John Adams

by David McCullough

  Leasowes, one of the earliest of all the new-style gardens, was considerably smaller than the others, set in gentle farmland, with a view of low hills to the south and west. But Leasowes had fallen into neglect since the poet's death, and Jefferson was greatly saddened and disappointed. It was nothing like what he had imagined. “This is not even an ornamental farm,” he wrote. “It is only a grazing farm with a path around it, here and there, a seat of a board, rarely anything better. Architecture has contributed nothing.” Let Leasowes be an object lesson, he concluded. Shenstone had ruined himself financially with all he had spent on the farm, and so “died of the heartaches which debt occasioned him.” It was a lesson that Jefferson, alas, would not heed.

  To Adams, on the other hand, Leasowes was preferable to anything they had seen. The small scale of the place was more to a New Englander's liking. It was “the simplest and plainest,” the “most rural of all,” and thus particularly appealing, Adams thought. “I saw no spot so small that exhibited such a variety of beauties.”

  From Leasowes the travelers turned and headed south again, in the direction of London, stopping in the course of the next few days at Hagley Hall, a Palladian great house on a hill with a sweeping view somewhat like that of Monticello, Blenheim Palace at Woodstock, and then nearby Oxford, where they visited the university's botanical garden beside the river Cherwell. By nightfall, April 9, they were back in London.

  According to Adams's count, they had toured twenty country places in all and he thought them high entertainment. Later, after a visit with Abigail to Pains Hill on the outskirts of London, at Surrey, where an immense ornamental park with lakes, grottoes, hermit's hut, even a facsimile tent of an Arab prince, had been created from a “heap of sand,” Adams declared it “the most striking piece of art” of any. Yet he hoped it would be a long time before such gardens ever became the fashion at home, where nature had done greater things on a nobler scale. How anyone could improve on Penn's Hill, Adams could not imagine.

  • • •

  IN LONDON, Jefferson resumed his shopping spree, buying, among other things, another microscope and a pair of satin “Florentine” breeches. With the three Adamses and Colonel Smith, he toured the British Museum and, at Adams's urging, sat for Mather Brown.

  Commissioned by Adams, it was Jefferson's first portrait and quite unlike anything done of him thereafter. A bust by Houdon, for example, sculpted in Paris a few years later, would be Jefferson in the heroic mode, chin lifted, eyes on a distant horizon—Jefferson as frontiersman. In this by Brown he might have been the perfect European dandy, magnificent in ruffled shirt, hair dressed and powdered. He had a wistful, almost mournful expression and there were dark circles under his eyes. It was Jefferson as courtier and romantic, and while some who saw it thought it a poor likeness, the Adamses appear to have been quite pleased.

  As requested, Brown would do a copy of the Jefferson portrait for them, as well as a copy of the Adams portrait for Jefferson. The original painting of Jefferson would ultimately disappear. The copy, which was hung prominently in the house on Grosvenor Square, would remain a proud possession in the Adams family for generations.

  On April 26, he and Adams having accomplished nothing in the way of diplomatic progress, and with no reason to expect a change in their prospects, Jefferson said his goodbyes and departed for Paris. Officially his mission had been “fruitless.” But of Adams, Jefferson had more to say, writing from Paris to his friend Madison as he had before on the subject. The difference this time was that Jefferson seemed to go out of his way, almost apologetically, to explain how Adams, with all his faults, had won his heart.

  You know the opinion I formerly entertained of my friend Mr. Adams. Yourself and the governor were the first who shook that opinion. I afterwards saw proofs which convicted him of a degree of vanity and of blindness to it, of which no germ had appeared in Congress. A 7-months' intimacy with him here and as many weeks in London have given me opportunities of studying him closely. He is vain, irritable and a bad calculator of the force and probable effect of the motives which govern men. This is all the ill which can be said of him. He is as disinterested as the Being which made him: he is profound in his views, and accurate in his judgment except where knowledge of the world is necessary to form a judgment. He is so amiable that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.

  • • •

  FROM THE TIME of his arrival in their lives the previous year, Colonel William Smith had impressed John and Abigail as entirely deserving of his reputation as an admirable young man of great promise. “He possesses a high sense of honor and as independent a spirit as any man I ever knew, and ... we have every reason to believe that his character will bear the strictest scrutiny,” Abigail had written earlier to Cotton Tufts. “His character is not only fair and unblemished,” she informed John Quincy, “[but] at age 21 he commanded a regiment, and through the whole war conducted with prudence and bravery and intrepidity, when armed against the foe.” She wished John Quincy to know this, because Colonel Smith was “like to become your brother.”

  William Smith's interest in Nabby, and hers in him, had been apparent for months, but only after Nabby had formally broken her engagement to Royall Tyler would Abigail permit any mention of the new “connection.”

  The contrast between the character of Smith and Tyler was clear enough, she stressed to John Quincy, in an effort to explain his sister's decision. Besides, had not Shakespeare observed that “a heart agitated with the remains of a former passion is most susceptible to a new one”?

  Having concluded from day-to-day observation that his young secretary possessed all the qualifications necessary to make a “faithful and agreeable” companion for Nabby, John Adams left it to her to determine her own future. But Abigail spent hours with Nabby in close conversation. “I begged her to satisfy herself that she had no prepossession left in her mind and heart, and she answered me she never could be more determined!”

  Abigail, however, as she confided to her sister Mary, had begun to find life increasingly empty and pointless. Her health was uneven; she was bothered by recurring rheumatism and severe headaches. She was tired of London and longed for home. When Mary apologized for filling her letters with too many Braintree “particulars,” Abigail replied, “Everything however trivial on that side of water interests me. Nothing here.” “Can there be any pleasure in mixing company where you care for no one and nobody cares for you?”

  She dwelled increasingly on the fate of their brother, William, whose drinking and errant ways had been a secret worry for years and who by now, after abandoning his wife and children, had more or less disappeared. In correspondence among themselves the three sisters never referred to William by name, only as “this unhappy connection,” the “poor man,” or “our dearest relative.”

  Who was looking after him, Abigail wondered. What had been different about his childhood in the Weymouth parsonage? What might be in store for her own children?

  “I cannot, however, upon a retrospect of his education, refrain from thinking that some very capital mistakes were very indesignedly made,” she would tell Mary. “I say this to you who will not consider it as any reflection upon the memory of our dear parents, but only as a proof how much of the best and worthiest may err, and as some mitigation for the conduct of our deceased relatives.”

  • • •

  IN THE FINAL DAYS of May 1786, John Adams was called on to hurry to Amsterdam once again, to secure still another desperately needed Dutch loan for the United States.

  On June 12, Adams having returned, Nabby and Colonel William Smith were married in the house on Grosvenor Square, in a small ceremony with only a few friends present—the Copleys, among others. In another few weeks bride and groom moved to a new address on Wimpole Street.

  “The young couple appear to be very happy,” was all that Adams had to say, in a letter to James Warren, while to Mary Cranch, Abigail described the ceremony as too solemn and impo
rtant an event for her not to have experienced “an agitation” equal to what she had felt at her own wedding. The night before the wedding, she further confided, she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and strangely found herself feeling sorry for him.

  Abigail and Nabby had been faithful companions for years, through all of John's endless absences. They had been virtually inseparable and the change now was difficult for Abigail. She had made the young couple promise to dine at Grosvenor Square every day; still, she was as “lonesome” as she had ever been. To boost her spirits she imagined a marriage between John Quincy and Patsy Jefferson, and to Jefferson playfully proposed the idea. While it was true, she wrote, that in losing her daughter she had gained a son, she already had three sons. What she needed was another daughter. “Suppose you give me Miss Jefferson and in some [fu]ture day take a son in lieu of her. I am for strengthening [the] federal union.”

  At home in Massachusetts, meantime, John Quincy had been denied admission to Harvard until he completed several months of tutoring in Greek with the Reverend Shaw at Haverhill. But then in March 1786, John Quincy, too, had become a “son of Harvard.”

  He must not study too hard, Adams cautioned kindly. “The smell of the midnight lamp is very unwholesome. Never defraud yourself of sleep, nor your walk. You need not now be in a hurry.” What was essential, Adams advised, was an inquisitive mind. John Quincy must get to know the most exceptional scholars and question them closely. “Ask them about their tutors; manner of teaching. Observe what books lie on their tables.... Ask them about the late war ... or fall into questions of literature, science, or what you will.”

  The more Adams thought about the future of his country, the more convinced he became that it rested on education. Before any great things are accomplished, he wrote to a correspondent, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.

  That his own exceptional, eldest son, with the advantages he had, could one day play a part in bringing about such a “memorable change,” he had every confidence.

  When Elizabeth Shaw wrote that as agreeable as John Quincy might be in company, he could be in private conversation “a little too decisive and tenacious” in his opinions, Abigail responded with a strong letter of motherly advice to the young man. “Watchfulness over yourself was called for, lest his knowledge make him arrogant.

  If you are conscious to yourself that you possess more knowledge upon some subjects than others of your standing, reflect that you have had greater opportunities of seeing the world, and obtaining a knowledge of mankind than any of your contemporaries. That you have never wanted a book but it has been supplied to you, that your whole time has been spent in the company of men of literature and science. How unpardonable would it have been in you to have been a blockhead.

  By now Charles, too, had entered Harvard, at age fifteen. More outgoing than his older brother, Charles was thought to be too easily distracted from his studies. Where John Quincy required a warning against the perils of the midnight lamp, Charles needed reminding that such a lamp existed.

  Remembering so much that went on in his own days at Harvard other than classwork and studies, Adams wrote affectionately to his second son, “You have in your nature a sociability, Charles, which is amiable, but may mislead you. A scholar is always made alone. Studies can only be pursued to good purpose by yourself. Don't let your companions then, nor your amusements, take up too much of your time.”

  • • •

  ADAMS WAS HIMSELF spending increasing amounts of time alone, working intently and seldom to good purpose, he felt. The impasse over the withdrawal of British troops from the American Northwest and the payment of American debts to British creditors continued. Lord Carmarthen readily agreed that by the Paris Treaty His Majesty's armed forces were to depart from the United States “with all convenient speed,” but, as he liked also to point out, the same treaty stipulated that creditors on either side “shall meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value in sterling of all bonafide debts.” “I flatter myself, however, sir,” Carmarthen told Adams, “that whenever America shall manifest a real determination to fulfill her part of the treaty, Great Britain will not hesitate to prove her sincerity.”

  For Adams, who had argued emphatically at Paris for full repayment of American debt and had never deviated from that view, American reluctance, or inability, to make good on its obligations was a disgrace and politically a great mistake. When word reached London that some states, including Massachusetts, had passed laws against compliance with the treaty, Adams was appalled. Any such suspension of British debts, however colored or disguised, was a direct breach of the treaty, he wrote in a fury to Cotton Tufts, who had become a member of the Massachusetts Senate. “Our countrymen have too long trifled with public and private credit.” He would make good on all outstanding debt to British creditors, and if the British posts in America were not then immediately evacuated, he would declare war.

  But he had written this when “wroth and fretted.” War was the last thing he wanted. Any war now would be calamitous for the United States and must be avoided at almost any cost, he wrote another day.

  What was implicit in all “oratorical utterance” from Whitehall, Adams knew, was that to the British there was as yet no proper American government and so it would be pointless to undertake serious transactions until such existed. To Adams it was particularly offensive that the British thus far had not thought it necessary even to appoint an ambassador to the United States.

  In an exchange of letters between London and Paris, meantime, he and Jefferson considered the question of whether to pay tribute to the Barbary pirates or wage war with them. Jefferson recommended war as more honorable and proposed that an American fleet be built. Adams agreed in principle and promised, “I will go all lengths with you in promoting a navy.” Like Jefferson, he detested the prospect of paying bribes. But given that there was no American navy at present and that it would be years most likely before Congress voted such a resolution, Adams thought it sensible to pay the money. “We ought not fight them at all, unless we determine to fight them forever,” he told Jefferson, who willingly deferred to Adams's judgment. Later in January 1787, they would sign a pact with Morocco, whereby the United States, like France and Britain, agreed to pay for protection.

  • • •

  EAGER FOR A BREAK from the doldrums of summer in London, with Parliament in recess and “everyone fled from the city,” the Adamses decided to see some of the English countryside. With Nabby and Colonel Smith, they set off for a weeklong excursion to Essex. Adams had expressed interest in visiting the village of Braintree, expecting they might find some connection with their own Braintree, but poking about in the village graveyard, he found no familiar names and the village itself was sadly disappointing, poor and “miserable.” Still, the trip was a welcome departure—and for Abigail especially—and even more welcome was the wholly unexpected journey that followed immediately afterward.

  Adams was needed at The Hague to exchange ratification of the treaty with Prussia, the one European trade agreement that he and Jefferson, for all their efforts, had succeeded in accomplishing. The treaty, signed in July 1785, had been ratified only that May of 1786, so late that unless it were signed within a matter of weeks, it would expire. Since Prussia had no minister in London or Paris, but only at The Hague, Adams was needed there without delay or the treaty would come to nothing. Jefferson excused himself from attending, saying it was on too short notice.

  “As this presents a good opportunity for seeing the country [Holland],” Abigail wrote happily, “I shall accompany him.” In fact, they were both extremely pleased to be going. Little could have delighted Adams more than the chance to show her the country that m
eant so much to him, where success had been his, where, as they both appreciated, he had helped change the course of history, and where he was still the accredited American minister, Congress having never bothered to replace him.

  They were gone five weeks, stopping first at The Hague for the signing ceremony on August 8, then moving on at a pace sufficient to see just about everything—Rotterdam, Delft, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Utrecht—with Abigail supplying colorful comment in her letters. “Not a hill to be seen,” she wrote, incredulous. The people were “well-fed, well-clothed, contented,” the women notable for their beautiful complexions. (“Rouge is confined to the stage here,” she reported approvingly to Nabby.) She saw no poverty such as in Paris and London. The cities were amazingly clean and orderly. “It is very unusual to see a single square of glass broken, or a brick out of place.” Leyden was the cleanest city she had ever seen in her life; and if Braintree in Essex had failed to evoke feelings of ancestral ties, the church of the Pilgrims at Leyden more than made up for it. In its stillness, she felt the same wave of emotion that had moved Adams to tears on his first visit. At the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, by contrast, the “buzz” of business being transacted reminded her of nothing so much as “the swarming of bees.”

  The reception they were given by the Dutch was warm and heartening, “striking proof, not only of their personal esteem,” Abigail wrote, “but of the ideas they entertain with respect to the Revolution which gave birth to their connection with us... The spirit of liberty appears to be all alive with them.”