First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  She had already made a more pointed argument. His recent letter had revealed a man worn down by his duties, fatigued to an extent that gave her cause for worry about his physical and mental health. He himself had recognized, she noted, that “the enveyed embassy to a certain Island, is surrounded with so many thorns, that the Beauty and fragrance of the Rose, would be but a small compensation for the wounds which might be felt in the gathering and wearing of it.” Why lust after an appointment so obviously destined for disappointment? After all, lingering on the European stage could only dilute the glory he had already achieved. “The Golden Fleese is won,” she observed, so his legacy would be best served by putting a decisive end to his diplomatic career and coming home.75

  This was excellent advice, but John could not hear it. What Abigail described as the “Golden Fleese” was for him more like the Holy Grail, which by definition kept receding beyond his grasp. His own insatiable ambitions were masked behind an equally bottomless sense of duty, which obliged him to remain poised to answer whatever call—be it in Paris or London—that the congress made. He persuaded himself that he really had no choice in the matter, which in turn meant that Abigail had no choice but to abandon her preference: “Come to Europe with Nabby as soon as possible,” he urged. “I am in earnest. I cannot be happy or tolerable without you.” Abigail responded with somewhat reluctant acceptance: “My present determination is to tarry at home this winter,” she wrote in November 1783, “and if I cannot prevail upon you to return to me in the Spring—you well know that I may be drawn to you.” She was simultaneously honoring her husband’s wishes and keeping her options open.76

  Once she realized that John’s political agenda was nonnegotiable, that he would never resign as long as the possibility of a new diplomatic assignment in Europe existed, she decided to discover whether such an assignment was likely. She wrote to Elbridge Gerry, the old family friend currently serving in the Continental Congress, to find out if John was under consideration for the London appointment. Gerry informed her that the London job was still problematic for John, but that it was virtually certain that he would be appointed, along with Franklin and Jefferson, as minister plenipotentiary in Europe for three years. Despite opposition from certain southern delegates, there was little chance that he would be recalled.77

  This information made her decision, if not easy, at least foreordained. In January 1784, she made arrangements to send Charles and Tommy to live with her sister in Haverhill. “I shall immediately set about putting all our affairs in such a train,” she apprised John, “as that I may be able to leave them in the spring.” She still felt terrified about the voyage, and still believed that John’s decision to linger in Europe was misguided, but her duty as a wife now needed to be aligned with his duty as a diplomat. She vowed to banish all “Idle Specters” and embrace the fact that “the desires and requests of my Friend are a Law to me.” At forty years of age, she had never before ventured beyond the Boston area.78

  Last-minute complications regarding care of the farm, along with shifting weather patterns on the Atlantic, delayed the departure until the summer. (Interestingly, she left the household in the hands of Phoebe Abdee, a former slave, who had become a dependable member of the household staff.) On June 20, 1784, Abigail and Nabby at last boarded the Active, bound for London. For the first time in her life, Abigail kept a diary. “Our ship dirty, our selves sick,” it began, and she then proceeded to document her conviction that the conditions on board any oceangoing vessel were incompatible with a woman’s integrity, chiefly because of the prevalence of dirt and the absence of privacy. A cow she had brought along for milk was injured during a storm and “was accordingly consigned to a watery grave.” But despite her protestations—“the ship itself is a partial prison”—the voyage proved blessedly uneventful and uncommonly short. She and Nabby disembarked on July 21. John Quincy, just back from St. Petersburg, joined them in London a week later. It required another week for John to arrive from The Hague. He claimed to feel “twenty years younger than I was yesterday.” She described him being “as happy as a lord!” After a separation that had put the partnership to the severest test it would ever face, they were, at long last, together again.79

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1784–89

  “Every man of this nation [France] is an actor, and every woman an actress.”

  ABIGAIL ACTUALLY SAW John in a painting before she saw him in the flesh. While waiting for him to join her in London from The Hague, she visited the studio of John Singleton Copley, after Benjamin West the reigning American artist in England. Copley had depicted John at the apparent zenith of his diplomatic career, holding a scroll—presumably the Treaty of Paris—while standing before a table covered with maps of the newly acquired American empire east of the Mississippi. A globe stood off to the side, suggesting that the emergence of an independent America had international implications. It was a picture that glorified the stunning American arrival into the world of nations, and it made John Adams the preferred face of that glory.

  Abigail’s only recorded comment—namely, that it struck her as “a good likeness”—was less innocuous than it sounded, since John had warned her that his crushing workload and prolonged illness in Holland had extracted such a physical toll that she might not recognize him. Now that seemed unlikely. But the portrait was not just a physical rendering of her long-absent husband; it was also a visual endorsement of his epochal triumph. Copley seemed to confirm that all of John’s fondest dreams and deepest ambitions had been fulfilled at last. In that sense, Abigail was looking at a painting that declared all of her own personal sacrifices through more than four years of loneliness and isolation had paid a public dividend, both for her country and for her fame-seeking husband. No one was going to paint her in equivalently brilliant colors, but in the privacy of her soul she could feel that her domestic version of patriotism had proved justified.1

  The justification, however, had come at a price. Because of John’s diplomatic duties, they had been together less than four months over the past six years. During that time, John’s periodic failures as a correspondent struck Abigail as a violation of their covenant as a couple. And his refusal to leave his European post, despite her pleadings to do so, constituted a clear statement that his ambitions were more potent urges than his obligations as a husband. John could counter that if Abigail had insisted that he return to her, he would have done so. In truth, she had come pretty close to doing just that, but he was too distracted by his duties to hear her. And she was too proud to couch her requests in the form of demands that exposed her personal desperation.

  From Abigail’s perspective, then, damage had been done to their previously impregnable bond. Her major reason for joining him abroad was to repair that damage by recovering their lost rhythms in the form of those mutual touches, glances, and banterings only possible when together. All the evidence suggests that John was completely oblivious to Abigail’s emotional agenda. He was so confident of her bottomless strength and devotion that it never even occurred to him that she harbored vulnerabilities that needed his attention. He presumed that they would simply pick up where they had left off.

  In the end, that is precisely what happened. Perhaps the best way to put it is that Abigail and John spent the next four years, first in Paris and then more enduringly in London, being together in a constant and unrelenting way that seemed almost designed to compensate for the previous separation. It helped that a diplomat’s wife was expected to accompany her husband on all ceremonial and social occasions, so they were effectively regarded as a political team, which gave Abigail a public role she did not have when John was laboring in the Continental Congress. Her unofficial status as an advisor and confidante was now the norm rather than the exception, so she was actually expected to stay abreast of ongoing diplomatic issues and controversies. She did not need to conceal her intelligence.

  For several overlapping reasons, virtually all the outstanding foreign policy problems that
John hoped to resolve soon showed themselves to be inherently intractable. Franklin, whose sense of timing was a version of perfect pitch, announced that there was nothing more for him to do in Paris, then sailed home in 1785, in plenty of time to become available as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and make some more history. John, on the other hand, found himself trapped in the European sideshow, attending endless ceremonies at court and lavish but pointless dinner parties, all with Abigail at his side, while the truly significant debates that would shape the future of the American republic were occurring across the Atlantic.

  To say that nothing of diplomatic substance happened during their four years abroad would be misleading. John did negotiate a commercial treaty with Prussia. And he used his excellent contacts with Dutch bankers to arrange several more loans that allowed the American government to consolidate its European debts and thereby affect at least the appearance of fiscal responsibility. But the main events were less visible and more intimate. Abigail and John were together virtually every hour of the day and night: dining together, socializing together, watching Nabby and John Quincy mature together, reading together, touring Paris, London, and the English countryside together, sleeping together. Never before in their twenty-year marriage had they enjoyed such prolonged and routinized proximity. And they would never again experience such abiding closeness until their retirement years at Quincy.

  This chapter in their story as a couple, then, is rich with irony. For as they made their way through the ornate etiquette and swirling splendor of Europe’s most cosmopolitan capitals, lived in luxurious mansions with small armies of servants, and bowed and curtsied to kings and queens, their major diplomatic achievement was the recovery of their own emotional connection. They learned to love each other at an even deeper level than before and locked that love in place, and nothing they experienced for the rest of their lives ever threatened their mutual trust.

  THE EDUCATION OF ABIGAIL

  The original plan was for Abigail and Nabby to join John and John Quincy at The Hague, then travel together to Paris. But John changed his mind, sending John Quincy ahead to London with a note to Abigail, telling her to “stay where you are and amuse yourself by seeing what you can, until you see me.” Abigail claimed that when she first saw John Quincy, who was now seventeen, she would not have recognized him, except for his eyes. Otherwise, her boy had become a man. The reunion with John was surely an emotional occasion, which she related to Mary Cranch, her sister, as being beyond description: “You know my dear sister that poets and painters wisely draw a veil over those scenes which surpass the pen or the pencil of the other.” John Quincy was dispatched to purchase a carriage to take them to the English coast, along with a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, so they could take turns reading to each other during the trip.2

  Their destination was Auteuil, a village located on the banks of the Seine four miles west of Paris and one mile south of Franklin’s quarters at Passy. John had rented an enormous villa, a three-story limestone of forty or fifty rooms—no one was quite sure—that also featured a huge ballroom able to accommodate five hundred guests as well as a small theater “gone to decay.” Abigail’s favorite adornment was the garden: five acres of orange trees, grapevines, flowers in constant bloom, a fishpond, and a somewhat dilapidated summerhouse. The villa came equipped with eight servants, each of whom, she quickly discovered, “had certain etiquette, and one will by no means intrude upon the department of the other.” The cook, for example, would not wash dishes, and the hairdresser would not sweep.3

  For Abigail, who had spent her entire married life in a six-room cottage, it was nothing short of overwhelming. She was, to be sure, an extremely well-read woman who had thereby traveled much in Braintree, but she had never experienced conspicuous luxury on such a majestic scale. Her first instinct was to filter the ostentation through the austere lens of a New England housewife, which produced a combination of bewilderment and disgust.

  Efforts to improve efficiency by requesting the servants to perform multiple chores failed completely. She quickly gave up trying to perform certain chores herself, since the servants found it insulting. As a result, since her daily regime back in Braintree had required a good deal of physical exertion, her more indolent habits produced a sudden increase in weight. “I suffer through a want of exercise,” she explained to her sister, “and grow too fat.” It took several months for her to become accustomed to having her hair dressed every day and to applying rouge to her cheeks for a stroll in the garden with Nabby.4

  Such splendor, she was at pains to insist, came at a moral cost: “If you ask me what is the Business of life here,” she explained to Mercy Otis Warren, “I answer Pleasure … It is a matter of great speculation to me, when these People labour.” However indispensable French economic and military assistance had been to the American cause—and she was fully prepared to acknowledge that fact—France more than England struck her as the epitome of European aristocratic decadence.5

  And the epitome of French decadence was Madame Helvétius, the sixty-five-year-old widow of the distinguished French philosopher, whom Abigail encountered at a dinner party hosted by Franklin soon after her encampment at Auteuil. Even within the flamboyant code of the French aristocracy, Madame Helvétius was considered eccentric. Abigail watched with incredulity as she asked the guests, “How do I look?”; then kissed Franklin on both cheeks, then the forehead; then kissed her lapdog, who proceeded to wet the floor, which she cleaned up with the bottom of her dress. If Madame Helvétius’s goal was to appear outrageous, which it was, she hit her mark with Abigail: “I hope however to find amongst the French Ladies manners more consistent with my ideas of decency,” she wrote to her niece, “or I shall be a mere recluse.”6

  John’s diplomatic duties made any attempt at solitary confinement impossible. The wife of an American minister was expected to make calls on the wives of all the other ministers to the French court, an exercise in diplomatic etiquette that Abigail performed only grudgingly. “I have not been very fond of so awkward a situation as going to visit ladies,” she complained, “merely to make my dumb compliments, and receive theirs in return.”7

  She was accustomed to making small talk and sharing gossip with women friends back in Braintree, but the stilted official conversations with the ministerial wives were not really conversations at all, more like theatrical performances in which one was supposed to speak the lines from a script drafted by some mindless courtier. Abigail acknowledged that French women had developed a disarming proficiency in this exceedingly languid and arched style, had in fact become “mistresses of the art of insinuation and persuasion” in which words were less important than dramatic facial expressions and sweeping physical gestures, just the sort of operatic style that Madame Helvétius had perfected to the point of parody. Abigail was not very good at this kind of hauteur, which struck her as inherently false and hollow. “So that it may with truth be said,” she observed to a cousin back home, “every man of this nation is an actor, and every woman an actress.”8

  One role that John’s position forced her to play was hostess: “It is necessary in this country for a Gentleman in a publick character to entertain Company once a week,” she explained to her sister, “tho it would take 2 years of an American ministers Sallery to furnish the equipage of plate which you will find upon the tables of all the Foreign ministers here.” Most of the other European ministers to the French court were titled aristocrats with inherited wealth, which permitted lavish standards for entertaining that Abigail could not begin to match on the budget afforded by John’s salary. She hoped that the quality of conversation would compensate for more modest accoutrements—the Spanish minister had eighty servants to her eight—and that inviting guests like the naval hero John Paul Jones might impress her guests more than the number of courses or the elegance of the silverware. (Abigail herself found Jones surprisingly ordinary: “I expected to have seen a Rough Stout warlike Roman. Instead of that,
I should think of wraping him up in cotton and putting him in my pocket, than sending him to contend with Cannon Ball.”) But no matter how modest the fare at her dinner parties, she always worried afterward that she had wasted money that should have been saved for her sons’ college education.9

  Paris invoked in her the same double-edged reaction that John had offered at his first exposure. On the one hand, the art, architecture, and pervasive mood of refinement justified its reputation as the cultural capital of Europe. On the other, such luxuries were inevitably linked with indolent habits and political corruption. This was the Adams version of civilization and its discontents, and while it had a discernibly moralistic and judgmental dimension, with deep roots in the religious traditions of New England, it reflected Abigail and John’s understanding of the way consolidated wealth simultaneously made great achievements in the arts possible and undermined the disciplined habits that had generated the wealth in the first place. “Riches always create luxery,” as she put it, “and luxery always leads to Idleness, Indolence and effeminacy, which stifles every noble purpose and whithers the blossom of genius.”10

  Unlike John, Abigail tended to focus on how the moral corruption of Paris affected women. For example, she was shocked to learn that there were fifty-two thousand registered prostitutes in Paris, which required its women of the night to sign up on the public rolls. “Blush O, my sex,” she exclaimed to her sister when she reported the numbers. Her powerful maternal instincts were challenged when she learned that the largest foundling hospital in the city accepted six thousand abandoned infants annually and that one-third of them died. “I have been credibly informed,” she wrote her sister, “that one half of the children annually born in this immense City of Paris, are enfans troives [i.e., abandoned].” She claimed that the only French woman she knew who took her duties as a wife and mother seriously was the marquise de Lafayette, who was considered strange because she was simultaneously “a French lady and fond of her Husband!!!”11