The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Mrs. Warren was not even slightly intimidated by John’s extended tantrum. She replied that she was unable to understand “the rambling manner in which your angry and undigested letters are written.” She had set out to do him “complete justice” and could not understand why John did not agree with her statements. She could only conclude that he thought “his fame had not been sufficiently attended to.” As even more vituperative letters arrived on her desk, she accused him of “meanness as well as malignancy”—he was trying to “blast a work” that had won the praise of “many of the best judges of literary merit.” It came down to this—her book was “an inadequate panegyric of your life and character.”3 John’s criticisms struck her as “the ravings of a maniac.” She closed her ripostes by declaring: “As an old friend, I pity you. As an Historian, I forgive you.”4

  Poor Abigail was trapped in the middle of this savage exchange. She sided with John but probably regretted his uncontrollable rage, as she had “mourned” the mess he had made of firing Secretary of War McHenry. Several months later, she was astounded to receive a letter from Mercy in which her old friend told her that disagreements on subjects that involve “the great bustle of the world” ought not to interfere with true friendship. Mercy even thought it was possible to denounce someone’s politics and retain feelings of love and admiration.

  Abigail did not answer this letter, nor did she write a letter of sympathy when Mercy’s husband died the following year. She had been hoping Mercy would reread John’s letters and “acknowledge her errors.” When no such acknowledgment came, Abigail could not pretend she had any friendly feelings for her. The politics of the party of two were still alive and well, seven years after John had left the presidency.5

  But Abigail had too many shining memories of her friendship with Mercy Warren to allow rancor to obliterate them. As a lifelong advocate for the equality of women, it pained her that John had acquired such a low opinion of a woman who had demonstrated her ability to write and discuss history and philosophy as intelligently as any man of her time. Abigail gradually resumed corresponding with Mercy and in 1812, visited her in Plymouth, where hours of conversation began a reconciliation between “the two ancient friends,” as Abigail called them. In a moment of courageous candor, Abigail said Mercy and John “were both in the wrong.” She tried to explain that John no longer harbored any “personal animosity” toward Mercy but he was not ready to be entirely reconciled. Time would be the best healer of the “reservation” that the ex-president still nursed about Mercy’s book.

  Mercy sent Abigail a ring as a memento of their “former amities,” and toward the end of 1812 Abigail sent Mercy a lock of her hair and a snippet of John’s sparse gray locks “at his request.” A year later some newspaper critics attacked Mercy’s play, The Group, which she had written during the Revolution. They maintained that it was too complex and historically insightful to have been written by a woman. John Adams leaped to Mercy’s defense in a vigorous letter, declaring he could confirm she had written the drama. In brusque Adams style, he described Mercy as the most gifted woman of her generation, a rare combination of intellect and artist. A delighted Mercy invited him to visit her in Plymouth. On the sidelines, Abigail smiled contentedly. The reconciliation was complete.6

  II

  Another woman who loomed large in John’s old age was his daughter, Nabby. She had long been a presence in his life, of course. He had writhed and fumed countless times when he heard about how badly her husband, Colonel William Smith, was treating her. As Nabby’s unhappiness intensified, her father became more and more meaningful to her, while her relationship to her mother deteriorated. Abigail’s repeated attempts to persuade her to leave Smith may have had something to do with Nabby’s inability—or refusal—to write to or talk meaningfully with her mother. She may also have blamed her for the way Abigail had interfered in her romance with Royall Tyler, and then all but thrust her into the arms of Colonel Smith in London.

  It was one of those tragedies of good intentions. Abigail had frequently complained about Nabby’s silent ways, even in her girlhood. As eager for her to achieve perfection in all things as she was for Nabby’s brothers, Abigail did not realize that a feeling of inferiority can be the result of too much exhortation and scrutiny. In Nabby’s case the tendency may have been intensified by the feeling that she could never equal her mother. In letters to her Cranch cousins, Nabby often expressed delight when she was permitted to visit friends and relatives for a week or two and escape from Abigail’s critical eyes.

  As the dimensions of her unhappy marriage became starkly apparent, Nabby’s silences grew more extensive. She ignored Abigail’s attempts to encourage or advise her. Only to her father was Nabby able to open her anguished heart—but Abigail began intercepting her letters and rebuking Nabby for sending them. As the politics of the vice presidency and presidency grew more turbulent, Abigail feared John would be driven over the edge by the details of his daughter’s suffering. This policy only deepened the rift between Abigail and Nabby; soon the mother was complaining that her daughter was “unapproachable.”7

  In the final year of his presidency, John appointed Colonel Smith surveyor of the port of New York, one of the most lucrative jobs in the federal government. For a while, Nabby’s problems seemed solved. Smith had more than enough money. But he spent it as fast as he made it, and continued to associate with hard-drinking men who passed their days gambling on fast horses and cards and talking endlessly about how to make a quick fortune. Still an Adams to the bone, Nabby despised Smith’s cronies. When her brother John Quincy visited her in New York, she invited him into a remote room in her house and played chess while her husband partied with his raucous friends.

  Frustrated by the lack of speculative opportunities in the United States after the bubbles of the 1790s had burst, Colonel Smith began conspiring with South American revolutionaries to fund an invasion of Venezuela and the overthrow of the Spanish government there. It would be the beginning of a revolutionary tide that would sweep through South America and make its leaders immensely rich. Such enterprises were difficult to keep secret; the talkative Smith did not bother to try. Instead, he boldly sent Francisco Miranda, the leader of the rebels, to President Jefferson to ask his help.

  The president declined to participate, but Smith and Miranda went ahead anyway. When the American ship Leander sailed with a vanguard of revolutionaries aboard, the president accused Smith of making war on a country with whom the United States was at peace and arrested him. Meanwhile the Leander was captured by the Spanish navy. Smith was not even moderately repentant; he claimed the charges against him were a Jeffersonian plot to remove him from his job.

  Once more Abigail implored Nabby to leave her husband. Instead, she moved into a cottage on the prison grounds and lived with him while he argued in court that he had been acting on Jefferson’s orders. The president and Secretary of State James Madison declined to appear at the trial, and the judge freed Smith for lack of evidence. Smith soon discovered freedom was a mixed blessing. Numerous people whom he had conned into financing the Miranda expedition wanted their money back. Virtually penniless, barely able to pay the rent for a crumbling house on a New York back street, the embittered Nabby subsided into total silence for almost a year, while Smith’s behavior toward her grew more and more hostile.

  Early in 1807, Nabby’s anguish exploded in a searing letter to her father, telling in detail Smith’s awful abuse. Once more, Abigail intercepted the letter and rebuked Nabby for threatening John’s emotional equilibrium. This was around the time that the ex-president was engaged in his violent controversy with Mercy Otis Warren. Tormented by his creditors, Colonel Smith abandoned Nabby and her daughter, Caroline (the only child still living at home), and fled west. John Quincy Adams brought the two women to Boston, where Nabby chose to live with him and his wife rather than endure Abigail’s attempts to mother her at Peacefield.

  A year later, Colonel Smith appeared in Boston and abruptl
y ordered Nabby to pack her trunk. He had found refuge in Chenango, New York, with his relatives, and it was her duty to join him. To her parents’ horror, Nabby consented and vanished into northern New York state, where she did not write to anyone in the family for the next three years.

  Early in 1811, Abigail received a stunning letter: Nabby feared a “hardness” in her right breast might be cancer. She described her symptoms, and Abigail rushed to confer with the best doctors in Boston. All agreed that Nabby could not get decent care in northern New York, a virtual wilderness in 1811. After several delays she decided to come to Peacefield, where the Boston physicians seemed to think her condition could be cured by hemlock pills. Nabby, meanwhile, was reading about her illness and discovered a treatise on breast cancer by Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, an old and close friend of her parents. She wrote to him, describing her symptoms, and he recommended immediate surgery.

  On October 8, 1811, four surgeons, led by Dr. John Collins Warren, amputated Nabby’s cancerous right breast. She remained conscious during the twenty-five minute operation, never making a sound. The doctors marveled at her courage. For Abigail and John, the operation was a nightmare that left them barely able to speak or think. John said he felt as if he were living the Book of Job. Abigail said she felt as if she had survived a session in the biblical fiery furnace.8

  Accentuating the sense of nightmare was the almost simultaneous illnesses and deaths of Abigail’s sister Mary Cranch and her husband, as well as the heartbreaking decline of Sally Smith Adams, Charles’s widow, who was dying of consumption in another room in Peacefield. The ex-president was also a patient. He had rushed outdoors to see a comet passing overhead and fallen over a stake, inflicting an ugly gash on his leg. Compounding the family’s misery, their son Thomas, whom Abigail had persuaded to return to Boston to practice law, had been thrown by his horse, and his doctors feared he might be crippled for life. Indomitable as always, Abigail struggled to nurse everyone. But Nabby was her deepest anguish. Three months after the surgery, she could barely sit up in bed and was unable to use her right arm. When her husband took her back to Chenango six months later, the arm was still in a sling. Almost frantically, Abigail told John Quincy and other correspondents that the doctors had assured her that Nabby’s recovery would be complete.

  In northern New York, Colonel Smith amazed everyone by running for Congress as a Federalist and winning. He departed for Washington, leaving Nabby with little or no money, suffering bouts of excruciating pain that Smith offhandedly diagnosed as a familiar Adams illness, rheumatism. Little more than a year later, Smith’s sister, Nancy, told Abigail that Nabby was being consumed by cancer. A contrite Colonel Smith mournfully informed Abigail that Nabby wanted “to die in her father’s house.” The word “father’s” was not accidentally chosen.

  In agonizing pain, Nabby endured three hundred miles in a jolting carriage over the primitive roads of northern New York to reach Peacefield on July 26, 1813. Abigail soon realized that she had nothing to offer her stoic daughter. She fled the dying woman’s sickroom and John Adams, revealing wellsprings of pity and love that his crusty exterior usually concealed, took charge of nursing Nabby for the next two weeks. At times the pain was so intense that she lay doubled up. Only opium gave her occasional relief. No one knows what the father and daughter said to each other during these horrendous hours. Silent tearful embraces were probably more meaningful than words.

  On the morning of August 15, Nabby asked her father to bring her a hymn book. He helped her open it to her favorite song, “Longing for Heaven.” She invited her mother, her husband, and her son John and daughter Caroline to join her and her father in singing it:

  Oh could I soar to worlds above

  That blessed state of peace and love

  How gladly would I mount and fly

  On Angels wings to joys on high.9

  Nabby died peacefully in her father’s arms a few hours later. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson, with whom he had begun a correspondence, John Adams called her “a monument to suffering and patience.” Jefferson wrote Abigail a sympathetic letter and she responded with a fragment of a poem:

  Grief has changed me since you saw me last

  And careful hours, with time’s deformed hand

  Hath written strange defections o’er my face.10

  III

  Besides Abigail and Nabby, the woman who played the largest role in John Adams’s old age was Louisa Catherine Johnson, John Quincy’s wife. Her first appearance in the family could not have been more unpromising. Abigail had been nurturing a dislike for her ever since her son became engaged to this “heiress,” ignoring his mother’s repeated warnings that she would make him miserable. The prediction acquired unexpected weight when Louisa’s merchant father went bankrupt and was unable to deliver the handsome dowry he had promised. John Quincy’s New England conscience—and Louisa’s delicate dark-haired beauty—persuaded him to marry her anyway.

  The marriage was fraught with strains from the start. To the bridegroom’s financial disappointment Louisa added a highly independent spirit that constantly put her at odds with her short-tempered husband about everything from wearing makeup to raising children. John Quincy’s decades of listening to and reading Abigail’s lectures on virtue and accomplishment and whom he should not marry—with a special emphasis on Mary Frazier—had left him determined not to take a woman’s advice no matter how good it was. He even went so far as to tell Louisa that women should have “nothing to do with politics”—a startling statement from Abigail’s favorite son.11

  Abigail was enraged when John Quincy did not even bother to tell her the date of his wedding. “My son, you will see as I do by the papers, is married,” she acidly informed her younger sister, Elizabeth Shaw Peabody.12 When John Quincy and Louisa returned to America in 1801 and she met her mother-in-law for the first time, everything seemed to go wrong. Louisa had an atrocious cold and was exhausted by the journey from Washington, D.C. Abigail studied her slim figure, listened to her croaking cough, and concluded that her stay on the planet would be of “short duration.” This did not distress her nearly as much as the way John Quincy’s anxiety about his wife had added “a weight to his brow.” Also in the mix was Abigail’s displeasure that the couple had named their first son George Washington Adams instead of John Adams. Abigail was sure this was Louisa’s doing.

  Peacefield was soon crowded with Adams relatives, who came to ogle the exotic English creature whom John Quincy had found in his travels. In the small-town world of Quincy, Louisa was more than a new bride; she was a curiosity. Abigail had propagandized everyone in the family about her moneyed background. Too sick to enjoy the special dishes Abigail prepared for her, Louisa was soon labeled “proud.”

  Louisa was equally unimpressed with her in-laws. Their nasal Boston accents, their old-fashioned clothes, and their strange hairstyles bewildered her. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more astonished,” she recalled years later. Only one person seemed to receive her without suspicions or reservations: John Adams. She sensed the “old gentleman” was the only person in the family to whom “I was literally and without knowing it [more than] a fine lady.”13

  This rapport would grow stronger over the next twenty years, as John Quincy’s star rose in the American political firmament. Louisa played a crucial role in this ascension. She was more politically astute than Abigail, never hesitating to disagree with John Quincy, who was prone to the Adams habit of ignoring public opinion. When he became a U.S. senator, Louisa relentlessly criticized his carelessness about his appearance, even enlisting Abigail’s help to reform his tailoring, as well as his eating habits.

  IV

  During these decades, Abigail remained the center of John’s emotional life. He struggled in vain to persuade her to slow down as her health became increasingly fragile. In October 1818, she took to her bed with an unidentified malady. A visit from their family doctor revealed she was suffering from ty
phoid fever, which happened to be epidemic in and around Quincy at the time. When the bad news reached Louisa in Washington, where John Quincy was secretary of state in the cabinet of President James Monroe, she wrote to John, expressing her own concern as well as her husband’s. John Quincy was too incapacitated by a psychic clash between love and guilt to write a word.

  The doctors struggled in vain to save Abigail. To conserve her dwindling strength, they even forbade her to speak or be spoken to. But the primitive medicine of the day could do nothing to help her. She died on Wednesday, October 28, 1818, at the age of seventy-four. Her eighty-three-year-old husband was the only person in the sickroom who remained calm. “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too,” he said.14

  Although John’s health remained remarkably good, and grandnieces and nephews and grandchildren and friends visited him, Peacefield seemed empty without Abigail. John told one friend it had become a “region of sorrow.” Into this void stepped Louisa Johnson Adams. She began sending John daily excerpts from her diary, filling him in on things political and social in Washington, D.C. John called the letters “a reviving cordial” and exulted over the way she was admitting him “into the characters of statesmen, politicians, philosophers, orators, poets, courtiers, convivialists, dancers, dandies and above all ladies of whom I should know nothing without your kind assistance.”15

  Next, Louisa enlisted him in a project to translate Plato from the original Greek into English. John told her the idea stirred “feelings of curiosity, astonishment and, excuse me, risibility.” He could not imagine or conceive “a subject more to my taste.” When she sent him a translation of Plato’s discussion of the Athenian general Alcibiades, John was all but overwhelmed. He wondered how it was possible “that a gay lady of Washington, amid all the ceremonies, frivolities and gravities of a court and a legislature, can write so many and so excellent letters to me…and at the same time translate Plato’s Dialogues?”16