First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Meanwhile, back in Braintree, Abigail claimed that she was riding all the waves with them in her dreams. In March, while the Boston was still at sea, alarming reports circulated in the Boston press that Benjamin Franklin had been assassinated and the Boston captured after a fierce battle. These false rumors were not discredited for two months, leaving Abigail to draft letters without knowing whether to send them to the American embassy in Paris or the Tower in London. “Hitherto my wandering Ideas Rove like the Son of Ulysses from Sea to Sea,” she lamented, “not knowing where to find you.” She did not learn that her husband and son had landed safely at Bordeaux until June 18, two and a half months after the fact, and only then, ironically, from a reprinted account in an English newspaper: “I shall wait with impatience till I receive tidings from the well known hand of my dearest friend,” she wrote guardedly. “O, When, When, shall it arrive? But hush my anxious heart.”5

  It arrived twelve days later, more a note than a letter, but bearing the glorious news that her husband and son were alive and well. “Shall I tell my dearest that tears of joy filled my eyes this morning at the sight of his well known hand,” she gushed, “the first line that has blessed my sight during his four months absence … I have lived a life of fear and anxiety ever since you left me.” It was almost as if she required a palpable expression of John’s personality, the distinctive slant of his scrawl, before she could rest assured he was alive. Though he had landed at Bordeaux, Abigail wanted him to know that he had also, at last, landed “in the Bosom of his partner.” She was now going to clutch him there more tightly than ever before, because the agonizing uncertainty of his fate had forced her to recognize, more than ever before, how completely her own life was wrapped around his.6

  The chief problem was the Atlantic Ocean. While Abigail realized that letters to and from Paris would require months rather than weeks to reach their destination, she presumed that the flow of correspondence would resemble a delayed version of their exchange of letters when John was in Philadelphia. For several reasons, however, her presumption proved wrong.

  First, the British navy patrolled the sea-lanes and seized all correspondence on captured American and French vessels in the hopes of finding intelligence of use in the war effort. Knowing this, ship captains often threw their literary cargo overboard as soon as British frigates appeared on the horizon. Although it is impossible to know with any precision, approximately one-fourth to one-third of the letters Abigail and John wrote to each other in 1778–79 ended up on the ocean bottom.7

  Second, John was acutely aware—Abigail thought excessively aware—that his letters could fall into British hands. “It is impossible for me to write as I did in America,” he explained. “It is not safe to write any thing that one is not willing should go into all the Newspapers of the World.” As a result, his letters, especially his earliest letters, tended to be short, businesslike, and devoid of just the kind of intimate expressions that Abigail craved to hear. He still felt them, he incessantly assured her, but he could not afford to put them on paper as he had in the past. Abigail thought this explanation rather lame: “The affection I feel for my Friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choise and approved by Heaven … What care I then for the ridicule of Britains should this testimony fall into their Hands, nor can I endure that so much caution and circumspection on your part should deprive me of the only consolor of your absence.”8

  By the summer of 1778 she was fretting out loud to friends that she had received only two letters from John, both overly concise reports that all was well, nothing more. The fretting became more heartfelt over succeeding months: “You could not have suffered more upon your Voyage than I have felt cut off from all communication with you. My Harp has been hung upon the Willows, and I have scarcely even taken my pen to write but the tears have flowed faster than the Ink.” His prolonged silences were transforming her, she reported, from a naturally cheerful wife and mother to an insipid creature: “All things look gloomy and melancholy around me.” Her mood worsened as winter approached, the long silences continued, and the snow built up around the house: “I would almost fancy myself in Greenland.”9

  Her depression eventually turned to anger, first directed at the Continental Congress for sending her husband an eternity away, then at John himself for his apparent inability to convey affection. She wondered out loud “if you have changed Hearts with some Laplander or made a voyage to a region that has chilled every Drop of your Blood.” How could he have changed so much from that affectionate soul mate she had waved farewell to on that horrible day last February? Was there something he was afraid to tell her? Had he fallen in love with someone else? Or had his heart constricted into a hard inert muscle that barely beat? Were all his letters, the few of them she did receive, going to remain hastily written acts of apparent obligation, almost worse than nothing at all? If the latter was so, he needed to know that she now had resolved to adopt a minimalist style of her own, “modeled on the very concise Methods of my Friend.”10

  Abigail was hardly a frail creature, but the very depth of her own sense of affinity for John made her vulnerable when their ongoing conversation suddenly became a monologue. If she was his ballast, he was her alter ego, and when, for whatever reason—Atlantic storms, British cruisers, or John’s temporary obliviousness—his presence was removed from the equation, she was like a graceful dancer suddenly alone on the floor without a partner.

  Her momentary vulnerability helps explain the uncharacteristically flirtatious correspondence that she found herself having with James Lovell at this time. Lovell was a Harvard graduate and former schoolteacher whose zeal for the patriot cause had convinced the British that he must be imprisoned as a dangerous character. He was apparently dangerous in several senses of the term, for upon his release from prison and appointment to the Massachusetts delegation in the Continental Congress, he developed a reputation as a ladies’ man with a wife and family back in Massachusetts and a series of female friends in Philadelphia.11

  The letters they exchanged during John’s absence had an official rationale, since Lovell was head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and therefore perfectly positioned to inform Abigail about events in Paris involving her husband. (In effect, Lovell could provide the information that John regarded as too sensitive to be included in his letters.) But Lovell’s letters, and eventually Abigail’s responses, defied all rules of official etiquette and became elaborate prose performances loaded with sexual innuendo, fanciful expressions of endearment, and mock distress at the other’s suggestive language. This operatic style (e.g., “Amiable tho unjust Portia! doubly unjust!—to yourself and to me”), overloaded with literary references to Shakespeare and the classics, almost requires translation for a modern reader because of the double entendres and obvious mimicking of Laurence Sterne’s layered sentimentalizing in Tristram Shandy, the novelistic rage of the moment in both Great Britain and America.12

  Abigail even acknowledged that she was uniquely receptive to Lovell’s double-edged expressions of affection. (For example, he claimed he could not stop himself from loving a woman who was so much in love with such an admirable man as John Adams.) “I love every one who Manifests a regard or Shews an Attachment to my absent Friend,” she confessed to Lovell, “and will indulgently allow for the overflowing of a heart softened by absence, pained by a separation from what it holds most dear upon Earth.” It also did not hurt that Lovell was writing just the kind of long, highly affectionate, and deeply flattering letters that she was demanding, but not getting, from John.13

  Nothing “happened” between Abigail and Lovell, which is to say that the literary dalliance with a man fully prepared to give her his undivided attention never seriously threatened the unconditional love she felt for her “Dearest Friend.” But the epistolary episode with Lovell did expose her emotional vulnerability, her craving for affectionate attention, and the sense of injustice she felt at being expected to accept secondary status forever to th
e country’s call. She was not happy.

  SEX, SPIES, AND THE FRANKLIN PROBLEM

  If Abigail’s major problem during John’s eighteen-month absence was a pervasive sense of loneliness and neglect, his was quite the opposite. France and French society showered him with attention as the newly arrived embodiment of the Franco-American alliance. He was feted and fussed over from the moment that he and John Quincy landed at Bordeaux. And at one of the lavish dinner parties in his honor, he encountered for the first time the aristocratic mores of a world wholly different from anything he had experienced before.

  The lovely wife of his host playfully asked him if he was descended from Adam, the first man, and if so whether he could answer a question that had always intrigued her: How did Adam and Eve, the first couple, learn to make love? Speaking no French, he blushed as he listened to the translation, then composed himself to explain that it was probably a natural act, like the attraction of magnets or a lightning strike, to which his hostess replied that it was certainly “a very happy shock.” No woman talked this way in Braintree or Boston.14

  More of the same greeted him in Paris, or more accurately in Passy, a village on the outskirts of the city, where Franklin resided in a magnificent château provided by the comte de Chaumont, which came equipped with a staff of nine liveried servants and a wine cellar of more than a thousand bottles. Franklin insisted that John move in with him—there was plenty of room, and his proximity would make doing diplomatic business more convenient. He also arranged for John Quincy to attend a nearby boarding school where his grandson, Benjamin Franklin Bache, was already a student.

  Multiple dinners were quickly scheduled to introduce the new American minister to “the first people of Paris.” (Franklin believed that the most important diplomatic work was done at dinner parties.) The beautiful Madame Brillon impressed John with her opinionated conversation, which resembled that of his own opinionated wife, but he was startled when she perched herself on Franklin’s lap and began kissing “cher Papa” on the cheek. Another woman whom John presumed to be Madame Brillon’s companion turned out to be her husband’s mistress: “I was astonished that these people could live together in such apparent friendship without cutting each other’s throats,” he observed much later. “But I did not know the world.”15

  Eventually, John’s view of this highly sophisticated and thoroughly promiscuous world came to resemble the response of the proverbial Puritan in Babylon. But at first he was rather bedazzled by it all: “To tell you the Truth,” he confided to Abigail, “I admire the Ladies here. Don’t be jealous. They are handsome, and very well educated. Their accomplishments are exceedingly brilliant.” (One can only imagine Abigail’s reaction when she read these words.) And while he eventually became highly critical of Franklin’s flirtatious ways, initially he described them as the harmless habits of an old man playing the role of male coquette. He even joked to Franklin that he intended to apprise their supervisors back in Philadelphia that the senior member of the delegation was developing a wholly new, “lap-oriented” approach to American diplomacy.16

  The more official version of American diplomacy in France was vested in the three-man commission of Franklin, Arthur Lee, and now John Adams. To say that the records of the delegation were in disarray would be misleading, since, as John quickly discovered, there were really no records at all, a condition that he immediately assumed was his mission to correct. This was tedious work—copying routine diplomatic dispatches, answering requests from marooned and penniless American tourists, approving prisoner exchanges—all time-consuming tasks that, so he explained, left little time to write Abigail. But the most pressing problem was the open break between Franklin and Lee, the roots of which would require the skills of a brilliant detective and a sophisticated psychiatrist to fathom. John quickly decided to make himself “an umpire between two bitter and inveterate enemies.”17

  Lee seemed the obvious source of the problem. Although his bloodlines were impeccable (he was a member of Virginia’s most prominent family) and his educational credentials were impressive (degrees in medicine from Edinburgh and law from London), Lee had a disarming knack for seeing corruption everywhere. He had accused Silas Deane, John’s predecessor in the American delegation, of war profiteering. And he claimed that Franklin’s household was staffed with British spies, whom Franklin, in his conspicuously oblivious style, was providing with every confidential decision the delegation reached. As a result, Lee refused to confer with Franklin, and Franklin concluded that Lee was beyond reason and redemption. John discovered that the effort to arrange a reconciliation, even to get his two colleagues into the same room to sign official correspondence, was impossible: “The Wisdom of Solomon, the Meekness of Moses, and the Patience of Job, all united in one character, would not be sufficient to qualify a Man to act in the Situation in which I am at present,” he complained to Abigail, adding that “I have scarcely a trace of any of these Virtues.”18

  What John did not realize at the time was that all of Lee’s apparently paranoid accusations were true. Deane was a corrupt profiteer and was eventually found guilty of that charge by the Continental Congress. Virtually the entire staff of Franklin’s château were, in fact, spies, though not all British spies. Some reported to the French court, others to mercantile houses interested in obtaining government contracts. But the most dramatic revelation, so unsuspected that it took over a century for historians to discover, was that Edward Bancroft, Franklin’s private secretary, was a British spy who provided weekly reports to London (in invisible ink) of every conversation within the American delegation.19

  Though he never fully realized the extent of the corruption surrounding him, John did recognize as early as May 1778 that he was spinning his wheels in a diplomatic swamp. In a private letter to Samuel Adams that he knew would be circulated within the Continental Congress, he proposed that the three-person commission was no longer necessary and one American minister to the French court would suffice. This had the double advantage of solving the Lee-Franklin problem without even mentioning it, and clearing the way for his own return home. For there was no question that if his advice was taken, Franklin would be appointed the sole American minister and John could cease being an absentee husband.20

  The Continental Congress did take John’s advice, but not until September 1778, and official word of its decision did not reach Paris until February 1779. Oddly, the appointment of Franklin was not accompanied by orders relieving John, who was left to stew amid rumors that he might be dispatched to Amsterdam or Vienna. “I never was in such a situation as I am now,” he confessed to Abigail, “and my present Feelings are new to me,” not knowing whether he should await further instructions or take it upon himself to head home on the next ship. He described himself as “wedged by the Waiste in the middle of a rifted Oak.”21

  During this prolonged waiting period the major, and surely most consequential, event was the deterioration of his relationship with Franklin. If only in retrospect, one could see this coming as far back as that evening in 1776 when they argued, albeit in a bantering way, over whether to open or close the window before going to sleep. More generally, Franklin’s capacious but elusive personality seemed designed by the gods to drive a straight-ahead man like John crazy. More specifically, John had arrived in Paris assuming that he and Franklin were political equals with roughly equal revolutionary credentials. Back in America this was not a far-fetched assumption, but in France it was a preposterous illusion.

  In a quite brilliant act of reinvention, Franklin the cosmopolitan, longtime resident of London had transformed himself into Franklin the original American, fresh from the backwoods complete with beaver hat and folksy wisdom. In Paris he was not just an American icon, he was the American icon, on a par with Voltaire as a philosopher and prose stylist, alongside the comte de Buffon as a world-class scientist. His image was everywhere—in portrait galleries, in print shops, on porcelain plates and gold-plated jewelry—the most famous and recognizab
le American sage of the enlightened age.22

  Though it took a while, it was probably inevitable that John would find the Franklin phenomenon intolerable. The criticism started slowly, with snide observations about Franklin’s vaunted proficiency in French, a touchy subject given his own total lack of fluency, then complaints about Franklin’s slovenly work habits and the fact that he did not rise until eleven o’clock, while he, John Adams, was at his desk at dawn. One can almost sense the smoldering resentment when John described scenes of “continual dissipation” as crowds showed up daily “to have the honor to see Franklin, and to have the pleasure of telling stories about his Simplicity, his bald head and scattering straight hairs.” On one occasion at the theater, a portrait of Franklin was displayed onstage during intermission, and John was so disgusted that he feigned illness and left the performance. The jealousy was palpable.23

  The result was an embarrassing exhibition of envy that also had significant political implications for the American cause. For John had chosen—no, actually he could not help himself—to put a huge crack in a political partnership that still had some history to make.