Adams Papers
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John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 4 April 1801

John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams

4.

4. April 1801.

My dear brother.

You will receive enclosed with this, a duplicate of my letter, relative to your annual account, and a literary letter of this date, containing an account of an interview between Frederic 2. and the poet Gellert, which I hope will amuse you.— If you chuse, it may be published as one of the letters on various topics of foreign literature.1

At the same time with your accounts, I received a couple of newspapers and the 4th: and 5th: numbers of the Port-Folio—2 The three last copies of the translation of Gentz’s parallel would have been very acceptable, and I hope still to receive them soon.— I made the translation and requested its publication, not only because I believed it would be useful towards settling and correcting opinions among our country men, but because I thought some return of civility was due to a man of genius who had stated the conduct of our revolution in a manner so highly honourable to the nation— I felt my self particularly bound to make this return, as the author to whom I was then personally unknown, sent me with a very obliging letter the four copies of the work which I transmitted to you.— I have sent him two of the three copies of the translation received from you, and have the satisfaction to know that he is pleased with it, and highly gratified with this mark of respect shewn to his writings beyond the Atlantic.3

My wishes for the success of our friend Dennie, in his new undertaking I have already more than once testified, and I think, proved— I am sorry to find him therefore, already at the fifth number announcing a want of subscriptions, of advertisements, and of wit.4 I am persuaded that the papers which will get him subscriptions, will be pieces the whole effect of which will depend on time and place— Pieces of local and momentary interest, which from that very circumstance will attract more than any others the attention of the town— These, it is obvious I cannot at this distance furnish him— My contributions can only be of foreign literature or politics, and these will not be likely to procure subscriptions for him— It is a well known anecdote in the life of Moliere, that he was obliged in order to make his Misanthrope, the master-piece of his genius and of the french drama, merely tolerable to a parisian audience, to couple it in the representation with the Mock-doctor, a mere piece of buffoonery—5 The application of this fact, you will think perhaps vainglorious, but I only mean to express the conviction that even if the papers I can supply, had great merit, and deserved much notice, they would not obtain it, in the present state of our literature— The observation indeed extends much further than to myself— It is a consideration which the editor of the paper will find important, and by which he must regulate in some measure his conduct— There are two very different principles each of which must serve as a passport for admission to his paper— The one, intrinsic merit; and the other, adaptation to the taste of the public.

Among the pieces in the two last numbers I have of the Port-Folio, I distinguished a couple of political essays by a looker-on— They are well-written, and contain a number of valuable observations— But I regret to see too much of the eastern-man in the sentiments of the author, after his professed wish to banish all local partialities— In the censure upon the project of a federal city, and upon the domineering and prejudiced character of our southern fellow-citizens, there may be truth, but there is not sufficient good humour—6 There seems to be no useful but a manifestly hurtful tendency in querulous or sarcastic censures upon a project which has become the law of the land, and upon classes of men, who if really arrogant and over-bearing will neither be reformed nor counteracted by being told that they are so— To dwell upon their faults must in the nature of things tend at once to increase them, and to irritate the minds of their neighbours against them— Men of proud and haughty minds often, have connected with those qualities, a real fund of generosity in their tempers, and much more may be done with them by conciliating than by exasperating means— I wish I could see in the eastern prints, writings of a manifestly concilatory nature towards the southern states and their citizens— I will not affirm that the example would be return’d; I will not undertake to say that it would produce any abatement of arrogance, or of prejudice against us; but I firmly believe it would; and I am sure, if it should not, we should lose nothing in interest, and should gain much in honour by the mere attempt.— If you know the writer of the looker-on, give him this hint to speak upon, and his abilities will be still more useful to his country.

The review of the English translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein gave me pleasure, as it took off the necessity of mentioning the original work, which I should perhaps have felt, in the course of my correspondence.7 I am not pleased indeed to find the English nation still possessing exclusively the carrying trade of all our literature and science; and that we can know nothing of modern foreign letters but through the medium of translations made in England— This evil I can but very partially contribute to remove— But what I can do, shall be done.

After all that I burden you with by this post, I shall say very little upon the subject of European news— An English fleet has appeared upon the coast of Denmark and Sweden— It is under the command of Lord Nelson; but I fully believe will effect nothing of consequence—8 The probabilities are that it will only prove one more disgraceful English expedition— But upon this subject I cannot yet speak with perfect confidence.— In the mean time, Danish troops have taken possession of the city of Hamburg, as Prussian troops will very soon of Hanover and probably Bremen. Such are the first steps of a War undertaken for the professed purpose of defending and enlarging neutral rights— The simple souls in our country, the tools of France, because they think it patriotism, and the haters of England, because they are the tools of France, will delight in all these events— The equally short sighted and wrong-headed adorers of England, will bluster and bully, and cry Rule Britannia, as England herself does— But every pure and impartial American will lament them as serious evils, and feel a deep concern for their too probable consequences to ourselves.

Your’s affectionately.

A.

RC (Adams Papers); internal address: “T. B. Adams Esqr.”; endorsed: “J Q Adams Esqr: No 4. / 4 April 1801. / 21st: May recd: / 31st: acknd:.” LbC (Adams Papers); APM Reel 134.

1JQA enclosed a copy of his 29 March letter, for which see JQA to TBA, 28 March, note 3, above. He also enclosed a 4 April letter to JA (LbC, APM Reel 134) in which he included a translation of a conversation on politics and literature between Frederick II of Prussia and German writer Christian Fürchtegott Gellert that appeared in Jean Charles Laveaux, Vie de Frederic II, roi de Prusse, 7 vols. in 12, Strasbourg, 1787–1789, 4:233–241. JQA’s translation was printed as “Letters from an American, Resident Abroad, No. II,” in Port Folio, 1:186–187 (13 June). In the 4 April letter, JQA also informed JA that he had previously sent “one or two” translations of works by Gellert, one of which was probably the “little item for your friend Oldschool” enclosed in his 29 March letter to TBA. The works by Gellert were published as “The Fly, a Fable” and “The Suicide” in the same issue of Port Folio, p. 192.

2The fourth and fifth numbers of Port Folio, 1:25, 33 (24, 31 Jan.), included JQA’s Silesia letter of 28 July 1800, for which see vol. 14:321.

3The letter from JQA to Friedrich von Gentz enclosing copies of his translation has not been found. Gentz first wrote to JQA on 15 June (Adams Papers), enclosing copies of his comparative study of the American and French Revolutions, for which see vol. 14:466–467. JQA replied with a note of thanks on 16 June (LbC, APM Reel 134).

4Port Folio, 1:39 (31 Jan. 1801), included the following note: “WANTED, Several promised advertisements; more City Subscriptions; a quantity of attic salt, a spice of satire, a few dozen epigrams with needle points, and a mouthful of merriment.”

5In 1666 Molière simultaneously published his complex and initially unpopular satiric comedy Le misanthrope and the farce Le médecin malgré lui, a work adapted by Henry Fielding in 1732 as The Mock Doctor; or, The Dumb Lady Cur’d (Michael Call, The Would-Be Author: Molière and the Comedy of Print, West Lafayette, Ind., 2015, p. 177; Maya Slater, Molière, “The Misanthrope,” “Tartuffe,” and Other Plays, Oxford, 2001, p. xx; Thomas Lockwood, “Fielding from Stage to Page,” in Claude Rawson, ed., Henry Fielding (1707–1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate, Newark, Del., 2008, p. 21–22).

6A serialized essay by TBA as Looker-On appeared in Port Folio, 1:25–26, 33–34 (24, 31 Jan. 1801). In it TBA lamented the cost of federal construction in Washington, D.C., and the “inconvenient, and I will add, disgraceful incumbrances, which the original sin of removing the government, seems to have entailed upon the country.” The essay discussed “a spirit of domination engrafted on the character of the southern people,” claimed Southerners were “imperious in their manners,” and blamed the selection of the capital site on “a rivalship between the states of Virginia and Massachusetts” (Kerber and Morris, “The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” description begins Linda K. Kerber and Walter John Morris, “Politics and Literature: The Adams Family and the Port Folio,” WMQ, 3d ser., 23:450–476 [July 1966]. description ends p. 453). For TBA’s response to JQA’s criticism, see his letter of 8 June, below.

7John Edmonds Stock authored a review of Frederick Schiller, Wallenstein: A Drama in Two Parts, transl. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, 1800, that appeared in Port Folio, 1:37–38 (31 Jan.) (Randolph C. Randall, “Authors of the Port Folio Revealed by the Hall Files,” American Literature, 11:409–410 [Jan. 1940]).

8A British fleet commanded by Adm. Hyde Parker, with Horatio Nelson second in command, attacked a Danish fleet in Copenhagen Harbor on the morning of 2 April. Nelson commanded the vanguard, disregarding a signal from Parker to withdraw and pressing the fight to victory. The Battle of Copenhagen resulted in 943 British casualties and more than 1,600 on the Danish side. A suspension of hostilities was agreed to on 9 April. The impetus to the Anglo-Danish conflict was removed when Russia under Alexander I signed a preliminary maritime convention with Britain on 19 June, agreeing to drop the renewal of the Armed Neutrality of 1780 in favor of Britain’s verbal agreement to honor the movement of neutral shipping. The conflict came to an official close when Denmark was compelled to sign the Convention of St. Petersburg on 23 Oct. 1801 and Sweden did the same on 30 March 1802 (Cambridge Modern Hist. description begins The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge, Eng., 1902–1911; repr. New York, 1969; 13 vols. description ends , 9:50, 51–53).

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