First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  She began to question whether her capacity to love was a blessing or a curse, given the relentless sorrow it produced when the outlet was an ocean away. She even attributed her own miserable condition—John did not strike her as similarly affected—to the biblical curse imposed on all women. “Desire and Sorrow were denounced upon our Sex,” she speculated, “as a punishment for the transgression of Eve. I have sometimes thought that we are formed to experience more exquisite sensations than is the Lot of your Sex. More tender and susceptible by Nature of … happiness or misery, we Suffer and enjoy in a higher degree.” Given the current downward spiral on her own emotional scale, she had discovered a new appreciation of “the philosopher who thanked the Gods that he was created a Man rather than a Woman.”40

  “WHEN HE IS WOUNDED, I BLEED”

  If Abigail’s problems were primarily emotional, John’s were chiefly diplomatic. In effect, he had been appointed minister plenipotentiary to negotiate an end of the war with Great Britain more than a year before the British ministry was prepared to give serious consideration to such negotiations. During the spring and summer of 1780, in fact, British strategy called for a major campaign in the Carolinas and Georgia designed to deliver a blow that would demonstrate the futility of continued American resistance. Until the British came to recognize the futility of their own war policy, John could only wait.

  Patience never came naturally to John, so in the summer of 1780 he began to question what he regarded as Franklin’s overly solicitous posture toward the French government, thereby inserting himself into a conversation between Franklin and the French foreign minister, the comte de Vergennes. Both Franklin and Vergennes regarded this intrusion as unwelcome and potentially harmful to the Franco-American alliance, a landmark achievement that they, quite correctly, viewed as their joint triumph.

  Vergennes took an immediate dislike toward this American interloper, who seemed to possess all the diplomatic grace of a cannonball and to regard stubbornness as a major virtue. “His obstinacy,” Vergennes noted caustically, “will cause to foment a thousand unfortunate incidents.” Eventually, on July 29, 1780, he announced the end of any and all communication with John Adams. From now on, he would deal only with Franklin when it came to American affairs. He also fired off an angry letter to La Luzerne, the French minister to the United States, urging him to use all his influence to have Adams recalled.41

  What had John done to provoke such exasperation? His major offense was to insist that the United States be treated as an equal partner in the Franco-American alliance, a point that Franklin preferred to finesse. Lurking behind that insistence was the conviction that French and American interests, though temporarily aligned, were not enduringly identical. As he put it in his diary, French policy was to “keep us weak. Make us feel our obligations. Impress our minds with a sense of gratitude.” Once the war with Great Britain was won—an outcome that John acknowledged to be quite dependent on French assistance—French and American goals were likely to diverge. France would probably seek to recover some portion of its lost empire in North America, for example, and hold American interests hostage to its larger European agenda in the global conflict with Great Britain. The time might very well come, in short, when America’s gratitude toward the French became a major obstacle in negotiating favorable terms with the British.

  However obstinate and ungrateful such convictions seemed to Vergennes and Franklin at the time, they were rooted in a highly realistic assessment of America’s long-term interests that proved prescient as events unfolded pretty much as John predicted. He was, as Vergennes described him, temperamentally unsuited for the diplomatic refinements of the French court, irritatingly irreverent toward French appraisals of the size of the naval force required to subdue British prowess off the American coast, apparently deaf to all of Franklin’s advice in favor of silence and deference. But on every strategic score, history proved him right.

  History had not yet happened by the late summer of 1780, and back in Philadelphia, the delegates at the Continental Congress could know only that their minister plenipotentiary had become a political liability in Paris. The most damaging testimony came from Franklin, who chose to align himself with Vergennes: “Mr. Adams has given offence to the Court here … He thinks, as he tells me himself, that America has been too free in Expressions of Gratitude towards France … I apprehend, that he mistakes his Ground, and that this Court is to be treated with Decency and Delicacy.” This was the diplomatic equivalent of a stab in the back, and the first formulation of Franklin’s most famous evisceration, rendered three years later: “He means well for his Country, is always an honest man, often a Wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his Senses.”42

  Abigail was well positioned to learn of the campaign being waged against her husband, since several of the participants in the debate within the congress were regular correspondents, especially the ever-ingratiating Lovell. An old family friend, Elbridge Gerry, reported that there was a faction determined to see John humiliated, one that “would I fear go to greater lengths than Judas did to betray his Lord.” The pro-Franklin faction in the congress, in fact, enjoyed a singular advantage. Given American dependence on French financial and military assistance, any request from Paris carried the force of a command.43

  While Abigail recognized this political reality, she tended to view the campaign to remove John as a personal vendetta led by Franklin and his supporters. When she read Franklin’s stiletto of a letter, she dismissed him as a “False, insinuating, dissembling wretch” who could best serve the American cause by dropping dead at the first opportunity. And, as she explained to Lovell, she experienced the assault on John’s character as a personal attack: “Yet it wounds me, sir. When he is wounded, I bleed.”44

  Eventually, after a year of debate, the congress reached a compromise solution that left neither side wholly satisfied. John’s commission as minister plenipotentiary was revoked, an implicit censure that he subsequently described as the greatest embarrassment of his public life. But he was then given another commission, this time as member of a five-man delegation to represent American interests in Europe, each minister representing a different region of the country—Adams for New England, Franklin for Pennsylvania, John Jay for New York, Thomas Jefferson for Virginia, and Henry Laurens for the Deep South. This meant that, despite the best efforts by Vergennes and Franklin to have him recalled, efforts that included bribing several members of the Continental Congress, John would remain in Europe.

  It also meant that he was not coming home anytime soon, an outcome that Abigail found difficult to digest. Publicly, she expressed satisfaction that her man had been vindicated by the new diplomatic appointment. Privately, however, she harbored an unspoken hope that his enemies in Paris and Philadelphia would succeed, thereby delivering him back to her. The best of all scenarios from her perspective was his reappointment, then his voluntary decision to resign, perhaps orchestrated as a final slap in the face of those critics who had called his character into question. “Is it not in your power,” she pleaded to him, “to withdraw yourself from a situation in which you are certain, no honour can be obtained to yourself or Country?” Given the abundantly clear hostility of Vergennes and Franklin, plus his status as persona non grata in the French court, what could he hope to achieve by remaining in Paris?45

  In fact, John’s mind was moving in the same direction, but on a different track. By the time Abigail made her plea, he had already moved his entire official family, to include John Quincy and Charles, to Amsterdam, far removed from the perpetual shadow of Franklin and the barely suppressed loathing of Vergennes. Acting on his own initiative, without any official authorization from the congress, and—best of all—against the expressed disapproval of Vergennes, he had decided to put himself squarely in the middle of the commercial and financial capital of Europe. There he would seek Dutch recognition of American independence and a loan from the notoriously tightfisted Amsterdam bankers that would,
if granted, establish American credit throughout Europe. It was a bold, stunningly singular move that caught everyone by surprise, comparable to his decision to defend the British troops after the Boston Massacre. But for seasoned students of the Adams psyche—Abigail topped that list—it made perfect sense, for it allowed John to establish himself as a wholly independent agent, free to release his enormous energies in a cause that was simultaneously worthy, defiant, and entirely his own.

  By the time Abigail’s letters requesting his return arrived, he was already in midflight in the other direction, tossing off pamphlets designed to persuade the Dutch government that American independence was just a matter of time, Dutch bankers that investing in America now would pay huge dividends later, and Dutch citizens that New England was an American replica of the Netherlands. He worked twenty-hour days and invented shuttle diplomacy by traveling to Leiden, The Hague, and then back again to Amsterdam, making himself a one-man American embassy. He was more fully engaged than at any other time in his political career, save perhaps those hectic months in 1775–76.

  About the last thing he wanted to hear, or could hear, was that his wife wanted him to come home. Most of her letters, which found their way to Amsterdam in six to eight months, went unanswered. “Methinks I might have been favoured in the course of eighteen months past with a letter,” she complained. He eventually responded, explaining that every hour of every day was spent “amidst Courts, Camps, and Crowds,” that he had been very sick, at one point on the verge of death—it was probably malaria—and fully invested in a cause that left him completely exhausted: “A Child was never more weary of a Whistle, than I am of Embassies.”46

  That was true enough, but a parallel truth, whether deeper or not we cannot know, was that John had allowed himself to become totally consumed by his Dutch crusade because it offered the promise of public recognition, and his lust for fame had temporarily nudged his love for Abigail into the distant background. For her part, Abigail did her best to suffer in silence, but her prolonged misery as a de facto widow occasionally seeped out: “O there are hours, days and weeks when I would not point to you all my feelings—for I would not make you more unhappy,” she lamented. “I begin to think there is a moral evil in this separation … Can it be a voluntary separation? I feel that it is not.”47

  Both geographically and psychologically, they were in different places, farther apart than they had been at any time in the history of their marriage. As it turned out, he was doing brilliant diplomatic work with the Dutch that few, if any, American statesmen had the energy and ability to match. But Abigail was no longer capable of accepting John’s public achievements as adequate compensation for her abiding loneliness. From her perspective, he was simply gone.

  PARENTING

  John’s diplomatic mission split the Adams family down the middle. The older boys, John Quincy and Charles, were with John in Paris, then Amsterdam, then Leiden. Nabby and Tommy remained in Braintree with Abigail. The division of labor created by this separation forced both adults to become single parents, though letters to each other permitted some consultation and, not so incidentally, left a record of their parenting practices that otherwise would have remained invisible.

  It is tempting to claim that neither Abigail nor John could possibly know that they were launching a dynasty—arguably the most prominent family line in American history—but the evidence demonstrates beyond much doubt that they intended to do precisely that. John was not only obsessed with posterity’s judgment, but also determined that his name would live on in the achievements of his children and then their descendants. Although John Quincy was his major project on this score, all the Adams children were raised to believe that they had come into the world at a truly critical moment in American history and into a family poised to play a major role in shaping that history. These huge advantages generated equally huge obligations on them all to fulfill their destiny: “These are times in which a Genius would wish to live,” Abigail apprised John Quincy. “It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of pacific station, that great characters are formed … The Habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties … Great necessities call out great virtues.”48

  Greatness was the goal, and in order to qualify as greatness in the Adams scheme, success had to manifest itself in ways that transcended mere worldly wealth. In fact, during their residence in Amsterdam, John worried that his boys might be corrupted by the Dutch obsession with making money, which he described as “an object that I hope none of my children will aim at.” The watchword was not wealth but virtue, and the only success that really counted came in the public arena for men and the domestic arena for women. The role model for Nabby was Abigail, the highly literate but deeply dutiful wife and mother. The role model for the boys was John, one of the leading statesmen in an auspiciously talented generation. Nothing less would do.49

  While all the boys were expected to master Latin and Greek, read widely in the classics, and eventually graduate from Harvard—all did—John Quincy was always the major project. “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” John warned the young prodigy. “And if you do not rise to the head of your Profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own Lasiness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy.” Abigail’s injunctions were less fierce, but equally lofty. “Glory my son in a Country which has given birth to Characters … which may vie with the wisdom and valour of antiquity,” she urged, adding that destiny had marked him “as an immediate descendent of one of those characters” for a life of “disinterested patriotism and that Noble Love of your country.” While every American boy is encouraged to dream that he might one day grow up to become president of the United States, John Quincy spent his entire childhood hearing that anything less than the highest office in the land would be regarded as failure.50

  Since the severity of that message sounds almost inhumane to modern ears, it merits mention that John’s educational advice to his eldest son frequently had a softer side. While Latin and Greek were obviously the gateway to all learning, at one point John suggested that John Quincy put Thucydides and Cicero aside and nourish other parts of his mind with English literature, especially poetry, for the sheer fun of it. “You will never be alone,” he rather famously observed, “with a poet in your pocket.”51

  Then there was the episode of the ice skates. John Quincy had asked his father for a pair as a Christmas present in 1780, claiming that he could then skate to school on the frozen canals of Leiden. Initially, John denied the request, apparently fearing that his son would waste his time skating away hours that should be devoted to study. Then he began to change his mind. (One could almost see paternal love slowly melting all the disciplined admonitions.) It now occurred to John that ice-skating might help John Quincy learn balance and rhythm, for it was “not simple Velocity or Ability that constitutes the Perfection of it, but Grace.” Since John himself had so often been accused of being graceless, the ice skates would allow John Quincy to remedy a chronic deficiency in the Adams family. The more he thought about it, the more John regarded ice skates as essential for John Quincy’s education. They should purchase a slightly oversize pair of boots, so that he could grow into them rather than outgrow them, another nod to hardheaded austerity that allowed John to feel responsible, not just indulgent, as a father. The son got his skates and the father retained his standards.52

  Three years younger than John Quincy, Charles prompted different parental responses that also defied the harsher code. “I am sometimes afraid my dear boy,” wrote Abigail, “that you will be spoilt by being a favorite. Praise is a dangerous Sweet unless properly tempered.” John put it more poetically. Charles was the kind of “amiable insinuating Creature” whom everybody found beguiling, the designated charmer in the Adams family. Abigail reported that all the children in their Braintree neighborhood were asking when Charley would come home and play with them. Even John admitted that “I love him too mu
ch.”53

  Charles went to all the same schools as John Quincy, first in Paris, then in Amsterdam and Leiden, but John never focused his fire on Charles as he did on John Quincy, in part because Charles was three years younger, in part because he had a way about him that melted all parental lectures into pools of pure affection. Knowing as we do that Charles would live a short and tragic life that ended in alcoholism, it is tempting to speculate that the seeds of that sad fate were sown during an indulgent childhood. But hindsight wisdom of that sort is notoriously self-fulfilling. What does seem clear is that Abigail and John mixed quite demanding doses of discipline with routinized expressions of parental affection in their child rearing, and that John Quincy received more of the former and Charles more of the latter.

  Both of these overlapping attitudes were put on display in the summer of 1781. Although John Quincy was only fourteen, John decided that he should accompany Francis Dana to St. Petersburg, where he would serve as secretary to America’s first minister to Russia, acquire another language, and launch his diplomatic career. Charles, on the other hand, had requested that he be allowed to return to family and friends in Braintree. John reluctantly complied, despite worries about sending an eleven-year-old boy across the Atlantic in the custody of strangers.