by Andrea Wulf
That spring Adams had missed seeing the meadows transform into colorful carpets of wildflowers. Instead he had watched the Federalists and Republicans battle over the Jay Treaty, a landmark agreement so controversial that John Jay, who negotiated the deal, later claimed that he could have traveled the whole country by the light of burning effigies of himself. Commercially the treaty further aligned the United States of America with the British Empire, effectively rejecting the French-American alliance that had been formed during the War of Independence. Britain had finally agreed to vacate the forts in the western territory and the threat of war was at last dispelled. Adams stood by Washington and the Federalists, who welcomed the closer links to Britain, but Madison, Jefferson and their fellow Republicans deeply disapproved of the pro-British turn.
The Senate had ratified the treaty the previous summer, but in spring 1796 the House of Representatives needed to decide whether to fund it or not. In his role as vice president, Adams was relegated to being a mere spectator during the long debates and so his mind frequently wandered back to his farm at Quincy. He also took pleasure in using agricultural metaphors to make his point. The Jay Treaty, he wrote to a fellow Federalist, was like making manure—like the lime he mixed with earth, mud and straw, it “occasions some smoke and some Dust and some hissing but will end in reducing all to one rich mould.” As the disagreement intensified, he once again used the metaphor of the cart with pairs of oxen at the front and back with which he had so vividly explained the checks and balances of government almost a decade earlier. Only this time the wagon was stuck “in the Mire” and with the oxen pulling in opposite directions, the “Wheels Stand Still.”
After a protracted and acrimonious battle, the House of Representatives passed the appropriation bill for the treaty by the smallest margin on 30 April 1796. Adams was relieved that the debates were over and desperate to return to his garden, “the Ultimate Object of all my Hopes, Wishes and Expectations, for myself.” There was no reason to stay in Philadelphia a moment longer than he had to. He requested leave of absence and less than a week later he was on the road home.
Coming six years after Alexander Hamilton’s Assumption Plan, the Jay Treaty (now finally passed) was a triumph for the Federalists’ economic plans, and with America now firmly allied with Britain, exports of grains and other products rose rapidly. Staunch Republicans, on the other hand, stood against it on pure principle, unmoved by the soaring economy. Appalled that the prosperity of his country now relied on commerce with Britain, James Madison, who had put all his political clout behind the battle, condemned the treaty as “the most worrying and vexatious that I have ever encountered.” The debate, which should have managed to “fortify the Republican cause,” he wrote to Jefferson, “has left it in a very crippled condition.” A number of moderate Republicans had spoken out in favor of the treaty, and when they began to abandon Madison, he lost his majority in Congress. Federalist newspapers were jubilant, one declaring the politician “absolutely deceased, cold, stiff and buried in oblivion for ever and ever.” When Madison left Philadelphia in June, he was defeated and tired, and desperately longed for Montpelier. Until now he had focused on his political career, but the prospect of being a full-time farmer was becoming increasingly attractive.
Madison and Adams were not the only ones who felt worn out after the battle. President Washington was exhausted but also felt betrayed, as his support for the Jay Treaty had provoked vicious attacks from his opponents. Republican newspapers censured Washington for acting like a king and a traitor. For the first time, the man who had united the people of the United States of America was treated like a mere mortal and not a hero. Only four years previously Jefferson had begged him to run as president for a second term, confident that “North and South will hang together, if they have you to hang on,” but now Jefferson privately accused Washington of betraying his country.1 “Be upon your guard,” an anonymous letter had warned Washington about Jefferson. “You have cherished in your Bosom a Serpent, and he is now endeavouring to sting you [to] death.” The president had managed to brush off such tittle-tattle but found it hard to sidestep the slanderous articles. The “Old Hero looks very grave of late,” Adams confided to Abigail, “the turpitude of their attacks touches him more nearly than he owns in Words.” There was nothing that Washington wanted more than to resign and to return to Mount Vernon for good.
That spring one man was missing from Philadelphia: Thomas Jefferson, who had resigned as secretary of state at the end of 1793. Jefferson was the only one of the founding fathers who could enjoy these months without the attrition of desperately long congressional discussions. He kept a low public profile, living on his mountaintop, as he described it, “like an Antediluvian patriarch among my children and grand children, and tilling my soil.” Again and again he insisted that he had no interest in politics and party matters. When Adams sent him a book on the French Revolution (still a contentious subject between them), Jefferson wrote that he couldn’t promise to read it for it was “on politics, a subject I never loved, and now hate.” Visitors, he claimed, could look forward to being entertained from morning until night with agricultural discussions but would have to look elsewhere for political conversations. Though he convincingly played his role as a retired farmer, he wrote of his dismay about the “execrable” treaty in private letters to his political allies, many of whom agreed that it was an alliance between England and misguided politicians “against the legislature and people of the United states.”
By the summer of 1796, Adams, Madison, Washington and Jefferson had all repaired to their farms and plantations, where agriculture, planting and gardening took precedence over politics. The founding fathers have often been cast as the haloed demigods of the American Revolution—some cerebral and literary, others brave and heroic—but what has long been missing from this picture is their lives as farmers and gardeners, which both reflected and influenced their political thinking and patriotism. Consequently their farms, fields and gardens can be read like their diaries and letters, and so the summer of 1796 provides a window into this part of their lives.
There was Adams with an axe in his hand felling trees next to his hired laborer, a New England farmer with a modest estate, a Federalist, but one who hated merchants and banks and who, to his wife’s frustration, “never saved any thing but what he vested in Land.” Madison, who had married the vivacious Dolley two years previously, had yet to inherit Montpelier, but during the summer of 1796 he began to prepare for the future—on the one hand his life as a plantation owner, on the other the first election campaign in American history. Also in Virginia was Jefferson, riding across his plantation as his slaves harvested the wheat, a man who conjured up many visionary farming methods and fanciful gardening schemes that never made it from the notebooks to the plantation. And then there was Washington, who applied the same rigorous discipline and management to Mount Vernon as he had to his army, turning it into a large business enterprise that comprised not only plantations but also a commercial gristmill, lucrative fisheries and later a whiskey distillery.
It was a summer in which the president discussed the culture of pineapples with the Spanish ambassador and entertained his guests with long talks on the merits of different types of ploughs, while the vice president was happily mixing manure in his own yard. A keen Madison oversaw the construction of a new mill in Montpelier, finding distraction from the painful defeat over the Jay Treaty. Adams was out in his fields every day, and Jefferson was trying his agricultural inventions at Monticello. All were testing new agricultural implements, sowing new crops and comparing the yields of their fields. At a time when the political party lines had hardened, agriculture and its importance for the future of the United States of America remained the one topic all four agreed upon and continued to correspond about.
The summer of 1796 stands between the battle over the Jay Treaty and the official announcement of Washington’s retirement in September. Played out on the estates among plant
s, ploughs and fields but also bracketed by important political shifts, the summer was at once typical and extraordinary. The men ran their farms and planted as they did every year, focusing on what they enjoyed most. When Adams had told Jefferson two years previously that “I have Spent my Summer So deliciously in farming that I return to the Old Story of Politicks with great Reluctance,” any of the four men could have said the same.
But something was different about the summer of 1796, because it was the last one that would see the United States of America led by a unanimously elected president. After the political abuse that he had endured during his second term there was nothing, not even his elevated and unerring sense of duty, that would make Washington stay on for another term. This decision made the summer of 1796 exceptional, for it was the calm before the political storm. “This has been the most quiet Summer I ever knew, in Politicks,” Adams wrote at the end of it, capturing the strange lull. It was as if the United States of America was holding her breath for what was about to follow.
WHEN ADAMS ARRIVED in Quincy in early May 1796, his sour mood immediately evaporated. Instead of quarreling politicians and busy city life, he now saw the roses that were growing under the window of the parlor and the beautiful lilacs that perfumed the air. From this window Adams could see the old-fashioned flower garden that was divided in rectangular grass plots bordered by ribbons of flowers and sharply clipped low box hedges. In layout it was similar to many other colonial gardens throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had been planted decades before the Adamses moved in. Adams would have seen the last daffodils that freckled the grass plots with yellow dots and the red columbines with their blooms of dangling bells. These were the flowers that Abigail compared to a “humble citizen,” in contrast to the stately crown imperial, which was banned from the garden because “it bears to[o] monarchical a Name.” There were also little grass plots in front of the house and an ancient orchard nearby with the fruit trees in full blossom—peaches, “saint Germain pears” and Russet apples. Behind the house, where the land gently dipped, they had established a kitchen garden with potatoes, large asparagus beds, lettuces and strawberries.
Adams had always maintained that he could only be happy when working the soil. “I should prefer the Delights of a Garden to the Dominion of a World,” he had declared nearly twenty years earlier, “I had rather build stone Wall upon Penns Hill, than be the first Prince in Europe, the first General, or first senator in America.” But that summer Adams embraced his life as a farmer with more passion than ever before. For the first time in more than a decade he dug out his diary and filled it with nothing other than accounts of his farming activities, almost as if he had decided to leave some record of this part of his life to posterity. Within days he had pushed aside the memories of the “unpleasant Moments” in Philadelphia and immersed himself instead in his “rural Amusements.”
Adams’s farm was so modest that, according to one French visitor, “no Paris advocate of the lowest rank” would live there. It was certainly small compared to the several thousand acres that Washington and Jefferson owned and that Madison would soon possess, but since inheriting the first 40 acres after his father’s death in 1761, Adams had increased his property to about 500 acres. The white clapboard house of two stories with six chambers was not grand by any means but was at least bigger than the small saltbox cottage he had shared with Abigail before leaving for Europe. They had bought the new house in 1787 while the family had still been in Britain, but Abigail had been disappointed on their return.2 It was so small, she wrote, that “it feels like a wren’s house,” warning her daughter not to wear feathers on her hat and her son-in-law to avoid heels “or he will not be able to walk upright.”
John Adams’s farm at Quincy in the early nineteenth century. The flower garden was to the left. Note the ornamental trees to the right of the house. (Illustration credit 5.1)
When they bought the house, the garden was a “wilderness” and the fields completely overgrown, but the orchard had the best collection of fruit in the neighborhood. Despite his constant frustration and anxiety about lack of money, Adams adored his land, particularly the “two or three spots” that he claimed offered “the most beautiful Prospects in the world.” Whenever he bought another small parcel of land, Adams looked forward to working and improving it. “My Farm gallops like a gay hobby Horse,” he enthused, delighted in the transformation of the land into neat fields, vegetable plots and flowerbeds. Over the years Adams had built stone walls, constructed a corncrib, drained some land, planted a large vegetable garden and put two additional windows in the parlor so that they could see the flowers below.
As a couple they divided their duties—Adams was in charge of the farm (when he was at home), the trees and the earth-moving garden work, while Abigail looked after the flowerbeds. She had left the overall layout as it was when they first moved in but added many of the flowers they had collected in England. She admired the tall blue candles of larkspur blossom, the orange flowers of nasturtiums and the bright yellow spring dress of daffodils and cowslips. A few years later, their son Thomas would bring flowers and fruits from his diplomatic mission in Europe, knowing how much his parents treasured them.
Adams and Abigail had acquired a more sophisticated taste in gardens during their time in Paris and London. In France they had fallen in love with the ornamental grounds at the house they had rented in Auteuil, just outside Paris. So besotted was Adams with it that he immediately began to worry that wherever they lived next would lack such beautiful surroundings. Abigail too dreaded the day they would have to leave, writing to her niece that “I shall mourn my garden more than any other object.” But on arriving at the fashionable Grosvenor Square in London, they had been pleasantly surprised. The house was “in as good an Air as this fat greasy Metropolis, can afford,” Adams said, or, as Abigail put it a little more politely, it was “one of the pleasantest squares of London,” full of shrubberies and meandering walks. Their tours of England’s gardens had also inspired them with ideas for their own, because Adams had deeply admired the ornamental farms such as The Leasowes and Wooburn Farm for their fusion of beauty and utility.
In the years since their return in 1788, Adams had never found time to implement any of these ideas, but now, as summer arrived, he began to bring the farmland, the gardens and the countryside into one unified whole. As he had seen with Jefferson on their visit to Stowe, the best way to do this was with a ha-ha—the ditch that allowed sweeping views across pastures and the countryside yet prevented cattle from walking into the garden, making walls and fences—which Adams thought were “a folly”—obsolete. It had been exactly ten years since Adams had seen the ha-ha in Stowe, but by July 1796 he was finally ready to remove some walls and dig his own.
“An ornamented Farm, appears to me an Innocent and desirable object,” Abigail believed, and though they might cost a fortune in England, where she had admired them with her husband, at home it would be cheap because a farm nestled in America’s spectacular landscape was already much like a ferme ornée. It would be easy to follow Joseph Addison’s directions, which had inspired so many English gardeners. Adams had read the essay in which Addison had railed against rigid shapes and patterns that garden shears and rulers imposed on nature. He had, like Jefferson, also bought Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening, which was filled with instructions on how to create such ornamental farms. He and Abigail admired Whately so much that they had also given the book as a present to some of their relatives.
“To blend the useful with the agreeable,” Whately advised his readers, was the goal of such improvements, a notion that chimed with Adams’s vision for his farm. He had enjoyed the orchestrated vistas in the English gardens, which guided the eye to the most important elements of the surrounding landscape, but in England the focal points were often temples. Adams wanted to emphasize instead the agricultural parts of his farm and the hills in the distance. “We have opened the Prospect,” Ad
ams wrote in his diary in July, “so that the Meadows and Western Mountain may distinctively be seen,” following Whately’s directions of “opening the garden to the country.” Just as Mount Vernon’s vista led from the house across the rolling land toward the west, Adams was now creating such views (although much shorter than Washington’s half-mile opening—Adams only had to fell fifty cedars to create this view). The garden in Quincy would never be as grand as the ones in Mount Vernon, Monticello and Montpelier, both because Adams could not afford it52 and because he thought such elaborate designs “mere Ostentations of Vanity.” His estate might have been small, but he took great pride in it because it was, more than anything, “the farm of a Patriot.”
By the end of the summer, almost a decade after he had bought the house and farm, he finally decided to name it, calling it Peacefield, in commemoration of the 1783 Peace Treaty that he had helped to forge, the years of peace that the United States of America had enjoyed since the War of Independence and the solace that Adams felt when he was at home. The name united Adams’s passions—his country, his politics, his garden and his fields. It showed how much politics and plants, the United States of America and agriculture, and peace and soil belonged together in his world.
One of the reasons why Adams was concerned with the naming of his estate and the appearance of his garden that summer might have been that he was preparing for a new stage in his life. Early in January he had heard the first rumors that Washington was determined to resign the following spring after the end of his second term, and Martha Washington had implied as much herself, Adams wrote to Abigail. Within a few days he had dashed off the next letter, telling Abigail that he was now certain of Washington’s decision, but that he would not be vice president under anybody else—most certainly not under Jefferson. In his many letters to Abigail he went endlessly back and forth about how he should proceed, and clearly needed her opinion—“Think of it and say nothing to any one but your J.A.” By the end of January he had confided to his wife that he was considering the presidency himself but seemed to be playing the reluctant suitor. “I hate to live in Philadelphia,” “I hate Levees,” “I hate to Speak to a 1000 people to whom I have nothing to say,” he protested. But for all his outward hesitation and Abigail’s own ambivalence toward the idea, his ambition also shone through, convincing him that “all this I can do.”