The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (24 page)

Meanwhile, Smith inveigled Charles Adams into his schemes. To John and Abigail’s dismay, Charles had married Smith’s sister Sally in 1795. The Adamses thought one Smith in the family was more than enough trouble for a lifetime. They had written numerous letters to Charles warning him against a premature marriage, but he had mastered the technique of ignoring their advice.

For a while, Charles seemed to be prospering as a lawyer. When John Adams visited him in December 1795, he was living in a house with a fine view of the East River. Friends told the vice president that his son had “twice or thrice the employment he ever had before.” John was delighted to find him in his office, conversing with three new clients. He was equally pleased to learn that many people considered Charles a wit. Not long after he married Sally Smith, a man asked him if “the fever” was spreading in New York. Charles replied, “Do you mean the yellow fever or the Smith fever?” In the large Smith family, marriage had become so frequent it was being described as an epidemic.
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John Lawrence, the attorney under whom Charles studied law, was a speculator who also infected Charles with dreams of a quick killing. All
he needed was cash—and thanks to John Quincy, he suddenly had a supply. John Quincy had asked Charles to invest a handsome sum John and Abigail had bestowed on him when he became a diplomat. Charles started putting his brother’s money into speculative ventures, no doubt thinking of how much he (Charles) would make if the gambles succeeded. But the time when speculators could make a quick fortune was gone. Cheerful Charles was sowing seeds that would humiliate and destroy him.

IX

In spite of Nabby’s woes and the wider worries over the turmoil the French Revolution was stirring in America, John and Abigail remained devoted partners. But they had little or no enthusiasm for participating in the political world of Philadelphia. The mounting feud between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton was creating two political parties that attacked each other with rabidly partisan venom. Abigail disliked the French styles that prevailed in the Quaker city. She thought they were much too revealing and encouraged the sexual license that had become associated with France’s revolution. She had no difficulty persuading John that they could save a great deal of money if she retreated to Massachusetts and he pursued a bachelor life in Philadelphia while Congress was in session.

Around this time they decided to give their Massachusetts home a name—Peacefield. They may have been motivated by the town of Braintree’s decision to upgrade its name to Quincy in 1792. But Peacefield was also a revealing indication of their feelings about acrimonious Philadelphia. A pleasant dividend of Abigail’s decision to flee the political fray was the letters they began writing to each other with much of their old warmth and candor. Both now began their reports with “My Dearest Friend.”

In one of his first letters, John regaled Abigail with the way Governor John Hancock revealed his petty envy and hunger for popularity. “I would not entertain you with this political tittle-tattle,” he added, “if I had anything of more importance to say. One thing of more importance to me, but no news to you, is that I am yours with unabated esteem and affection forever.”

Abigail told him of the pleasure of spending Thanksgiving Day with their family—mostly Smiths and John’s mother. She was alarmed by John’s reports of the way the country was dividing into two political par
ties. He took some consolation from the way he was unanimously elected for another term as vice president by the states who backed the Federalists—and just as unanimously opposed by the states controlled by the anti-Federalists. He was especially dismayed by “the blind spirit of party” that had seized the soul of his friend Thomas Jefferson. Somewhat ruefully, John noted that the vice presidency was regarded as an office that played no part in the raging partisan quarrels. “Poor me…I am left out of the question and pray I ever may.”
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Abigail disagreed with John that he was becoming—or had already become—a political nonentity. Although she took a dark view of the turbulent political scene—“The halcyon days of America are past, I fully believe”—she told John that in spite of the “limited office you hold” he had a “weight of character” thanks to his “former exertions and services” that was bound to exert a “benign influence” on the partisan quarrels. In fact, she was happy to note from the resolutely cheerful tone of his letters that “the only fault of your political character—which had always given me uneasiness was wearing away”—his “irritability.” It had sometimes thrown him off his guard and revealed “that a man is not always a hero.”
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No wonder John wrote in reply, “One day spent at home would afford me more inward delight and comfort than a week or a winter in this place.” Abigail’s letters, he assured her, “give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear.” This frequent reiteration of his boredom as vice president makes it evident that the job had been another bad career choice for this complex man. John should have accepted election as a senator from Massachusetts, where his oratorical skills and political insights could have been influential in the political struggle that raged throughout these years. He might have developed a following that would have added weight to his presidential ambitions.

Instead John and Abigail convinced themselves that he was better off remaining aloof. The implications of this embrace of political purity would become painfully visible when John Adams became the second president of the volatile American republic.

A
s the presidential election of 1796 approached, John Adams vacillated between hungering for the honor and dreading the abuse he would receive in the vicious political atmosphere of the times. “I am weary of the game,” he told Abigail in February. “Yet I don’t know whether I can live without it.”
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Both Adamses seemed to think the presidency was John’s by right of seniority. A lot of people disagreed. Thomas Jefferson accepted the Republican Party’s nomination, with Aaron Burr as his vice president. John acquiesced to Thomas Pinckney of South Carolina as his vice president on the Federalist ticket. Pinckney’s claim to fame was a treaty he had negotiated with Spain in 1795, which opened the Mississippi to western farmers eager to sell their surpluses to a hungry world.

Adams was elected president by three electoral votes. If New England had not stood solidly behind its native son, he would have lost. Thomas Jefferson was second and became vice president. Pinckney ran third. John immediately saw winning by three votes as a humiliation, which it was to some extent. His mood was not improved when he learned, just before the electoral votes were counted, that Alexander Hamilton had again intrigued behind the scenes. This time he had tried to make Pinckney the president by persuading some electors not to vote for John. The Federalist leader had decided that Adams would be difficult to deal with.

The new president’s response to Hamilton’s treachery was strange. It was common knowledge that the cabinet Adams inherited from Washington
were all followers of Hamilton. Nevertheless, Adams kept them on the job. Numerous historians have described this decision as bizarre. But Adams, without a political following, had few friends and no allies with whom to replace them. Later, he claimed that he feared the public would react violently if he had swept out the entire Washington cabinet. As for his personal relationship with Hamilton, Adams vowed to “maintain the same conduct toward him that I always did—that is, to keep him at a distance.”
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Abigail had a darker view of Hamilton. She told John to “beware of that spare Cassius.” The words from Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
occurred to her almost every time she saw that “cock sparrow.” She had “read his heart in his wicked eyes many a time. The very devil is in them…or I have no skill in physiognomy.”
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In a letter to a friend, she portrayed the Federalist leader as a dangerous man who was pursuing a “Machiavellian policy.” He wanted a weak president like Thomas Pinckney—someone that a “Master Hand could work” behind the scenes.
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But Abigail did not try to persuade John to dismiss the Hamilton-controlled cabinet. She did not arrive in Philadelphia for almost two months after his inauguration. As early as March 13, a little more than a week after he became president, John told her, “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you.” In another letter he all but wailed: “I never wanted your advice and assistance more in my life.” He warned her, “You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives.”
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Abigail still delayed her departure from Quincy. Her excuse was the lingering, ultimately fatal illness of John’s aged mother and the tragic death of a young niece. Neither of these small, sad dramas required her presence. There were numerous relatives in and near Quincy who could have cared for both women. The real reason for Abigail’s delays was her lack of enthusiasm for the ordeal she and John faced in Philadelphia. At one point she told John of a dream in which she seemed to be in a battle and cannon were firing huge black balls—all aimed at her.
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The challenge that haunted Adams’s presidency was post-revolutionary France. With the Reign of Terror over and its Jacobin leaders executed, the country was in the hands of a Directory, a five-man group who were as hostile to America as their blood-soaked forerunners. Soon after Adams took office, they ordered their navy and privateers to seize American ships at will. If it was not a declaration of war, it was the next best (or worst)
thing. Adams responded by calling a special session of Congress for May 15, 1797. Behind the scenes, he rushed a letter to Mount Vernon, offering to resign so George Washington could take charge of the nation once more. It was a painful glimpse of John’s lack of self-confidence in the shadow of Washington’s fame.

Abigail finally arrived in Philadelphia on May 10, after an exhausting trip on muddy roads and over rain-swollen rivers. In a touching scene, she told her sister Mary Cranch how John met her about twenty-five miles outside the city and she “took my seat by his side” in his carriage. They stopped for dinner at Bristol, giving themselves most of the day to talk things over. Here, Abigail probably confided to John her hope that their friend, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, might be an ally in spite of their political differences. She had already expressed this opinion in a letter from Quincy.
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Six days later, John went before Congress and told the legislators he was prepared to negotiate America’s differences with France but was determined to preserve America’s neutrality in the ongoing war between the two major powers. To do that, it was time to start creating a strong navy to protect the nation’s merchant ships from French depredations. The Jeffersonians’ reaction swiftly destroyed Abigail’s hopes for help from the vice president. Republican newspapers and orators in Congress dismissed John’s speech as “a presidential war-whoop.” They defended France’s policies and called for a virtual repudiation of George Washington’s declaration of neutrality. Jefferson never said a word on Adams’s behalf.

Abigail would have been even more disappointed if she had known that while the Republicans were publicly excoriating President Adams, Vice President Jefferson was secretly telling the French chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia that there was no need to take him seriously. Jefferson advised the French to pretend to negotiate and wait for the American people to assert their friendship for France. President by only three electoral votes, Adams had no popular support.
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II

Along with this public uproar, private woes tormented the Adamses. Nabby’s marriage to the erratic William Smith showed no sign of improvement. When they returned from England, the colonel dumped her and
their offspring in a tiny house in Westchester County while he roamed northern New York looking for bargains in real estate on which to speculate. Abigail visited her daughter on her way to Philadelphia and was appalled by her unhappiness. She had four young children to raise and did not have a neighbor within twenty miles with whom she could converse.

Abigail was almost as worried by news from John Quincy that he had fallen in love with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Maryland-born merchant living in London. Although John Quincy was twenty-eight, and a diplomat so successful that outgoing president George Washington had made a point of praising him, Abigail still wrote to him as if he were a teenager. She worried about Louisa’s foreign birth and wealthy background. Would John Quincy be able to support this young woman in her accustomed style? The ambassador struggled to reassure his mother in long, elaborate letters.

Charles Adams was a far worse worry. With a wife and two children to support, he was often pressed for money and declined to seek help from his parents, after so long and so stubbornly ignoring their advice. He was an easy target for his brother-in-law William Smith and his smooth-talking relatives. They lured him into one of their speculative schemes, and when the bubble burst, Charles lost almost every cent of the money John Quincy had given him. It was a humiliation that Charles was psychologically incapable of enduring. He reached for the liquor bottle, and soon he was on his way to poverty and despair.

III

In spite of these personal sorrows, First Lady Abigail Adams did not neglect her duties. She received as many as sixty callers a day at the presidential mansion on Philadelphia’s Market Street and often entertained forty at dinner. But her enthusiasm for her job was constantly undermined by the city’s opposition newspapers. Worst of all the “scribblers,” as Abigail called them, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin’s grandson, who was editor of the
Philadelphia Aurora
. He regularly accused President Adams of being in his dotage. He called John “the advocate of a kingly government and of a titled nobility…to keep down the swinish multitude.”

When John sent a three-man delegation to France to try to resolve the crisis, Bache called it an attempt to deceive the American people. In his
speech to Congress, Bache raged, the president never said a word about the way the British navy arrogantly boarded American ships on the high seas and seized sailors that they claimed were deserters from their ranks. Adams acted as if he governed a nation of “ourang outangs” instead of intelligent men. Someone should tell “His Serene Highness” that he had been elected president by three votes.
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By the time Abigail finished one of these Bache screeds, she was seething with outrage. It did not help to know that Bache was Ben Franklin’s grandson; it only reignited Abigail’s (and John’s) enmity for Franklin at a time when they needed to stay calm and clearheaded. Even more unhelpful was the way Bache constantly claimed that Adams was a secret monarchist because of his reputed insistence on resounding titles for President Washington and for himself. Did Abigail blame herself for not accompanying John to New York in 1789 until his frantic letters pleading for her presence reached her in Quincy?

When President Adams appointed John Quincy minister to Berlin, capital of Prussia, the billingsgate from Bache and other editors got worse. They claimed John Quincy’s salary was ten thousand dollars a year (it was actually $4,500) and made it sound as if the president were sending him the money as a bonus. Was there any limit to the malice of these scribblers? Abigail wondered.

IV

In February 1798, the Adamses reeled under another blow. A group of fashionable Philadelphians announced that they planned to stage a ball and dinner to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. These celebrations had taken place every year while Washington was president. Though John and Abigail had never approved of them—they claimed to admire Washington but did not think he should be feted as a king or a Roman emperor—they kept this opinion to themselves. A celebration when John Adams was president was another matter. A celebration to which the president and his wife were invited, as if they were just another pair of citizens? The Adamses reacted with outrage. John’s concealed envy of Washington exploded and ignited similar emotions in Abigail.

In a fiery letter to Mary Cranch, Abigail wrote, “I do not know when my feelings of contempt have been more called forth.” She poured most of
her spleen on the Philadelphians who were staging the ball, calling them “a strange set of people” lacking “the least feeling of real genuine politeness.” How could they dare to invite the president of the United States to appear as a “secondary character”? It would hold him up before all the nations of the world “in that [secondary] light.” It was “ludicrous beyond compare.”
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President Adams wrote “DECLINED” on the face of the invitation and added a snarling denunciation of the affair. Abigail warmly approved—and then expressed horror when this communication appeared in the
Aurora
with sneers and gloats of delight from editor Benjamin Franklin Bache. The Federalists were dismayed, and they began quarreling among themselves when some party stalwarts cancelled their acceptances to the celebration.

Vice President Jefferson was delighted by the uproar, remarking in a letter to James Madison that the “birthnight” had split the Federalist Party. Abigail remained grimly convinced that she and John had done the right thing. She told her sister Mary Cranch that the Americans now knew they had a president “who would not prostrate their dignity and character, neither to foreign nations, nor the American people.” This was, to put it mildly, inflating a molehill into an imaginary political mountain. More and more, it became apparent that John and Abigail were almost totally lacking in political savvy. They were a party of two.
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V

A few weeks later, a startling turn in the crisis with France upended everything. The three envoys that President Adams had sent to Paris were rejected by the French government, after they refused to pay a bribe of $250,000 to Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand and agree to a loan of $10 million as a precondition to “peace” talks. The envoys responded with “No, not a sixpence,” which was soon transformed by Federalist newspapers into “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” President Adams sent the correspondence with the French negotiators, disguised as X, Y, and Z to Congress in response to the Republicans’ demand to see the documents. When the Jeffersonians read the stunning evidence of French arrogance and greed, they were, Abigail gleefully reported, “struck dumb and opend not their mouths.”

The desperate Republicans attempted to keep the correspondence secret. The Federalist-controlled Senate voted to publish fifty thousand copies and distribute them throughout the country. Americans from Boston to Savannah were infuriated and called for war. Suddenly, President Adams was the most popular man in America. People cheered him when he appeared in public. At one point, eleven hundred young Philadelphians marched in a long column to the presidential mansion to present him with pledges of their support.

One of the most emphatic war-wishers was Abigail. In a letter to her daughter Nabby, she pointed out that America was already at war on the high seas and had been for months. She was eager to see a formal declaration of war by Congress, “the sooner the better.” At present the country was suffering “the miseries and misfortunes” of war without striking back. A declaration of war would also enable the president to do something about the lying newspapermen and the French agents that Talleyrand reportedly had swarming throughout the nation. To her nephew William Shaw, Abigail declared that France was plotting to subjugate America. The French were spreading their amoral principles, their atheism, and their “depravity of manners” in every part of the United States. There was only one answer to this insidious attack: “Let every citizen become a soldier and determine as formerly on Liberty or Death!”
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