John Quincy Adams

by James Traub

  In June 1774, Adams was appointed by the state legislature as one of the five Massachusetts delegates to the first Continental Congress. He would be away for much of the next three years, leaving Abigail to raise four children and run the family farm largely on her own.

  Abigail and her sisters had been educated at home, as was the custom. “Female education,” she wrote in her old age, “in the best families, went no further than writing and arithmetic, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing.” The Reverend Smith had instilled an air of piety in the household that was, in turn, reinforced by Elizabeth Quincy Smith, a paragon of New England modesty and rectitude. But it was a bookish home as well, with a library that held the English classics as well as the Bible. When John’s friend Richard Cranch began courting Mary, he appointed himself tutor to all three, reading Shakespeare, John Milton, and Alexander Pope with them. Abigail was a highly intelligent young woman who had more exposure to literature, and thus to serious thought, than was normal even for a well-born woman of New England.

  Abigail was a tiny woman with dark, piercing eyes under fine, arched brows; one early portrait, admittedly by an amateur, makes her look quite lovely, though later ones painted by more talented artists are not quite so flattering. Even at fifteen, when she first met John, Abigail was forceful and intellectually self-assured in a way that Adams must have found remarkable, and thrilling, in the cloistered female world of small-town New England. Adams took her seriously, which she must have found flattering; he was a worldly and ambitious man with an exceptional mind and a playful spirit. The famous letters between them overflowed with love and desire from the very first. “I hereby order you to give him as many Kisses and as many hours of your company after 9 o’clock as he shall be pleased to demand,” John wrote, pretending to be the “bearer” of a debt. Abigail, much younger and more prim, wrote back of “a tye more binding than Humanity and stronger than friendship, and by this chord I am not ashamed to say that I am bound.” She began to sign her letters “Diana,” the beautiful huntress of Greek myth, and John was delighted to address her so.

  Within her own necessarily circumscribed sphere, Abigail proved to be an extremely competent and resourceful young woman. In her husband’s absence she managed the family farm and made a small income on the side by selling whatever products he was able to send her, first from Philadelphia and later from Europe. Though confined to home and hearth for the first forty years of her life, Abigail had a far-reaching mind. She once wrote to a cousin that “I would have been a rover if of the other sex,” but instead depended on men to indulge her curiosity. Very few women of her time succeeded in living a public life, and she was thrilled and fascinated by those who did. She carried on a long and intimate correspondence with Mercy Otis Warren, a historian and playwright and wife of James Warren, a Massachusetts patriot, and with Catherine Macaulay, a British historian who championed the cause of the colonies. She envied them their intellectual freedom and their ability to advance the cause of liberty, as men did. Of Macaulay, she wrote to her cousin, “I have a curiosity to know her Education, and what first prompted her to engage in a study never before Exhibited to the publick by one of her own Sex and Country.”

  Abigail was, in fact, the intellectual equal of the women she most admired. She had committed a vast amount of English poetry to memory, and her letters brim with long citations from Milton, as well as from Pope and the other Augustans. She read a great deal of classical history, though in translation, for girls were not taught Latin or Greek. And she shared her husband’s ardor for knowledge. Years later, when Abigail overcame her resistance to crossing the ocean in order to join her husband in London, where he had been appointed minister, she reported in a letter home that she had signed up for a series of lectures and attended talks, including experiments, on “Electricity, Magnetism Hydrostatics optics pneumatics. . . .” The experience, she wrote, “was like going into a Beautiful Country, which I never saw before, a Country which our American Females are not permitted to visit or inspect.”

  The first stirrings of revolution roused the same passion in Abigail as it did in John. In the days leading up to the Boston Tea Party, in December 1773, she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren, “The flame is kindled and like lightning it catches from soul to soul. Great will be the devastation if not timely quenched or allayed by some Lenient Measures.” Like John, she was an early convert to the cause of independence: in February 1775 she wrote that she had concluded “that we cannot be happy without being free, that we cannot be free without being secure in our own property, that we cannot be secure in our own property if without our consent others may take it as of right.” Abigail despised the British generals who had quartered themselves in the homes of her friends and dined off their crockery. And she revered George Washington. Abigail met General Washington when the Continental Army reached Boston in the summer of 1775. “You had prepared me to entertain a favourable opinion of him, but I thought the one half was not told me,” she wrote John. She was reminded of a line from Dryden: “He’s a temple sacred by birth, and built by hands divine.”

  Abigail did not shrink from the necessity of war. In early 1775, when many patriots still hoped for a peaceful settlement with England, she wrote to Mercy Otis Warren that “the Sword is now our only, yet dreadful alternative.” And though she cowered before the awful bombardment of Bunker Hill, she soon learned to accept, and even welcome, those thunders. In February 1776, with General Washington shelling the British on nearby Dorchester Heights, she walked up to Penn’s Hill once again, listened to the cannonades, and reported to John, “The sound I think is one of the Grandest in nature, and is of the true Species of the Sublime.” Whatever suffering might come, Abigail never doubted that the Lord would smite the British and protect the patriotic cause.

  Few couples were more exquisitely matched than the Adamses: each was restless, brilliant, high-minded, eager for self-sacrifice. John was the more abrasive, Abigail the more sententious—which is only to say that the one was a man of his time, the other a woman of her time. They were, in fact, remarkably similar in temperament. By a strange twist of fate, John Quincy Adams would spend his childhood and youth in the company of either his mother or his father, but almost never both. His mother had sole charge of him from ages seven to eleven, his father from eleven to sixteen. The two so completely reinforced each other that it would not be easy to trace his character as an adult to one as opposed to the other. What is clear, in any case, is that both poured themselves into the raising of their eldest son and that he dutifully, indeed reverently, absorbed their lessons and their example. He became what they wished him to be.

  Both John and Abigail regarded the upbringing of children as a sacred and solemn obligation. They did not embrace the French Enlightenment view of humans as inherently rational creatures and education as the encouragement of natural propensities. Though deeply steeped in that tradition, John and Abigail were heirs to a Puritan culture that saw human beings as fallen creatures who must be redeemed from sin through the most conscientious acts of cultivation. “Education has made a greater difference between man and man, than nature has made between man and brute,” John wrote Abigail in 1775. “It should be your care, therefore, and mine to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them a habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty and virtue.” Abigail and John would have recoiled at the idea that intellect could be taught in the absence of morality, for they believed that the goal of education was to produce both goodness and usefulness.

  John was quite content to leave Nabby’s education up to Abigail, but the boys had to be prepared to help forge a new world in which the colonists would prove themselves fully equal to the Englishmen who now treated them as subjects. The time had come, he wrote Abigail, when the boys were four, six, and nine, to “think of forming the Taste, and Judgment of y
our Children. . . . Have no mercy on an affected Phrase, any more than an affected Air, Gate, Dress or Manner.” He suggested she instruct them to write descriptions—“of a Battle, a Storm, a siege, a Cloud”—as well as to declaim speeches on various topics. As a young man, John Adams had seen to his own education in the most laborious manner possible, copying sentences he wished to memorize, writing out the definition of every difficult word in Latin, carrying his quill pen and a tablet of paper everywhere he went in order to memorialize any new thought or observation or wise expression he happened upon. He had left nothing to chance, and now he would give the children the benefit of his own method.

  John Adams had pronounced ideas about education, but they were not his alone. The men who were to found the United States understood that while a nation of masters and servants needed only to elevate the one and abase the other, a nation of free men needed to cultivate the gifts of all its citizens. “Every man in a republic is public property,” as the physician and patriot Benjamin Rush put it. A monarch could compel acquiescence, but a free people could be governed only through consent. A republic would work only if citizens could be trained to overcome their natural selfishness, pettiness, and factionalism. The virtues that John Adams prized in himself were those that needed to be inculcated in the next generation—disinterestedness, a contempt for meanness, an abhorrence of injustice.

  The civic virtues that John and Abigail wished to instill in their son rested on a foundation of Christian virtues. A child must learn—for it would not happen by itself—to seek the good and abhor the bad. In one of her letters to her husband, Abigail explained why she had decided not to send Johnny to Braintree’s primary school. “I have always thought it of very great importance,” she wrote to John, “that children should in the early part of life be unaccustomed to such examples as would tend to corrupt the purity of their words and actions that they may chill with horror at the sound of an oath, and blush with indignation at an obsene expression.” The nursery itself had to be kept pure. In later years, when Nabby herself became a mother, Abigail recommended Isaac Watts’ “Moral Songs for Children,” an immensely popular Christian tract that, she wrote, taught “brotherly love, sisterly affection, and filial respect and reverence.” Nursery rhymes like “Jack and Jill,” Abigail sniffed, had “neither a rule of life, nor sentiment worth retaining.”

  In the absence of school, Abigail put John Thaxter, one of Adams’ idle law clerks, to work as John Quincy’s tutor. But as a woman who read widely, wrote with great force and pungency—if erratic spelling—and had large amounts of literature at her fingertips, Abigail was a teacher whom very few men could match. And she thought as deeply as he husband did about the forming of children’s minds. In her very first letter to Mercy Otis Warren, written in July 1773 after a visit to Mrs. Warren’s home at Plymouth, she recalled that she had told her new friend of a work on child rearing, On the Management and Education of Children: A Series of Letters Written to a Niece, by a British author—and a woman—Juliana Seymour. Abigail had been very much taken with Mercy’s children, and she wanted to know if the program laid out by Mrs. Seymour “corresponds with the plan you have laid out for yourself.” Abigail made her own preferences clear when she described education as “rearing the tender thought”—not instilling commandments but nurturing the immature mind. She ended her letter with lines of verse describing the parent who seeks to learn “What Bias Nature gave the mind.” The teacher seeks not to uproot that bias but to shape it through careful cultivation—and through love. What delight, the poet observes,

  Each Boisterous passion to controul

  And early Humanize the Soul

  The noblest Notions to inspire,

  Her offspring conscious of her care

  Transported hang around her chair

  Abigail spent long hours reading to her son as he sat at her feet before the hearth. But Abigail would never have thought that loving attention, from either mother or son, was enough. She expected Johnny to read aloud to her, so that she could critique him and help him along. She reported to her husband that she had gotten the seven-year-old boy to read to her every day from Charles Rollins’ Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians, a best seller published six years earlier that, one scholar points out, “seamlessly melded classical themes with Christian ends.” It was, of course, written for adults. And she encouraged the boy to write. In his first letter to his father, October 13, 1774, the seven-year-old Johnny wrote, “Sir—I have been trying ever since you went away to lern to write you a Letter.” He apologized for his meager effort—an exaggerated sense of his own insufficiency which a lifetime of achievements would barely make a dent in—and concluded, “I hope I grow to be a better boy and that you will have no occasion to be ashamed of me when you return.”

  On his own, Johnny read fairy tales and adventure stories and The Arabian Nights, slaying dragons and rescuing damsels in his imagination. At age ten, poking through a closet in his mother’s bedroom, he found copies of the Shakespeare comedies. He fell under the magical spell of The Tempest. Half a century later, he recalled how quicksilver Ariel and monstrous Caliban “made for me a world of revels, and lapped me in Elysium.” He also found an edition of Paradise Lost. This, he knew, was grown-up literature, and he was determined to read what his parents read. Perhaps going outside for safety, he smoked his father’s pipe and read his parents’ Milton—and felt sick at the one and frustrated to tears at the other. He gave up Milton until he was older, though he never stopped smoking.

  John Adams began writing directly to his son in the spring of 1776. His first letter must have overawed the boy: “I hope that you will remember how many Losses, dangers, and Inconveniences, have been borne by your parents, and the inhabitants of Boston in general, for the sake of pursuing freedom for you and Yours.” Johnny probably needed very little reminding about sacrifice: in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the British had blockaded the port of Boston and placed the city under martial law. Even the most basic products were unavailable or impossibly expensive. Abigail, always self-sufficient, laid in her own stores of flax and wool in order to make the family clothes and linen herself. By the spring of 1775, the Adams family servants had either returned home or joined the militia, leaving Abigail to make the soap, nurse the sick, tend to the animals, and of course care for her children virtually on her own. The battle of Bunker Hill, that June, only offered the most vivid lesson in the sacrifices compelled by the pursuit of freedom.

  As the children grew older, the father’s instructional program, conveyed by post, became more sophisticated and demanding. John Adams always found time to write home with admonitions about the children’s upbringing. They must learn French, he told Abigail, for “it will become a necessary accomplishment of an American Gentleman and Lady.” He asked if Johnny was following news of the war in the newspapers and asked her to quiz him on his reading of history: “Which character he esteems and admires? Which he hates and abhors?” He sent Johnny a line in Latin and instructed him to go through it word by word with Thaxter so that he could construe it properly when his father came home. And he should read Thucydides: “You will find it full of Instruction to the orator, the Statesman, the general, as well as to the Historian and the Philosopher.”

  If there was a curricular core to the emerging education for citizenship, it was the study of ancient history—Cicero, Tacitus, Plutarch, Sallust, and of course Thucydides, the great historian of ancient Greece. “The classics” was not a subject, like geography or history, but rather a lens through which to examine and understand the life around you. Here one could learn of the rise and fall of empires and of republics as well, and learn that they often died not from the outside but from the inside—from corruption and sloth, just as despotic and grasping England had begun to do. Rome was everything—both the very type of overweening empire (like Great Britain) and the great antecedent to America. Roman
vice was English vice, but Roman patriotism, the love of the republic, was the great model for America. The Adamses revered Cicero, the brilliant orator, senator, and sage who sacrificed himself for the good of Rome. They recoiled at the tyrant Caesar and admired the courage of Brutus, his assassin.

  At times, in fact, you can almost hear the Adamses fashioning themselves after the Roman heroes they so admired. Abigail signed her letters to John “Portia,” after Brutus’ patient and long-suffering wife. To the Adamses and their contemporaries, the Romans were not simply emblems of individual virtue but paragons of citizenship. The colonists looked to republican Rome for lessons in patriotism, an attribute they exalted above almost all others. In a letter to Mercy Otis Warren, apparently written in January 1776, as John was leaving home yet again for the Continental Congress, Abigail wrote:

  Our Country is as it were a Secondary God, and the first and greatest parent. It is to be preferred to parents, to wives, children, Friends and all things the Gods only excepted. These are the considerations which prevail with me to consent to a most painfull Seperation. I have not known how to take my pen to write to you. I have been happy and unhappy. I have had many contending passions dividing my Heart, and no sooner did I find it at my own option whether my Friend should go or tarry and resign; than I found his honour and reputation much dearer to me, than my own present pleasure and happiness, and I could by no means consent to his resigning at present, as I was fully convinced he must suffer if he quitted.

  The classics taught the revolutionary generation to repress “present pleasure” in favor of something “much dearer.” But the classic world was, of course, pagan, and while the civic virtues eighteenth-century New England most admired were Roman ones, the moral order itself, which dictated a person’s deepest obligations, was Christian. John and Abigail were far removed from the apocalyptic world of their Puritan ancestors, with its vision of mankind dangling over the fiery pit of perdition, but they were infused with a deep sense of sinfulness and a corresponding horror of wrongdoing. Once can hear this both in Abigail’s fear that public school might corrupt her son’s moral purity and in the boy’s apologies for his shortcomings. Abigail, especially, had grown up in a household infused with piety, and God was never far from her thoughts. She kept her son’s mind perpetually focused on the narrow path he must tread and on the thorns that lay to either side. When he went off to Europe at age ten, she admonished him, “Adhere to those religious Sentiments and principals which were early instilled into your mind and remember that you are accountable to your Maker for all your words and actions.”