Epictetus, the Greek Stoic philosopher, had said, among other things, “It is difficulties that show what men are.”
WITH THE REVIVAL of spring on the farm, with fruit trees in flower and warmer days steadily lengthening, familiar roles and routines resumed. Abigail, in a letter to Colonel Smith, asked that he tell Nabby, “I have commenced my operation of dairy woman, and she might see me at five o’clock in the morning skimming my milk.” To Catherine Johnson, John Quincy’s mother-in-law, she described how the beauties of her garden, “from the window at which I write . . . the full bloom of the pear, the apple, the plum and peach,” helped her forget the past and rejoice. “Envy nips not their buds, calumny destroys not their fruits, nor does ingratitude tarnish their colors.”
“Your father,” she told Thomas, “appears to enjoy tranquility and a freedom of care which he has never before experienced. His books and farm occupy his attention.”
Adams professed to be perfectly content in his new “employment,” but how long this tranquility would continue, he could not honestly say. “Men are weak,” he added in a letter to William Cranch. “No man can answer for himself.”
He wrote but few letters, and these mostly to friends who had written to wish him well in retirement. But then, as he said, he did not have a great deal to write about, except for how his corn was growing or “how much wall I lay up every day.”
Only occasionally in what he wrote did he reflect on the national or world scene. There was no use trying to predict what Bonaparte might do, because Bonaparte was not like any conqueror of the past, he offered at one point in a letter to Thomas. “Everything I read only serves to confirm me in the opinion of the absolute necessity of our keeping aloof from all European powers and influences, and that a navy is the only arm by which it can be accomplished.” Jefferson, he noted, had lately said some “very strong things” about the navy and Adams felt “irresistibly inclined to agree with him.” But there was a problem with Jefferson, he told Thomas.
The only misfortune of it is that Mr. Jefferson’s sayings are never well digested, often extravagant, and never consistently pursued. He has not a clear head, and never pursues any question through. His ambition and his cunning are the only steady qualities in him. His imagination and ambition are too strong for his reason.
In mid-June came welcome news from John Quincy. After several miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, Louisa Catherine had given birth to a baby boy on April 12 in Berlin. They would be departing for home as soon as mother and child were strong enough.
Abigail worried about how well John Quincy might cope with his added burdens. “I pray God send him a safe and fortunate passage to his native land, with his poor, weak and feeble wife and baby,” she wrote to Thomas. When, a few weeks later, she learned that the baby had been named George Washington Adams, rather than John, she was not pleased. “I am sure your brother had not any intention of wounding the feelings of his father, but I see he has done it.”
After seven years abroad, John Quincy would have to begin all over again in the law in Boston, in “a profession he never loved, in a place which promises him no great harvest,” Abigail wrote sympathetically. It was “a humiliating prospect.” Yet she saw no other choice for him. So long as the Republicans were in power, “the post of honor” would be in private pursuits.
Adams, meantime, was busy in his hayfields, bringing in the biggest crop ever. Where once the yield had been six tons on the same acreage, it was now thirty, to his immense delight.
The Adams domain comprised in all three farms. In addition to the main house, there were the two old houses by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born and where he and Abigail had raised their family. In total, by now, there were more than 600 acres of fields, woods, and salt marsh, and as usual in summer the work required hired help.
Adams loved joining in the work as much as ever — for the exercise and “pure air,” the companionship of men he had known and worked with for years, and the pride he took in seeing things done just so. But it all had to be taken with utmost seriousness. Stoneyfield was no gentleman’s farm and he no gentleman farmer. The farm that had sustained the Adamses and their family through the lean years of the Revolution would have to sustain them again. They could expect no additional income. And while the farm had expanded over the years, so had the family. The Adams household was more crowded now than it had ever been and would remain so.
John and Abigail had taken Charles’s wife Sally and her two daughters in to live with them, and this, in addition to Louisa Smith, made six. Nabby and her four children also moved in for the summer, which brought the total to eleven, not counting servants or visiting cousins or friends, of which there were often two or three. At times, there were twenty people or more beneath their roof. In addition, since the return from Washington, Abigail had acquired a Newfoundland puppy, which she named Juno.
JOHN QUINCY, Louisa Catherine, and their infant son arrived at Philadelphia on the ship America on September 4, 1801. “Her health, though yet very infirm, is better than we could have expected,” John Quincy said of Louisa Catherine in a letter to his father, “and your grandson is as hearty as any sailor of his age that ever crossed the ocean.” They were staying with Thomas and had so much to talk about, there was little time for anything else.
The day the letter reached Quincy, Adams wrote, was one of the happiest of his life.
I hope you will consider my house as your home, for yourself, your lady, and son, as well as your servants. . . . We can accommodate you all as well as destiny intends that you and I ought to be accommodated, at least until you have time to deliberate on your future arrangements.
After a rest in Philadelphia, Louisa Catherine and the baby traveled to Washington to see her parents, while John Quincy set off for Massachusetts. The only difference he saw in his brother, Thomas reported to his parents, was a “sort of fatherly look.” Also, Thomas informed them, “He has no propensity to engage in a political career.”
John Quincy wrote of his reunion with his parents as a moment of “inexpressible delight.” Arriving on September 21, he found his father in “good health and spirits.” His mother, though “very ill,” was fast on the mend. Both mother and father, he assured Louisa Catherine, were waiting to receive her with “most cordial affection.” In a few weeks, having purchased a house in Boston, he left for Washington to bring her and the baby home. Any apprehensions he may have had about Louisa Catherine’s first meeting with his family, he kept to himself.
According to what she wrote long afterward, Louisa Catherine arrived at Quincy and almost immediately decided she liked nothing about it or its quaint ways. It was the Thanksgiving season, the days chill, and she was feeling miserably ill and depressed. Family and friends were gathered to look her over.
Raised in France and London, well read, well mannered, and well spoken with an English accent, she found herself being “gazed” at as a curiosity, “a fine lady.” Only “the old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she would write, remembering Adams’s warmth and interest in her. Otherwise, she felt hopelessly out of place.
Quincy! What shall I say of my impressions of Quincy! Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished — Dr Tufts! . . . Mr Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! . . . It was lucky for me that I was so much depressed, and so ill, or I should certainly have given mortal offense. Even the church, its form, its snuffling through the nose, the singers, the dressing and dinner hours, were all novelties to me; and the ceremonious parties, the manners, and the hours of meeting half past four were equally astonishing to me.
Thomas, who had been quite taken with Louisa Catherine, wrote to his mother of her “sprightliness and vivacity.” Even when “in only tolerable health,” Thomas said, “her spirits are abundant.” But she was not in tolerable health at Quincy, and her spirits were far from abundant. As she herself recalled, she was “cold and reserved, and seldom spoke which was deemed pride.” Everyone wanted to ple
ase her and at meals particularly, but the more she was fussed over, the more she resented it.
I had a separate dish set by me of which no one was to partake; and every delicate preserve was brought out to treat me with in the kindest manner . . . and though I felt very grateful, it appeared so strongly to stamp me with unfitness that often I would not eat my delicacy, and thus gave offense. Mrs. Adams was too kind. . . . Louisa Smith was jealous to excess, and the first day that I arrived, left the table crying and sobbing, and could not be induced to eat any dinner.
Abigail’s impressions, written at the time, express concern rather than disapproval. The young woman seemed so terribly frail and suffered such a racking cough that Abigail feared for her life. “Her frame is so slender and her constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.”
Except for “the old gentleman’s” obvious approval of Louisa Catherine, it was not an auspicious beginning. Abigail found it impossible to ignore the “weight of worry” that had been added to John Quincy’s brow.
Louisa Catherine was twenty-six years old, John Quincy thirty-four. In the time he had been away, his hair had greatly thinned, which made him look older, and he did indeed have a serious expression most of the time. With age he was looking more like his father than he had, and there was no mistaking his extraordinary intelligence. But he was less ardent, less spontaneous than his father. He had little of Adams’s passion for life or his humor.
By Christmas the young family had moved into their new home in Boston. John Quincy worried over expenses, worried that his parents might find themselves with too little money. Finding it difficult to get started again in the law, feeling like a stranger, and bored with what work he had, he toyed with the thought of giving it up and striking out for a life of “rustic independence” in the wilds of upstate New York, an idea encouraged by his brother-in-law Colonel Smith and that appealed at once to brother Thomas. “I am your man for a new country,” Thomas affirmed, convinced that his own legal career in Philadelphia was going nowhere. That neither of them was the least prepared or suited for such a venture seems not to have occurred to them.
But the impulse passed as John Quincy began to feel more at home in Boston and acquired a circle of friends. And whatever prior aversion to politics he had had, or that his parents may have expressed, he was very soon involved. “Walked in the mall just before night,” he recorded in his diary on January 28, 1802. “I feel a strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy.” Then he wrote, “A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.”
In April 1802, less than four months after settling in the city, John Quincy was elected to the Massachusetts Senate. The following November, he ran as a Federalist candidate for Congress and lost, but by less than 100 votes. He had become a rising star. In February 1803, at age thirty-five, John Quincy Adams was elected a United States senator, a victory made all the sweeter by the fact that his opponent was Timothy Pickering.
In the meantime, he could not have been a more dutiful son, riding out to Quincy to be with his parents nearly every weekend. He kept his father supplied with books and encouraged him to undertake an autobiography, which Adams, with some reluctance, began in October 1802, with Part I, titled “John Adams.”
But it was the following spring, in 1803, just after he had been elected to the Senate, that John Quincy came to the rescue of his father and mother as no one else could have.
Partly on his advice, most of what John and Abigail had managed to save over the years — some $13,000 — had been invested with the London banking house of Bird, Savage & Bird, bankers for the United States Treasury. It had seemed an entirely prudent step. But in 1803, the house of Bird, Savage & Bird collapsed, leaving the Adamses on the brink of ruin.
At once, John Quincy stepped in to save them. “The error of judgment was mine,” he wrote, “and therefore I shall not refuse to share in the suffering.” By selling his house in Boston, drawing on his own savings, and borrowing, he was able to proceed slowly to buy up his parents’ property, ultimately paying them what they had lost, while they retained title to the land for life.
To their joy, he also announced that he would move to Quincy with his family, which by the summer of 1803 included a newborn second son, this one named John Adams. The plan was to live in the house where John Quincy had been born. But by September he and his family were off to Washington.
II
TO THE GREAT SURPRISE of those who had predicted nothing but dire consequences should Thomas Jefferson ever rise to the presidency, the advent of Jefferson in the President’s House turned out to be far from a radical upheaval, or a second Revolution, as he claimed.
Not surprisingly, Jefferson made Madison the Secretary of State and chose Albert Gallatin as Secretary of the Treasury. He did away with presidential levees, something Adams had wanted to do but felt obliged to continue. Under the new system, Jefferson received the public only twice a year at the President’s House, New Year’s Day and the Fourth of July. He entertained frequently, but preferred small, elegant dinners, which were part of his way of carrying on the process of government. Rather than going to the Capitol to speak before Congress, he submitted his annual message in writing.
Among his first decisions after taking office was to release from jail those sentenced for violating the Sedition Act, and with the avid support of the Republican majority in Congress, he did away with Adams’s Judiciary Act and the new circuit courts. Further, Jefferson abolished the old whiskey tax and began cutting back on the navy, halting shipbuilding and selling off ships already built, while at the same time, ironically, starting to deal effectively with the Barbary pirates.
Yet the first year and more passed with surprisingly little commotion or sensation, until the first weeks of September 1802, shortly before John Quincy declared himself a candidate for Congress. It was then, in the second year of Jefferson’s new administration, that the rumor hitherto only whispered, of a liaison between Jefferson and a slave woman, broke into print. What made it especially sensational was that the source of the allegation was his own former ally and unrelenting scourge of John Adams, the notorious James Callender. As Abigail would later tell Jefferson bluntly, it was as though the serpent he had “cherished and warmed” had turned and “bit the hand that nourished him.”
The slave woman, as the Adamses and the country learned, was Sally Hemings, who fifteen years before, at age fourteen, had arrived with little Polly Jefferson at the house on Grosvenor Square in London, and Abigail had judged her too immature to look after the child.
Callender, having served his sentence for violating the Sedition Act, was out of jail by the time Jefferson took office. But unable to pay the fine imposed by the court, he had appealed to Jefferson for help, asking also that he be made postmaster in Richmond. Feeling that Jefferson owed him as much and more, Callender went to Washington to see Madison and in the course of the meeting implied that if denied his requests he might have things to say. Madison warned Jefferson, who immediately, on May 28, 1801, had his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, give Callender $50.
Furious at Jefferson’s parsimony, Callender switched sides to become the editor of a new Federalist paper, in Richmond, the Recorder. In the summer that followed, writing in the Recorder, Callender revealed that Jefferson, while Vice President, had secretly subsidized and encouraged him as he broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal and did all he could to defame John Adams. For proof Callender quoted several of Jefferson’s letters to him.
“I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender,” Jefferson wrote to James Monroe on July 14. His concern, Jefferson said, was that his own “mere motives of charity” might be misunderstood.
When the Republican press attacked Callender for his “apostasy, ingratitude, cowardice, lies, venality, and constitutional malignity,” Callender struck back in the Recorder on September 1, 1802, under the ti
tle “The President Again”:
It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, a concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . .
By this wench Sally, our President has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it. . . . The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.
In subsequent articles Callender reported that Sally Hemings had five children, that she had been in France with Jefferson, and claimed that now, with the truth out, Jefferson could expect certain defeat in the next election. The stories spread rapidly, appearing in the Federalist press — the New York Evening Post, the Washington Federalist, the Gazette of the United States, and in Boston in the Gazette and the Columbian Centinel, papers read by the Adamses. A cartoon published at Newburyport, titled “A Philosophic Cock,” pictured Jefferson as a rooster strutting with his dark hen Sally. In October the Boston Gazette ran the words to a song of several stanzas, supposed to have been written by the sage of Monticello to be sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”:
Of all the damsels on the green
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