“I will also take down some of the rules of the school”

On 31 Aug 1780, John Quincy Adams woke up in an unfamiliar bed.

As I recounted yesterday, the thirteen-year-old had been left at the Latin School on the Singel in Amsterdam, along with his ten-year-old brother, Charles.

Their father, John Adams, was in Holland as the Continental Congress’s representative to the Dutch government. He didn’t want his boys to fall behind on their schooling.

Earlier in the year, when the Adamses were in Paris, John had sent his two boys to a small academy. There’s no discussion in the family papers of how he made a similar decision in Amsterdam, but presumably it wasn’t a surprise.

In characteristic mode, John Quincy immediately set about to studying his new school and home. His diary for 31 August begins:

This morning we got up and I asked the names of all the scholars who board here. They are as follows.

Roghe, Toelaer, Vander Burgs, Hulft, Slingelandt, Brants, Van Lennep, Koene, de Graft, Genets, Petri, Van der Paul, Clifford.

He added marks to help him pronounce those unfamiliar names.

Then John Quincy wrote, “I will also take down some of the rules of the school.” At least in this recording, that really meant the meal schedule, but it ran to more than 200 words.

At the end John Quincy wrote about his fellow students:

Every one of the young Gentlemen Speak french and it is a general Custom for the Gentlemen to have their sons speak french. Their comes here every day an hundred boys to learn latin.

That was helpful because he couldn’t speak Dutch, but he could read and speak French pretty well.

Indeed, John Quincy then began to write out a history of the school from a 1772 French guidebook that his father had lent him, translating the prose as he went:

This place was formerly a charity house of a Convent of Religious women. I have a book call’d le Guide D’Amsterdam in which this School is spoke of. It is in french but I will translate it as well as I can into English.

That passage came to another 600 words, starting with a count’s permission for the city to found schools in 1342 and ending with new library acquisitions.

The new schoolboy concluded his morning diary entry by writing: “At about 10 o clock our things were brought here by [family servant Joseph] Stevens. Pappa and Mr. [Herman] Le Roi came to see us.”

John Quincy didn’t record any reluctance about staying at this school. He seems to have been really eager to fit in.

TOMORROW: The school day.

Off to a New School in 1780

Here’s a story I’ve had in mind for a while, waiting for back-to-school season. It’s about the time young John Quincy Adams behaved so badly he had to be pulled out of school.

“What?” you exclaim. “John Quincy Adams? The prematurely mature fellow who went to St. Petersburg on a diplomatic mission at the age of fourteen and learned to speak eight foreign languages?

“The disciplined guy who kept a diary for sixty-eight years and served in the House of Representatives for eighteen years until he had a fatal stroke at his desk and was even, to be honest, a bit of a prig? Not our Johnny Quincy! No, no, you must mean Charles.”

Indeed, Charles Adams did rack up a lot of infractions at Harvard College, far more than his older and younger brothers. (See the Boston 1775 investigation starting here.) But in the episode I’m now writing about, reports said Charles was pulled into misbehavior by John Quincy. This story unveils a side of the oldest Adams boy we hardly ever see.

In August 1780, John Adams was the Continental Congress’s envoy to Holland, based in Amsterdam. He had brought his two oldest sons to Europe with him. John Quincy had just turned thirteen, and Charles was ten. John Thaxter had come along as a secretary for the minister and an occasional tutor for the boys, but he was back in Paris, and their father wanted them to have formal schooling.

On 30 August, John Quincy Adams wrote in his diary: ”After supper Mr. Le Roi went with us to a School and left us here. How long we shall stay here I can not tell.”

“Mr. Le Roi” was Herman Le Roy, New York–born son of the Rotterdam merchant Jacob Le Roy. He hosted the Adamses in Amsterdam, particularly the boys, and helped John Adams translate documents. A couple of years later as the war simmered down, Herman Le Roy sailed back to America. He formed a mercantile firm with his in-law William Bayard and made a lot of money from trade and developing land in western New York. Le Roy was also Holland’s consul to the U.S. of A.

As for the school where Le Roy left the two boys, the editors of the Adams Papers explain:

The school was the celebrated Latin School on the Singel (innermost of Amsterdam’s concentric canals), close to what is today one of the busiest sections of the city, marked by the ornate and highly conspicuous Mint Tower in the Muntplein (Mint Square) and across from the Bloemenmarkt (Flower Market). The building then used by the school is now, much altered, occupied by the city police.

The picture above shows that school building painted by Jacob Smies around 1802. Explore that painting more, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum and Google Arts and Culture, here.

TOMORROW: Settling in.