First Family (9 page)

In subsequent correspondence Abigail continued to press for expanded rights for women: “If we mean to have Heroes, Statesmen and Philosophers,” she insisted, “we should have learned women,” because mothers would be most responsible for educating the rising generation. And that, in turn, meant that women should enjoy the same educational advantages as men. “The world, perhaps, would laugh at me,” she told John, “but you know I have a mind too enlarged and liberal to disregard the Sentiment.” Belatedly grasping that his wife meant business, John scrambled to find common ground. “Your Sentiments of the Importance of Education in Women,” he wrote, “are exactly agreeable to my own.” That conclusion followed naturally from being married to a woman like Abigail.
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But once he went beyond the private parameters of his own outspoken wife, John thought the implementation of a wholly egalitarian political agenda in one fell swoop a catastrophic political mistake: “There will be no end to it,” he warned. “New claims will rise. Women
will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State.”
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The conservative cast of John’s mind caused him to regard the full promise of the American Revolution as a set of latent implications that must seep out slowly over a long stretch of time. For her part, Abigail also relished the opportunities to remind him of the political and social consequences of his own arguments. While he conceded that Abigail’s arguments made intellectual sense, and he was prepared to entertain them in their private correspondence, John’s highest priority at the public level was to create a consensus for American independence. That effort needed to take precedence, because if it failed, all the other reforms would prove meaningless. Abigail’s silence on this score indicated that she agreed, or at least deferred to the political wisdom of her husband.

The spring and summer of 1776 was a crowded moment, both for the still-divided American colonists and for the Adams family. At the public level, the decision by George III to reject all proposals for reconciliation and to mount a military assault—the largest amphibious force ever to cross the Atlantic to date—exposed the moderate agenda in the Continental Congress as wishful thinking. And the publication of Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense
, which depicted George III as a ruffian and political criminal, enjoyed an unprecedented level of popularity, making it arguably the most influential piece of journalism in American history. As Paine put it in his electric style, “an island cannot rule a continent.” Events were now moving in the direction that John had always predicted they would.
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The decisive moment, at least as John saw it, occurred on May 15, 1776. For on that day he proposed a resolution that all the former British colonies now regard themselves not as colonies within the British Empire, but as sovereign states within the American republic. This was not just a negative act, denouncing the authority of the
British Empire, but also a positive act, announcing the arrival of an autonomous set of states, each of which should now draft a new constitution.
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John regarded this decision as “the most important Resolution that ever was taken in America,” a de facto declaration of independence. He confided to Abigail that it was the culmination of his campaign to get the Continental Congress on the right side of history, and he was extremely proud of his role in making it happen: “When I consider the great Events which are passed, and the greater which are rapidly advancing, and that I may have been instrumental in touching some springs and turning some small wheels, which have had and will have such effects, I feel an Awe upon my Mind which is not easily described.” He had entered the Continental Congress hoping to make history, and now he had actually done it.
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If John was making history, Abigail was witnessing it firsthand. She climbed up Penn’s Hill again to view the artillery bombardment of Boston by American cannons perched on Dorchester Heights. “The sound I think is one of the grandest in Nature,” she exulted, for it signaled the end of the British occupation. (Her eyewitness report to John included a humorous story circulating in and around the city that the infamous John Adams, who had been such a prominent advocate for American independence, had at last seen the light, defected to the British side, and boarded a ship for England.) A few weeks later she was atop Penn’s Hill once more to witness the British evacuation of Boston: “We have a view of the largest Fleet ever seen in America. You may count upwards of 100
&
70 Sail. They look like a Forrest.”
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John recorded a third triumphant moment in two letters to Abigail written on July 3, 1776. “Yesterday the greatest Question was decided which ever was debated in America,” he declared, “and a greater perhaps never was or will be decided among Men.” He was referring to the formal vote on the resolution, proposed by the Virginia delegation, advocating American independence from all forms of British authority. It had taken a long time to reach this climactic conclusion, longer than John had wished. But now even the ever-impatient and fidgety John Adams found a measure of virtue in the
delay. “Time has been given for the whole People, maturely to consider the great Question of Independence and to ripen their judgments.” Now that he had won, he could afford to be magnanimous.
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In subsequent recollections of this historic occasion, John tended to play down the significance of this formal vote and even the approval of the Declaration of Independence two days later. As he recalled it, the big decision had already been made on May 15, when his resolution to require each colony to regard itself as an independent state and to draft a new constitution accordingly had passed unanimously. That was the moment the lightning struck, and the formal vote on July 2 was merely the thunderous afterthought.
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But that latter-day recollection does not quite square with the second letter he wrote to Abigail on July 3. For there he joyously described the vote on independence as the truly culminating moment, the date that deserved to be celebrated as America’s birthday:

John got everything right, including the fireworks displays, but he got the date wrong because he thought the vote on independence more symbolically significant than the vote on the Declaration two days later.
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He was historically correct in his opinion, but he did not take into account the fact that the rest of America and the world first learned about the momentous decisions by the Continental Congress with the publication of the Declaration of Independence on July 4. (By the way, the delegates did not sign the document on that day, as most history books and the popular play
1776
claim. Most signed in early August, but delegates were coming and going and signing throughout
the fall.) John was actually at center stage on July 3–4, for he had selected Thomas Jefferson to draft the document and then had single-handedly defended Jefferson’s draft before the congress, which eventually deleted or revised about 20 percent of the text. But once July 4 became the acknowledged date for America’s birth, credit shifted from Adams to Jefferson.
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This shift annoyed him for the rest of his life. He could claim, with the lion’s share of the evidence on his side, that he had been the most vociferous advocate of American independence in the Continental Congress, consistently at the cutting edge of the radical camp, willing to risk unpopularity by dragging the moderate faction in the congress to a place they did not wish to go. For a man whose primal ambition was to achieve fame, the secular equivalent of immortality, the ascendance of Jefferson’s reputation over his own proved too much to bear. In his old age he asked, “Was there ever a Coup de Theatre, that has so great an effect as Jefferson’s penmanship of the Declaration of Independence?” The real business of American independence was a long-term struggle within the Continental Congress that John, more than anyone else, had orchestrated. By focusing exclusively on the Declaration, “Jefferson ran away with the stage effect … and all the glory of it.”
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But in the summer of 1776 John was so pleased with the ultimate verdict itself, and so confident that his own role in the revolutionary process was beyond question, that none of his later laments over who would have the starring role in the history books seemed necessary. Moreover, as we try to recover his mood at this crowded moment, two other events intervened to complicate his thinking, and, it turns out, his feelings, in ways that made resting on his laurels impossible.

The first event was the arrival of the forward edge of the British expeditionary force on Staten Island. John had been appointed chair of the Committee on War and Ordnance on June 13, a position that made him responsible for all the large and small policy decisions governing the Continental Army. (Strategically, should we oppose the British invasion at New York? Logistically, where do we get muskets and powder?) Washington was coming down from Boston with a
smallpox-infested army of twelve thousand men. The British force was conservatively estimated at thirty thousand, assisted by a naval squadron of several hundred ships perfectly suited to New York’s coastal exposure and navigable rivers.
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All the recently vented patriotic sentiments made the defense of New York mandatory. But any detached assessment of the military situation made a stand at New York suicidal. And if the Continental Army made such a stand and was virtually destroyed in the process, all the uplifting arguments in the Declaration of Independence would be essentially meaningless and all the prominent revolutionaries, John included, could expect to be hanged as traitors.

Abigail later tried to comfort John with the suggestion that even if the Continental Army suffered a catastrophic defeat, he need not worry, because “a race of Amazons” would rise up to replace the fallen men. John spent most of July and August attempting to negotiate the gap between his own convictions about the worthiness of the American cause and the gathering strength of the British army and navy, which were poised to crush that cause with overwhelming force.
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The second event concerned Abigail and the children. On July 16 John learned that Abigail had taken the family to Boston for inoculation against smallpox. “It is not possible for me to describe,” he told her, “nor for you to conceive my feelings upon this Occasion. Nothing but the critical State of our Affairs should prevent me from flying to Boston, to your assistance.” He said he felt like “a savage to be here, while my whole Family is sick at Boston.”
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As a result, July and August 1776 were two of the most politically dramatic and psychologically congested months in the history of the Adams family, mixing glory, foreboding, and trepidation in overlapping waves of emotion. In John’s mind’s eye he could simultaneously envision patriotic celebrations throughout the land, the largest fleet ever to cross the Atlantic gathering in Long Island Sound, and his entire family confined in quarantine amid a raging smallpox epidemic that, according to Abigail, had infected seven thousand people in and around Boston. On the latter score, the first reports were quite alarming: “Nabby has enough of the small pox for all the family beside,”
wrote Abigail. “She is pretty well coverd, not a spot but what is so soar that she can neither walk, stand, or lay with any comfort … She has above a thousand pussels as large as a great Green Pea.”
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Subsequent reports from Abigail only got worse: “Little Charles in delirium for 48 hours. Has caught the pox in the natural way.” That meant that he was at much greater risk, and Abigail warned John that he must prepare himself for the worst. “I would not have alarmed you,” she confided, “but we cannot tell the Event.” While this letter was in transit, John learned that Washington’s army had carried the contagion down from Boston and only about half his troops were fit for duty, this on the eve of what promised to be the defining battle of the war. “The Small Pox has done Us more harm than British armies, Canadians, Indians, Negroes, Hannoverians, Hessians, and all the rest,” he lamented to Abigail. And now it was threatening to carry off “my little Babes.”
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If his correspondence is an accurate measure, John’s primary concern was not the ongoing debates in Philadelphia, or the two armies gathering at New York, but rather his wife and children under quarantine in Boston. Or perhaps it is safer to say that he rocked back and forth between his draining public responsibilities and his emotional concern for the family. At any rate, he wrote Abigail almost every day, most frequently asking about “my sweet Babe, Charles, [who] is never out of my Thoughts—Gracious Heaven preserve him.”
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Abigail was thrilled to receive such a steady stream of letters: “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she exclaimed, “but I feel myself more obliged by the frequent tokens of your remembrance.” Abigail described one scene in which John Quincy, whose inoculation had taken and was now perfectly healthy, returned from the post office, “and pulling one [letter] from under his Gown gave it to me, the young Rogue smiling and watching Mammas countenance, draws out another, and then an other, highly gratified that he had so many presents to bestow.” In the same letter she also described Charles, “who lay upon the couch coverd over with small Pox, lifted up his head and says ‘Mamma, take my Dollar and get a Horse for Pappa,’ ” so he could come home.
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