At first, Adams thought his law practice would never take off. “I feel vexed, fretted, chafed, the Thoughts of no Business mortifies me, stings me.” But then he urged himself to banish these fears. “Let me assume a Fortitude, and Greatness of Mind.” He filled his diary with recriminations. Was he working hard enough? “What am I doing?” he asked. “I sleep away my whole 70 years.” He reproached himself for his languor, his inattention, for being easily distracted.15 He promised his diary that he would push himself into business. “I will watch my Opportunity, to speak in Court, and will strike with surprize—surprize Bench, Bar, Jury, Auditors and all.”
What he needed most was to call attention to himself. “Reputation,” he wrote, “ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behaviour. How shall I gain a Reputation? How should I spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished Genius, Learning, and Virtue?” If his ascent to fame and fortune was gradual, the resulting pleasure would be “imperceptible.” But with “a bold, sudden rise,” he would “feel all the Joys” of fame and fortune “at once.” Did he have the “Genius and Resolution and Health enough for such an achievement?” How to make his way in the law? “Shall I creep or fly?”16
Adams succeeded brilliantly. Although he had started from scratch, in time he became one of the leaders of the Massachusetts bar. He trained and befriended nearly a dozen law students and steadily developed his practice to the point where he became the busiest lawyer in the province. His clients came from all levels of the society, and his practice covered every kind of public and private law—cases involving real estate, torts, defamation, violations of the navigation acts, and crimes. Not only did he spend a great deal of time traveling between Braintree and Boston, but he rode two- and three-week circuits around eastern Massachusetts and tried cases in courts as far west as Worcester, as far south as Martha’s Vineyard, and as far north as present-day Portland, Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts—“tossed about so much from Post to Pillar,” he said, that he scarcely knew what “this Life of Here and every where” was about.17
• • •
LIKE ADAMS, Jefferson became a lawyer. There is no evidence, however, that he ever agonized over his decision to study law in the way Adams did. Indeed, law seemed a natural acquisition for an aristocratic planter. Even his friend James Madison, who never practiced law, nevertheless felt the need to educate himself in the law. After Jefferson graduated from William and Mary in 1762, he apprenticed to George Wythe in Williamsburg to study law, at which time he purchased numerous law books, along with other works of history and literature, including John Milton’s Works, David Hume’s History of England, William Robertson’s History of Scotland, the Thoughts of Cicero, and George Sale’s translation of the Koran.
Although Jefferson never purchased as many law books as Adams did, he bought many more books of other sorts, especially history books. Although in 1770 he lost all his books in a fire at his mother’s home at Shadwell, within three years he had created a new library that numbered 1,256 volumes, which was three or four times larger than the one he had lost. This meant that since the fire he had purchased on average about one book per day. Eventually, Jefferson acquired the largest private library in the country.18
Adams expressed some misgivings over the money he was spending on law books. On the eve of the Revolution he realized that compared with other lawyers in Massachusetts he was poor, even though he had “done the greatest Business in the Province” and “had the very richest Clients in the Province.” But, he confessed to his wife, Abigail, he also knew that he ought “to be candid enough to acknowledge that I have been imprudent. I have spent an Estate in Books.”19
By contrast, Jefferson seems to have had no qualms whatsoever about the amount of money he was spending on books. Even though he was already in debt, he borrowed more money in order to buy more books. When Jefferson was compelled by his increasing debts to sell his extensive library to the U.S. government in 1815, he regretted the loss. When Adams learned of the sale, which went to form the nucleus of the second Library of Congress after the burning of the Capitol by the British in 1814, he congratulated Jefferson for the “immortal honour.” But he admitted that he could not “enter into competition” with him, for his “books are not half the number of yours.” Jefferson admitted that he hadn’t sold all of his books; that would have been impossible. “I cannot live without books,” he told Adams, “but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”20
Jefferson had the same expansive view of reading for the law as Adams did. After laying a foundation by reading the usual law books, Jefferson advised students to add to the study of the law “such of its kindred sciences as will contribute to its attainment,” the most important of these being “Physics, Ethics, Religion, Natural Law, Belles Lettres, Criticism, Rhetoric, and Oratory.”21
Both men were omnivorous readers and both agreed that reading was essential to wisdom. “How could any Man judge,” wrote Adams in 1761, “unless his Mind had been opened and enlarged by reading.” He never lost his love of reading. He said later in his life that he would even “sacrifice my eyes like John Milton rather than give up the Amusement without which I should despair.”22
• • •
WYTHE SET JEFFERSON reading Coke upon Littleton, which was the first of four parts of Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Lawes of England, and students’ usual introduction to English law. Like other students, Jefferson struggled with “the black letter text and uncouth but cunning learning” of Coke. He thought Coke’s work was old and dull, and wished that the devil would take it. Adams too recognized the work’s difficulty, but he was determined to keep reading it “over and over again,” until he broke through it. As Adams told his diary, the difficulties involved in the study of law may have discouraged some students, “but they never discouraged me.” Aware of the vanity expressed in this remark, he added: “Here is conscious superiority.”23
Wythe was more than young Jefferson’s law teacher; he introduced him to Francis Fauquier, the royal governor of Virginia, and together with William Small, the four men dined frequently at the Governor’s Palace. At these dinners, Jefferson later recalled, he heard “more good sense, more rational & philosophical conversations” than at any other time in his life.24 Connected to the governor’s court in this manner, young Jefferson experienced as much grace and polish as provincial America had to offer. Governor Fauquier was a fine musician who helped Jefferson acquire his passion for music. Jefferson took his violin playing seriously, sometimes practicing three hours a day in preparation for performing in quartets at concerts at the palace. Adams, of course, never had this kind of experience.
After about three years of his apprenticeship with Wythe, Jefferson became a member of the bar in 1765; a year later he was appointed a justice of the Albemarle County Court. In 1769, at the age of twenty-six, he was elected to the House of Burgesses. The rapidity of his rise was a sign of his already established position in Virginia society. Although he knew the court system well, he never practiced in the county courts. Almost all of his cases were tried in the General Court of Virginia, which met semiannually in Williamsburg for four weeks in both April and October. Of the ten or so members of the General Court, Jefferson was the youngest and the only member from the west; all the others were from the Tidewater counties. A few lawyers practiced in both courts, but Jefferson did not; in fact, it was against Virginia law for a lawyer to practice in both courts unless he was a graduate of the Inns of Court in London. Although at the outset of his career he attended some county courts in order to drum up business, he was never a member of the county court bar, and thus he never rode circuit every month in the counties as the county court lawyers did. Thus, in addition to his attending the mid-June session of the governor’s council, Jefferson spent roughly only two months of the year trying cases.
Jefferson’s practice, such as it was,
was not very remunerative. During his eight years of trying cases Jefferson’s income in collected fees, before deducting expenses, was only about £1,200. Busy county court lawyers made considerably more than that. Jefferson’s fees as a lawyer scarcely supported him; his plantations and his slaves were the principal source of his income. He was the patriarch of Monticello and his county and was never just a lawyer. While he was practicing law, he was deeply engaged in all sorts of efforts to improve the marketing of his tobacco and corn, including sponsoring legislation to clear obstructions on the James River.25
Unlike Adams, Jefferson did not seem to enjoy the law, or at least he seems to have become tired of it. Lawyers, he said in 1802, were just like priests, designed to “throw dust in the eyes of the people.” Lawyers in legislatures were especially irritating, with their “endless quibbles, chicaneries, perversions, vexations, and delays.” He came to hate the mystifications of the common law, especially as it was practiced by postrevolutionary pettifoggers—“Ephemeral insects,” he called them. He wanted to exclude from the courts “the malign influence” of all English authorities cited since the reign of George III began in 1760 and free the unwritten common law from the “chaos of law-lore,” perhaps by purifying it and codifying it in statutes. By 1810 he had concluded that the law was “quite overdone.” It had “fallen to the ground; and a man must have great powers to raise himself in it to either honour or profit. The Mob of the profession get by it as little money, & less respect, than they would by digging the earth.” Compared with a physician who tried to save lives and always had the respect of his neighbors, “the lawyer has only to recollect, how many, by his dexterity, have been cheated of their right, and reduced to beggary.”26
By contrast, Adams believed that “a Lawyer, who confines himself to his practice and is careful to preserve his honor Intigrity, Humanity, Decency, and delicacy, may be as happy and useful a Citizen as any in society.” Adams loved the mystery of the common law. “Law,” he said, “is human Reason,” and he never lost his “Veneration” for it.27 He reveled in the law’s complexity and was never happier in court than when he could pull out of the English law reports an authority or a precedent that no one had ever heard of. Mastering the difficulty and intricacy of the common law was the source of his success.
Perhaps a more important explanation for his admiration for the law was his belief that he had never known “a great Statesman in my sense of the Word who was not a lawyer.” By his definition of great statesmen, he said in 1790, there were in America only three or four, and presumably he was one of them.28
• • •
AS ADAMS WAS DEVELOPING HIS LAW PRACTICE, he ignored the advice of his mentor Jeremiah Gridley that he not socialize too much and not be in a hurry to marry. Writing a former Harvard classmate in October 1758, Adams asked him about his marriage plans. “For my part, you know, that Women never fell within my Scheme of Happiness, altho’ the world tells me I am over head and ears in love.” Whether he was or not, he said, “I sincerely don’t know.” 29
This reference may have been to Hannah Quincy, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Colonel Josiah Quincy. She was attractive and flirtatious, and he enjoyed her company; but perhaps she was more taken with him than he with her. Her brother Samuel Quincy was absorbed in “Cards, Fiddles and Girls,” which Adams was sometimes unable to resist. He was interested in women, but confessed that he didn’t know how to talk with them, “so dull and confused at present is my mind.” He filled his diary with the distractions of women, music, and parties, and his constant resolve to resist them. Keep to the law, he told himself. “Let no trifling Diversion or amuzement or Company decoy you from your Books, i.e. let no Girl, no Gun, no Cards, no flutes, no Violins, no Dress, no Tobacco, no Laziness, decoy you from your Books.” Still, he could not help himself: for four days in a row, “All spent in absolute Idleness, or what is worse, gallanting the Girls.”30
When Adams first met Abigail Smith in the summer of 1759, he was still seeing Hannah Quincy. Initially, neither John nor Abigail was impressed with the other. Since Abigail was not quite fifteen years old to Adams’s twenty-three, she must have seemed immature compared with Hannah Quincy, who was only a year younger than Adams. Besides, he regarded Abigail’s father, the Reverend William Smith of Weymouth, as a “crafty, designing Man,” whose cynical and selfish manner he didn’t at all like. Abigail and her older sister regarded themselves as “Wits,” and he dismissed them as “not fond, not frank, not candid”; indeed, he thought both of them lacked the “Tenderness” of Hannah Quincy. 31
But Adams was alarmed by the growing feelings he had for Hannah—feelings “that would have eat out every seed of ambition, . . . and every wise Design or Plan” he had for his future. Besides, his father told him he could not keep leading Hannah on if he wasn’t serious about marriage. He came within a hairsbreadth of proposing to Hannah but was interrupted, fortunately, he said, for “Marriage might have depressed me to absolute Poverty and obscurity, to the end of my Life.” So the relationship slackened, and Hannah married someone else the following year, which, Adams told his diary, “delivered me from very dangerous shackles, and left me at Liberty, if I will but mind my studies, of making a Character and a fortune.”32
It may have been more complicated. Hannah’s personality seems to have made Adams uneasy, and that uneasiness may have played into his hesitation. “Her face and Hart have no Correspondence,” he noted. She knew how to check people with subtle sarcasm and ridicule. She could be sweet and charming on the outside, “when she is really laughing with Contempt” on the inside. And Adams, as he repeatedly confided to his diary, dreaded above all being the victim of sarcasm, ridicule, and contempt.33
Although the initial meeting between Adams and Abigail Smith had not gone well, they continued to see each other. Because Adams’s friend Richard Cranch was courting Abigail’s older sister, Mary, Adams often went along to the Smith household. By 1761 his earlier indifference had turned into affection. Abigail had matured both physically and emotionally. She had become more attractive, with a dark complexion and darker hair and eyes. And her sharp intelligence and her wide reading were bound to impress John. During his courtship he only once mentioned Abigail in his diary and that reference in 1763 was obscure, suggesting Adams’s sudden seriousness and his unwillingness to say things even to his diary that he might regret. Calling her “Di,” which was short for “Diana,” the name he began using in correspondence with Abigail, he described her as a “friend,” who was “Prudent, modest, delicate soft sensible, obliging, active.”34
The courtship was not rushed. Not until 1764 did John and Abigail marry. John was nearly twenty-nine, Abigail soon to turn twenty. Marriage changed his life. He had matured as well. Fifteen months before the marriage, he broke off his diary and did not resume it until three months later. And when he did resume it, the diary entries were dramatically different. His writing became much less revealing of his inner feelings, less expressive of his insecurities and anxieties, and more objective and more straightforward in presenting facts.
Compared with the marriages of the other Founding Fathers, John and Abigail’s was unusual, if not unique. It appeared to offer little financial advantage to either party. Although Abigail’s father was the minister in Weymouth and her mother was a Quincy, a wealthy and important Massachusetts family, John did not seem to worry much about his wife’s estate or dowry. If anything, it was Reverend Smith who worried about his young daughter’s marrying beneath her social station by taking as her husband the son of a modest Braintree farmer and shoemaker.
Much to her regret, Abigail had no formal education. “I never was sent to any school,” she recalled. “I was always sick.” Besides, she said, “female education in the best of families went no further than writing and arithmetic.”35 Instead, she set about educating herself. She read voraciously, taught herself French, borrowed books and took suggestions of what to read from her brothe
r, William Smith, and exchanged ideas about her reading with other girls and young women. When she met John, she realized that he too was “a Lover of Literature.” Indeed, she recalled, he “confirmed my taste, and gave Me every indulgence that Books could afford.” In this way she was “taught at an early period of Life, that the true Female Character consisted not in the Tincture of Skin, or a fine set of Features, in lilly’s white, or the Roses red, But in something still beyond the exterior form.”36
She read many of the same works of history and poetry as John did and tried to match him in citing and quoting what she read. Abigail aimed to be her husband’s intellectual partner, if not his equal. She once told an old friend that “a well-informed woman” was more capable “of engaging and retaining the affections of a man of understanding, than one whose intellectual endowments rise not above the common level.”37
Most eighteenth-century marriages were not intellectual partnerships between equals. Most were still traditional and patriarchal. Women rarely had an independent existence, at least in law. In public records they were usually referred to as the “wife of,” the “daughter of,” or the “sister of” a male. Before marriage women legally belonged to their fathers, and after marriage they belonged to their husbands. A married woman was a feme covert: she could not sue or be sued, make contracts, draft wills, or buy and sell property. It went without saying that women could not hold political office or vote. They were considered to be dependent like children and were often treated like children by their husbands. Husbands might address their wives as “dear Child” or by their Christian names, but be addressed in return as “Mr.”
For the eighteenth century the Adamses had an unconventional marriage, one that historians have called a companionate marriage, in which husbands, in the genteel wisdom expressed by Abigail, “willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend.”38 The Adamses were not just man and wife and lovers; each was also the other’s intellectual partner and best friend. “Mrs. Adams,” said Dr. Benjamin Rush, “in point of talent, knowledge, virtue, and female accomplishment was in every respect fitted to be the friend and companion of her husband in his different and successive stations.”39
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