A Brill Calendar: April 19

Leiden and a Future President

Few men embody their age as perfectly as the second President of American United States, John Adams (1735 – 1826).

His extenuated stay in Leyden is a mile-stone in a fascinating, very long life, evoked in 2003 by David McCullough in the definitive biography (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2003), where the reader finds the following; as from page 253.

“Adams was by then at Leyden […] in a house on a narrow street behind the Pieterskerk, the city’s famous cathedral on the opposite side of the Rapenburg Canal from the university. It was the old quarter where the Pilgrims had lived during their years at Leyden, a connection deeply felt by Adams. A deacon at the cathedral would later relate, “Mr. Adams could not refrain from tears in contemplating this great structure.” On April 19, 1781, six years to the day from the battle of Lexington and Concord, Adams completed and signed a sixteen-page memorial, addressed to “Their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries”. A strong, even passionate appeal for cooperation, it began by affirming that the American people were “unalterably determined” to maintain their independence and that if ever there was a “natural alliance,” it would be between the two republics of the Netherlands and the United States. He recalled the years of asylum that the Pilgrims had found among the Dutch. He recounted how New York and New Jersey had been first settled by the Dutch, whose descendants and customs remained.”

Adams presented the Memorial, soliciting diplomatic and financial support for his revolutionary cause Friday May 4, at the Binnenhof at The Hague to the President of the States-General, and had already arranged for publication in English, French and Dutch; thousands of printed copies were instantaneously available, while newspapers - the ‘Gazette de Leyde’, read all over the Western world, included - were provided with the full text. It is seldom that an existing motto - ‘Praesidium Libertatis’, Leyden’s epithet as a bulwark of freedom since 1574 – was revived more than two centuries later in such a meaningful context.