John Adams - SA (92 page)

“While you live,” Adams answered, “I seem to have a bank at Monticello on which I can draw for a letter of friendship and entertainment when I please.

I believe in God and in his wisdom and benevolence
[he continued]
, and I cannot conceive that such a Being could make such a species as the human merely to live and die on this earth. If I did not believe in a future state, I should believe in no God. This universe, this all, this totalitas
[“totality”]
would appear with all its swelling pomp, a boyish firework.

That he had been blessed in a partnership with one of the most exceptional women of her time, Adams never doubted. Her letters, he was sure, would be read for generations to come, and with this others strongly agreed. Years later Louisa Catherine, who had not always enjoyed a close or easy relationship with her mother-in-law, would say that it was especially in the letters of Abigail Adams that “the full benevolence of an exceptional heart and the strength of her reasoning capacity” were to be found. “We see her ever as the guiding planet around which all revolved performing their separate duties only by the impulse of her magnetic power.”

To his granddaughter Caroline, Adams would write of Abigail's “virtues of the heart.” Never “by word or look” had she discouraged him from “running all hazards” for their country's liberties. Willingly, bravely, she had shared with him “in all the dangerous consequences we had to hazard.”

For years afterward, whenever complimented about John Quincy and his role in national life, and the part he had played as father, Adams would say with emphasis, “My son had a mother!”

*   *   *

Two WEEKS after Abigail's death, the painter John Trumbull, as well as several of the Quincy family, insisted that Adams go with them to Boston—“carried me off by storm,” he reported to John Quincy—to view Trumbull's enormous new painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Commissioned by Congress for the rotunda at the Capitol, it was on tour through several cities and was now on display at Faneuil Hall.

In preparation for an earlier, much smaller version of the scene, Trumbull had painted studies from life of thirty-six of the signers, including Adams, whom Trumbull sketched in London. If there was anyone who ought to see the colossal new rendition, measuring twelve by eighteen feet, it was surely Adams. Also, it was hoped the excursion to town would do him good.

The arrival of Adams at Faneuil Hall was described that night in her journal by Eliza Susan Quincy, herself an artist, who was among those riding with him. “Colonel Trumbull came to the carriage door... assisted Mr. Adams to alight and offered his arm to descend the steps. But Mr. Adams pushed him aside and insisted in handing Mrs. Quincy up the stairs and into Faneuil Hall, in which many persons had assembled.” The aged Adams standing before the painting, gazing silently at “the great scene in which he had borne a conspicuous place,” was a sight long remembered.

In composing the picture, Trumbull had placed Adams at the exact center foreground, as if to leave no doubt about his importance. Hand on hip, Adams looked stout but erect, the expression on his face, one of bold confidence and determination. Beside him, facing the desk where John Hancock sat in the president's chair, were Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Jefferson, and Franklin, all dead now except Jefferson, who in the painting held the Declaration in his hands.

Ranged behind were forty-seven of the fifty-six delegates who had signed the Declaration, each quite recognizable, including Adams's favorite, Stephen Hopkins of Rhode Island, standing at the rear with his Quaker hat on.

What Adams thought as he looked at the painting will never be known. A few years earlier, hearing that Trumbull was to undertake such a commission, Adams had lectured him on the importance of accuracy. “Truth, nature, fact, should be your sole guide,” Adams had said. “Let not our posterity be deluded with fictions under the pretense of poetical or graphical license.” Further, he had expressed concern over the projected size of the painting. “The dimensions, 18 by 12, appear vast... I have been informed that one of the greatest talents of a painter is a capacity to comprehend a large space, and to proportion all his figures in it.” During his years in Europe, Adams recalled, he had never passed through Antwerp without stopping to see the paintings of Rubens. “I cannot depend upon my memory to say that even his
Descent from the Cross
or his
Apotheosis of the Virgin
exceeded these measures.”

Clearly, Trumbull was no Rubens, and concern for accuracy had not been a major consideration. No such scene, with all the delegates present, had ever occurred at Philadelphia.

His audience in Faneuil Hall waited for Adams's response. Then, pointing to a door in the background, on the right side of the painting, he said only, “When I nominated George Washington of Virginia for Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, he took his hat and rushed out that door.”

Possibly it was Adams's old vanity that prompted the remark—to remind those gathered of how much else he had done of importance in that room in Philadelphia—or perhaps, confronted all at once with so many faces from the past, he was reminded of the all-important man whose face was not to be seen. Afterward, in a note to John Quincy, Adams remarked only on how cold it had been in the hall and that he had “caught the pip
[a sore throat]
as a result.”

John Quincy was vexed—“forgive me my dear father for saying it”—that Adams had not paid greater homage to the “mighty consequences” of July 4, 1776. “It was not merely the birthday of a powerful nation. It was the opening of a new era in the history of mankind.” As for the painting, which he had already seen, John Quincy thought it highly disappointing, no more than a collection of interesting portraits, “cold and unmeaning.” But then in capturing so sublime a scene, even a Raphael or a Michelangelo would have been inadequate, he was sure.

“All is now still and tranquil,” Adams wrote to Jefferson as the year ended. “There is nothing to try men's souls.... And I say, God speed the plough, and prosper stone wall.”

*   *   *

TO THE GREAT DELIGHT of everyone around him, Adams remained remarkably healthy and good-spirited. In the exchange of correspondence with Jefferson he continued to be by far the more productive, sending off thirteen letters to Monticello in the year 1819, for example, or more than two for every one from Jefferson.

To his immense pleasure, his Dutch friend, Francis van der Kemp, came for a visit of several days. Writing to Jefferson, Adams described Van der Kemp as “a mountain of salt of the earth.”

With Nabby and Abigail gone, Louisa Catherine filled a great need in his life, writing to him steadily and with affection, and welcoming what he wrote in return. Concerned about the trials she would face as the wife of so prominent a public man, Adams cautioned her to study stoicism. But who was he to preach stoicism, she responded warmly. “You, my dear sir, have ever possessed a nature too ardent, too full of benevolent feelings ... to sink into the cold and thankless state of stoicism. Your heart is too full of all the generous and kindly affections for you ever to acquire such a cold and selfish doctrine.”

John Quincy's achievements as Secretary of State were proving all that a proud father could hope for. When the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 added Spanish Florida to the United States, the old President in Quincy proclaimed it a blessing “beyond all calculation,” largely for the ways it might serve American naval operations.

His enjoyment of his family never diminished. He kept close watch on how George, John, and Charles Francis were progressing in their education. To help his son Thomas, who was having a difficult time supporting his wife and five children—but also for his own pleasure—Adams insisted they move in with him. When it was said he deserved to be known as the father of the American navy, Adams answered that he was father of enough as it was, with two sons, fourteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren, all of whom required his attention and support.

He loved company, the house full. He was rarely without aches and pains and suffered spells of poor health. Some days were extremely difficult. But he could still ride horseback, at nearly eighty-five, and on “rambles” over the farm or his walks about town he sometimes covered three miles.

He never tired of the farm. He loved every wall and field, loved its order and productiveness, the very look of it. “My crops are more abundant than I expected,” he would write one September. “I have the most beautiful cornfield I ever saw. It is drawn up like an army in array, in a long line before my house.”

His appetite strong, he delighted in the plain, substantial fare of the family table. As he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “We go on ... eating fat turkeys, roast beef—and Indian pudding—and more than that, mince pies and plum pudding in abundance, besides cranberry tarts.”

In the hours he spent alone, reading, thinking, or just looking out the window by his desk, he found an inner peace, even a sense of exhilaration such as he had seldom known. Old poems, ballads, books he had read many times over, gave greater pleasure than ever. “The Psalms of David, in sublimity, beauty, pathos, and originality, or in one word poetry, are superior to all the odes, hymns, and songs in any language,” he told Jefferson. He had read Cicero's essay on growing old gracefully,
De Senectute
, for seventy years, to the point of nearly knowing it by heart, but never had it given such joy as on his most recent reading, he told another correspondent.

For as I like a young man in whom there is something of the old
[ran a famous passage]
, so I like an old man in whom there is something of the young; and he who follows this maxim, in body will possibly be an old man but he will never be an old man in mind.

The simplest, most ordinary things, that in other times had seemed incidentals, could lift his heart and set his mind soaring. The philosophy that with sufficient knowledge all could be explained held no appeal. All could not be explained, Adams had come to understand. Mystery was essential. “Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good,” he wrote in the margin of one of his books, “but never assume to comprehend.”

Even the punctuation of a page, or the spelling of an individual word, could seem infinitely beautiful to him as part of what he had come to see as “this wonderful whole.

I never delighted much in contemplating commas and colons, or in spelling or measuring syllables; but now ... if I attempt to look at these little objects, I find my imagination, in spite of all my exertions, roaming in the Milky Way, among the nebulae, those mighty orbs, and stupendous orbits of suns, planets, satellites, and comets, which compose the incomprehensible universe; and if I do not sink into nothing in my own estimation, I feel an irresistible impulse to fall on my knees, in adoration of the power that moves, the wisdom that directs, and the benevolence that sanctifies this wonderful whole.

The view from his window the morning after one of the worst March storms on record filled him with ecstasy, despite the damage done to his trees. It was “the most splendid winter scene ever beheld,” Adams wrote.

A rain had fallen from some warmer region in the skies when the cold here below was intense to an extreme. Every drop was frozen wherever it fell in the trees, and clung to the limbs and sprigs as if it had been fastened by hooks of steel. The earth was never more universally covered with snow, and the rain had frozen upon a crust on the surface which shone with the brightness of burnished silver. The icicles on every sprig glowed in all the luster of diamonds. Every tree was a chandelier of cut glass. I have seen a Queen of France with eighteen millions of livres of diamonds upon her person and I declare that all the charms of her face and figure added to all the glitter of her jewels did not make an impression on me equal to that presented by every shrub. The whole world was glittering with precious stones.

*   *   *

IN LATE 1820, at age eighty-five, Adams found himself chosen as a delegate to a state convention called to revise the Massachusetts constitution that he had drafted some forty years before.

“The town of Quincy has been pleased to elect me a member of the Convention—and wonderful to relate—the election is said to be unanimous... I am sufficiently advanced in my dotage to have accepted the choice,” he reported to Louisa Catherine. “I feel not much like a maker or mender of constitutions, in my present state of imbecility.... But I presume we shall not be obliged to carry windmills by assault.” But in what was to be his last public effort, in a speech considered “very remarkable” for its energy and conviction, Adams boldly offered an amendment guaranteeing complete religious freedom in the commonwealth. As he believed that all were equal before God, so he believed that all should be free to worship God as they pleased. In particular, he wanted religious freedom for Jews, as he had written earlier to a noted New York editor, Mordecai Noah, who had sent him a discourse delivered at the consecration of a synagogue in New York.

“You have not extended your ideas of the right of private judgment and the liberty of conscience both in religion and philosophy farther than I do,” Adams wrote in appreciation.

I have had occasion to be acquainted with several gentlemen of your nation and to transact business with some of them, whom I found to be men of as liberal minds, as much as honor, probity, generosity, and good breeding as any I have known in any seat of religion or philosophy.

I wish your nation to be admitted to all the privileges of citizens in every country in the world. This country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in religion, government, and commerce.

Jefferson wrote to tell Adams he “rejoiced” at the news that Adams had “health and spirits enough” to take part in such an effort in the “advance of liberalism.” On arrival at the convention, Adams had received a standing ovation. But his amendment failed to pass. Blaming himself, he told Jefferson, “I boggled and blundered more than a young fellow just rising to speak at the bar.” But to young Josiah Quincy, who came by frequently to visit, Adams spoke with regret of the intolerance of Christians.