The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (21 page)

If Portia knew what was happening in the Netherlands, she would have been even more distraught. Her dearest friend had hurled himself into his effort to win a loan and diplomatic recognition from the Dutch with a frenzy of activity remarkably similar to his mother’s outbursts of frantic housecleaning. Meanwhile, Charles Adams had become seriously ill with strange fevers and had lapsed into permanent homesickness. His father decided his “sensibility” was “too exquisite” for Europe, and sent him home in August 1781.

The trip would take the eleven-year-old boy five anxiety-filled months. The ship that his father chose for him, the frigate
South Carolina
, had an erratic captain, one Alexander Gillon, a Franklin-hater and friend of Ralph Izard. Gillon was supposed to transport important war matériel to America. Instead he left the cargo in Amsterdam and put into a Spanish
port, where he dumped Charles and other passengers ashore and went off privateering to make some quick money. Fortunately, the Connecticut-born painter John Trumbull was one of the other passengers and looked after the boy. He and Charles finally got home aboard another American privateer in January 1782.
15

Not long after Charles sailed, John received a letter from Benjamin Franklin. The ambassador informed him that Congress had abolished his job as sole peace negotiator with England. Adams was now one of four commissioners, including Franklin, empowered to negotiate a treaty when and if the British showed any interest in the subject. Already discouraged, Adams suffered an emotional collapse that he later described as a “nervous fever.” For two months he did not write a single letter. More than once he was sure he was near death.

Then came news that rescued him from this cataclysmic gloom. An entire British army had surrendered to General George Washington and his French allies at Yorktown, Virginia.

IX

Peace and independence suddenly became possibilities. So did recognition of the United States by the Netherlands—and a loan from well-heeled Dutch bankers. The Comte de Vergennes signaled his approval of both steps to his ambassador in the Netherlands, and soon Adams was able to claim a diplomatic triumph that equaled Benjamin Franklin’s. That was hardly true, but this earnest, deeply patriotic man had struggled through so many disappointments, no one had the heart to disagree with him.

In April 1782, Adams returned to Paris, where he played a major role in negotiating the treaty of peace with England. The double triumph did not make John a happy man. If anything, it exacerbated his envy of Benjamin Franklin. He filled the mail with nasty remarks about the sage. He told correspondents that Franklin’s reputation was explained by “scribblers in his pay in London to trumpet his fame.” He was sure that Franklin would make his grandson, William Temple Franklin, ambassador to France and himself ambassador to England—a post Adams badly wanted. He topped these wrathful thoughts with a letter to Arthur Lee, in which he predicted someone was going to propose “to name the 18th Century the Franklinian age.”
¹⁶

X

Although Abigail rejoiced in John’s triumphs, she found it harder and harder to endure his absence. At one point, Portia told her dearest friend, “I am much afflicted with a disorder called the
Heartach
. Nor can any remedy be found in America.” By this time, her body was succumbing to her emotional stress. “Indispositions” sent her to bed, too sick at heart to face another lonely day. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Nabby, took over more and more of the housework.

As prices continued to soar, Abigail wondered whether she could pay the taxes on the farm. She brooded about why they were so poor, when she saw or heard about people who were living luxuriously thanks to the money that poured into Boston and other ports from privateers and smuggling. But the ultimate pain was the separation from her dearest friend. It would soon be ten years since John departed for Philadelphia in 1774—ten years of almost constant loneliness.
¹⁷

Portia tried to console herself by telling John in several letters that “patriotism in the female sex is the most disinterested of all virtues.” She made a good case for it, pointing out that women had no hope of obtaining a job or any other reward for their devotion to the country. But the lonely days and weeks and months wishing for letters that seldom came soon obliterated these attempts to find courage and patience. Not even the news that peace was about to break out did Portia much good, because her dearest friend informed her that he would probably remain in France for at least another year to help negotiate a treaty of commerce with Great Britain.

Suddenly Portia had a problem that cried out for John’s presence. Their oldest child and only daughter, sixteen-year-old Nabby, was in love. A wealthy, handsome young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to Braintree and was boarding with Abigail’s sister, Mary Cranch, and her daughters. That made the twenty-five-year-old attorney an acceptable visitor to the Adams household. However, Tyler had a reputation for being a wild man in his Harvard years. He had broken the windows of certain professors and drunk several taverns dry. He had also spent quite a lot of the fortune he had inherited from his father. In Abigail’s uneasy mind, all this added up to one ominous word: dissipation.

She confided the “family problem” to her dearest friend, who predictably exploded. The man should be banned from the house, John stormed
for five wordy paragraphs. But the time lapse between letters to and from Europe and their delivery enabled Tyler to charm Abigail as well as Nabby. In fact, everyone in Braintree seemed to think well of the young man, who was negotiating to buy the finest mansion in the village and was handling a wide range of cases in the courts of Boston and elsewhere. Abigail was soon telling her flummoxed dearest friend of the “esteem and kindness” her neighbors felt for Royall Tyler. John, after inquiring about him from several friends, retreated to a temporary neutrality, leaving the “family problem” to Portia.

XI

As soon as the war ended, Portia began bombarding her dearest friend with demands that she be invited to join him in Europe. John finally agreed and told Abigail to come to Paris in the spring of 1784—and bring Nabby with her. Charles, who was preparing to enter Harvard, could stay with her sister, Mary Cranch; he knew her Braintree house almost as well as his own. Their youngest son, Thomas, who was also on the Harvard track, was deposited with another Smith sister in Haverill, Massachusetts. Abigail told Royall Tyler of their planned departure. She assured him that she was not opposed to welcoming him into the family as a son-in-law. On the contrary, she told him, he had good reason to “hope.”

Tyler thanked her extravagantly and accepted the separation with apparent satisfaction. So, it would seem, did Nabby, who had maintained a rather severe reserve toward her suitor—so severe at times that Abigail thought she lacked “sensibility”—something every woman was now supposed to possess. With access to her letters and diary, we know that Nabby was deeply in love with Tyler but had been badly shaken by her father’s first angry reaction to him. She was even more unhappy to be told by her mother that she and Tyler were to be separated for a year.

XII

After a pleasant voyage, Abigail and Nabby arrived in England on June 21, 1784. Abigail’s dearest friend was mired in more negotiations with the Dutch, but when he heard that they had survived the Atlantic, he was transformed. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday,” he
declared. A week later, John arrived in London for a reunion that capped Abigail’s joy. She declared them “a happy family again.” Soon they were in Paris, where John settled them in a lovely “cottage” in suburban Auteil. The house was so large, it took Abigail weeks to visit all the rooms. But it had a five-acre garden that she adored.

They began touring the city under John and John Quincy’s auspices, admiring the gardens and mansions but dismayed by the prevailing stink. Nabby told one of her correspondents that the French were the dirtiest people in the world. The Adams women went to the opera and the ballet and were enchanted by the splendid interiors and the soaring music of the orchestra. Then came a shock. The ballet dancers sprang “two feet from the floor, posing themselves in the air, with their feet flying and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers.” Abigail turned her face away, appalled. In a few months she was telling her sister that her disgust had “worn off” and she was now enjoying the beauty and precision of the dancers. But she lamented the sad fate of these “opera girls” who were regarded as little more than playthings for rich young men about Paris.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, Abigail became friendly with the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, and several other Frenchwomen. Although she was intimidated by their gorgeous finery and intricately “frizzed” hair, she was delighted by their witty conversation, their charming manners, and their knowledge of literature. But Portia’s tolerance vanished when they visited Benjamin Franklin in nearby Passy and encountered Madame Helvetius. Franklin had assured Abigail and Nabby that they were going to meet “a genuine Frenchwoman, and one of the best women in the world.”

This offhand encomium left the Adams women totally unprepared for Madame when she strolled into Franklin’s drawing room. Not expecting to find other guests there, she was dressed in everyday clothes, featuring a profusion of dirty muslin over a shabby blue dress. She dashed up to the seventy-eight-year-old sage crying “Helas, Frankling!” and kissed him on both cheeks, plus a smack for good measure on his wrinkled forehead. Later, she sat between Franklin and John Adams at dinner. “She carried on the chief of the conversation,” Abigail reported. “Frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentleman’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly around the Doctor’s neck.”

After dinner, Madame hurled herself on a settee, “where she showed
more than her feet,” Abigail reported. With Madame was her lapdog, “who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite.” When the canine urinated on the floor, Madame “wiped it up with her chemise.” One can almost hear Abigail’s quivering indignation as she concluded, “This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.” Mrs. Adams decided she was “completely disgusted and never wish for an acquaintance with ladies of this cast.” Although Madame was her “near neighbor” in Auteil, Abigail never visited her.
¹⁹

Eventually all the Adamses had to surrender their New England simplicity, get their hair frizzed, and dress in the most shockingly splendid style. Nabby was especially stunned by the finery her father wore when he went out on diplomatic business. “To be out of fashion,” Abigail wryly concluded, “was more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature”—a condition, she slyly added, “to which the Parisians were not averse.”
²⁰

XIII

From Congress came the most satisfying news that John Adams had ever received from his fellow politicians: he was appointed America’s first ambassador to England. His ailing nemesis, Franklin, was going home, removing John’s often stated fear that the “Doctor,” as everyone called him, would get the job. John saw his selection as amends for the cavalier way Congress had treated him during the war.

John and Abigail decided to send John Quincy home to enter Harvard. They also had to deal at long range with a warning from Abigail’s sister, Elizabeth Shaw, that Charles, only fifteen, was growing very attracted to a young lady. Abigail dispatched a letter banning all such diversions. She wanted her sons to devote themselves to literature, science, and practicing virtue. It was a glimpse of how she and John had begun to trade places. Abigail was growing more severe and censorious as middle age approached, while he, having achieved some triumphs in Europe that he thought would guarantee his fame, was starting to mellow.

In London the Adamses were politely received by a few people, but most ignored them or openly abhorred them. George III was majestically polite and so was his queen, but the newspapers were full of cruel remarks. One story claimed that John’s supposed inability to make a living as a lawyer explained why he had overthrown his nation’s laws in a revolution.
Another story portrayed him as so awed at meeting George III, he forgot all the fine compliments he had planned to recite. But His Majesty good-naturedly forgave the stuttering American bumpkin’s distress.

Abigail was soon in a permanent state of rage at the “scribblers”—especially when she learned some American newspapers were reprinting the gibes. Meanwhile, John got nowhere in his efforts to persuade the British to sign a commercial treaty with the United States, or to live up to the terms of the peace treaty he had helped negotiate in Paris.

Fortunately, so it seemed at the time, their “family problem” distracted them. Nabby had grown more and more unhappy with the few short letters she had received from Royall Tyler. Abigail’s sister, Mary Cranch, annoyed that Tyler had ignored her own daughters, launched a propaganda campaign against the young man. She filled her letters to Abigail with venomous portraits of his behavior. When Nabby and Abigail departed for Europe, Tyler had reeled back to the Cranch household and cried for hours. Thereafter he vanished from Braintree, which enabled Mary to speculate that he was relapsing into his previous “dissipated” ways. Abigail passed on Aunt Cranch’s dark intimations to Nabby, further fueling her unhappiness.

By this time, Colonel William Stephens Smith had become the secretary of the London legation and part of the Adams household. He was a handsome thirtyish New Yorker with a breathtaking war record. Smith had fought in almost every major battle of the Revolution, repeatedly distinguishing himself. His ultimate reward was a 1781 invitation from George Washington to join his staff. Jovial and charming, he impressed John Adams and enthralled Abigail. Nabby was more than a little distracted by the way Colonel Smith gazed at her across the dinner table. But she was still engaged to Royall Tyler and could give him no encouragement.