The situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the
world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May
1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have
enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with
one cabin-boy in a rowboat. Luckily for the cabin-boy, he was
alone. Had Secretary Seward and Senator Sumner given to Mr. Adams
the rank of Ambassador and four times his salary, a palace in
London, a staff of trained secretaries, and personal letters of
introduction to the royal family and the whole peerage, the
private secretary would have been cabin-boy still, with the extra
burden of many masters; he was the most fortunate person in the
party, having for master only his father who never fretted, never
dictated, never disciplined, and whose idea of American diplomacy
was that of the eighteenth century. Minister Adams remembered how
his grandfather had sailed from Mount Wollaston in midwinter,
1778, on the little frigate Boston, taking his eleven-year-old
son John Quincy with him, for secretary, on a diplomacy of
adventure that had hardly a parallel for success. He remembered
how John Quincy, in 1809, had sailed for Russia, with himself, a
baby of two years old, to cope with Napoleon and the Czar
Alexander single-handed, almost as much of an adventurer as John
Adams before him, and almost as successful.
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