John Adams - SA (11 page)

Few delegates to Congress ever became accustomed to the bustle and noise; or to the suffocating heat of a Philadelphia summer; or to the clouds of mosquitoes and horseflies that with the onset of summer rose like a biblical scourge. Prices were high. Lodgings of even a modest sort were difficult to find. Conditions for the poor appeared little better than in other American cities. Misery, too, was on display. Delegates to Congress were frequently approached by beggars and, as in every city of the time, the scars and mutilations of disease and war were not uncommon among the passing crowds. Further, Philadelphia was notorious for its deadly epidemics of smallpox. During the most recent outbreak, in 1773, more than 300 people had died.

In his initial eagerness to see everything, Adams had made a tour of the new hospital. Led below ground to view the “lunaticks” locked in their cells, he saw to his horror that one was a former client from Massachusetts, a man he had once saved from being whipped for horse stealing. Afterward, upstairs, Adams walked between long rows of beds filled with the sick and lame, a scene of “human wretchedness” that tore at his heart. But if bothered by pigs loose in the streets, or the stench of rotting garbage and horse manure, he wrote nothing of it. Besides, like others, he found that to the west, toward the Schuylkill River, the city rapidly thinned out, beginning at about Sixth Street. By Eighth, beyond the hospital and the potter's burial ground, one was in open country. To a man who thought nothing of walking five to ten miles to “rouse the spirits,” it was a welcome prospect. There were fields with wild strawberries in summer and scattered ponds, which in winter were filled with skaters, the most accomplished of whom, doffing their hats, performed something called the “Philadelphia Salute,” a bow much like in a minuet.

One fair afternoon, as if to clear their heads, Adams and two or three others climbed the bell tower of Christ Church, up a series of dimly lit, narrow ladders, past the great bells in their yokes, to a point a hundred feet aboveground, where a trap door led to the open air of the arched lantern, above which rose the church spire. Steadying themselves on a slightly canted roof, they looked over the whole of the city, the long sweep of the river, and the farmland of New Jersey to the east. The breeze at that height was like nothing to be felt in the streets below.

With the rest of the Massachusetts delegation, Adams had moved into a lodging house kept by a Mrs. Sarah Yard on the east side of Second Street, across from City Tavern. A tally of his expenses shows charges for room and board of 30 shillings a week in Pennsylvania currency, not including firewood and candles, which were extra.

“My time is too totally filled from the moment I get out of bed until I return to it,
[with]
visits, ceremonies, company, business, newspapers, pamphlets, etc., etc., etc.,” he had reported excitedly to Abigail.

On Sundays, the one day of respite from Congress, he was at church most of the day, attending services twice, even three times. With numerous denominations to choose from (everything except Congregational), he tried nearly all—the Anglican Christ Church, the meetinghouses of the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, the German Moravians—and passed judgment on them all, both their music and the comparative quality of their preaching. The Reverend Thomas Coombe of Christ Church was “sprightly” and distinct. “But I am not charmed,” wrote Adams. “His style was indifferent.” Indifference was a quality Adams found difficult to tolerate. The Methodist preacher was another matter. “He reaches the imagination and touches the passions very well.”

One Sunday, “led by curiosity and good company,” which included George Washington, Adams crossed a “Romish” threshold, to attend afternoon mass at St. Mary's Catholic Church on Fifth Street, an experience so singular that he reflected on it at length both in his journal and in a letter to Abigail. Everything about the service was the antithesis of a lifetime of Sabbaths at Braintree's plain First Church, where unfettered daylight through clear window glass allowed for no dark or shadowed corners, or suggestion of mystery. For the first time, Adams was confronted with so much that generations of his people had abhorred and rebelled against, and he found himself both distressed and strangely moved. The music, bells, candles, gold, and silver were “so calculated to take in mankind,” that he wondered the Reformation had ever succeeded. He felt pity for “the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood,” he told Abigail.

The dress of the priest was rich with lace—his pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar piece was very rich—little images and crucifixes about—wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Savior in a frame of marble over the altar at full length upon the Cross, in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds?

Yet Adams stayed through all of the long service. The music and chanting of the assembly continued through the afternoon, “most sweetly and exquisitely,” and he quite approved of the priest's “good, short, moral essay” on the duty of parents to see to their children's temporal and spiritual interests. The whole experience, Adams concluded, was “awful and affecting”—the word “awful” then meaning full of awe, or “that which strikes with awe, or fills with reverence.”

For one accustomed also to the plainest of domestic comforts and daily fare—and who loved to eat—the scale of Philadelphia hospitality in the opening weeks of the First Congress had been memorable. Not even in New York had he seen such display of private wealth, or dined and imbibed so grandly. At a great dinner for Congress in the banqueting hall at the State House, on September 16, 1774, a total of thirty-one toasts had been raised before the affair ended. There were further elegant receptions and dinners at the homes of the Mifflins, the Shippens, the Powels, Cadwalladers, and Dickinsons, extended gatherings presided over and attended by many of the most beautiful, fashionably dressed women of Philadelphia.

“I shall be killed with kindness in this place,” he told Abigail. “We go to Congress at nine and there we stay, most earnestly engaged until three in the afternoon, then we adjourn and go to dinner with some of the nobles of Pennsylvania at four o'clock and feast on ten thousand delicacies, and sit drinking Madeira, claret and burgundy 'til six or seven.” Even plain Quakers, he reported, served ducks, hams, chickens, beef, creams, and custards.

“A most sinful feast again,” he recorded after another occasion, this in the splendor of a great four-story mansion on Third Street, the home of Mayor Samuel Powel, whose wealth and taste could be measured in richly carved paneling, magnificent paintings, a tea service in solid silver that would have fetched considerably more than the entire contents of the Adams household at Braintree.

“Dined with Mr.
[Benjamin]
Chew, Chief Justice of the Province,” he began still another diary entry.

Turtle and every other thing. Flummery, jellies, sweet meats of twenty sorts. Trifles, whipped syllabubs
, floating islands... and then a dessert of fruits, raisins, almonds, pears, peaches—wines most excellent and admirable. I drank Madeira at a great rate and found no inconvenience in it.

Within the walls of Congress, he was at first dazzled by the other delegates, who, he decided, comprised an assembly surpassing any in history. Of the fifty-four in attendance, nearly half were lawyers and most had received a college education. Several, like Washington, were known to be men of great wealth, but others, like Roger Sherman of Connecticut, had humbler origins. He had begun as a shoemaker.

As observant of people as ever, Adams recorded his impressions in vivid, fragmentary notes of a kind kept by no other member of Congress.

Richard Henry Lee of Virginia was a “tall, spare... masterly man”; Roger Sherman spoke “often and long, but very heavily”; James Duane of New York had a “sly, surveying eye,” but appeared “very sensible.” Joseph Galloway, a leading Philadelphia attorney and speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly who would later resign from Congress and ultimately seek refuge with the British army, struck Adams at first meeting as having an air of “design and cunning.”

John Dickinson, another prominent Philadelphian, was “a shadow... pale as ashes”; Adams doubted he would live a month. Caesar Rodney of Delaware was “the oddest looking man in the world... slender as a reed—pale—his face is not bigger than a large apple. Yet there is sense and fire, spirit, wit, and humor in his countenance.”

Adams was amazed by the range and variety of talents. “The art and address of ambassadors from a dozen belligerent powers of Europe, nay, of a conclave of cardinals at the election of a Pope... would not exceed the specimens we have seen.” Here were “fortunes, abilities, learning, eloquence, acuteness” equal to any. “Every question is discussed with moderation, and an acuteness and minuteness equal to that of Queen Elizabeth's privy council.”

But after a month of such “acuteness and minuteness” over every issue at hand, irrespective of importance, Adams was “wearied to death.” The business of Congress had become tedious beyond expression, he told Abigail.

This assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every man in it is a great man—an orator, a critic, a statesman, and therefore every man upon every question must show his oratory, his criticism, and his political abilities.

The consequence of this is that business is drawn and spun out to immeasurable length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that we should come to a resolution that three and two make five, we should be entertained with logic and rhetoric, law, history, politics, and mathematics concerning the subject for two whole days, and then we should pass the resolution unanimously in the affirmative.

Certain members began to irritate him. The perpetual round of feasting became only another burden of his “pilgrimage.” Even Philadelphia lost its charm. For all its “wealth and regularity,” Adams decided, Philadelphia was no Boston. Yet on departure from the First Congress in late October of 1774, after a stay of two months, he had written wistfully of the “happy, peaceful, the elegant, the hospitable, and polite city of Philadelphia,” wondering if he would ever be back.

By the time he returned for the Second Continental Congress, in late spring 1775, a month after Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia had become the capital of a revolution. Troops were drilling; lavish entertaining was out of fashion. Congress was in the throes of creating an army, appointing a commander-in-chief, issuing the first Continental money. With several other delegates, Adams spent a day inspecting defenses on the Delaware.

“There are in this city three large regiments raised, formed, armed, trained, and uniformed under officers consisting of gentlemen of the very first fortune and best character in the place,” Adams reported to Abigail's uncle, Isaac Smith, a prosperous Boston merchant whom Adams greatly admired. “All this started up since
[the]
19th
[of]
April
[since Lexington and Concord]
. They cover the common every day of the week, Sundays not excepted.”

The deliberations of Congress, meantime, had been moved from Carpenters' Hall to the larger, grander State House on the south side of Chestnut Street, between Fifth and Sixth Streets. Built some forty years before, it comprised a handsome main edifice, two stories tall with a bell tower and arcaded wings joining smaller “offices” at either end, all of it done in red brick. High on the exterior west wall of the main building, a large clock proclaimed the hour.

Congress convened in the Assembly Room on the first floor, to the left of the Chestnut Street entrance. An ample chamber, measuring forty by forty feet, it was notably devoid of decoration, “neat but not elegant,” with whitewashed walls and flooded with daylight from high windows on both the north and south sides. On a low platform at the east end of the room stood a single, tall-backed chair for the president. There were two woodstoves and on the east wall, twin fireplaces, one on either side of the president's chair. Seats for the delegates, fifty or so Windsor chairs, were arranged in a semicircle facing the president's chair, these interspersed with work tables covered with green baize cloths and clustered according to region: New England on the left, middle colonies in the center, southern colonies on the right.

The Pennsylvania Assembly, having given up its space, had moved across the hall to the more elaborate Supreme Court Room, where the royal coat-of-arms hung. At the rear of the hall, a broad stairway led to the banqueting room that extended a hundred feet, the full length of the building.

Outside to the rear was the State House Yard, an open public green the size of a city block and enclosed the whole way around by a seven-foot brick wall. The Rittenhouse observation platform stood off to one side, and at the center of the far wall a huge single-arched wooden gate, twice the height of the wall, opened onto Walnut Street. In good weather, as a place for the delegates to stretch their legs and talk privately, the yard was ideal. Many days more business was transacted there than inside. And with the yard serving also now as a place to store cannon and barrels of gunpowder, the war was never far from consciousness.

All sessions of Congress were conducted in strictest secrecy behind closed doors because of the number of British agents in and about Philadelphia and the need to convey an impression of unity, that all members were perfectly agreed on the results of their deliberations. Consequently, like others, Adams could report comparatively little in his letters home, except that the hours were longer than ever, the issues of greater urgency, the strain worse on everybody.

His health suffered. His eyes bothered him to the point that he had difficulty reading. He wrote of the frustrations of “wasting, exhausting” debates. America was “a great, unwieldy body,” he decided. “Its progress must be slow. It is like a large fleet sailing under convoy. The fleetest sailors must wait for the dullest and slowest.”

Yet he would not give up or let down. “I will not despond.”