First Family (26 page)

At least to a slight extent, John Quincy’s was. As the designated protégé, he was the recipient of the same kind of educational injunctions from his father at twenty-five as he was at five: make yourself a master of the classics, to include Cicero, Livy, Polybius, and Sallust; moreover, you must “read them all in Latin—Nor would I by any
means consent that you forget your Greek.” In truth, however, John Quincy was now a young man with an emotional and professional agenda of his own. He had become infatuated with a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Frazier while setting up his law practice in Newburyport—an entanglement that exposed how his emotional immaturity rested uncomfortably alongside his intellectual precociousness. The love affair—his first—ended when he moved to Boston in search of clients. But they failed to show up. John Quincy was humiliated when he had to inform his father that he could not support himself.
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John rose to the occasion. His son was, he told everyone who would listen, “as great a Scholar as this Country has produced at his Age.” He was not one of those “flashing Insects [who] glitter and glow for a moment and then disappear.” A bit later he claimed that his son “has more Prudence at 27, than his father at 58.” The boy simply needed some help over this temporary hump before soaring to the heights that were his destiny.
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John offered to provide an annual stipend of $100, plus free use of one of his Boston properties as an office and home, until John Quincy could support himself. This was a violation of all his earlier pronouncements against providing financial support beyond college for his children. But once decided, John extended the same level of assistance to Charles and Thomas, presumably as a statement of equity. John Quincy was mortified at the fact of his abiding dependence but was in no position to refuse his father’s offer. John preferred to regard it as a safe and shrewd investment in an extraordinarily talented young man whom he had personally groomed for greatness.
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This investment earned dividends in 1794, when John Quincy was nominated by Washington to serve as American minister to The Hague. The vote in the Senate, which John oversaw, was unanimous, despite John Quincy’s tender age, and despite the inevitable whisperings about nepotism. (But who else could claim fluency in Dutch, French, and Russian?) Washington, who had demonstrated over his long career a true genius at spotting talent, assured John that the choice was based entirely on merit and was likely to be merely the first step in John Quincy’s brilliant career. “I shall be much mistaken,”
wrote Washington, “if, in as short a Period as can well be expected, he is not found at the head of the Diplomatic Corps.” Like so many of Washington’s judgments, this proved prescient.
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With John Quincy now launched as an erstwhile American statesman—his brother Thomas was appointed as his secretary, so both of John’s boys would be treading the same paths in The Hague that he had walked a decade earlier—John acknowledged that the torch had been passed to the next generation. John Quincy’s official correspondence from his listening post in the middle of Europe, currently aflame with the political and military conflagration generated by the French Revolution, was immediately recognized for the brilliance of its panoramic scope and mastery of detail. At the height of his own powers, John observed, he could never have duplicated his son’s sagacity. “Go on, my son, in your glorious Career,” he wrote, “and may the Blessings of God crown you with success.” He was an extremely proud parent, who fully recognized that his boy had become his own man.
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The same was not true of Charles, the spoiled son in the Adams family, whom John decided to make his special project. Because the etiquette of the era forbade direct discussion of private domestic problems, the family correspondence makes only elliptical references to the rumors that Charles was drinking heavily. He had apparently fallen in with a rowdy crew at Harvard, been disciplined by the college for running naked while drunk through Harvard Yard, and persisted in his bad habits and bad associations after graduation. John Quincy claimed that he had warned his brother that his behavior, if ever discovered by their father, would produce massive explosions: “I wrote him a very serious letter three weeks ago,” he confided to his uncle, “upon the subject in such a manner as must, I think, lead him to be more cautious.” Abigail took the view that Charles had sowed some wild oats at Harvard, but would recover once removed from the influence of his college companions.
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Nevertheless, the decision that Charles should read law in New York reflected the recognition that he required parental supervision, which could best occur if he lived with Abigail and John at Richmond Hill. By all accounts, Charles was a model law student. “I sometimes
think his application too intense,” Abigail observed, “but better so, than too remis.” After his parents moved to Philadelphia, Charles opened his law office just off Wall Street and, unlike John Quincy, was flooded with clients based on his growing reputation as one of the brightest and most personable young lawyers in the city.
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John decided to initiate what became a voluminous correspondence with Charles in 1792, not so much because he still harbored fears of his son’s addiction to alcohol, but mostly because he wanted to carve out a more mature adult-to-adult relationship based on their mutual interests in politics and the law. He sold his own horses in order to purchase the most up-to-date law books for Charles.

During a four-month period in the spring of 1794, John wrote thirty long letters to Charles, asking his legal opinion on America’s treaty obligations to France; bombarding him with lengthy discourses on the misleading doctrine of equality as promulgated by the French philosophes; urging him to broaden his base of knowledge by reading Confucius, Socrates, Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus; asking his advice about the convoluted politics of New York; and answering his questions about the existence of any thoroughly democratic societies in world history (“Yes, my son, there are many Such Societies in the Forests of America, called Indian Tribes”).
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He invited Charles to visit him for a week in Philadelphia (offering to pay all expenses), join him to observe the Senate, attend a levee, mingle with the prominent players, let a proud father show him off. Charles did visit, and after he left John described his favorite scene: father and son sitting together after attending a dinner, smoking cigars, sharing their reactions to the political gossip, bantering as friends into the night.
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Once back in New York, Charles received a letter from John in the parental mode: “You appeared to me, when you were here,” wrote John, “to be too plethorick,” meaning bloated. “There are innumerable Disorders which originate in Fulness, especially in a sedentary and studious life. You must rouse yourself from your Lethargy and take your Walk every Day.” Only with the advantage of hindsight, knowing as we do that Charles would die of complications from alcoholism five years later, is it possible to recognize that his bloated condition
was most probably not the result of inadequate exercise. He had become an alcoholic who was extremely adroit at concealing his addiction from his father and, for that matter, from everyone else, except his wife.
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When John returned to his post in the Senate in December 1792, the first order of business was to oversee the official counting of the electoral votes for president and vice president. Washington’s reelection was assured, and the tally revealed that, once again, he was a unanimous choice with 132 electoral votes. John’s reelection was less foreordained, creating the awkward prospect of certifying his own rejection by the electorate. Despite opposition from New York and several southern states, which rallied behind Governor George Clinton of New York, John was comfortably reelected with 77 votes to 50 for Clinton. “It does not appear,” he wrote Abigail, “that I am born to so good Fortune as to be a mere Farmer in my old Age.”
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The letter was necessary because Abigail had decided to remain at Quincy. Despite his pleadings, she refused to accompany him to Philadelphia, using her rheumatic condition and her aversion to that city’s heat and humidity as excuses. John complained that her decision produced a nefarious pattern, “to be separated both when we were too young and now when we are too old.” It also broke the prevailing pattern of the preceding eight years, when she was by his side as a full partner in the interstices of politics and life. The only compensation was her letters: “They give me more entertainment than all the speeches I hear,” John observed. “There is more good Thoughts, fine strokes and Mother Wit in them than I hear in a whole Week.”
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This time the roles were reversed; it was John who complained of being lonely and miserable: “I pore upon my Family at Quincy, my Children in Europe, and my Children and Grandchildren in New York till I am Melancholy and wish myself a private Man.” He adopted a refrain about his altered sense of time: “It is a common observation of old People, that as they advance in Life, time appears to run off faster.” But during his solitary days in Philadelphia, without
Abigail to quicken his pulse, time seemed to slow down. Abigail, on the other hand, found the distance less daunting this time around, and noted that the existence of dependable postal service created the possibility of an ongoing conversation. She thought it almost eerie that they found themselves, despite the distance, having the same thoughts at the same time: “It may be called the telegraph of the Mind,” she noted admiringly.
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Whether it was telegraphic or telepathic, Abigail and John had nearly identical reactions to the sudden surge of fiercely partisan politics that came to dominate John’s second term. Both of them located the source of the emerging opposition in the southern states, most especially in Virginia, which viewed the entire fiscal program of Hamilton as an engine designed to transfer power from the agrarian to the commercial sector, which effectively meant from South to North. Jefferson and Madison were the highly capable leaders of the Virginia-writ-large view that the federal government had no authority to legislate for the states and that Hamilton’s fiscal program, especially the National Bank, was therefore unconstitutional. Abigail was particularly outspoken in describing this purportedly principled position as a mere mask to conceal the sectional interests of the slaveholding south. “I firmly believe,” she wrote to her sister, “that if I live ten years longer, I shall see a division of the Southern and Northern states.” They both regarded the selection of a Potomac location for the national capital as a victory for Virginia, which was obsessed with ensuring that the federal governent speak with a southern accent.
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The political agenda shifted dramatically in the spring of 1793, when the French Revolution exploded into spasms of violence that sent shock waves throughout Europe. In both
Defence
and
Davila
John had predicted that any attempt to impose the utopian schemes of the French philosophes would produce anarchy, though he claimed to take no satisfaction in being proved correct: “It is melancholy that everything in France … should conspire so perfectly to demonstrate over again all my Books … Yet they do not good.” The only thing to do when the guillotine was moving so methodically was to steer clear and allow the bloodletting to run its murderous course. “Dragons Teeth have been sown in France,” he observed, “and come up Monsters.”
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Washington had reached the same conclusion, and in April 1793 issued the Neutrality Proclamation, declaring the United States a disinterested spectator to Europe’s ongoing calamities and, most especially, a neutral in the looming war between France and Great Britain. Though the proclamation represented a repudiation of the nation’s obligations in the Franco-American Treaty of 1778, John could claim that he had long ago abandoned those obligations by negotiating a separate peace with Great Britain in 1783.

While Abigail and John both agreed with the president on the policy of American neutrality, for at least three reasons that policy was much easier to proclaim than enforce. First, the vast majority of American citizens loved the French and loathed the British, for the obvious reason that French assistance had rendered possible the American victory over the British leviathan. Second, diplomatic detachment was difficult to reconcile with commercial entanglements, for the American economy was heavily dependent on trade with both France and Great Britain. (This was an intractable problem that would surface again in 1812 and 1917, in both instances drawing the United States into war.) Third, the burgeoning political opposition, now styling itself the Republican Party to differentiate itself from the Federalists, was more than willing to play politics with the issue, seizing upon the enormous popularity of the French cause throughout the land.

The new French minister, Edmond Genet, after coaching from Jefferson, stirred the pot by urging American citizens to defy the neutrality policy of the elected government and demonstrate their loyalty to the French cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Charles reported from New York that the city was delirious over Genet: “every man who now ventures to disapprove of a single measure of the French is, according to modern language, an Aristocrat.” The popular sentiment for a pro-French foreign policy, which almost surely meant war with Great Britain, reached a crescendo during the last months of 1793, with popular demonstrations in all the major cities and advocates on each side blazing away at each other in the newspapers. While he could plausibly claim to be the most experienced student of foreign policy in the government, John played no role in the debates
or the deliberations of the executive branch. “My own Situation is of such compleat Insignificance,” he lamented to Abigail, “that I have scarcely the Power to do good or Evil.” As Republican editorials targeted Washington and Hamilton for their betrayal of the French connection, John jokingly observed that he was so irrelevant that no one bothered to vilify him: “Poor me,” he confided to Abigail, “I am left out of the Question.”
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