By Kevyn Spill, Adams Papers Intern

Detail of Definitive Peace Treaty between the United States and Great Britain.[Treaty of Paris.], 3 September 1783

Hello, my name is Kevyn Spill. I have worked as a remote intern for the Adams Papers at the MHS during the summer. I am currently a rising senior student attending Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. I had the privilege of transcribing documents for the Papers of John Quincy Adams and researching correspondence for the upcoming Winning Peace select topics webpage, which details John Adams’s role in negotiating Anglo-American peace at the end of the Revolutionary War. In the process of this research, one letter in particular stuck out to me as an interesting reflection of John Adams’s character while he served in politics, that being a letter addressed to his wife Abigail on 27 February 1783.

By this time, John Adams had already written several letters detailing his desire to leave France and return home. He missed his wife, children, and extended family dearly. In other letters, Adams worried about the health and well-being of his brother-in-law Richard Cranch. However, he felt it was his “Destiny” to remain in France and secure peace for his new nation. He understood that he had “come into Life at a critical dangerous time, and to see Prospects before me that I dreaded and wished to avoid but could not, with Honor or a good Conscience.”

With this in mind, Adams referenced both John Dryden and Roman senator Scipio in his understanding of what it means to be a good patriot and servant to his country. Dryden was a popular English poet and playwright who described a patriot as someone who helps their country flourish. Scipio, Adams noted, “served his Country, when it was in need of his Courage and Conduct” but “dismounted from the Saddle, when he found the Beast which bore him began to grow restif and ungovernable.”

Detail from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 27 February 1783

Adams believed he had similarly served his nation in its time of need and could now return to more peaceful endeavors. “No Honors, not a Crown—no Profits, not all the Indias, would be the smallest Temptation to me now to go thro’ it again, nor would ever have tempted me to begin it,” he wrote. “I thought it my Duty and that I should be a guilty Wretch if I did not do it.”

While Adams longed to be reunited with his family in Massachusetts, he remained in France and signed the Definitive Anglo-American Peace Treaty on 3 September 1783, thus winning peace for the early republic he had fought so hard to create. “I took my Part according to the Dictates of my Heart and Head,” Adams wrote, “and have gone thro’ it and all its Horrors, and landed the Public safe and glorious in the Harbour of Peace.” 

For more information about the Adamses and their roles in and reflections on securing peace at the end of the Revolutionary War, see the upcoming Winning Peace select topic page.

I am incredibly thankful for the Adams Papers to give me the opportunity to work on both the Winning Peace select topic page and correspondence of John Quincy Adams over the summer. I look forward to using what I learned here in my future studies and career.