In Philadelphia, John grew almost frantic as Abigail’s time approached. “Oh that I could be near to say a few kind words, or show a few anxious looks or do a few kind actions. Oh, that I could take from my dearest a share of her distress, or relieve her of the whole.” These heartfelt phrases were too frail to withstand Abigail’s mounting anxiety. In July, she was seized with paroxysms; her heart pounded wildly, her whole body trembled. Soon she was convinced that the baby was dead, in spite of her doctor’s reassurance.
Her labor pains began as she was writing a letter to John. She told him that she had to lay down her pen “to bear what I cannot fly from.” When the pangs ceased for a few minutes, she wrote, “I have endured it and resume my pen.” She proceeded to give John a detailed account of the condition of the farm—the promising wheat and corn crops, the need for manure, the exorbitant cost of hiring a man to do some mowing. After another twenty-four hours of sporadic labor, Abigail gave birth to a baby girl, stillborn—to the doctor’s great chagrin. Abigail’s dark intuition had been correct. John’s former law clerk, John Thaxter, a Braintree neighbor, told the congressman it was “an exceeding fine looking child.”17
Abigail recovered with a rapidity that amazed her. Both she and John seemed to accept the baby’s death as the will of God—and perhaps a covert blessing. She had more than enough for one woman to do—raising four children and managing the farm. In Philadelphia, a ferocious heat wave reduced John to utter misery. He was “wasted and exhausted in mind and body,” he told Abigail. It had been three long years since he had departed for Philadelphia “in search of adventures.” Looking back, all he could see now was the toll it had on taken his spirits. He was thoroughly tired of being a legislator. “The next time I come home it will be for a long time,” he vowed.
With the courage that seemed to come naturally to her, Abigail told John she felt “my sufferings amply rewarded” by the “tenderness” he expressed for her and—though she did not put it in words—by her own passionate patriotism. The sense that she was sustaining—and sharing—this complicated man’s contributions to their country had huge meaning for her.
Behind these brave words lay a growing sense of abandonment. Abigail was not helped by a correspondence with Massachusetts delegate James Lovell, a glib flatterer who left his wife and six children home for five years without a single visit while he surreptitiously enjoyed several women in Philadelphia. When Abigail asked for a map of Pennsylvania so she could follow the progress of the war if the British attacked the American capital, John asked Lovell to send her one. It arrived with a covering letter that suggested Mr. Lovell had shed whatever vestiges of puritanism he may have inherited from his ancestors. Addressing it to “Portia,” he told her that knowing she had given her heart to such a man as John Adams is “what most of all makes me yours.” More letters would follow, full of even more leering double entendres.
VII
In November 1777, after Washington’s army lost three battles and was forced to surrender Philadelphia to the British, John and his fellow legislators fled to York, a town settled by German immigrants, where only a handful of people spoke English. The war seemed to be veering into a stalemate. In October, the Americans had scored a victory at Saratoga, capturing an entire British army. But the British seizure of the American capital was a blow that suggested the struggle might last for years. John decided it was time to retire from Congress and acquire some of the money other lawyers were making.
Back in Braintree by the end of November, he was joyously reunited with Abigail and the children. Soon the revived attorney was in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, handling a case in admiralty court, where privateering captains sold the British ships and cargoes they had captured and frequently quarreled with their officers and crews about how to share the spoils of war. In Braintree, a packet arrived from Congress that Abigail opened. She read with horror and astonishment that John had been appointed a “commissioner” to negotiate an alliance with France, replacing Silas Deane of Connecticut, who had been recalled for purported incompetence and corruption.
Along with a stern letter from the committee on foreign affairs practically demanding John’s acceptance was a personal note from James Lovell. He hoped John would accept, “however your amiable partner may be tempted to condemn my persuasions of you to distance yourself from her.”
Abigail exploded. She seized her pen and asked Lovell how he could “contrive to rob me of all my happiness.” How could he expect her to “consent to separate from him whom my heart esteems above all earthly things? My life will be one continual scene of apprehension and anxiety.” Did he really expect her to “cheerfully comply with the demand of my country?”18
When John returned from Portsmouth, he accepted the appointment. Lovell had made it sound as if he would be the only capable member of the American diplomatic team. Benjamin Franklin was too old, and the other commissioner, Arthur Lee of Virginia, was erratic. John saw it as his duty. A distraught Abigail announced she would go with him. They would take the two oldest children, Nabby and John. But John regretfully demurred. There was a very good chance that their ship might be captured by British men-of-war. A winter crossing of the icy Atlantic was harrowing, even without this risk. Then there was the expense of living in Paris, which would far exceed his meager salary. Without Abigail at home, there would be no one to run the farm; the crops made money they badly needed. John decided he would take ten-year-old John Quincy with him to relieve Abigail of some responsibility and hope to be home in a year with a treaty signed and the Revolution rescued.
On one level, John’s decision—and Abigail’s reluctant acceptance—is moving evidence of their commitment to their country’s cause. On another level it underscores how ready Portia’s dearest friend was to sacrifice her happiness to his pursuit of fame. John did not even try to find out if the accusations against Silas Deane were true. Nor did he ask himself why it was necessary for him to rush to France when Benjamin Franklin was already on the scene.
Adams knew Franklin well, having served with him in Congress in 1775–1776. His envy of the sage had rapidly abated when Franklin became an outspoken supporter of independence. When the seventy-year-old patriot undertook a winter trip to Montreal to try to persuade the French-Canadians to side with the American army that had invaded Canada in 1775, Adams had praised him for his “masterly acquaintance with the French language, his extensive correspondence in France, his great experience in life, his wisdom, his prudence, his caution.”
Why did John take the word of a second-rater like James Lovell that Franklin was now too old to deal with the French in Paris without the assistance of John Adams, who was totally inexperienced in European diplomacy and did not understand a word of French? John’s hunger for fame had become a passion that overwhelmed his judgment and common sense. Abigail shared his ambition, but she had begun to wonder how much loneliness she could endure.
PORTIA’S DUBIOUS DIPLOMAT
From the start, the omens for John Adams’s venture to Europe were bad. Father and son boarded their ship, the U.S. Navy frigate Boston, on Friday, the thirteenth of February, 1778. An Adams relative, who had a habit of reading worrisome portents in nature, noted how “the clouds roll and the hollow winds howl” as the Adamses departed. The portents were on target. A week earlier in Paris, Benjamin Franklin and his fellow commissioners, including the supposedly untrustworthy Silas Deane, had signed a treaty of alliance with France. When John Adams finally reached Paris after a series of terrifyingly close calls from pursuing British men-of-war and ferocious winter storms, he was a superfluous diplomat. There was nothing for him to do but sit around and wait for Congress to ratify the compact, which was as certain as balmy spring breezes succeeding the wintry winds that had almost deep-sixed the USS Boston.
Even more dismaying must have been Adams’s discovery that the accusations against Silas Deane were anything but open-and-shut. His accuser, Arthur Lee, was also feuding vituperatively with Benjamin Franklin.
It did not take Adams long to conclude that Lee was a mental case. As a partner in vitriol Lee had an even more unstable Franklin envier/hater, Ralph Izard of South Carolina. A friend of the president of Congress, Henry Laurens, Izard had been appointed ambassador to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who declined even to permit him into his domain. So he stayed in Paris and made trouble for everyone. Izard was a paradigm of Congress’s gross ineptitude in the business of foreign policy.
Thus began the worst years of John Adams’s career—and of his marriage. His hopes of wider fame withered in Benjamin Franklin’s shadow. “There was,” he complained, “only one American name on everyone’s lips: Franklin. His name was familiar to government and people, to foreign courtiers, nobility, clergy and philosophers, as well as plebians to such an extent that there was scarcely a peasant or a citizen…who did not consider him a friend.”
Almost as upsetting were the numerous Frenchmen and women who asked Adams if he were “le fameux Adams” and were puzzled to learn he was not named Sam. Worse, John’s French was so poor—even nonexistent at this point—that he could not explain that he and Sam were cousins and partners in the glorious struggle for independence.
The French readiness to discuss sex in casual conversation shocked John’s puritan sensibility. He was barely ashore in Bordeaux when he was invited to a dinner at which he found himself seated beside an attractive young Frenchwoman. Through an interpreter, she asked him if she might conclude from his name that he was descended from the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. She hoped that he had imbibed from his family’s ancient traditions an answer to a question that had long troubled her: “How did the first couple learn the art of lying together?”
Adams felt his face grow hot, but he controlled himself and decided to “set a brazen face against a brazen face.” He coolly assured the smiling young lady that he was in fact descended from the first family and was glad to answer her question. There was a “physical quality in us resembling the power of electricity or of the magnet.” That was why when men and women came within “striking distance of each other” they flew together like objects in electrical experiments. (John would have been mortified if he knew that Benjamin Franklin was using the same metaphor to charm the ladies of Paris.) The young lady was delighted with the explanation and replied that until now she had never understood the reason for it, but she knew it was “a very happy shock.” Adams remained unamused.1
Adams’s dislike of the French did not lessen when he reached Paris. He told Abigail in an early letter that “if human nature can be made happy by any thing that can please the eye, the ear, the taste or any other sense,” France would be a “region for happiness.” But he would exchange all the elegance in dress, the magnificence in architecture, even the “handsome and very well educated” women for “the simplicity of Braintree.”2
Benjamin Franklin welcomed John as a friend and colleague from the glory days of his fight for independence in Congress. He invited him and John Quincy to live rent free in the villa he was using in Passy and introduced John to powerful and influential Frenchmen and women. Adams struggled to be fair and cordial at first. He wrote to Sam Adams, telling him that there was no need for three diplomatic “commissioners” and Congress should appoint Franklin the sole ambassador to France. But his endemic envy and his anger at himself for succumbing to the lure of fame—and at Congress for sending him on this pointless mission—slowly soured his disposition.
Honest John began finding fault with the casual, seemingly unsystematic way Franklin operated as a diplomat. Although Adams enjoyed French food, he grew weary of Franklin’s habit of dining out with the rich and powerful almost every day and spending his evenings in visits to Madame Brillon, Madame Helvetius, and other women friends, enjoying music, chess, and card games. “The life of Dr. Franklin was a scene of continual discipation [sic],” Adams groused.
Franklin’s popularity with the ladies of France grew harder and harder for Adams to endure. In one of his first letters to Abigail, John tried to be lighthearted about it. “My venerable colleague enjoys a priviledge [sic] that is much to be envied. Being seventy years of age, the ladies not only allow him to embrace them as often as he pleases, but they are perpetually embracing him.” Adams was shocked by Madame Brillon’s household, with her husband sleeping with the governess and Madame herself, in Adams’s fevered imagination, taking lovers. John was even more appalled by Madame Helvetius, who had the young doctor (and poet), Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, and two unfrocked abbots living in her house and dining nightly at her table. “These ecclesiastics…I suppose have as much power to pardon a sin as they have to commit one. Oh Mores! said I to myself,” John muttered in his diary.
II
While Franklin was inadvertently torturing John in Paris, back in Braintree, Abigail Adams was in a continual state of anxiety and dread. It was months before she heard that her dearest friend and John Quincy had reached France safely. She had to survive a rumor that they had been captured and John would soon be on trial for treason in London. The British propaganda machine even circulated the name of the frigate that had captured the Boston.
Then came another rumor, that Benjamin Franklin had been assassinated. Abigail immediately thought that if the perfidious British were ready to murder “that great philosopher [and] able statesman,” they would not hesitate for a moment to kill John Adams. It took two months for this story to be altered from an accomplished fact to a dastardly plot that had failed. Abigail told her dearest friend that she could only hope “this shocking attempt will put you upon your guard.” Without her faith in “a superintending providence” she would be “overwhelmed by my fears and apprehensions.”3
Meanwhile, she sent letter after letter across the Atlantic into an apparent void. This experience of almost total isolation blended with her sense of abandonment to ferment emotions Abigail never imagined she would feel as a wife. She warned John in one of her first letters that he “must console me in your absence by a recital of all your adventures.” When he failed to do so, she became more and more unhappy. His letters were much too short, and as time passed they seemed cold and almost perfunctory. She did not realize that he was struggling to find some purpose in his superfluous diplomatic role. Congress seemed to have forgotten he even existed.
Throughout 1778 and 1779, Abigail grew more and more angry. By November 1778 she was becoming blunt. She “could not help complaining to my dearest friend” that she had received only “3 very short letters” in the previous nine months. By this time John was slipping into a serious depression, and he replied in kind. Her letters, he wrote, gave him something close to a “fit of spleen.” In a tone of almost brutal dismissal, he told her “you must not expect to hear from me so often…. I have too much to do.” He proceeded to list all his duties—keeping track of the embassy’s correspondence with Congress, the Navy, and the Court of France, all without the aid of a clerk, which he could not afford. Meanwhile, rumors warned him that he was likely to be recalled, or sent to a foreign capital such as Vienna, where he would be treated as a nonperson. He was being ignored and/or mistreated because he was too independent, he would truckle to nobody. He was ready to accept his fate and “preserve my independence at the expense of my ambition.”
Once Abigail would have tried to soothe this outburst of self-pity. But she was too unhappy to deal with it, especially when the moans arrived three or four months after they were uttered. In the last weeks of 1778, John denounced her recent letters as “complaints [that] gave me more pain than I can express.” He wrote three angry answers to them but “burnt them all.” Grimly he warned her, “If you write me in this style I shall leave of[f] writing intirely. It kills me.” What was wrong with her? His letters professed his esteem. “Can protestation of affection be necessary? Can tokens of remembrance be desired? The very idea of this sickens me.” Was he not “wretched enough, in this banishment?”4
Abigail’s mood veered from desperate loyalty to sarcasm to anger.
Two days after Christmas 1778, she told John that the Atlantic divided “only our persons for the heart of my friend is in the busom of his partner.” A week later, she wryly wondered how she could have lost every letter of the fifty John claimed he had written to her. She must be “the most unfortunate person in the world.” Perhaps the best solution was to adopt “the very concise method of my friend” and send him “billits containing not more than a dozen lines, especially when paper has grown so dear.”5
Still too depressed to change his mind or tone, John turned to eleven-year-old John Quincy for help. He of course took John’s side of the quarrel. At the end of February 1779, he told his mother he had read one of her letters in which she complained “of my Pappa’s not writing.” John Quincy scolded Abigail for not understanding that Pappa had “so many other things to think of” and had time to write only short notes because they usually heard about a ship’s sailing at the last minute and there was no time to write a long letter. But Abigail complained “as bad or worse than if he had not wrote at all and it really hurts him to receive such letters.”6
This communication must have made Abigail wonder about her dearest friend. Why was her would-be statesman asking an eleven-year-old to be his spokesman?
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Page 17