First Family (37 page)

Jefferson’s response was both deft and duplicitous. He argued that partisans on both sides had engaged in wild distortions during the presidential campaign, and that scandalmongers on the Federalist side had vilified him beyond recognition. (This was true.) But he also claimed that “any person who knew either of us could not possibly believe that either meddled in the dirty work.” In effect, he was contesting the claim that he had personally paid Callender to libel John. (This was a lie.)
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Abigail called his bluff. Jefferson’s payments to Callender were well documented, exposed by Callender himself after the election, when he complained about the meager level of compensation he had received and then went after Jefferson for his liaison with Sally Hemings. Jefferson’s response to these revelations had been some subtle
combination of silence and denial. Abigail was the only person on the historical record to confront Jefferson with the charge that he was a bald-faced liar. She did it with almost Jeffersonian deftness, recalling her previous respect for him, observing that “the Heart is long, very long in receiving the conviction that is forced upon it by reason.” But there was no denying that he had mortgaged his honor to win an election against her husband. His critics had always accused him of being slippery, disingenuous, and dishonorable. “Pardon me, Sir,” Abigail concluded, “that I fear you are.” In the vast Jefferson correspondence, no one had ever put it to him so directly.

Jefferson presumed that this volley of letters with Abigail had occurred with John’s knowledge and consent. In fact, Abigail had conducted the correspondence on her own, never informing John of the exchange until several months later, when she showed all the letters to him. “The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my Knowledge or Suspicion,” John wrote in the margins of the last letter. “I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.” Always his most ardent advocate, Abigail had delivered a decisive blow to his most elusive enemy, done with a level of controlled anger that John himself could never have mustered. All communication between Quincy and Monticello subsequently ceased for the next eight years.
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The blow delivered to Jefferson, no matter how satisfying, was a wholly private triumph, invisible to the public. It was also an exception to the main pattern of Abigail’s focus during the retirement years, which was more domestic than political. If John’s chief ambition was to live forever in the memory of future generations, Abigail’s was to create the hard nucleus of a family that would do the same. Her immortality was more derivative; she would live on in the memories and genes of her children, her grandchildren, and their progeny. It was also more maternal, frequently taking the form of a personal campaign to gather as many members of the extended family as possible to her Quincy haven, where they would come under her direct supervision and matriarchal gaze.

Her major projects were Louisa Catherine and Nabby. Quincy was probably the last place where Louisa Catherine wished to reside, since
she was temperamentally incapable of matching Abigail’s domestic competence, and in her presence felt like a hummingbird to Abigail’s eagle. But Abigail made a heroic effort to cultivate her trust, writing her on nearly a weekly basis and insisting that she regarded the wife of John Quincy as her own daughter. Her efforts to be helpful, however, frequently backfired, in part because of her own commanding style, in part because Louisa Catherine was predisposed to collapse into heaps of sobbing insecurity whenever Abigail’s advice seemed to question her own effectiveness as a wife and mother.

Soon after John Quincy, in keeping with his destiny, was elected to the Senate, for example, Abigail began a bombardment of maternal wisdom that Louisa Catherine, somewhat understandably, deeply resented: “I regret to hear that my dear son’s health is not good,” Abigail began. “I wish you would not let him go to Congress without a cracker in his pocket. The space between Breakfast and dinner is so long, that the stomach gets filled with flatuencies, and his food when he takes it neither digests or nourishes him.” Some newspaper reports had called attention to his careless and even slovenly attire, which Abigail found embarrassing, prompting her to urge Louisa Catherine “to prevail upon him to pay more attention to his personal appearance.” By almost any standard, this was maternal overkill and intrusive, no matter how well-intentioned.
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On the other hand, even a harmless suggestion by Abigail could send Louisa Catherine into a tearful collapse. For example, when Abigail mentioned that a relative living in Washington had expressed regret at not hearing from the wife of the newly elected senator, Louisa Catherine interpreted the remark as a personal affront “that gave me pain as it obliquely insinuated a reflection on my family,” meaning that she had not been raised properly and was obviously ill-equipped to fulfill the social obligations of her station. Abigail had said no such thing, but that is what the precariously perched and always vulnerable Louisa Catherine heard. Emotionally and temperamentally, the two women were worlds apart.
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Yet they were also inextricably connected, not only by the link with John Quincy but also by two young grandchildren, George and John, who did much of their growing up under Abigail’s care at
Quincy, where they were deposited for most of John Quincy’s term in the Senate and then again when he was appointed ambassador to Russia. Louisa Catherine frequently fretted about her role as absentee mother, and Abigail did due diligence as a hovering grandmother who tried to reassure her that the boys had her fullest attention: “I told him [John, then two years old] that I was writing to you,” she wrote Louisa Catherine, “and asked him what I should say. Shall I say John is good? No. Shall I say John is Naughty? No. He stood a moment and his little Eyes glistened. Say John has got a Beauty new Hat.”
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Abigail’s only concern was that grandparenting was almost by nature a more permissive and indulgent role than parenting, which might bode badly for the boys down the line. John apparently gave the matter no thought whatsoever. He encouraged the boys to crawl into bed with him, “disarrange all the Papers on my writing Table,” and whenever they said they were hungry, “devour all my Strawberries, Cherries, Currants, Plumbs, Peaches, Pears and Apples.” The children of John Quincy, it seems safe to say, were not raised in the same superdisciplined way as their father and pretty much had the run of the house. Although both boys eventually attended Harvard, neither lived long enough to make a contribution to the Adams line, and George committed suicide at twenty-nine.
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Nabby was Abigail’s other priority, more a rescue operation like Thomas, designed to limit losses in the current generation rather than cultivate prospects for the future. She wrote to Nabby more than anyone else, most often pleading with her to leave her hopelessly insolvent and dissolute husband and bring her three children back to the safe haven at Quincy: “I am writing by candle-light, whilst all around me are fast bound in sleep … Even faithful Juno lies snoring beside me … You must come to live with us.” It was a difficult command for Nabby to hear, since it contradicted all her previous education about a wife’s obligations to her husband. Nabby adopted a compromise position, which fit her core disposition to please all parties, by spending three or four months a year at Quincy and the remainder of the time in Lebanon, New York, with her husband, at one point even joining him in jail, where he was detained for his complicity in a wild-eyed scheme—his specialty—to invade and liberate Venezuela.
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This prevailing pattern changed dramatically in the fall of 1811. Nabby was in residence at Quincy with her daughter, Caroline, a spirited girl who reminded Abigail of herself at the same age, when she detected a tumor in her breast. John immediately wrote to Rush for advice, and he provided an unequivocal diagnosis: “From her account the remedy is the knife … I repeat again, let there be no delay in flying to the knife … It may be too late.” In November, three physicians performed a full mastectomy of her right breast in the parlor of the Old House, without anesthesia, while Abigail and John held each other in an adjoining room.
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“My own bosom has been lacerated by wound upon wound,” Abigail wrote to John Quincy. “I can scarcely trust my pen to describe them.” She was primarily referring to Nabby’s surgery, but her sister, Mary Cranch, and Mary’s husband, Richard, had died a day apart at almost the same time. Sally Adams seemed on the verge of death with pleurisy, and John had seriously gashed his shin while attempting to view the transit of a comet a few nights earlier. Her Quincy haven had become a hospital.
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Nabby remained in Quincy for six months to recover from the surgery, then returned to her husband. But, as Rush feared, the cancer had spread. Two years later, in July 1813, she arrived back at Quincy to die, emaciated, almost unrecognizable: “She is indeed a very sick woman,” Abigail reported to John Quincy. “Cannot take food … How she got here is a marvel to me.” Three weeks later Nabby died in her father’s arms with Abigail sobbing at the bedside.
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While resilience was a trademark Abigail trait, she never fully recovered: “To me the loss is irreparable,” she confided to John Quincy. “The wound … cannot be healed.” She had used similar words at the death of Charles, but Nabby’s death clinched a new level of prevailing sorrow that she could never completely dispel. Her grief poured out in gushes in her letters for a full year after Nabby’s passing, which Abigail described as the sudden departure of “my closest companion.” She had conceived of her matriarchal role as the preparation of future generations for greatness. But now it seemed that her primary task was to watch her own children die or, in Thomas’s case, slide gradually into alcoholism.
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The cloud of despair that descended upon Abigail after Nabby’s death coincided, ironically, with the lifting of the cloud that had been shadowing John since his retirement. Perhaps the deuces-wild correspondence with Rush had helped him to exorcise his demons. Or perhaps the interminable rantings in the
Boston Patriot
had served as a catharsis that purged his tortured soul of anxieties about posterity’s judgment. Whatever the cause, starting in 1812, and growing steadily thereafter, his letters reflect an emerging recognition of his own foibles and follies, a flair for self-deprecating humor, a capacity to laugh at his own eccentricities.

Inquiries about his physical and mental condition, for example, became occasions to make fun of himself: “I have one head, four limbs and five senses,” he told one curious stranger. “My temper in general has been tranquil except when any Instance of extraordinary Madness, Deceit, Hypocrisy, Ingratitude, Treachery or Perfidy has suddenly struck me. Then I have been irascible enough, and in three or four Instances too much so.” His expanding girth, he explained, had forced him to adopt a strict diet: “No veal cutlets, no old hock, no old or young madeira, no meat, no spirits, nothing but Indian porridge, water gruel … and five and twenty cigars.” There was no question, however, that time had taken its toll: “My constitution is a glass bubble or a hollow icicle … A slight irregularity or one intemperate dinner might finish the catastrophe of the play.”
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What did he think of Jefferson’s decision to mothball the ships-of-the-line that he, as president, had built up into a respectable American navy? Well, Jefferson would live to regret that decision, John observed, since war with Great Britain was probably inevitable, despite Jefferson’s futile policy of an embargo. (This was in 1811.) And when war began we would quickly discover that the American navy “was so Lilliputian that Hercules after a hasty dinner would sink it by setting his foot on it.” Or, even more irreverently: “I had like to say that Gulliver might bury it in the deep by making water on it.”
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How did it feel to be an American icon? Well, somewhat strange: “It is become fashionable to call me ‘The Venerable.’ It makes me
think of the venerable Bede … or the venerable Savannarola,” icons of the past whom John thought undeserving. He considered all efforts to mythologize him or the founding generation as a whole misguidedly reverential: “But to tell you the truth,” he wrote one young admirer, “as far as I am capable of comparing the merit of different periods, I have no reason to believe we were better than you are.”
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Did he have any serious reservations about the Christian doctrine of life after death? Well, such questions were inherently unanswerable, but he had presumed that God would afford him the opportunity to debate Franklin in heaven. On the other hand: “If it should be revealed or demonstrated that there is no future state, my advice to every man, woman, and child would be … to take opium.”
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These flashes of self-possessed irreverence suggested that the great volcano of American politics was at last in remission. The clinching evidence came in 1812, when he allowed Rush to manipulate him into a correspondence with Jefferson: “I perceive plainly enough, Rush,” he observed, “that you have been teasing Jefferson to write to me, as you did me to write to him.” Abigail’s earlier exchange with Jefferson had appeared to deliver the coup de grâce to any resumption of the old friendship. But Rush was relentless in his efforts to bargain a breakthrough: “I consider you and him,” he told John, “as the North and South Poles of the American Revolution. Some talked, some wrote, and some fought to promote and establish it, but you and Mr. Jefferson thought for us all.” Moreover, Rush reported that he had a dream in which the two great patriarchs resolved their differences, restored their famous friendship, and then “sunk into the grave nearly at the same time.” As it turned out, Rush’s dream proved eerily prophetic.
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Over the course of fourteen years, from 1812 to 1826, Adams and Jefferson exchanged 158 letters, with the flow from Quincy more than double the output from Monticello. Since John had made no secret of his animus against Jefferson during the past decade, several friends expressed surprise that he would agree to a reconciliation with that man from Monticello. But John claimed that he could no longer remember what disagreements he had with Jefferson, except that they had once argued about the proper length of a man’s hair: “It was only
as if one sailor had met a brother sailor after twenty-five years absence,” he joked, “and had accosted him, ‘how fare you, Jack?’ ”
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