David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  In reply, Mercy Warren protested the “rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written.” When the letters kept coming, she accused him of “vulgarisms” and worse: “There is a meanness as well as malignancy in striving to blast a work that many of the best judges of literary merit . . . have spoken of [as] very flattering to the author.”

  The letters finally stopped, and by all signs the lifelong friendship between the Adamses and the Warrens had ended, which was deeply troubling on both sides. In time, however, the break would heal, and correspondence between them would resume.

  In the meanwhile, the episode had shown that Adams was quite as capable as ever of furious indignation. The old lion could still roar.

  Never wholeheartedly devoted to the task of writing his autobiography, he now abandoned the project altogether and launched into a lengthy — some thought interminable — spate of letters to the Boston Patriot, his last passionate exercise in self-justification. At the start he concentrated on answering the charges leveled by Hamilton in the heat of the 1800 election, then continued on to review his role in foreign affairs, from his difficulties with Franklin in Paris to the dismissal of Timothy Pickering to the XYZ Affair and the missions to France. He became the attorney for the accused — fierce and vivid in defense, writing with exceptional vigor and not a little self-admiration, even occasional wonderment at his own virtuous tenacity in the face of opposition and intrigue.

  The letters appeared almost weekly for three years, until Adams, too, it appears, realized how tiresome he had become and called a halt. “Voltaire boasted that he made four presses groan for sixty years, but I have to repent that I made the Patriot groan for three,” he later wrote to a friend, aware that his efforts had been largely in vain.

  THE DAILY ROUNDS and established patterns of domestic life continued within the Adams homestead, which had come to be called the Big House — to distinguish it from the other houses by Penn’s Hill — and an eyewitness account written years afterward by a kinsman is notable not only for its portraits of the elderly Abigail and John at home in or about the year 1808, but as evidence that “domestic economy,” too, pertained no less than ever.

  Josiah Quincy, a cousin of Abigail’s, was six or seven years old when he began attending Sunday dinners at the Big House, which would have been an ordeal for a boy, he wrote, except for “the genuine kindness of the President, who had not a chip of an iceberg in his composition.”

  With Mrs. Adams there was a shade more formality. A consciousness of age and dignity, which was often somewhat oppressive, was customary with old people of that day in the presence of the young. Something of this Mrs. Adams certainly had, though it wore off or came to be disregarded by me, for in the end I was strongly attached to her.

  It was with certain pride, too, that he, as a Quincy, saw her as one of the last of the true, old-style New England ladies of another era:

  She was always dressed handsomely, and her rich silks and laces seemed appropriate to a lady of her dignified position in the town. If there was a little savor of patronage in the generous hospitality she exercised among her simple neighbors, it was never regarded as more than a natural emphasis of her undoubted claims to precedence. The aristocratic colonial families were still recognized, for the tide of democracy had not risen high enough to cover all its distinctions. The parentage and descent of Mrs. Adams were undoubtedly of weight establishing her position; though, as we now look at things, the strong personal claims of herself and husband would seem to have been all sufficient.

  Sunday dinners, served at one o’clock, he remembered as sufficiently plentiful but modest, and beginning invariably with a pudding of cornmeal, molasses, and butter.

  This was the custom of the time — it being thought desirable to take the edge off of one’s hunger before reaching the joint [of veal or mutton]. Indeed, it was considered wise to stimulate the young to fill themselves with pudding, by the assurance that the boys who managed to eat the most of it should be helped most abundantly to the meat, which was to follow. It need not be said that neither the winner nor his competitors found much room for meat at the close of their contest; and so the domestic economy of the arrangement was very apparent.

  When the time came for the meat course, Louisa Smith did the carving while the President made his contribution in the form of “good-humored, easy banter.” What Adams talked about, his young guest was unable to recall in later years, though he remembered distinctly “a certain iron spoon which the old gentleman once fished up from the depths of a pudding in which it had been unwittingly cooked.”

  With dinner ended, nearly all at the table went a second time to church. At tea following church, another guest would recount, topics of conversation could range from religion, politics, and literature, to Mrs. Siddons, Shakespeare, and Benedict Arnold.

  Like countless grandparents in all times, Abigail worried that she might be spoiling the grandchildren under her charge. “I begin to think grandparents not so well qualified to educate grandchildren as parents,” she wrote to Nabby. “They are apt to relax in their spirit of government, and be too indulgent.” It was a thought that appears never to have concerned John Adams.

  BY THE TIME Jefferson’s second term was under way, Bonaparte had crowned himself the Emperor Napoleon and with his victorious armies had become master of Europe. France and Britain were still at war, and on the high seas both the French and the British were again attacking American commerce, seizing American ships, and impressing American seamen. More than a thousand ships and millions of dollars in goods had been lost, and everywhere in the country debate raged over what to do.

  Determined to avoid war, Jefferson called for an embargo on all American shipping, which John Adams, like most New Englanders, saw as a catastrophe for New England, if not the nation. But alone of the Federalists in Congress, John Quincy supported and voted for the embargo as a worthy “experiment,” the same term used by Jefferson.

  “If ever a nation was guilty of imprudence, ours has been so in making a naval force and marine preparations unpopular,” Adams wrote to Rush. He thought the embargo “a cowardly measure.” He had always been against embargoes, but he would “raise no clamor” now, “being determined to support the government in whatever hands as far as I can in conscience and honor.”

  When Massachusetts Federalists denounced John Quincy as no longer one of the party, Adams wrote to him to say he wished they would denounce him the same way, for he had long since “abdicated and disclaimed the name and character and attributes of that sect, as it now appears.”

  The embargo proved a colossal mistake for the country, and a catastrophe for New England. For John Quincy, it meant the end of his Senate career. In 1808 the Massachusetts legislature elected a successor even earlier than they had to, which prompted John Quincy to resign before his term ended. If he or his father ever entertained any thought that Jefferson, before leaving office, might reward John Quincy for the support he had given, they were greatly disappointed, for this was not to happen. It was Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, who after taking office as President, rescued John Quincy from practicing law in Boston by appointing him minister to Russia.

  Abigail was crestfallen. She thought the appointment unsuitable and urged John Quincy not to accept. “The period is not yet arrived when your country demands you,” she wrote. Adams differed, as much as he dreaded the thought of John Quincy in St. Petersburg. “As to my son, I would not advise him to refuse to serve his country when fairly called to it,” he told Rush, “but as to myself, I would not exchange the pleasure I have in his society once a week for any office in or under the United States.”

  By midsummer of 1809, John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had departed for Russia, taking with them the most recent addition to their family, two-year-old Charles Francis Adams, while eight-year-old George and five-year-old John remained behind in Quincy.

  “It was like taking our last leave,” Abigail wrote. The separation,
Adams told Rush, tore him to pieces. How long it might be until they saw them again, if ever, there was no telling.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, feeling the time was ripe, Rush sent Adams a memorable letter, dated October 17, 1809. With Jefferson also in retirement now, Rush thought it time for a renewal of the old friendship between Adams and Jefferson, and that he, Rush, as the friend of both, could help bring it about. He had been corresponding with Jefferson all along, and thus felt he knew the hearts of both men.

  As part of his medical investigations, Rush had a long-standing interest in dreams. Dreams, he told his students, should be allowed to “sport themselves idly” in their brains. Observed, dreams could provide useful inferences. In the course of his correspondence with Adams, Rush had already related several dreams of his own. Now he had another to report. He had a dream of reading a history of America written at some point in the future, and of a particular page saying that among the “most extraordinary events” of the year 1809 was the renewal of friendship and correspondence between the two former presidents, Mr. John Adams and Mr. Thomas Jefferson. And it was Adams, according to Rush’s dream history, who rekindled the old friendship.

  Mr. Adams addressed a short letter to his friend Mr. Jefferson in which he congratulated him upon his escape to the shades of retirement and domestic happiness, and concluded it with assurances of his regard and good wishes for his welfare. This letter did great honor to Mr. Adams. It discovered a magnanimity known only to great minds. Mr. Jefferson replied to this letter and reciprocated expressions of regard and esteem. These letters were followed by a correspondence of several years.

  Delighted by Rush’s good-natured performance, Adams replied: “A dream again! I wish you would dream all day and all night, for one of your dreams puts me in spirits for a month. I have no other objections to your dream, but that it is not history. It may be prophecy.”

  But then Adams did nothing, and no more was said of the matter. Silence between Stoneyfield and Monticello continued.

  “OUR READING has been all about Russia,” Adams wrote to John Quincy that winter, when it looked for all the world like Russia outside Adams’s window and the palsy in his hands was “rather increased” by the severe cold. He wrote of the pleasure he was taking in John Quincy’s two sons and of their progress in their studies. He reported on his own son Thomas, who was by now married to Ann Harrod of Haverhill and with his growing family had settled in the old house by Penn’s Hill where Adams had been born; and on Elbridge Gerry, who had lately been elected governor of Massachusetts. In October of 1810, Adams celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday.

  He had taken up reading modern epic poems and novels, “romances,” he reported to Rush — Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs — and was finding great enjoyment in them.

  “My days glide smoothly away,” he wrote early in the new year of 1811. Snow fell for twelve consecutive days, leaving drifts ten feet high.

  “I am well, my appetite as good as ever,” he reported after another six months had passed. “I sleep well nights. My natural vision is not bad, but I use glasses for ease to my eyes. . . . My hearing . . . is as good as ever.” His only difficulties were the “quiveration” in his hands and a loss of voice. “It would divert you to witness conversation between my ancient friend and colleague Robert T. Paine and me. He is above eighty. I cannot speak and he cannot hear. Yet we converse.”

  But 1811 was to be an almost unbearably difficult and painful year for the Adamses, indeed, “the most afflictive” year they had known. In April, when his horse reared and threw him, Thomas was so badly injured it was feared he would be crippled for life. By early summer Mary Cranch, who suffered from what was probably tuberculosis, appeared to be dying. Then, Sally, Charles’s widow, began spitting up blood, which as Adams later reported to Benjamin Rush, confined her under the constant care of physicians for three or four months.

  One night in September, going out in the dark to view a comet, Adams tripped over a stake in the ground and ripped his leg open to the bone, so that for months he too was confined to the house, a doctor “daily hovering” to bathe and dress the wound.

  Abigail, who almost alone of the household remained on her feet, went back and forth across town to the Cranches, nursing her sister as well as those at home. “Neither the morals of Epictetus or the stoic philosophy of the ancients could avail to allay the tumult of grief excited by such a succession of distress,” she wrote to John Quincy.

  But greatest was the anguish over Nabby, about whom Abigail said nothing yet to John Quincy, probably to spare him the worry.

  Nabby had discovered a “hardness” in her right breast, and had come on to Quincy from the farm in upstate New York where she and Colonel Smith had been living for some while in near poverty. She consulted with Cotton Tufts and several physicians in Boston and wrote to Benjamin Rush for his advice. The Boston doctors all advised the surgical removal of her breast, as did Rush in a thoughtful letter to her father. He preferred giving his opinion this way, Rush told Adams, so that he and Abigail could “communicate it gradually.”

  From the experience of more than fifty years in such cases, Rush said, he knew but one remedy, “the knife.” “From her account of the moving state of the tumor, it is now in a proper situation for the operation. Should she wait till it superates or even inflames much, it may be too late. . . . I repeat again, let there be no delay. . . . Her time of life calls for expedition in this business, for tumors such as hers tend much more rapidly to cancer after 45 than in more early life.” Nabby was forty-six.

  A mastectomy was performed on Nabby in the bedroom beside that of her mother and father on October 8. As Adams wrote to Rush, the operation took twenty-five minutes, the dressing an hour longer. The agony she endured in that day before anesthetics is unimaginable. The four surgeons who performed the operation told Adams afterward that they had never known a patient to show such fortitude.

  Two days later, on October 10, the beloved Richard Cranch died of heart failure at age eighty-five, and the day following, Mary Cranch died at age seventy. For Abigail it was the greatest loss since the death of Charles.

  The horror of Nabby’s ordeal brought a marked change in Adams. The old shows of temper were not to be seen again. He became more mellow, more accepting of life, and forgiving. He had felt during Nabby’s agony, he said, as if he were living in the Book of Job.

  JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Adams heard again from Benjamin Rush, who wished to remind him of a visit Adams had had the summer before from two young men from Virginia. They were brothers named Coles, Albemarle County neighbors of Jefferson’s, and in the course of conversation Adams had at length exclaimed, “I always loved Jefferson and I still love him.” This had been carried back to Monticello, and was all Jefferson needed to hear. To Rush he wrote, “I only needed this knowledge to revive towards him all the affections of the most cordial moments of our lives.”

  “And now, my dear friend,” declared Rush to Adams “permit me again to suggest to you to receive the olive branch offered to you by the hand of a man who still loves you.”

  On New Year’s Day 1812, seated at his desk in the second-floor library, Adams took up his pen to write a short letter to Jefferson very like the one Rush had prophesied in his dream.

  IV

  IT WAS A BRIEF, cordial note to wish Jefferson many happy new years, and to say he could expect to receive a bit of “homespun lately produced in this quarter by one who was honored in his youth with some of your attention and much of your kindness.” Posted separately, the “homespun” was a copy of John Quincy’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, but before it could arrive, Jefferson had concluded that it must be some article of home-produced clothing, and so in reply to Adams wrote at length about the virtues of the spinning jenny and loom, and of the thriftiness of household manufactures.

  If, as stage-managed by Rush, it had been left to Adams to make the first move, Jefferson more than fulfilled his part. “A le
tter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind,” he continued. “It carried me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government.”

  Jefferson was fond of images of storm-tossed seas and employed them often, as he did now, though in his own travels at sea he himself had known only smooth sailing.

  Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless under our bark, we knew not how we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

  Like Adams, he claimed to be out of touch with politics, which was hardly so. He was kept abreast regularly by Madison and Monroe, among others. “I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus and Thucydides, for Newton and Euclid,” he wrote, which was also an overstatement, but one certain to please his fellow classical scholar at Quincy.

  Adams answered in high spirits and at greater length than Jefferson had written to him. “What an exchange have you made? Of newspapers for Newton!” he wrote. “Rising from the lower deep of the lowest deep of dullness and bathos to the contemplation of the heavens and the heavens of the heavens.” Responding to Jefferson’s figurative storm at sea, Adams recalled again his own real voyage on the Boston, chased by British frigates, struck by “a hideous tempest of thunder and lightning,” the mainmast split, twenty men down, one dead. It was the story of his life, he said.

  “I walk every fair day,” he told Jefferson, “sometimes three and four miles. Ride now and then, but very rarely more than ten or fifteen miles.” The tremble in his hands made it difficult to write at all and impossible to write well, as Jefferson could readily see.