First Family (4 page)

As they were working out their new roles as husband, wife, and parents, the American colonies were being asked to work out new roles within a reconfigured British Empire. Abigail and John launched their marriage at the same time the British ministry launched its legislative initiative to impose parliamentary authority
over the colonies. In fact, Nabby arrived at almost the same time that news of the most offensive parliamentary initiative, the Stamp Act, arrived in America.

In one sense this convergence was purely coincidental. But the coincidence is worth contemplating, because it permits us to recover the messier and more layered mentality of history happening, that is, as Abigail and John actually experienced it. The great public events of the time that stand front and center in the history books were only part of the story they were living, and the more private side of the story—their family life—became the lens through which they perceived and made sense of those grander events emanating from England. The prominent role that John came to play in orchestrating the opposition to British policy, a role that provided him with the revolutionary credentials that established the foundation for his entire career in public life thereafter, required great patience as well as bottomless conviction. He was ready for the role that history eventually assigned him after the marriage to Abigail in a way that he had not been before.

During the three years before his marriage, John began to write essays aimed at the public press. He was clearly not content to become a successful country lawyer, and the ambitions surging inside him were searching for an outlet on some larger stage. His first effort was a series of essays entitled “The Evils of Licensed Houses,” none of which was ever published. This was probably for the best, since their purported point—that most taverns were dens of iniquity—was contradicted by the evidence in his diary at the time, which depicted the boisterous camaraderie of dancers, drinkers, and singers at his favorite tavern as a beguiling portrait of the human menagerie at play. Perhaps he felt guilty about his own feelings of fun, so the essays were his clumsy effort at making amends. Or perhaps he simply was telling prospective readers what he thought they wanted to hear.
²⁹

His next effort, which did make it into the Boston newspapers, was a series of pieces written under the pseudonym “Humphrey
Ploughjogger.” Mostly moral lectures on the evils of political factions and partisanship, these essays were distinctive in their style, which attempted to mimic the voice of a quasi-literate farmer with a down-home sense of humor and a rustic kind of wisdom. For example, Humphrey ridiculed “grate men who dus nothing but quarrel with one anuther and put pices in the nues paper,” which, if you think about it, was a parody of himself. One could read the Ploughjogger essays as a primitive version of an American literary tradition that reached its artistic culmination in Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. In the context of the moment, however, its significance would seem more personal. John was trying on different identities and voices as he auditioned for a role in the limelight. At the cusp of his marriage, he comes across as a painfully earnest, still unfocused young man, full of himself in several senses of the term, but still very much a work in progress.
³⁰

In the spring of 1764 Great Britain began to implement its new imperial strategy for the American colonies. The imperial initiative, most especially the Stamp Act (1765), was a heavenly gift for John, who had been searching for a cause of truly historic proportions, and the ministry of George III, along with the British parliament, now provided it almost providentially. Abigail and the soon-to-arrive children provided him with a family haven from the vicissitudes of the world, a comfort zone where he did not have to worry about constantly proving himself, a more stable psychological foundation for his ever-quivering ego. Not so incidentally, Abigail also offered an outlet for the long-suppressed sexual energies of a twenty-nine-year-old male. All at once he had a cause as large as an imperial crisis and a newfound confidence. The consequences were nothing short of spectacular.

The first consequence was a series of four essays in the
Boston Gazette
entitled
A Dissertation Upon the Canon and Feudal Law
. (John later made a point of mentioning that portions of this work were drafted in his Braintree study while Abigail was nursing Nabby upstairs.) His initial entry in the imperial debate—scores of others would quickly follow—
Dissertation
was perhaps the most intellectually cogent and stylistically satisfying collection of essays he ever
wrote. Years later, he recalled its composition fondly, adding that “it might as well have been called an Essay upon Forefathers Rock.”
³¹

Many of John’s subsequent contributions to the political debate were closely reasoned legalistic arguments, often of a tedious sort.
Dissertation
, on the other hand, had a sweeping and soaring quality that derived from its central premise, which was that the political cultures of England and New England were fundamentally at odds. The former was rooted in the arbitrary and coercive forms of government of the Old World, legacies of the medieval fusion of church and state. The entire history of New England since the first settlements, on the other hand, was a repudiation of this legacy, which over the course of almost 150 years had yielded political and religious institutions based on the principle of consent.

Although John began drafting
Dissertation
before news of the Stamp Act arrived in Boston, his analysis of the inherently imperious character of the British Empire eerily foreshadowed the most offensive features of the Stamp Act. He was one of the first into the fight.

Dissertation
became one of the earliest expressions of what came to be called American Exceptionalism, though in John’s version only New England was featured as the unique depository of an essentially consensual and participatory politics. His argument laid the intellectual foundation for the more focused rejections of Parliament’s authority that he published over the next decade, because it suggested that the disagreements between the American colonies and Great Britain were deeply rooted in two fundamentally different historical experiences, and therefore were probably irresolvable. It was a rather auspicious way to launch a political career, the kind of panoramic and prophetic contribution that one might expect from someone much older. It signaled the arrival of a major presence on the Boston political scene.
³²

He followed up
Dissertation
with a more pointed attack on the Stamp Act as an illegal violation of long-standing American rights. This was
Braintree Instructions
, which he wrote at the request of the Braintree town meeting. He made three arguments, none particularly original but all rendered in a succinct and defiantly punchy style: first, that the Stamp Act was unconstitutional because Parliament was
claiming a power to tax colonists that it did not possess; second, by taking this unprecedented step, the members of Parliament were the true radicals and the colonists the true conservatives; third, given the illegality of the Stamp Act, the proper way to proceed was to refuse to obey it, since, as he later put it, “it was no more binding than an Act to destroy half of our Species.”

Forty towns in Massachusetts, including Boston, adopted the language of
Braintree Instructions
as the clearest and most forceful expression of their political sentiments. This made John, almost overnight, one of the most famous men in Massachusetts. And when
Braintree Instructions
was published in several London newspapers, he became one of the most infamous men in England.
³³

Abigail had almost surely assumed that she was marrying a man of potentially local prominence who might achieve a lawyerly version of her father’s ministerial career at Weymouth. All of a sudden, the size of the theater and the stakes of the game had changed dramatically. We do not know how she viewed this escalation of prospects. She was nursing Nabby and about to become pregnant with John Quincy, so she already faced a demanding set of physical and emotional challenges. Now a new and at least equally demanding dimension was added to her life. She was being asked to accompany John—presumably the children, whatever their eventual number, trailing behind—as he strolled toward his appointment with destiny.

“The year 1765 has been the most remarkable year of my life,” John recorded in his diary as the year was ending. “The enormous engine fabricated by the British Parliament for battering down all the rights and liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread through the whole continent a spirit that will be recorded to our honor, with all future generations.” This observation, made in the moment, turned out to be correct. American opposition to the act became the opening shot in a struggle that led to withdrawal from the British Empire, the creation of an American republic, and the ascendance of a country lawyer named John Adams to the top tier of a quite
remarkable group of American statesmen, later capitalized and mythologized as the Founding Fathers.
³⁴

John was extremely prolific during the next decade, publishing between twenty-five and thirty essays that challenged Parliament’s right to tax the colonies and, eventually, to legislate at all for them. One could argue that Abigail was equally prolific during this time, laying the biological foundation for what would eventually be called the Adams dynasty. John’s political writings dominate the historical record of their lives together at this time, in part because they focus on major public issues that ended up altering the course of history, in part because of the paradox of proximity, meaning that there are very few letters offering a window into Abigail’s domestic world.

One does get a few glimpses of Abigail’s mentality every now and then, as when she complains to her sister that John’s legal cases have made him “such an Itinerant … that I have but little of his company.” Or when she reports that two-year-old Nabby is “fat as a porpoise and falls heavey,” thereby producing a continually bruised forehead. Or when, in 1774, John is preparing to leave for the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and worries out loud to Abigail about whether to buy a new suit and how much linen to pack. On a day-by-day basis, the primary lens through which both of them viewed the world—she, of course, more than he—was the family. As a result, the more publicly oriented historical record distorts their actual experience of living through a rather propitious moment in American history at the same time as they were defining their respective roles within the marriage and founding a family.
³⁵

The unbalanced documentation also makes it difficult to know how fully informed Abigail was about the political debates that consumed so much of John’s energy and attention. Her letters make clear that she was reading the Boston newspapers. Glancing remarks in his letters suggest that he shared his thoughts with her, read early drafts of his essays to her, and asked her advice about key decisions, such as whether to accept election to the Massachusetts legislature in 1770. (On the latter score, John mentioned in his autobiography that he “expressed to Mrs. Adams all my Apprehensions” and that Abigail, “that excellent lady, who always encouraged me, burst unto a flood of
Tears” but eventually endorsed the decision to take the post.) We also know from later chapters in John’s political career that Abigail was a fully informed and deeply involved political confidante, so it is plausible to read that role into this earlier chapter.
³⁶

The clearest evidence of her political posture comes in a letter to Isaac Smith Jr., a cousin who was living in London. “From my infancy,” she wrote, “I have always felt a great inclination to visit the Mother Country as tis called, and had nature formed me of the other Sex, I should certainly have been a rover.” Then she went on: “Dont you think this little spot of ours better calculated for happiness than any you have yet seen? Would you exchange it for England, France, Spain or Ittally? Are not the people here more upon an Equality in point of knowledge and of circumstances—there being none so immensely rich as to Lord it over us, neither any so abjectly poor as to suffer for the necessaries of life.” Clearly, if the lines were ever drawn, she stood proudly with New England.
³⁷

In his published essays John was also drawing a series of lines, the chief one being between American rights and Parliament’s authority, but not until the end of the decade, in 1774, was he prepared to contemplate drawing the ultimate line that severed the connection between the colonies and the British Empire, and even then he was reluctant to cut the cord with the Crown. As we have seen, the argument first advanced in
Dissertation
implied that the history of New England had created a fundamentally different set of political assumptions and institutions from those operative in England. And much later in his life he claimed that, at least in retrospect, the argument made by James Otis in the writs of assistance case in 1761, in which Otis denied the right of Parliament to sanction searches of Massachusetts homes, foreshadowed the eventual break. (Adams was present in the courtroom for Otis’s presentation, later describing himself as “a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury” and Otis as a more impressive orator than Patrick Henry.) However, throughout the late 1760s and early 1770s John’s political agenda was not American independence, but getting the British ministry to come to its senses in order to recover America’s historic status within the empire.
³⁸

Under the pseudonym “Clarendon,” he emphasized that it was the
British constitution that guaranteed the rights of all Englishmen, establishing as a principle of law that the British Empire was “not built on the doctrine that a few nobles or rich commons have a right to inherit the earth.” The Stamp Act was, by this reasoning, clearly a violation of “those ancient Whig Principles” and therefore no more binding on any true Englishman than some crazed pronouncement by the local drunk.
³⁹