First Family

by Joseph J. Ellis

  John and Jefferson managed one last exchange of opinion on the shape of the new Constitution, which proved to be a preview of coming attractions. They agreed that the document should have included a Bill of Rights, and that drafting one should be the first business of the new government. Beyond that, however, their reactions were polar opposites. Jefferson thought that the Articles of Confederation required revision, not wholesale replacement: “I think that all the good of the new constitution might have been concealed in three or four articles to be added to the good, old, and venerable fabrick,” he explained to John, “which should have been preserved even as a religious relique.” John thought that the Constitution should have gone further in asserting federal sovereignty over the states, which was also seriously compromised by the vague powers allocated to the executive. Jefferson, on the other hand, feared the office of the presidency was too powerful, permitting routinized reelection for life in the manner of an American king. John’s response was unequivocal: “So much the better it seems to me.”70

  Abigail and John had to wait at Cowes for nearly a week before their ship, the Lucretia, could clear the harbor. “I have never before experienced to such a degree what the French term ennui,” Abigail confided to her diary, eager as she was to get the inevitable seasick phase of the voyage over and to set foot at last on New England soil. Looking back on England’s shores as the winds carried them out to sea in early April 1788, she offered a clear conclusion about her time in Europe: “I do not think four years I have past abroad the pleasantest part of my life. Tis Domestic happiness and Rural felicity in the Bosom of my Native Land that charms for me. Yet I do not regret that I made this excursion since it has only attached me more to America.” And, she might have added, to her “dearest friend.”71

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1789–96

  “[The vice presidency is] the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.”

  THE CANNONS ON Castle Island boomed in celebration as the Lucretia approached Boston Harbor, welcoming two American stalwarts back home. John and Abigail had spent three years as pariahs in London, where they were an unwelcome reminder of American independence. But the crowd at the Boston dock loved them for the same reason that Londoners loathed them, as prominent embodiments of that improbably successful achievement called the American Revolution.1

  Governor John Hancock’s ornate carriage was dispatched to pick them up, then sped them through the streets as church bells sounded all around. The ocean voyage had transformed them from outcasts into celebrities. In case John had somehow forgotten, the jubilant reception reminded him that, alongside George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, he stood at the very peak of the American version of Mount Olympus.

  The downside of this triumphal return came when they arrived at their new home in Braintree, which they had purchased sight unseen. Abigail’s first impression was disappointment. “In height and breadth,” she reported to Nabby, “it feels like a wren’s house.” They had grown accustomed to the spacious, high-ceilinged rooms of their residences in Paris and London, which made the rooms of their new home feel like cubicles. Abigail warned Nabby that the ceilings were so low that she would not be able to wear her feathered hats when visiting, and her husband would have to stoop if he wore his heeled boots.2

  In July 1788, as Abigail and John were moving into their new home, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution, thereby ensuring that a newly empowered federal government would be elected in November. A new chapter in the evolution of the American Revolution was beginning, a chapter in which an aspiring American nation-state replaced a loose-knit confederation of individual states. The question facing Abigail and John was whether or not to participate in this next round in the American experiment.

  Both of them had made a point of signaling a preference for retirement to the bucolic splendors of Braintree. While utterly sincere, such Ciceronian testimonials had become formulaic refrains among the top echelon of the revolutionary generation, less statements of their true intentions than ritualistic posturings. In this venerable tradition, anyone exhibiting a conspicuous craving for political office was presumed unqualified to serve.

  Nabby reported from her new home in New York, already identified as the first capital of the aspiring nation, that no one took such protestations seriously. There was as yet no organized party structure, no agreed-upon process for selecting candidates, so the “smoke-filled rooms” of the day were the taverns and coffeehouses where informal conversations weeded out prospective nominees. Nabby apprised her father that—no surprise—George Washington was the foregone conclusion for the top spot, and that “You will be elected to the second place on the continent,” meaning the vice presidency. Moreover, as she observed to John Quincy, if the informal appraisals proved correct, there was no way that their father would refuse the summons to serve. “The Happiness of our family,” she shrewdly noted, “seems ever to have been so interwoven with the Politics of our Country as to be in a great degree dependent upon them.”3

  If subsequent generations of the family had ever devised a plaque to be placed over the Adams plot, these words might very well have been chosen as the most appropriate testimonial. As the first national election approached, however, John was psychologically incapable of acknowledging that his own personal fulfillment depended upon being chosen for a prominent post in the new federal government. Though he was perhaps the most astute student of the role that ambition played among his political peers, he rather lamely insisted that any summons to serve would entail a huge personal sacrifice for both him and Abigail. “My mind has balanced all circumstances,” he told Abigail while awaiting the election results, “and all are reducible to … Vanity and Comfort.” If he was not chosen, so he claimed, they would live out their lives in relative serenity at Braintree. If he was elected, they would dutifully answer the call, once more placing the public interest above their private happiness.4

  He twitched back and forth between anxiety and denial: “I am willing to serve the public on manly conditions,” he wrote Nabby, “but not on childish ones.” Only the vice presidency would do. It was not the power of the office that attracted him—indeed, as he was soon to discover, the vice presidency was almost designed as a political cul-de-sac—but the status it carried as the second-ranking office in the government. The election, as he saw it, was a referendum on revolutionary credentials, and Washington was the only person whom John was prepared to recognize as his superior on that score. Abigail concurred that anything less than the vice presidency was “beneath him.”5

  Conveniently, he did not need to campaign or even declare his candidacy. The political etiquette of the time regarded outright campaigning for office akin to an act of prostitution, and therefore clear evidence that one was unworthy. Moreover, the electoral process for president described in the new Constitution did not yet distinguish between candidates for the first or second spot. The winner, if he received a majority of electoral votes, became president, while the runner-up became vice president.

  Both Abigail and John assumed a somewhat studied posture of nonchalance as they awaited the results of the election. Abigail decided that politics ought not take precedence over her new obligations as a grandmother, so she traveled down to New York to assist Nabby with the birth of her second child, another boy, who was named John Adams Smith, despite John’s objection (“I wish the child every Blessing from other Motives besides its name”). She reported that a visit with the Jay family in the city yielded the opinion that John was virtually certain to be elected vice president, despite opposition from factions in Virginia and New York that objected not so much to him but to any consolidated federal government whatsoever.6

  Though she presumed that the nights were cold back in Braintree, she wished to hear no more jokes about “virgins”: “I would recommend to you the Green Baize Gown, and if that will not answer, you recollect the Bear Skin.” In keeping with
his custom of silence whenever the voters were deciding his fate, John hunkered down while the snowdrifts piled up at Braintree: “The new government has my best wishes and most fervent prayers,” he wrote to Jefferson, who was still ensconced in Paris. “But whether I shall have anything more to do with it, besides praying for it, depends on the future suffrage of freemen.”7

  That was not technically correct. John’s fate depended on electors chosen by each state, mostly by the respective state legislators, who themselves were determined by the “suffrage of freemen.” When these electoral votes were counted in February 1789, Washington had won unanimously, receiving 69 votes. Eleven other candidates received some measure of support, but, with 34 electoral votes, John was the clear runner-up. It was not quite the resounding chorus of confidence that John had hoped for, but as Abigail reminded him, it showed that only Washington ranked higher in the minds of the American citizenry.

  The Boston newspapers tended to reinforce this interpretation of the election, describing John’s victory as a recognition of his distinguished service in the Continental Congress and then in Paris and London. No one mentioned the fact that the vice presidency was largely a ceremonial office, ill-suited to his outspoken and passionate temperament, or, as he put it a few years later, “the most insignificant office that ever the Invention of Man contrived or his Imagination conceived.”8

  Reservations about the limited powers of his new post never crossed John’s mind at that exuberant moment. Both he and Abigail were wholly focused on the status conferred by being recognized as second only to Washington, and therefore the second-ranking family in the United States. John was also thrilled with the long-term implications of his election, for it constituted an early referendum on the primacy of his place within the revolutionary generation, and therefore boded well for his prospects in the most important election of all, namely, the judgment of posterity.

  Abigail chimed in with her sense of satisfaction that the location of the new capital in New York would allow her to spend more time with Nabby and the grandchildren. And John beamed with pride when the fishermen of Marblehead offered to provide the vice president’s household with a steady supply of cod, in recognition of his earlier insistence in the Treaty of Paris on their fishing rights off the Grand Banks. Even if his duties were largely ceremonial, this final assignment—which is how John regarded the vice presidency—was the perfect capstone to his political career. There at the start to launch the movement for American independence. There to negotiate the end of the war and the new borders of a continental republic. And now there to help establish the first national government. What more could anyone ask?9

  ETIQUETTE AND EMULATION

  “We are most delightfully situated,” Abigail explained to her sister. “The prospect around us is Beautiful in the highest degree, it is a mixture of sublime & Beautiful.” She was describing the new Adams residence at Richmond Hill, a thirty-acre estate overlooking the Hudson, located about a mile north of the city in what is now the west side of Greenwich Village. While it was not quite up to the magisterial standards of their mansion at Auteuil, it was the most elegant American home that John and Abigail had ever occupied. Soon after Abigail’s arrival in June 1789, it immediately became social headquarters for the second-ranking official in the new American government and his famously impressive wife. “Our House has been a Levee ever since I arrived,” Abigail observed. “Had visits from 25 ladies, all [the wives of] senators and all foreign ministers.”10

  No couple in the country was more experienced at managing the social obligations of political office than Abigail and John. Their diplomatic duties in Paris and London had provided an unmatched education in courtly etiquette at the highest levels of refinement. John recognized that Abigail was his greatest asset on the all-important social front, and he expressed his impatience when she delayed her departure from Braintree to make arrangements for their farm. “You must sell Horses, Oxen, Sheep, Cowes, anything at any Rate rather than not come on—if no one will take the Place, leave it to the Birds of the air and Beasts of the Field.” He needed her by his side.11

  Since a nation-size republic was a novelty—no such creature had ever existed before—and since the courtly etiquette of European monarchies seemed to defy the very core of republican values, no one was quite sure what the social side of a republican government was supposed to look like. One solution was a weekly open house called the levee, where the president and vice president, along with their respective wives, greeted elected officials, foreign dignitaries, and distinguished guests in a format that attempted to strike the proper middle note between courtly formality and republican simplicity.

  Abigail described the scene, which was thoroughly choreographed. She always stood to the right of Martha Washington, who received curtsies from the women guests and bows from the gentlemen: “The president then comes up and speaks to the lady, which he does with a grace, dignity, and ease that leaves Royal George far behind him.” The guests were passed on to Abigail and John with the requisite curtsies and bows; then the assembled throng made small talk for about fifteen minutes while consuming small portions of ice cream and lemonade—substantive conversations about matters of policy were strictly forbidden—then more curtsies and bows when Washington exited the room. It was a somewhat awkward contradiction in terms, a republican court, and the major venue in which Abigail and John were on display as ranking members of—another contradiction—republican royalty.12

  Abigail was the point person for the Adams family at the levees as well as the weekly dinners she hosted at Richmond Hill. And in a reprise of her diplomatic role in Paris, she visited the wives of fifteen to twenty government officials or foreign ministers each week. John’s role, chiefly ceremonial, was to preside over the Senate, usually for six hours every day.

  According to the language of the Constitution, the vice president was allowed to vote only in order to break a tie and was required to remain silent during debates. In his maiden speech before the Senate, John acknowledged that the latter requirement would not be easy for him: “I have been more accustomed to take a share in the debates, than to preside in their deliberations,” he confessed, which was an implicit reference to his prominent role in the Continental Congress. Nevertheless, he promised to do his best, and if he forgot the limitations periodically, he hoped his colleagues would forgive his lapses. To John Quincy he confided that the office of vice president required “a kind of Duty, which, if I do not flatter myself too much, is not quite adapted to my Character.” For the passionate and combative veteran of several truly historic debates that shaped the direction of the American Revolution, silence was not a natural act.13

  A minor matter of official etiquette prompted the first violation of his oath of office and made him the centerpiece of the first political controversy to afflict the new government. The issue at stake was an apparently harmless question: By what title should the president be addressed? The real protagonist in the debate was Senator William Maclay, who hailed from the western frontier of Pennsylvania, where republican values assumed a decidedly egalitarian character and all forms of pomp and ceremony carried with them the distinct odor of monarchy. Maclay insisted that the proper title for President Washington should be “Mr. President,” and that all efforts to affix greater grandeur to the office conjured up the decadent legacies of British royalty, which he thought the American Revolution had long ago consigned to the oblivion they deserved.

  John interrupted Maclay on several occasions, delivering quasi lectures to the Senate on the importance of visible trappings of authority for an infant republic that desperately needed to project symbols of national unity. And besides, since everyone agreed that President Washington was genuinely majestic, why not recognize that fact by referring to him as “His Majesty”? If that sounded too reminiscent of European monarchy, then perhaps “His Highness” would be preferable.

  Maclay went on a tirade, protesting the interruptions from someone purportedly r
equired to remain silent during debates, then suggesting that the vice president had apparently been infected by the disease called “nobilmania” during his long sojourn in Europe. Other senators agreed, reprimanding John for his violation of procedure and joking that perhaps he himself would prefer to be referred to as “the Duke of Braintree” or, better yet, as “His Rotundity.”

  Maclay’s diary, hardly a neutral source, is the fullest account of the exchange, so that most subsequent historical accounts of the episode reflect his hostile opinion of John, whom he described as an “avowed monarchist” and “a monkey just put into breeches.” But even after one adjusts for Maclay’s biased version, the consensus within the Senate was that John had made a fool of himself. Jefferson, recently arrived from Paris, when apprised of John’s insistence on high-sounding titles, observed that it struck him “as the most superlatively ridiculous thing I have ever heard.” The Senate voted for the simple title “Mr. President,” thus repudiating John’s advice, and from that time forward he refrained from injecting himself into debates.14

  Instead of feeling chastised, John felt that he had been misunderstood. And the way to correct the misunderstanding was to demonstrate to all concerned that the hovering ghost of monarchy that haunted all American conversations about government needed to be exorcised if the infant republic was to enjoy any prospect of success. Every afternoon, after presiding over the Senate debates, he returned to Richmond Hill and poured his thoughts onto paper. In typical Adams fashion, the stream of words became a flood, eventually taking the form of thirty-one essays printed in the Gazette of the United States over the next year and subsequently published as a separate volume entitled Discourses on Davila. Looking back many years later, John pronounced Davila his most profound attempt to identify the primal forces shaping all human effort at government.