John Quincy Adams

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by James Traub


  Adams’ life had now settled into a pattern. During the day he worked at the senate or went to his State Street office, where he studied law and met with the occasional client. He had been appointed a commissioner of bankruptcy, a post that offered a new source of income. He spent most evenings at home with Louisa and George. He often read to Louisa and her younger sister Kitty, who had come up to Boston with her mother in 1802 and remained behind as a companion: the Dunciad, Paradise Lost, essays of Locke. He was, characteristically, preparing for the obligations of fatherhood by reading Plutarch on the education of children. Once a week, Adams joined a group of gentleman scientists to perform experiments. One evening Josiah Quincy delivered a lecture on electricity. “We broke two of our Leyden jars by charging them too highly,” Adams wrote. He was suffering from pain in his shoulder, and he allowed his friends to administer a few electric shocks in the hopes of speeding his recovery—an early version of the electric stimulation now used by physical therapists. Other sessions involved inquiries into chemistry and algebra.

  Louisa’s first months in Boston were not very happy ones. She remained convinced that Abigail viewed her as “a maudlin hysterical fine Lady.” She also thought that Nabby had wanted John Quincy to marry Caroline, Louisa’s more worldly older sister. To make matters worse, on the passage from Berlin, her husband had told her of his former love for Mary Frazier, and of course this had only convinced Louisa of her unworthiness. When she met Mary, which she appears to have done twice, she found that her husband’s former belle was “all that she had been described.” And then in April 1802, she received word that her father had died, a bankrupt held in contempt by the world. Louisa could not think of his demise without a sense of shame and of anger at a world that had subjected her father to such unmerited humiliation.

  But Louisa was not quite as frail as she appeared, either to the Adamses or to herself. She was a woman of uncommon intelligence who would later dabble in writing poetry, drama, and fiction. She was emotional and expressive, where her husband was rational and withdrawn. She needed friends, and she had a gift for making them. The entire Boston elite called on her: “The Amory’s, the Codman’s, the Russells, The Sheaffes, the Sergeants, the Cushing’s, The Paynes, the Sullivans, the Babcocks, the Gores, the Hubbards, the Tudors, the Quincy’s,” and so on, as she listed them in her journal. Louisa went to parties and gave some of her own in the house on Hanover Square. She felt very close to Otis and his wife, Sally, whose home was the center of genteel society in Boston and who carried themselves with an effortless grace she could only wistfully admire. “They were both,” she wrote, “so calculated to shine by the ease of their manners, their distinguished minds, and their liberal hospitality, it was impossible to know them without feeling their claim to admiration and acknowledging it.” And she became pregnant once again. On July 4, 1803—an auspicious date—she gave birth to another boy. And this time the boy was named John. She had produced two heirs to the Adams family name.

  The young couple spent their week in Boston and their weekends in Quincy. Adams was a prodigious walker, as his father had been, and sometimes he would walk from Boston to Quincy and time himself—two and a half hours, at a speed of sixteen minutes a mile (meaning that the trip was nine and a half miles). Once in the countryside he would go hunting or fishing, or walk the property with his father. John had dubbed the eighty-acre farm that came with the Vassall-Borland house Peacefields and had since added more adjacent property, so that his total holdings came to six hundred acres. Abigail had never been altogether satisfied with the house, which she found low and small, and in 1800, while her husband was in Washington, she had added a wing that virtually doubled its size. This long, three-story clapboard house had fine parlors with furniture and porcelain Adams had acquired in Europe, a broad staircase leading to spacious bedrooms, and a separate kitchen to keep the smoke and heat away from the living quarters. A French visitor in 1788 had marveled that the former American diplomat lived in a home no second-rate Paris lawyer would accept as a country place; now Adams had a home suitable to his status as America’s only living ex-president.

  Peacefields was John Adams’ shelter from the political—and personal—battles that had defined his life for the past four decades. Abigail thought she had never seen him so tranquil. She, herself, though at times quite ill, delighted in the fruit trees in her garden—pear and apple, plum and peach. The Adamses were not dilettantes; the farm had served as their source of support their whole lives together. And then this beloved shelter and family retreat was threatened with destruction. On April 1, 1803, John Quincy received a letter from London stating that Bird, Savage and Bird, the London bank that held his parents’ assets, had failed. John Adams had patriotically purchased about $16,000 worth of matured American bonds during the revolution, and John Quincy had transferred the funds from Holland to the British firm, which offered a higher rate of interest and a greater sense of security. Bird Savage served as the bank for the US Treasury in England.

  John Quincy’s sensible investment had backfired. Checks written on his father’s account were immediately returned with demand for payment. John Quincy hurried home to deliver the disastrous news to his parents. “They felt it severely, but bore it with proper firmness and composure,” he wrote in his journal. Indeed, stoicism in the face of loss was deeply etched in the family ethos. “If I cannot keep a carriage, I will ride in a chaise,” Abigail wrote defiantly to Tom. “If we cannot pay our labourers upon our Farms, we will let them to the halves, and live upon a part.”

  But the farm itself was at risk, for it was the only substantial remaining asset the elder Adamses owned. The Adams’ friends in London, including Rufus King, the minister to England, wrote promising to cover outstanding debts—but they would have to be repaid. Only John Quincy was in a position to do so. “I feel myself in a great degree answerable for this calamity,” he wrote, “and of course bound to share largely in the loss.” Adams was prepared to empty his own purse to save his parents. He tried to sell his insurance—and his father’s—but couldn’t find a buyer. He tried to sell back his own home, but Isaac Smith refused. He did sell the house in Franklin Street for $7,175—a 10 percent profit after one year.

  John Quincy now thought of a more drastic solution. He asked his father’s brother, Peter, to appraise the value of the farm. Peter came back with a figure of $16,803 for the land as well as four houses and three barns. And John Quincy agreed to give his parents $12,813 for 250 acres, the barns, and all the houses save his parents’. His parents would have the use of the entire property for the rest of their lives, and it would revert to him upon their death. Thus John Quincy Adams became the owner of the family farm and his parents’ savior—at the cost of virtually his entire fortune. As a struggling lawyer and state legislator, he had reason to fear that he would not be able to climb out of the hole he was digging for many years, but he never hesitated. In his own mind he was only repaying them for a lifetime of nurture and instruction. Given the almost disabling sensitivity he felt about the advantages conferred on him by his father’s exalted station in life, he may also have taken some deep satisfaction at the reversal of the family order. His parents now depended on him and would forever after.

  ADAMS TURNED THIRTY-FIVE IN 1802. AS A LAWYER, AND AS AN investor, he remained far behind his peers. But as a political thinker he was already fully evolved. He had developed an identifiable worldview, one compounded of Puritan morality and Federalist conservatism, but steeped in a study of history as well as in personal experience of the great conflicts between monarchy and republicanism in Europe. In late 1802, Adams was invited to give the annual oration celebrating the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock. He spoke of Leyden, his former home, from which the Pilgrims had set out for the New World. The other settlers in America had come with many motives, including the hope of gain. Only the Pilgrims, he said, had obeyed a command of conscience. They remind us, he told his listeners, of the fundamental fact upon which all soc
ial life must rest: “Man was not made for himself alone.” The social compact binds the person to his country; the Christian obligation of “universal charity” links the individual to other human beings. Even before they reached New England, the Pilgrims had drawn up a compact by which they hoped to build a community founded on faith and truth—and, Adams noted, love of the very country that had driven them out. Patriotism, like conscience, was “a sacred bond.”

  The political life the Pilgrims had established in Massachusetts was based on eternal truths. And yet the form it took was adapted to real human nature. Adams observed that the Plymouth Compact had envisioned the collective ownership of property but that the settlers had tried the experiment and then wisely abandoned it. Forbidding the private ownership of property “discourages all energy, by destroying its rewards.” Adams rebuked Jean-Jacques Rousseau for his naïveté: “To form principles of government upon too advantageous an estimate of the human character is an error of inexperience.” The French Revolution had furnished abundant evidence of this mistake. Adams was continuing the argument he had begun with his Publicola letters, defending the Burkean wisdom drawn from tradition and lived experience as against the a priori principles Rousseau and Thomas Paine had derived from an alleged state of nature.

  The limit on Adams’ political fortunes turned out to be a short-lived one. In late 1802, Jonathan Mason, one of Massachusetts’ US senators, decided not to run for reelection. The leading candidate to replace him was Timothy Pickering, the fiery secretary of state John Adams had dismissed for insubordination in 1800. Pickering, in turn, had joined Hamilton’s scheme to unseat the president. Pickering was the leader of the hard-line, pro-British faction known as the Essex Junto. His history made him controversial, and the state party agreed that if he weren’t chosen after two ballots, they would look elsewhere.

  Adams was the obvious alternative, though the bitter feelings between his family and the hard-liners posed a problem as well. Party officials were also considering Fisher Ames, a former congressman, a golden-tongued attorney, and a member of the Junto. Adams deferred to Ames, as he had to Josiah Quincy, but Ames, too, had no wish to run. Adams had no fortune to protect; all his wishes centered on politics. He agreed to stand, and when, on February 3, 1803, Pickering’s candidacy failed, the younger man was chosen to become a US senator. Several weeks later, the state’s other senator, Dwight Foster, resigned, and Pickering was chosen to fill out the remainder of his term, thus becoming Massachusetts’ junior senator, a status he found galling. The man of no party and the hard-core partisan would make for very fractious colleagues in Washington.

  CHAPTER 10

  Curse on the Stripling, How He Apes His Sire

  (1803–1804)

  NO ONE WHO VISITED WASHINGTON IN THE FIRST YEARS OF the nineteenth century could avoid remarking on the shocking gap between the magnificence of the city’s conception, meant to accommodate the government of an emerging world power, and the pitiful condition of the city itself. When Albert Gallatin, a Swiss national familiar with Europe’s great cities, came to Washington to serve as President Jefferson’s secretary of the treasury, he wrote to his wife Hannah, “Around the Capitol are seven or eight boarding-houses, one tailor, one shoemaker, one printer, a washing-woman, a grocery shop, a pamphlets and stationery shop, a small dry-goods store and an oyster-house. This makes the whole of the Federal City connected with the Capitol.”

  The Capitol, like the city itself, was projected for magnificence but remained in a very humble state. Only the north wing, intended for the Senate, had been built when President Adams and the legislature moved from Philadelphia in 1800. The Senate met on the ground floor in a semicircular columned space with six tall windows at the rear and fireplaces on either side. At first the House of Representatives met in the Library of Congress on the second floor, but in 1801 it moved into a hastily built elliptical structure erected on the foundations of the south wing and known as “the oven,” owing both to its shape and the stuffy, overheated interior. This was the jerry-built complex in which Adams and his colleagues worked. The Congress had never appropriated enough money for upkeep, and the roof leaked so badly that lawmakers were forced to adjourn for three days in the fall of 1803 while masons repaired the damage. Since this happened to fall during horse-racing season, most congressmen were happy to knock off work. Several months later, the Senate passed a resolution, never carried into effect, to stop work on the Capitol, move the legislature to the president’s house, and buy the president a new home.

  The Senate had a gallery upstairs, but visitors, when there were any, often milled around among the senators. Vice President Aaron Burr took exception to this practice, and one morning in late 1803 he ordered the floor cleared of everyone save members of the House. This sparked a lively debate, with several senators insisting that “ladies” should be allowed to stay, “since their presence gave an animation to debate, that is not only pleasing but necessary,” according to a contemporary account. Three others, including Adams, demurred, insisting that “their admission introduced noise & confusion into the debate—that several senators frequently left their places—& that debates were protracted to arrest the attention of the ladies.” Adams was, as we would say today, a work horse, not a show horse. The work horses carried the day.

  The president’s house lay a mile and a half from the seat of the legislature, across a swamp, with virtually nothing between them. The entire city of Washington had 109 permanent structures in 1800, though quite a few derelict ones, as well as empty warehouses and collapsed bridges; the private developers who had been expected to build the place up had failed to invest, while the government had appropriated funds for very little beyond the construction of the president’s house, the Capitol, and the Treasury. The Congress would not pay to begin grading the streets until 1807. Most legislators did not bring their families with them and lived in one of the boarding houses near the Capitol. Louisa was fortunate to have her sister and her mother’s family with her. But having grown up in London and lived for four years in Berlin, Louisa was as shocked as Gallatin. In her memoirs she recalled, “The City not being laid out; the Streets not graduated; the bridges consisting of mere loose planks; and huge stumps of trees recently cut down intercepting every path; and the roads intersected by deep ravines continually enlarged by rain.”

  Jeffersonian Washington was a shabby, dusty, and rather solitary place. But in part for this very reason the city had an air of intimacy unimaginable in a European capital. Neither the president nor the legislators had a staff, and almost all the employees of the federal government lived elsewhere, working as postmasters, revenue collectors, or soldiers. Only a few countries had sent ministers. There were few journalists to look over anyone’s shoulder and few servants to bar the door to visitors. President Jefferson’s convictions about democracy dictated an informal style of governing as much as a blueprint for government itself. Soon after taking office, Jefferson decided that as a matter of policy he would abolish the idea of fixed appointments and would make himself available to callers at any hour of the day. The president practiced dishabille as a matter of principle. He was in the habit of greeting visitors to his home in faded corduroys and down-at-the-heel slippers. The new British minister, Anthony Merry, a figure of frosty propriety, arrived for his formal presentation to the president kitted out in diplomatic finery; the president wore a tattered bathrobe. Another of Jefferson’s democratic decrees was that he would not observe orders of precedence between diplomats and government servants, or for that matter among diplomats. Merry was shocked to be seated “pell-mell”—a favorite expression of Jefferson’s—among the dinner guests.

  Adams was able to bring his wife and son with him to Washington only because he stayed at the fine Georgetown home of Walter Hellen, a prosperous tobacco merchant who had married Louisa’s older sister Nancy. (The other Johnson sisters, Caroline, Kitty, and Adelaide, remained unmarried.) The Hellens’ brick-fronted home was in the 2600 block of K
Street, at least as Pierre Charles L’Enfant had laid out the still-hypothetical nation’s capital. Every day Adams walked the two and a half dusty or muddy miles from home to the Capitol, a solitary journey through a largely barren landscape. At times he trudged through snowstorms. And yet his journal records absolutely nothing of his personal habits or of his social life. He wrote almost exclusively of the battles raging in the leaky, half-finished Capitol—struggles that to him echoed with vast import, even if to others they seemed to amount to little more than partisan haggling for advantage. The remainder of Adams’ day, by his own account, consisted of reading books he had borrowed from the Senate library, writing letters, and dining with the family. He pleaded two cases before the Supreme Court.

  The Adamses did, in fact, attend a regular circuit of card parties and balls and dinners, as Louisa informed Abigail that winter. The lack of other forms of entertainment may have made the tiny community of lawmakers, government officials, and diplomats socialize all the more enthusiastically. Because they lived in a fine house of their own—or at least of their in-laws—the Adams often entertained at home. And of course they were frequent guests at the White House.

  The Adamses were among the president’s most regular visitors. He would have them over for a small dinner, where brilliant company could be expected. “The entertainment was handsome,” Louisa recalled. “French servants in livery, a French Butler, a French cuisine, and a buffet full of choice Wine and Plate.” But the fire was barely lit on a freezing day, and the whole assembly huddled together after dinner, their teeth chattering.

 

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