David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Rent for the house was an exorbitant $2,700 a year, plus another $2,500 for carriages and horses. Though Congress would allot $14,000 to purchase furniture, Adams worried that on his salary of $25,000, it would be impossible to make ends meet. They would be more “pinched” than ever in their lives, he warned Abigail. “All the glasses, ornaments, kitchen furniture . . . all to purchase. All the china . . . glass and crockery. . . .

  All the linen besides. . . . Secretaries, servants, wood, charities . . . the million dittoes.” Yet not a word could they say. “We must stand our ground as long as we can.” To no one but her could he ever complain.

  The work was more taxing than he had been prepared for, “very dry, dull,” “perplexing,” and “incessant.” But again nothing could be said. “Don’t expose this croaking and groaning. . . . I should lose all my character [reputation] for firmness. . . . Indeed, I sometimes suspect that I deserve a character of peevishness and fretfulness, rather than firmness.”

  But more was happening than he let on. On Saturday, March 25, he called for Congress to reconvene in special session on May 15, “to consult and determine on such measures as their wisdom shall be deemed meet for the safety and welfare of the United States.” War clouds gathered over the capital — to the angry indignation of the Republicans. The Federalist press declared the United States had been grievously insulted by France; the Republican press affirmed American friendship with the French and, while expressing the hope that the President would remain true to his inaugural pledge to seek peace, reported that a “certain ex-Secretary” (Hamilton) was secretly preaching war to further his political ambitions.

  A lively new newspaper had begun publication in Philadelphia, in answer to Bache’s Aurora. Porcupine’s Gazette was the work of an English printer and bookseller, William Cobbett, who wrote under the pen name “Peter Porcupine” and immediately demonstrated that he could be as biased, sarcastic, and full of invective as Bache, and attract no less attention. Headlines in Porcupine’s Gazette announced that war with France was all but certain:

  MR. PINCKNEY, THE AMERICAN MINISTER AT PARIS, HAVING RECEIVED ORDERS TO QUIT THE TERRITORIES OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, HAS ACTUALLY TAKEN HIS DEPARTURE ACCORDINGLY. WAR BETWEEN THESE TWO POWERS MAY THEREFORE BE CONSIDERED INEVITABLE.

  Cobbett not only expected and wanted war with France, but favored the alliance with Britain that was bound to result — an increasingly popular view in many quarters.

  It is manifestly the design of the French party to lull the people into a fatal security, to deaden their national energy and to defeat in this way those measures of defense which would secure to us our independence. With this view they will fabricate reports of accommodation with France — for this end they are constantly preaching up the improbability of a war with that nation, and some of the base traitors have even declared that in the event of war they will join France.

  Adams remained silent, but in letters to Henry Knox and John Quincy said he would do everything possible to settle all disputes with France. To Abigail he confessed to being totally exhausted and begged her to come to his rescue. The more at odds he felt with his cabinet, the less he trusted their judgment, the greater his need for her insight and common sense, her presence in his life. His pleas for her to come grew more urgent even than those he had sent during his difficult debut as Vice President.

  “I must go to you or you must come to me. I cannot live without you,” he wrote. And again: “I must entreat you to lose not a moment’s time in preparing to come on, that you may take off from me every care of life but that of my public duty, assist me with your councils, and console me with your conversation.”

  “The times are critical and dangerous, and I must have you here to assist me,” he told her. “I must now repeat this with zeal and earnestness. I can do nothing without you.”

  ABIGAIL HAD BEEN corresponding faithfully the whole time, offering advice, opinions on people, often saying more than she knew she should as the wife of a president. “My pen runs riot,” she allowed. “I forget that it must grow cautious and prudent.” She had encouraged his confidence in Jefferson. Like others, she had thought the odd circumstance of having a President and Vice President of “differing sentiments” could prove a blessing were both to “aim at the same end, the good of their country.” Conceivably the combination of two well-meaning men could serve to continue the Union as Washington had managed all alone.

  When Adams confided that he hoped to keep Hamilton at a safe distance, she provided a withering farsighted assessment. “Beware that spare Cassius has always occurred to me when I have seen that cock sparrow,” she wrote. “Oh, I have read his heart in his wicked eyes. The very devil is in them. They are lasciviousness itself.”

  She prayed that “’things which made for peace may not be hid from your eyes.’” Her feelings were not those of pride or ostentation, but “solemnized” by the knowledge of the obligations and duties he had assumed. “That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with the satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A.A.”

  Her own days were taken up with all that would have preoccupied him had he been home, and more. She kept house, ran the farm, settled issues among the hired men, managed the family finances, and tried not to complain about her health or loneliness.

  In a particularly memorable letter, she recounted a crisis that arose when the youngest of her hired hands, James Prince, a free black boy she had taken under her wing in Philadelphia, came to ask if he might attend evening classes in town at a new school for apprentices. Abigail, who had taught him herself to read and write, warmly approved, but was soon asked by a neighbor to withdraw James. If she did not, she was told, the other boys would refuse to attend and the school would close. Had James misbehaved, Abigail asked. No, she was informed, it was because he was black. Did these other boys object when he attended church? No, they did not.

  “The boy is a freeman as much as any of the young men, and merely because his face is black is he to be denied instruction?” she asked. “How is he to be qualified to procure a livelihood? Is this the Christian principle of doing unto others as we would have others to do to us?”

  She requested that the boys be sent to her. “Tell them . . . that I hope we shall all go to Heaven together.” And this, she was pleased to report to Adams, ended the crisis. She heard no more on the subject; James continued in the school.

  As ever, a very considerable part of her time was devoted to correspondence with the rest of the family, about whom she reported to John, seldom withholding her own opinions.

  John Quincy was in love again, this time with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the daughter of the American consul in London whom the Adamses knew. Though John Quincy assured his mother that his “matrimonial prospects” were still uncertain, she could not help worrying, as she told him, whether the young woman was right for him, whether she might be too young, too accustomed to the splendors and attractions of Europe — meaning her expensive tastes might be more than he could afford.

  “All your observations on the subject are received by me with gratitude, as I knew them to proceed from serious concern and purest parental affection,” answered the young diplomat. The lady in question had “goodness of heart and gentleness of disposition, as well as spirit and discretion,” and would “prove such a daughter as you would wish for your son.”

  “My fear arose from the youth and inexperience of the lady,” Abigail wrote in reply, and asked John Quincy to please tell Louisa that “I consider her already my daughter.”

  Her greater concern was still over Nabby, whose husband, Colonel Smith, Abigail had sadly concluded, was “a man wholly devoid of judgment.” He had deceived himself with his visionary schemes and “led his family into a state of living which I fear his means will not bear him out.”

  In April, as Abigail was preparing to leave for Philadelphia, the weather turned unseasonably hot. T
hen as suddenly the temperature plunged and John’s aged mother went into a sharp decline. “The good old lady is sure she shall die now [that] her physician and nurse are about to leave her, but she judges with me that all ought to be forsaken for the husband,” Abigail informed John.

  Refusing to leave, she was with his mother until the end came on April 21, and it was she who made arrangements for the funeral in her front parlor.

  “I prepare to set out on the morrow,” she wrote to John on April 26. “Our aged parent has gone to rest. . . . She fell asleep, and is happy. . . . I am ready and willing to follow my husband wherever he chooses.”

  The obituary that appeared in the Boston papers, noted that Susanna Boylston Adams Hall, mother of the President of the United States, who died in the eighty-ninth year of her life, had “afforded the present generation a living example of that simplicity of manners and godly sincerity for which the venerable settlers of this country were so justly esteemed.”

  From Philadelphia, Adams wrote to Abigail to express his grief and the wish that he had been at Quincy to give her help and comfort.

  Our ancestors are now all gone, and we are to follow them very soon to a country where there will be no war or rumor of war, no envy, no jealousy, rivalry or party.

  You and I are entering on a new scene, which will be the most difficult and least agreeable of any in our lives. I hope the burden will be lighter to both of us when we come together.

  Her journey south was extremely difficult, because of heavy rains and washed-out roads. She felt like Noah’s dove, Abigail wrote, her thoughts always returning to the ark she had left. The part she must play now, as wife of the President, though “enviable no doubt in the eyes of some,” was one she had never envied or wanted. “That I may discharge my part with honor and give satisfaction is my most earnest wish.”

  Stopping to see Nabby at East Chester, she was stunned to find that Colonel Smith was off again on another of his uncertain ventures, and Nabby too upset even to talk about it, except to say she had no idea where he was. “My reflections upon prospects there took from me all appetite for food,” Abigail confided to her sister Mary, “and depressed my spirits, before too low.”

  Expecting her to arrive at Philadelphia on May 10, Adams set off that morning by carriage and met her about twenty-five miles outside the city.

  I quitted my own carriage, and took my seat by his side [she wrote]. We rode on to Bristol, where I had previously engaged a dinner, and there upon the banks of the Delaware, we spent the day, getting into the city at sunset.

  It took several days for her to recover from the trip. But in little time she, too, was caught up in the tumult of events.

  ONE DAY LATER, ON MAY 11, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia from Monticello to find the city astir over a private letter he had written more than a year before that had just appeared in print in the New York Minerva, a strongly Federalist paper, edited by Noah Webster. Writing to an Italian friend, Philip Mazzei, during the debate over the Jay Treaty, Jefferson had described America as a country taken over by “timid men who prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous sea of liberty,” and by leaders who were assimilating “the rotten as well as the sound parts of the British model.” Then, in the line that caused the stir, Jefferson wrote:

  It would give you a fever were I to name to you the apostates who have gone over to those heresies, men who were Samsons in the field and Solomons in the council, but who have had their heads shorn by the harlot England.

  Successive translations of the letter from English to Italian to French, then back to English again had changed and intensified some of the wording by the time it appeared in the Minerva — “harlot” had become “whore,” for example — but the meaning was essentially unchanged and the letter was taken by many as an unconscionable attack on Washington.

  Jefferson said nothing in his defense, and Washington, too, remained silent. But great damage had been done to Jefferson by the “Mazzei Letter,” notwithstanding the many prominent Republicans who claimed he had only been telling the unvarnished truth.

  II

  THE PRESIDENT entered Congress Hall at midday, May 16, 1797, absolutely clear in his mind about his intentions and walked to the dais knowing he had the support of his cabinet in what he was about to say. Indeed, some of the language in the speech he carried was their own, arrived at after he had asked for their answers to a list of specific questions, a technique employed by his predecessor. Long a man of decided temperament, Adams was as determined as he had ever been to maintain the policy of neutrality established by Washington, while refusing to submit to any indignities or to sacrifice American honor — he was determined, in essence, to fulfill his own inaugural promises.

  But as an old realist, and one who had read more of history and experienced more of it than any of those in his audience, he also knew how extremely difficult, if not impossible, neutrality would be to achieve and maintain in a world at war. He knew how much could happen in France or Britain or on the high seas, or within his own country, over which he had no control. Regional and party differences had made a tinderbox of American politics. It was not only that Republicans were divided from Federalists, but Federalists were sharply at odds with themselves, and the roll of the strident, often vicious press was changing the whole political atmosphere.

  Nor was Adams like George Washington immensely popular, elected unanimously, and all but impervious to criticism. He had no loyal following as Washington had, no coterie of friends in Congress. Further, there was the looming reality that America at the moment had no military strength on land or sea. With authorization from the Republic of France, French privateers continued to prey on the American merchant fleet at will and there was no way to stop them.

  In a calm, steady voice, Adams said the French had “inflicted a wound in the American breast,” but that it was his sincere desire to see it healed, and to preserve peace and friendship with all nations. He was therefore calling for both “a fresh attempt” at negotiation with France, and a buildup of American military strength.

  While we are endeavoring to adjust all our differences with France by amicable negotiation, with the progress of the war in Europe, the depredations on our commerce, the personal injuries to our citizens, and the general complexion of our affairs, render it my duty to recommend your consideration of effectual measures of defense.

  This was not an act of belligerence, but a measure to give added weight and respect to the mission he planned to send to Paris.

  As was remarked at the time, the speech bore a strong resemblance to the American eagle, an olive branch in one talon, and in the other the “emblems of defense.” Federalist papers hailed Adams’s patriotic fire. He had “shone forth” as in times of old, exciting “the liveliest approbation of all real Americans.”

  It may be justly called a true American speech [said the Gazette of the United States]. It breathes in every line true American patriotism. It came from the heart of a tried patriot, and was addressed to the hearts of patriots alone. There was nothing wavering in it; no little trick to catch a transitory approbation from the discontented, or to soothe the fractious. It was the explicit language of the first magistrate of the nation, disclosing to his fellow citizens the honest sentiments of his heart, expressing with proper feeling and sensibility the wrongs done to his injured country, and his determination to attempt to obtain redress; while at the same time it manifested humane anxiety to avert the calamities of war by temperance and negotiations.

  Federalist approval was emphatic and widespread. From Mount Vernon, Washington wrote that the President had “placed matters upon their true ground.”

  Republicans were enraged. Adams had not only failed to express sufficient sympathy for the French but had sounded a “war-whoop.” How, if he wanted to avoid war, could he press Congress to build up the navy?

  Benjamin Bache turned with a fury on the President he had so recently lauded as a prudent, high-minded man of integrity.
In almost daily attacks in the Aurora, Adams was belittled as “The President by Three Votes,” mocked again as “His Rotundity,” excoriated as a base hypocrite, a tool of the British, “a man divested of his senses.” He was charged again and again as a creature of Hamilton and the Federalist war hawks.

  In fact, most Federalists at this point, including Hamilton, recognized the need for a renewed effort to treat with France, and as Adams did not know, it was largely because of Hamilton’s influence that the cabinet had given their full support to the peace mission.

  Within days Adams appointed two special envoys who, with General Pinckney, would comprise a new commission to proceed to Paris. He chose John Marshall of Virginia, whom he did not know, and his own former aide in Paris, Francis Dana. But when Dana declined because of poor health, Adams named Elbridge Gerry.

  Marshall, a forty-two-year-old lawyer, was an ardent champion of George Washington under whom he had served gallantly in the war. A cousin of Jefferson’s, but not an admirer of the Vice President, he was known to be able, skilled in the law, and, as mattered greatly, he was one of Virginia’s few Federalists. Secretary of State Pickering and others in the cabinet strongly approved the choice.

  Elbridge Gerry, however, was unacceptable to Pickering and the cabinet, who thought him too independent and unreliable. “It is ten to one against his agreeing with his colleagues,” Secretary of War McHenry warned the President. Even Abigail questioned the choice. But Adams insisted. He needed someone on the commission whose friendship and loyalty were beyond doubt. He knew Gerry — “I knew Gerry infinitely better than any of them,” he later said. The old bond of 1776 was still a tie that held Adams to Rush and even to Jefferson, for all the strains of politics. From the time of their ride to Philadelphia by horseback in the crisis winter of 1776, Adams had felt Gerry was someone to count on, and he was prepared to do just that in the present crisis. With the exception of his own son, John Quincy, there was perhaps no man in whom Adams placed more trust. Also, importantly, of the three envoys Gerry was the most sympathetic to France and, with his open admiration of Jefferson, came the closest to making it a bipartisan commission.