The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Not long after Charles sailed, John received a letter from Benjamin Franklin. The ambassador informed him that Congress had abolished his job as sole peace negotiator with England. Adams was now one of four commissioners, including Franklin, empowered to negotiate a treaty when and if the British showed any interest in the subject. Already discouraged, Adams suffered an emotional collapse that he later described as a “nervous fever.” For two months he did not write a single letter. More than once he was sure he was near death.

  Then came news that rescued him from this cataclysmic gloom. An entire British army had surrendered to General George Washington and his French allies at Yorktown, Virginia.

  IX

  Peace and independence suddenly became possibilities. So did recognition of the United States by the Netherlands—and a loan from well-heeled Dutch bankers. The Comte de Vergennes signaled his approval of both steps to his ambassador in the Netherlands, and soon Adams was able to claim a diplomatic triumph that equaled Benjamin Franklin’s. That was hardly true, but this earnest, deeply patriotic man had struggled through so many disappointments, no one had the heart to disagree with him.

  In April 1782, Adams returned to Paris, where he played a major role in negotiating the treaty of peace with England. The double triumph did not make John a happy man. If anything, it exacerbated his envy of Benjamin Franklin. He filled the mail with nasty remarks about the sage. He told correspondents that Franklin’s reputation was explained by “scribblers in his pay in London to trumpet his fame.” He was sure that Franklin would make his grandson, William Temple Franklin, ambassador to France and himself ambassador to England—a post Adams badly wanted. He topped these wrathful thoughts with a letter to Arthur Lee, in which he predicted someone was going to propose “to name the 18th Century the Franklinian age.”16

  X

  Although Abigail rejoiced in John’s triumphs, she found it harder and harder to endure his absence. At one point, Portia told her dearest friend, “I am much afflicted with a disorder called the Heartach. Nor can any remedy be found in America.” By this time, her body was succumbing to her emotional stress. “Indispositions” sent her to bed, too sick at heart to face another lonely day. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Nabby, took over more and more of the housework.

  As prices continued to soar, Abigail wondered whether she could pay the taxes on the farm. She brooded about why they were so poor, when she saw or heard about people who were living luxuriously thanks to the money that poured into Boston and other ports from privateers and smuggling. But the ultimate pain was the separation from her dearest friend. It would soon be ten years since John departed for Philadelphia in 1774—ten years of almost constant loneliness.17

  Portia tried to console herself by telling John in several letters that “patriotism in the female sex is the most disinterested of all virtues.” She made a good case for it, pointing out that women had no hope of obtaining a job or any other reward for their devotion to the country. But the lonely days and weeks and months wishing for letters that seldom came soon obliterated these attempts to find courage and patience. Not even the news that peace was about to break out did Portia much good, because her dearest friend informed her that he would probably remain in France for at least another year to help negotiate a treaty of commerce with Great Britain.

  Suddenly Portia had a problem that cried out for John’s presence. Their oldest child and only daughter, sixteen-year-old Nabby, was in love. A wealthy, handsome young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to Braintree and was boarding with Abigail’s sister, Mary Cranch, and her daughters. That made the twenty-five-year-old attorney an acceptable visitor to the Adams household. However, Tyler had a reputation for being a wild man in his Harvard years. He had broken the windows of certain professors and drunk several taverns dry. He had also spent quite a lot of the fortune he had inherited from his father. In Abigail’s uneasy mind, all this added up to one ominous word: dissipation.

  She confided the “family problem” to her dearest friend, who predictably exploded. The man should be banned from the house, John stormed for five wordy paragraphs. But the time lapse between letters to and from Europe and their delivery enabled Tyler to charm Abigail as well as Nabby. In fact, everyone in Braintree seemed to think well of the young man, who was negotiating to buy the finest mansion in the village and was handling a wide range of cases in the courts of Boston and elsewhere. Abigail was soon telling her flummoxed dearest friend of the “esteem and kindness” her neighbors felt for Royall Tyler. John, after inquiring about him from several friends, retreated to a temporary neutrality, leaving the “family problem” to Portia.

  XI

  As soon as the war ended, Portia began bombarding her dearest friend with demands that she be invited to join him in Europe. John finally agreed and told Abigail to come to Paris in the spring of 1784—and bring Nabby with her. Charles, who was preparing to enter Harvard, could stay with her sister, Mary Cranch; he knew her Braintree house almost as well as his own. Their youngest son, Thomas, who was also on the Harvard track, was deposited with another Smith sister in Haverill, Massachusetts. Abigail told Royall Tyler of their planned departure. She assured him that she was not opposed to welcoming him into the family as a son-in-law. On the contrary, she told him, he had good reason to “hope.”

  Tyler thanked her extravagantly and accepted the separation with apparent satisfaction. So, it would seem, did Nabby, who had maintained a rather severe reserve toward her suitor—so severe at times that Abigail thought she lacked “sensibility”—something every woman was now supposed to possess. With access to her letters and diary, we know that Nabby was deeply in love with Tyler but had been badly shaken by her father’s first angry reaction to him. She was even more unhappy to be told by her mother that she and Tyler were to be separated for a year.

  XII

  After a pleasant voyage, Abigail and Nabby arrived in England on June 21, 1784. Abigail’s dearest friend was mired in more negotiations with the Dutch, but when he heard that they had survived the Atlantic, he was transformed. “I am twenty years younger than I was yesterday,” he declared. A week later, John arrived in London for a reunion that capped Abigail’s joy. She declared them “a happy family again.” Soon they were in Paris, where John settled them in a lovely “cottage” in suburban Auteil. The house was so large, it took Abigail weeks to visit all the rooms. But it had a five-acre garden that she adored.

  They began touring the city under John and John Quincy’s auspices, admiring the gardens and mansions but dismayed by the prevailing stink. Nabby told one of her correspondents that the French were the dirtiest people in the world. The Adams women went to the opera and the ballet and were enchanted by the splendid interiors and the soaring music of the orchestra. Then came a shock. The ballet dancers sprang “two feet from the floor, posing themselves in the air, with their feet flying and as perfectly showing their garters and drawers.” Abigail turned her face away, appalled. In a few months she was telling her sister that her disgust had “worn off” and she was now enjoying the beauty and precision of the dancers. But she lamented the sad fate of these “opera girls” who were regarded as little more than playthings for rich young men about Paris.18

  Meanwhile, Abigail became friendly with the Marquis de Lafayette’s wife, Adrienne, and several other Frenchwomen. Although she was intimidated by their gorgeous finery and intricately “frizzed” hair, she was delighted by their witty conversation, their charming manners, and their knowledge of literature. But Portia’s tolerance vanished when they visited Benjamin Franklin in nearby Passy and encountered Madame Helvetius. Franklin had assured Abigail and Nabby that they were going to meet “a genuine Frenchwoman, and one of the best women in the world.”

  This offhand encomium left the Adams women totally unprepared for Madame when she strolled into Franklin’s drawing room. Not expecting to find other guests there, she was dressed in everyday clothes, featuring a profusion of dirty muslin over a shabby blue dre
ss. She dashed up to the seventy-eight-year-old sage crying “Helas, Frankling!” and kissed him on both cheeks, plus a smack for good measure on his wrinkled forehead. Later, she sat between Franklin and John Adams at dinner. “She carried on the chief of the conversation,” Abigail reported. “Frequently locking her hand into the Doctor’s, and sometimes spreading her arms upon the backs of both the gentleman’s chairs, then throwing her arm carelessly around the Doctor’s neck.”

  After dinner, Madame hurled herself on a settee, “where she showed more than her feet,” Abigail reported. With Madame was her lapdog, “who was, next to the Doctor, her favorite.” When the canine urinated on the floor, Madame “wiped it up with her chemise.” One can almost hear Abigail’s quivering indignation as she concluded, “This is one of the Doctor’s most intimate friends, with whom he dines once every week, and she with him.” Mrs. Adams decided she was “completely disgusted and never wish for an acquaintance with ladies of this cast.” Although Madame was her “near neighbor” in Auteil, Abigail never visited her.19

  Eventually all the Adamses had to surrender their New England simplicity, get their hair frizzed, and dress in the most shockingly splendid style. Nabby was especially stunned by the finery her father wore when he went out on diplomatic business. “To be out of fashion,” Abigail wryly concluded, “was more criminal than to be seen in a state of nature”—a condition, she slyly added, “to which the Parisians were not averse.”20

  XIII

  From Congress came the most satisfying news that John Adams had ever received from his fellow politicians: he was appointed America’s first ambassador to England. His ailing nemesis, Franklin, was going home, removing John’s often stated fear that the “Doctor,” as everyone called him, would get the job. John saw his selection as amends for the cavalier way Congress had treated him during the war.

  John and Abigail decided to send John Quincy home to enter Harvard. They also had to deal at long range with a warning from Abigail’s sister, Elizabeth Shaw, that Charles, only fifteen, was growing very attracted to a young lady. Abigail dispatched a letter banning all such diversions. She wanted her sons to devote themselves to literature, science, and practicing virtue. It was a glimpse of how she and John had begun to trade places. Abigail was growing more severe and censorious as middle age approached, while he, having achieved some triumphs in Europe that he thought would guarantee his fame, was starting to mellow.

  In London the Adamses were politely received by a few people, but most ignored them or openly abhorred them. George III was majestically polite and so was his queen, but the newspapers were full of cruel remarks. One story claimed that John’s supposed inability to make a living as a lawyer explained why he had overthrown his nation’s laws in a revolution. Another story portrayed him as so awed at meeting George III, he forgot all the fine compliments he had planned to recite. But His Majesty good-naturedly forgave the stuttering American bumpkin’s distress.

  Abigail was soon in a permanent state of rage at the “scribblers”—especially when she learned some American newspapers were reprinting the gibes. Meanwhile, John got nowhere in his efforts to persuade the British to sign a commercial treaty with the United States, or to live up to the terms of the peace treaty he had helped negotiate in Paris.

  Fortunately, so it seemed at the time, their “family problem” distracted them. Nabby had grown more and more unhappy with the few short letters she had received from Royall Tyler. Abigail’s sister, Mary Cranch, annoyed that Tyler had ignored her own daughters, launched a propaganda campaign against the young man. She filled her letters to Abigail with venomous portraits of his behavior. When Nabby and Abigail departed for Europe, Tyler had reeled back to the Cranch household and cried for hours. Thereafter he vanished from Braintree, which enabled Mary to speculate that he was relapsing into his previous “dissipated” ways. Abigail passed on Aunt Cranch’s dark intimations to Nabby, further fueling her unhappiness.

  By this time, Colonel William Stephens Smith had become the secretary of the London legation and part of the Adams household. He was a handsome thirtyish New Yorker with a breathtaking war record. Smith had fought in almost every major battle of the Revolution, repeatedly distinguishing himself. His ultimate reward was a 1781 invitation from George Washington to join his staff. Jovial and charming, he impressed John Adams and enthralled Abigail. Nabby was more than a little distracted by the way Colonel Smith gazed at her across the dinner table. But she was still engaged to Royall Tyler and could give him no encouragement.

  Colonel Smith, hinting that his heart was bruised by Nabby’s apparent indifference, announced he was going to Berlin to inspect the Prussian Army. Soon after he departed, Nabby made up her mind to break her engagement to Tyler. She informed her mother, and Abigail gave her heartfelt approval. When Colonel Smith returned to London, Abigail made a point of telling him about her daughter’s change of heart. The colonel did not need a map to tell him the coast was clear. His proposal was a foregone conclusion.

  John and Abigail did not have a single negative thought about Colonel Smith. The “strictest scrutiny,” Abigail told one of her sisters, could not find a flaw in his character or his life. Alas, strict scrutiny was precisely what the Adamses failed to give this prospective son-in-law. They never wondered how he could afford to maintain a carriage in London and spend his time with fashionable young men his own age on a legation secretary’s salary. Or travel in style on the continent for six or eight weeks at a stretch. They would soon discover that Colonel Smith had a bad habit of spending a lot more money than he had in his pocket.

  Ambassador Adams pulled a few strings, and the young couple obtained a marriage license in twenty-four hours. John persuaded the pro-American Bishop of St. Asaph to perform the ceremony. The newlyweds rented a fully furnished house some blocks from the Adams residence, but they came to dinner every day. John and Abigail could not resist visiting them almost as often. Soon their happiness was appreciably increased by the news that Nabby was pregnant. The colonel persuaded her to name the baby William Steuben Smith, in honor of General Friedrich von Steuben, the German-born volunteer whom Smith admired extravagantly. They vowed the next arrival would be called John Adams Smith. Abigail consoled herself by declaring the boy had “the brow of his grandpapa.”21

  XIV

  In America, sons John Quincy and Charles were at Harvard. John and Abigail decided to send Thomas, too, even though he was rather young. They were afraid that they might not be able to afford a third son in the fabled college when John lost his government salary. For the moment, they were depending on John Quincy to help Charles resist the temptations that had demoralized more than one aspirant to a Harvard diploma. Abigail had an older brother, William Smith, whose inglorious career had begun with dissipation at Harvard. As a married man he had gone on drinking sprees, chased women, and accumulated awful debts. Mary Smith Cranch had a brother-in-law, Robert, who had followed a similar route to self-destruction.

  John and Abigail wrote to their sons by almost every ship that sailed from London, exhorting them to study and behave. Charles had won the affection of Eliza Smith Shaw, the sister who lived in Haverhill. She predicted he would become an “engaging well-accomplished gentleman—the friend of science, the favorite of the misses and the graces—as well as of the ladies.” His younger brother, Thomas, on the other hand, had “a more martial and intrepid spirit…a love of business and an excellent faculty for dispatching it.” Eliza thought he might have a successful career as a soldier.22

  With their boys in the danger zone of adolescence, the Adamses’ thoughts turned more and more to America. John was getting nowhere in his negotiations with the British, and Abigail found it harder and harder to deal with the “studied civility and concealed coldness” she encountered when they went to receptions at St. James’s Palace. Especially humiliating was the British refusal to dispatch an ambassador to America, apparently on the assumption that the bankrupt republic would not last long enough to make
it worth the trouble.

  The stories that the Adamses heard from home seemed to suggest the British were right. Farmers in western Massachusetts and on the western borders of several other states revolted against high taxes in 1786, burning courthouses and beating up sheriffs. The penniless Federal government could not send a single soldier to quell the upheavals. Eventually the Massachusetts rioters had to be dispersed by gunfire from a hastily organized army from Boston and its environs. Then came news that a constitutional convention was meeting in Philadelphia to form a new government, equipped with power to deal with such crises. John decided to send his resignation to Congress. After ten years of almost total separation from his country, its politics, and its people, John Adams was coming home.

  SECOND BANANA BLUES

  With little to do aboard ship but brood, John Adams became convinced that he was returning home to a country that neither respected nor appreciated him. While he was in London he had written a book, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. It stressed the importance of a balanced government, with power distributed between the legislative, judicial, and executive branches. With typical Adams bluntness, he did not hesitate to say the British government was a good working example of what he meant. The book had been assailed by some Americans who thought most if not all of the power should be given to the legislature, where the voice of the average voter would be decisive. Several critics wondered whether Adams’s sojourn in the British capital had aroused a long concealed fondness for monarchy. Was he facing a future of ostracism and obloquy?