First Family (21 page)

This little episode demonstrates with near certainty that Abigail and John routinely slept together in the same bed. It also suggests that they were comfortable with the subject of sex, or at the very least that John was. (Abigail was allowed to smile upon receiving such a letter, but not to send anything so explicit herself.) It also seems plausible, if not quite provable, that at ages forty-two and fifty-one, respectively, they continued to enjoy a physical connection.

Race, it would seem, was a more uncomfortable subject than sex. There were some passages in Jefferson’s
Notes on the State of Virginia
that might have prompted a reaction, passages describing Africans as
a biologically inferior species, forever condemned to inferiority as long as they retained their blackness. John chose not to notice these passages, preferring to focus on Jefferson’s critical remarks on slavery, which he said are “worth Diamonds.”
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It is clear that Abigail and John, who never owned a slave, regarded slavery as incompatible with the values of the American Revolution, and therefore an awkward anomaly that British critics of American independence liked to throw in their faces. Abigail expressed her sense of embarrassment at a London dinner when seated next to William Blake, a wealthy South Carolina planter: “I am loth to mention that he owns 1500 Negroes,” she observed, “as I cannot avoid considering it disgraceful to Humanity.” (Though it made no moral difference, according to the 1790 census Blake owned 695 slaves.) Slavery, then, was one of those countless issues about which Abigail and John thought identically and almost seamlessly. Both took considerable pride when the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled slavery illegal on the grounds that it violated the language John had written in the Massachusetts Constitution.
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Yet, consider this stunningly candid confession, offered by Abigail after viewing a performance of
Othello
at a London theater: “Othello was represented blacker than any African. Whether it rises from prejudices or Education or from a real natural antipathy I cannot determine, but my whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty More touch the fair Desdemona … That most incomparable Speech of Othello’s lost half its force and Beauty to me, because I could not separate the Colour from the Man.” As Abigail implied, her racial reaction was instinctive, not an idea that emerged from her mind so much as a feeling that surged, as she put it, from her soul. It was obviously not a feeling she liked, but, just as obviously, not something she could control. Her honesty in acknowledging its potency was quite rare. The fact that these racial prejudices were present inside her, however, was the norm rather than the exception. It suggests that however liberated she was on the gender front, and however comfortable she and John were with their sexuality, race imposed hurdles she could not clear.
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Their parental roles were complicated by an elemental reality.
Though they were together as a couple, they were not together as a family. All the boys, in fact, were back in New England, in various stages of preparation for Harvard. Charles and Thomas were boarding with their aunt at Haverhill. John Quincy had sailed home at the same time as his parents had departed Paris for London. Always the dutiful young man, he spent most of the voyage caring for seven hunting dogs that the marquis de Lafayette was sending to George Washington, who was now in retirement at Mount Vernon.

If the number and length of Abigail and John’s letters are a fair measure, John Quincy remained their favorite son, a project almost as much as a person. After he passed the admissions exam to Harvard, doing brilliantly, as expected, Abigail reminded him, given all the educational advantages he had enjoyed, “how unpardonable it would have been in you, to have become a Blockhead.” Charles received a few letters from both parents, usually warning him that his inveterate charm, while endearing, was no substitute for diligent work habits. Poor Thomas, who received but one letter in four years and sent none of his own that have survived, had become almost invisible.
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John’s letters to John Quincy were full of diplomatic news, as if he were a junior colleague as much as a son. Once he began his courses at Harvard, John urged him to take full advantage of the educational opportunities: “You are breathing now in the Atmosphere of Science and Literature,” he observed, “the floating particles of which will mix with your whole Mass of Blood and Juices.” John Quincy’s senior oration was a variation of the Adams family mantra on virtue and public service, almost calculated to make his father swoon: “It seems to me, making allowance for a fathers’ Partiality, to be full of manly Sense and Spirit,” John wrote. “By the sentiments and Principles of that oration, I hope you will live and die, and if you do, I don’t care a farthing how many are preferred to you.” The paternal pride was palpable.
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Despite the dramatic difference in attention paid their three sons, it was clear that Abigail and John presumed they had a responsibility to see them all through childhood and adolescence under their demanding parental gaze—most demanding for John Quincy—and then make sure that they all received a college education, an expectation then uncommon, except among elite New England families.
Abigail worried that the expensive lifestyle John’s position required had prevented them from saving enough money to cover the looming educational expenses. “We will return poor,” she informed John Quincy, “but if we can get you all through college, the World is all before you, and providence your guide.” In other words, there would be no Adams trust fund. Once launched into the world after Harvard, they were on their own.
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For two elemental reasons, Nabby was a different matter: first, she was a young woman, which meant that educational expectations did not include college; second, she was living with her parents in London, which in practice meant that she spent a good deal of time in the company of her mother. Abigail was, without question, one of the most intelligent and independent women of her time, but she harbored a realistic recognition that the liberation of women from the sexist assumptions of the day—a liberation she correctly considered to be a latent implication of the American Revolution—lay somewhere in the distant future. As she saw it, her maternal obligation was to prepare her daughter to function in the world that was rather than the world that ought to be. When all was said and done, this meant that Nabby needed to become a literate lady who married well.
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For a time, Nabby’s suitor in Braintree, Royall Tyler, remained steadfast, promising to wait for her and formally propose upon her return from Europe. He and Nabby had exchanged miniatures (locket-size portraits) upon her departure and had promised to correspond regularly. Tyler’s prospects ascended when Abigail learned upon meeting John in London that he would bless any decision that Nabby made with her whole heart.

But Tyler failed the distance test. His letters became increasingly infrequent, and the local gossip reported by Abigail’s sisters suggested, albeit in highly elliptical language, that he was seeing other women on the side. This was enough to convince Abigail that her high estimate of Tyler’s character had been misguided. In August 1785, Nabby returned Tyler’s miniature and letters, effectively breaking off the engagement. Abigail’s comment had a terminal tone: “A woman may forgive the man she loves an indiscretion, but never a neglect.”
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A new suitor was already waiting in the wings. In person and on paper, he appeared nothing short of perfect. William Stephens Smith was a dashingly handsome young man appointed by the Continental Congress to serve as John’s private secretary in London. Abigail described him as “a Gentleman in every thought, word and action, domestic in his attachments, quick as lightening in his feelings, but softened in an instant.” His résumé was equally impressive. A graduate of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, he had served as an officer in the Continental Army with distinction throughout the war, including a stint on Washington’s staff. He was almost too good to be true. And best of all, he was obviously infatuated with Nabby.
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At first, Abigail played her accustomed managerial role. She drafted letters to family and friends in New England, singing the praises of this young man whom no one back home had ever met. And she most probably convinced Smith to give Nabby some space to recover fully from the Tyler affair, which he then did by arranging a somewhat sudden trip to Europe to witness military maneuvers of the Prussian Army. But upon his return, Abigail lost control of the courtship. “What shall I do with my young soldier,” she complained. “I wish he would not be in such a hurry.” Apparently, Nabby and Smith took matters into their own hands and insisted on an accelerated schedule aligned with their own hearts. On June 12, 1786, John gave his only daughter away in a small ceremony at their home on Grosvenor Square. The night before the wedding Abigail confided that she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and felt emotions toward him that defied description.
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Finally, on another front, it bears notice that John experienced no emotional excesses of the sort that caused him such trouble with Vergennes and the French court, or damaged his reputation back in the Continental Congress with vain statements about his beleaguered sense of self-importance. Given the frustrations he was feeling at the intransigence of the British ministry, one might have expected at least a few Vesuvian moments that defied diplomatic decorum and enhanced his image as a man who was sometimes slightly out of control.

But no such incidents occurred in either Paris or London after
Abigail joined him. While it is possible that John suffered from a thyroid imbalance, which provides a physical explanation for his severe mood swings, Abigail’s presence reduced the stress that triggered the emotional reactions. She was his most effective medicine. With her constantly at his side, the explosive energies were drained off before they could build up. Their sense of mutual trust made it more difficult for him to feel isolated and alone, and she could tell him, like no one else, when he was on the verge of making a fool of himself.

“Tis true I enjoy good Health,” Abigail informed her sister, “but am larger than both my sisters compounded! Mr. Adams keeps pace with me, and if one horse had to carry us, I pity the poor Beast.” This was her way of warning her relatives that when they eventually saw her after her European sojourn, she was going to be much heavier. She was at pains to assure them, however, that any change in her physical constitution—mostly a function of multiple servants who performed all the household tasks, plus required attendance at lavish dinners—should not be regarded as evidence of her conversion to aristocratic habits. “I shall quit Europe with more pleasure than I came to it,” she insisted, “uncontaminated I hope with its Manners and vices.” The longer she remained in London, the greater was her desire to return to “my little cottage … which has more charms for me than the drawing rooms of St. James, where studied civility, and disguised coldness, cover malignant Hearts.”
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Abigail’s frequent references to her humble Braintree abode, while heartfelt, masked the fact that John had already requested Cotton Tufts, Abigail’s uncle, to begin searching for a larger house, an implicit acknowledgment that a mere cottage, no matter how symbolically resonant, could no longer satisfy their more expansive household requirements, which had grown like Abigail’s girth. Eventually, Tufts arranged for the purchase of the Vassall-Borland house in Braintree, a quite modest country estate by the standards of any French or British aristocrat, but by American standards a handsome home. (Ironically, Royall Tyler was a previous owner.) Later dubbed
Peacefield, it became the domestic centerpiece for the Adams family over four generations. Once the purchase was completed, John claimed that knowing it was there, awaiting his return, allowed him to envision the remainder of his life with newfound clarity: “My view is to lay fast of the Town of Braintree,” he wrote Tufts, “and embrace it, with both my Arms and all my might. There to live and there to die—there to lay my Bones.”
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In August 1786 both John and Abigail traveled to the Netherlands, where John completed the negotiations for a commercial treaty with Prussia. Abigail described the Dutch countryside as a monotonous series of “meadows, Trees, Canals, then more Canals, Trees, and meadows” so boring that she found herself almost hoping to be waylaid by a roadside robber in order to break the spell. Once back in London, John barricaded himself in his study and refused to see official visitors or maintain his diplomatic correspondence. He entered one of those all-consuming zones where, as Abigail described him, “he was as much engaged upon the Subject of Government as Plato was when he wrote his Laws and Republic.”
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He had decided to write a major treatise on the proper shape of constitutions. Given the paralysis on the diplomatic front, it seemed a more productive way to spend his time. And given the reports from Jay back home, which described a mounting recognition that the Articles of Confederation were proving inadequate as the basis for American union, it seemed more important to make a contribution to that looming political debate than to continue his futile conversations with the British ministry.
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Moreover, his own frustrations in Paris and London with an American government unable to speak with one voice on foreign policy predisposed John to accept Jay’s view that reform of the Articles was long overdue. In 1776, he had stepped forward to offer his
Thoughts on Government
at a crucial political moment. Now he intended to do the same thing at the next stage of the American experiment with republicanism.
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The result was a massive three-volume treatise entitled
A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America
. The title conveyed the main argument, which was a defense of the tripartite arrangement—executive, legislative, judiciary—John had proposed
in
Thoughts on Government
and then implemented in the Massachusetts Constitution. In that sense,
Defence
was an elaborate recapitulation of his case for three separate branches of government, balanced and counterpoised to check one another, that had become the model for most of the state constitutions. (Pennsylvania and Georgia were the only exceptions.) It was also a lengthy legal brief against the simpler framework of a single-house legislature favored by the French philosophes and currently embodied in the Articles of Confederation; it was an argument for making the state constitutions the model for a revised federal constitution. There was nothing particularly original in this proposal. Jay informed him that most advocates for reform of the Articles were already thinking along the same lines.
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