She could not resist one parting shot. Jefferson’s decision to place Patsy in a convent had always mystified and disappointed her. Now that Polly was also joining her father, “I hope that she will not lose her fine spirits within the walls of a convent too, to which I own I have many, perhaps false prejudices.” Even stronger than her prejudices against Catholicism were convictions Abigail harbored about the obligations of parenthood. She made sure to let Jefferson know that he did not meet her standard.31
Looking back, with all the advantages of hindsight, one can see clearly that bonds of mutual affection were forged between Jefferson and the Adams family during their time together in Europe. But one can also see with equivalent clarity that the seeds of an eventual conflict based on deep-rooted ideological and temperamental differences were present from the start. For now, however, the shared intimacies blotted out the latent differences. In May 1785, when the Adamses departed for London, Jefferson reported that he was “in the dumps” and that “my afternoons hang heavily on me.” John wrote from the road to Calais, saying not to fret, because the Jefferson mind was traveling with them in the form of his recently published Notes on the State of Virginia, which he and Abigail were reading out loud to each other in the carriage.32
MAROONED IN LONDON
Both John and Abigail realized that they were entering enemy territory. The British press had greeted the news of John’s appointment as American ambassador much like the Vatican would have greeted the appointment of Martin Luther, for the very man who had played a leading role in instigating the American rebellion, then again in negotiating the loss of the British Empire in North America, now must be extended the civilities of the British court and society. From the very start, Abigail noticed that her husband’s presence “bites them like a serpent and stings them like an ader.” The large numbers of loyalists in exile, who could only explain their misfortune as the result of a diabolical plot by a few unscrupulous American agitators, regarded John as one of the radical ringleaders. One loyalist editorial proposed that, instead of being introduced to royalty at court, he should be sent to the gallows and hanged for treason.33
After attending a ball in his honor at the French ambassador’s residence, John recorded his impressions in his diary: “These People cannot look me in the Face. There is a conscious Guilt and Shame in their Countenances, when they look at me. They feel they have behaved ill, and that I am sensible of it.” This was a quite charitable interpretation. Most Britons were having considerable difficulty digesting the calamitous loss they had recently suffered, and hatred rather than guilt was the common reaction toward the most palpable reminder of their humiliation. Throughout their three-year stay in London, this abiding hostility remained the prevailing if unspoken opinion at all the official functions that Abigail and John attended. The sense of isolation this generated, or perhaps the sense of siege they felt from the British press, only drove them closer together. There was no one else to rely upon.34
The one exception to this pattern, though hardly someone to count on, was none other than George III himself. As John reported to John Jay, the interview to present his credentials before the British king, whom he had once described as a tyrant unfit to govern a free people, went remarkably well. According to John’s account of the interview, after he had made his introductions, George III showed himself to be a gracious sovereign: “The circumstances of this interview are so extraordinary,” George III observed, “the language you have now used is so extremely proper … that I must say that I not only receive with pleasure the assurance of friendly dispositions of the United States, but that I am very glad that the choice has fallen upon you to be their minister.” This stroking of John’s psyche had the desired effect, for ever after, even when George III’s apparent madness made him the butt of jokes in America, John defended his integrity.35
Abigail, for her part, remained more skeptical. After she had waited for over four hours at court to be introduced to the king and queen, George III asked her if she had taken a walk that day—the standard question he had just asked all guests. “I could have told him,” Abigail wrote her sister, “that I had been all the morning preparing for him.” The chief advantage of overcrowded court ceremonies that featured the king, she observed, “is that you may go away when you please without disturbing anybody.”36
London struck Abigail as less visually impressive than Paris, but more livable. (It helped that everyone spoke English.) Their quarters at Grosvenor Square were less palatial than the Auteuil villa, though they once again employed multiple servants, who seemed more disposed to share domestic duties than their French counterparts. The London ladies she was required to call upon wore less rouge than the Parisians, and cultivated a more subdued, less theatrical, style. There was no London version of Madame Helvétius.
But the urge to shock was replaced, so Abigail thought, by the desire to bore, which was institutionalized, she observed, in “Supremely stupid card games at all official events and parties,” and in the marathon waiting lines that kept all guests at court standing around for several hours until the royal family reached them and spoke a few meaningless words. In the end, despite their differences, Abigail found the aristocratic societies of Paris and London variations on the same degenerate theme: “All is lost in ceremony and Parade, in venality and corruption, in Gamery and debauchery, amongst those who stile themselves … the fashionable World.”37
Although there is no record of their private conversations, Abigail and John clearly worked out their responses to life in London together, both as a married couple isolated within an openly anti-American environment and as a diplomatic team determined to speak about matters of policy with one voice. Indeed, they often used almost identical language to describe their reactions to distinctive features of English life, almost always finding them inferior to the American version.
For example, Abigail wrote her sister about the ornate and highly manicured English gardens, which represented a cultivated and tightly organized kind of man-made beauty. But she found the wilder and more wide-open American landscape more appealing because it was more natural. Meanwhile, John confided to his diary that the fashionably arranged English parks and fields were symptomatic of an older European world that made a virtue of confinement or limited space: “But Nature has done greater things and furnished noble Materials there [i.e., America],” where “the Rivers, Mountains, Valleys are all laid out upon a larger scale.”38
The same anti-English echo resounded from their different sides of the gender divide. Abigail thought that American women were more attractive than English women, once all the makeup and hair-dressings were removed from the equation. The most beautiful woman in all of London, she declared, was Anne Bingham, the famously beguiling wife of the immensely wealthy William Bingham of Philadelphia. “I have not seen a lady in England who can bear a comparison with Mrs. Bingham … who taken altogether is the finest woman I ever saw.”39
John preferred more masculine comparisons. English farmers kept bragging about the superiority of their techniques for fertilizing the soil. But John insisted that American farmers in Pennsylvania produced larger crop yields per acre and, a bit of special pleading, that the quality of manure he spread over his fields at Braintree surpassed anything used on English farms. During a visit from Jefferson in the spring of 1786, when they spent a week together touring the English countryside, John was unimpressed by an English artisan who claimed to have devised a new way to bend wood for making wheels. He was sure that farmers in New Jersey had perfected an even better technique, and Jefferson, chiming right in, speculated that they had gotten their idea from a passage in the Iliad, “because ours are the only farmers who can read Homer.”40
Such partisan pleading for American landscapes, American women, American farmers, even American manure, could sound almost laughingly provincial, and at least on one occasion, Abigail felt compelled to parody her own excesses: “Do you know,” she wrote her sister, “that European birds h
ave not half the melody of ours, nor is their fruit half so sweet, or their flowers half so fragrant, or their Manners half so pure, or their people half so Virtuous? But keep this to yourself.” Isolated as they were among an English population that resented their presence, and routinely subjected to ridicule in the British press, Abigail and John took refuge in each other and in the stories they shared about the intrinsic superiority of the American values that were being so casually and caustically vilified around them.41
The British ministry was less openly hostile than the British press but, in its own officially polite fashion, remained implacably opposed to substantive negotiations of any sort with the American ambassador. John discovered there was really no diplomacy to conduct soon after his arrival in London, when he met with Lord Carmarthen, the young foreign minister who also happened to be a neighbor at Grosvenor Square. On the matter of British troops garrisoned on the Great Lakes, a clear violation of the Treaty of Paris, Carmarthen informed John that they would remain until the Americans lived up to their treaty obligations by paying off the prewar debts that southern planters, mostly Virginians, owed to British creditors. On the matter of British trade policy, Carmarthen acknowledged that American exports would always be welcomed at British ports, as long as they came in British bottoms and paid the required duties. British exports to America, however, were another matter, and the loss of such trade, which had flourished in the prewar years, was the price Americans must be prepared to pay for their glorious independence.42
As for the only other outstanding issue, compensation to southern slave owners for the slaves liberated by the British army, then carried away by the British fleet from New York at the end of the war—well, that was never going to happen. John did his diplomatic duty in raising this awkward issue but never pushed it. Off the record, he also thought that the indebted southern planters, Jefferson among them, were violating the Treaty of Paris and should be forced to pay.
Based on her letters to friends and relatives back in America, it is clear that Abigail was fully informed about the diplomatic impasse John was facing, and familiar with the details as well as the grand shape of the gridlocked negotiations. She estimated, for example, that the continued presence of British troops on America’s northwestern frontier would cost the economy $50,000 a year from losses in the fur trade. During John’s early career opposing British policy in Boston and Philadelphia, it was clear that Abigail fully supported his decisions and the ultimate goal of American independence, but it was not clear how involved she was in the formation of his political goals or the tactics used to achieve them. In London there could be no doubt that she was a full-fledged partner, abreast of all the diplomatic issues, a colleague as well as a wife.43
In fact, on one elemental issue affecting American foreign policy, Abigail was more outspoken than John. While the stand-pat intransigence of the British ministry was a major problem, and John understandably focused on it because it was the immediate source of his frustration, Abigail tended to emphasize American complicity in creating the diplomatic deadlock by failing to provide the Confederation Congress with a clear mandate to oversee foreign trade and make foreign policy: “In vain will they call for commercial treaties,” she lamented, “in vain will they call for respect in Europe; in vain will they hope for Peace with the Barbary states,” until the state governments ceded powers to the federal congress, “which would allow them to act in concert and give vigor and strength to their proceedings.”44
In the absence of agreed-upon federal jurisdiction over foreign policy, America could not speak with a single voice in Europe. Instead, there were thirteen separate sovereignties, a cacophony rather than a chorus, all in the hands, as she put it, of “beardless Boys” in the state governments, who were just as ignorant of international affairs as that infamous member of Parliament “when he talked of the Island of Virginia.” This was a dominant theme in Abigail’s correspondence, much more than in John’s, and it placed the lion’s share of responsibility for the futility of John’s diplomatic mission—or perhaps their diplomatic mission—squarely on the shoulders of their own countrymen.45
INTIMACIES
During Abigail and John’s time abroad, the most significant fact about their relationship was that they were together almost all the time. This meant that they talked, touched, bantered, argued, commiserated, and bonded more routinely than they had ever done before in their married life. We can only imagine their conversation upon returning from an especially boring court function, sharing impressions of the most supercilious guests or the most obnoxious courtiers. And we can only infer, based on Abigail’s richly detailed letters to relatives back home, that they spent many hours discussing the intractability of their diplomatic agenda in London, the shifting factions within the British ministry, the interest rates charged by Dutch bankers, and the interlocking virtues and vices of Europe’s aristocratic culture.
We can imagine, and we can infer, but we can never know for sure, because none of their intimate conversation was recorded. In that sense, the most crucial piece in the Adams family puzzle during this extended time together is lost forever or, perhaps more correctly, never made its way into the historical record in the first place. Intimacy is by definition an inherently private affair, shielded from public view back then, even more sequestered from our well-intended snooping over two centuries later. The best we can do is to catch a few glimpses, based on faint traces left in letters that are usually about something else, grainy snapshots of moments in their overlapping interactions as lovers, friends, partners, and parents.
In December 1786, for example, Abigail and Nabby made a trip to Bath so that Abigail could “take the waters” to alleviate what she described as “Bellious disorders” and “a slow intermitting fever,” which might have been early symptoms of her chronic battle with rheumatism in her later years. It was one of the few occasions when John and Abigail were apart, and Abigail wrote him for reassurance that he was able to manage without her: “Don’t be solicitous about Me,” John replied. “I shall do very well—if I am cold in the night, and an additional quantity of Bed Cloaths will not answer the purpose of warming me, I will take a virgin to bed with me—Ay a Virgin—What? Oh Awful!” After this attempt at mock shock, John went on to explain that virgin was the name Londoners gave to a hot-water bottle.46
This little episode demonstrates with near certainty that Abigail and John routinely slept together in the same bed. It also suggests that they were comfortable with the subject of sex, or at the very least that John was. (Abigail was allowed to smile upon receiving such a letter, but not to send anything so explicit herself.) It also seems plausible, if not quite provable, that at ages forty-two and fifty-one, respectively, they continued to enjoy a physical connection.
Race, it would seem, was a more uncomfortable subject than sex. There were some passages in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia that might have prompted a reaction, passages describing Africans as a biologically inferior species, forever condemned to inferiority as long as they retained their blackness. John chose not to notice these passages, preferring to focus on Jefferson’s critical remarks on slavery, which he said are “worth Diamonds.”47
It is clear that Abigail and John, who never owned a slave, regarded slavery as incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, and therefore an awkward anomaly that British critics of American independence liked to throw in their faces. Abigail expressed her sense of embarrassment at a London dinner when seated next to William Blake, a wealthy South Carolina planter: “I am loth to mention that he owns 1500 Negroes,” she observed, “as I cannot avoid considering it disgraceful to Humanity.” (Though it made no moral difference, according to the 1790 census Blake owned 695 slaves.) Slavery, then, was one of those countless issues about which Abigail and John thought identically and almost seamlessly. Both took considerable pride when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled slavery illegal on the grounds that it violated the language John had written in
the Massachusetts Constitution.48
Yet, consider this stunningly candid confession, offered by Abigail after viewing a performance of Othello at a London theater: “Othello was represented blacker than any African. Whether it rises from prejudices or Education or from a real natural antipathy I cannot determine, but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty More touch the fair Desdemona … That most incomparable Speech of Othello’s lost half its force and Beauty to me, because I could not separate the Colour from the Man.” As Abigail implied, her racial reaction was instinctive, not an idea that emerged from her mind so much as a feeling that surged, as she put it, from her soul. It was obviously not a feeling she liked, but, just as obviously, not something she could control. Her honesty in acknowledging its potency was quite rare. The fact that these racial prejudices were present inside her, however, was the norm rather than the exception. It suggests that however liberated she was on the gender front, and however comfortable she and John were with their sexuality, race imposed hurdles she could not clear.49
Their parental roles were complicated by an elemental reality. Though they were together as a couple, they were not together as a family. All the boys, in fact, were back in New England, in various stages of preparation for Harvard. Charles and Thomas were boarding with their aunt at Haverhill. John Quincy had sailed home at the same time as his parents had departed Paris for London. Always the dutiful young man, he spent most of the voyage caring for seven hunting dogs that the marquis de Lafayette was sending to George Washington, who was now in retirement at Mount Vernon.
If the number and length of Abigail and John’s letters are a fair measure, John Quincy remained their favorite son, a project almost as much as a person. After he passed the admissions exam to Harvard, doing brilliantly, as expected, Abigail reminded him, given all the educational advantages he had enjoyed, “how unpardonable it would have been in you, to have become a Blockhead.” Charles received a few letters from both parents, usually warning him that his inveterate charm, while endearing, was no substitute for diligent work habits. Poor Thomas, who received but one letter in four years and sent none of his own that have survived, had become almost invisible.50
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