The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (26 page)

Without the fear of Washington’s disapproval, President Adams and Abigail became outspokenly critical of the Hamilton loyalists in the president’s cabinet. Abigail was especially hostile to Secretary of State Timothy Pickering. His manners, she told one correspondent, were “forbidding,” his temper was “sour,” and his resentments were “implacable.” He fancied himself having the power to “dictate every measure,” thanks to Hamil
ton’s backing. The party of two concluded that this situation was intolerable. But the president did nothing about it for months.
²⁴

The weakest member of the cabinet was Secretary of War James McHenry, an affable former Revolutionary War aide to Washington who strove to be agreeable to everyone. On the night of May 5, 1800, President Adams summoned him from a dinner party to discuss a routine matter. He suddenly asked what McHenry knew about General Hamilton’s activities in New York, where Adams had heard he was constantly criticizing the administration. McHenry claimed to know nothing about Hamilton’s hostile words or actions. The president exploded into vituperative rage: “You are subservient to him. It was you who biased General Washington’s mind…and induced him to place Hamilton on the list of major generals!”

Stamping up and down his study, Adams called Hamilton “the greatest intriguant in the world, a man devoid of moral principle—a bastard and…a foreigner.” He would rather be a vice president under Jefferson than be indebted “to such a being as Hamilton for the presidency.” Moreover, McHenry was a total failure as secretary of war. The army was a mess! The soldiers lacked decent uniforms! “You cannot, sir, remain any longer in office!” Adams bellowed.

The overwhelmed McHenry said he would resign at once. Regaining a semblance of self-control, Adams apologized. He admitted McHenry was a man of integrity. McHenry returned to his office and wrote a vivid account of his dismissal, which he sent to Hamilton. The secretary of war was soon describing the scene to other people, telling them that he thought Adams was “actually insane.”
²⁵

A week later, the president fired Secretary of State Pickering. Abigail reported the dismissals in a letter to a cousin: “You will learn that great changes have taken place in the cabinet—some will mourn, some will rejoice, some will blame, others will confuse, all this was foreseen.” In fact the firings were foreseen by no one. The president had given nobody a hint of what he was thinking of doing—except his fellow member of their party of two.
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X

By this time the presidential election of 1800 had begun. President Adams was seeking reelection; Thomas Jefferson was his opponent. The Republicans’ chief hit man was Scottish journalist James Thomson Callender. In
a blazing pamphlet,
The Prospect Before Us
, “the wretch,” as Abigail called Callender, described John Adams as “that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness.” He said the voters’ choice lay “between Adams, war and beggary, and Jefferson, peace and competency.” As usual, Abigail read every word of these clotted pages of invective, shuddering with each blow.

The party of two returned to Quincy for the summer, and the newspapers told them of even more damage inflicted on John’s hopes for reelection. In a series of trials, hot-tempered Judge Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court jailed numerous editors for criticizing, among other things, the president’s supposed “thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation and selfish avarice.” Chase inflicted heavy fines on those found guilty, along with jail sentences. One of the prime victims was Callender, whom Judge Chase excoriated with special savagery. The Republicans denounced these trials as a violation of the first amendment, and many people agreed with them. Abigail became so distressed that she wondered whether American elections ought to be less frequent. She began to think an excess of democracy would destabilize the country.

The party of two’s only hope was the peace mission to France. But no news of this divisive venture emerged from the vast Atlantic Ocean. For reasons that remain obscure, the three envoys did not begin negotiating until March 1800. Meanwhile more bad news reached John and Abigail. The president had disbanded Hamilton’s provisional army, turning their political differences into a personal vendetta. The former general was passing the word that “Mr. Adams must be sacrificed.” The party’s vice presidential nominee, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina (older brother of Thomas Pinckney), had to be elected president if the party were to survive.

To guarantee this outcome, General Hamilton decided to write a
A Letter from Alexander Hamilton Concerning The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams Esq, president of the United States
. Fifty-four pages long, it was as thick with abuse as Callender’s Republican screed. Hamilton denounced Adams’s “ungovernable temper” and “paroxysms of anger.” At least as bad was the president’s “disgusting egotism” and his “bitter animosity” toward his own cabinet. These “great intrinsic defects of character” made him a menace to stability and order.

Hamilton originally planned to circulate this interminable missive only
to a select group of Federalist leaders to persuade them to choose Pinckney over Adams. But several Republican operatives obtained copies and published excerpts in the
Aurora
and other newspapers. Blinded by his rage at Adams, Hamilton decided to publish the entire letter as a pamphlet, which soon circulated throughout the nation. The general’s intemperate blast split the Federalist Party and all but guaranteed Jefferson’s election. A heartbroken Abigail told her sister Mary Cranch that Hamilton had defeated himself—and John.
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XI

Heartbreak of another kind awaited the party of two as they departed from Quincy for the final months of John’s presidency. John left first, and on his journey through New York he again refused to see his son Charles. He had declared that he renounced him, and he grimly kept his word. Abigail could not be so hardhearted. “My journey is a mountain before me but I must climb it,” she told her son Thomas, who was now practicing law in Philadelphia. She found Charles unmistakably dying. His wife, Sally, was with him in a furnished room paid for by a generous friend. He was bloated and incoherent, in the final stages of alcoholism. His doctor told her there was no hope.
²⁸

Bearing this terrible burden, Abigail struggled on to Philadelphia, where she was consoled by her son Thomas. From there she journeyed to the new capital of the country, Washington, D.C., and joined her husband in the huge unfinished mansion the government had constructed for the president. Abigail was fascinated by the even more unfinished capital city, which she described as “romantic but wild.” John gave his final State of the Union address to Congress, and Abigail tried to cope with heating the gigantic house, which was being called the president’s “palace.” The term White House was more than a decade in the future.

In December the results from the last states to vote trickled into Washington. (There was, as yet, no single election day.) The contest was surprisingly close. But by December 16, it became apparent that Jefferson had won by eight electoral votes. By that time, crushing personal news had reached John and Abigail from New York: Charles was dead. Abigail wrote a touching letter to his widow, Sally, recalling how lovable Charles
had been as a boy. She assured her that the president mourned for his lost son, “as he has for a long time.”
²⁹

As for the lost election, Abigail confessed that her first reaction was relief. “I shall be happier at Quincy,” she told Thomas Adams. But to a cousin she admitted, “I lose my sleep often and I find my spirits flag. My mind and heart have been severely tried.”
³⁰
She worried about how the president would react to this abrupt loss of power and prestige. She feared that returning to his farm, “a world so limited and circumscribed,” would plunge him into permanent gloom.
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But Portia’s dearest friend found consolation in the peace treaty with France, the chief accomplishment of his administration. A copy of the treaty did not reach Washington, D.C., until after the election was lost. The terms were so unsatisfactory that the Senate at first refused to ratify it. The envoys had ignored instructions to seek millions of dollars to repay American merchants and ship owners for the vessels the French had seized in the Quasi-War. But the agreement ended the shooting war, enabling John to claim a victory over his enemies in his own party, if not over the Jeffersonian Republicans. He found special satisfaction in thinking of the treaty as a triumph over Alexander Hamilton. The president vowed he would go home and write his autobiography, answering the ex-general’s slanders. Above all, he looked forward to years and years in the company of his beloved Portia, the only person in the world who appreciated him.

J
ohn Adams never completed his autobiography. But he enjoyed seventeen happy years of Abigail’s companionship. They remained partners in mind and heart, deeply involved in the lives of their children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. At various times, many of the grandchildren lived with them. As the years advanced, Abigail’s health became fragile. But she refused to slow down. Her “uncontrollable attachment to the superintendence of every part of her household,” John told John Quincy, worried him. “She must always be writing to you and all her grandchildren…she takes upon herself the duties of her granddaughter…maids, husband.” He might have added that she was also managing the life and career of her youngest son, Thomas. Acknowledging that he had no hope of restraining her, John could only grumble, “I say…she must, because she will.”
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During these years, several other women became part of John Adams’s life. One drove him almost berserk, another broke his heart, and a third brought him love and consolation when he needed them most. Mercy Otis Warren was the disrupter of his peace. This remarkable woman, the sister of James Otis, the early agitator against British rule, was an old friend who attracted John’s attention with her trenchant prose style even before the Revolution. He praised her satires and hard-hitting criticism of loyalists and conservatives. We have seen how their friendship collapsed when John refused to help her husband, James Warren, get a federal appointment in 1789.

In 1805, Mercy Warren published what she and many others considered her masterpiece—three formidable volumes, titled
History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, Interspersed with Biographical, Political and Moral Observations
. President Thomas Jefferson bought copies and urged his friends to do likewise. Inevitably, John and Abigail read these long and remarkably well-researched books—and were dismayed and enraged. Although Mrs. Warren praised John’s domestic life for its “morality, decency and religion,” she made it clear that she took a dim view of John Adams as a revolutionary leader. She contended that he was a failure as a diplomat—he was “ridiculed by the fashionable and polite society of France” because he was deficient in the “
je ne sais quoi
so necessary in polite society.”

In England, merciless Mercy claimed Adams had been “corrupted” by his close contact with monarchy and came home enamored of aristocracy, replete with “all the insignia of arbitrary sway.” A “large proportion of his countrymen” thought he had “forgotten the principles of the American Revolution.” As president he was a virtual betrayer of the Revolution, leader of an anti-republican administration. Even worse were her comments on John’s character: he was driven by “pride of talents and much ambition.” Too often “his passions and prejudices were…too strong for his sagacity and judgment.”
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An enraged Adams fired off ten blazing letters to Mrs. Warren, condemning her habit of presenting him “in an odious light…to lessen and degrade” him. Where did she get this disposition to “wink him out of sight?” he virtually bellowed. Why was he deficient in
je ne sais quoi
but not Franklin, Jefferson, and a host of others? How dare she call him “corrupted”? He challenged her to produce a single fact justifying this insult, “from my cradle to this hour!” He reminded her that her brother, James Otis, had predicted in the 1760s that “John Adams would one day be the greatest man in America!”

Mrs. Warren was not even slightly intimidated by John’s extended tantrum. She replied that she was unable to understand “the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written.” She had set out to do him “complete justice” and could not understand why John did not agree with her statements. She could only conclude that he thought “his fame had not been sufficiently attended to.” As even more vituperative letters arrived on her desk, she accused him of “meanness as
well as malignancy”—he was trying to “blast a work” that had won the praise of “many of the best judges of literary merit.” It came down to this—her book was “an inadequate panegyric of your life and character.”
³
John’s criticisms struck her as “the ravings of a maniac.” She closed her ripostes by declaring: “As an old friend, I pity you. As an Historian, I forgive you.”
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Poor Abigail was trapped in the middle of this savage exchange. She sided with John but probably regretted his uncontrollable rage, as she had “mourned” the mess he had made of firing Secretary of War McHenry. Several months later, she was astounded to receive a letter from Mercy in which her old friend told her that disagreements on subjects that involve “the great bustle of the world” ought not to interfere with true friendship. Mercy even thought it was possible to denounce someone’s politics and retain feelings of love and admiration.

Abigail did not answer this letter, nor did she write a letter of sympathy when Mercy’s husband died the following year. She had been hoping Mercy would reread John’s letters and “acknowledge her errors.” When no such acknowledgment came, Abigail could not pretend she had any friendly feelings for her. The politics of the party of two were still alive and well, seven years after John had left the presidency.
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But Abigail had too many shining memories of her friendship with Mercy Warren to allow rancor to obliterate them. As a lifelong advocate for the equality of women, it pained her that John had acquired such a low opinion of a woman who had demonstrated her ability to write and discuss history and philosophy as intelligently as any man of her time. Abigail gradually resumed corresponding with Mercy and in 1812, visited her in Plymouth, where hours of conversation began a reconciliation between “the two ancient friends,” as Abigail called them. In a moment of courageous candor, Abigail said Mercy and John “were both in the wrong.” She tried to explain that John no longer harbored any “personal animosity” toward Mercy but he was not ready to be entirely reconciled. Time would be the best healer of the “reservation” that the ex-president still nursed about Mercy’s book.

Mercy sent Abigail a ring as a memento of their “former amities,” and toward the end of 1812 Abigail sent Mercy a lock of her hair and a snippet of John’s sparse gray locks “at his request.” A year later some newspaper critics attacked Mercy’s play,
The Group
, which she had written during
the Revolution. They maintained that it was too complex and historically insightful to have been written by a woman. John Adams leaped to Mercy’s defense in a vigorous letter, declaring he could confirm she had written the drama. In brusque Adams style, he described Mercy as the most gifted woman of her generation, a rare combination of intellect and artist. A delighted Mercy invited him to visit her in Plymouth. On the sidelines, Abigail smiled contentedly. The reconciliation was complete.
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II

Another woman who loomed large in John’s old age was his daughter, Nabby. She had long been a presence in his life, of course. He had writhed and fumed countless times when he heard about how badly her husband, Colonel William Smith, was treating her. As Nabby’s unhappiness intensified, her father became more and more meaningful to her, while her relationship to her mother deteriorated. Abigail’s repeated attempts to persuade her to leave Smith may have had something to do with Nabby’s inability—or refusal—to write to or talk meaningfully with her mother. She may also have blamed her for the way Abigail had interfered in her romance with Royall Tyler, and then all but thrust her into the arms of Colonel Smith in London.

It was one of those tragedies of good intentions. Abigail had frequently complained about Nabby’s silent ways, even in her girlhood. As eager for her to achieve perfection in all things as she was for Nabby’s brothers, Abigail did not realize that a feeling of inferiority can be the result of too much exhortation and scrutiny. In Nabby’s case the tendency may have been intensified by the feeling that she could never equal her mother. In letters to her Cranch cousins, Nabby often expressed delight when she was permitted to visit friends and relatives for a week or two and escape from Abigail’s critical eyes.

As the dimensions of her unhappy marriage became starkly apparent, Nabby’s silences grew more extensive. She ignored Abigail’s attempts to encourage or advise her. Only to her father was Nabby able to open her anguished heart—but Abigail began intercepting her letters and rebuking Nabby for sending them. As the politics of the vice presidency and presidency grew more turbulent, Abigail feared John would be driven over the edge by the details of his daughter’s suffering. This policy only deepened
the rift between Abigail and Nabby; soon the mother was complaining that her daughter was “unapproachable.”
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In the final year of his presidency, John appointed Colonel Smith surveyor of the port of New York, one of the most lucrative jobs in the federal government. For a while, Nabby’s problems seemed solved. Smith had more than enough money. But he spent it as fast as he made it, and continued to associate with hard-drinking men who passed their days gambling on fast horses and cards and talking endlessly about how to make a quick fortune. Still an Adams to the bone, Nabby despised Smith’s cronies. When her brother John Quincy visited her in New York, she invited him into a remote room in her house and played chess while her husband partied with his raucous friends.

Frustrated by the lack of speculative opportunities in the United States after the bubbles of the 1790s had burst, Colonel Smith began conspiring with South American revolutionaries to fund an invasion of Venezuela and the overthrow of the Spanish government there. It would be the beginning of a revolutionary tide that would sweep through South America and make its leaders immensely rich. Such enterprises were difficult to keep secret; the talkative Smith did not bother to try. Instead, he boldly sent Francisco Miranda, the leader of the rebels, to President Jefferson to ask his help.

The president declined to participate, but Smith and Miranda went ahead anyway. When the American ship
Leander
sailed with a vanguard of revolutionaries aboard, the president accused Smith of making war on a country with whom the United States was at peace and arrested him. Meanwhile the
Leander
was captured by the Spanish navy. Smith was not even moderately repentant; he claimed the charges against him were a Jeffersonian plot to remove him from his job.

Once more Abigail implored Nabby to leave her husband. Instead, she moved into a cottage on the prison grounds and lived with him while he argued in court that he had been acting on Jefferson’s orders. The president and Secretary of State James Madison declined to appear at the trial, and the judge freed Smith for lack of evidence. Smith soon discovered freedom was a mixed blessing. Numerous people whom he had conned into financing the Miranda expedition wanted their money back. Virtually penniless, barely able to pay the rent for a crumbling house on a New York
back street, the embittered Nabby subsided into total silence for almost a year, while Smith’s behavior toward her grew more and more hostile.

Early in 1807, Nabby’s anguish exploded in a searing letter to her father, telling in detail Smith’s awful abuse. Once more, Abigail intercepted the letter and rebuked Nabby for threatening John’s emotional equilibrium. This was around the time that the ex-president was engaged in his violent controversy with Mercy Otis Warren. Tormented by his creditors, Colonel Smith abandoned Nabby and her daughter, Caroline (the only child still living at home), and fled west. John Quincy Adams brought the two women to Boston, where Nabby chose to live with him and his wife rather than endure Abigail’s attempts to mother her at Peacefield.

A year later, Colonel Smith appeared in Boston and abruptly ordered Nabby to pack her trunk. He had found refuge in Chenango, New York, with his relatives, and it was her duty to join him. To her parents’ horror, Nabby consented and vanished into northern New York state, where she did not write to anyone in the family for the next three years.

Early in 1811, Abigail received a stunning letter: Nabby feared a “hardness” in her right breast might be cancer. She described her symptoms, and Abigail rushed to confer with the best doctors in Boston. All agreed that Nabby could not get decent care in northern New York, a virtual wilderness in 1811. After several delays she decided to come to Peacefield, where the Boston physicians seemed to think her condition could be cured by hemlock pills. Nabby, meanwhile, was reading about her illness and discovered a treatise on breast cancer by Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, an old and close friend of her parents. She wrote to him, describing her symptoms, and he recommended immediate surgery.

On October 8, 1811, four surgeons, led by Dr. John Collins Warren, amputated Nabby’s cancerous right breast. She remained conscious during the twenty-five minute operation, never making a sound. The doctors marveled at her courage. For Abigail and John, the operation was a nightmare that left them barely able to speak or think. John said he felt as if he were living the Book of Job. Abigail said she felt as if she had survived a session in the biblical fiery furnace.
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Accentuating the sense of nightmare was the almost simultaneous illnesses and deaths of Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch and her husband, as well as the heartbreaking decline of Sally Smith Adams, Charles’s widow,
who was dying of consumption in another room in Peacefield. The ex-president was also a patient. He had rushed outdoors to see a comet passing overhead and fallen over a stake, inflicting an ugly gash on his leg. Compounding the family’s misery, their son Thomas, whom Abigail had persuaded to return to Boston to practice law, had been thrown by his horse, and his doctors feared he might be crippled for life. Indomitable as always, Abigail struggled to nurse everyone. But Nabby was her deepest anguish. Three months after the surgery, she could barely sit up in bed and was unable to use her right arm. When her husband took her back to Chenango six months later, the arm was still in a sling. Almost frantically, Abigail told John Quincy and other correspondents that the doctors had assured her that Nabby’s recovery would be complete.