First Family (39 page)

On August 10, 1817, John declared that “Yesterday was one of the most uniformly happy days of my whole life.” He had just learned that John Quincy, Louisa Catherine, and their three boys had landed at New York and the whole entourage would be arriving at Quincy in about a week. The joyous homecoming on August 18 was the highlight of their retirement years, a festive occasion to which Abigail invited a host of local dignitaries. She put on one of her best dresses and insisted that her famous son sit at the head of the table for dinner. The minister from Salem described her as the model of competence, seated on the sofa, sorting laundry while answering questions about Madison’s conduct of the recent war: “She had a distinct view of our public men and measures,” he reported, “and had her own opinions.”
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She also had her own property, or at least property that she regarded as her own. According to Massachusetts law, all family property was legally owned by the male head of household. But in January 1816 Abigail prepared a will, parceling out to her children, grandchildren, and niece, Louisa Smith, her silk gowns, jewelry, a lace shawl, beds, blankets, and $4,000, which was the nest egg that resulted from war bonds purchased during the 1770s. She also distributed to John Quincy and Thomas two parcels of land she had inherited from her family. Though a clear violation of the law, neither Abigail nor John regarded her will as an especially defiant act. It simply reflected the
underlying assumption of Abigail’s personal independence that had been the basis of their life together for over fifty years. John endorsed the terms of her will as a statement by the saucy woman he loved, but who never belonged to him or anyone else. No legal official in the commonwealth dared to challenge her claims in court.
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The will also reflected Abigail’s looming sense that the end was near, that her nearly miraculous ability to recover from each bout with debilitating illness, almost to reclaim her life by sheer act of will, would eventually run its course. Blessedly, for the year following John Quincy’s triumphant return she enjoyed excellent health, which permitted her to join John in carriage rides over the Quincy hills to visit friends and relatives. She even made two trips to Boston, where they were feted and fussed over as New England’s most venerable couple and one of the last surviving links to a glorious but bygone era.

It was a kind of Indian summer for the now legendary partnership, a final fling celebrating their central satisfaction of being together. John’s only complaint was that Abigail’s overly assiduous devotion to her domestic duties sometimes prevented them from spending more time together. He lamented her “uncontrollable attachment to the superintendence of every part of her household,” despite the obvious reality of “how few minutes either of us have to live.” For almost a full year, however, they recovered the old rhythms, walking the gardens, riding the fields, reading aloud to each other at night—Abigail was particularly intrigued by a biography of an emerging American hero named Andrew Jackson—relishing together the seasoned quality of their ongoing conversation.
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It all came to a sudden end in October 1818. Abigail collapsed with typhoid and probably suffered an accompanying stroke that made it difficult for her to speak. Interestingly, John first reached out to Jefferson, who had lost his own wife many years earlier: “The dear partner of my life for fifty-four years and for many years more as a lover, now lies in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to.” Abigail was in great pain and at one point murmured to John that she knew she was dying, that it was just a matter of time. After leaving her bedside in tears, John was inconsolable: “I wish I could lie down beside her and die too … I cannot bear to see her in this state.” Despite Abigail’s
chronic ailments, as almost ten years her senior, John had always expected to go first. With John at her bedside, Abigail died on October 28. She was seventy-four. The music they had made together for so long finally stopped.
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Of the many eulogies, Louisa Catherine’s was the best: “She was the guiding planet around which all revolved, performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.” John remained adrift and in mourning for nearly a year: “My House is a Region of Sorrow,” he explained to one friend. “Inhabited by a sorrowful Widower … burdened with Multitudes of Letters from total strangers, teasing me with impertinent inquiries.” He felt strangely alone, like a dancer without a partner: “The bitterness of death is past,” he told John Quincy. “The grim spider so terrible to human nature has no sting left for me.” The time that remained for him was just an earthly limbo while he waited to join her, either in heaven or under the ground, whatever providence decreed. He had no way of knowing that he had eight years left.
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EPILOGUE

1818–26

J
OHN DID NOT THINK
of the years that remained as a final chapter so much as an epilogue. With his partner of fifty-four years gone, he waited for the summons to join her and resume their conversation in the hereafter. (If it turned out there was no such place, his bodily remains would at least rest beside hers in the cemetery of Quincy’s First Congregational Church.) As he told Nabby’s daughter, he was ready to go at a moment’s notice, and growing increasingly impatient with “my distemper, Old Age, which I will not say with Franklin is incurable, because the ground will soon cure it.”
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He missed the daily banter with Abigail: the routine exchanges about children and grandchildren, Jefferson’s latest letter, John Quincy’s achievements as secretary of state, the annual manure shortage, Thomas’s embarrassing slide into alcoholism and permanent depression—the whole motley mix of large and small interests that, taken together, had filled their well-lived life together. He felt empty.

No one could replace Abigail, but the closest approximation became Louisa Catherine, another highly intelligent and well-read woman, not as saucy or self-confident as Abigail, though formidable despite her frailties. He had grown accustomed to being in constant contact with a woman’s voice, so he initiated a correspondence with Louisa Catherine to fill the void.

“The world falls to pieces around me,” he confessed to her in his most candid mode, “my friends and my enemies disappear.” This was
the kind of emotional honesty that he had formerly reserved for conversations with Abigail. Louisa Catherine responded with equivalent candor, sending John drafts of her poetry and her translations of Greek and Roman classics, requesting his advice about how to handle the delinquency of her eldest son, George, now at Harvard, and—this was risky—exposing her own discomfort with the social and political obligations of a wife whose husband wished to become the next president of the United States. John was all commiseration: “You will find in no department of public life any exemption from frequent twinges,” he explained from deep experience. “You must retire to Montezillo … for perfect serenity.”
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He confided to Louisa Catherine his frustration at never quite fitting into the Ciceronian mode of retirement. She responded by suggesting that he should not even try, since the role did not fit him: “You, my dear Sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent … to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism.” Abigail could not have put it better.
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From Louisa Catherine’s perspective, John’s heartfelt letters conveyed a level of unconditional acceptance that she had always wanted but never received from Abigail, whose matriarchal stature seemed so forebidding and whose efforts at intimacy often struck Louisa Catherine as thunderbolts hurled from atop Mount Abigail. If John needed to be in regular contact with a woman’s voice and mind, Louisa Catherine needed endorsement from the family headquarters at Quincy. John gave it to her: “The old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she recalled in her autobiography, “and was the only one [to whom] I was literally and without knowing it a fine lady.”
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John had always worried about “dying at the top,” but just the opposite aging process was happening to him: most of his teeth were now gone, and his “quiverations” made it impossible to hold a pen, so he had to dictate all letters to different grandchildren. He could ride a horse three miles but could not walk without a cane, and stairs had become insurmountable mountains. On the other hand, his mind remained hyperactive, at times almost childlike in its reckless release of innocent energy and endless curiosity.

An ice storm in the early spring of 1820, for example, caused him to conjure up the frozen rain on the trees as nature’s equivalent of a diamond necklace that was “more striking than all the diamonds worn by the Queen of France.” He was convinced that “all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression upon me equal to that presented by every shrub.” Or when rereading Cicero’s
De Senectute
, the classical handbook for retired statesmen, his mind took flight while contemplating the punctuation: “I have never delighted much in contemplating commas or colons,” he observed, “or in spelling or measuring syllables, but now, while reading Cato, if I look at these little objects, I find my imagination … roaming in the Milky Way.” As his body shriveled, his mind soared.
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In 1820 he was named a special delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, which had assembled to revise the document he had single-handedly drafted more than forty years earlier. He claimed to feel like a witness to his own second coming: “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions in my present state of imbecility,” he told Louisa Catherine, “but I presume that we will not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.”
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He rose to speak on two occasions, first to argue for the retention of the property qualification to vote, then to urge the removal of any religious requirement. He was outvoted on both occasions, prompting him to observe that he was simultaneously too far behind and too far ahead of popular opinion to win an election: “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar,” he apprised Jefferson. “I believe the Printers have made better speeches than I made for myself,” meaning that his own toothless mumblings had been rendered more cogent by newspaper editors than they deserved, perhaps the only occasion in his political career, he claimed, when the press seemed disposed to protect him from himself.
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It was not clear whether he ever conquered his demons or simply outlived them. Clinching evidence that all had either been forgiven or forgotten with Jefferson came in 1823. One of his old letters to a friend, castigating Jefferson for his multiple duplicities, had found its way into print, threatening the recovered friendship with an explosive blast from the past. Jefferson’s response was Monticellian gallantry in
its most lyrical form: “Be assured, my dear Sir,” he wrote John, “that I am incapable of receiving the sightest impression from the effort now made to plant thorns on the pillow of age, worth, and wisdom, and to sow tares between friends who have been such for nearly half a century. Beseeching you then not to suffer your mind to be disquieted by this wicked attempt to poison its peace, and praying you to throw it by.”
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John was overjoyed, only wishing that Abigail were there to read the letter alongside him. Instead, he insisted that it be read aloud to the entire extended family at the breakfast table, calling it “the best letter that ever was written … just such a letter as I expected, only it was infinitely better expressed.” He promised Jefferson that he would join him in all-out war against “the peevish and fretful effusions of politicians,” then signed off as “J.A. In the 89 year of his age, still too fat to last much longer.”
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Both men were also able to share the sense that they had become living statues. Jefferson, for example, entrusted his last letter to his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who was traveling to Boston and planned a visit with the Sage of Quincy: “Like other young people,” Jefferson explained, “he wishes to be able, in the winter nights of old age, to recount to those around him what he has learnt of the Heroic age preceding his birth, and which of the Argonauts particularly he was in time to have seen.” Most Americans coming of age in the 1820s regarded the American Revolution as a sacred moment in the distant past, when a gallery of greats had been privileged to see God face-to-face. It was disconcerting to realize that two of the most prominent heroes of that bygone era were still alive.
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