First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Abigail wrote Mercy Otis Warren that she had considered asking John to stay with her, “and I know I could have prevailed, but our public affairs at the time were so gloomy an aspect that I thought if ever his assistance was wanted, it must be at such a time.” A ray of sunshine broke through the gloom on Christmas night, 1776, when Washington crossed the ice-choked Delaware River despite horrible weather conditions and surprised the British garrison at Trenton, which surrendered after a spirited fight. A week later he struck again at Princeton, a somewhat larger engagement in which Washington himself led the final charge that broke the British line. Neither Trenton nor Princeton were major battles, but taken together they signaled an important psychological shift, rescuing the American cause from what had seemed like certain death. As John settled into his new quarters in Baltimore—Philadelphia was deemed too vulnerable to British attack—he could tell himself that a new life was stirring in his beloved wife and in America’s prospects.68

  “I feel you have gone to a foreign Country,” Abigail complained after not hearing from John for over a month. The gossip mills were churning out all kinds of outlandish stories. Was it true that Washington had won a great victory at New Brunswick, capturing fifteen thousand British troops? (No, it was Trenton, and six hundred British prisoners.) She presumed that reports of Washington’s death and John’s death by poisoning were just British or Tory propaganda. But she needed to hear from him to be sure, most especially about the latter story.69

  When his first letter arrived on March 9, 1777, it was full of distress about not hearing from her, especially because of her “delicate condition.” All was fine, she assured him, and the movements inside her were “a constant remembrance of an absent friend, and excites sensations of tenderness which are better felt than expressed.” Master John had told her that he had never seen anyone so fat.70

  John explained that he was buried under paperwork, some of it grisly reports on the standard practice of Hessian troops to bayonet all American soldiers who surrendered in battle. But his biggest headache was the bizarre pettiness of so many officers in the Continental Army, who were “scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.” Mention of the military turned his mind to a lamentation that he was too old to serve; then that thought ricocheted to the regret that his boys were too young: “I wish my lads were old enough. I would send every one of them into the Army, in some Capacity or other.”71

  All his children were old enough to read, save perhaps Tommy, and John made a vow to write them all in March. He urged John Quincy to read history, the seminal source of “solid instruction” about human nature, beginning with Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War, eventually in the original Greek, but for now in translation, available in the family library. For poetry, he should begin with Milton’s Paradise Lost. Nabby also received educational advice, mostly to recognize that she was expected to follow her mother’s path beyond what was considered appropriate for women and should make French a special focus. Charles was not pushed as hard as John Quincy. He had the most engaging personality of them all, John told him, but what calling best fitted him remained a mystery. The military was not an option, since the war would be over before he came of age. Tommy, who was only five years old, was encouraged to consider a medical career, perhaps to do research on better ways to stamp out smallpox.72

  Smallpox was very much on John’s mind. His own family, now inoculated, was safe from the scourge, but John correctly believed that the disease was an even greater threat to the Continental Army than the British. After the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia in March, he went to a cemetery where two thousand fallen American soldiers were buried, the vast majority of them victims of smallpox and dysentery. “Disease has destroyed Ten Men for Us,” he estimated, “where the Sword of the Enemy has killed one.” Fortunately, Washington agreed with John’s assessment, so it became mandatory for all new enlistees in the Continental Army to undergo inoculation before reporting for duty. It was one of the most important strategic decisions of the war.73

  John went into confessional mode with Abigail, suggesting that he had reached a high level of authority within the patriot camp that he could never fulfill: “I begin to suspect that I have not much of the Grand in my Compositions,” he wrote. “I long for rural and domestic scenes, for the warbling of Birds and the Prattle of my Children—Don’t you think I am somewhat poetical this morning?” If poetical, he was also misleading, as John himself acknowledged by adding: “is not the Heart Deceitful above all things?”

  What he meant was psychologically complicated. By remaining in Philadelphia rather than with his children and pregnant wife, John worried that he was acting selfishly, allowing his political ambition to dominate his domestic responsibilities. He recognized that he was a deeply ambitious man. But he needed to convince himself, and Abigail, that “Ambition which has Power for its Object, I don’t believe I have a Spark in my Heart … But there are other forms of Ambition of which I have a great deal.”74

  By “other forms” he meant the desire to live forever in the memory of succeeding generations, rather than the desire to accrue power and wealth in his lifetime. He was so anxious to press the point, however, because he recognized that the distinction invited suspicion. And no matter how sincere he felt about it, he was also trying to assure himself. There was therefore a constant refrain about abandoning the “infinite Noise, Hurry, and Bustle” of the Congress, the urge to escape the “lonely melancholy Life, mourning for all the Charms of Life … for all the Amusements that I ever had, which is my farm.”75

  John was being sincere, but Abigail knew he would never leave his post. Both of them adopted a sacrificial perspective: he would suffer pangs of guilt to serve his country; she would suffer the pain produced by the absence of her husband. Her resolve had its fleeting moments as her pregnancy progressed. She complained that she was denied the pleasure enjoyed by others, “of having their mate sit by them with anxious care during all their Solitary confinement.” She wanted him home before the birth of the child in July, but she never asked or ordered him to return, because she knew that he would find it impossible to refuse, and she did not want to impose such choices.76

  One less elliptical issue that they could agree upon without lingering ambiguity or conceit was the profiteering by merchants who hoarded goods and exploited wartime conditions. John delivered several jeremiads on this score, but Abigail was even more incensed, because she had to deal with such insufferable creatures on a daily basis to purchase provisions for her family. She was pleased to report one impromptu rebellion by the women of Boston against a particularly notorious profiteer:

  It was rumored that an eminent, stingy, wealthy merchant had a hogshead of coffee in his store which he refused to sell for under six shillings per pound. A number of females, some say a hundred, some say more, assembled with a cart and trucks, marched down to the warehouse, demanded the keys, which he refused to deliver, upon which one of them seized him by his neck, and tossed him into the cart. Upon his finding no quarter, he delivered the keys, they tipped up the cart and discharged him, then opened the warehouse, hoisted out the coffee themselves, put it into the trucks and drove off.77

  By late spring of 1777 John was writing two letters to one of hers, trying to sustain an ongoing conversation as her pregnancy progressed. He would rise at four o’clock, write letters until six, then ride for an hour before going to his office. One morning he apparently had nothing new to say, so he copied a huge selection, over four thousand words, from a recent book by Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man, for Abigail’s edification. Mostly, and as the delivery date neared even more so, he expressed the desire to be with her: “Oh that I could be near, to say a few kind Words, or shew a few Kind Looks … Oh that I could take from my dearest, a share of her Distress, or relieve her of the whole.”78

  The day before he wrote these words, Abigail had written him with some ominous news: “I was last night taken with a shaking fit, and am very
apprehensive that a life was lost. As I have no reason today to think otherwise, what may be the consequences to me Heaven only knows.” The following day, July 10, the contractions began, and she wrote him in between them over the next thirty-six hours: “The Doctor encourages me to Hope that my apprehensions are groundless respecting what I wrote you yesterday … and I almost wish I had not let that letter go.” She mixed reports of the looming birth with remarks about the inflated cost of sugar, the need to get more seaweed as fertilizer, and the rumor—true, it turned out—that Ticonderoga had fallen to the British.79

  John wrote her a newsy letter on July 11, the day of the birth, unaware of her precarious condition and full of speculation about the intentions of General Howe, who had just sailed out into the Atlantic with his entire army, his destination a mystery: “A Faculty of penetrating into the Designs of an Enemy is said to be the first Quality of a General,” John observed. “But it is impossible to discover the Designs of an Enemy who has no Design at all.” As it turned out, Howe did have a design, though an odd one. He intended to sail south to the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, then march his troops overland through Delaware to attack Philadelphia. Fixated on the military crisis rather than Abigail’s, John expressed bewilderment: “But they might as well imagine them gone round Cape Horn into the South Seas to land at California, and march across the Continent to attack our back settlements.”80

  It took two weeks for a letter to reach him with the news that Abigail had delivered a daughter, “an exceedingly fine looking Child” named Elizabeth, but that she was stillborn. A letter from Abigail herself arrived a few days later, describing the child as “a very fine Babe, and as it never opened its Eyes in this world it looked as tho they were closed for sleep.” The cause of death was apparent, probably strangulation by the umbilical cord, but Abigail preferred not to put such details in a letter. After she was fully recovered, she was better able to express her sense of disappointment. Addressing John in the third person, she said that “I had pleasd myself with the Idea of presenting him a fine son or daughter upon his return … but those dreams are buried in the Grave, transitory as the morning Cloud, short lived as Dew Drops.”81

  The two- to three-week delay between sending and receiving a letter created awkward disjunctions. In this case, John had posted five letters to Abigail since her ordeal, and in all of them he was obsessed with Howe’s weird maneuverings and the equally worrisome movement of General John Burgoyne’s huge army, seven thousand strong, south from Lake Champlain into the Hudson River Valley. He was completely oblivious to, or at least said nothing about, the movements occurring inside Abigail.

  When a series of letters finally arrived informing him of the stillborn Elizabeth, he felt both devastated and guilty. “Never in my whole Life,” he claimed, “was my Heart affected with such Emotions and Sensations … Is it not unaccountable, that one should feel so strong an Affection for an Infant, that one has never seen, nor shall see?” His guilt resulted from the realization that his personal attention, which should have been fixed on the love of his life, was instead focused on British strategy. The tension between his public and private duties had never been so stark, and if this was some kind of providential test, he believed that he had failed it.82

  Abigail used the incident to speculate on the injustice of living through historic times that imposed impossible obligations on both of them. “ ’Tis almost fourteen years since we were united,” she recalled, “but not more than half that time we had the happiness of living together.” Nor was that all: “I consider it as a sacrifice to my Country and one of my greatest misfortunes [for my husband] to be separated from my children at a time of life when the joint instructions and admonitions of parents sink deeper than in maturer years.” John heartily concurred: “I am wearied with the Life I lead, and long for the Joys of my Family … If I live much longer in Banishment, I shall scarcely know my own Children.”83

  In late September a young aide to Washington by the name of Alexander Hamilton arrived in time to warn the Continental Congress of the approach of Howe’s army outside Philadelphia. John told Abigail not to worry, that the delegates knew how to run away almost as deftly as the American militia, and Howe’s occupation of Philadelphia would only increase the drain on his resources.84

  At last, as both armies moved into their winter quarters, John wrote from the temporary congressional headquarters at York to announce he was coming home. Abigail told him she had dreamed that, upon his return, their lengthy separation produced a cool reception from him: “Your Dream will never come to pass,” he assured her. “You can never be coolly received by me while my Heart beats and my senses remain.”85

  John had been gone from Abigail and the children for ten months, and both of them looked forward to a prolonged reunion during which they could recover their physical and emotional rhythms. But it was not meant to be.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1778–84

  “When he is wounded, I bleed.”

  IT WAS LIKE a scene out of a sentimental novel. On February 13, 1778, John and ten-year-old John Quincy walked out the door of their Braintree home into the snow. Abigail was too distraught to accompany them up Penn’s Hill, then down the other side to the shore of what is now Quincy Bay, where a skiff from the frigate Boston was waiting to begin their journey to France. Instead, she went back inside the house, put her head on the kitchen table, and began to cry inconsolably.

  She had been crying for over a month, ever since word reached her that John had been selected to replace Silas Deane as a member of the American diplomatic delegation in Paris, charged with the all-important mission of negotiating a treaty to bring France into the war on the American side. She knew that patriotism obligated her to make this personal sacrifice silently, and Mercy Otis Warren pretty much ordered her to do just that. “But is it really necessary to muster up arguments to prevail with my dear Mrs. Adams?” Mercy asked rhetorically. Instead she should stop fretting and take pride in the recognition that her husband, as Mercy put it, “is the best qualified of any man on the Continent to represent the United States of America.”1

  Abigail certainly knew all the patriotic homilies by heart, but reciting them was one thing and really meaning them quite another. For she was being asked to part willingly for an unknowable length of time “with him whom my Heart esteems above all earthly things.” She simply could not do it. “My life will be one continued scene of anxiety and apprehension,” she predicted, an emotional reality that made it impossible “to cheerfully comply with the demand of my Country.”2

  There were several family conversations soon after the news of John’s appointment arrived. Abigail’s preference, despite an utter dread of an Atlantic crossing, was to accompany her husband, taking Nabby and John Quincy with them and leaving the youngest boys back home with relatives. “My desire was … to have run all the hazards and accompany him,” she explained to a friend, “but I could not prevail upon him to consent.” John had eventually decided that the risks of a winter crossing of the North Atlantic, plus the predatory presence of British frigates cruising the sea-lanes for prizes, might lead to the near annihilation of the Adams family, or capture and imprisonment in England for the duration of the war. He himself was duty-bound to run those risks, but Abigail and the children must not be part of the gamble, a decision he qualified by acquiescing to John Quincy’s argument that he wanted and needed to spend more time with his father.3

  It never occurred to John to refuse the appointment, an option Abigail probably preferred but never felt she could insist upon, knowing as she did that John would feel obliged to grudgingly concur, then hold it against her the rest of their lives. For while John was unquestionably an American patriot, he was also obsessed with claiming a prominent role as an architect of American independence, and the last thing that Abigail would ever do was to become an obstacle between her husband and his fondest dream.

  What neither of them knew at the time, nor did anyone else in Ameri
ca, was that a week before John and John Quincy sailed, a treaty creating the Franco-American alliance had already been signed. In effect, the mission on which John was being sent had already been accomplished. And as he was to discover upon his arrival in Paris, there was very little of any diplomatic significance for him to do, except attempt to bridge the growing chasm between warring factions within the American delegation that had gathered around Benjamin Franklin on the one hand and Arthur Lee on the other.

  All the anguish Abigail was anticipating as she sobbed away at her kitchen table would never have occurred if modern communications had been available. As it turned out, in the absence of any meaningful diplomatic agenda, the emotional agenda created by their prolonged separations became the main story. The diplomatic negotiations that mattered most were domestic, as distance forced John and Abigail, most especially Abigail, to confront their mutual doubts and dependencies in ways they had never done before. This proved to be the greatest strain on their marriage and “friendship” in their lifetimes.

  OVER THERE

  The six-week voyage was even more precarious than John had imagined. The Boston bucked twenty-foot waves, gale winds that ripped her rigging to pieces on three occasions, and a lightning storm that split the mainmast and incapacitated twenty of the crew. Three British frigates chased them for several days, and, in a separate action, the Boston engaged and captured a British merchant ship, the Martha. During that action John appeared beside the captain, musket in hand, prepared to join the boarding party until ordered below. A young lieutenant whom John had befriended was seriously wounded when a cannon exploded while firing a warning shot. John volunteered to hold the officer down while the ship’s doctor amputated his leg. (He died a week later and was buried at sea with the remnants of the cannon lashed to his chest.) Through it all, John Quincy was a model of composure, always by his father’s side, stunningly mature beyond his years, mastering French at a pace that John found he could not match.4