Both men were also able to share the sense that they had become living statues. Jefferson, for example, entrusted his last letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was traveling to Boston and planned a visit with the Sage of Quincy: “Like other young people,” Jefferson explained, “he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” Most Americans coming of age in the 1820s regarded the American Revolution as a sacred moment in the distant past, when a gallery of greats had been privileged to see God face-to-face. It was disconcerting to realize that two of the most prominent heroes of that bygone era were still alive.10
In 1825 the American sculptor John Henri Isaac Browere visited both sages with a proposal to produce “life masks” designed to yield realistic likenesses of their faces and heads, so that subsequent generations could see an accurate rendering of the American icons. The process required pouring several coats of a hot, plasterlike liquid over the head, allowing it to harden, then breaking it off in chunks. “He did not tear my face to pieces,” John explained, “though I sometimes thought that he would beat my brains out with a hammer.”11
The bronze casting that resulted made John look like a metallic cadaver clad in a Roman toga, what he himself described as the “life mask” for a corpse. The most accurate and inspired rendering of the elder statesman proved to be the last portrait by Gilbert Stuart, painted in 1823, which managed to capture the wrinkled and rumpled body encasing an ever-glowing spirit. As John’s neighbor Josiah Quincy put it, Stuart caught the old man “at one of those happy moments when the intelligence lights up the wasted envelope.” John himself sounded the same note: “I enjoy life and have as good spirit as I ever had,” he wrote to Charles Carroll, “but my fabric has become very weak, almost worn out.” His body was ready to join Abigail’s in the ground, but his mind kept up a running mockery of his wrinkled frailties with regular flashes of vivacity.12
One such flash occurred when he received a visit from Mrs. Ebenezer Storer, a widow who in her earlier incarnation as Hannah Quincy had been John’s old flame in the pre-Abigail days. John startled her and the other visitors by declaring, “What! Madam, shall we not go walk in Cupid’s Grove together?” (Cupid’s Grove was the lover’s lane where John and Hannah had strolled over sixty years before.) Initially taken aback, Mrs. Storer quickly recovered her old coquettish form: “Ah, sir, it would not be the first time we have walked there.” Josiah Quincy, who witnessed the exchange, observed that “the flash of old sentiment was startling for its utter unexpectedness … It is a surprise to find a great personage so simple, so perfectly natural, so thoroughly human.”13
Quincy also provided what is perhaps the best description of the elder statesman’s personality in full flight near the end. In June 1823, despite a bad gash on his ankle, John walked over a mile to Quincy’s house in order to share company and conversation. He held forth for more than two hours, recalling his negotiation with the ambassador from Tripoli, when he blew smoke rings in a competition to reduce the size of the required ransom of American prisoners, and then proceeded to demonstrate his proficiency by duplicating the feat for Quincy’s guests. He speculated, incorrectly as it turned out, that John Jay had actually written Washington’s Farewell Address. (It was Hamilton, still the last person that John could stoop to honor.) He also surmised that John Dickinson’s opposition to American independence in the Continental Congress was due to the influence of his wife and mother, both devout Quakers and resolute pacifists. “If I had such a mother and such a wife,” John concluded, “I believe I should have shot myself.”
His last story was about Judge Edmund Quincy, Josiah’s grandfather, who had once beaten off a robber with his cane. John lifted up his own cane to demonstrate how the old judge had defended himself, but accidentally struck and demolished a picture hanging on the wall behind him. John began to laugh uncontrollably at his blunder, announcing that he had not had such a good time in months: “If I was to come here once a day,” he declared, “I should live half a year longer.” One of the guests responded that John might consider coming “twice in a day, and live a year longer.” John found that to be a splendid suggestion and, to the applause of the crowd, vowed to return that evening.14
There are several other evocative scenes of the sage in his twilight phase: the day the entire Corps of Cadets from West Point assembled on the Old House lawn, where John delivered a speech to them on Washington’s commitment to civilian control of the military; or the afternoon that Lafayette and his huge entourage visited Quincy as a mandatory stop on his American tour, and both patriarchs left the interview muttering that age had so changed the other that they found themselves unrecognizable. But the most poignant and historically suggestive scene occurred without witnesses in the privacy of John’s library.
It was prompted by John Quincy’s out-of-the-blue announcement that he intended to write a biography of his father. “Tell Mr. A,” John wrote to Louisa Catherine, “that I am assiduously and sedulously employed in Exertions to save him trouble, by collecting all my Papers. What a Mass!” He had dipped into the unedited Adams archives while writing his autobiography and the Boston Patriot series, but he had never before taken the full measure of the historical record that he and Abigail had generated and preserved, which was so vast that the modern editors of the Adams Papers, after sixty years of scholarly effort, still have no end in sight.15
“I am deeply immersed in researches,” he wrote John Quincy, “after old Papers. Trunks, Boxes, Desks, Drawers locked up for thirty years have been broken open because the Keys are lost. Nothing stands in my Way.” In one of his last letters to Rush after renewing their candid correspondence, he had shouted out his fear: “Have mercy on me Posterity, if you should ever see any of my letters.” Now, however, sitting in his library amid the enormous cache of family history, he began to realize that he and Abigail had created the most comprehensive and intimate portrait of a prominent family living through America’s founding.16
The abiding candor of the correspondence still left him uneasy, as he explained to John Quincy: “Every scrap shall be found and preserved for your Affliction [or] for your good,” he warned. “I shall leave you with an inheritance sufficiently tormenting [to] make you Alternately laugh and cry, fret and fume, stamp and scold, as they do me.” He knew, deep down, that his letters would render him ineligible as an American hero who fit the mythical mold that all new nations required. But he began to glimpse, for the first time, that the full exposure of his edges and imperfections might eventually, over the long stretch of time, endear him to posterity as the most fully revealed member of the revolutionary generation. These letters, spread all around him, were his ticket into the American pantheon as the original postmythical hero. And he was the only one who would be admitted with his wife alongside him. It turned out to take more than a century and a half for history to rediscover him.17
He could no longer write letters to Abigail, but he almost certainly conferred with her spirit on a daily basis. And as the presidential election of 1824 approached, he surely shared his concern about the looming fate of their eldest son, who was generally regarded as one of the leading candidates—along with Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson—for the highest office in the land. “What a rattling & crackling and clattering there is about the future presidency,” John observed to a friend. “It seems like a Conclave of Cardinals intriguing for the Election of the Pope.”18
The more explicit style of political campaigning offended John’s personal sensibilities, which had been formed in an earlier era when any overt expression of political ambition was regarded as inadmissible. Even more paternally, he worried about the fate of John Quincy, and his worries were maddeningly double-barreled: first that he would lose, and then that he would win.
At first blush the second worry seems strange. After all, it is n
ot often that a father grooms his son from birth for public office at the highest level of achievement, monitors every phase of his upbringing and education to focus on that goal, lives long enough to witness his son’s imminent arrival at the providential destination, then hopes it does not happen. But, in fact, John had been sending precisely that signal to John Quincy for more than a decade: “Political claims cannot be of long duration in this Country,” he worried in a typical plea. “My advice … is to be always prepared and ready to retire at a moment’s warning.” Multiple letters to Louisa Catherine carried the same message, which only intensified as the election approached.19
Although he never said so explicitly, it seems clear that John feared that his son would repeat his own painful pattern. So much of John Quincy’s political and diplomatic career had already followed an arc that seemed eerily reminiscent of his father’s course. (Only a member of the Adams family, it appeared, could negotiate the end of a war with Great Britain.) John worried that the pattern would continue with the presidency, which would end like his, after one term, in frustration and disappointment. And, in fact, it did.
The pattern was so predictable because John Quincy had been educated in the Adams political tradition, which harbored only hatred for all forms of partisan politics and skepticism toward the shifting winds of popular opinion. Almost by definition, an Adams felt most comfortable defying the illusion that there was such a harmonious thing as “the people,” which knew where history was headed. An Adams, again by definition, distrusted the wild political swings of democracy and relished alienation from its superficial certainties. It was the trademark conviction of the Adams family, given its classic formulation in The Education of Henry Adams by John Quincy’s grandson. John put it most concisely in what was to be his last letter to Jefferson: “Our American Chivalry is the worst in the World. It has no laws, no bounds, no definitions, it seems to be all a caprice.” Any political leader who embraced such a conviction, it turned out, was running against the grain of the emerging American democracy, which was the major reason why John Quincy, like his father, would be a one-term president.20
By the summer of 1826 John’s physical condition had declined beyond the point where another surge of his indomitable spirit could rescue it. He had already apprised Jefferson that the end was near: “The little strength of mind … that I once possessed appears to be all gone,” he acknowledged, “but while I breathe I shall be your friend. We shall meet again, so wishes and so believes your friend, but if we are disappointed we shall never know it.” He was still hedging his bets on the hereafter, and had come to regard heaven as a putative place where Abigail was waiting. The Christian doctrine of the Beatific Vision struck him as insipid and boring. Gazing upon God was less interesting than embracing Abigail and resuming his arguments with Franklin and Jefferson. That for him was the true paradise.21
He knew that his powers of thought and speech were permanently diminished, so when a delegation from Quincy visited him on June 30, requesting some statement from the patriarch for the looming Independence Day celebration, he refused to cooperate: “I will give you ‘Independence forever,’ ” he declared. Asked if he might like to elaborate, he declined: “Not a word.” He had finally learned, at the very end, the gift of silence. Abigail would have approved. Physicians and other visitors came away from his bedside convinced that the end was near.22
On the morning of July 4 John lay in his bed, breathing with difficulty, apparently unable to speak. But when apprised that it was the Fourth, and the fiftieth anniversary of Independence Day, he lifted his head and, with obvious effort, declared: “It is a great day. It is a good day.”23
Late in the afternoon he stirred in response to a severe thunderstorm—subsequently described in eulogies as “the artillery of Heaven”—and was heard to whisper, “Thomas Jefferson survives,” by several bedside observers. But by a coincidence that defied the probabilities of history and even the parameters of fiction, Jefferson had died earlier that afternoon. Both patriarchs, each possessed of indomitable willpower, seemed determined to die on schedule.24
John drew his last breath shortly after six o’clock. Witnesses reported that a final clap of thunder sounded at his passing, and then a bright sun broke through the clouds. An estimated four thousand people attended the funeral at the First Congregational Church three days later as his body was laid to rest alongside Abigail’s. They have remained together ever since.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As every author can attest, a book that has only one name on the cover is really a child with multiple parents, or at least several midwives who have nurtured it into the world. In my case, four readers provided wisdom, a critical eye for both style and substance, and savvy about how to tell the story.
Edmund S. Morgan, my long-ago mentor at Yale, and beyond much doubt the most distinguished historian of early American history over the last half century, heartily endorsed the project, caught many gaffes, and urged me to have the courage of my convictions.
Robert Dalzell, who continues to stalk the classrooms of Williams College dispensing wit and wisdom, provided suggestions about the role of family dynasties in American history and pushed me on what makes for a happy marriage.
Stephen Smith, currently editor of the Washington Examiner, is a journalist who takes American history seriously. He is also a peerless critic, capable of showing you why this word is better than that, or persuading you that what you want to say is not quite what you have said.
C. James Taylor, editor of the Adams Papers, not only read and commented on a late draft, but also made available the unpublished letters between Abigail and John assembled by his staff for subsequent volumes of the Adams Family Correspondence.
This is my fifth book with Ash Green, who is officially retired from Knopf but remains my editor and friend until one of us goes to the hereafter. If Abigail and John had unconditional love, Ash and I have unconditional trust. Andrew Miller, his successor at Knopf, ushered the completed manuscript through the several stages of editorial wizardry that transformed it into a book.
My agent, Ike Williams, negotiated the contract with a minimum of fuss, then called periodically to see how things were going. Our conversations invariably became passionate digressions into the prospects of the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics.
Although I had no research assistants—I have this stubborn conviction that reading the sources with my own eyes is the only way—Linda Fernandes was my assistant in all the other ways, including technological, clerical, and therapeutic. I wrote the drafts in longhand on the blank back sides of junk mail, sometimes late at night, when the slant of my scrawl defied translation. Linda put it all into printed form on a disk, periodically offering suggestions that I could not afford to ignore.
Twenty students at Mount Holyoke took a research seminar with me on Abigail and John in the spring of 2008. Our conversations and their papers influenced my thinking about Abigail as a proto-feminist, the perils of parenting, and, most important, what to leave out. Undergraduates are supposed to be incapable of irony, but that was the interpretive edge they insisted upon.
As I took notes and wrote words in my study, I was accompanied by an aging golden retriever, a young Labradoodle, a feisty Jack Russell terrier, and a defiant cat. They offered no advice that I could understand, but their sheer presence created serenity.
My wife, Ellen Wilkins Ellis, as the dedication suggests, merely provided the ballast. I have a hunch that this was essential.
Joseph J. Ellis
Amherst, Massachusetts
NOTES
The notes below represent my attempt to provide documentation for all quotations in the text, the vast majority of which come from the published and yet unpublished correspondence between Abigail and John. When the story I try to tell crosses over contested historical terrain that has spawned a formidable scholarly literature, I have tried to cite books and articles that strike me as sensible and seminal. But my accounting on this score is
far from exhaustive, in part because such a standard would burden the book with notes that outweighed the text itself, in part because I think the conversation between Abigail and John should take precedence over the conversation among several generations of historians.
That said, previous biographers of John and Abigail have blazed the trail in ways that have influenced my reading of the primary sources and, therefore, deserve mention at the start. For John there are three distinguished predecessors: Page Smith, John Adams, 2 vols. (New York, 1962); John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Knoxville, 1995); and David McCullough, John Adams (New York, 2001). For Abigail there are also three biographical pioneers: Lynn Withey, Dearest Friend: A Life of Abigail Adams (New York, 1981); Phyllis Lee Levin, Abigail Adams: A Biography (New York, 1987); and Edith Gelles, Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington, 1992). A new biography by Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (New York, 2009), appeared just in time to influence my final draft.
Because the relationship between Abigail and John was so seamless, any biographer of one almost automatically ends up writing about both. And all the biographers mentioned above do just that. But there is a difference between a biographer who leans in the direction of the partner and a historian of the partnership itself. I aspire for the latter.
…
P.S.—While this book was being copyedited, a study appeared of the Adams partnership, entitled Abigail & John: Portrait of a Marriage (New York, 2009), by Edith B. Gelles. Gelles is a distinguished student of Abigail and a friend. I look forward to comparing her version of the story with mine.
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