The one area of Parisian culture that most confounded her was the theater, especially the opera. The entire Adams family—Abigail, John, Nabby, and John Quincy—attended an early performance of The Marriage of Figaro by Beaumarchais, which challenged the pretensions of the French aristocracy by exposing its presumed superiority as a mere accident of birth and by making Figaro, a valet, more admirable than his noble master. Abigail applauded the message, but acknowledged that, as a medium, the French theater celebrated the aristocratic values that Figaro criticized. She was especially shocked by the blatant sexuality of the dances: “Girls clothed in the thinnest Silk … Springing two feet from the floor poising themselves in the air … and as perfectly showing their Garters and drawers, as tho no petticoat had been worn.” Nevertheless, she kept going to the performances, often with Nabby alongside, obviously enchanted by theatrical productions that would have been banned in Boston.
Gradually, she found herself lowering her guard and succumbing to the seductive magic of the stage: “I have found my taste reconciling itself to habits, customs and fashions, which at first disgusted me,” she confessed to her sister. “Shall I speak a Truth and say that repeatedly seeing these Dances has worn off that disgust which I first felt, and that I see them now with pleasure?” She was not sure whether she should feel guilty about her moral backsliding or proud of her newfound appreciation of a different world. If her New England conscience needed reassurance, she could—and did—tell herself that regular attendance at the theater markedly improved her French.12
Abigail’s infatuation with the Parisian theater proved the exception to the rule, which was to measure the excesses and extravagances of French culture against her own austere standards and find them sinfully lacking. “My Heart and Soul,” she assured her uncle, “is more American than ever.” She apprised her sister that no matter how exciting her social life might sound, it was like eating a box of chocolates, an indulged habit that soon wore thin: “I take no pleasure in a life of ceremony and parade,” she explained. “I had rather dine in my little room in Braintree with my family and a set of chosen old Friends, than all the Counts and Countesses.” If not quite a judgment rendered in the Puritan-in-Babylon mode, it was a clear statement of preference by a self-confident New England woman for the simpler virtues that her entire life had come to embody.13
If the core of those simpler virtues was family, and for Abigail it surely was, day-to-day life at Auteuil afforded a surprisingly ample opportunity to recover the old domestic rhythms despite the diplomatic and social obligations. Most elementally, Abigail and John were at long last living under the same roof. The accommodations were much more capacious than the Quincy cottage, permitting Abigail to enjoy a full room of her own, not just a closet, overlooking the gorgeous gardens. The two older children, Nabby and John Quincy, were right down the hall, periodically popping in to interrupt her letter writing with a question about the evening’s agenda or the availability of a book.
The family made a point of eating breakfast together every morning; then John Quincy would retreat to his room to study Horace and Tacitus, which John would quiz him on that evening. Nabby and Abigail would often take walks together in the garden, exchanging gossip about the apparently embedded inefficiency of the servants, upcoming plays at the Parisian theaters, or the latest outrage of Madame Helvétius. In one letter Abigail described the scene: she at a table next to the fire, John at the other end of the table reading Plato, Nabby sewing, and John Quincy dropping in to ask John’s assistance on an algebra problem.14
There they were, surrounded by servants, ensconced amid aristocratic splendor, all, save John Quincy, still trying to master a foreign language, but interacting in the old and ordinary ways as the Adams family. For John, it was a slice of serenity. For Abigail, it was heaven.
THE JEFFERSONIAN CONNECTION
The most frequent guest at Auteuil, so frequent that at times he seemed a permanent resident, was Thomas Jefferson, now a widower after the recent death of his wife. He had been chosen to replace Franklin as American minister to France but had fallen ill upon arrival, a victim of the damp French weather that forced him to undergo what he called “seasoning.” John had applauded his appointment, recalling their political partnership in the Continental Congress in the heady days of 1776, and let everyone know that he still regarded Jefferson as “an excellent hand” and “the same wise and prudent Man and Steady Patriot.”15
Abigail extended him an open invitation to regard their sumptuous villa as his second home, an offer that Jefferson found as irresistible as it was generous. Familiarity, in this instance, bred just the opposite of contempt, for once folded into the domestic routine of the Adams family, Jefferson became, as Abigail described him, “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom and unreserve.” Many years later, recalling Jefferson’s ongoing conversations with John Quincy at Auteuil, John reminded Jefferson that “he was as much your son as mine.”16
The Adams-Jefferson partnership was destined to become one of the most consequential, tumultuous, and poignant relationships in American political history, with an ending that no novelist would dare to make up. And for at least two reasons, the French chapter in their fifty-year story of cooperation and competition proved particularly significant. First, Adams and Jefferson bonded as friends and not just as diplomatic colleagues, which ever after gave their political relationship an intimate edge that cut through their deep differences over no less a question than the true meaning of the American Revolution. Second, the first indication of those profound differences, which were both ideological and temperamental in origin, became visible at this time, as they worked together to coordinate a coherent American foreign policy toward Europe.
Their major mission as American ministers was to negotiate treaties of amity and commerce with as many European nations as possible. Jefferson’s mind worked from the theoretical downward to the practical, starting with his own vision of the preferred policy, which was often quite visionary, then trying to make it fit the actual historical conditions. With regard to international trade, for example, he described his beau ideal as the permanent elimination of all tariffs and embargoes, in effect the creation of a global marketplace committed to free trade, unencumbered by national restrictions of any sort. He proposed that all commercial negotiations with European powers, most especially Great Britain, proceed from these utopian assumptions, which he was convinced were destined to shape the international economy of the future. It was Jefferson’s anticipation of globalization.17
John’s thoughts flowed in precisely the opposite direction. He began with the assumption that nations viewed the international marketplace through the prism of their own sovereign interests. Great Britain, for example, already enjoyed the lion’s share of American exports, so it had no incentive to drop import duties or make concessions to American merchants or shippers: “We must not, my Friend, be the Bubbles of our own Liberal Sentiments,” he lectured Jefferson. “If we cannot obtain reciprocal Liberality, we must adopt reciprocal Prohibitions.” Jefferson’s romantic prescriptions were surely beautiful, but their implementation must await arrival of the Second Coming, when all men became angels at last.18
In the meantime, as American negotiators they must impose their own restrictions and protections, lest European powers “take an ungenerous Advantage of our Simplicity and philosophical Liberality.” Moreover, as the British negotiators kept reminding them, the American government as currently constituted under the Articles of Confederation refused to recognize federal authority over foreign trade, which was retained by the sovereign states. This fatal flaw rendered all their efforts at negotiating treaties, to include Jefferson’s grand scheme, essentially futile. Best, then, to launch their diplomatic effort together, hope for a miracle, but realize from the start that they were on a fool’s errand.19
The same kind of intellectual collision also occurred when they attempted to solve the problem posed by the Barba
ry pirates. Muslim corsairs sailing out of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers were plundering European and American vessels in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, seizing the cargoes as prizes, sending the passengers and crew into slavery, then demanding exorbitant ransom for their release. It was a clear case of state-sponsored terrorism, though when Adams and Jefferson met with the ambassador of Tripoli to demand an explanation for such outrages, they reported that he had a ready answer: “The Ambassador apprised us that it was founded on the Laws of the Prophet [misspelled as “Profit” in the original], that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.”20
Jefferson’s response to this glorified version of blackmail once again began on the high moral ground and then reasoned downward from his own elevated ideals. The Barbary pirates were nothing less than international criminals, so to negotiate with them on their terms only made America complicitous in their barbarism. Instead, Jefferson proposed an alliance of the United States and all European states victimized by these pirates and the creation of a joint naval force in the Mediterranean to destroy their corsairs, ravage their ports, and put an end, once and for all, to their savagery. He was suggesting an early version of NATO.21
John concurred that this was the honorable course of action, but then confronted Jefferson with three inconvenient facts. First, the European powers, so jealous of each other, would never agree to such an alliance. Second, the cost of such an enterprise, which he calculated at $500,000, would be larger than the requested ransom and more than the American government would ever approve. And third, Jefferson’s plan presupposed the presence of a potent American naval presence in the Mediterranean, but the awkward truth was that no American navy existed.22
John was at pains to assure Jefferson that the day might come when the American government was capable of mounting a successful campaign against the North African terrorists, but that day lay somewhere in the distant future. In the meantime, “we ought not to fight them at all unless we determine to fight them forever.” The only realistic option, then, as unpalatable as it was unavoidable, was to pay the ransom. “You make the result differently from what I do,” Jefferson responded, adding that “it is of no consequence, as I have nothing to say in the decision,” meaning that, as the senior American minister in Europe, John’s judgment was sovereign.
Oddly, the sordid business of paying a bribe ended on a comical note. In negotiating the size of the ransom payments with the ambassador of Tripoli, John managed to talk him down by blowing larger smoke rings from a huge Turkish pipe, which prompted the ambassador to exclaim, “Monsieur, vous êtes un Turc.”
In their early diplomatic collaborations it became abundantly clear that the Jefferson-Adams team embodied the classic contrast between idealistic and realistic approaches to American foreign policy. The two former colleagues in Philadelphia, who had agreed about the inevitability of American independence, discovered in Paris that they disagreed fundamentally about the direction an independent America should take. It was also clear that their differences were somewhat obscured because Jefferson routinely deferred to John’s seniority and experience. If there was a Jefferson-Adams team, Jefferson at this time saw himself as the junior partner.23
His relationship with Abigail was also deferential, though in a more playful and flirtatious manner. Abigail nursed Jefferson through the flulike symptoms that afflicted him during the winter and early spring of 1785, when he spent most afternoons with the Adams family at Auteuil, tutoring John Quincy in mathematics and swapping stories with Abigail about everything from the bizarre etiquette of the French court to Nabby’s new French hairdo. Abigail was also the conversational link between policy discussions, such as the interest rate charged by the Dutch bankers, and domestic topics, such as the current price of linen. She was the first woman that Jefferson came to know well who combined the traditional virtues of a wife and mother with the sharp mind and tongue of a fully empowered accomplice in her husband’s career. The gender categories that Jefferson carried around in his head envisioned men and women occupying wholly separate spheres. Abigail’s androgynous personality confounded his categories.
Their conversations at Auteuil were obviously unrecorded, but the letters they exchanged after the Adams family moved to London do allow us to recover some themes: for example, Jefferson’s efforts to engage Abigail’s several sides, and Abigail’s willingness to confront Jefferson in a way that he had never before experienced from a woman.24
They shared a running joke about the misguided arrogance of the British press, which reported, for example, that Franklin, upon his return to America, had been stoned to death by irate citizens, who blamed him for severing the connection with the British Empire, which they now deeply regretted. Jefferson noted “a blind story here of someone attempting to assassinate your king [George III].” He hoped it was untrue, joking that “no man upon earth has my prayers for his continuance in life more sincerely than him. He is truly the American Messias.” Abigail explained that all stories originating in the British press were lies, “if it were not too rough a term for a lady to use, I would say false as Hell, but I would submit one not less expressive and say false as English.”25
Many of their letters fluctuated between fashionable frivolities and serious exchanges about European politics and American foreign policy, again all dashed off in a conspicuously playful style. Jefferson explained that he had decided not to send her a small statuette of Venus for her dining table, since “I thought it out of taste to have two at the table at the same time.” For her part, Abigail apologized for asking him to survey the Parisian shops for black lace and evening shoes, which was “a little like putting Hercules to the distaff.”26
On the more substantive side, Abigail felt an obligation to keep Jefferson abreast of reports from America reproduced in the Boston press concerning the impact the British military garrison on the Great Lakes had on the fur trade, the failure of the Confederation Congress to fashion a responsible fiscal policy, and the decision by Massachusetts to close its ports to British imports. Jefferson presumed that John and his secretary were too busy to convey such information, “so they left it to you [Abigail] to give me the news.” Noting her command of the issues, he claimed that “I would rather receive it from you than them.” It is difficult to imagine Jefferson saying this about any other woman he had ever known.27
When news reached London and Paris of a popular insurrection in western Massachusetts, later dubbed Shays’s Rebellion after one of its leaders, a spirited debate ensued about whether it represented a serious threat to the embryonic American government. Jefferson concluded that the threat was exaggerated and shared the reasons for that conclusion with Abigail: “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions,” he observed, “that I wish it to be always kept alive … I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.” Abigail thought such liberal sentiments were only possible from someone safely ensconced in Paris, far from the trauma. She lectured Jefferson on the very real danger such popular uprisings posed for political stability, an essential condition that Jefferson seemed to take for granted. “Ignorant, wrestles desperados, without conscience or principles,” she warned, “have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard.” They should be punished rather than pardoned, an outcome that Jefferson would be well-advised to embrace.28
Finally, Abigail drew upon her own experience as a mother to question Jefferson’s demeanor as a father. When they were together at Auteuil, she had questioned Jefferson’s judgment in sending his eldest daughter, Martha, nicknamed Patsy, to a Catholic convent in Paris, which struck Abigail as an abdication of his parental responsibilities. Then, partly as a result of her prodding, Jefferson decided to bring his younger daughter, Maria, called Polly, over to France fro
m Virginia, and Abigail agreed to meet her at the London docks. Polly, who was nine years old, was accompanied by a fourteen-year-old mulatto slave named Sally Hemings, described by Abigail as “quite a child” but soon destined to strike Jefferson as a good deal more than that.
Abigail almost immediately began to bombard Jefferson with pointed accusations of parental negligence. Apparently quite the charmer, Polly won Abigail’s heart right away. “I never saw so intelligent a countenance in a child before,” she wrote Jefferson, “and the pleasure she has given me is an ample compensation for any little services I have been able to render her.” But it quickly became clear that Polly had no knowledge of her father, not even what he looked like: “I showed her your picture. She says she cannot know it, but how could she when she could not know you.”29
It got worse. Jefferson wrote to explain that diplomatic duties made it impossible for him to leave Paris, so he was sending his chief household servant, Petit, to fetch Polly. Abigail minced no words: “Tho she says she does not know you,” Abigail apprised Jefferson, Polly “depended upon you coming for her. She told me this morning that as she had left all her friends in Virginia to come over the ocean to see you, she did think that you would have taken pains to have come here for her, and not send a man [Petit] whom she cannot understand. I express her own words.”30
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