John Adams

by David McCullough

  She was outraged by his dealings with Callender, and particularly as revealed in the letters Callender had published. Of the accusations concerning Sally Hemings she said nothing. The issue to her was Callender, who by then was dead. He had been found on a Sunday in June 1803, in Richmond, floating by the shore of the James River in three feet of water. He had been seen earlier wandering the town in a drunken state, but the circumstances of his death were unknown.

  Abigail mistakenly understood that Jefferson had liberated the “wretch” Callender from jail, and this to her was totally unacceptable, after the attacks Callender had made on Adams, a man, she reminded Jefferson, “for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship.” Was he not, as President, she asked, answerable for the influence of his example upon the manners and morals of the nation? She had tried, she said, to believe him innocent of any part in Callender's slanderous attacks.

  Until I read Callender's seventh letter, containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe that such measures could have been resorted to: to stab the fair fame and upright intentions of one who, to use your language, “was acting from an honest conviction in his own mind that he was right.” This, sir, I considered as a personal injury. This was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot which could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalship, by jealousy, or any other malignant fiend.

  The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character is lost.

  Her letter, she assured him, was written in confidence. She had shown it to no one. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” she concluded, quoting Proverbs. “I bear no malice, I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could—nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.”

  Jefferson protested. He was being falsely accused. “My charities to him [Callender] were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life, and to make them chargeable to myself.” He had never suspected Adams of being party to the “atrocities” committed against him by Fenno and Porcupine, so why should he be suspected? He himself had “ever borne testimony to Mr. Adams's personal wrath,” he assured her.

  It was all quite disingenuous, as doubtless Abigail knew. Jefferson had indeed encouraged and paid Callender for his efforts, and he had spoken of Adams in quite unflattering terms on a number of occasions.

  Altogether seven letters passed between Abigail and the President, in the course of which she brought up one further matter that, to her mind, had put great strain on the past friendship. A district judge had earlier appointed John Quincy a commissioner of bankruptcy in Boston, a petty federal office involving petty fees, but that had made a difference to him in his first lean year in Boston. When, under Jefferson, John Quincy was suddenly replaced, Abigail had taken it as an act of personal reprisal by Jefferson himself, which it was not, as he managed now to convince her.

  “I conclude with sincere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit,” Jefferson wrote, bringing to a conclusion his part in the exchange.

  Abigail wished him well in his responsibilities and promised to intrude on his time no more. But his part as a “rewarder and encourager” of Callender, “a libeler whom you could not but detest and despise,” she could not and would not forget. Once she had felt both affection and esteem for him, she wrote. “Affection still lingers in the bosom, even after esteem has taken flight.”

  This, her last letter, was written on October 25, 1804. On November 19, Adams wrote the following at the bottom of her letter-book copy:

  The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams, I read them whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.

  • • •

  THE PROSPECT OF WRITING an autobiography had never really appealed to Adams. Writing history was difficult at best, he knew, and if personal history, it could be most discomforting. “It is a delicate thing to write from memory,” he told John Quincy. “To me the undertaking would be too painful. I cannot but reflect upon scenes I have beheld.” So having barely begun his projected memoir in the fall of 1802, he let it drop.

  For more than a year he wrote little at all, devoting the greater part of his time to the farm. As always, he read much of every day—old favorites in Latin, Greek, and French, English poetry and history, journals such as the Edinburgh Review, and newspapers to the point he feared he might become a newspaper (as “button-maker becomes button at last”). He saw a few old friends, went on long walks with Richard Cranch, attended church, and hugely enjoyed the company of his grandchildren.

  But his days on the move, on the road, were truly over. Only on rare occasions did he go even to Boston or Cambridge, to attend a Harvard commencement or a dinner of the American Academy of Sciences. At Fourth of July celebrations in Boston he would join Robert Treat Paine and Elbridge Gerry “in the place of honor” as surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. But at the most now, the radius of his world was about fifteen miles.

  Like Abigail, he worried about Thomas, who seemed incapable of taking hold in Philadelphia and suffered spells of gloom and loneliness, his “blue devils,” and with Abigail he rejoiced when Thomas quit Philadelphia and moved back to Quincy to try a fresh start. Thomas's presence, the pleasure of his company in the evenings, helped compensate for the large vacant place in the Adamses' life since the departure of John Quincy for Washington. For her part, Abigail told John Quincy to eat well, not work too hard, and mind his appearance.

  I do not wish a Senator to dress like a beau, but I want him to conform so far as to the fashion as not to incur the character of singularity, nor give occasion to the world to ask what kind of mother he had or to charge upon a wife negligence and inattention when she is guiltless. The neatest man, observed a lady the other day, wants his wife to pull up his collar and mind that his coat is brushed.

  John Quincy took his seat in the Senate in time to give Jefferson support in the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. With the acquisition of Louisiana from Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte had begun planning a French empire in North America. But when the army he sent to crush the slave revolt in San Domingo was wiped out by war and yellow fever, Bonaparte abandoned his plans and suddenly, in 1803, offered to sell the United States all of the vast, unexplored territory of Louisiana. It was an astounding turn of events and one that probably would not have come to pass had the Quasi-War burst into something larger. Were it not for John Adams making peace with France, there might never have been a Louisiana Purchase.

  Federalists in Congress argued that under the Constitution the powers of the President did not include buying foreign territory. Jefferson, who had for so long advocated less, not more, power in the executive, chose to take a larger view now, given the opportunity he had to double the size of the nation at a stroke. John Quincy crossed party lines to support the purchase, which his father, too, strongly favored. “ ‘Curse the stripling, how he apes his sire,’ ” declared one irate Massachusetts Federalist.

  When John Quincy joined in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the spread of slavery into Louisiana, he found it harder than pulling a “jaw tooth,” he told his father. “This is now in general the great art of legislation at this place,” he continued, venting his frustration. “To do a thing by assuming the appearance of preventing it. To prevent a thing by assuming that of doing it.”

  In the summer of 1804, on the banks of the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, Alexander Hamilton was fatally wound
ed in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Carried back across the river to New York, Hamilton died the next day, July 12.

  When the Vice President returned to Washington to preside over the Senate, he was looked upon by many, including young Senator Adams, as no better than a murderer. John Adams would write that though he had forgiven his “arch enemy,” Hamilton, Hamilton's “villainy” was not forgotten. Nor did he feel obliged “to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

  In the election of 1804, Jefferson and George Clinton of New York, the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans, won by an overwhelming margin. Even Massachusetts went for Jefferson.

  Much that John Quincy wrote to his parents from the Capitol had a familiar ring. “Hitherto my conduct has given satisfaction to neither side,” he observed, “and both are offended at what they consider a vain and foolish presumption of singularity, or an ambition of taking a lead different from the views of either. All this I cannot help.”

  John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had dined at the President's House, and would again several times, finding Jefferson no less engaging than ever, but overly fond of extravagant claims and “large stories.” One evening, John Quincy listened in amazement as Jefferson described how, during one of his winters in Paris, the temperature had dropped to twenty below zero for six weeks. It was a preposterous claim. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, as John Quincy knew from having been there. “He knows better than all this, but loves to excite wonder.” At another point, commenting on the French Revolution, Jefferson said it seemed all to have been a dream. John Quincy, as he reported to his father, could hardly believe his ears.

  Jefferson had installed a French chef in the presidential mansion. His wine bill alone exceeded $2,500 a year. “There was, as usual, the dissertation upon wines, not very edifying,” John Quincy recorded after another dinner. “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy.”

  In addition to serving in the Senate, John Quincy also accepted a new professorial chair of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard. Adams's pride in his brilliant son could not have been greater, as he let him know when at times John Quincy grew discouraged with the pettiness and hypocrisies of politics.

  Patience and perseverance will carry you with honor through all difficulties. Virtuous and studious from your youth, beyond any other instance I know, I have great confidence in your success in the service of your country, however dark your prospects may be at present. Such talents and such learning as you possess, with a character so perfectly fair and a good humor so universally acknowledged, it is impossible for you to fail.

  Reminding him of their ordeal on the Boston, when “you and I ... clasped each other together in our arms, and braced our feet against the bedboards and bedsteads to prevent us from having our brains dashed out,” Adams said he himself had since weathered worse political storms, “and here I am alive and hearty yet.”

  Alive and hearty he was, and remarkably so, all things considered. He was a picture of health, as visitors and family members would attest. He still nursed wounds of defeat; he could brood over past insults; he longed for vindication, and for gratitude for so much that he had done and the sacrifices he had made. And he dwelled often on death. Dear old friends were passing from the scene—Parson Wibird, Samuel Adams. He was “never more to see anything but my plow between me and the grave,” Adams told a correspondent, sounding more than a little sorry for himself. Yet in the same letter he claimed to be happier than he had ever been, which if said partly for effect—as a matter of pride—was also fundamentally true, once the initial years of retirement had passed and particularly after he began writing again.

  • • •

  IN EARLY 1805, after four years at Quincy, during which he had made little effort to contact others, Adams decided to send a letter of greetings to his old friend Benjamin Rush.

  “Dear Sir,” Adams began on February 6, “It seemed to me that you and I ought not to die without saying goodbye, or bidding each other adieu. Pray how do you do? How does that excellent lady, Mrs. R?

  Is the present state of the national republic enough? Is virtue the principle of our government? Is honor? Or is ambition and avarice, adulation, baseness, covetousness, the thirst for riches, indifference concerning the means of rising and enriching, the contempt of principle, the spirit of party and of faction the motive and principle that governs?

  “My much respected and dear friend,” Rush answered. “Your letter of the 6th instant revived a great many pleasant ideas in my mind. I have not forgotten—I cannot forget you.”

  You and your excellent Mrs. Adams often compose a conversation by my fireside. We now and then meet with a traveler who has been at Quincy, from whom we hear with great pleasure not only that you enjoy good health, but retain your usual good spirits.

  And so began an extended, vivid correspondence between the two men that was to occupy much of their time and bring each continuing enjoyment. For Adams it was as if he had found a vocation again. His letters to Rush became a great outpouring of ideas, innermost feelings, pungent asides, and opinions on all manner of things and mutual acquaintances—so much that he had kept within for too long. He wrote of his worries about the future and the sham of the political scene. “My friend! Our country is a masquerade! No party, no man dares to avow his real sentiments. All is disguise, vizard, cloak.”

  Much of his strength and capacity for study were gone, Adams professed. “But such is the constitution of my mind that I cannot avoid forming an opinion.”

  [Samuel] Johnson said when he sat upon his throne in a tavern, there he dogmatized and was contradicted, and in this he found delight. My throne is not in a tavern but at my fireside. There I dogmatize, there I laugh and there the newspapers sometimes make me scold; and in dogmatizing, laughing, and scolding I find delight, and why should not I enjoy it, since no one is the worse for it and I am the better.

  He had by now resumed work on his autobiography as well, Part II, “Travels and Negotiations,” though it was still labor he did not relish. “To rummage trunks, letter books, bits of journals and great heaps of bundles of old papers is a dreadful bondage to old age, and an extinguisher of old eyes.” And how, after all, did one write about one's self, he asked Rush. What must he say of his own vanity and levity? How was he to account for so many impulsive, tactless, ill-considered things he had said down the years?

  There have been very many times when I have been so agitated in my own mind as to have no consideration at all of the light in which my words, actions, and even writings would be considered by others. Indeed, I never could bring myself seriously to consider that I was a great man, or of much importance or consideration in the world. The few traces that remain of me must, I believe, go down to posterity in much confusion and distraction, as my life has passed. Enough surely of egotism!

  He wrote of how greatly friendship mattered to him. “There is something in my composition which restrains me from rancour against any man with whom I have once lived in friendship.” He wrote of his sense of duty to his country. “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” And the threats he saw to the country: “The internal intrigues of our monied and landed and slaved aristocracies are and will be our ruin.” He reported to the learned physician of his own health and disposition, assuring him “my spirits have been as cheerful as they ever were since some sin, to me unknown, involved me in politics.” And he described his physical activities, which began at five or six in the morning with work on his stone walls.

  I call for my leavers and iron bars, for my chisels, drills, and wedges to split rocks, and for my wagons to cart seaweed for manure upon my farm. I mount my horse and ride on the seashore, and I walk upon Mount Wollaston and Stonyfield Hill.

  For a healthful diet, he told the abstemious Rush, he believed, like the d
octors of his youth, in milk and vegetables, “with very little animal food and still less spiritous liquors.” In his autobiography, however, Adams told how his “excellent father” had encouraged him to partake of more meat as well as more “comforting” drink than milk.

  He wrote of his renewed enjoyment of Shakespeare—Adams would read Shakespeare twice through again in 1805—and in his continued devotion to Cicero and the Bible. And he dwelt much on ideas. The ideal of the perfectibility of man as expounded by eighteenth-century philosophers—perfectibility “abstracted from all divine authority”—was unacceptable, he declared.

  It is an idea of the Christian religion, and ever has been of all believers of the immortality of the soul, that the intellectual part of man is capable of progressive improvement for ever. Where then is the sense of calling the perfectibility of man an original idea or modern discovery... I consider the perfectibility of man as used by modern philosophers to be mere words without a meaning, that is mere nonsense.

  He had himself, he told Rush, “an immense load of errors, weaknesses, follies and sins to mourn over and repent of.” These were “the only affliction” of his present life. But St. Paul had taught him to rejoice ever more and be content. “This phrase ‘rejoice ever more’ shall never be out of my heart, memory or mouth again as long as I live, if I can help it. This is my perfectibility of man.”

  The letters sparkled with aphorisms—on the virtue of America standing free from binding involvement with other nations: “We stand well, let us stand still”; on the perils of majority rule: “Absolute power in a majority is as drunk as it is in one”; on lawyers: “No civilized society can do without lawyers.” Of kings and presidents, Adams said he saw little to distinguish them from other men. “If worthless men are sometimes at the head of affairs, it is, I believe, because worthless men are at the tail and the middle.” In a spirited appraisal of the overall folderol of an election year, he wrote: