First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  Charles departed on the South Carolina in August, but the ship was forced ashore in Spain after a series of mishaps that tested the mettle of all passengers, who described Charles as the pluckiest boy they had ever met. He transferred to a privateer, the Cicero, which sailed south to the Caribbean before heading north toward New England. The voyage took five months, a virtual eternity for both parents. John was so worried that he wrote that he would “never again have the Weakness to bring a child to Europe.” Abigail worried even more, because reports in the Boston press indicated that the South Carolina, the ship she assumed Charles was on, had gone down at sea with the loss of all hands. When the Cicero landed on the Massachusetts shore in January 1782 and Charles showed up, unannounced and unexpected, Abigail almost broke down, saying that Charles had proved sufficiently resourceful to have come back from the dead.54

  Abigail now had two young boys and one teenage girl to raise, but increasingly it was Nabby who became the chief focus of her attention. Late in 1782 a young lawyer by the name of Royall Tyler began showing up at the Adams house with obvious interest in Nabby, who was eminently eligible at seventeen. Tyler’s appearance triggered all of Abigail’s maternal instincts, since a daughter’s choice of a husband carried all the lifetime consequences of a son’s choice for a career. She did the equivalent of a background check on Tyler, interrogating her sister and brother-in-law, with whom Tyler was boarding, and during his visits to the house monopolized the conversations with him, undoubtedly to the annoyance of Nabby and the discomfort of Tyler, who must have felt that he was undergoing a domestic version of a cross-examination.

  In a long letter to John, after bemoaning the fact that he was not there to participate in the process, she conveyed her conclusions. Tyler had sowed some wild oats while a student at Harvard, where he earned the reputation of being a ladies’ man. After graduation he “dissipated two or three years of his life and too much of his fortune” writing poetry and even some plays, none of which ever saw the light of day. But he had recovered from these youthful dalliances to become a serious student of the law—John would be impressed with his legal learning—and was now generally regarded as a solid citizen and an up-and-coming lawyer in the Boston area. “I fancy I see in him,” she explained, “Sentiments, opinions, and actions which endeared to me the best of friends.” In other words, Tyler struck her as the second coming of John. Best of all, he was obviously smitten with Nabby.

  Whether Nabby was smitten with him is difficult to know. What was clear beyond any doubt is that Abigail had decided that Tyler was the man that Nabby was waiting for, whether she knew it or not. As Abigail explained to John, their daughter was “a fine Majestick Girl who has as much dignity as a princess.” On the other hand, she was “not beautiful” and “no air of levity ever accompanies her words or actions.” It was, of course, much too early to panic about Nabby’s prospects, but young men of Tyler’s character and credentials were not common in Braintree. Abigail needed to know, as soon as possible, if John agreed with her maternal instincts on this score.55

  John definitely did not. “I confess I don’t like the subject at all,” he explained, with considerable frustration that a matter of such significance for the family had proceeded so far without his knowledge, much less his consent. “My child is a Model,” he pronounced, “and is not to be the Prize … of any, even reformed, Rake.” (The inconvenient truth was that Nabby had grown up in John’s absence, and he had not seen much of her since she was a little girl.) What most upset him, however, was Abigail’s obvious orchestration of this entire episode. “You seem to have favoured this affair much too far,” he warned, “and I wish it off.” Though it came from afar, John’s message had the distinct sound of a command, and Abigail took it as such. She wrote back immediately to say that the Tyler connection was “wholly done with.”56

  Apparently Tyler never got the word, or if he did, refused to accept its finality; several months later, in January 1784, he wrote John to request his permission to court Nabby. By then it was highly likely that Nabby would be leaving for Europe with her mother, though even that daunting fact did not deter Tyler, who claimed that he was willing to wait. John responded politely, expressing “much Esteem and Respect” for the obviously lovesick young man. He probably realized that time and distance would eventually make the matter moot, as it did. But he wanted Tyler to know, just in case, that his fatherly approval would always support “the Final Judgment and Inclination of my Daughter.”57

  Abigail’s assessment of Tyler, by the way, proved prescient. He went on to a distinguished career as a lawyer and became America’s first prominent playwright, a devoted husband and father, and eventually head of the Vermont judiciary. Nabby had, as Abigail feared, missed a marvelous opportunity. And her own judgment about a mate a few years later proved considerably less shrewd than her mother’s.58

  TWO TREATIES

  “Your humble servant has lately grown much into Fashion in this Country,” John apprised Abigail in March of 1782, adding that “I shall recollect Amsterdam, Leyden and The Hague with more emotion than Philadelphia or Paris.” He was pounding his chest with pride because, all of a sudden, Dutch diplomats and bankers, who had previously ignored his appeals for recognition of American independence and for a loan from the Bank of Amsterdam, were now courting him. The upbeat mood inspired a flurry of letters to Abigail—this after an inexplicable and, as Abigail saw it, unconscionable silence for nearly a year. He was going out to dine with dukes and duchesses, he wrote, but would much prefer to dine “upon rustocrat potatoes with Portia—Oh! Oh! hi ho hum!” Some sluice that had been closed for a year suddenly opened up again: “I have bought an House at the Hague,” he bantered. “Will you come and see me?”59

  Both the buoyant mood and the more receptive posture of the Dutch government were products of a dramatic shift in the strategic situation after the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown. “Some Folks will think your Husband a Negotiator, but it is not he, it is General Washington at Yorktown who did the substance of the Work,” he acknowledged to Abigail; “the form only belongs to me.” The Dutch were now prepared to listen because the argument that John had been making for over a year, namely, that American independence was inevitable, now appeared to be coming true. Both Dutch recognition of a sovereign American nation and a substantial loan that would restore American credit in the financial capitals of Europe, once so improbable, were now just a matter of resolving the diplomatic details.60

  What’s more, it had been a solo performance. Without any formal authority from the Continental Congress, John had assumed the initiative for a Dutch treaty, conducted all the negotiations by himself, and defied efforts by Vergennes to question his authority by orchestrating the campaign being waged in both Paris and Philadelphia to label him a diplomatic liability. For these highly personal reasons, John was excessively effusive in describing the Dutch treaty “as the happiest Event, and the greatest Action of my Life, past or future.”61

  Abigail was the principal beneficiary of his buoyant mood. She received more letters in one month than she had for the preceding two years. The delays and losses at sea that had disrupted their correspondence before disappeared with the end of the war, so that they were able to recover some semblance of a conversation.62 They concurred that the separation had gone on too long and could not continue, and the only question was whether she and Nabby should risk the Atlantic voyage to join John or he should come home. The answer to that question depended on the diplomatic duties, if any, the congress would require of him in the wake of his Dutch triumph. The issue was resolved in October 1782, when word arrived that the British were at last prepared to negotiate a peace. “I am now going to Paris,” John wrote hurriedly from The Hague, “to another Furnace of Afflictions.”63

  The chief sources of affliction were Franklin and Vergennes, not the British negotiating teams, which arrived in Paris predisposed to acknowledge that their empire in North America was now lo
st. John could never forget or forgive Franklin’s behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine his character with the Continental Congress, which he described as an “attempt at my assassination,” but he vowed to swallow his pride: “As far as fate shall compel me to sit with him in public affairs, I shall treat him with decency and perfect impartibility.” His problem with Vergennes also plucked at emotional chords that were still tormenting the Adams soul, but there was a serious substantive problem as well. The congress had made a point of instructing the American delegation to do nothing without the approval of the French government, which in practice meant Vergennes. John arrived in Paris convinced that such instructions were fatally misguided and that his highest diplomatic duty was to ignore them, which put him on a collision course with his superiors back in Philadelphia, as well as with both Franklin and Vergennes.64

  Fortunately for John, the third member of the American negotiating team, John Jay, agreed with him. Neither as intellectually supple nor as psychologically inscrutable as Franklin, and more complacent and diffident than the ever-combustible Adams, Jay nevertheless was adept at grasping the strategic realities. In this case, he realized Adams was right in recognizing that American and French interests were not synonymous. The French, for example, would almost certainly make American interests hostage to their own imperial aspirations in Europe and the Caribbean.

  Adams’s urge to break ranks with the French was complicated by his personal loathing of Vergennes, whereas Jay’s uncluttered vision was simply a case of a seasoned diplomat seeing America’s abiding interests clearly. Franklin remained wedded to a sentimental French attachment rooted in the recognition that only French assistance had made American victory in the war possible. Adams and Jay were fully prepared to abandon the French and sign a separate peace with Great Britain.65

  This was the crucial strategic decision, and even Franklin, albeit grudgingly, came to recognize its wisdom. Adams, on the other hand, found the act of violating the explicit instructions of the congress to be liberating: “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” he wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so will it appear to all posterity.” Once freed of French entanglements, the negotiations proceeded remarkably swiftly and smoothly. Franklin, in fact, had already extracted major concessions in preliminary conversations with Richard Oswald, an elderly one-eyed British aristocrat who had made his fortune in the slave trade and harbored no illusions about the impossible task he had before him. Even before Adams arrived in Paris, the British had agreed to recognize American sovereignty, relinquish all claims to the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Canadian border to Spanish Florida, and recognize American navigation rights on the Mississippi. These were huge concessions, but unless the British were prepared to resume the war—which they were not—their negotiators lacked the leverage to contest them.66

  Only three outstanding issues remained, and they were resolved in daily sessions throughout November. First, the British insisted that prewar debts owed to British creditors, chiefly Virginia planters, be honored. Franklin and Jay resisted the claim, but Adams argued that the law was on the British side. His view prevailed, though how this provision would be enforced remained conveniently obscure. Second, the British sought to obtain compensation for loyalists whose property had been confiscated during the war. Adams joined Franklin and Jay in opposing this proposal, and the issue was eventually finessed by delegating the decision to the different states, where it was sure to languish forever. Third, the Americans sought to ensure the historic right of New England fishermen to catch cod off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. For obvious reasons, Adams cared most about this question, stubbornly refused to accept any language that might compromise New England’s interest, and successfully made it his signature issue.67

  What was called the Provisional Treaty was signed on November 30, 1782. It was provisional because its terms applied only to America and Great Britain. Franklin received the thankless task of apprising Vergennes that the Americans had signed a separate peace, which he performed with his customary grace, even mustering up the nerve to request an additional French loan of six million livres.

  Within the space of six months John had managed to play a leading role in two unmitigated diplomatic triumphs. Though he relished the singularity of his success in negotiating the Dutch treaty, the Treaty of Paris was by far the greater achievement. Indeed, the Treaty of Paris was destined to become the most consequential and lopsided victory in the history of American statecraft, achieving independence and control over the eastern third of the North American continent without making any major concessions to British designs.

  Bad weather on the Atlantic delayed the treaty’s arrival in Boston until April 1783. Abigail expressed pride in knowing that her husband had contributed to crafting a treaty that “sheaths the Hostile Sword and gives a pleasing presage that our spears may become pruning tools.” A letter from John was already on the way, granting her unspoken but fondest wish. He had submitted his resignation to the congress, “and as soon as I shall receive their acceptance of it, I will embark for America.”68

  DEMONS AND DESTINATIONS

  The problem with John’s formulations—that he would come home as soon as the congress accepted his resignation—was that the congress refused to act. Rumors circulated in Philadelphia and Paris that he was under consideration for another European post, perhaps even to serve as America’s first ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in London. But no official word of any sort arrived, leaving John to lament his equivocal status. “I had rather be employed in carting Street Dust and Marsh Mud,” he complained to Abigail. She was equally equivocal, not knowing whether John was coming to her or whether she should make plans to go to him. The worst scenario was that they would pass each other on the Atlantic.69

  The prospect of an ambassadorial assignment in London, so John claimed, did not interest him. “I shall be Slandered and plagued there, more than in France,” he predicted. The British public was currently reeling from the realization that they had lost their American empire—copies of the Treaty of Paris were being burned in the streets—so the first American ambassador was certain to become a scapegoat. “In England,” he wrote Abigail, “I should live the Life of a Man in a Barrell spiked with Nails.” He shared a dream—actually a nightmare—with her, in which he envisioned himself running an endless gauntlet while the British press was “lashing him with scorpions all the Way.” He claimed to find it inexplicable, given the obvious pitfalls that any American minister to Great Britain would face, that “in the Eyes of many [it is] the Apple of Paradise.” All he wanted was for the congress to relieve him of his duties so he could take himself “out of the scramble.”70

  Abigail, who should have known better, was predisposed to take these protestations at face value: “Few persons who so well Love domestic Life, as my Friend,” she wrote, “have been called for so long a period to relinquish the enjoyment of it. Yet like the needle to the Pole, you invariably turn toward it, as the only point where you have fixed your happiness.”71

  This was naive. To be sure, John was utterly sincere about his desire for blissful retirement to Abigail’s arms in Braintree. But the dominant “needle to the Pole,” as she described his motivations, almost always pointed toward the next challenge in the public arena. Indeed, the very passion of his protestations about the London post was a clear sign that John’s ambitions were vibrating so violently that he felt obliged to deny their very existence.

  Throughout the spring of 1783, in addition to demonstrating a powerful penchant for denial, he started to swing between extreme expressions of his diplomatic achievements and equally extreme, indeed quasi-paranoid, statements about an invisible army of enemies plotting to do him in. On the former score, he wrote Abigail that his diplomatic successes in the Netherlands and Paris were unprecedented, claiming to have rendered “Such Services as were never rendered by any other minister in Europe, the most critical, important and decisive se
rvices.” In the journal he submitted to the Continental Congress to document his diplomatic doings, he included a gratuitous compliment by Vergennes to the effect that John Adams had become the George Washington of European statecraft. When read aloud in the congress, this embarrassing piece of puffery produced gales of laughter, most especially from those delegates already predisposed to believe that Franklins conclusion was correct, namely, that his diplomatic colleague on occasion seemed slightly out of his mind.72

  Swollen thoughts about his own significance then led to exaggerated fears that unseen enemies were plotting to belittle his achievements. “Millions of Contrivances,” he complained to Abigail, “by some invisible spirit” had made him the target of “Arrows shot in darkness designed to render an honest man’s Life uncomfortable.” And the more he thought about it, the more he concluded that his “french and franklinite” enemies were behind the scheme to make him minister to England, where he would encounter perpetual persecution in what was, in effect, a diplomatic graveyard.73

  Though Abigail was the most astute student of John’s psyche on the planet, and the only person capable of exorcising his demons when they rose up with such frightening force, she was an ocean away, dealing with demons of her own. One was her fear of the Atlantic crossing that, try as she might, she could not conquer. Another was the apprehension that she would embarrass her husband and herself by cutting an awkward figure in Paris or London society. “I have not a wish to join you in a scene of life so different from that in which I have been educated,” she exclaimed. “I have so little of the Ape about me, that I have refused every publick invitation to figure in the Gay World, and sequestered myself in this Humble cottage.” While they both agreed that their separation had to end, which meant that either she had to go to him or he had to come to her, Abigail’s preference was clear: “I have considered your invitation to me, the arguments for and against it, with all the deliberations I am mistress of,” she told him, “and upon the whole, your return here, is the object my Heart pants for.”74