There is such a choice of elegant entertainments in the theatric way, of good company and excellent books that nothing would be wanting to me in this country but my family and peace to my country to make me one of the happiest of men.
The one tribute he received was a letter from Versailles, a letter Adams treasured. Vergennes, speaking for the King, offered praise for “the wise conduct that you have held to throughout the tenure of your commission,” as well as “the zeal with which you have constantly furthered the cause of your nation, while strengthening the alliance that ties it to his Majesty.”
What appears to have pleased Adams no less was the discovery during his parting call at Versailles that his French had so improved he could manage an extended conversation and speak as rapidly as he pleased.
THE TWO ADAMSES took their leave of Benjamin Franklin and others at Passy on March 8, 1779, and, with the servant Stephens, departed by post chaise for the coast of Brittany. At the bustling port of Nantes on the lower Loire, they settled into a hotel to wait for passage on the American frigate Alliance. Days passed, eventually weeks, during which father and son were together steadily. Biding their time, they walked about the town and along the river. Through long afternoons, Adams helped the boy in translating Cicero.
In late April, they moved on board the Alliance, only to learn later still, in a letter from Franklin, that orders had been changed and the ship was not to sail for America after all. However, a French frigate, La Sensible, was due to sail from Lorient, with a new French minister to the United States, Chevalier Anne-César de La Luzerne. Franklin gave instructions that the Alliance carry Adams to Lorient, but on arrival Adams found that Minister La Luzerne had been delayed. And so the wait went on, father and son remaining on board the Alliance.
In the days that followed, Adams spent considerable time with the daring young Scottish-American naval officer, John Paul Jones, who was fitting out an old French merchantman that he had renamed the Bonhomme Richard. They had met earlier at Passy, corresponded over naval matters, and Jones, quite unjustly, had decided that Adams, in his role as commissioner, was conspiring against him. Privately, Jones referred to Adams as a “wicked and conceited upstart,” and expressed the wish that “Mr. Roundface” were at home minding his own business.
Having no part to play, no say in anything, no useful work, and no choice but to wait, was more nearly than Adams could bear. He began brooding. Imagining himself the victim of more than mere chance, he saw Jones and “the old conjurer” Franklin at the bottom of his troubles. He was being kept waiting, being humiliated, intentionally. “I may be mistaken in these conjectures, they may be injurious to J. and F., and therefore I shall not talk about them, but I am determined to put down my thoughts and see which turns out,” Adams wrote in his diary.
Do I see that these people despise me, or do I see that they dread me? Can I bear contempt — to know that I am despised? It is my duty to bear everything that I cannot help.
From time spent with Jones, Adams decided he was the most ambitious and intriguing officer in the American navy.
Eccentricities and irregularities are to be expected from him. They are in his character, they are visible in his eyes. His voice is soft and small; his eye has keenness, and wildness and softness in it.
Adams never doubted that faces carried clues to character: the white-as-paper pallor of Condorcet bespoke dedication to hard study; the eyes of Voltaire with their “fine frenzy rolling” were the eyes of a poet; in the face of Louis XVI, Adams had seen “goodness and innocence” as clearly as he saw “keenness, and wildness and softness” in the eyes of young Jones.
But then studying his own face in the mirror, Adams did not like what he saw. There was nothing exceptional about him, he concluded, writing in his diary. “By my physical constitution, I am but an ordinary man. The times alone have destined me to fame.” There was too much weakness and languor in his nature. “When I look in the glass, my eye, my forehead, my brow, my cheeks, my lips all betray this relaxation.” Yet he could be roused, he knew. “Yet some greatevents, some cutting expressions, some mean scandals, hypocrisies, have at times thrown this assemblage of sloth, sleep, and littleness into a rage a little like a lion.”
Most days, however, passed pleasantly enough. It was by his own choice that he dined often with Jones, spent hours in conversation with him and his officers, and as always, Adams was buoyed by talk. He and the surgeon of the Bonhomme Richard, an especially companionable man named Bourke, discussed everything from mathematics to rheumatism, Paris, London, the war at home, the war at sea, medicine at sea, the absence of profanity on French ships, and the nuances of the French language. At a dinner hosted by Jones at L’Épée Royale in town, the talk turned to the two ways most recommended for learning French, to take a mistress and to attend the Comédie-Française. When in good humor Dr. Bourke asked Adams which he preferred, Adams responded in like spirit, “Perhaps both would teach it soonest, to be sure sooner than either.” But in his diary, he felt obliged to add, “The language is nowhere better spoken than at the Comédie.”
“On board all day, reading Don Quixote,” was the single entry for May 18.
It was June by the time the French minister, La Luzerne, arrived at Lorient. On June 17, Adams and John Quincy went aboard the Sensible, and that afternoon they were finally under way from France, Adams having no idea how very soon he would be returning.
IV
THERE WAS NO ADVANCE WORD of the arrival of the Sensible. The latest information Abigail had received, at the end of June in a letter written the first week of April, was that Adams was waiting to sail on the Alliance. But then in mid-July, Mercy Warren had passed along information received through James Lovell to the effect that Congress had in mind a new appointment for Adams, and that “Nobody seems to have an expectation of his return at present.”
In the year and a half of her husband’s absence, Abigail’s distress had been worse than she had ever anticipated or, she was certain, than anyone could ever realize. “Known only to my own heart is the sacrifice I have made, and the conflict it has cost me,” she had confided to her sister Elizabeth in the first weeks of his absence. “I wish a thousand times I had gone with him,” she later told John Thaxter. For the first time in fourteen years of marriage she had had to face an entire winter on her own.
“How lonely are my days. How solitary are my nights,” she had written to Adams in a letter that would not reach Passy until after he had departed.
Her sister Mary Cranch, of whom Abigail was extremely fond, continued to reside nearby in Braintree with her husband and family. But sister Elizabeth had married and moved away to Haverhill near the New Hampshire border. (Unimpressed by Elizabeth’s choice in a husband, the young Reverend John Shaw, Abigail had tried to dissuade her, but without success. “Men are very scarce to be sure,” Abigail had written by way of explanation to her own John.) And now Nabby, too, had gone off for an extended stay with the Warrens, leaving Abigail feeling more solitary than ever.
Earlier in the fall, when the French fleet put in at Boston, she had had her own encounter with French hospitality. A delegation of French officers, resplendent in royal blue and scarlet uniforms, had appeared in Braintree to pay their respects to the wife of the American commissioner. She was invited to dine on board one of their ships, which she did, twice, delighting in the perfect manners of the officers and the sense of being at the center of things. On another occasion, accompanied by Colonel Quincy, she dined with Admiral d’Estaing on board his magnificent flagship, Languedoc, possibly the finest warship in the world. “If I ever had any national prejudices [against the French] they are done away,” she wrote, “and I am ashamed to own I was ever possessed of so narrow a spirit.”
But in winter, surrounded by mountains of snow, secluded from all society, she could as well have been in Greenland, she said. In other times of separation, times of horrible duress with war at her doorstep and epidemic disease raging, she had somehow borne
up, with so much to contend with, so little time to dwell on her own loneliness. “This is a painful situation,” she wrote to James Lovell, “and my patience is nearly exhausted.”
But there was a further, complicating element and that was Lovell himself. When Adams had wondered, from the tone of her letters, if some “infernal” might be whispering insinuations in her ear, he was not far from the truth.
In the first weeks after Adams’s departure for France, Abigail had confided her state of mind to Lovell, who in response had written that her alarms and distress only afforded him “delight.” More letters followed in which Lovell addressed her as Portia, presuming to use Adams’s pet name for her, and inquiring whether he must limit himself to language devoid of sentiment. She replied saying, “I begin to look upon you as a very dangerous man . . . a most ingenious and agreeable flatterer.” Yet she signed her letter “Portia.”
Writing again, he appealed to her with a line from the Scottish poet Allan Ramsay, declaring if “ye were mine . . . how dearly I would love thee,” and underscored the word love. When at the start of a new year she wrote to say Adams had been absent for a full eleven months, the reply from Lovell was closer to the raw double entendres of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a book Abigail had never read: he expressed relief that her husband’s “rigid patriotism” (again underscored) had not left her pregnant again.
Telling her not to imagine Adams doing anything in his private hours in Paris other than attending museums, Lovell, by insinuation, raised the question of what else Adams might be doing.
Lovell was a married man who, in five years in Congress, never once returned to Boston to see his wife and children. That he enjoyed the company of several women in Philadelphia was no secret there, but whether Abigail knew of this is not clear.
In Lovell’s defense, it could be said that other men, too, would, as time went on, find Abigail Adams an irresistible correspondent — young John Thaxter, as an example, and most notably Thomas Jefferson. Her spirit and intelligence, her interest in their lives, her fund of opinions, seemed to elicit confidences such as they shared with few others, though none in the salacious manner of Lovell.
Abigail could have called a halt to the exchange with Lovell at any time, had she wished. But she did not. Clearly she enjoyed his flirtatious attention, but primarily she craved information — “intelligence” — and more than anyone in Congress, Lovell had shown himself willing and able to keep her supplied with news. He reported to her on the war, sent copies of the weekly Journals of Congress. As the most active member of the Committee for Foreign Affairs, he was also in the best possible position to keep her posted on anything pertaining to her husband.
At no time was she indiscreet in what she wrote, and if he was, she refused to be intimidated. She needed him. That her affections rested entirely with her “dearest friend,” and that she longed only for his return, she left no doubt. “I love everyone who manifests a regard or shows an attachment to my absent friend,” she told Lovell, and however infrequently she heard from her absent friend, she kept writing to him at length with never a letup.
ON AUGUST 2, 1779, a clear summer day with the blue waters of Boston sparkling in sunshine, the two Adamses and their servant were rowed from the Sensible to a point on the Braintree shore not far from where, under such different conditions, their adventures had begun. With no one expecting them, the shore was empty. Their arrival at home was a total surprise.
Try as he would through life, John Adams was never able to express adequately his attachment to home, his adoration of his wife and children. And the effect of his long absences since the onset of the war had only intensified these feelings. “I am, with an ardor that words have not power to express, yours,” he had closed a letter to Abigail, and though her wish that he be less stringent in his expressions of affection was entirely understandable, there was never a question about the depth of his feelings or his devotion to her.
But at last there was no need for either to write anything. They were together again and their happiness — the happiness of the entire family — could not have been greater.
The farm would have been at its summer peak, and one may imagine John and Abigail walking their fields together, John glad for home ground beneath his feet again and delighting in the look of things under her management. There would be hard cider again, to start the day, fresh vegetables from the kitchen garden. There were relatives and old friends to see — his mother, the Cranches, Colonel Quincy, Parson Wibird. Neighbors stopped to bid him welcome. Together he and Abigail rode over Penn’s Hill to visit with her father at the Weymouth parsonage. But mainly, it appears, Adams kept close to home, within familiar walls and the embrace of his family. The three children who had remained with their mother had all grown and changed. All had stories to tell him and hung on his own telling of his travels, the sights he had seen. The talk went on day and night, and doubtless John Quincy demonstrated his French to the amazement of all.
Time and again when away, Adams would profess preference for the simple domestic life by Penn’s Hill above anything he knew; time and again, on reaching home, he would say that there and there only was everything he desired. It was a lifelong refrain, and his enjoyment now seemed to bear him out.
Sweet though it was, the interval was no time out of time. The war weighed too heavily on everyone’s mind. The scarcities, inflation, taxes, and profiteering, the incessant worries and enmities of war, were all ever-present. Adams experienced firsthand the “amazing depreciation” of the currency, of prices so high as to be laughable under any other circumstances. Abigail and friends spoke bitterly of a selfish, avaricious spirit that had taken hold to a degree unthinkable earlier. A highly indignant James Warren told how “fellows who would have cleaned my shoes five years ago” had “amassed fortunes and are riding in chariots.”
The news of the war was not encouraging. In the spring of 1778, Washington’s army had emerged from the ordeal of winter at Valley Forge a stronger, more disciplined force. That June, when the British chose to evacuate Philadelphia and march back to New York, Washington had hit them at Monmouth, New Jersey, in a major battle which, though indecisive, had proven that his so-called “rabble” were well able to hold their own against the vaunted enemy. But then both armies were back where they had been before, with the British holding New York, the Americans outside keeping watch, and in the aftermath of the failed French and American effort at Newport that summer, the war appeared at a stalemate. Attention shifted to naval engagements between the French and British in the West Indies and to British forays into the South, where, in the spring of 1779, the Americans were defeated at Briar Creek, Georgia. There were British raids along the coast of Connecticut that summer, shortly before Adams returned, and apprehension along coastal Massachusetts that a major British strike there might be in the offing. But no one knew and nothing seemed to portend a resolution of the struggle.
• • •
ADAMS HAD BEEN HOME hardly a week when the town of Braintree chose him as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Adams accepted and immediately began preparing himself.
There being as yet no national constitution, the form of government chosen by each of the states was a matter of utmost gravity. The constitution of an independent sovereign state had to stand on its own merits, not serve merely as a secondary component of a larger, overarching structure.
On September 1, Adams was off to Cambridge, to the First Church at the corner of Harvard Yard, where some 250 delegates gathered. In another few days he was chosen as one of a drafting committee of thirty who met in Boston on September 13 and in turn picked a subcommittee of three — Adams, Samuel Adams, and James Bowdoin, who was president of the convention — whereupon the other two picked Adams to draw up the state’s constitution. He had become, as he later said, a sub-sub committee of one.
The work was to be his alone, and if ever he had a chance to rise to an occasion for which he was ideally suited, this
was it. So many of his salient strengths — the acute legal mind, his command of the English language, his devotion to the ideals of the good society — so much that he knew of government, so much that he had read and written, could now be brought to bear on one noble task.
Nor could circumstances have been much more in his favor. He was rested, refreshed, inspired by the welcome home and by the honor his town and fellow delegates had bestowed on him. He could work at home in familiar surroundings, his books and papers about him, and with Abigail’s steadying presence, which was always to his advantage. That his efforts were for his own Massachusetts was also of very great importance. After the frustrations and disappointments of France, such a chance to shine again must have seemed a godsend. Possibly, had there been no difficult time in France, no feelings of failure, his performance now would have been something less. In any event, the result was to be one of the most admirable, long-lasting achievements of John Adams’s life.
To prepare, he had reviewed in detail those constitutions already framed by other states, and reread his own Thoughts on Government. He worked through the still-warm days of late September in his office just off the front hall. He worked at a plain, tall desk at which he wrote standing up or perched on a high stool, and he appears to have completed the draft sometime in early October. Printed copies, for the consideration of the convention, were ready at the end of the month, on or about October 30, 1779, his forty-fourth birthday.
It was titled “A Constitution or Form of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Adams having chosen to use the word “commonwealth” rather than “state,” as had Virginia, a decision he made on his own and that no one was to question. A tone of absolute clarity and elevated thought was established in the opening lines, in a Preamble, a new feature in constitutions, affirming the old ideal of the common good founded on a social compact:
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