I believe there is no one principle which predominates in human nature so much in every stage of life, from the cradle to the grave, in males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this passion for superiority.
He wondered if he was sadly miscast in his public role. “I begin to suspect that I have not much grand in my composition. The pride and pomp of war, the continual sound of drums and fifeshave no charms for me.” He would prefer the delights of a garden to dominion of a world. “I have nothing of Caesar’s greatness in my soul. Power has not my wishes in her train.”
He urged Abigail to keep up her cheer. Wondering what was in store for their children, he poured out heartfelt advice and admonitions to each of them.
You have discovered in your childhood a remarkable modesty, discretion, and reserve [he told Nabby]. You are now, I think, far advanced in your twelfth year — a time when the understanding opens, and the youth begin to look abroad into the world among whom they are to live. To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.
“A taste for literature and a turn for business, united in the same person, never fails to make a great man,” he counseled Johnny, while to Charles he expressed the hope that with the war over by and by he would have only to study “the arts of peace.” To Thomas he offered the prospect of a career in medicine, warming so to the subject that he seemed to forget the boy was only five years old. “Would it not please you to study nature on all her wonderful operations, and to relieve your fellow creatures under the severest pains and distress to which human nature is liable?”
“I love to receive letters very much better than I love to write them,” replied Johnny, who reported proudly that he was embarked on the third volume of Tobias Smollett’s History of England.
History was the true source of “solid instruction,” Adams wrote to the boy encouragingly. He must read Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. There was no better preparation, whatever part he was called to play on “the stage of life.” It was best read in the original Greek, of course, but he could find a reliable translation among his father’s books. (Long afterward, writing of this time in his boyhood, John Quincy Adams would recall secreting himself in a closet to smoke tobacco and read Milton’s Paradise Lost, trying without success to determine what “recondite charm” in them gave his father so much pleasure.)
RAMPANT INFLATION, shortages of nearly every necessity made the day-to-day struggle at home increasingly difficult. A dollar was not worth what a quarter had been, Abigail reported. “Our money will soon be as useless as blank paper.” Bread, salt, sugar, meat and molasses, cotton and wool, had become dear beyond measure. Farm help, help of any sort, was impossible to find. Yet she managed — scrimped, saved, wove her own wool, made the family’s clothes — determined not only to stay free of debt, but to make improvements. She would do her part in her way, as a patriotic duty but also because it was expected of her in his absence. “I believe nature has assigned each sex its particular duties and sphere of action,” she would write, “and to act well your part, ‘there all the honor lies.’”
“What will become of you, I know not,” John wrote in anguish. “How you will be able to live is past my comprehension.”
That spring James Warren reported to Adams that the farm never looked better and that Abigail was “like to outshine all farmers.” But then Adams had never doubted that she could run things as well as he, or better.
She wanted him home by July in time for her delivery. Even the brutes of creation had the consoling company of their mates at such times, she reminded him. Beset by morbid premonitions, she imagined their separation as prelude to the “still more painful one” of his death, or her own. She longed for his soothing tenderness. “Is this weakness or is it not?”
His affection for her was of a kind that neither time nor place could abate, he insisted, knowing, as she did, that he could not abandon his duties.
On a night in early July, taken with a “shaking fit,” she feared the life within was lost. Two weeks later, after an ordeal of several days, she wrote to tell him their baby, a daughter, had been stillborn. “It appeared to be a very fine babe, and as it never opened its eyes in this world, it looked as though they were only closed for sleep.”
“The corn looks well, and [the] English grain promising,” she bravely reported the week following. “We cannot be sufficiently thankful to a bountiful Providence that the horrors of famine are not added to those of war.”
They had both wanted another child and hoped it would be another daughter. “The loss of this sweet little girl,” wrote Adams after receiving her letter, “has most tenderly and sensibly affected me.”
“’Tis almost 14 years since we were united, but not more than half that time we had the happiness of living together,” she wrote plaintively. “The unfeeling world may consider it in what light they please, I consider it a sacrifice to my country and one of my greatest misfortunes.”
Remembering these years long afterward, Adams would tell Benjamin Rush they were “times that tried women’s souls as well as men’s.”
THROUGH THE REST of the eventful summer of 1777, they exchanged news of the war. An immense enemy force under General John Burgoyne had started south from Canada, down the valley of Lake Champlain, in an audacious move to separate New England from the rest of the country. Fort Ticonderoga had fallen, abandoned by its American garrison, and enemy troops were pressing steadily on, hacking their way through the wilderness to reach the Hudson River. On July 22, Sir William Howe had sailed out of New York Harbor with a fleet of 267 ships carrying 18,000 soldiers, and vanished over the horizon, bound, it was thought, for Philadelphia. A week later the ships appeared in Delaware Bay, only to disappear again, which led to days of tension and speculation as to Howe’s intentions. Adams interpreted such feints and maneuvers to mean the real objective was the Hudson, where Howe would join forces with Burgoyne, but then Adams decided an invasion of Philadelphia must be the plan after all. If Howe’s army was at sea all this time, he speculated to Abigail, the men between decks must be suffering beyond expression.
Howe’s fleet was sighted in Chesapeake Bay on August 21. Three days later, in a show of resolve, Washington paraded his troops through Philadelphia, every man wearing a sprig of green as an emblem of hope. Adams felt a lift of heart at the sight. His hard work with the Board of War had had some effect. They looked well armed and tolerably well clothed, he thought, if a bit out of step.
Sixty miles below Philadelphia, the next day, August 25, Howe’s army began coming ashore. On September 11, in a fierce, confused fight at Brandywine Creek, only twenty-five miles south of Philadelphia, Washington tried without success to check the advance of a superior enemy force. The battle, one of the largest of the war, raged until dark. The roar of cannon and of volleys of musketry could be heard plainly in Philadelphia. Washington lost more than 1,500 men killed, wounded, and taken prisoner. In no time the British were on the outskirts of the city, and before dawn on September 19, in response to urgent warning messages from a young officer on Washington’s staff, Alexander Hamilton, Congress began departing with all possible speed — “chased like a covey of partridges,” as Adams would say — to resettle in the little market town of York to the west. On September 26, Howe’s columns marched in to occupy Philadelphia.
Privately, Adams questioned Washington’s leadership. The Virginian had been “out-generaled” once again. “Oh, Heaven! grant us one great soul!” Adams wrote in his diary. “One leading mind would extricate the best cause from that ruin which seems to await it. . . . One active, masterly capacity would bring order out of this confusion and save this country.”
But writing to Abigail, he showed no despair. The army had survived, the loss of Philadelphia did not matter, he assured her. She longed for “spirited exertions everywhere,” for “some grand important actions to take place.”
In October, as if in answer, came the stupendous news of the surren
der of Burgoyne and his entire army at Saratoga to an American force commanded by Horatio Gates. In another few weeks, like most delegates to Congress, Adams was heading home.
Yet his stay this time was to be more abbreviated even than that of the year past, and Mercy Otis Warren would once more summon Abigail to noble sacrifice. “Great advantages are often attended with great inconveniences, and great minds called to severe trials,” she wrote. “If your dearest friend had not abilities to render such important services to his country, he would not be called. . . . I know your public spirit and fortitude to be such that you will throw no impediment in his way.”
ADAMS REACHED MASSACHUSETTS by horseback in the last days of November 1777 and for two weeks did little but relish the comforts of his own fireside. He was home to stay, by preference and of necessity, he said.
It was my intention to decline the next elections, and return to my practise at the bar. I had been four years in Congress, left my accounts in very loose condition. My debtors were failing, the paper money was depreciating. I was daily losing the fruits of seventeen years’ industry. My family was living on my past acquisitions which were very moderate. . . . My children were growing up without my care in their education, and all my emoluments as a member of Congress for four years had not been sufficient to pay a laboring man on a farm.
But before leaving York, Adams had been told by Elbridge Gerry that he was to be appointed a commissioner to France, in place of Silas Deane, who was being recalled to answer charges of questionable conduct. According to Adams’s later recollection, he said nothing to Gerry about accepting the post, only that he felt unqualified. Gerry, too, would describe Adams as “silent” on the matter, though Gerry would tell the Congress that knowing Adams as he did, he was sure Adams would not decline the duty. On November 27, Congress named Adams a commissioner to work with Franklin and Arthur Lee in negotiating a French alliance.
A packet of letters and Adams’s official commission to the Court of France went off to Braintree by post rider. There was a formal letter of notification from the new president of Congress, Henry Laurens of South Carolina, and another from Richard Henry Lee and James Lovell on behalf of the Committee for Foreign Affairs. (“We are by no means willing to indulge a thought of your declining this important service.”) In a separate letter, Lovell, the new Massachusetts representative, said that all in Congress who understood the importance of the negotiations with France were counting on Adams’s acceptance, and that those sacrifices Adams had already made of private happiness gave them confidence he would undertake “this new business.” There was alarm over Franklin’s age, Lovell said, adding, “We want one man of inflexible integrity on the embassy.”
Lovell, the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs and a dedicated patriot, was a shrewd, industrious man who loved intrigue and would make himself Congress’s expert on cryptology. He and Adams had known each other for years, and Lovell professed only the warmest regard for Adams, as well as for Abigail. But Lovell was a practiced flatterer, sometimes to the point of impropriety. In a note to Abigail the summer before, accompanying some information on the war he thought she would want to see, Lovell had declared, “This knowledge is only part of the foundation of my affectionate esteem for you. Nor will I mention the whole.” So an appeal to Adams’s self-regard, by extolling his integrity to the point of implying that Franklin and Arthur Lee had none, was quite in the Lovell mode.
The official packet reached Braintree in mid-December, at about the time Washington’s army was on the march west from Philadelphia to take up winter quarters at Valley Forge. Adams was away at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, representing a client in what was to be his last appearance ever in court as a private attorney. Thinking the packet must be urgent business, Abigail opened it and was stunned by what she read. Furious, she wrote straight away to Lovell, demanding to know how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.
And can I, sir, consent to be separated from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things, and for an unlimited time? My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension, and must I cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?
The thought of John braving the North Atlantic in winter, and the very real possibility of his capture at sea, horrified her. No one put to sea from Boston in winter if it could possibly be avoided, even in peacetime.
News of the appointment had already reached Adams in New Hampshire. Thus, the day he dismounted from his horse at Braintree, December 22, he and Abigail knew they had reached one of the turning points of their lives. What was said between them, neither divulged. But the decision, difficult as it was, Adams made at once. There was no hesitation, no playing out the ordeal of deciding. If nothing else, he was decisive — they both were. Within twenty-four hours he had written his letter of acceptance to Henry Laurens. To James Lovell he wrote, “I should have wanted no motives or arguments to induce me to accept of this momentous trust, if I could be sure that the public would be benefited by it.
But when I see my brothers at the bar here so easily making fortunes for themselves and their families . . . and when I see my own children growing up in something very like real want, because I have taken no care of them, it requires as much philosophy as I am master of, to determine to persevere in public life, and engage in a new scene for which I fear I am very ill qualified.
The question of whether Abigail should accompany him was discussed, and for a few days it appeared she might go, great as her fear was of crossing the water. It was the risk of capture by the enemy that weighed heaviest in the balance. But also the expense of living in Paris was bound to be more than they could afford, and clearly things at home would fall to ruin without her.
“My desire was, you know, to have run all hazards and accompanied him,” Abigail would tell a friend, “but I could not prevail upon him to consent.”
She would remain at home, but ten-year-old Johnny was to go with his father, as the boy ardently wished. It was the chance of a lifetime for him, an experience of inestimable value, Abigail recognized, her “thousand fears” notwithstanding. Assuredly he would encounter temptation, she wrote, but to exclude him from temptation would be to exclude him from the world in which he was to live. Later, in a long letter written after he had gone, she would assure him he was ever in her heart, but tell him also what was expected of him in his obligations to society, his country, and to his family:
You are in possession of a natural good understanding and of spirits unbroken by adversity, and untamed with care. Improve your understanding for acquiring useful knowledge and virtue, such as will render you an ornament to society, an honor to your country, and a blessing to your parents . . . and remember you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.
He was to “attend” the advantages of such an experience and “attend constantly and steadfastly to the precepts and instructions of your father as you value the happiness of your mother and your own welfare.”
THEY WERE TO SAIL on the new 24-gun frigate Boston, under the command of Captain Samuel Tucker of Marblehead. For weeks there was much scurrying to get ready, much ado over packing and estimating the food and supplies to be sent on board — for Adams, John Quincy, and a Braintree man named Joseph Stephens, who would be going as Adams’s servant. The completed list included such immediate necessities for Adams as ink, paper, account books, twenty-five quill pens, a dozen clay pipes, tobacco, and a pocket-size pistol; but also two hogs, two “fat sheep,” six dozen chickens and five bushels of corn, fourteen dozen eggs, a keg of rum, a barrel of madeira, four dozen bottles of port wine, tea, chocolate, brown sugar, mustard, pepper, a box of wafers, a bag of Indian meal, and a barrel of apples.
In view of the number of spies in and about Boston and the certainty of British cruisers in New England waters, departure was to be managed with all possible secrecy. Adams was not to go aboard at Boston. He would be picked up near dark, at a rendezvous on the Braintree shore kn
own as Hough’s Neck. As little as possible was to be said of the plan. Adams would leave pressing legal matters unattended and without explanation to his clients. Numbers of friends, even members of the family, never knew of his appointment to France until after he had gone.
One of the last letters he received before departure was from his admiring friend Benjamin Rush, who in his usual flowing, assured hand wrote that though he hated to see Adams go, he had every confidence in him:
I am aware that your abilities and firmness are much wanted at the Court of France, and after all that has been said of the advantages of dressing, powdering, and bowing well as necessary accomplishments for an ambassador, I maintain that knowledge and integrity with a common share of prudence will outweigh them all. . . . I am willing to risk the safety of our country upon this single proposition, that you will effectually “baffle and deceive them all by being perfectly honest.”
On a blustery morning in February, the Boston dropped anchor off Nantasket Roads. But with snow squalls and winds gathering to gale force, it was not until two days later that a barge was lowered.
Abigail did not go down to the shore to see her husband and son depart. The goodbyes were said at home.
THEY CROSSED THROUGH GREY TWILIGHT and blowing snow to a house by the shore, where sailors from the Boston were waiting out of the bitter wind. It was the home of a distant cousin whose wife, afflicted by “hysterical complaints,” accosted Adams with a warning. He was embarking under bad signs. “The heavens frown, the clouds roll, the waves roar upon the beach,” she declaimed. He was not enough of a Roman, Adams later said, to take this as an ill omen, but then neither was he a New Englander of the kind bred to the sea, for all that he loved its proximity and bracing air. He had never in his life sailed on a ship. His one venture had been by small boat in boyhood, and then only to go fishing at nearby Cohasset Rocks.
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