Being a man of strong mind, of wide reading and even great learning, and having serene confidence in the purity of his motives as well as in the soundness of his judgment, Adams was little inclined to surrender his own views, and was ready to carry out his ideas against every obstacle.

By nature as well as by training he seems to have been incapable of understanding the French; he was suspicious of them and he disapproved of Franklin's popularity even as he did of his personality.
Five Commissioners in all were named, but Thomas Jefferson and Henry Laurens did not take part in the negotiations, so that the only other active member was John Jay, then thirty-seven years old and already a man of prominence in his own country.

Of French Huguenot stock and type, he was tall and slender, with somewhat of a scholar's stoop, and was usually dressed in black.

His manners were gentle and unassuming, but his face, with its penetrating black eyes, its aquiline nose and pointed chin, revealed a proud and sensitive disposition.

He had been sent to the court of Spain in 1780, and there he had learned enough to arouse his suspicious, if nothing more, of Spain's designs as well as of the French intention to support them.
In the spring of 1782 Adams felt obliged to remain at The Hague in order to complete the negotiations already successfully begun for a commercial treaty with the Netherlands.