The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (17 page)

XIII

Of all the women who loved Benjamin Franklin and tried to express the complexity of their affection, Madame Brillon said it best. When Franklin was eighty-three, she wrote to him from Passy about her family’s happiness, which had only one troubling aspect: his absence. But her regret had “a certain sweetness,” because Franklin had told her he was happy
in America. “To have been, to still be, forever, the friends of this amiable sage who knew how to be a great man without pomp, a learned man without ostentation, a philosopher without austerity, a sensitive human being without weakness, yes, my dear papa, your name will be engraved in the temple of memory but each of our hearts is, for you, a temple of love.”
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F
riday, June 21, 1775, was hot and muggy, a typical Philadelphia summer day. But the weather did not prevent excitement from coursing through America’s largest, wealthiest city. General George Washington, the newly appointed commander in chief of the American Continental Army, was leaving to take command of the thousands of New England militiamen who had rushed to Boston after British troops clashed with Massachusetts men at Lexington and Concord on April 19. The choice of Washington was a brilliant political move. It made Virginia, the largest colony, a visible, unmistakable partner in the confrontation with Great Britain.

Numerous Philadelphians and not a few congressmen such as Thomas Jefferson were waiting on horseback, eager to accompany the new general out of town to testify to their enthusiastic approval of him and his willingness to assume the leadership of the nation’s embryo army. The Philadelphia Light Horse, cavalrymen drawn from the best families, were acting as Washington’s official escort. They were wearing their expensive uniforms—light-brown jackets, white breeches, gleaming high-topped black boots, and flat round hats bound with silver. Bugles blared, drums beat, and Washington, looking magnificent on a big bay horse, began his journey with cheers from hundreds of spectators.

One of the escorting congressmen was having very different thoughts. John Adams had been the man behind Washington’s appointment. He had persuaded his cousin Samuel Adams and other New England del
egates to accept the Virginian, in spite of vehement objections from several men. Samuel Adams’s emphatic approval—he had seconded John’s nomination speech in Congress—was decisive. Most men would have felt a quiet exultation, watching the results of this shrewd, enormously important politicking. But John Adams felt nothing but a gnawing mixture of depression and disappointment.

Back in his hot, dingy room after his brief ride, Adams gazed in the mirror at his pudgy middle-aged torso, with its potbelly and stumpy legs, and tried to accept the fact that he would never be a soldier. He sat down and scrawled a letter to his wife, Abigail. He described the departure of Washington and his subordinate generals, stressing how almost everyone, even officers of the militia, was wearing a uniform. “Such is the pride and pomp of war,” he wrote. “I, poor creature, worn out with scribbling, for my bread and liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, leave others to wear laurels which I have sown; others to eat the bread which I have earned….”
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This anguished sense of inferiority, which became more and more tinged with raw envy as the Revolutionary War lengthened, is the little understood leitmotif of John Adams’s life. Earlier in 1775, when Ben Franklin returned to America and was immediately elected to the Continental Congress, Adams morosely noted that “from day to day [he was] sitting in silence, a great part of the time asleep in his chair.” But John was sure the already famous sage would get most of the credit for everything achieved in Congress. Adams was too self-absorbed to appreciate that Franklin’s policy of remaining silent was a shrewd tactic aimed at disarming the numerous congressman who suspected he might be a British spy because his son William was loyal to the king.

II

“Honest John” Adams, as he liked to call himself, was born on October 30, 1735, three years after George Washington. His father, John Adams Sr., was a small farmer and leatherworker in the town of Braintree, ten miles south of Boston. A sober, industrious puritan, the elder John traced his lineage back to Pilgrims John and Priscilla Alden. He served the town in various local capacities, including lieutenant of the militia.

Behind his solemn facade lay a warm and loving parent, who paid close
attention to the personalities of his three sons and loved to play with them. One of his favorite stunts was rapping out reveille on the kitchen table with a pair of drumsticks he had learned to use in the militia at the age of fifteen. His sons loved it, but his wife, Susanna Boylston Adams, violently objected, claiming it hurt her ears—and may have left a few nicks in her table, which, as a compulsive housekeeper, she would feel obliged to wax smooth.

John’s mother was a far more turbulent spirit than his steady, methodical father. Susanna Boylston Adams had a fiery temper that exploded at anyone who crossed her. She and her husband had numerous arguments about money. John called them “rages and raves” that made him fear “all was breaking into flame.” Often he fled the house or retreated to his room to try to lose himself in a book.

From other glimpses of her in John’s diary, Susanna was a woman whose mood swings were wild and unpredictable. She would fly through the house, dusting, polishing, and scrubbing, scolding her sons to be neater and more careful with their toys and clothes—and then relapse into fits of blank gloom and lassitude in which housework was neglected and the slightest question could trigger tears and disproportionate rage.

John Adams inherited this temperament. In one of his earliest diaries, he wrote: “ballast is what I want. I totter before every breeze. My motions are unsteady.” Several biographers have suggested that he—and Susanna—were manic depressives. Whether or not he or she deserves that diagnosis, John’s unstable emotions would cause him—and his country—not a little political turmoil in years to come.

III

In his voluminous youthful diary, John admitted he had “an amorous disposition” and as early as eleven was “very fond of the society of females.” Growing up on a farm, he had no need for sex education. But he retained his self-control with his many “favorites” throughout his Harvard years. Thereafter his “disposition” toward the opposite sex “engaged [him] much.”
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As a new attorney, John found it especially hard to concentrate on his law books whenever his thoughts wandered to a certain house in nearby Germantown, where Hannah Quincy lived. Hannah was beautiful—and
not at all shy. At twenty-three, she had matrimony on her mind and was determined to get it into John Adams’s head. She teased him relentlessly about his studious habits, flatly declaring he would make a very poor husband in her opinion.

“Suppose you was in your study,” she asked him, “and your wife should interrupt you accidentally and break off your chain of thought?” Would he snarl at her? Rebuke her? Or welcome her?

“Should you like to spend your evenings at home in reading and conversing with your wife rather than to spend them abroad in taverns or with other company?” Hannah demanded.

By the time he replied to these challenges, John was drenched in perspiration. He found it extremely difficult to discuss love and marriage with Hannah without asking her to be his wife. Among her other charms, Hannah could discuss Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer or John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
with a perspicacity that John Adams had seldom heard, even at Harvard. Whenever he found Hannah’s lovely head bent over a book, he was so overwhelmed with desire that he almost asked the fatal question.
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But the law was a sterner mistress—in theory at least. Practice was another matter. After a weekend with Hannah, John desperately lectured himself in his diary: “Here are two nights and one day and a half spent in a softening, enervating, disapating [
sic
] series of bustling, prattling poetry, love, courtship, marriage…” A portion of those nights was almost certainly spent strolling with Hannah in “Cupid’s Garden,” a lover’s lane not far from her house. His inability to resist the opportunity to steal a kiss led him into gloomy doubts about his future. He yearned to play a part on a larger stage, to win fame, to become a rich lawyer and great man. How could he hope to do it when he wasted so much time with a mere woman?

Frantic, John tried to deny the reality of Hannah’s charms to her face. He lectured her and her equally pretty cousin, Esther Quincy, who lived across the road, on the folly and futility of love. He announced that he despised the whole idea of submitting to such a petty passion. The Quincy women laughed in his face. He reeled home to spend another night denouncing himself in his diary.

One day in the spring of 1759, John found himself in the drawing room of the Quincy home, alone with Hannah. With her usual skill, she turned the conversation to the intricacies of love and marriage. She
began talking about her cousin Esther Quincy’s engagement to Jonathan Sewall, murmuring in her sibilant, knowing way about how much love had changed Esther.

All semblance of resistance collapsed in John’s tormented psyche. Alone in the silent house, the entire world seemed to shrink to the dimensions of the couch on which they were sitting. John leaned toward Hannah, breathing her delicate perfume, lost in the liquid depths of her tantalizing eyes. The words of love and commitment were on his lips…

The door crashed open and upon them burst Hannah’s cousin, Esther, and her fiancé, Jonathan Sewall. The almost lovers recoiled to opposite ends of the couch, and John rode back to his family’s farm in Braintree feeling as if he had narrowly escaped falling off the edge of the earth. For the next month he avoided Hannah’s company.

To his astonishment, John next heard that Hannah was engaged to one Bela Lincoln, a handsome militia captain who had begun calling on her in his uniform. Adams found himself incapable of looking at a law book without seeing Hannah’s face on the page. He spent half his nights awake thinking about her and the other half asleep dreaming about her. Less amusing were the “chagrin and fretfulness and rage” this highly emotional man struggled to contain. He began to wonder whether he was going mad.

IV

John Adams slowly recovered from his heartbreak over Hannah Quincy and found new preoccupations for his restless mind and unruly imagination. One diversion was the beginning of a serious quarrel between the province of Massachusetts and the rulers of the British Empire over their assumed right to raise revenue from import duties and taxes. He was also slowly advancing up the ladder as a lawyer, winning cases and admittance to the Superior Court as a barrister.

A Harvard friend, Richard Cranch, was courting Mary Smith, the oldest daughter of the Reverend William Smith in nearby Weymouth. Like many other suitors, Cranch felt more comfortable with a friend for support, and he inveigled John into several visits to the Smith parsonage. Here he encountered slim, dark-haired Abigail Smith, age seventeen. Two years earlier, he had met her and her two sisters and had disliked them all. They
were “wits,” he conceded, but he doubted whether they were “frank or fond or even candid.”
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John was surprised to find what a difference two years had made in his impression of Abigail Smith. He liked her because she was direct and frank, unlike the fond but devious (in retrospect) Hannah Quincy. Moreover, Abigail was interested in politics and philosophy as well as the arts. She could even read French, a remarkable achievement for someone who had received little formal education. She was not shy about telling him and other people that she considered this failure to educate women a great mistake. She argued that women had an important role to play in the “theater of life” and it was folly not to prepare them for this “trust.”

John Adams found himself thinking more and more about Abigail Smith and paying repeated visits to her father’s Weymouth parsonage. Sickly Abigail, barely five feet tall, had been a semi-invalid for much of her life. She had despaired of ever having a “spark”—a boyfriend. She found herself unexpectedly attracted to this stocky, somewhat pompous lawyer who treated her numerous strong opinions with remarkable respect. Did she divine how badly he needed someone with whom he could share his perpetual inner agitation? Perhaps.

The courtship was powered by mounting ardor—especially on John’s part. One day he showed up at the Weymouth parsonage with a letter written in solemn legalese, ordering Abigail “to give the bearer as many kisses and as many hours of your company after six o’clock as he shall please to demand and charge them to my account.” More than once they came close to abandoning their puritan restraint. When a violent rainstorm prevented John from making the trip from Braintree to Weymouth, he told Abigail that it was “a cruel but perhaps blessed” downpour, because it forced him to “keep my distance.”
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They were often separated by the demands of John’s growing law practice. In the fashion of the time, they adopted pen names. She was Diana, the virgin huntress; he was Lysander, a Spartan general who scored a famous victory over Athens and was also a noted diplomat and politician. As her confidence in their love grew, Abigail went to work on reshaping Lysander into a more sociable creature. She told him he was much too intimidating in company, with a haughty, oaklike reserve—“an intolerable forbidding expecting silence which lays such a restraint upon moderate modesty that ’tis impossible for a stranger to be tranquil in your presence.”

John replied by sending Abigail a list of her faults: 1. She did not play cards well, holding the deck in a very “uncourtly” way. 2. She was too bashful. 3. She refused to sing. 4. She had a bad habit of hanging her head like a bulrush—undoubtedly caused by another fault that was all but inexcusable in a lady—“reading writing and thinking.” 5. She sat with her legs crossed, a habit that would broaden her hips. This, too, was caused by too much thinking. 6. She walked with her toes turned inward. He wanted to see her with a “stately strut and divine deportment.” These were all the faults he could find after three weeks of deep thought while they were separated by his inoculation against smallpox—a complicated procedure in their day. “All the rest is bright and luminous.”
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Abigail’s reply was saucy. She told him she was “so hardened as to read over most of my faults with as much pleasure as another person would have read their perfections.” This was hardly surprising. All of them demonstrated that Lysander spent most of his time scrutinizing Diana with an intensity that could only be the product of love. She defended her failure to sing by warning him that her voice was as harsh as the screech of a peacock. She promised to stop crossing her legs, though she tartly suggested “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.” As for her parrot toes, they could be cured only by a dancing master.
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