“Send my Children to me this Evening”

As I quoted yesterday, on 10 Nov 1780 Latin School rector Heinrich Verheyk sent American diplomat John Adams a letter stating that his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was misbehaving in an attempt to get expelled.

John Adams responded immediately:

Sir

I have this moment received, with Surprise and Grief, your Billet.

I pray you Sir, to send my Children to me this Evening and your Account, together with their Chests and Effects tomorrow. I have the Honour to be, with great Respect, Sir, your humble servant,

He whisked both John Quincy and younger son Charles out of the Latin School at the Singel.

We don’t know what conversations took place in the Adams house that night. We do know that Adams already disagreed with how the school was placing John Quincy in a class with younger boys instead of letting him study Greek. So, while he may have been mortified at his son’s reported misbehavior, he sympathized with the motive behind it.

Adams cast about for a way for his boys to continue their education. John Quincy was thirteen, a year away from the age when many elite Massachusetts boys went to Harvard, and Charles was ten. They needed Latin and Greek for college. Adams was too busy trying to convince the Dutch republic to recognize the U.S. of A. to teach them himself. John Thaxter, who had tutored the boys in Braintree and aboard the ship to Europe, was still in Paris helping the American diplomats there.

Somehow Adams learned about another possible source of information: a young man from Newport, Rhode Island, named Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846, shown above as painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1775). He had started studying medicine as an apprentice at age sixteen and then sailed to Britain for more advanced training in March 1775, just before the Boston Port Bill took effect. Though Waterhouse spent the next three years in wartime Britain, he supported the independent U.S. of A.

In 1778 Waterhouse went to study at the University of Leyden, reportedly disconcerting the authorities by declaring himself a citizen of the free American states, which Holland had yet to recognize. After finishing a medical degree in 1780, he went back to Britain to visit his mentor there, then returned to Leyden to attend lectures on law and history. Perhaps on that trip he passed through Amsterdam, a little over twenty miles north of Leyden, and met the American minister.

Sometime in November or early December Adams asked Waterhouse if there were educational opportunities for his sons in Leyden. On 13 December the young doctor wrote back:

It so happened that I could not see the persons of whom I wished to enquire concerning the Schools, mode of education &c. untill yesterday, otherwise I should have written before.—

The Gentlemen from whom I have my information have each of them a young person under their care about the age of your eldest, and are well acquainted with every thing appertaining to education in this City, from conversing with them I am able to inform you that besides the publick-school which is a good one, there are private masters in the latin and greek, who at the same time they teach these languages, teach the greek and roman History. With boys who are far advanced in greek they read and explain Euripides, Sophocles and others.

The same person will if required repeat any of the Law-lectures to the pupil, and that indeed is what they are principally employed for, by those whose wives are to be Mevrouws [i.e., ladies].— There is a teacher of this kind in Leyden who is both an elegant schollar and a gentleman, such a one asks 20 ducats a year. . . .

In regard to living I am persuaded they can live here for much less than at Amsterdam. Three furnished rooms would probably cost 20 guilders a month. We find our own tea, sugar, wine, light and fire, and give one ducat a week for dinner, it is always the same price whether we go to the public-house, or have it brought from thence to our own rooms . . .

In respect to their being Americans or Sons of Mr. Adams they will never meet with any thing disagreeable on that head, where any profit is like to accrue little do the Dutchmen care for their political, or even religious principles—Turk, Jew, or Christian make no difference with them. I beleive we may say of them as they said of themselves at Japan when the Japonese enquired if they were christians—they answered, they were Dutchmen.

If the Gentlemen should come, I can insure them an agreeable Society and a genteel circle of acquaintance. If they should not, I hope at least they will come and pay us a visit, and I think I need not add how ready I should be to render them any service in my power.

Meanwhile, Adams had summoned Thaxter from Paris.

TOMORROW: A new arrangement.

“The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son”

John Quincy Adams signed off his 30 Sept 1780 diary entry with: “End of My Journal.”

It’s not clear whether he meant the end of that month, the end of one little volume, or the end of his resolve to write daily entries about his life. But no journals from John Quincy survive until June 1781, when his life was quite different.

Back on 6 September John Quincy recorded that at the Latin School on the Singel: “Brother Charles and Myself Study in a little chamber apart because we dont understand the Dutch.” And on 9 September he wrote:

At about twelve o clock [family servant Joseph] Stevens came here for us, as we were going we met our Dutch Master who was coming to give us a Lesson.

The Adams brothers didn’t stay for that lesson; they were at their father’s home well before one o’clock. It’s also notable that John Quincy didn’t put the name of his Dutch teacher or any other teacher at the Latin School into his journal. He wasn’t connecting with them.

After September, our evidence about John Quincy’s life at the Latin School come from his father John Adams’s correspondence. First, on 18 October he wrote out a letter to the heads of the school:

Mr. Adams presents his Compliments to the Rector and the Preceptor, and acquaints them that his eldest Son is thirteen Years of Age: that he has made considerable progress already in Greek and Latin: that he has been long in Virgil and Cicero, and that he has read a great deal for his Age, both in French and English; and therefore Mr. Adams thinks it would discourage him to be placed and kept in the lower Forms or Classes of the School; and that it would be a damage to interrupt him in Greek, which he might go on to learn without understanding Dutch. Mr. Adams therefore requests that he may be put into the higher Forms, and put upon the Study of Greek.

In the end, however, Adams didn’t send that letter. He continued to defer to the teachers’ judgments about his eldest son.

That presumably left John Quincy stuck as a teenager in a class with little boys just starting their Latin, still struggling with rudimentary Dutch even though he could speak French.

It appears that John Quincy then took action on his own to resolve his situation. On 10 November the school’s rector, Heinrich Verheyk, wrote to John Adams (as translated from the French by Google and me):

The disobedience and impertinence of your eldest son, who does his best to corrupt his amiable Brother, is no longer to be suffered, since he himself seeks by his insolence to attract the punishment he Merits, in hopes of leaving the school under this pretext.

I beg you, therefore, to have the goodness to withdraw him from here, rather than to see public discipline rendered laughable, since at the end I shall be obliged to treat him according to the laws of our school.

I have the honor to be Monsieur Your Most Humble Servant,

As I wrote before, John Quincy rarely broke rules. He liked doing well in school, and he craved his parents’ approval. He tried to fit in at the Latin School when he arrived. But he apparently didn’t make friends among the Dutch boys, and the teachers held him back. So, at least according to the rector, he changed his usual behavior and set out to get himself expelled.

TOMORROW: What did Pappa and Momma say?

[The picture above is the title page of an edition of Antoninus Liberalis’s Metamorphoses, edited and published in 1774 by rector Heinrich Verheyk. A handsomely bound edition of this book was one of the prizes given to top boys at the Latin School.]