First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  PHILADELPHIA STORY

  Before arriving in Philadelphia, John had envisioned the Continental Congress quite grandly as “a School of Political Prophets …, a Nursery of American Statesmen.” He imagined an American equivalent of the Greek and Roman orators and hoped that he would fill the role of the American Cicero. His private ambitions were palpable and gargantuan. And so far providence had somehow shaped events to accommodate them. The British ministry had created a political crisis in its effort to reform the British Empire, thereby providing the script for an epic historical drama. The Massachusetts legislature had elected him as a delegate to the Continental Congress, thereby placing him on the great stage. Now all he needed to do was play his appointed role and ensure his secular immortality.7

  From the outset, this uncharacteristically romantic vision encountered several formidable obstacles. The first hint of the clash between his expectations and political reality took the form of his realization that the delegates from the other colonies were not like Greek or Roman statesmen, but rather self-important provincials who lacked his understanding of the monumental issues at stake. Patrick Henry was the exception, but the other members of the Virginia delegation seemed determined to deliver endless soliloquies that floated above the fray like inflated balloons.8

  His diary entries on fellow delegates were often highly critical. Roger Sherman of Connecticut was “Rigid as a starched Linen … Awkward as a junior Batchelor or Sophomore.” Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, destined to become a lifelong friend, came across as “too much of a Talker to be a deep Thinker. Elegant, not great.” John was obviously measuring himself against the competition for prominence within the congress, so his personal assessments should be read as highly opinionated verdicts that shed more light on his own urge to become a dominant player than a detached appraisal of his colleagues. But beyond his own psychic twitchings, his frustration with the quality of debate within the congress had roots in a larger political problem: “Tedious, indeed, is our Business,” he complained to Abigail. “I have not been used to such ways.”9

  What confounded John was the fact that political opinion in Massachusetts had moved much further toward the prospect of American independence than in the other colonies. This made eminent sense, since only Massachusetts had been placed under martial law and made to suffer the indignity of occupation by the British army. But what was a mainstream position in Boston was regarded as extremist in Philadelphia. The entire Massachusetts delegation, John included, were seen as dangerous radicals: “We have been obliged to act with great Delicacy and Caution,” he explained to Abigail, “to keep ourselves out of Sight, and to feel pulses, and Sound the Depths—to insinuate our Designs and Desires by means of other Persons.” For the main goal of the vast majority of delegates was not defiance, but reconciliation. And these moderates lived in constant fear that the same incendiaries who had tossed the tea in Boston Harbor might provoke an incident with the British troops that would escalate the crisis to a political point of no return.10

  The ideological convictions that John brought to Philadelphia were fundamentally incompatible with the agenda of the moderates. From the start of his political participation as a critic of British policy, John had described England and New England as two separate political cultures with different histories and contradictory values that could never be wholly reconciled. In his published writings for the Boston Gazette and his correspondence with friends on both sides of the looming divide, he did not describe Britain’s efforts to consolidate its American empire as misguided blunders by uninformed policy makers in London and Whitehall. Instead, he viewed the legislative assault by Parliament as a conscious plot designed to deprive American colonists of their rights as British citizens, to transform them into abject subjects or, worse, slaves. His conspiratorial mentality meant that it was impossible for him to view a tragic figure like Thomas Hutchinson as anything but a vile sycophant. It also meant that he regarded any policy of reconciliation based on the belief that the British would come to see the error of their ways as a naive pipe dream.

  Abigail’s perspective was equally, perhaps even more, nonnegotiable. Though she was surely influenced by her husband’s opinions, her experience as a woman gave her views on British policy a more floridly moralistic tone and an almost operatic voice. In addition to her conversations with John, her correspondence with two other women, Catharine Macauley and Mercy Otis Warren, who just happened to be the two most intellectually prominent female critics of British policy in the English-speaking world, gave her convictions a distinctive edge.

  Macauley was an Englishwoman whose multivolume History of England became a kind of Bible for political dissenters in England and America. She depicted all of English history as a struggle between liberty and tyranny. The cause of the American colonies, then, should also be the cause of every liberty-loving Briton. It was the forces of light against the forces of darkness, with no ambiguous hues and shades to complicate the story—what came to be called “Whig history” in its purest form.11

  Mercy Otis Warren was an American version of Macauley, sister of John’s political hero, James Otis (who, unfortunately, was going mad), a resident of nearby Plymouth who became one of Abigail’s closest confidantes. Warren also saw the Anglo-American conflict in highly moralistic terms, wrote several propagandistic plays populated by British villains and virtuous Americans, and eventually wrote a three-volume History of the American Revolution that John found deficient because it failed to give him the leading role he thought he deserved.12

  In her correspondence with Macauley and Warren, Abigail tended to defer to their superior status, imitating their melodramatic tone and bombastic categories. “The only alternative which every American thinks of is Liberty or Death,” she wrote to Macauley, “for we are invaded with fleets and Armies.” The letters to Warren mimicked the same hyperbolic style: “Our only comfort lies in the justice of our Cause … O Britain, Britain, how is thy glory vanished—how are the annals stained with the Blood of thy children.” Intricate constitutional questions were irrelevant within this framework, since the core issue at stake was a question of power, and the British were obviously prepared to exercise that power arbitrarily. If for John that meant slavery, for Abigail it meant physical violation, in short, rape. These were the ultimate ignominies for a man and a woman, so in that sense John and Abigail agreed that the British ministry was committed to a course that justified their most primal fears. The conversation John encountered at the Continental Congress—with its emphasis on accommodation, compromise, and reconciliation—lacked altogether the emotional dimension of his and Abigail’s deepest convictions.13

  Abigail’s perspective never changed, and her location within striking distance of the British army in Boston gave her physical fears for herself and her family a palpable edge. Though John’s perspective never really changed either, his location in the Continental Congress forced a shift in tactics. The moderates seeking reconciliation dominated the dialogue there, and while he thought them misguided—as he told Abigail, they were “waiting for a Messiah who will never come”—he gradually and grudgingly realized that most of the colonies were politically unprepared to contemplate secession from the British Empire. “But America is a great, unwieldy Body,” he explained to Abigail. “Its Progress must be slow. It is like a large Fleet sailing under Convoy. The fleetest Sailors must await the dullest and the slowest.”14

  He played no role whatsoever in the congress’s expression of solidarity with the plight of Massachusetts or the creation of a Continental Association to adopt nonimportation agreements until the Coercive Acts were revoked. His membership in the Massachusetts delegation required him to avoid any appearance of partisanship on these issues.

  But he was a major player in drafting the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. It called for the restoration of the political status of the American colonies “at the end of the late war” (1763). This meant that the colonial assemblies, not Parliament, should
legislate “in all cases of taxation and internal polity” but consent to Parliament’s regulation of trade “out of mutual interest to both countries.” While John believed that such an arrangement could work—over a century later it became known as the British Commonwealth—he also believed that the likelihood of the British ministry’s accepting this scheme was remote in the extreme. In that sense, he was drafting a document that was not designed to reach an accommodation with Great Britain, but rather to expose the futility of all such efforts.15

  Whatever his motives, John’s mastery of the constitutional arguments made him a conspicuous presence in the Continental Congress. (He later claimed, somewhat defensively, that his political stature at that moment was never exceeded because of the enemies he made later on.) When the Continental Congress adjourned in January 1775, he returned to Braintree and immediately began work on a series of essays entitled Novanglus, which appeared in the Boston Gazette from January until April.

  These were tedious, overburdened, excessive displays of legalistic learning that exposed John’s undisciplined, Vesuvian style, which seemed dedicated to overwhelming the opposition with a lava flow of words. But Novanglus was also the first publication to defend the position of the Continental Congress, which he had helped to draft, rejecting Parliament’s authority not just over taxation, but over all colonial domestic policy. It was not a novel constitutional position for John, but it was a significant clarification of the American argument. Despite his impulsive temperament, he had managed to make himself one of the most prominent leaders of the moderate American cause, even though he never believed that it had the remotest prospect of succeeding. He was now publicly recognized as a major player in the Continental Congress.16

  FAMILY VALUES, AGAIN

  In May 1775, when John returned to Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress, he was effectively leaving his family in a war zone. A month earlier the incendiary incident that the moderates in congress had long feared occurred at Lexington and Concord. John believed that the casualty reports in the Boston press—295 British dead or wounded at the end of the day—were probably exaggerated. There was no doubt, however, that the political crisis had escalated to a military conflict, and its epicenter was the Boston area. “I am concerned for you and our dear babes,” he confided to Abigail. “In Case of real Danger, fly to the Woods with our children.”17

  The sense of fear and guilt he felt—should he leave the congress to be with his wife and “babes”?—only intensified a month later when he read these words from Abigail: “The Battle began upon our intrenchments upon Bunker Hill, at Saturday morning about 3 o’clock and has not ceased yet and tis now 3 o’clock Sabbeth afternoon … How many have fallen we know not—the constant roar of the cannon are so distressing that we cannot Eat, Drink or Sleep.”18

  Abigail had actually taken John Quincy, then eight years old, to view the battle from the top of Penn’s Hill. They witnessed from afar the Pyrrhic British victory, achieved at the cost of a thousand casualties, nearly half their attack force. (Back in London, one retired British officer observed that a few more triumphs like Bunker Hill would lead to the annihilation of the British army.) John’s public reaction was political, for the blood spilled reinforced his long-standing argument that reconciliation with Great Britain was highly unlikely. But his private reaction was emotional. What was he doing four hundred miles away in Philadelphia, safely ensconced, while his beloved Abigail and four young children were hunkered down within earshot of a major battle?

  Little John Quincy never forgot what he saw that day. And in his reminiscences many years later, as a very old man, he recalled the abiding sense of fear that his mother and siblings lived under for several weeks because of British foraging parties and various bands of marauders taking advantage of the lawless conditions. (When he attended the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument in 1843, he expressed only loathing for the main speaker, President John Tyler, a “slave monger” whose presence represented a desecration of the values that true patriots had died for.) Abigail played down the danger in her letters to John, but he recognized the risks she was running: “It gives me more Pleasure than I can express to learn that you sustain with such Fortitude, the Shocks and Terrors of the Times,” he wrote. “You are really brave, my dear, you are a heroine.” She responded with a verbal kiss: “Adieu my Dearest Friend, and always believe me unalterably yours.”19

  It soon became clear to John that the greatest threat to his family was not the British army but disease, chiefly smallpox and dysentery. In addition to seven thousand British troops garrisoned in Boston, there were twelve thousand American militia, soon to become the Continental Army, encircling the city in what came to be called the Siege of Boston. The unsanitary conditions created by two army encampments exacerbated the preexistent smallpox epidemic, then added a particularly lethal version of dysentery to the toxic mix. “Our House is an hospital in every part,” wrote Abigail, “and such is the distress of the neighbourhood that I can scarcely find a well person to assist me in looking after the sick.” Within a two-week period, eighteen people died in Braintree. “A general putrefication seems to have taken place,” Abigail reported, “and we cannot bear the House only as we are constantly cleaning it with hot vinegar.”20

  Abigail’s primary posture toward her role as single parent was stoic acceptance: “Here I serve my partner, my family and myself, and enjoy the Satisfaction of your serving your Country.” But this convenient formulation—a neat division of labor between public and private duties—had never accurately described the way the Adams family actually worked. Abigail had strong political opinions about American policy, and John had domestic responsibilities, especially the education of the children, that played an important role in broadening and balancing his volatile personality. But now, as the threats of war and disease came at Abigail and her little brood in waves, she could not help but feel pangs of resentment at shouldering these burdens alone: “Our Country is as if it were a Secondary God,” she complained to Mercy Otis Warren. “It is to be preferred to parents, wives, children, Friends and all things, the Gods only excepted.” There were some dire occasions, and this happened to be one of them, when family responsibilities should trump public service. She needed John now more than did those delegates at the Continental Congress.21

  John’s response was a combination of empathy and evasion: “My best wishes and most fervent Prayers attend our little Family,” he explained. “I have been banished from them, the greatest part of the last Eighteen Months, but I hope to be with them more, in Time to come.” The chances of that occurring, in truth, were remote in the extreme, in great part because those two armies perched near Braintree represented a dramatic escalation of the imperial crisis that made a recess of the Continental Congress impossible even to imagine. On another occasion he raised the possibility of moving his family to Philadelphia. This was a logistical impossibility for the foreseeable future, as John himself acknowledged: “Let me please myself with the Thought however.”22

  Though she never said it outright, and would have chastised herself afterward for doing so, Abigail felt that, given the circumstances, John’s highest duty was to his family, and to her, rather than his country. He saw it differently: “From my earliest entrance into Life, I have been engaged in the public Cause of America. And from first to last I have had upon my Mind, a strong Impression, that things would be wrought up to their present Crisis. I saw from the Beginning that the Controversy was of such a Nature, that it would never be settled, and every day convinces me more and more.” In short, now that his political prediction of an inevitable break with the British Empire was coming true, and now that the crisis was entering its climactic phase, history was calling him to play a major role in the final chapter of the story, and that call took precedence over all others. The combination of patriotism and ambition was seamless in his soul.23

  Abigail understood her man’s paradoxical urges better than anyone else alive, so instead
of challenging his choices, she eventually endorsed them. If he could not join her, then he should carry the American colonies where they needed to go more effectively than any other member of the congress. “Let us separate, [for] they [the British] are unworthy to be our Brethren. Let us renounce them and instead of supplications … let us beseech the almighty to blast their counsels and bring to Naught all their devices.” This was exactly what John wanted to hear.24

  Whatever strains John’s prolonged absence put on the marriage, Abigail was an emotionally stable, psychologically sophisticated adult who understood the sacrifices that love required. Her four children, however, were going through formative stages of their own development. And the elemental fact was that their father was not present during most of that time. Though he frequently decried the situation himself, John’s public duties made him an absentee parent.

  There is a reason, rendered available by hindsight, to notice this fact. For we know what happened to all the Adams children, and it is not an attractive story. Charles died young from alcoholism; Tommy also drank his way through a dreary life; Nabby married badly and was forced to leave her husband to live with her parents before succumbing to breast cancer. John Quincy, of course, the apple of John’s eye, was a huge success, arguably the greatest secretary of state in American history and the first son to follow his father as president. But even John Quincy, for all his intellectual sophistication and political achievement, was not a happy man, lacked the emotional spontaneity of his father, and seemed to regard laughter as an unnatural act. Given this prevailing pattern, which is truly heartbreaking to know as one reads John and Abigail’s parental observations as their children were growing up, the salient question is unavoidable: Did the absence of a father stunt their emotional growth?