Last Evening I recieved your Excellency's Letter of the 16th. of this month, accompanied with a Letter from the President of Congress containing the Commissions You mention.2

You desire to know what Steps have already been taken in this business.3 There has been no Step taken by me, in pursuance of my former Commission, until my late Journey to Paris at the Invitation of the Comte de Vergennes, who communicated to me certain Articles, proposed by the mediating Courts, and desired me to make such Observations upon them, as should occur to me. Accordingly I wrote a Number of Letters to his Excellency of the following Dates, July 13th. inclosing an answer to the Articles, 16th. 18th. 19th. 21st.4 I would readily send You Copies of the Articles and of those Letters, but there are matters in them, which had better not be trusted to go so long a Journey, especially as there is no Necessity for it.

The Comte de Vergennes will readily give You Copies of the Articles and of my Letters, which will prevent all risque.

I am very apprehensive that our new Commission will be as useless as my old one. Congress might very safely I believe permit Us all to go home, if We find no other business5, and stay there some Years: at least until every British Soldier in the United States is killed or captivated. Till then Britain will never think of Peace, but for the purposes of Chicanery.

I see in the Papers, that the British Ambassador at Petersbourg has recieved an Answer from his Court to the Articles.6 What this Answer is, We may conjecture from the King's Speech. Yet the Empress of Russia has made an Insinuation to their high Mightinesses, which deserves Attention. Perhaps You may have seen it: but lest You should not, I will add a Translation of it, which I sent to Congress in the time of it, not having the original at hand.7

I must beg the favour of your Excellency to communicate to me whatever You may learn, which has any Connection with this Negotiation, particularly the French, Spanish and British Answers to the Articles, as soon as You can obtain them. In my Situation, it is not likely I shall obtain any Information of Consequence, but from the French Court. Whatever may come to my Knowledge, I will communicate to You without delay.

If Britain persists in her two Preliminaries, as I presume She does, what will be the Consequence? Will the two Imperial Courts permit this great plan, of a Congress at Vienna, which is public and made the common talk of Europe, to become another sublime Bubble, like the armed Neutrality? In what a light will these mediating Courts appear, after having listened to a Proposition of England, so far as to make Propositions themselves, and to refer to them in many public Acts, if Britain refuses to agree to them? and insists upon such Preliminaries as are at least an Insult to France and America, and a kind of Contempt to the common Sense of all Europe.

Upon my word I am weary of such round about and endless Negotiations, as that of the armed Neutrality and this of the Congress at Vienna. I think the Dutch have at last discovered the only effectual Method of Negotiation, that is by fighting the British Fleets, until every Ship is obliged to answer the Signal for renewing the Battle by the signal of distress. There is no Room for British Chicanery in this. If I ever did any good since I was born, it was in stirring up the pure Minds of the Dutchmen, and setting the old Batavian Spirit in motion, after having slept so long. Our dear Country will go fast to sleep, in full Assurance of having News of Peace by Winter, if not by the first Vessel. Allass! what a disappointment they will meet.8 I believe I had better go home and wake up our Countrymen out of their Reveries about Peace. Congress have done very well to join others in the Commission for Peace.9 My Talent, if I have one lies in making War. The Grand Segnior will finish the Proces des trois Rois sooner than the Congress at Vienna will make Peace, unless10 the two Imperial Courts act with Dignity and Consistency upon the occasion, and acknowledge American Independency at once, upon Britain's insisting on her two insolent Preliminaries.

I have the honor to be, Sir, Your most obedient and most humble Servant

It cannot be said definitively what illness JA suffered from, for any diagnosis done more than two hundred years after the fact must in the end rest largely on speculation. Many of the medical terms current in the eighteenth century are either no longer used or have meanings different from those in JA's day. Dr. Oosterdijk's notes and testimony of his examination are unavailable and JA's own descriptions, those of a layman, lack precision.

The inherent difficulty of diagnosing JA's illness has not deterred some biographers from making the attempt. Peter Shaw, in the Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill, 1976, p. 150–152), and James H. Hutson, in John Adams and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Lexington, Ky., 1980, p. 97–98), see JA as mentally unstable, even paranoid, and conclude that his illness was psychosomatic. John Ferling, in John Adams, A Life (Knoxville, 1992, p. 237–238), wrote that JA contracted malaria, a view David McCullough shared in his John Adams (N.Y., 2001, p. 264–266). But Ferling, in an article entitled “John Adams' Health Reconsidered” that he co-authored with Lewis E. Braverman ( WMQ , 3d ser., 55:83–104 [Jan. 1998]), declared that JA was likely a victim of Graves' disease, so that his “behavior was not, as many have thought, the result of problems in his head or his heart, but in his thyroid.”

The editors believe JA's illness was physical and most likely indigenous to the Netherlands. JA wrote to Ferdinand Grand on 12 Oct. (LbC, Adams Papers) that he was the victim of “an Amsterdam Fever, which they call an Introduction to the Freedom of the City,” implying that it was normal for one foreign to Amsterdam to fall ill in the course of acclimating himself to the locale. Indeed, on 5 Oct. Benjamin Franklin wrote: “I hope this Seasoning will be the means of securing your future Health, by accommodating your Constitution to the Air of that Country” (Adams Papers; Franklin, Papers , 35:565–567). And JA later wrote that it was “the destiny of every stranger who goes into Holland to encounter either an intermittent or bilious fever within the two first years” (JA, Corr. in the Boston Patriot , p. 533).

A diagnosis of malaria is attractive because it was endemic to the Netherlands, particularly in North Holland. Physicians would have been familiar with the symptoms and with the prescribed treatment: Peruvian bark or quinine. Moreover, from their reported symptoms it is likely that JA's son CA, his servant Joseph Stephens, and his secretary John Thaxter all suffered from malaria.

But JA's descriptions of his illness are at variance with the classic symptoms of malaria. Malaria is a periodic fever, that is, the victim suffers severe chills and then a fever that reaches a peak and then subsides, only to return two or three days later. In the intervals between the fever, the patient may appear and feel in good health. JA, however, nowhere describes his fever as periodic or “tertian,” as he does CA's in the spring of 1781 ( Adams Family Correspondence , 4:108). Instead, he states that he suffered a high fever of at least five days' duration and was unable to work for well over a month.

JA's repeated statements that he suffered from a “nervous fever” present another possibility. The term “nervous fever” is another name for typhus in medical reference books of the time (Quincy's Lexicon Physico-Medicum, 8th edn., N.Y., 1802; Robert Hooper, A Compendious Medical Dictionary, Boston, 1801; The Philadelphia Medical Dictionary, Phila., 1808). Typhus causes a rapidly rising fever that peaks at 102 to 105 degrees during the first two or three days and is then sustained for another five. In the course of the fever the patient experiences delirium and, on or about the fifth day, a dark red rash of elevated spots appears. Thereafter the fever falls rapidly, assuming that the outcome is favorable (Cambridge World History of Human Disease, ed. Kenneth F. Kiple, N.Y., 1993, p. 1080–1081). The use of Peruvian bark would have reflected contemporary medical practice for typhus, because while quinine was used for malarial fevers, it was used also “for most patients who had been debilitated by continued fevers” (J. Worth Estes, Dictionary of Protopharmacology, Therapeutic Practices, 1700–1850, Canton, Mass., 1990, p. 48). These are approximately the symptoms and the treatment JA described in his letters, particularly those of 9 Oct. to his wife ( Adams Family Correspondence , 4:224), and 15 Oct. to the president of Congress (Wharton, ed., Dipl. Corr. Amer. Rev. , 4:776–779).

A diagnosis of typhus is intriguing, but no less speculative than others that have been proposed. Ultimately all that can be said is that JA had a serious, debilitating illness in 1781 that severely curtailed his activities for months. Its precise nature is unknown.