First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  John regarded this decision as “the most important Resolution that ever was taken in America,” a de facto declaration of independence. He confided to Abigail that it was the culmination of his campaign to get the Continental Congress on the right side of history, and he was extremely proud of his role in making it happen: “When I consider the great Events which are passed, and the greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some springs and turning some small wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind which is not easily described.” He had entered the Continental Congress hoping to make history, and now he had actually done it.46

  If John was making history, Abigail was witnessing it firsthand. She climbed up Penn’s Hill again to view the artillery bombardment of Boston by American cannons perched on Dorchester Heights. “The sound I think is one of the grandest in Nature,” she exulted, for it signaled the end of the British occupation. (Her eyewitness report to John included a humorous story circulating in and around the city that the infamous John Adams, who had been such a prominent advocate for American independence, had at last seen the light, defected to the British side, and boarded a ship for England.) A few weeks later she was atop Penn’s Hill once more to witness the British evacuation of Boston: “We have a view of the largest Fleet ever seen in America. You may count upwards of 100 & 70 Sail. They look like a Forrest.”47

  John recorded a third triumphant moment in two letters to Abigail written on July 3, 1776. “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided which ever was debated in America,” he declared, “and a greater perhaps never was or will be decided among Men.” He was referring to the formal vote on the resolution, proposed by the Virginia delegation, advocating American independence from all forms of British authority. It had taken a long time to reach this climactic conclusion, longer than John had wished. But now even the ever-impatient and fidgety John Adams found a measure of virtue in the delay. “Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments.” Now that he had won, he could afford to be magnanimous.48

  In subsequent recollections of this historic occasion, John tended to play down the significance of this formal vote and even the approval of the Declaration of Independence two days later. As he recalled it, the big decision had already been made on May 15, when his resolution to require each colony to regard itself as an independent state and to draft a new constitution accordingly had passed unanimously. That was the moment the lightning struck, and the formal vote on July 2 was merely the thunderous afterthought.49

  But that latter-day recollection does not quite square with the second letter he wrote to Abigail on July 3. For there he joyously described the vote on independence as the truly culminating moment, the date that deserved to be celebrated as America’s birthday:

  The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance … It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.

  John got everything right, including the fireworks displays, but he got the date wrong because he thought the vote on independence more symbolically significant than the vote on the Declaration two days later.50

  He was historically correct in his opinion, but he did not take into account the fact that the rest of America and the world first learned about the momentous decisions by the Continental Congress with the publication of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. (By the way, the delegates did not sign the document on that day, as most history books and the popular play 1776 claim. Most signed in early August, but delegates were coming and going and signing throughout the fall.) John was actually at center stage on July 3–4, for he had selected Thomas Jefferson to draft the document and then had single-handedly defended Jefferson’s draft before the congress, which eventually deleted or revised about 20 percent of the text. But once July 4 became the acknowledged date for America’s birth, credit shifted from Adams to Jefferson.51

  This shift annoyed him for the rest of his life. He could claim, with the lion’s share of the evidence on his side, that he had been the most vociferous advocate of American independence in the Continental Congress, consistently at the cutting edge of the radical camp, willing to risk unpopularity by dragging the moderate faction in the congress to a place they did not wish to go. For a man whose primal ambition was to achieve fame, the secular equivalent of immortality, the ascendance of Jefferson’s reputation over his own proved too much to bear. In his old age he asked, “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that has so great an effect as Jefferson’s penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” The real business of American independence was a long-term struggle within the Continental Congress that John, more than anyone else, had orchestrated. By focusing exclusively on the Declaration, “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect … and all the glory of it.”52

  But in the summer of 1776 John was so pleased with the ultimate verdict itself, and so confident that his own role in the revolutionary process was beyond question, that none of his later laments over who would have the starring role in the history books seemed necessary. Moreover, as we try to recover his mood at this crowded moment, two other events intervened to complicate his thinking, and, it turns out, his feelings, in ways that made resting on his laurels impossible.

  The first event was the arrival of the forward edge of the British expeditionary force on Staten Island. John had been appointed chair of the Committee on War and Ordnance on June 13, a position that made him responsible for all the large and small policy decisions governing the Continental Army. (Strategically, should we oppose the British invasion at New York? Logistically, where do we get muskets and powder?) Washington was coming down from Boston with a smallpox-infested army of twelve thousand men. The British force was conservatively estimated at thirty thousand, assisted by a naval squadron of several hundred ships perfectly suited to New York’s coastal exposure and navigable rivers.53

  All the recently vented patriotic sentiments made the defense of New York mandatory. But any detached assessment of the military situation made a stand at New York suicidal. And if the Continental Army made such a stand and was virtually destroyed in the process, all the uplifting arguments in the Declaration of Independence would be essentially meaningless and all the prominent revolutionaries, John included, could expect to be hanged as traitors.

  Abigail later tried to comfort John with the suggestion that even if the Continental Army suffered a catastrophic defeat, he need not worry, because “a race of Amazons” would rise up to replace the fallen men. John spent most of July and August attempting to negotiate the gap between his own convictions about the worthiness of the American cause and the gathering strength of the British army and navy, which were poised to crush that cause with overwhelming force.54

  The second event concerned Abigail and the children. On July 16 John learned that Abigail had taken the family to Boston for inoculation against smallpox. “It is not possible for me to describe,” he told her, “nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this Occasion. Nothing but the critical State of our Affairs should prevent me from flying to Boston, to your assistance.” He said he felt like “a savage to be here, while my whole Family is sick at Boston.”55

  As a result, July and August 1776 were two of the most politically dramatic and psychologically congested months in the history of the Adams family, mixing glory, foreboding, and trepidation in overlapping waves of emotion. In John’s mind’s eye he could simultaneously envision patriotic celebrations throughout the land, the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic gathering in Long Island Sound, and his entire family confined in quarantine amid a raging smallpox epidemic that, acc
ording to Abigail, had infected seven thousand people in and around Boston. On the latter score, the first reports were quite alarming: “Nabby has enough of the small pox for all the family beside,” wrote Abigail. “She is pretty well coverd, not a spot but what is so soar that she can neither walk, stand, or lay with any comfort … She has above a thousand pussels as large as a great Green Pea.”56

  Subsequent reports from Abigail only got worse: “Little Charles in delirium for 48 hours. Has caught the pox in the natural way.” That meant that he was at much greater risk, and Abigail warned John that he must prepare himself for the worst. “I would not have alarmed you,” she confided, “but we cannot tell the Event.” While this letter was in transit, John learned that Washington’s army had carried the contagion down from Boston and only about half his troops were fit for duty, this on the eve of what promised to be the defining battle of the war. “The Small Pox has done Us more harm than British armies, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hannoverians, Hessians, and all the rest,” he lamented to Abigail. And now it was threatening to carry off “my little Babes.”57

  If his correspondence is an accurate measure, John’s primary concern was not the ongoing debates in Philadelphia, or the two armies gathering at New York, but rather his wife and children under quarantine in Boston. Or perhaps it is safer to say that he rocked back and forth between his draining public responsibilities and his emotional concern for the family. At any rate, he wrote Abigail almost every day, most frequently asking about “my sweet Babe, Charles, [who] is never out of my Thoughts—Gracious Heaven preserve him.”58

  Abigail was thrilled to receive such a steady stream of letters: “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she exclaimed, “but I feel myself more obliged by the frequent tokens of your remembrance.” Abigail described one scene in which John Quincy, whose inoculation had taken and was now perfectly healthy, returned from the post office, “and pulling one [letter] from under his Gown gave it to me, the young Rogue smiling and watching Mammas countenance, draws out another, and then an other, highly gratified that he had so many presents to bestow.” In the same letter she also described Charles, “who lay upon the couch coverd over with small Pox, lifted up his head and says ‘Mamma, take my Dollar and get a Horse for Pappa,’ ” so he could come home.59

  By late August the two dramas seemed to be playing out along parallel lines. As the two armies faced off on Long Island, Charles’s life hung in the balance: “Amidst all my Concern for the Army,” John remarked, “my dear Charles is continually present to my Mind. I don’t know what to think.” Early reports from New York were not optimistic. “I fear,” he worried to Abigail, “that we have suffered a great deal.” The truly bad news arrived a few days later. The Continental Army had suffered a devastating defeat, and the surviving remnant was retreating up the Manhattan peninsula in order to avoid being trapped there and face total annihilation. “In general,” he explained to Abigail, “our generals were out generalled.”60

  But good news arrived at the same time. “Little Charles stands by me and sends Duty to Pappa,” Abigail was pleased to report. His fever had broken and his recovery was now assured. John had almost lost an army, but he had not lost a son. Abigail advised him to leave family concerns to her and focus his attention on an investigation of the reasons for the American debacle at New York. She herself wanted to know what had gone so terribly wrong, adding that “if all America are to be ruined and undone by a pack of Cowards and Knaves, I wish to know it too.”61

  John desperately wanted to return home, but did not feel he could leave his post with the Continental Army in such disarray. He had been working eighteen- to twenty-hour days for over two months, his eyes were permanently bloodshot, and his sight was strained, making it difficult to read, especially at night. The emotional toll of witnessing a colossal blow to the American cause was high, and he knew better than most that Washington’s army had gone through a near-death experience. The celebratory mood of early July was now replaced by the somber recognition that it was going to be a long war.

  Remaining in Philadelphia, it turned out, allowed him to launch his diplomatic career. Soon after his decisive victory, the commander of the British army, General William Howe, apprised the Continental Congress that he was prepared to offer new and more acceptable terms of reconciliation that would put an end, once and for all, to the bloodletting. John made it known that he regarded such a promise as disingenuous and wanted no part of a parlay with Howe. Because of his stature in the congress, he was nonetheless selected to join Benjamin Franklin and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina to meet with Howe and hear him out. John’s assessment proved to be correct. Howe had no authority to negotiate a realistic political compromise, only to grant pardons, and as John was delighted to inform him, the Americans had no need for pardons, because they had done nothing wrong.62

  While this little episode marked John’s first appearance as an American ambassador, it subsequently enjoyed considerable prominence in the history books, first for John’s matter-of-fact defiance of General Howe’s authority, and second for his colorful version of the story in his autobiography. As he told it, he and Franklin were forced to sleep in the same bed at a tavern in Perth Amboy, where they engaged in a spirited conversation about the window, whether it should be open or closed. Franklin insisted on the former, John on the latter, the first indication that these two giants of American independence represented two wholly distinct temperaments, as subsequent events in Paris were soon to expose.

  This was one of the few occasions in his long relationship with Franklin when John had the last word, for in his old age he liked to point out that Franklin died with a bad cold, caught because he slept with the window open. He never told Abigail or anyone else about the window argument at the time, which suggests that it was one of those latter-day embellishments that Franklin, if he were alive and able to tell his own story, would have remembered differently.63

  More substantially, John was the primary author of the Plan of Treaties, adopted by the congress in September. At the most immediate level it recognized that some kind of alliance with France, Great Britain’s long-standing rival for European supremacy, should be a goal of American diplomacy. (For several months John had been urging Abigail, who knew the rudiments of French, to teach the language to all the children.) But John also insisted on inserting a paragraph that denied France any permanent holdings in North America as a reward for its prospective alliance. More strategically, the Plan of Treaties urged commercial relations with all European nations, but no binding diplomatic commitments to any foreign power. John did not know it at the time, but he had almost offhandedly defined the abiding goals of American foreign policy for the next century.64

  By the beginning of October many of the other delegates had departed, making it difficult to achieve a quorum. But John regarded his duties as head of the Committee on War and Ordnance as compelling reasons to linger, especially with the fate of the Continental Army still unclear. About the same time, unbeknownst to John or anyone else on the American side, General Howe was deciding not to pursue Washington’s remnant of an army into New Jersey, without much question the biggest British tactical blunder of the war. For if Howe had chosen to pursue Washington, the consensus among military historians is that the Continental Army was in no condition to defend itself. The destruction of the Continental Army would most probably have meant the end of the war, and American history would have flowed in a different direction.65

  As the days passed, even John began to think that he was like the last sentry maintaining his post on a deserted battlefield. “I have been here,” he complained to Abigail, “until I am stupefied.” Worn down like the nub of an overused eraser, he eventually decided that he could accomplish little by hanging on: “I suppose your Ladyship has been in the Twitters, for some Time past,” he chided Abigail, “because you have not received a Letter by every Post, as you used to do. But I am coming to make my Apo
logy in Person.” He cautioned her not to expect him for two or three weeks because of British patrols in New Jersey that he would have to evade. But he was coming home.66

  STILLBORN

  Because of the paradox of proximity, we know very little about what happened within the Adams family for the next three months. We can presume with some confidence that John encouraged Nabby to press on with her French, that he told John Quincy, now called Master John, that his destiny depended upon an austere devotion to his study of the classics, though mere academic learning was less important than a virtuous character, which could not be learned, only lived. As for Tommy and Charles, aged five and seven, they were too young for such injunctions. Their experience of inoculation had introduced them to hardship, the ultimate schoolroom, but for now they just needed to be good boys who listened to their mother.

  But these are mere presumptions, deduced from letters John wrote later. As for Abigail, for similar reasons, we can presume she talked about John’s prominent role in the Continental Congress, the fragile condition of the Continental Army, the vulnerability of the revolutionary cause, the need to remain strong at this difficult moment. These, however, are also only educated guesses based on what they wrote to each other before and afterward. The one thing we know with complete confidence is that Abigail was pregnant.

  Because the etiquette of the era forbade any direct mention of Abigail’s condition, John’s letters back home after he returned to the congress require some interpretation: “I am anxious to hear how you do,” he wrote from the new location in Baltimore. “I have in my Mind a Source of anxiety which I never had before, Since I became such a Wanderer. You know what it is. Cant you convey to me, in Hieroglyphicks which no other person can comprehend, Information which will relieve me? Tell me you are as well as can be expected.” Leaving behind a pregnant wife made him feel guilty and joyful at the same time. “When I think of your Circumstances,” he explained, “I rejoice in them in spight of all this Melancholy.”67