course, was political, ideological. The Federalists, in general, favored Britain, distrusted France. The Republicans, later to become the Democratic Party, favored France and greatly distrusted Britain.
But Adams had an idea, Adams had a principle, which was—it's hard for us to imagine today—novel. We will make peace with all our might and we will build up the military. But by "the military" he meant the Navy. The imagery that was harkened was that of the eagle with the olive branch in one claw and the arrows in the other. But the opposition—the Republican Party, and Jefferson in particular—were unable, unwilling, and in some ways incapable of understanding how this could possibly be, how it could possibly work. Jefferson, for the life of him, never understood it. You either make peace or you make war. You don't build up this costly luxury of a navy while you're trying to make peace with the French.
Adams was convinced that the peace would never be made with the French without a military might on the waters. And in May 1798, Congress passed a bill empowering the United States warships to begin to capture any French privateer or cruiser found in American waters. This was the rebirth of the Navy, "the wooden walls of America," as Adams called it; and the first new Department of the Navy, a separate department from the War Department, which was his own, the president's, pride and joy. Little that he achieved as president would give him greater satisfaction. And with his choice of his first, the first, secretary of the Navy—the very able and very energetic Benjamin Stoddert, of Maryland—he brought into his administration the one truly loyal ally he had close at hand in his own administration.
Now let's advance again forward a little further, to December of that year. And imagine the snow fills Philadelphia after a very heavy storm. Sleigh bells are sounding. And the president of the United States and his cabinet and his secretary of the Navy gather around large maps in the president's house, a building that no longer exists, in Philadelphia. And they're perusing these maps because four squadrons, twenty-one ships in total, virtually the whole American naval force, were now assigned to the Caribbean. The largest squadron, which included the heavy frigates United States and Constitution, was under commander John Barry, who was admonished in his orders that, "a spirit of enterprise and adventure cannot be too much encouraged in the officers under your command. We have nothing to dread but unactivity."
By the second week of March, the following spring, as Adams was preparing to go home to Quincy, word reached Philadelphia that the American frigate Constellation, under Captain Thomas Truxtun, had captured the French frigate Insurgente after battle near the island of Nevis, in the Leewards; the first and perhaps the most important engagement of the undeclared war at sea.
This news struck Philadelphia with terrible results, terrible consequences. People were either cheering or they were absolutely distraught, that this madman who was president was leading the country into a mistaken, terrible war with France. Where would it all end? people were asking in Philadelphia when the news of Truxtun's victory came. But Adams was anything but alarmed or displeased. Of Captain Truxtun he wrote, "I wish all other officers had as much zeal."
In two years, really less than two years, the United States Navy, under John Adams, grew from almost nothing to 50 ships, including the frigates United States, Constitution, and Constellation, and over 5,000 officers and seamen. This bore heavily on the outcome of the negotiations with France. Indeed, Adams's insistence on American naval strength proved decisive, achieving peace in France in 1800.
It would have been a colossal mistake had we gone to war with France. We were going to be up against a military power the likes of which the world had not seen. Remember, this is the time of Napoleon. He's at his peak. French Army, French Navy, French wealth against a very weak, poor, undermanned country. We didn't go to war, the crisis passed, and it had a lot to do with the United States Navy, which Jefferson—once he became president—quickly disbanded, almost to the point that it was nonexistent.
Had we gone to war with France, it's my belief that there might very well never have been a Louisiana Purchase, which came very shortly thereafter. The Louisiana Purchase, as I'm sure you've read, really fell into our laps because Napoleon decided to get rid of it. He wanted to unload Louisiana. He'd had a terrible time in Haiti, mainly because of malaria and yellow fever. And he thought, if this is what that part of the world is going to do to my armies, I'm going to sell it. It was a fire sale, and one of the great events in our history, of course, because it more than doubled the size of the nation.
Jefferson sent ships, of course, to the Barbary Coast; and with some effectiveness, of course. And then came the War of 1812, when they were both out of office. They had become enemies politically. They'd been rivals for the presidency. Adams had defeated Jefferson in 1796, and Jefferson defeated Adams in 1800, by a very, very slim margin. And in fact, had word of the French peace—word of the fact that Napoleon had signed an agreement not to have the war—reached this country two weeks earlier, Jefferson might very well have lost.
As it was, a difference of 250 votes in the popular count in New York would have given Adams the electoral count in New York, and he would have won the election. Furthermore, as is not made clear enough in most accounts, in the South, three-fifths of all the slaves were counted as part of the voting population—which, of course was preposterous; they had no vote, they had no freedom—in order to give a higher total population, and thus a higher count in the electoral system. Had that not been the case, Adams would have won in a landslide. He was far more popular than one is led to believe by most accounts in history, because we tend to think only about winners and Adams was a loser in 1800.
In the War of 1812, when the Navy was performing with spectacular success, Jefferson, having made up with Adams and resumed correspondence, wrote to him—generously, to be sure—to give him credit where credit was due. "I sincerely congratulate you on the success of our little navy, which must be more gratifying to you than to most men, as having been the early and constant advocate of wooden walls."
John Adams was the American patriot who defended the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre—a very brave act, which he thought might destroy his political career, and was made the more difficult for his popularity in that he got them off. They were not convicted.
John Adams was the man—as Jefferson and innumerable people, like Benjamin Rush, who were there at the time attested—was the man on the floor of the Congress who drove the Declaration of Independence through the Congress, when it happened. And when it happened was crucial.
John Adams was our first ambassador to the Court of Saint James's. It is John Adams, a farmer's son from Massachusetts, who stands before King George III, for the first time, to declare that he is there to represent the new, independent United States of America—one of the great scenes in American history.
He was then the first vice president, the second president, and the first president to occupy the White House.
He was also—and I think this is very important, as an illustration of his hidebound convictions—he was the only one of the Founding Fathers who never owned a slave, as a matter of principle.
When he retired, he went back to Quincy, and lived out a long, quiet, and largely satisfying life, for all of the tragedies that beset Abigail and him. He lived longer than any president in our history, and died on the same day as Thomas Jefferson, who was more than eight years younger. And he died, not just on any day, but the day, their day—July 4th, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence; which, to many Americans and to his son, seemed the clearest evidence yet that the hand of God was involved with the destiny of our country.
Was he a great man? Absolutely. Was he a good president? Certainly. Was he a brave president? Absolutely. Was he honest? Almost to a fault. And I honestly believe that his part in the creation of the Navy, his belief in the idea of the Navy as a form of balance—not just protection, balance in the order of things in the world—is paramount. He was the one, more than any other of the founders at the time, who saw that we had to have balance in government—legislative, executive, and judicial. He was the one who saw that we must have a bicameral legislature, and that we must have an independent judiciary—balance. And he saw the Navy as balance in the order of power in the world; and that if we didn't have it, we were in for trouble.
As a very young man, he began writing. He wrote all of his life. And much of what he said survives today in hundreds, indeed thousands, of letters, diary entries, cases argued before courts in Massachusetts, and in what he wrote in his presidential papers. Some of it is familiar: "We must be a government of laws and not of men." "Facts are stubborn things," as he told the jury trying the British soldiers after the Boston Massacre.
But one of the most moving passages, in all that he wrote, was written when he was thirty years old—in 1765, ten years before Concord and Lexington, in something called A Dissertation on the Cannon and the Feudal Law—because it is the chosen motto of the Naval Institute, the last sentence of it. He said, "The true source of our suffering has been our timidity. We have been afraid to think." And here's the sentence, which I dedicate to you of the class of 2001: "Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write."
Thank you for this honor.
David McCullough is host of PBS's The American Experience series and has narrated Ken Burns's The Civil War and other PBS programs. He is the author of Truman, which won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1993. McCullough also is author of The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, and Brave Companions.