by James Traub
Adams returned to Newburyport in the fall of 1788 but found that he was no better. In mid-October, he wrote in his diary that “I think I am on a way to recover this evening”—and then he stopped writing anything at all. His journal, which he had kept with very few breaks from the age of twelve, does not pick up again for almost a year, though he did scribble one-line lists of his daily activities in an almanac. He wrote few letters. Perhaps he could find nothing to record that did not make him feel worse. He spent the first several months of this period back in Braintree. Only by late March, six months after he had first been felled by his disorder, did he feel that his health was sufficiently restored for him to return to his studies. Over time Adams’ most debilitating symptoms of depression would subside, while the self-accusation, the expectation of bad endings, would prove almost impervious to contrary experience. He would, after all, succeed greatly. But John Quincy Adams was not fashioned to be happy.
NEWBURYPORT WAS, IN FACT, AN EXCELLENT PLACE FOR THE HIGH-STRUNG Adams to spend his first years after college—small enough to offer him an enfolding community, big enough and wealthy enough to offer the social life he craved. In the spring of 1789, his spirits having lifted, Adams would amble up and down the High Street, where he and his fellow clerks were sure to meet the unmarried young ladies of town. Sometimes Adams would bring his flute, the better to serenade impressionable women. There were the usual dances and card games, and sleigh rides in the winter. Adams began writing little sketches of his favorites, though usually in the censorious mode that had drawn a rebuke from Nabby: “Miss Dublois is not wholly destitute of that vanity which is naturally a companion of beauty. She puckers her mouth a little, and contracts her eyelid a little, to look very pretty, and is not wholly unsuccessful.”
Adams began to fasten his attentions on one young lady in particular. The previous summer he had met the Frazier sisters and written, in his usual jeering style, “As they are handsome, I had rather look at them for five minutes, then be with them for five hours.” But the flippancy dropped away when he returned to Newburyport and fell very much in love with Mary Frazier, who was then fifteen. Mary was the daughter of Moses Frazier, a respected selectman in town; her cousin, Nathaniel, was one of Adams’ pals.
Moses Frazier was one of the wealthiest men in Newburyport; his fine three-story frame house, with its distinctive squared-off roof, lay on Green Street, a block or two up from the river. Adams spent many of his evenings between the spring of 1789 and the early summer of 1790 in the Fraziers’ front parlor. He wrote only the most cryptic entries in his diary, and he appears to have destroyed many of the letters he wrote about Mary. He put a hash mark on top of a letter written in April 1790 to Billy Cranch, explaining in a note that any letter so marked should be burned or hidden away. He wrote of feelings “which I submit to merely from the total impossibility to help myself.” His legal training was almost finished, and he wrote to Cranch that he had to leave Newburyport as soon as possible. “Three more months,” he wrote, “may be fatal,” for Mary was “acquiring graces and virtue in addition to incomparable beauty.” (No pictures of Mary survive or perhaps were ever made.) It was not only the smitten Adams who thought so. After hearing an account of Mary from brother Charles, Nabby wrote to say, “You may worship without Idolatry—for he asserts that there is nothing so like perfect, in Human Shape appeared since the World began.” Nabby also wrote to suggest that he first settle in the world and move in a wider social circle—“if it is not too late to advise.”
Was it too late? Adams didn’t know. A man was expected to wait until he could support his future wife. John Adams had begun seriously courting Abigail when he was about twenty-seven, a fully practicing lawyer with property inherited from his father, who had recently died. But John Quincy Adams was in love. In a poem dedicated to “Clara” and composed in the alexandrine couplets he had learned from Pope, he wrote, “The partial gods, presiding at her birth / Gave Clara beauty, and yet gave her worth.” The flimsy curtain of fiction parted to reveal the author as the swain himself:
On thee thy ardent lover’s fate depends,
From thee the evil or the boon descends;
Thy choice alone can make my anxious breast
Supremely wretched, or supremely blest
Adams knew that he would soon be admitted to the bar, and then would leave Newburyport for Boston, where he would take up his law practice—or try to. What was he to do about Mary Frazier? In June, he recorded “a walk in the grove with Miss Frazier”—a rare moment when they could be alone together. In early July, he spent almost every evening at the Frazier household. On July 15, he was admitted to the bar. He rode into Boston to arrange his office, in a house his father owned on Hanover Street. He returned one last time to Newburyport and then moved to Boston. Whatever correspondence passed between him and Mary has not survived. But Adams’ feelings were so raw that he opened himself up to his friend James Bridges in a way that he almost never did, writing that “all my hopes of future happiness in this life center on that girl.” This was far too grave a matter for his usual juvenile sarcasm.
Abigail apparently began to catch on that her son was in imminent danger of surrendering to love. In August she wrote, “I will give you one piece of advise, never form connexions until you see a prospect of supporting a family.” A few weeks later John Quincy wrote back to promise that he would never do so. In October, Elizabeth Shaw wrote to her sister to say that she had heard from some of the Newburyport girls that “a certain Lady is highly favoured.” Abigail had heard enough. She wrote to John Quincy that she was “sorry” to hear of these rumors, for they would do harm to the reputation of the young lady in question since his own prospects “are not such as can warrant you in entering into any entanglement.” She asked for reassurances that he would break off the relationship. The following week, Adams wrote in his journal, and then sharply underlined, “Letter from my mother.” And he wrote back to say that the relationship was over and the lady in question forty miles away.
Abigail’s words sound very cold to the modern ear. They were cold. But we should remember that a marriage in eighteenth-century New England was very much the business of the parents as well as of the prospective partners. It was understood that the union of two individuals united two families as well and reflected credit or discredit on those families. Mary came from a fine family; that wasn’t the issue. The problem was money. Had John Adams been a wealthy merchant, like the fathers of so many of the boys with whom John Quincy had attended Harvard, he could have afforded to support his son until the young man had begun earning his own living. But he wasn’t, and he couldn’t. In September, the vice president wrote to his son to say bluntly he could not augment his allowance, since “you have Brothers and a Sister who are equally entitled.” And if he couldn’t support Mary, he couldn’t marry her—not respectably, in any case. Money woes would continue to haunt the Adamses for long years to come, humiliating some family members, terrifying others, and at times exacting a dreadful emotional cost.
John Quincy tried hard to solve what seemed to be an intractable problem. In October 1790, the Fraziers came to Medford, a town near Boston. Adams often rode back and forth from Boston. He asked Mary to consider herself betrothed but to put off marriage until he had put his affairs on a solid footing. Mary must have considered this a fool’s bargain; she insisted on a public proposal. And Adams declined. Abigail’s decisive letter appears to have arrived after, not before, this exchange and thus can not be considered the direct cause. Adams could not bring himself to defy social expectations and his parents’ wishes. Such a thing was not impossible: five years later his brother Charles would marry Sally Smith, the younger sister of Nabby’s husband, Colonel William Smith, against his parents’ express command. But John Quincy Adams could not violate what he understood to be his duty. He and Mary swore to one another, with touching naïveté, that they would marry no one unworthy of the other.
This was a dark time for Adams. He
had endured a “depression of spirits,” which today we would probably call a breakdown. He had suffered terribly over his love for Mary Frazier. And as a novice lawyer he felt like a total failure, just as he had feared he would. As he earned little or no money, he depended on handouts from his father, which utterly mortified him. Vice President Adams wrote from New York to say that he was happy to pay the subsidy—and then reminded his son that he was not a rich man and had other children to support as well. The younger Adams lost his first case and had found himself almost deprived of the power of speech when he had to address the court. Charles wrote to buck him up: “Do you know a man of great knowledge who has not succeeded at the bar?” But his older brother saw only the dark side.
Adams was also, or so his diary obliquely implies, tormented by unsatisfied desire. He and his friends often walked in the mall on Boston Common, which had recently been planted with trees and paved with gravel. But in the late summer of 1792 he began taking himself in a different direction, possibly westward along Beacon Street to the lower-class neighborhood known as Mount Whoredom, Boston’s red-light district. Prostitution had become increasingly common in Boston during the second half of the eighteenth century, and in the area near the wharves women openly offered sex.
Adams filled his diary with barely veiled references to his exploits: “Mall. I got fortunately home.” “As before—idleness instigates to everything bad.” “Oh! Shame, Where is thy blush! Late home.” “Evening at my office. Foolish adventure afterwards. Discretion prevailed.” Adams was horrified by his own behavior: he used the word “fortunate” to mean “nothing happened.” But sometimes he made a “lamentable mistake”—whatever that meant. He arranged to meet a woman at night at the steps of the venerable Brattle Street Church, where he was very well known. He waited, and she did not come. Then he waited again the next night, with what must have been agonizingly mixed feelings. Again he “escaped unhurt.” This pattern of adventuring in the demi-monde would continue until he left Boston in 1794.
Adams could not shake Mary from his mind. In June 1792, he wrote in his journal, “Miss Jones—long conversation with her upon an interesting subject. M.F. If I forget thee, may my right hand forget its cunning.” He did not forget her. In a diary entry written when he was an old man of seventy, he recalled that “four years of wretchedness” followed his break with Mary. “Nor was the wound in my bosom healed till the Atlantic Ocean flowed between us.”
ADAMS WOULD NEVER BE CRUSHED BY ANY OF HIS PRIVATE TRIBULATIONS, great though they were, for his mind always turned away from the personal to the great issues of public affairs. His years of legal apprenticeship occurred in the midst of a new epoch for the American republic. The Articles of Confederation, which had been adopted once the revolution had been won in 1781, had been found to be hopelessly inadequate to the job of governing a nation. The Articles had granted virtually all powers to the thirteen states, leaving them unable to adopt any coherent domestic or foreign policy. The nation’s leading men had gathered in Philadelphia to adopt a national constitution. That document, in turn, had been submitted to the states for ratification. People across the country began to debate the great questions of the division of power between the state and national government, and among the envisioned institutions of the latter.
The Massachusetts convention convened in Boston in January 1788. Theophilus Parsons was a delegate and a staunch Federalist, as the pro-Constitution faction called itself. So was John Adams, for the Constitution contained the strong executive he had argued for, as well as an upper house of the legislative branch—the Senate—which would, like the House of Lords, operate as a check on the more rash and populist lower chamber. John Quincy Adams, for all his father’s influence and his years spent in the courts of Europe, worried that a powerful national government would infringe on the rights of the people. At Harvard, he had always taken the republican side of the debate over the proposed constitution against his aristocratic classmates. Adams was not a democrat: he had little faith in the wisdom of majorities, and he still abhorred the mob. But he feared the rise of an English-style hereditary ruling class. “No branch will represent the people,” he wrote to Billy Cranch. Both houses of Congress, he thought, would represent the interests of the rich. This principled insistence on the distinction between the interests of the whole people and those of one’s own faction prefigured Adams’ break with the Federalists twenty years later.
But Adams was too practical to cling to an abstraction. A visit to the convention in February persuaded him that the opponents of the constitution, known as the anti-Federalists, objected to any central authority, which he considered a far graver danger. He was, he decided, a Federalist. He could hardly have remained otherwise, for by the end of that year the new Electoral College was to choose his Federalist father as the vice president under President George Washington. If there was any man whom Adams revered as much as his father, it was General Washington.
Adams had been too preoccupied with his legal studies to visit the new government. But in late January 1791, Adams traveled to Philadelphia, the temporary capitol, while the new city of Washington was being built. Both Thomas and Charles were there as well—the first time the Adams sons had been under the same roof with both of their parents since they were small boys. Once again Adams found himself treated as a member of America’s ruling aristocracy. He visited President Washington, watched debates in Congress, and attended a splendid assembly of the nation’s leaders on the president’s birthday, February 22. He heard about the growing split between the Federalists and the Jeffersonian faction, soon to be known as Republicans, and heard his father complain bitterly about the rise of faction and his grossly unfair treatment, as he saw it, at the hands of his adversaries.
The young man was still deeply disconsolate. Abigail fretted to her sister Mary that John Quincy “appears to have lost much of his sprightlyness and vivacity.” At times he moaned that he would have been better off as a farmer or a merchant. Adams returned to Boston in the spring. Back in the life he had chosen for himself, or rather that had been chosen for him, he felt irresolute and faintly disgusted with himself. He picked up his journal and put it down again. He wrote admiringly of a friend who had had the honesty to recognize that he would never succeed as he had hoped—but then added the thought that a man needs “perseverance and fortitude.”
Adams was torn between aspiration and resignation. “My heart is not conscious of an unworthy ambition,” he wrote another day. “But it is conscious, and the consideration is at once painful and humiliating, that the ambition is constant, and unceasing”—while his efforts were “feeble, indolent,” etc. He had thought of undertaking “some literary performance,” but his legal work got in the way. And he could not pursue a “public career” without seeming to exploit his father’s position, a thought that filled him with loathing. What then? He made a resolution: he would, like his friend, adjust his expectations to his prospects, and seek “at least a respectable reputation.” He would depend not on genius, but on perseverance. First Harvard and then his own languishing career had cured him, he felt, of the delusion of his own genius.
The problem was that Adams was trying very hard to do what he did not want to do; he was at odds with his own gifts. What he cared about were those debates he had heard in Congress and, before that, at the constitutional convention. Adams wanted to join those debates, but he needed an opening. Then he found one. In early 1791, Thomas Paine had published The Rights of Man, a ringing defense of the French Revolution intended as a rebuttal of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Paine’s work first appeared in London, but Thomas Jefferson had passed it on to a printer in Philadelphia with a note that the pamphlet would refute “the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” That was read as, and almost certainly intended as, a shot at John Adams, whom Jefferson and the other anti-Federalists viewed as a monarchist bent on curbing the unruly force of democracy. Adams had recently published his own
Burkean meditations on the revolution in a series of essays titled Discourses on Davila.
The prospect of defending his father and, no less important, the principles of Federalism proved strong enough to overcome Adams’ sense of constraint. In June, he began publishing in the Colombian Centinel, a Federalist newspaper in Boston, a series of weekly letters attacking Paine. He used the pen name Publicola—“friend of the people.” Paine had sought to vindicate not only the French Revolution but the “inherent, indefeasible right” of a people “to abolish any form of government it finds inconvenient.” Thomas Jefferson had asserted that right in the Declaration of Independence, but he had stipulated that a government must be “destructive” of basic human goods rather than merely “inconvenient” in order to justify a revolution. And Jefferson was only thinking of the rights of the colonists against King George. Paine called for a “general Revolution” against all aristocratic forms of government, including England’s. He scoffed at the English constitution, in whose name John Adams and others had once demanded their rights as Englishmen. And he justified the worst of mob violence, which arises, he wrote, “as an unavoidable consequence, out of the ill construction of all old Governments in Europe.”