Taking Back the Helm

The last thing one expects to find in Adams’s writings is a word of praise for an action of the British government. The number of such instances scattered throughout his vast oeuvre are so rare that they can probably be counted on the fingers of a single hand. One of them was on New Year’s Day, 1799. Looking back at 1798, Adams wrote his wife: “The English have exhibited an amazing example of skill and intrepidity, perseverance and firmness at sea.”

Napoleon’s destination (as Rufus King was finally able to report in September and early October), was Egypt, where he had landed with his army on July 1 and thence probably India. Adam’s first stroke of luck came courtesy of the British navy and the “Nelson touch.” On August 1, 1798, in a rash, brilliant nighttime attack, Nelson’s squadron destroyed most of the French Mediterranean fleet at anchor in Aboukir Bay, leaving Napoleon marooned in the Levant. A second coalition against France, including Britain, Turkey, Russia, and in March 1799, Austria, began to form. In a lesser known action on October 11, 1798, the Royal Navy captured or dispersed a number of French men-of-war carrying troops and ammunition to assist the Irish rebellion against British rule. The French, it seemed, were mad enough to attempt almost anything. One of Napoleon’s biographers comments on the Egyptian campaign, “The whole enterprise was so preposterous that it remains an enigma.” But it was clear that they could not, for the time being, seriously threaten America. Though Adams was not prepared to admit it, the British navy was part of America’s first line of defense. His position in the fall of 1798 toward the European antagonists anticipated that of those Americans who believed that, after the British sinking of the battleship Bismarck, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and the containment of the German submarine menace in mid- to late 1941, the United States could safely adopt a stance of live and let live with the Reich.