John Quincy Adams Digital Diary

7. VI:30. Mr de Wint made up a party for us, and we went in a small packet Sloop, to West Point, distant nine Miles from Fish-kill landing. The party consisted of Mr and Mrs de Wint, Mr and Mrs Johnson, with their boy John Adams Johnson, one Miss Smalz and Miss den Yfel, a son of Judge Verplanck’s, and a young man named Fenno. Mrs Adams, Mary Hellen and myself— We left the wharf about ten O’Clock, and the weather being fine, and almost calm we were nearly three hours in descending the river till we landed at West-Point. We had therefore ample leisure to view the celebrated passes of the Highlands. Their elevation on both sides the river is between 1300 and 1700 feet; of course not very lofty Mountains—high enough however, to give the country a picturesque appearance of wild grandeur. The hills are steep from the edge of the river and covered with wood— There is a clear and strong echo in the passage on the river between the hills, which answered to the horn blown by one of our men in the sloop, with pleasing effect. one of the hills is shaped so as to exhibit with some assistance from the imagination, the form of a gigantic human face in profile. Another has the form, and bears the name of a sugar loaf. On landing at West-Point, de Wint went and bespoke a dinner for us at the Inn; while the rest of us stroll’d up one of the hills to view the prospect around, and the ruins of an old fort upon the brow of one of them. Mrs Adams, Johnson with his boy and myself lost of our way, and I went to the top of a hill nearly double the height of the fort we were seeking. After some time and search we found de Wint who was also in search of us, and went to the fort, from which the prospect is pleasant, but not very extensive. We descended and dined at the Inn, and immediately after dinner, met there, old Colonel Talmadge, formerly a member of Congress from Connecticut; his Son Coll: Talmadge, who served in the late war, and whom I knew two years ago, in England, and another Son, now a Cadet at the Academy at West Point. We called on Major Thayer who is at the head of this Military Academy. He was not at his house, but we met him at the public building of the Academy, containing the Library; the collection of Maps and the apparatus for the lectures in natural and experimental philosophy; all of which he shewed us, together with Captain Lenox, whom he introduced to me. The library of twelve hundred volumes was chiefly collected in Europe, by Major Thayer himself; as were the maps, many of which are very good. There are now he told me two hundred and twenty Cadets at the Academy, upwards of one hundred having been admitted this Summer. The establishment can accommodate not more than 270. Their exercises literary, and recitations, are in the morning, and accordingly I could not witness them; but we saw numbers of them in Platoons, before the buildings, drilled by the Cadets of older standing— About five in the afternoon we embarked again in our Sloop, and returned with a beautiful, mild and calm Evening to Fish-kill landing. We saw the purple tint of the Sunbeams lingering on the tops of the Mountains, and heard by Moon-light the distant echo of the horns blown from a boat upon the river in the passage between them. About seven in the Evening we landed at the wharf from which we had this morning departed— Mr and Mrs Johnson there left us—and crossed the river to Newburgh, whence they proceed with the Steam-boat which comes 410this day from Albany, down to New-York. The rest of us returned to Cedar grove, where we found judge Verplanck, and Mr Peter de Wint, a Cousin of John Peter’s and an inmate of the family. Some of the younger part of our party went to a Ball this Evening at Fish-kill— We endeavoured to persuade Johnson to stay, till to-morrow Night, and then go on with us; but he could not have stayed without missing the Steam-boat of Friday Morning from New-York to Norwich, which would have delayed him three days at New-York, till next Monday. Johnson’s child is the most extraordinary boy, at three years of age that I ever saw; but is indulged by his father to such an excess that he is extremely troublesome— He talks incessantly, though his articulation is yet defective; and has a quick power of observation and retentive memory, loaded with senseless and stupid words which have been taught him as jokes, and which he repeats with rudeness— His temper is good and his great danger is of being ruined by Mismanagement— His father is nevertheless a sedate, sensible and apparently discreet man. His mother now not more than twenty appears also of a grave and judicious character, and less disposed to spoil the child than her husband.