John Adams

by David McCullough

  Then, just as agreement seemed near, Henry Strachey proposed to amend the line specifying the American “right” of fishing to read “liberty” of fishing, to which young Fitzherbert declared the word “right” to be “an obnoxious expression.”

  The moment was one made for Adams. Rising from his chair, smoldering with indignation, he addressed the British:

  Gentlemen, is there or can there be a clearer right? In former treaties, that of Utrecht and that of Paris, France and England have claimed the right and used the word. When God Almighty made the Banks of Newfoundland at 300 leagues distant from the people of America and at 600 leagues distance from those of France and England, did he not give as food a right to the former as to the latter. If Heaven in the Creation have a right, it is ours at least as much as yours. If occupation, use, and possession have a right, we have it as clearly as you. If war and blood and treasure give a right, ours is as good as yours. We have been constantly fighting in Canada, Cape Breton, and Nova Scotia for the defense of the fishery, and have expanded beyond all proportion more than you. If then the right cannot be denied, why then should it not be acknowledged? And put out of dispute?

  It was settled—almost. Article III of the treaty would read, “It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank.” However, on the matter of taking fish along the coast of Newfoundland and “all other of his Britannic Majesty's Dominions in America,” the people of the United States were to have the “liberty,” which, insisted the British negotiators, amounted to the same thing.

  “We did not think it necessary to contend for a word,” wrote a more mellow John Adams years afterward.

  By the end of the day there was agreement on everything. Dining that evening at his hotel with Matthew Ridley, Adams was in high spirits. Asked if he would have fish, he laughed and declined, saying he had had “a pretty good meal of them” already that day.

  Adams generously praised his fellow negotiators. Franklin, he told Ridley, had performed “nobly.” But to Jay belonged the greatest credit, Adams said. Jay had played the leading part, Adams felt then and later, never failing to give Jay credit.

  The following day, Saturday, November 30, 1782, all parties made their way through still another damp Paris snowfall, again to Oswald's quarters at the Grand Hôtel Muscovite for the signing of the preliminary treaty. Oswald was first to fix his name, followed by the four Americans in alphabetical order.

  In effect, the Americans had signed a separate peace with the British. They had acted in direct violation of both the French-American alliance and their specific instructions from Congress to abide by the advice of the French foreign minister. To Adams there was no conflict in what they had done. The decision to break with the orders from Congress, and thus break faith with the French, had been clear-cut, the only honorable course. Congress had left them no choice. Congress had “prostituted” its own honor by surrendering its sovereignty to the French Foreign Minister. “It is glory to have broken such infamous orders,” Adams wrote in his diary. “Infamous I say, for so they will be to all posterity.”

  To Franklin fell the unpleasant duty of breaking the news to Vergennes, and fortunately so, as in the parlance of diplomacy, it was a “delicate” moment.

  As expected, Vergennes was extremely displeased, though “surprised” was the word he chose. “I am at a loss, sir, to explain your conduct, and that of your colleagues in this occasion,” he wrote formally to Franklin. What had been signed, Franklin emphasized, were preliminary articles only. Nothing had been agreed to that ran contrary to French interests, and, of course, no peace could take place until the French and British concluded their talks and the definitive treaty was signed by all parties. Franklin apologized if he and his colleagues had been guilty of neglecting a point of “bienséance “(propriety), but this was from no want of respect for the King, “whom we all love and honor.”

  Then, with a cleverness of the kind he excelled in, Franklin included an afterthought. The English, he said, were now flattering themselves that they had divided the Americans from the French. So it were best that this “little misunderstanding” be forgotten and thereby prove the English mistaken.

  Further, with amazing bravado, Franklin asked Vergennes for a loan of 6 million livres.

  In truth, Vergennes thought well of the work done by the Americans at the negotiating table. He had no serious objections to the preliminary articles. Indeed, he thought Franklin, Jay, and Adams had obtained considerably more from the British than he had thought possible. “The English buy peace rather than make it,” he remarked contemptuously to a French colleague. The “little misunderstanding” was “got over” in a matter of days and Vergennes agreed to the loan.

  In a letter to Livingston that he never sent, Adams would later contend that Franklin would not have signed the treaty without the knowledge of Vergennes—that Vergennes, in fact, had been in on the whole thing. But Adams, exhausted in “strength and spirits,” had by then succumbed to one of his spells of gloom during which he was incapable of seeing either Franklin or Vergennes in any but the darkest light.

  It was not until late the following summer that the final, or definitive, Treaty of Paris was signed, and in the intervening time Adams fell once again into a black mood. Again, and with good cause, he felt Congress had forgotten him. He had received no expressions of gratitude or praise for what he had done, nor any sign of what, if anything, Congress had in mind for the future. To Abigail he described the “sharp fiery humors which break out in the back of my neck and other parts of me and plague me as much as the uncertainty in which I am in my own future destiny.”

  It was that summer, in a letter of July 22, 1783, to Robert Livingston, that Franklin described Adams in words that were never to be forgotten: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”

  In the first week of September the peacemakers convened to sign the definitive treaty. Henry Laurens was absent. Thus it was Adams, Franklin, and Jay who represented the United States at the ceremony at the Hôtel d'York on the Rue Jacob, and who signed their names in that order, along with a new representative of King George III, David Hartley.

  In fixing his signature to the document, Adams, as he often did, put a little dash or period after his name, as if to say “John Adams, period.”

  The all-important first sentence of Article I declared, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States ... to be free, sovereign and independent states.”

  “Done at Paris,” read the final line, “this third day of September, in the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and eighty three.”

  The mighty Revolution had ended. The new nation was born.

  • • •

  IT HAD BEEN NINE YEARS since the First Continental Congress at Philadelphia, eight years since Lexington and Concord, seven since the Declaration of Independence, and more than three years since John Adams had last left home in the role of peacemaker.

  To Thomas Jefferson, Adams would one day write, “My friend, you and I have lived in serious times.” And of all the serious events of the exceedingly eventful eighteenth century, none compared to the arrival upon the world stage of the new, independent United States of America. Adams's part in Holland and at Paris had been profound. As time would tell, the treaty that he, Franklin, and Jay had made was as advantageous to their country as any in history. It would be said they had won the greatest victory in the annals of American diplomacy.

  • • •

  FOR HIS OWN PART, for the time being, Adams knew for certain only that he was exhausted and intended never again to be separated from Abigail for any extended period for as long as he lived. “You may depend upon a good domestic husband for the remainder of my life, if it is the will of Heaven that I should once more meet you,” he wrote. And this, he told her, was a promise not lightly made
. Whether he should come to her, or she to him, or how soon that could be, remained to be seen.

  Chapter Six

  Abigail in Paris

  What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.

  —Laurence Sterne,

  A Sentimental Journey

  AS GREATLY AS SHE WISHED it were not so, Abigail Adams was terrified of the sea. She who had held her ground against war, plague, and abject loneliness, who had faced one dread uncertainty after another through the worst of times, steadfastly, never flinching by all appearances, looked upon “hazarding” a voyage over the North Atlantic with nothing less than horror. The very thought, she told her husband, made a coward of her. It was not something she could change, he must understand, and as a measure of his love, he must come home to her with all possible speed. “I know not whether I shall believe myself how well you love me, unless I can prevail upon you to return.”

  Her mind was much on mortality. The same September of the Paris Peace Treaty, her adored father, the Reverend William Smith, had died in the Weymouth parsonage where she had been born and raised. The last of her “parental props” had fallen; one of the strongest of her ties to home was “dissolved.” Her father had been among the reasons she had never felt free to leave for Europe. “I cannot consent to your going, child, whilst I live,” he had told her. Still, though free now, she could not bring herself to go.

  In the years when John served in Congress, Pennsylvania had seemed “that far country.” Now her firstborn had seen Russia and returned to Europe on his own by way of Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany, as she knew from John's letters, though from the boy himself she had not had a line in two years. Her two youngest, Charles and Thomas, were away at Haverhill, boarding with her sister Elizabeth and the Reverend John Shaw, who was preparing them for college, Abigail having had a change of mind about John Shaw and his abilities. When she made the fifty-mile ride to Haverhill for a visit, it was the farthest from Braintree she had ever traveled.

  Of her children, only Nabby remained at home, but at seventeen Nabby's life, too, was moving on. Fair-haired, pleasing in appearance, she was taller than her mother, more circumspect, less inclined to voice an opinion, a “fine majestic girl who has as much dignity as a princess,” in Abigail's description, though she wondered if Nabby was too reserved, too prudent.

  She has stateliness in her manners which some misconstrue into pride and a haughtiness, but which rather results from too great reserve; she wants more affability, but she has prudence and discretion beyond her years. She is in her person tall, large, and majestic; Mamma's partiality allows her to be a good figure. Her sensibility is not yet which attracts whilst it is attracted. Her manners rather forbid all kinds of intimacy and awe whilst they command.

  “Indeed, she is not like her Mamma,” Abigail confided to John at last. “Had not her Mamma at her age too much sensibility to be very prudent.”

  A young lawyer named Royall Tyler had moved to town, boarding with the Cranches, and was showing interest in Nabby. Nor did he neglect to shower attention on Abigail, who thought highly of him. The son of a wealthy father, valedictorian of his class at Harvard, Tyler was handsome, witty, and well read. “If he is steady he will shine in his profession,” she wrote. “His disposition appears extremely amiable.” She seemed nearly as charmed by him as was Nabby.

  But there was gossip of “dissipation” in the young man's past—that he had fathered an illegitimate child by a housemaid at Harvard and had, besides, squandered his inheritance. Abigail began having second thoughts, and wrote at length on the matter to her distant husband. A “growing attachment” between the two young people was plain to see. Tyler was spending more and more evenings by their fire, she reported. What should she do? “What ought I to say? I feel a powerful pleader within my own heart and well recollect the love I bore to the object of my early affections to forbid him to have hope.” She wondered if perhaps a tender passion might be “just the thing for Nabby,” to bring her out of herself.

  Earlier, in a long, affectionate letter to his daughter, John had offered memorable advice on choosing a husband that, in sum, expressed what he valued most in a man and what he so struggled to be himself so much of his life:

  Daughter! Get you an honest man for a husband, and keep him honest. No matter whether he is rich, provided he be independent. Regard the honor and moral character of the man more than all other circumstances. Think of no other greatness but that of the soul, no other riches but those of the heart. An honest, sensible, humane man, above all the littleness of vanity and extravagances of imagination, laboring to do good rather than be rich, to be useful rather than make a show, living in modest simplicity clearly within his means and free from debts and obligations, is really the most respectable man in society, makes himself and all about him most happy.

  On the matter of Royall Tyler he had shown little patience. “I don't like the subject at all,” he told Abigail. The girl was too young for such thoughts. Nor did he like Tyler's method of “courting mothers.” Abigail and Tyler both had “advanced too fast, and I should advise both to retreat.

  I don't like your word “dissipation” at all. I don't know what it means.... My child is a model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the prize, I hope, of any reformed rake... In the name of all that is tender don't criticize your daughter for those qualities which are her greatest glory, her reserve and her prudence.

  By the autumn of 1783, the romance had been suspended, though as Abigail reported, the young man's “attachment” had not lessened. As for Nabby, she would do nothing without her father's approval. It was another reason why John was needed at home, to appraise the situation for himself.

  Abigail had a melancholy sense of life slipping away before she and John had had a chance to enjoy it. She had turned thirty-nine; the face in the mirror was a young woman no longer. And where, she asked in one especially plaintive letter, was that young “untitled” John Adams she had fallen in love with.

  I recollect the untitled man to whom I gave my heart and in the agony of recollection, when time and distance present themselves together, wish he had never been any other. Who shall give me back my time? Who shall compensate to me those years I cannot recall? How dearly have I paid for a titled husband.

  Hearing he might be appointed ambassador to the British Court, she begged him to refuse. She had no desire to live in England, no wish for the “parade and nonsense” of a public role. She was too inclined to wear her heart on her countenance, she reminded him. “I am sure I would make an awkward figure. And then it would mortify my pride if I should be thought to disgrace you.” Her health was poor. She tired easily and suffered from headaches. “Neither of us appear built for duration,” she wrote. “Would to heaven the few remaining days allotted to us might be enjoyed together.”

  His letters from Paris, written in September, pressed her to sail as soon as possible. Congress had appointed him to a new commission to negotiate a commercial treaty with Britain. She must come. She could sail for London, Amsterdam, or any port in France. The moment he heard of her arrival, he would fly to her—even by balloon if such travel were perfected in time, he added lightheartedly.

  But it was only on hearing that he had suffered another serious illness that she changed her mind and resolved to go to him. Except for her marriage itself, it was the most important decision she had ever had to make.

  A fever like that at Amsterdam had laid him low, she read in a letter written October 14, one of the last she was to receive before Boston's harbor was closed by winter ice. He was leaving for London for his health and taking John Quincy with him. She must come soon. Concerning the courtship, the “family affair” on her mind, that could be managed quite well, Adams wrote. “The lady comes to Europe with you. If the parties preserve their regard until they meet again and continue to behave as they ought, they will still be young enough.”
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  She began making plans, though not without dire apprehensions:

  You invite me to you. You call me to follow you. The most earnest wish of my soul is to be with you—but you can scarcely form an idea of the conflict in my mind. It appears to me such an enterprise, the ocean so formidable, the quitting of my habitation and my country, leaving my children, my friends, with the idea that perhaps I may never see them again, without my husband to console and comfort me under these apprehensions—indeed, my dear friend, there are hours when I feel unequal to the trial.

  In January, after further consideration, John wrote again to say that if she thought it inadvisable to come to Europe, he would come to her. As for Nabby, he continued, “I can scarcely think it possible for me to disapprove of her final judgment formed with deliberation upon anything which so deeply concerns her whole happiness.”

  Then, having looked into the young man's background and reputation for himself, as much as that was possible at such a distance, Adams sent another letter, this to Tyler himself. “Sir, you and the young lady have my consent to arrange your plans according to your own judgment,” Adams wrote, “and I pray God to bless and prosper you both whether together or asunder.”

  But neither letter would arrive in time.

  • • •

  SEEING TO THE NECESSARY ARRANGEMENTS kept Abigail occupied well into spring. As John had advised, she and Nabby were to be accompanied by two servants, Esther Field and John Briesler, both of Braintree. Uncle Isaac Smith, the Boston merchant, was to look into proper passage, while another uncle, Dr. Cotton Tufts of Weymouth, who had been advising Abigail on land investments, was to manage the family's financial affairs in her absence.