Adams Family Correspondence, volume 15

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Descriptive List of Illustrations

1. “STATE STREET, 1801,” BY JAMES BROWN MARSTON, 1801	157[unavailable]
Writing to his brother Thomas Boylston Adams on 9 January 1802, John Quincy Adams excused the tardiness of his letter, citing “the continual occupation I have found in moving, repairing and furnishing my house, and entering upon my office” (below). On 26 December 1801, he had secured a lease for a place of business at 10 State Street owned by John Lowell Jr. John Quincy spent the first days of the new year moving books and making arrangements, including having a sign hung. On 5 January 1802 he resumed his legal career, working as a Boston attorney out of that office until 30 June of the following year when he prepared to begin his work as a U.S. senator in Washington, D.C. “I gave it up sooner than I should perhaps; at the request of Mr: Lowell of whom I hired it,” John Quincy wrote in his Diary. “As a summer room it is too much exposed to the heat— And as the Supreme Court is postponed untill November, I shall not have business enough, in the interval before I go to Congress, to make it worth the cost.”
The focal point of James Brown Marston’s 1801 oil painting of downtown Boston is the Old State House. The Declaration of Independence and Proclamation of Peace with Great Britain were read from its balcony, while the square in the foreground was the site of the Boston Massacre. John Quincy navigated these streets to reach his office at 10 State Street, which is just out of view here on the left side of the street, close to the Old State House.
Marston (1775–1817), originally from Salem, was a member of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association and rose to the rank of captain in the state militia. He was a commercial painter in Boston by 1800, though only one other painting of his is extant (D/JQA/24, 26 Dec. 1801, 1–2, 4–5 Jan. 1802, APM Reel 27; D/JQA/27, 30 June 1803, APM Reel 30; M/JQA/18, APM Reel 215; Witness to America’s Past: Two Centuries of Collecting by the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, 1991, p. 135; Boston Columbian Centinel, 17 Dec. 1800, 31 March 1802).
Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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2. THOMAS MCKEAN, ENGRAVING BY DAVID EDWIN, AFTER GILBERT STUART, 1803	261[unavailable]
On 18 January 1803 Thomas Boylston Adams wrote from Philadelphia to his father, John Adams, offering to send a recently published engraving of an “eminent personage here, with whom you have been long acquainted” (below). The print was of Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean, and the image, the younger Adams sardonically noted, was “so profusely decorated with the symbols of nobility and the emblems badges of Royalty, that I think every genuine Democrat in the Country, should take it as a model for his own resemblance.” Adorning McKean’s left breast was the medal with eagle and rosette representing membership in the Order of the Cincinnati. Below the portrait is a heraldic crest with the Latin phrase “MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO,” the latter the McKean family motto, “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body.” Although he had not seen the engraving when he replied to his son on 28 January, John recognized that “Parade, Ceremony, Pomposity and Finery” were all trappings appreciated by the Pennsylvania governor. “Whatever may be said of that Gentlemans Consistency of Conduct, his Uniformity of Principle and System, his Fidelity to his Friends, his conjugal Felicity, his Constancy in his opinions, his Modesty, his Humility, his Meekness or his Temperance; thus much must be confessed, that he Understands the Management of the People of Pensilvania, better than any of the Federalists,” John wrote of his “old Friend McKean” (below).
Taken from a ca. 1802 portrait of McKean by the artist Gilbert Stuart, the engraving was made in January 1803 by British-born engraver David Edwin. Edwin (1776–1841) immigrated to Philadelphia in 1797 with training in stipple engraving, a technique well suited to portraiture. The artist soon flourished in the city’s publishing trade, working first with artist Edward Savage before striking out on his own in 1801 (Charles Henry Hart, Historical Descriptive and Critical Catalogue of the Works of American Artists in Collection of Herbert L. Pratt, N.Y., 1917, p. 40; Charles Knowles Bolton, Bolton’s American Armory: A Record of Arms Which Have Been in Use Within the Present Bounds of the United States, Boston, 1927, p. 112; ANB ).
Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
3. VALUATION OF JOHN ADAMS’ QUINCY REAL ESTATE, PETER BOYLSTON ADAMS, 23 JUNE 1803	285[unavailable]
On 5 May 1803 John Adams asked his brother Peter Boylston Adams to assess the value of several properties the former president owned in Quincy, explaining that he was making the request “for very particular reasons which it is not at present necessary to explain” (Adams Papers, Adams Office Manuscripts). The reason was the loss of John and Abigail Adams’ retirement savings in the failure of the London banking firm Bird, Savage, & Bird. John Quincy Adams had placed $18,000 of his father’s assets with the firm, xi relying on its reputation as the British banking house of the U.S. government. Weakened by losses in the East Indies and French attacks on British shipping, the house failed without warning. John Quincy lost $13,000, but the effect on his father was “more distressing to me than to himself,” he wrote in his Diary, calling it “among the most painful things that ever happened to me.” After learning of the failure while in Boston, John Quincy went to Quincy on 2 April to inform his parents, writing, “They felt it severely; but bore it with proper firmness and composure.”
Abigail called the news “a Catastrophe so unexpected to us,” and it was made more severe by John’s purchase of additional real estate earlier on the same day that John Quincy brought the news ( AA to TBA, 26 April, below). Within hours of learning of the failure and before telling his parents, John Quincy began the process of selling his Boston properties to raise money for his parents’ relief. He and his father later agreed that he would purchase several of his father’s Quincy real estate holdings, thus necessitating John’s request to his brother Peter Boylston to assess the current value of his properties. The document is one of only a few by Peter Boylston in the Adams Papers. The centerpieces of the 23 June valuation were the John Adams and John Quincy Adams Birthplaces, assessed at $3,000 and $2,000, respectively. In total the seventeen properties on the list had an assessed value of $16,802.50.
On 8 August John Quincy signed a deed of sale from his father, with his mother signing as dower holder. John also prepared a memorandum describing the purchase (both Adams Papers, Adams Office Manuscripts). John Quincy paid the full assessed value for the first five properties on the valuation, as well as those listed seventh and eleventh. For the two pastures listed twelfth he paid $1,093, or $173 above the listed value. John Quincy did not purchase the remaining properties, substituting instead two lots of salt marsh and a small lot at Penny Ferry. For those fourteen lots he paid a total of $12,812. John Quincy on 15 August “rode out with my father on horseback this forenoon, and viewed the lands which he has conveyed to me.”
John Quincy’s actions had the full support of his wife, Louisa Catherine Adams, according to her later comment: “To prevent the possibility of loss to his Father he immediately began to dispose of his property so as to secure his Father from loss— The energy and decision with which he acted on this occasion was highly honourable and meritorious” ( JQA to TBA, 2 April 1803, and note 1, below; D/JQA/27, 2 April, 15 Aug., 31 Dec., APM Reel 30; AA to TBA, 26 April, and notes 1 and 2, below; JQA to WSS, 2 Jan. 1804, and note 1, below; AA to TBA, 8 May 1803; JQA to JA, promissory note, 8 Aug., Adams Papers; LCA, D&A , 1:185–186).
From the original in the Adams Family Papers, Adams Office Manuscripts. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
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4. DETAIL FROM MAP OF LOUISIANA, SAMUEL LEWIS, 1804	311[unavailable]
The 30 April 1803 Louisiana Purchase negotiated with France by U.S. envoys James Monroe and Robert R. Livingston more than doubled the size of the United States, adding 875,000 square miles at a cost of $11.25 million, or less than 4 cents per acre. As part of the deal the envoys agreed that the United States would assume up to $3.75 million in claims by U.S. merchants against France, bringing the total cost to $15 million. Napoleon Bonaparte made the offer after the defeat of French forces in St. Domingue led him to abandon plans for a French republic in the Americas. President Thomas Jefferson approved of the purchase because it simultaneously expanded the nation and protected it from foreign entanglements along its inland borders.
The U.S. Senate ratified the Treaty for the Cession of Louisiana on 21 October, along with conventions detailing the payment process and the assumption of U.S. claims against France. John Quincy Adams was sworn in as a senator the day after the ratifications and participated in debates on bills that authorized acceptance of the territory, raised revenue to fund the purchase, authorized the collection of duties, and organized the territory into two parts—the Louisiana District in the north and Orleans Territory in the south. The freshman senator notably broke with his Federalist colleagues to vote in favor of funding the purchase, citing “the immense importance to this Union of the possession of the ceded country.”
A ceremony in New Orleans on 20 December officially transferred Louisiana from France to the United States. French officials turned over the city’s fort to the newly appointed governor, William Charles Cole Claiborne (1775–1817), a former congressman from Tennessee. Exploration of the new territory was undertaken by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who departed on 14 May 1804 from a camp near St. Louis on a trek to the Pacific coast and back. Joined en route by Native guide and translator Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman, the party returned to St. Louis on 23 September 1806.
Philadelphia cartographer Samuel Lewis (ca. 1753–1822) created this 1804 map for London publisher Aaron Arrowsmith (1750–1823). The map, based on exploration reports from the British Navy and maps drawn by British fur traders and Native Americans, was printed in Arrowsmith and Lewis’ New and Elegant General Atlas, Phila., 1804 ( JQA to AA, 9 Dec. 1803, and note 2, and JQA to TBA, 14 Jan. 1804, and note 1, both below; Wood, Empire of Liberty , p. 367–374; Roberts, Napoleon , p. 324–326; Jefferson, Papers , 39:320–321; 40:169–172, 303–304; 41:63–66; Miller, Treaties , 2:498, 512, 516; U.S. Statutes at Large , 2:245–248, 251–254, 283–289; U.S. Senate, Exec. Jour. , 8th Cong., 1st. sess., p. 449–450; Washington, D.C., National Intelligencer, 27 Jan. 1804; Biog. Dir. Cong. ; Gary E. Moulton, The Lewis and Clark Expedition Day by Day, Lincoln, Neb., 2018, p. xvii, xxii, xxxii–xxxiii, l, lxix).
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
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5. ANNA MARIA BRODEAU THORNTON, BY GILBERT STUART, 1804	339[unavailable]
“We were last evening at a Ball given by Mrs. Thornton,” Louisa Catherine Adams reported to Abigail Adams on 11 February 1804 (below), before regaling her mother-in-law with a snapshot of the social politics at play in the nation’s capital during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Scandalous attire and “great airs” by some of the women present “destroyed the harmony of the party,” Louisa scoffed, as some in attendance caused disruptions over points of etiquette. The scene of the “ridiculous business” was the F Street home of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (1774–1865), the daughter of Ann Brodeau, an English emigrant who ran a successful women’s boarding school in Philadelphia. Thornton married Dr. William Thornton at Christ Church in Philadelphia on 13 October 1790. Well educated and, as her husband gushed in 1791, possessing “uncommon genius in all works of art and fancy,” Anna Maria Thornton was a prominent figure in Washington society, chronicling much of her life in the capital in her substantial diary.
This oil on canvas portrait of Anna Maria Thornton was executed by the artist Gilbert Stuart in 1804. She is one of a number of Washington elites and foreign dignitaries captured on canvas by the artist during his extended residence in the capital from December 1803 to July 1805 (Papers of William Thornton, ed. C. M. Harris, Charlottesville, Va., 1995, p. xliv, 152; Dolley Madison Digital Edition ; Anna Thornton Diary; LCA to JQA, 12 [6] May 1804, and note 4, below).
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Collection.

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