The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Abigail finally arrived in Philadelphia on May 10, after an exhausting trip on muddy roads and over rain-swollen rivers. In a touching scene, she told her sister Mary Cranch how John met her about twenty-five miles outside the city and she “took my seat by his side” in his carriage. They stopped for dinner at Bristol, giving themselves most of the day to talk things over. Here, Abigail probably confided to John her hope that their friend, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, might be an ally in spite of their political differences. She had already expressed this opinion in a letter from Quincy.7

  Six days later, John went before Congress and told the legislators he was prepared to negotiate America’s differences with France but was determined to preserve America’s neutrality in the ongoing war between the two major powers. To do that, it was time to start creating a strong navy to protect the nation’s merchant ships from French depredations. The Jeffersonians’ reaction swiftly destroyed Abigail’s hopes for help from the vice president. Republican newspapers and orators in Congress dismissed John’s speech as “a presidential war-whoop.” They defended France’s policies and called for a virtual repudiation of George Washington’s declaration of neutrality. Jefferson never said a word on Adams’s behalf.

  Abigail would have been even more disappointed if she had known that while the Republicans were publicly excoriating President Adams, Vice President Jefferson was secretly telling the French chargé d’affaires in Philadelphia that there was no need to take him seriously. Jefferson advised the French to pretend to negotiate and wait for the American people to assert their friendship for France. President by only three electoral votes, Adams had no popular support.8

  II

  Along with this public uproar, private woes tormented the Adamses. Nabby’s marriage to the erratic William Smith showed no sign of improvement. When they returned from England, the colonel dumped her and their offspring in a tiny house in Westchester County while he roamed northern New York looking for bargains in real estate on which to speculate. Abigail visited her daughter on her way to Philadelphia and was appalled by her unhappiness. She had four young children to raise and did not have a neighbor within twenty miles with whom she could converse.

  Abigail was almost as worried by news from John Quincy that he had fallen in love with Louisa Catherine Johnson, the seventeen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Maryland-born merchant living in London. Although John Quincy was twenty-eight, and a diplomat so successful that outgoing president George Washington had made a point of praising him, Abigail still wrote to him as if he were a teenager. She worried about Louisa’s foreign birth and wealthy background. Would John Quincy be able to support this young woman in her accustomed style? The ambassador struggled to reassure his mother in long, elaborate letters.

  Charles Adams was a far worse worry. With a wife and two children to support, he was often pressed for money and declined to seek help from his parents, after so long and so stubbornly ignoring their advice. He was an easy target for his brother-in-law William Smith and his smooth-talking relatives. They lured him into one of their speculative schemes, and when the bubble burst, Charles lost almost every cent of the money John Quincy had given him. It was a humiliation that Charles was psychologically incapable of enduring. He reached for the liquor bottle, and soon he was on his way to poverty and despair.

  III

  In spite of these personal sorrows, First Lady Abigail Adams did not neglect her duties. She received as many as sixty callers a day at the presidential mansion on Philadelphia’s Market Street and often entertained forty at dinner. But her enthusiasm for her job was constantly undermined by the city’s opposition newspapers. Worst of all the “scribblers,” as Abigail called them, was Benjamin Franklin Bache, Ben Franklin’s grandson, who was editor of the Philadelphia Aurora. He regularly accused President Adams of being in his dotage. He called John “the advocate of a kingly government and of a titled nobility…to keep down the swinish multitude.”

  When John sent a three-man delegation to France to try to resolve the crisis, Bache called it an attempt to deceive the American people. In his speech to Congress, Bache raged, the president never said a word about the way the British navy arrogantly boarded American ships on the high seas and seized sailors that they claimed were deserters from their ranks. Adams acted as if he governed a nation of “ourang outangs” instead of intelligent men. Someone should tell “His Serene Highness” that he had been elected president by three votes.9

  By the time Abigail finished one of these Bache screeds, she was seething with outrage. It did not help to know that Bache was Ben Franklin’s grandson; it only reignited Abigail’s (and John’s) enmity for Franklin at a time when they needed to stay calm and clearheaded. Even more unhelpful was the way Bache constantly claimed that Adams was a secret monarchist because of his reputed insistence on resounding titles for President Washington and for himself. Did Abigail blame herself for not accompanying John to New York in 1789 until his frantic letters pleading for her presence reached her in Quincy?

  When President Adams appointed John Quincy minister to Berlin, capital of Prussia, the billingsgate from Bache and other editors got worse. They claimed John Quincy’s salary was ten thousand dollars a year (it was actually $4,500) and made it sound as if the president were sending him the money as a bonus. Was there any limit to the malice of these scribblers? Abigail wondered.

  IV

  In February 1798, the Adamses reeled under another blow. A group of fashionable Philadelphians announced that they planned to stage a ball and dinner to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. These celebrations had taken place every year while Washington was president. Though John and Abigail had never approved of them—they claimed to admire Washington but did not think he should be feted as a king or a Roman emperor—they kept this opinion to themselves. A celebration when John Adams was president was another matter. A celebration to which the president and his wife were invited, as if they were just another pair of citizens? The Adamses reacted with outrage. John’s concealed envy of Washington exploded and ignited similar emotions in Abigail.

  In a fiery letter to Mary Cranch, Abigail wrote, “I do not know when my feelings of contempt have been more called forth.” She poured most of her spleen on the Philadelphians who were staging the ball, calling them “a strange set of people” lacking “the least feeling of real genuine politeness.” How could they dare to invite the president of the United States to appear as a “secondary character”? It would hold him up before all the nations of the world “in that [secondary] light.” It was “ludicrous beyond compare.”10

  President Adams wrote “DECLINED” on the face of the invitation and added a snarling denunciation of the affair. Abigail warmly approved—and then expressed horror when this communication appeared in the Aurora with sneers and gloats of delight from editor Benjamin Franklin Bache. The Federalists were dismayed, and they began quarreling among themselves when some party stalwarts cancelled their acceptances to the celebration.

  Vice President Jefferson was delighted by the uproar, remarking in a letter to James Madison that the “birthnight” had split the Federalist Party. Abigail remained grimly convinced that she and John had done the right thing. She told her sister Mary Cranch that the Americans now knew they had a president “who would not prostrate their dignity and character, neither to foreign nations, nor the American people.” This was, to put it mildly, inflating a molehill into an imaginary political mountain. More and more, it became apparent that John and Abigail were almost totally lacking in political savvy. They were a party of two.11

  V

  A few weeks later, a startling turn in the crisis with France upended everything. The three envoys that President Adams had sent to Paris were rejected by the French government, after they refused to pay a bribe of $250,000 to Foreign Minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand and agree to a loan of $10 million as a precondition to “peace” talks. The envoys responded with “No, not a sixpence,” which was soon transf
ormed by Federalist newspapers into “millions for defense but not one cent for tribute.” President Adams sent the correspondence with the French negotiators, disguised as X, Y, and Z to Congress in response to the Republicans’ demand to see the documents. When the Jeffersonians read the stunning evidence of French arrogance and greed, they were, Abigail gleefully reported, “struck dumb and opend not their mouths.”

  The desperate Republicans attempted to keep the correspondence secret. The Federalist-controlled Senate voted to publish fifty thousand copies and distribute them throughout the country. Americans from Boston to Savannah were infuriated and called for war. Suddenly, President Adams was the most popular man in America. People cheered him when he appeared in public. At one point, eleven hundred young Philadelphians marched in a long column to the presidential mansion to present him with pledges of their support.

  One of the most emphatic war-wishers was Abigail. In a letter to her daughter Nabby, she pointed out that America was already at war on the high seas and had been for months. She was eager to see a formal declaration of war by Congress, “the sooner the better.” At present the country was suffering “the miseries and misfortunes” of war without striking back. A declaration of war would also enable the president to do something about the lying newspapermen and the French agents that Talleyrand reportedly had swarming throughout the nation. To her nephew William Shaw, Abigail declared that France was plotting to subjugate America. The French were spreading their amoral principles, their atheism, and their “depravity of manners” in every part of the United States. There was only one answer to this insidious attack: “Let every citizen become a soldier and determine as formerly on Liberty or Death!”12

  With Abigail saying such things at the dinner table, it was hardly surprising that President Adams also wanted a declaration of war. But Congress was too divided to produce one. They compromised by creating a twelve-ship navy and a “provisional” army of ten thousand men. Adams asked George Washington to take command of the army, and he reluctantly agreed. But he informed the president that he had no intention of exercising actual command. That large task called for a younger man, and Washington chose Alexander Hamilton as his chief deputy.

  Here was a new humiliation that tormented both Adamses. For weeks the president struggled to evade appointing Hamilton. In a raging memo to Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Adams called it “the most difficult action to justify” that he had been forced to take in his “whole life.”13 But Washington made it clear that he would resign if he did not get Hamilton, and the president was forced to capitulate.

  With Abigail’s warm approval, the president attempted to name William Stephens Smith as a brigadier general in the new army. When Washington saw his name on the list, he exploded: “What in the name of military prudence could have induced [this] appointment?” An enraged President Adams told Secretary of State Timothy Pickering that his son-in-law was “far, very far superior to Hamilton” as a soldier. Pickering saw to it that the Senate vetoed Smith. It was not a difficult task. The colonel’s reputation as a bankrupt speculator was well and widely known. An overwrought Abigail cried in a letter that “secret springs” were at work. But Smith remained defunct—another painful political humiliation.14

  VI

  While John Adams was fighting a losing struggle over control of the army, the Federalists in Congress decided to silence the newspapers that were slandering and insulting them and the president. Abigail Adams was an enthusiastic backer of these “Alien and Sedition Acts,” as they were soon called. She told Mary Cranch she wanted to “punish the stirrer up of sedition, and the writer and printer of base and unfounded calumny.” Such laws would add immeasurably “to the peace and harmony of our country.”15

  The acts were actually four in number, dealing with different aspects of the situation that seemed to be threatening the United States. One bill revised the naturalization laws, requiring a fourteen-year wait to become a citizen. Two other acts empowered the president to deport “aliens”—noncitizens he deemed dangerous to the nation’s peace and safety. The chief target of these laws were the 25,000 refugees from the French Revolution in America. Some came from France, but a far larger number had fled from French West Indian islands, which had undergone their own revolutions. The law also made immigrants from Ireland, England, and other nations liable to expulsion if they criticized the government.

  Abigail approved of these alien laws. She thought a “more careful and attentive watch ought to be kept over foreigners.” But it was the Sedition Act that brought rejoicing to her lips. The act called for fines and imprisonment for anyone who wrote, printed, or uttered “any false, scandalous and malicious” statements against the government of the United States, either house of Congress, or the president “with intent to defame” these public servants, or bring them “into contempt or disrepute.” Here was a law that would protect Portia’s dearest friend from slanderers like Bache. To no one’s surprise, John Adams signed the bills into law. He saw them as “war measures”—temporary weapons that would enable the government to retain control of the country. The bills stated that the special powers they authorized would expire in 1801, unless Congress renewed them.

  The Republicans, thrown on the defensive by the XYZ revelations, were desperate for an issue. They seized on the Alien and Sedition Acts as a heaven-sent weapon. Thomas Jefferson and his ally James Madison drafted resolutions that were passed by the legislatures of Kentucky and Virginia denouncing the acts. Jefferson’s Kentucky resolutions declared a state had the right to nullify acts of Congress that violated the Constitution. Federalists saw these declarations as little short of a call to revolution.

  Up and down the country, Republican orators fulminated and newspapers published hysterical denunciations of the acts. They were condemned as a first step toward setting up a Federalist dictatorship, with a president and senate elected for life. The vituperation flung at John Adams reached hitherto unimaginable heights. In July 1798, a bewildered, exhausted Abigail reeled back to Quincy with her politically battered husband—and collapsed.

  VII

  Abigail’s symptoms were similar to those that had laid her husband low when he took to his bed in Amsterdam in 1781, demoralized by his losing struggle with Benjamin Franklin’s fame. Rheumatic-like pains roamed Portia’s body, diarrhea contracted her intestines, and insomnia wracked her nights. Most of the time she was close to a helpless invalid, too weak to rise from her bed. Today’s doctors would probably call her condition a nervous breakdown. John hovered over her day and night for the next four months, letting the federal government operate without him. The thought of losing Abigail left him virtually unable to function. When letters warned him against giving Hamilton unchecked control of the army, he responded that Abigail’s “dangerous sickness” had left him too depressed and agitated to do anything about it.16

  In November, the president returned to Philadelphia without his dearest friend. Abigail was tormented by guilt. She felt she had “quitted” her “post” at John’s side. But she was mentally and physically incapable of facing more political warfare. She followed the ongoing turmoil from a soothing distance, relying on letters from John and from his secretary, their nephew William Shaw.

  During these months alone in his mansion, the president began to rethink the international situation. From several sources, including his diplomat son, John Quincy, he learned that the French Directory and its spokesman, Foreign Minister Talleyrand, were now saying they did not want a war with the United States. They realized it would inevitably convert the Americans into allies of the English. At home, American voters were not enthusiastic about the taxes the Federalists levied to pay for the new navy and army. One of these measures was a stamp tax, not much different from the one that had helped launch the revolution against George III. Then there was the matter of the man Adams now unreservedly hated, Alexander Hamilton, parading around Philadelphia in the uniform of a major general. Wouldn’t it be delicious if
his army suddenly became superfluous?

  The president decided to dispatch another envoy to see whether an understanding could be reached with the Directory. To the astonishment of everyone in the Federalist party, on February 18, 1799, Adams sent a note by messenger to Vice President Jefferson and asked him to read it to the Senate. The staggered solons learned that Adams was appointing William Vans Murray, the young ambassador to the Netherlands, as minister plenipotentiary to France to see if peace could be achieved. Politicians all, the Federalists in Congress saw Adams destroying the issue that had won them unparalleled popularity.

  A delegation of congressional leaders called on the president to discuss the decision with him. According to Secretary of State Pickering, Adams flew into a “violent passion” and rebuked the visitors for questioning his judgment. When the Federalists threatened to reject Murray as a nominee, Adams told them that if they did, he would resign and hand the presidency over to Jefferson. Senator Theodore Sedgwick of Massachusetts lost his temper and called Adams’s decision “the wild and irregular starts of a vain jealous and half frantic mind.”17

  Throughout the country, a large percentage of the Federalist Party shared Sedgwick’s reaction. One New York Federalist leader said the Murray appointment had given “almost universal disgust.”18 The Federalists thought Adams was risking another series of runarounds and humiliations by submitting so eagerly to reports of France’s changed mood. Instead of staying in Philadelphia and combating this reaction, when Congress adjourned, President Adams departed for Quincy and the company of the other member of his party of two. Not even an armed revolt against federal taxes in Pennsylvania, led by a German American named Fries, delayed him. He issued a proclamation declaring the rebels guilty of treason, ordered the army to seize them, and left for Quincy. He stayed there for the next seven months—the longest absence of any president from the seat of government in America’s history.