“As you weren’t the Presidentress in 1782,” Abigail went on, “I don’t see how this can belong to the nation. It was simply a gift from one woman to another.”
From the last Queen of a kingdom that no longer existed, she thought, to the first hostess—the first consort—of a nation that, in 1782, had yet to be born.
“So all things do come in time to where they’re meant to be,” Martha murmured. “No matter what happens to us in the meantime. Thank you, dear. I’ll keep this, and look at it whenever I need to remember.”
“Is she all right?” Abigail asked Sophie, as the widow’s black driver helped her into Abigail’s carriage.
“As well as can be expected.” Years, matrimony, and bereavement didn’t seem to have changed Sophie much. She appeared little altered from her days of advising Abigail on the purchase of inexpensive ambassadorial china in Paris. Those cool eyes still regarded the world—or at least the United States—with amused derision. “She took the General’s death very hard. And since those years when the capital was in New York she’s never been really well.”
“Who among us has?” Abigail drew her own thick collection of black shawls and cloaks more tightly about her narrow shoulders. “I swear there was something in the air of that city that gave everyone who lived there an ague. I’ve certainly never gotten over it.”
For a moment an elusive expression flickered on Sophie’s face: Abigail almost had the impression she was about to say, Served the traitors right. But she said instead, “I doubt this new ‘Federal City’ will prove more healthily situated. My father always said these Potomac lowlands bred fevers. I suppose it’s well enough now, when every house is at least half a mile from its nearest neighbor and there’s room for air to circulate. But how it will answer in the future, to have built a city for the enrichment of Southern land-speculators, remains to be seen.”
“Had they not,” replied Abigail, “the government would even yet be at a standstill while they squabbled over payment of the Virginians’ debts to the English—I think that’s how the deal was worked.”
“It is how all such deals are worked,” answered Sophie, with her sidelong cynical smile. “I suppose the placement of the Parthenon in Athens had something to do with which Archon’s brother-in-law owned the land it was to stand on.”
As they crossed the ferry to Georgetown the wind blew up with a bitter chill, though the day remained clear and bright. Abigail shivered, and Louisa pulled up the lap-robe more closely around her. The gray stone houses of the little tobacco-port looked bleak among the bare trees. Beyond the new wooden bridge the woods closed in, the carriage-team floundering in the soupy ruts. “On our way here we were lost for two days, trying to find our nation’s capital,” remarked Abigail drily. “I shall suggest to Mr. Adams that funds be asked from Congress for signposts.”
“One must admit, though, it’s a beautiful situation for a city.” Louisa folded her gloved hands. “And it is indeed a new thing in the history of the world, to have a capital city purpose-built for a new nation, instead of taking history’s hand-me-downs. There is much to be said for that. I expect,” she added, as the carriage emerged from the brown-and-silver shadows of the woods, “it will be beautiful in spring.”
Beside the little clump of buildings that housed the State Department’s seven employees, their driver paused to rest the team. Brushy pastures foraged by cows stretched before them. Here and there buildings rose, inconsequential in the open wilderness, like toys set down and forgotten by giant children. “That’s Mr. Moore’s farm, there among the trees,” pointed out Sophie. “He’s a more reliable source of produce than the markets, if you get on his good side. And General Washington’s friend Mr. Tayloe has just finished a quite handsome town house, and is now waiting for the town to arrive.”
“I count myself lucky the plastering and painting were actually finished in the President’s House before John arrived last month,” remarked Abigail, as the driver clucked the horses into motion. “We keep all twelve fireplaces going, and that helps, though God only knows how we’re to afford to heat the place when winter really sets in. And instead of a grand front staircase, we have a lovely cavern in the front hall, no doors in half the rooms, and not a bell in the house. I suppose its unfinished state simply means Mr. Jefferson will have less to tear down before he starts to make changes.”
She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. Only days after John had gotten on the road for the Federal City in October, someone had brought her Alexander Hamilton’s newly printed pamphlet, A Letter from Alexander Hamilton, Concerning the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams.
Long usage had partially inured her to the spectacle of her husband being called doddering, fat, monarchist, and insane by the people for whose freedom he had broken himself—and sacrificed his own happiness and that of his family—the whole of his life. But coming from a man of his own party—from the man whom many Federalists looked up to as the true leader of America—Abigail knew this meant John’s almost certain defeat in the upcoming contest for President.
Almost certainly, the victor would be Jefferson. And with Jefferson would come the mob-rule that Abigail had feared since the days of Citizen Genêt’s street-riots.
“And the irony of it is,” she sighed, as the horses stopped again so that Sophie could get into her own chaise near the corner of a dilapidated country graveyard, “for all that wretched little man’s venom about John being incompetent, a treaty with France has finally been signed.”
“It’s official, then?” Sophie raised her brows. “I’d heard it printed in the newspapers, but—”
“It’s official,” said Abigail. “First Consul Bonaparte drank a toast to our envoys and dismissed the riots in our streets and the seizures of our ships as a ‘family quarrel’ which will not be repeated. No family of mine.”
“No,” murmured Sophie as she descended from the carriage. “And one wonders what England will have to say on the subject.”
“ ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ ” replied Abigail wisely, “ ‘are the troubles thereof.’ ”
The Mansion bestowed by the country upon its executive stood isolated in a wagon-rutted field, surrounded by heaped stone, building debris, and weeds. Smoke trailed from its chimneys but Abigail wasn’t fooled: It would be cold as a tomb inside. At least, she thought, trying to rub the ache of rheumatism from her shoulder, she wouldn’t be expected to put on many entertainments in the great half-finished pile. At the far end of the brushy two-mile vista of what was pompously referred to as Pennsylvania Avenue, she guessed rather than actually saw the movement around the tiny pale bulk of the Capitol. Electors gathering, to cast their States’ votes for the new President.
George Washington had had two terms, and would have been elected for a third if he’d chosen to stand.
John was being pushed out after one—and that one achieved by only three votes, for which the Democratic-Republicans had never ceased to mock him.
After all he had done—after all they had done, he and she together—the young nation was destroying itself, as France had destroyed itself. The taste of despair was wormwood in her mouth.
She climbed the rattletrap wooden stair that bridged the sunken areaway which let light into the kitchens. The oval reception hall was, as usual, jammed with men—many of whom had clearly neither bathed nor had their shirts washed since the days of Royal governors. Though everyone was fairly sure that John had lost the election, many still hoped for government jobs. Beyond the oval chamber, the Mansion’s central hall was gloomy and the stink of wet plaster overrode even the riper petitioners. She’d have to have the oil-lamps lit. In addition to being clammy, drafty, and without any means of summoning servants bar shouting, the Executive Mansion was also immense, a statement of Presidential majesty. Such furniture as they’d shipped down from Quincy huddled, lost, in those enormous rooms.
The house had been built for a man of George Washington’s wealth (or Martha’s, if truth be
told). It would, Abigail estimated, take thirty servants to run the place, counting the stable help.
She and John had six, and would be paying Sophie Hallam’s cook a dollar a week to come on Mondays and help with the laundry. With the weather inclement, she and Esther had been hanging the clothes to dry in the huge unfinished “audience room” at the east end of the house. The bedsheets smelled of paint, but the room was drafty enough that there should be little danger of mold.
She made her way to the winding servants’ stairway that was the sole route to the upper floor. Some of the men rose to tip their hats to her, or murmured, “Good day, Mrs. Adams.” Esther had made up the fire in the bedroom, but like every other room in the house the place still smelled of damp plaster, and the clammy atmosphere made her body ache, as it had at sea. Through the window she could see a slave-gang, clearing away some of the rubble around the new stone Treasury Building, the closest structure to the Executive Mansion and still half a mile away. They were dressed in rags and barefoot. She couldn’t imagine how they could work outside in cold like this. A white overseer sat nearby on a stump, watching them. They worked slowly, though not nearly as slowly as the few white workers hereabouts that Abigail had observed.
Like the slaves on Mount Vernon—Abigail suspected, like slaves anywhere—they had no reason to care if things got done or not.
She was taking off her hat when movement in the mirror caught her eye. Turning, she saw John, a letter in his hand. He held it out to her, and taking it, she put her arm around his waist, pressed herself to him. His face told her what it said, before she read it.
Charley was dead.
The Federal City
Thursday, January 1, 1801
“It is a shocking mix-up,” declared Meg Smith, wife of the editor of the new National Intelligencer, at Abigail’s New Year’s Day reception. A rather horse-faced young lady of twenty-two, she, like everyone else, was a newcomer to the Federal City. “Why no one ever thought what would happen if everyone who voted for Gentleman A as President would also vote for Gentleman B as Vice President…Giving Gentleman B the same number of votes as Gentleman A…”
“They were assuming that—er—Mr. B—actually is a gentleman,” replied Abigail. “And would, as a gentleman, step aside. Though I suppose they all refer to one another as ‘Citizen’ in good French form and the concept of such a distinction as ‘Gentleman’ is a dead letter among them.”
“You do the authors of the Constitution too much credit, Mrs. Adams,” purred Sophie Hallam. “I’m sure they never gave the matter any thought at all. Just as they didn’t consider the fact that in other circumstances the man with the second-highest number of votes stood a good chance of holding views radically different from those of the man with the highest number of votes.”
There had been times, John had told her, during the worst of the “Pseudo-War” with France, when he and Tom Jefferson would pass each other on the streets of Philadelphia without speaking.
It comforted Abigail somewhat to reflect that her husband had done better in the election than either of them had thought he would. He’d carried New England, and had garnered a total of sixty-five electoral votes. Only eight votes behind Jefferson’s seventy-three.
Equally, only eight votes behind Aaron Burr’s seventy-three.
“Well, of course everyone meant for Mr. Jefferson to be President and Mr. Burr, Vice—”
“Vice” being an apt title for Mr. Burr, reflected Abigail, but she merely agreed, “I think there is no doubt as to who is the greater genius.”
Young Mrs. Smith beamed. Though the Intelligencer concentrated on news rather than personalities (or invective), she clearly worshipped Jefferson. Sophie Hallam, elegant in silver-gray silk in the new French style, remarked, “Perhaps not everyone. Mr. Burr is a New Yorker, and it was New York that made the difference in the election. He brought it to Mr. Jefferson as his dowry.”
Abigail followed Sophie’s sardonic gaze across the overcrowded levee-room to Tom Jefferson, surrounded as usual by his supporters—charming, warm, unpowdered, untidily dressed, and radiating a quirky scholarly brilliance. She remembered how diffidently he’d stepped into that family gathering in her uncle Isaac’s parlor, and had had all those stiff dark-clothed New England patriots eating out of his hand before the end of the afternoon.
Remembered the many afternoons he’d come to dinner with them, at that preposterous mansion on the outskirts of Paris; the evenings he’d walk with her in the gardens, talking of architecture, flowers, the inherent rights that God had given to Man.
What had gone through his mind, she wondered, when word came in November of Bonaparte’s coup that had ended once and for all even the pretense of the Revolution in France? Or because a Corsican tyrant was on the throne now instead of a French dunce, did he still pretend to himself that the Revolution had ended in victory instead of defeat?
All around them men kept crowding into the Mansion, darting up the makeshift wooden stairway in the rain to straighten their coats and refurbish their hair-powder in the oval hall. Fires roared in every fireplace, but the evening was still wickedly cold. Abigail wondered that Sophie, slender as the girl she’d been in Paris, didn’t freeze. The new French style seemed to consist of diaphanous silk, no petticoat (and the French Minister’s wife was clearly not wearing a corset either!), high-cut in the waist and so shockingly low in the bosom that Abigail was hard-put not to blush for some of the ladies who wore it, although Sophie herself managed to make the disgraceful costume seem elegant.
Of a piece, thought Abigail despairingly, with the libertinism that the Revolution had brought in its bloody wake.
“I hope your husband will offer his support to Mr. Jefferson, when the voting in the House begins in February.” Meg Smith was, Abigail knew, a faithful attender of Congressional sessions, sitting in the gallery with the most amazingly motley crowd of society women, free blacks, idlers, and prostitutes to observe the debates and cheer during speeches. Had the weather not been so raw—had her grief for Charley not weighed so heavily on her heart—Abigail might have gone herself: Who knows? Sophie had said cheerily a few weeks ago, We might see another brawl.
But though once Abigail would have done murder for a chance to attend sessions of Congress, it seemed to her now a hollow victory. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity….
The truth was, she suspected she would simply become too angry.
“My husband is a firm believer in the separation of powers,” replied Abigail. “He says it is a matter for the legislature now, and that it is not his business.”
“One’s heart might almost go out to Mr. Hamilton.” Meg giggled like a schoolgirl behind her fan. “He has to choose whom he hates least. Whichever way the Federalist votes go, that man will be placed above him. And between Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Burr, I’m not sure that he can choose.”
“Mr. Hamilton will lean toward Jefferson.” Sophie smiled her slightly malicious smile. “He knows Burr, and Burr knows him, through to his marrow-bones. Hamilton believes he can talk his way around Jefferson, given time.”
“Obviously,” remarked Louisa, coming up to join the little group. “A man who would believe Citizen Genêt would believe anyone.”
The others laughed, but Abigail wasn’t so sure. Craning her neck a little, she returned her gaze to Jefferson, wondering if she had ever truly known him. If anyone did. He would almost certainly pardon that pack of foul-minded journalists who’d been jailed for Sedition, not seeing where their lies would lead and perhaps not caring. As a Virginian, and like all Virginians desperately in debt to English tobacco-factors, he might very well repudiate not only the treaty with England but the power of the central government to make any such treaty.
The man is dangerous, she realized. His followers, more dangerous still.
A part of her wished with all her heart that she was back in Quincy again, back on the farm that was now the rock on which their lives were founded, with Louisa and little Caro and Susie. Na
bby’s boys would join them, too, when they were done with school for the summer. Johnny would be home from Europe next year, with his bride—
But a part of her wondered, Should John step down? Or should he make a stand against what is clearly the beginning of ruin for this country?
The voting in the House of Representatives took place on Wednesday, the eleventh of February; Abigail was already packing to leave. After weeks of pounding rains, the sky had cleared. Though the cold remained arctic, the northward roads were drying. Whoever won the House vote, Abigail knew, it would not be John. The thought of staying on in the Federal City—in a hotel? As a guest of one of Martha Washington’s granddaughters?—was more than John, or she, could bear.
If John had ever entertained the thought of not stepping down, of not leaving the country to the mercies of a Jacobin demagogue, he never spoke of it. And since John spoke to her of whatever entered his mind, it was safe to believe that it hadn’t. At one point he had considered resigning in protest a few days before the inauguration, but Abigail had talked him out of it. It would not do, she said, for him to appear a bad loser.
“I am a bad loser,” he’d replied. “Tom…Well, Burr would be worse. Tom may be a Deist, and a Jacobin, but Burr is…Burr is nothing.”
He’d come down to the great East Room where Abigail was taking down the laundry, which took two days to dry in the clammy cold. Only politicians could have designed this house, Abigail reflected, flexing her aching shoulders. It had no service courtyard, nor even a fence around it, and the stables were nearly a mile away. Going back and forth to the Presidential Necessary-House was bad enough. Weeks of rain aside, she wasn’t about to hang the Presidential linen out in full view of the likes of James T. Callendar’s spiritual brethren.
Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers Page 42