First Family (13 page)

Though he never fully realized the extent of the corruption surrounding him, John did recognize as early as May 1778 that he was spinning his wheels in a diplomatic swamp. In a private letter to Samuel Adams that he knew would be circulated within the Continental Congress, he proposed that the three-person commission was no longer necessary and one American minister to the French court would suffice. This had the double advantage of solving the Lee-Franklin problem without even mentioning it, and clearing the way for his own return home. For there was no question that if his advice was taken, Franklin would be appointed the sole American minister and John could cease being an absentee husband.
²⁰

The Continental Congress did take John’s advice, but not until September 1778, and official word of its decision did not reach Paris until February 1779. Oddly, the appointment of Franklin was not accompanied by orders relieving John, who was left to stew amid rumors that he might be dispatched to Amsterdam or Vienna. “I never was in such a situation as I am now,” he confessed to Abigail, “and my present Feelings are new to me,” not knowing whether he should await further instructions or take it upon himself to head home on the next ship. He described himself as “wedged by the Waiste in the middle of a rifted Oak.”
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During this prolonged waiting period the major, and surely most consequential, event was the deterioration of his relationship with Franklin. If only in retrospect, one could see this coming as far back as that evening in 1776 when they argued, albeit in a bantering way, over whether to open or close the window before going to sleep. More generally, Franklin’s capacious but elusive personality seemed designed by the gods to drive a straight-ahead man like John crazy. More specifically, John had arrived in Paris assuming that he and Franklin were political equals with roughly equal revolutionary credentials. Back in America this was not a far-fetched assumption, but in France it was a preposterous illusion.

In a quite brilliant act of reinvention, Franklin the cosmopolitan, longtime resident of London had transformed himself into Franklin
the original American, fresh from the backwoods complete with beaver hat and folksy wisdom. In Paris he was not just an American icon, he was
the
American icon, on a par with Voltaire as a philosopher and prose stylist, alongside the comte de Buffon as a world-class scientist. His image was everywhere—in portrait galleries, in print shops, on porcelain plates and gold-plated jewelry—the most famous and recognizable American sage of the enlightened age.
²²

Though it took a while, it was probably inevitable that John would find the Franklin phenomenon intolerable. The criticism started slowly, with snide observations about Franklin’s vaunted proficiency in French, a touchy subject given his own total lack of fluency, then complaints about Franklin’s slovenly work habits and the fact that he did not rise until eleven o’clock, while he, John Adams, was at his desk at dawn. One can almost sense the smoldering resentment when John described scenes of “continual dissipation” as crowds showed up daily “to have the honor to see Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his Simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs.” On one occasion at the theater, a portrait of Franklin was displayed onstage during intermission, and John was so disgusted that he feigned illness and left the performance. The jealousy was palpable.
²³

The result was an embarrassing exhibition of envy that also had significant political implications for the American cause. For John had chosen—no, actually he could not help himself—to put a huge crack in a political partnership that still had some history to make.

In all respects save one, then, the mission to France had been an abject failure. Its diplomatic rationale, the treaty with France, had been accomplished before John even set sail. The separation from Abigail, in both time and distance, had generated emotional shock waves that shook her customary stoicism and produced a temporary breach in their partnership. And the working relationship with Franklin, which had performed magic in the past, was now damaged in ways that proved beyond repair.

The sole exception to this depressing pattern was the relationship between John and John Quincy, which solidified under the pressures of their dramatic adventures together, especially their Atlantic crossing, and their more mundane day-to-day interactions in Paris. John’s earlier
absences in Philadelphia, plus his deference to Abigail’s parental authority when he was home, had allowed a gap to develop between father and son, not so much a serious misunderstanding as the absence of any deeper understanding. That gap was closed during their eighteen months together at such close quarters.

Part of the new alignment was a function of John’s conspicuous pride in his precocious son. Virtually everyone who met John Quincy commented on his stunning composure and remarkable maturity. (Later on this would cause problems, since it meant that John Quincy never really had a childhood.) Both Abigail and John put enormous pressure on the boy, often in language that violates our modern sensibilities for its uncompromising expectations. “There are talents put into your Hands,” wrote Abigail, “of which an account will be required of you hereafter, and being possessed of one, two, or four, see to it that you double their numbers.” John could easily have written the same words, though he could not have written the words that followed in Abigail’s letter: “But dear as you are to me, I had much rather you should have found your Grave in the Ocean you have crossed or any untimely death crop you in your Infant years, rather than see you an immoral profligate or a Graceless child.”
²⁴

John tended to mix stern injunctions about diligence with self-deprecating jokes about the superiority of his son’s mastery of French. (John Quincy frequently translated for him.) When they went to the theater together—the beginning of John Quincy’s lifelong passion for the stage—John brought along a written version of the play in French, and John Quincy did a line-by-line translation for his father as the play proceeded, making him the teacher and his father the student. Small wonder that when Abigail began to berate her husband for failing to send longer and more intimate letters, John Quincy took his father’s side: “You complain as bad or worse than if he had not wrote at all,” he told his mother, “and it really hurts him to receive such letters.” He crossed out and never sent the next line: “If all your letters are like this, Papa will cease writing at all.” He had become his father’s son.
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The final months in France were like lingering death. John decided in March 1779 that he could wait no longer for instructions from
Philadelphia. Plans to sail from Nantes on the
Alliance
were delayed when the ship underwent emergency repairs, then canceled altogether when John was apprised that he should accompany the new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-César de la Luzerne, on the
Sensible
. It finally departed from Lorient on June 17 and arrived at Boston on August 3. John and John Quincy were deposited on the same shore of Quincy Bay from which they had departed eighteen months earlier. They walked over Penn’s Hill again and into the house at Braintree. Abigail was crying again, but this time they were tears of joy.
²⁶

We can imagine several scenes of blissful reunion: John turning his recurrent dream into reality by walking the Braintree fields hand in hand with Abigail, the children skipping alongside them; John Quincy being prodded to show off his fluency in French at the dinner table; Abigail crying with relief as she explained how marooned and lonely she had felt, but would never have to feel again.

We can imagine all these scenes, and some of them almost surely occurred, but we cannot really know because no letters between John and Abigail exist, for the obvious reason that they were together again at last. Nor did either of them write many letters at all from August to November 1779, making this the most undocumented chapter in their more than half century as a couple. Apparently, they were so busy recovering their customary rhythms of affection and interaction, filling up the emotional hole that distance had created, that there was neither the time nor the inclination to do much else.

There was one major exception, truly major because it almost offhandedly led to the most enduring political contribution of John’s entire career, his drafting of the Massachusetts Constitution, which remains (with multiple amendments) the oldest written constitution in the English-speaking world still in use.

John was invited to join more than three hundred delegates at Cambridge on September 1, all charged with the task of drafting a new constitution for Massachusetts. An effort the previous year had
run afoul of procedural disagreements, leaving Massachusetts, somewhat awkwardly, as the only state without a new constitution that embodied the republican principles of the American Revolution. The delegates selected a drafting committee of thirty men, which in turn selected a subcommittee of three that included John, which then proceeded to appoint him, as he put it later, “a Sub Sub Committee of one.” Working alone in his study at Braintree, he single-handedly composed the new constitution in late September and early October.
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In retrospect, all the stars were perfectly aligned. With the possible exception of George Mason in Virginia, John was the most knowledgeable student of constitutional history in America. The advice he had offered in
Thoughts on Government
three years earlier had established his reputation on that score, and most of the new state constitutions adopted during the ensuing years had benefited from his guidance. The confidence the delegates to the Massachusetts Convention had in his competence reflected the broadly shared belief that there was an almost perfect match between John’s legal and intellectual talent and the needs of what he insisted be called the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Moreover, the creative context was ideal emotionally as well as intellectually. John worked at home with his family around him and with Abigail available to comment each evening on the fruits of that day’s work. In many of his previous (and subsequent) writings, John burdened his efforts with excessive displays of learning that verged on pedantry, long-winded asides that distracted the reader from the core message, often raising doubts that there was one. His temporary serenity amid the routinized domestic rhythms at Braintree, plus Abigail’s reliable presence as nightly editor, allowed his words and ideas to flow, his verbal twitches to subside, and his occasional excesses to be silently edited out. It was another perfect match.

There were several distinctive touches to his draft constitution. “The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals,” he wrote in the preamble. “It is a social compact, by which the citizens unite with the whole people, that all may be governed by certain laws for the common good.” The proper title for such an arrangement was not
state
, which could apply to monarchies as well as republics, but
commonwealth
, which could apply only to a government that vested sovereignty in the people as a collective. So great was John’s prestige that no delegate ever questioned this decision, which made Massachusetts, along with Virginia and Pennsylvania, a commonwealth rather than a state forevermore.
²⁸

Moreover, unlike most of the other state constitutions, which made the executive branch a mere appendage to a quasi-sovereign legislature, John’s draft created a powerful executive with an absolute veto over all legislation and a judiciary that was appointed rather than elected, serving not just a delineated term but “during good behavior.”

As it turned out, the other delegates to the convention were not ready for such sweeping executive power, and modified his draft to permit the legislature to overturn a veto by a two-thirds majority. John always regarded this revision as a defacement, claiming that the preternatural fear of executive power represented an overlearning of the lessons of 1776. Unlike George III, he reminded his critics, all Massachusetts governors would be elected annually. Without an absolute veto, he feared that governors would “be run down by the legislature like a Hare before the Hunters.” He lost this argument, though his insistence on a truly independent judiciary immune to popular pressure survived intact, a landmark contribution to American jurisprudence in which he took justifiable pride.
²⁹

More than any of the other state constitutions, the Massachusetts Constitution was a postrevolutionary document that rejected as naive some of the most hallowed assumptions of the preceding decade; it insisted upon a political framework more akin to the federal constitution adopted eight years later. Under the revolutionary glow, all projections of government power were stigmatized, so most state constitutions presumed that the chief function of government was to serve as a conduit for popular opinion: to digest and refine it, to be sure, and then to enact it. John’s view of government, on the other hand, presumed that popular opinion was not a harmonious whole but a hydra-headed beast requiring orchestrated management, which meant channeling the different interests into separate constitutional compartments that would in turn police one another.
³⁰

In a very real sense, John’s view of government was a projection
onto the world of the control mechanisms necessary to subdue the powerful urges and impulses he felt surging through his own soul. More than any of the other American political thinkers of the age, he derived his most creative insights from a psychological understanding of the irrational side of human behavior. During the fall of 1779, with all his children surrounding him as he wrote, with Abigail once again present to listen and love, he reached a temporary level of mastery—all mastery was temporary in this context—over his abiding demons and self-destructive tendencies. Albeit momentarily, he found balance and proceeded to write, in record time, the most balanced state constitution in America.