First Family (34 page)

Marshall went on to serve for thirty-four years, without much question the most towering and influential chief justice in American history and, beyond any question, the most relentlessly effective opponent of Jefferson’s state-centered view of the Constitution. Marshall
was even more of a Trojan horse, planted squarely in the Jefferson administration, than Jefferson had been in the Adams administration.

Abigail decided that she should leave the capital before John, despite his wish that they go out together. The roads and rivers between Washington and Philadelphia were notoriously difficult to negotiate in winter. (The absence of bridges meant that riders had to travel out onto the ice, crash through, then move on to locate safer crossings.) She dreaded this adventure and wanted to get it behind her. Jefferson visited her before her departure, a gracious gesture, “more than I expected,” she declared, and she kept the conversation focused on practical matters like rugs and furniture in the presidential mansion. It was the last time they saw each other. She began the trek back to Quincy on February 13. The House elected Jefferson as the next president three days later.
⁷⁴

The
Aurora
chose to treat John in the same abusive way it had treated Washington when he prepared to exit the office. The editors described him as a pathetic malingerer who “needed to be cast like polluted water out the back door, and who should immediately leave for Quincy, that Mrs. Adams may wash his befuddled brains clear.” He could certainly be forgiven for cringing at such stings, for he had, in the space of four years, lost his mother, a son, and the presidency, and almost lost his wife. (One might add that he had also supervised the suicide of the Federalist Party, but that was really Hamilton’s work.) He was, in several senses of the term, a beaten man.
⁷⁵

But, rather remarkably, he did not feel beaten so much as buoyant. When a fire broke out at the Treasury Department building next door to the presidential mansion, the local newspapers described the scene: “Through the exertions of the citizens, animated by the example of the President of the United States (who on this occasion fell into the ranks and aided in passing the buckets), the fire was at length subdued.” It was a trademark Adams act, defiantly energetic when most wounded, at his best when the situation was at its worst. For beyond the litany of losses, there were two overarching victories: his policy of neutrality and peace, which he was confident would become the keystone of his presidential legacy over the years, had been vindicated; and Abigail had neither died nor become a permanent invalid, but
was waiting for him at Quincy at something approaching full force. These were the true essentials, and they were both in place.
⁷⁶

On March 4, 1801, the day of Jefferson’s inauguration, John boarded the four o’clock morning stage out of town. His absence at his successor’s installation attracted criticism then, and has ever since, as a petulant gesture. More likely, he did not think he was supposed to be present. There was no precedent for a defeated candidate to attend the inauguration of his successor, and he wished neither to complicate Jefferson’s moment of triumph nor to lend a hand in its celebration.

Matters of ceremony were the furthest thing from his mind, an unfortunate fact given that his presence would have added symbolic significance to the first peaceful and routine transfer of power from one party to another in American history. But his mind was elsewhere: on the awkward realization that he had outlived a son; on the best design for his potato field; on the melting ice in the rivers that would delay his trek back to Quincy; mostly, on the time remaining to him, which he presumed would be brief, and the woman with whom he wished to spend it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1801–18

F
OR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS
Abigail had been urging her husband to retire from public life and join her beside the hearth at Quincy. Now, at last, he was finally doing so, albeit at the insistence of the American electorate rather than by any choice of his own. John Quincy, writing from Berlin, observed that his father should not be surprised at being hurled from office, since such was the fate that, by his own analysis, awaited all public servants determined to lead rather than listen to popular opinion. “I knew he was aware that in contributing to found a great republic,” John Quincy noted to his mother, “that he was not preparing a school for public gratitude … and that he himself in all probability would be one of the most signal instances of patriotism sacrificed to intrigue and envy.” Indeed, as John Quincy himself was destined to discover, a conspicuous flair for alienating voters while acting in their long-term interest, much like premature baldness, was bred into the genes of all prominent male members of the Adams line.
¹

At least publicly, John claimed to realize that his political defeat had been inevitable: “I am not about to write lamentations or jeremiads over my fate nor panegyrics upon my life and conduct,” he told a friend. “You may think me disappointed. I am not. All my life I expected it.” He also knew that, according to the Ciceronian code, he was supposed to affect the posture of a world-weary pilgrim who had at last reached the Promised Land that was his Quincy farm, where blessedly bucolic rhythms would replace the frenzied and often frantic pace of political life. John, for his part, preferred to sound a more
irreverent note: “I found about a hundred loads of sea weed in my barnyard,” he joked. “I thought I had made a good exchange … of honors and virtues for manure.”
²

Abigail shared his joking mood. All the well-coiffed and turned-out ladies of Washington would surely be impressed to see her skimming milk at dawn in her nightgown. It had been a cold, wet, and sour spring in Quincy, she added: “They call it Jeffersonian weather here.”
³

John sustained the frivolous face to the world, announcing that his Quincy estate, initially named Peacefield but now referred to more simply as the Old House, needed a grander title in order to do justice to his new status as an elder statesman. Jefferson had his Monticello, so he must have his Montezillo, which he said meant “little mountain,” apparently not realizing that Monticello meant the same thing. As one who had been accused of an affinity for aristocratic titles, he announced that he now wished to be identified as “the Monarch of Stony Field, Count of Gull Island, Earl of Mount Ararat, Marquis of Candlewood Hill, and Baron of Rocky Run.”
⁴

Whatever one wished to call it, the Quincy homestead had grown over the years to six hundred acres, a product of both Abigail’s and John’s assiduous pursuit of any proximate lots that came on the market. There were in fact three farms, one at the main house and two near Penn’s Hill, which included the building where John had been born. While hardly a match for Jefferson’s five thousand acres at Monticello, by New England standards it was a handsome estate that, upon John’s death, was valued at almost $100,000.

Nor were they retiring to the proverbial empty nest. The household staff included John and Esther Brisler, loyal servants who had been with them for nearly thirty years; Louisa Smith, Abigail’s niece, who had come aboard as a child and now grown into a proper New England spinster, regarded by all as a fully vested member of the family; and finally Phoebe Abdee, the black servant whose regal bearing purportedly reflected her descent from African chiefs. The only new member of the Quincy household was Juno, a Newfoundland puppy, who was a gift from John Quincy to his father, though Juno preferred to follow Abigail around the house on her daily rounds.

This little congregation of household help was not caring just for
Abigail and John. During that first summer Sally Adams, widow of Charles, moved in with her two children, soon joined by Nabby and her three toddlers. Shortly thereafter, Thomas, having failed at the law in Philadelphia, moved back to Quincy, married a local girl named Ann Harrod, and immediately began to demonstrate a proficiency at producing children that he could never achieve in a job, eventually fathering seven grandchildren for Abigail and John. Within a year, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine arrived home from Berlin and purchased a house in Boston, but because John Quincy’s career carried him to Washington, St. Petersburg, and then back to Washington, two and sometimes all three of their children were deposited in Quincy to be raised by their grandparents.
⁵

To be sure, there were so many comings and goings that any account of the number of residents in the Old House (or Montezillo) was always a snapshot of a moving picture. But on several occasions Abigail reported seating twenty-one people for dinner. From the very start, then, the image of Abigail and John living out their last chapter together in secluded serenity was a complete distortion. Their retirement home was also a hotel, an orphanage, a child-care center, and a hospital.

This seemed wholly natural to them, in part because they were accustomed to providing the home base for all the wounded and derelict members of the extended Adams family, in part because they presumed that the family was supposed to perform the multiple functions now assigned to a variety of different institutions. They also agreed that John, whatever his title, was the acknowledged master of Montezillo, though day-to-day management of the domestic dominion belonged to Abigail. She had spent so many years joining him on his turf; they would now live out the remainder of their time on hers.

In a strictly legal sense, John Quincy became the owner of all the Quincy properties, and John and Abigail became his tenants only a few years into their retirement. In 1803 their life savings in stocks and bonds, about $13,000, disappeared when the London bank Bird, Savage & Bird, in which John Quincy had invested their only liquid assets, inexplicably collapsed. Ever the super-responsible son, John Quincy sold his Boston house and used the proceeds to purchase all
the various pieces of Quincy land. In effect, he bought his own inheritance, then gave his parents title to the land for life. The legal transactions were all in the family, where John remained the unquestioned patriarch and Abigail his equal partner, but the arrangement was an early sign of how much their sought-after serenity would come to depend on their only nonprodigal son.
⁶

Even John Quincy unwittingly disappointed his father by naming his eldest son George Washington Adams. “I am sure your brother had not any intention of wounding the feelings of his father,” Abigail reported to Thomas, “but I see he has done it … Had he called him Joshua, he would not have taken it amiss.” Apparently John stomped around the house, murmuring obscenities for several days in the summer of 1801, furious that his brilliant son had been so stupid as to memorialize in the Adams line the only American hero with a stronger claim on posterity’s admiration. Years later, John attempted to compensate by making George his favorite and most indulged grandson.
⁷

There were obviously still demons darting about John’s bruised psyche, lingering resentments that resisted his best efforts to make them the butt of self-deprecating jokes. Abigail spied him working in the fields alongside the hired help one summer day, swinging his scythe in rhythmic strokes, looking like the epitome of the retired statesman in his agrarian paradise. She also reported that he appeared to be talking or mumbling to himself with each swing, though she could not make out the words. If his correspondence at that time is any indication, he was probably cursing Jefferson.
⁸

It was clear from the start that John was emotionally incapable of sitting serenely beneath his proverbial vine and fig tree. Idyllic images failed to take account of his obsession with posterity’s judgment of his role in America’s founding, his brooding memories of the political shenanigans by both Jefferson and Hamilton that had denied him a second term as president, and, finally, his impulsive vivacity, which rendered a stoic posture virtually impossible.