John Adams - SA (21 page)

*   *   *

THE TENSION GREW EXTREME. John wrote to Abigail of being in constant “suspense, uncertainty, and anxiety” about the army at New York, and about “my best, dearest, worthiest, wisest friend in this world and all my children.”

Even if he were granted a leave of absence, it would not come soon. Things being what they were, perhaps it would be better if she came to Philadelphia. If she were beside him, Adams wrote, he could stay on indefinitely, “proud and happy as a bridegroom.” But thinking better of it, he decided she should inquire about horses to bring him home. “If Bass is in the land of the living, and is willing to take one more ride with his old friend, let him come.”

Low in spirits, feeling misjudged and unappreciated by others in Congress, some of whom, he was sure, mistook his ardor for ambition, he succumbed to brooding and self-pity. Nobody understood him. “I have a very tender feeling heart,” he wrote. “This country knows not, and never can know the torments I have endured for its sake.” He would rather build stone walls upon Penn's Hill than hold the highest office in government, he told her, as though he believed every word.

His view of the prospects at New York grew steadily darker. “May Heaven grant us victory, if we deserve it,” he prayed, “if not, patience, humility, and persistence under defeat.”

But sensitive to Abigail's own anxiety and the long days of her confinement in Boston, he began writing at greater length and more frequently than he had, filling pages with his thoughts on a great variety of subjects, conscious that the mixture was often quite odd. Her pleasure in such letters was boundless. “I know not how you find the time amidst such a multitude of cares as surround you,” she wrote. “I am really astonished at looking over the number
[of letters]
I have received during this month... I hope 'tis your amusement and relaxation from care to be thus employed. It has been a feast to me.”

A large wall map at the State House inspired a letter given over entirely to geography. (The Map of the British Empire in America with the French and Spanish Settlements Adjacent Thereto, by Henry Popple, measured nearly eight by eight feet, and was so detailed it even marked Braintree, spelled “Bantry.”) As a branch of knowledge, geography was “absolutely necessary to every person of public character,” and to every child, Adams declared. “Really there ought not to be a state, a city, a promontory, a river, a harbor, an inlet or a mountain in all America, but what should be intimately known to every youth who has any pretensions to liberal education.”

A sermon preached one Sunday by an unknown southern Baptist minister led to an extended essay on New England and southern preachers, the benefits of travel and education, Adams's own ambition to establish a Boston Philosophical Society, and concluded with a consideration of the shortcomings of his fellow New Englanders, in which he was also writing about himself.

My countrymen want art and address. They want knowledge of the world. They want the exterior and superficial accomplishments of gentlemen upon which the world has foolishly set so high a value. In solid abilities and real virtues they vastly excel in general any people upon this continent. Our N
[ew]
England people are awkward and bashful; yet they are pert, ostentatious and vain, a mixture which excites ridicule and gives disgust. They have not the faculty of showing themselves to best advantage, nor the act of concealment of this faculty. An art and faculty which some people possess in the highest degree. Our deficiencies in these respects are owing wholly to the little intercourse we have had with strangers, and to our inexperience in the world. These imperfections must be remedied, for New England must produce the heroes, the statesmen, the philosophers, or America will be no great figure for some time.

He wrote of Benjamin Rush as the very model of a member of the American Philosophical Society, and described a rare moment away from the cares of Congress, a visit he had made to the studio of Charles Willson Peale on Arch Street, where he had had the pleasure of seeing portraits by Peale of Washington, Franklin, the young wife of Benjamin Rush, and various members of Peale's large family. Peale, a new star in the Philadelphia firmament, young, gifted, gregarious, was also a wholehearted patriot who only days earlier had signed on as a common soldier in a company of local militia. “He is ingenious,” Adams wrote. “He has vanity, loves finery, wears a sword, gold lace, speaks French, is capable of friendship, and strong family attachments, and natural affections.”

Adams was drawn particularly to a painting Peale had begun several years earlier following the death of a daughter who, like Adams's own Susanna, had died in infancy. “He showed me one moving picture. His wife, all bathed in tears, with a child about six months old, laid out upon her lap. This picture struck me prodigiously.”

Encouraged by Adams's interest, Peale brought out books for him to see, showed him his sketches of Virginia plantation houses where he had stayed, including Washington's Mount Vernon. “He showed me several imitations of heads, which he had made in clay, as large as life, with his hands only. Among the rest, one of his own head and face, which was a very great likeness.” Adams was delighted. How he wished he had the time and “tranquility of mind” for “these elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture, and music.”

But if Peale's portraits were all “very well done,” he told Abigail, they were not so accomplished as those by John Singleton Copley, a view he knew would please her, since two particularly fine examples of Copley's work, companion portraits of Isaac Smith and his wife, Elizabeth, hung in the house where she was confined. “Copley,” Adams assured her, “is the greatest master that ever was in America.”

Writing of her days in the Smith house, Abigail told him she had discovered the joy of a room of her own. She had never coveted anything until now. It was a small room of her aunt's with a “pretty desk,” bookshelves, and a window overlooking a garden. She wrote all her letters there, she explained, and kept his letters to her “unmolested” by anyone.

Here, I say, I have amused myself in reading and thinking of my absent friend, sometimes with a mixture of pain, sometimes with pleasure, sometimes anticipating a joyful and happy meeting, whilst my heart would bound and palpitate with the pleasing idea, and with the purest affection I have held you to my bosom 'til my whole soul has dissolved in tenderness and my pen fallen from my hand.

How often do I reflect with pleasure that I hold in possession a heart equally warm with my own, and fully as susceptible of the tenderest impressions, and who even now whilst he is reading here, feels all I describe.

“I must leave my pen to recover myself and write in another strain,” she went on. “I wish for peace and tranquility. All my desires and all my ambition is to be esteemed and loved by my partner, to join with him in the education and instruction of our little ones, to set under our own vines in peace, liberty, and safety.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, she said there was an odd report circulating in Braintree that he had been poisoned.

*   *   *

EARLY ON THURSDAY, August 22, an exceptionally clear, bright day in New York, the British commenced their invasion of Long Island. In wave after wave, first in small boats, then transports, 15,000 English, Scottish, and Hessian troops were rowed across the Narrows from Staten Island to land without opposition on the broad shoreline near Gravesend, eight miles to the rear of the American stronghold on Brooklyn Heights.

A violent storm the night before had cleared the air. The wind was out of the north. Everything sparkled in sunlight. An aide to Admiral Richard Lord Howe described the spectacle of a fleet “of above 300 ships and vessels with their sails open to dry, the sun shining clear upon them,” of the green, wooded hills and meadows of Long Island, and the calm surface of the water as “one of the finest and most picturesque scenes that imagination can fancy”; and to this was added “the vast importance of the business and of the motions of the day.”

Contrary to basic military doctrine, Washington had divided his forces between Manhattan and Long Island. Expecting a second, larger British landing on Manhattan, he remained there, while on Long Island his battalions braced themselves for the assault. But for days the British command under General William Howe made no move in force, not until August 27, when a furious battle was fought to the southwest of Brooklyn Heights. Washington was by then on the scene with reinforcements from Manhattan. Exhorting his men to conduct themselves like soldiers, he told them everything worth living for was at stake.

But the inexperienced Americans were outnumbered, outflanked, and overwhelmed in only a few hours. Most had never been in battle, and while many fought hard and courageously, many did not. Conceivably, as Adams speculated, had General Nathanael Greene remained one of their commanders, things would have gone differently. Ill of fever, Greene had been replaced by General John Sullivan, a former member of Congress from New Hampshire who knew nothing of the terrain and had little of Greene's ability. More than 1,000 Americans were captured, wounded, or killed, and among the prisoners were several generals, including Sullivan. British losses were perhaps 400.

Howe's forces had gone into action filled with contempt for the traitorous American rabble, and numbers of Americans were slaughtered after surrendering. One British officer happily reported, “The Hessians and our brave Highlanders gave no quarter; and it was a fine sight to see with what alacrity they dispatched the rebels with their bayonets after we had surrendered them so that they could not resist.... You know all stratagems are lawful in war, especially against such vile enemies to their King and country.”

From a hill where with a telescope he watched a Maryland regiment fight its way back to the American lines against terrible odds, Washington was heard to say, “Good God! What brave fellows I must this day lose!”

When the remaining American army fell back to the defenses on Brooklyn Heights, General Howe, remembering the cost of his assault on Bunker Hill, chose not to press the attack, then or the following day.

Meantime, the wind held north, preventing any movement of British warships up the East River to cut off escape by the Americans, and on August 29 another storm blew in. A cold, drenching rain continued through the day and into the night. Before morning, a “peculiar providential” fog set in. When daylight came and the fog began to thin, the British discovered that the Americans had vanished.

Through the night, under the cover of darkness, rain, and fog, Washington's army had been ferried across the mile-wide East River, through powerful currents, in every conceivable kind of small boat, most of them manned by Massachusetts fishermen—some 9,000 to 10,000 troops with baggage and equipment, all moving with utmost silence.

The risks involved in so difficult a withdrawal had been extreme. Much had depended on those troops that remained behind, holding the lines until the last possible moment, an assignment given to two Pennsylvania battalions under Thomas Mifflin, who was by now a major general. “Our situation was very dangerous,” an unnamed officer would write in the Pennsylvania Evening Post. “The retreat was conducted in the greatest secrecy, and by six o'clock in the morning we had everything embarked.” But the hero was Washington. “There never was a man that behaved better upon the occasion than General Washington; he was on horseback the whole night, and never left the ferry stairs 'til he had seen the whole of his troops embarked.”

*   *   *

NEWS OF WHAT HAPPENED did not reach Philadelphia until days later. It was only on August 27, the day of the battle of Long Island, that Congress even learned that the British had landed at Gravesend. The wait for further word seemed interminable and in such “strange uncertainty,” John Adams sensed disaster. “Have we not put too much to the hazard in sending the greatest part of the army over to Long Island from whence there is no retreat?” he pondered.

It was not until August 31 that Congress learned of the battle and of Washington's withdrawal. And though the escape had been brilliantly executed and Washington was justly praised for saving his army, the defeat on the battlefield had been overwhelming, and the effect on Congress and on people everywhere as the news spread was devastating. “In general, our generals were outgeneralled,” Adams would conclude.

Newspapers were filled with eyewitness accounts of the suffering and defeat. For days in Philadelphia the talk was of little else. Then, to compound the atmosphere of uncertainty, the captured General Sullivan appeared in the city. He had been paroled by the British to report to Congress that Admiral Lord Howe wished to confer privately about an accommodation.

Sullivan arrived on September 2, and it was on the following day, Tuesday, September 3, with the outlook as dark as it had ever been, that Jefferson decided to delay his departure no more. As it was; he had stayed three weeks longer than he had intended. Having settled his accounts, he mounted his horse, and with his young servant following behind, started for Virginia.

Adams, too, had reached a decision, as he explained to Abigail in a letter of September 4. Events having taken such a turn at Long Island, he would remain in Philadelphia. When Joseph Bass arrived the next day with the horses to take him home, it made no difference. “The panic may seize whom it will,” Adams wrote, “it will not seize me.”

*   *   *

WHEN JOHN SULLIVAN, a swarthy, arrogant man, appeared in Congress on September 3 to deliver Lord Howe's request for a conference, Adams was incensed. As Sullivan began his speech, Adams remarked under his breath to Benjamin Rush how much better it would have been had a musket ball at Long Island gone through Sullivan's head.

Taking the floor in protest, Adams called Sullivan a decoy duck sent to seduce Congress into renunciation of independence. But after four days of debate it was decided that a committee be sent to meet with Howe, a decision, said Caesar Rodney, made more to “satisfy some disturbed minds out of doors,” than from any expectation of bringing about peace.