First Family (25 page)

Although John witnessed the same events as Abigail, he did not leave a written record of his reactions, in part because of his vows to embrace the required role of silence as vice president, in part because he was channeling his intellectual energies into the
Davila
essays. These provoked the only occasion when he, or at least his name, emerged from the invisible background, and he went from being essentially harmless to politically dangerous. The incident was provoked, albeit inadvertently, by his old friend and former colleague Thomas Jefferson.

Washington had persuaded a reluctant Jefferson to serve as the first secretary of state. Jefferson was late to arrive in New York, delayed until May 1790 because he needed to oversee the marriage of his eldest daughter at Monticello. He had previously written a glowing tribute to John on his appointment as vice president, and it is
virtually certain—though the historical record is blank on this score—that he resumed his social interactions with Abigail and John that summer. The old intimacies of Paris were recovered.
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A few months later, however, Jefferson was asked to provide an endorsement of Thomas Paine’s new book,
The Rights of Man
, which was a soaring argument for viewing the recent French Revolution as a European version of the American Revolution. Misguidedly thinking that his endorsement would be anonymous, Jefferson praised Paine’s book, which accurately expressed his own somewhat romantic political conviction about ongoing developments in France. He described it as an antidote “against the political heresies which have sprung up among us.” The reference was widely and correctly seen as a swipe against John’s defense of “the monarchical principle” in the
Davila
essays, and was quickly picked up by all the major newspapers.

Deeply offended, John confronted his old friend for what he regarded as a gratuitous slap and blatant distortion of his views. Jefferson’s remark, he later observed, “was generally considered as an open personal attack upon me, by insinuating the false interpretation of my Writings as favouring the introduction of hereditary Monarchy and Aristocracy into this Country.” His clear intent, so he explained, was to insist that a strong executive was essential in the new American government, and that in France the retention of some version of constitutional monarchy was probably wise in order to ease the transition to more full-blooded republican principles.
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Jefferson had already responded apologetically, but also somewhat elusively. Whatever political differences existed between them mattered less to him than their personal friendship: “And I can declare with truth in the presence of the almighty that nothing was further from my intention or expectation than to have had either my name or your name brought before the public on this occasion.” This was surely sincere, for Jefferson had not expected his name to be cited in an endorsement of Paine’s book. Then he added—and this was not sincere—that he was “not referring to any writing that I might suppose to be yours.”
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Whether John actually believed Jefferson is unclear, but he chose to accept the apology because he wished to avoid a rupture in a friendship that, as he put it, “has subsisted for fifteen years between us without
the slightest interruption … and is still dear to my heart.” A series of eleven essays under the pseudonym “Publica” soon appeared in the Boston newspapers, quite deftly criticizing Paine’s linkage of the American and French revolutions, questioning Jefferson’s political judgment in embracing the connections, and defending the opposing views of
Davila
. Most pundits assumed that Publica was John, arguing on his own behalf. But it was really John Quincy, in his first—albeit anonymous—appearance on the national stage, defending his father.
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It was only a minor incident with no immediate policy implications, a small crack in the friendship, swiftly repaired with the aid of Jefferson’s well-intentioned duplicity and John’s eager gullibility. But it turned out to be a premonition of the looming chasm in both the Adams-Jefferson friendship and, more significantly, the political division between warring camps within the infant American republic. This little flurry was a preview of the debate between two revolutionary veterans over nothing less than the true meaning of the American Revolution, the first skirmish in the battle between self-styled Federalists and Republicans over the proper shape of a republic that also aspired to be a nation.

In November 1790, when John and Abigail moved to the temporary capital at Philadelphia, he was fifty-five and she was forty-six. The euphemistic term
middle-aged
had yet to be coined, but they both felt that they were closer to the end than the beginning. At one point Abigail seemed to suggest that the running biological clock had, albeit gradually, transformed the very character of their relationship: “Years subdue the ardour of passion,” she observed, “but in lieu thereof a Friendship and affection deep Rooted persists which defies the Ravages of Time, and will survive whilst the vital Flame persists.”
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To the extent that Abigail’s observation suggested that the sexual dimension of their marriage was finished, both of them furnished evidence that the “vital Flame” remained at least partially physical. For example, when John ended a letter with “I am impatiently yours,”
Abigail confessed that the phrase prompted her “to be a little Rhoguish and ask a Question.” Or when she referred to his advancing age in one letter, he reprimanded her in a suggestively jesting way: “But how dare you hint or Lisp a Word about Sixty Years of Age. If I were Here, I would soon convince you that I am not above Forty.” One can never be sure about such long-ago intimacies, but the bulk of the evidence indicates that John and Abigail remained lovers in the physical sense of the term well into middle age.
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Although she was nine years younger than John, the inevitable ravages of time struck Abigail sooner and more dramatically. The first symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis appeared during her London years, but the chronic and degenerative disease advanced to new levels of intensity in the 1790s. “I have been so weakened & debilitated as to be unable to walk alone,” she reported in 1791, “and my Nerves so affected as to oblige me to seclude myself from all company except my most intimate companions.” Her rheumatic symptoms, chiefly swelling of the joints, ebbed and flowed in waves of pain and paralysis, often exacerbated by cold weather and the rigors of travel. During one especially acute attack she was confined to her bed for six weeks. Even writing letters became difficult, because she could not hold a pen.
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By 1792, the end of John’s first term as vice president, the extra weight she had put on in Paris and London was gone. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison of what I was,” she reported, probably a function of not being able to eat for prolonged periods. The trip from Braintree to Philadelphia became an excruciating ordeal, limited to only a few hours of travel each day. This was the major reason for her decision to remain at Braintree for John’s entire second term. (Actually, Braintree’s north precinct was incorporated into the town of Quincy in February 1792, so her letters to John ever after reflected the new postmark.) During her last season in Philadelphia she found her social obligations “an Egyptian task” because of her chronic condition, and she was forced to decline about half the invitations for health reasons. Better to remain at home, she decided, than become a burden.
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John’s health problems at midlife were less debilitating. His hair continued to fall out, but that was nothing new, and the practice of wearing wigs on all officiai occasions, though a dying tradition, conveniently
covered his naked skull. His teeth went the way of his hair—for whatever reason he never replaced them with a false set—but his speech had not yet become slurred as a consequence. He periodically experienced a feverish condition accompanied by violent chills, what he called an “ague,” malaria-like symptoms that were probably latent remnants of his illness in Amsterdam ten years earlier. But he always recovered quickly and fully.

His most troubling ailments were failing eyesight and persistent tremors in his hands that affected his ability to read and write. When several long letters from John Quincy received only brief responses, he offered his physical degeneration as an excuse: “It is painful to the Vanity of an Old Man to acknowledge the decays of Nature,” he explained, “but I have lost the habit of Writing … from weak Eyes and from a trembling hand to such a degree that a Pen is as terrible to me, as a Sword to a Coward, or as a rod to a child.”
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The tremors, however, came and went, and when in remission allowed him to toss off ten pages without pause. The bloodshot eyes he attributed to a lifetime of reading without proper light, but he stubbornly refused to change his reading habits, declaring in full bravado mode his determination “to sacrifice my Eyes like Milton [i.e., go blind] rather than give up the Amusement without which I should despair.” When Abigail urged him to cut back on his nightly reading, he refused to comply. “The more one reads,” he protested, “the more one sees.”
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In part because he was older, John took these annoying biological reminders of his aging more seriously. He began to fear that he was approaching some chronological line beyond which lay only a downhill slide into senility and death: “How soon will my Sands be run out of the Glass?” he asked Abigail, adding that once you crossed an invisible line “the Days and Hours have additional Wings which then waive and beat with increasingly rapidity.”
³⁸

He was especially worried about what he called “dying at the top,” meaning a loss of mental coherence because of dementia or senility. Samuel Adams, then governor of Massachusetts, was apparently suffering from the early stages of dementia, and John cringed when he witnessed “the debilitating Power of Age” during a speech in which
the old man made a fool of himself. He had the same reaction when one of his old acquaintances in the Senate lost his train of thought and stumbled his way into complete confusion before his colleagues. The scene, John reported, “moved the tender feeling of any heart for a Friend advanced in years, not many however beyond my own.” Most disconcerting was the alarming realization that neither man was aware of how pitiful he had become, a fate that John vowed to avoid at all costs.
³⁹

Abigail was the designated truth teller if such a senior moment arrived, but she herself was having foreboding thoughts about her own final chapters. They were prompted by caring for John’s mother, who was in her mid-eighties and undergoing all the painful tribulations of physical decline, including constant coughing, sleepless nights, an emaciated body, and a listless mind: “My constant attendance upon her has very much lessened my desire of long life,” Abigail confessed to John. “Her fear lest she should recover and become useless, her appearing to have lived out every enjoyment, shows that life is at best a poor play, and the best that can come of it is a miserable Benediction.” Abigail’s chronic battle with rheumatism made her especially sensitive about becoming a hopeless invalid like her mother-in-law, a premonition that paralleled John’s fear of becoming a mindless embarrassment on the public stage. Abigail tended to sustain a stoic stance about the morbid uncertainties of aging, while John veered toward more melodramatic predictions of imminent decline: “My forces of Mind and Body are nearly spent,” he warned. “Few Years remain for me, if any.” At the time, in 1795, he had thirty-one years to go.
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Midlife also required them to renegotiate the relationship with their children, all of whom were now adults out of the nest and no longer mere receptacles into which they could pour their parental wisdom with impunity. Both Abigail and John were accustomed to being hands-on parents, presuming and assuming an authority over their children that verged on the absolute. Now that had to change.

Nabby, after all, was a mother of her own. Abigail relished her new role as grandmother, and when Nabby became pregnant for the third time, she volunteered to take the two young boys for several weeks.
She quickly discovered that Nabby’s parenting style was more permissive than her own, since John Adams Smith, a mere toddler, presumed he had the run of the house. “One great mistake in the education of youth,” she apprised Nabby, “is gratifying every wish of their hearts.” All young children, she thought, “should know how to suffer want.” Eventually, however, she acknowledged that her own views “are so old fashioned that … they are illsuited to modern style and fashion.” Her disciplinary standards continued to melt away as she watched her grandson persuade John to pull him around the room in a chair, “which is generally done for half an hour, to the derangement of my carpet and the amusement of his grandpa.”
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Both Abigail and John developed a growing concern for the career choices that Nabby’s husband was making. William Stephens Smith had presumed that he would be offered a prominent post in the new government. He even had the temerity to propose himself for the ambassadorial vacancy in London based on his previous experience as John’s secretary there. This was considered a quite flagrant act of arrogance by all concerned and was summarily rejected; Smith reacted huffily, vowing to prove his critics wrong by making a private fortune in the lucrative but highly speculative market in western lands. Initially, he enjoyed a measure of success, though John did not approve of his new career or his inflated sense of importance: “He boasts too much of having made his fortune.”
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After Smith spent two weeks with him in Philadelphia, John confided to Abigail that their daughter’s husband “is tormented by his Ambitions, but has taken unsagacious measures to remove his Pains. I know not what he is in Pursuit of.” They both felt that their daughter and grandchildren were dependent on a man whose future depended on winning a high-stakes game of speculation in western lands. But they kept their concern to themselves. Nabby’s fate was no longer within their control.
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