John Adams

by David McCullough

  Hamilton and his wife became dangerously ill but would recover. Jefferson, who had earlier given up living in town and moved to a house beside the Schuylkill, wrote of the crowds fleeing to the countryside, and allowed that he, too, would leave except that he did not wish to give the appearance of panic. When the President and Mrs. Washington departed for Mount Vernon, Jefferson was soon on his way to Monticello.

  By October the death rate reached more than a hundred a day. People were dying faster than they could be buried. Numbers of physicians and ordinary citizens performed heroically, doing all they could for the stricken, and no one more so than Rush, though whether his ministrations—his insistence on “mercurial purges” and “heroic bloodletting”—did more good than harm became a subject of fierce controversy. Eventually Rush, too, fell ill, but survived.

  At Quincy worry over Thomas did not end until mid-October, when the young man wrote to say he had fled to New Jersey and, though perfectly well, was “pretty short of cash.”

  The epidemic ended with the first hard frost in November. In all, more than 5,000 had perished and Philadelphia would be a long time recovering from the fearful loss.

  In France, however, there was no cease to the slaughter. That October, Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, as did Brissot de Warville, who had visited the Adamses in Quincy. “Would to Heaven that the destroying angel would put up his sword,” wrote Abigail, who seems to have felt the horror of what was happening more even than her husband.

  But the Terror only accelerated, eventually consuming those who set it in motion. Marat was murdered; Danton and Robespierre went to the guillotine. The final toll would eventually reach 14,000 lives. Among those executed in the last few days of the Terror, as Abigail would later learn, to her horror, were the grandmother, mother, and sister of her friend Madame Adrienne Lafayette.

  • • •

  ARRIVING AT PHILADELPHIA in late November, Adams was pleased to find the President reinstated and most of Congress back to business. Moving in with the Otises again, Adams resumed his thoroughly unspectacular, rather solitary routine: “I go to the Senate every day, read the newspapers before I go and the public papers afterward, see a few friends once a week, go to church on Sundays; write now and then a line to you and Nabby, and oftener to Charles than to his brothers to see if I can fix his attention and excite some ambition.”

  Adams harbored no illusions about his importance, any more than during his first term. “My country in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” he told Abigail. The measure of his insignificance was that all parties could afford to treat him with some respect. “They all know that I can do them neither much good nor much harm.”

  It was not just that the vice presidency offered so little chance to say or do anything of consequence, but that at a time when party politics were becoming increasingly potent and pervasive, he would not, could not, be a party man. And so, for both reasons, he was becoming more and more a man apart.

  Genet was still stirring up trouble, but then, to Adams, Genet was a fool whose head had been turned by too much popular attention, and there was far more harmony over the issue of neutrality than Adams had expected. Even Jefferson, who had so warmly welcomed Genet at first, now professed strong agreement with the President's stand.

  Jefferson's conflict with Hamilton, however, had become intolerable. As Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha, he was “under such agitation of mind” as he had never known. On December 31, 1793, Jefferson resigned as Secretary of State, news that led Adams to write at length on the subject of his friend, saying things in several family letters he had not said before and that he wished to remain confidential. He had admired Jefferson's abilities and disposition for so long, Adams told Abigail, that he could not help feel some regret at his leaving. “But his want of candor, his obstinate prejudices of both aversion and attachment, his real partiality in spite of all his pretensions, his low notions about many things, have so utterly reconciled me to [his departure]... that I will not weep.” On January 6, he reported, “Jefferson went off yesterday, and a good riddance of bad ware.”

  What might be in store for Jefferson in Virginia politics, Adams had no way of knowing, but of this he was certain: if Jefferson were to retire to his “rural amusements and philosophical meditations” at Monticello, he would soon wither away. For instead of being “the ardent pursuer of science” that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was “the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field... [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.”

  Jefferson thinks he shall by this step get a reputation of a humble modest, meek man, wholly without ambition or vanity. He may even have deceived himself into this belief. But if the prospect opens, the world will see ... he is as ambitious as Oliver Cromwell.... Though his desertion may be a loss to us of some talent, I am not sorry for it on the whole, because his soul is poisoned with ambition.

  Ambition was something he knew about, Adams acknowledged, for he himself had been struggling for thirty years to conquer “the foul fiend.”

  Jefferson had once described Adams as a poor judge of human nature—“a bad calculator of the force and probably the effect of the motives which govern men,” Jefferson had said in a letter to Madison. But with the exception of Madison, Adams understood Jefferson as well as anyone did, or perhaps ever could. And as exasperated as Adams was with him, as critical as he sounded, he refused to let the friendship slip away.

  In April he sent Jefferson the gift of a book, with a note of congratulations on the arrival of spring at Monticello, far from the “din of politics and the rumors of war.” It was the first letter Adams had written to Jefferson in more than two years. Jefferson replied at once, saying he had returned to farming “with an ardor which I scarcely knew in my youth,” and in answer Adams said he knew the very same ardor every summer on his own farm.

  Rural life was a topic on which they could readily agree, just as they could on the increasing threat of war. The British had begun stopping American ships and taking off sailors, claiming they were British citizens. In the West Indies they captured American trading vessels. War fever swept the country. When a bill that would have suspended all trade with Britain resulted in a tie vote in the Senate, the Vice President “determined the question in the negative.”

  He had had enough of one war to wish ever to see another, Jefferson wrote, and to this Adams concurred wholeheartedly. The President, he reported to Jefferson, was sending Chief Justice John Jay as a special envoy to London to “find a way to reconcile our honor with peace.” He had “no great faith in any very brilliant success,” Adams said, “but [I] hope he may keep us out of war.”

  A modest correspondence would continue for two years. At the end of another long stretch at Quincy, Adams would write of a summer spent “so deliciously in farming that I return to the old story of politics with great reluctance,” and Jefferson would profess that “tranquility becomes daily more and more the object of my life, and of this I certainly find more in my present pursuits than those of any other part of my life.” Jefferson portrayed himself as living plainly, “farmerlike,” as though he had little more on his mind than crops and weather. “We have had a hard winter and backward spring,” he would report to Adams from his mountaintop the following May.

  This has injured our wheat so much that it cannot be made a good crop by all the showers of heaven which are now falling down on us exactly as we want them. Our first cutting of clover is not yet begun. Strawberries not ripe till within this fortnight, and everything backward in proportion... I am trying potatoes on a large scale, as a substitute for Indian corn for feeding the animals.

  Once, briefly, a difference in philosophy was touched upon, when Jefferson observed that the “paper transactions” of one generation should “scarcely be considered by succeeding generations,” a princip
le he had earlier stated to Madison as “self-evident,” that “ ‘the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither the power or rights over it.” Adams, however, refused to accept the idea that each new generation could simply put aside the past, sweep clean the slate, to suit its own desires. Life was not like that, and if Jefferson thought so, it represented a fundamental difference in outlook.

  “The rights of one generation of men must depend, in some degree, on the paper transactions of another,” Adams wrote. “The social compact and the laws must be reduced to writing. Obedience to them becomes a national habit and they cannot be changed by revolutions that are costly things. Men will be too economical of their blood and property to have recourse to them very frequently.” Jefferson's wish for “a little rebellion now and then to clear the atmosphere,” as he had once put it to Abigail, did not stand to reason, Adams was telling him. Nor did reason have any bearing on what was happening in France, Adams insisted in another letter:

  Reasoning has been all lost. Passion, prejudice, interest, necessity have governed and will govern; and a century must roll away before any permanent and quiet system will be established.... You and I must look down from the battlements of Heaven if we ever have the pleasure of seeing it.

  Politics, Jefferson answered, was “a subject I never loved, and now hate.”

  Nowhere in his correspondence with Adams did Jefferson suggest he was suffering anything like what Adams had predicted retirement to Monticello would do to him. Only to Madison did he reveal in a letter of April 1795, “My health is entirely broken down within the last eight months.” And only years later, in a letter to his daughter Polly, warning her against a life of seclusion, would Jefferson acknowledge that in fact he had suffered a breakdown very like what Adams had foreseen.

  I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it... I can speak from experience on the subject. From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

  Adams's supposition that Jefferson was cutting back on his extravagant ways was, however, mistaken. To the contrary, the Virginian had resolved to live in grander style than ever, and plunged into the largest, most costly project of his life. He had decided to transform Monticello—to tear off the entire second floor and more than double the size of the house—along the lines of an elegant new residence he had seen in Paris, a palatial house with a dome called the Hôtel de Salm, on the Left Bank of the Seine. All the building and remodeling he had done thus far—the renovation of rented houses in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia, even the initial construction of Monticello itself—had been but prelude to what was now under way.

  It was as if he were helpless to do otherwise. He must draw up plans, design and redesign everything down to the smallest detail, build, rebuild, take apart, take down, and put up again, no matter the cost or impracticality of it all.

  The existing eight-room Palladian country house was to become a great domed villa with twenty-one rooms. It was designed to accommodate lavish hospitality and to answer all his own private needs and comforts. His mind brimmed with French ideas and niceties. There were to be beds in alcoves as in France, elongated windows and French doors, a magnificent parquet floor replicated from one he had seen in the country estate of a French friend, as well as ample space to display the paintings and busts, the gilded pier mirrors, clocks, and furniture he had shipped home from France.

  He had already begun ordering window sash from Philadelphia, and set his slaves to quarrying limestone and making bricks. To Adams he mentioned his new “nail manufactory” and the time devoted to counting and measuring nails, but of the larger project he said nothing, knowing what the frugal New Englander would think of it.

  • • •

  FOR RELIEF from the tedium of his “insignificant” labors, Adams took long walks through Philadelphia as he often had in years past, his pace only somewhat slower. Exercise was indispensable, he explained to Charles, who had complained of feeling lethargic. “Move or die is the language of our Maker in the constitution of our bodies.” One must rouse oneself from lethargy. “When you cannot walk abroad, walk in your room.... Rise up and then open your windows and walk about your room a few times, then sit down again to your books or your pen.”

  To many in Congress, Adams was an old man, an assessment he thought perfectly valid. His teeth tormented him—it had been necessary to have several pulled—and he worried over a tremble in his hands. In keeping with the changes of fashion, he had given up wearing a wig and was by now quite grey and bald. He was overweight; his eyes were often red and watery from too much reading.

  It was “painful to the vanity of an old man to acknowledge the decays of nature,” he wrote. So weak were his eyes, such was the trembling of his hand, he told John Quincy, that “a pen is as terrible to me as a sword to a coward.” He wondered how much longer he could continue in public life. Yet he devoted hours each day to writing letters, and often at great length. On his walks he generally covered three to five miles, thinking little of it. Nor does there appear to have been any appreciable slowing down on the quantity of books he read.

  He had much to be grateful for—“good parents, an excellent wife, and promising children, tolerable health on the whole and competent fortune,” as he told Abigail. With Thomas recently admitted to the Philadelphia bar, he could now claim three lawyer sons. Increasingly his thoughts turned to their careers and their future, more than to his own.

  “Much more depends on little things than is commonly imagined,” he cautioned John Quincy. “An erect figure, a steady countenance, a neat dress, a genteel air, an oratorical period, a resolute, determined spirit, often do more than deep erudition or indefatigable application.”

  With Charles he shared his private views on the current clamor over the subject of equality. “How the present age can boast of this principle as a discovery, as new light and modern knowledge, I know not.” The root of equality, Adams said, was the Golden Rule—“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Equality was at the heart of Christianity. When he had written in the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights that “all men are by nature free and equal,” he meant “not a physical but a moral equality.”

  Common Sense was sufficient to determine that it could not mean that all men were equal in fact, but in right, not all equally tall, strong, wise, handsome, active, but equally men... the work of the same Artist, children in the same cases entitled to the same justice.

  Nabby and her family had returned from England, where William Smith's financial ventures appeared to have brought them a measure of welcome prosperity. Adams was pleased for Nabby, but worried over what his son-in-law would ultimately make of himself. “I know not what he is in pursuit of,” he told Abigail.

  John Quincy had lately distinguished himself with a series of newspaper essays denouncing Citizen Genet and seemed well launched as an attorney in Boston, if still unresolved about aspiring to a public career. When Washington requested of France that Genet be recalled, Adams, with a father's pride, was certain that John Quincy's essays had played a decisive part. Yet he could not help feeling sympathy for Genet, his old friend's son. Ordered home to Paris, to face charges of misconduct, which meant almost certain death by guillotine, Genet chose to stay on in New York, where eventually he married the daughter of George Clinton and settled down to the life of a country gentleman on the Hudson.

  From the tone of the letters that arrived week after week from Philadelphia, Abigail sensed a change in her husband. There seemed to be little or none of the old
anger, but far more acceptance of life. “I am happy to learn,” she wrote, “that the only fault in your political character, and one which has always given me uneasiness, is wearing away. I mean a certain irritability which has sometimes thrown you off your guard.”

  When reports reached him that his mother was gravely ill, Adams, assuming the worst, was saddened almost beyond words. “My aged and venerable mother is drawing near the close of a virtuous and industrious life,” he wrote to Nabby. “May her example be ever present with me! May I be able to fulfill the duties of life as well as she has done.” But the old lady's resilience was astounding. She revived, to his great relief, and his thoughts returned to his children.

  To Abigail, late in the spring of 1794, he wrote of John Quincy's rising reputation, implying he knew more than he was saying. “I have often thought he has more prudence at 27 than his father at 58.” “All my hopes are in him,” he said in another letter, “both for my family and my country.”

  At last, on May 26, Adams sent off a confidential letter to John Quincy with the biggest news he had been able to report in years. He had been informed that day that the President would nominate John Quincy to be minister to the Netherlands. If Adams had played a part in the decision, as possibly he could have, he never said so. To his mind there was not a shadow of doubt that John Quincy was the ideal choice, as he told him. Annoyed that he had not been consulted on the appointment, John Quincy replied, “I rather wish it had not been made at all.” But as an Adams, he had little choice, and so began another long career in public service. His father was presiding as usual the day the Senate confirmed the appointment.

  Slightly taller than his father, John Quincy had become notably handsome, his youthful face lean and finely chiseled. In a magnificent portrait by Copley done in London a year later, he might be the beau ideal of the time. He was also more widely traveled and more conversant with French and Dutch than any American diplomat yet dispatched across the Atlantic. He sailed from Boston that September of 1794, taking his brother Thomas along with him to serve as his private secretary.