John Adams - SA (93 page)

Josiah, a student at Harvard, was to keep Adams company over several years, spending summers as Adams's secretary, and in his diary he devoted frequent entries to “the President” and his observations on life. “Visited the President as usual,” he wrote at the end of one session. “He was quite amusing, and gave us anecdotes of his life. He was particularly funny in an account of an interview he had with the Turkish ambassador
[the envoy from Tripoli]
in England.” Another time Adams stressed the need for “commotion” in life, to keep it from going stagnant. “For my own part,” he exclaimed, “I should not like to live to the Millennium. It would be the most sickish life imaginable.”

One June evening, when Adams came to call on the Quincys and brought along a letter from Jefferson to read aloud, he was asked to explain how he could possibly be on such good terms with Jefferson, after all the abuse he had suffered from him. According to Josiah's diary, Adams replied as follows:

I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe he always liked me: but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything that he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in life. This is human nature... I forgive all my enemies and hope they may find mercy in Heaven. Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of goodwill.

Indeed, Adams had become sufficiently confident in their “ancient goodwill” to broach the subject of slavery. In 1819, with Congress in debate over whether to admit Missouri into the union as a slave state, Adams had expressed the hope to Jefferson that the issue might “follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm.” Yet he worried. “I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire,” but a struggle between the states over slavery “might rend this mighty fabric in twain.”

The Missouri Compromise of 1820—whereby Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine (until then part of Massachusetts) as a free state, and slavery excluded in the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36° 30'—left Adams in torment over the future. She would think him mad were he to describe “the calamities that slavery was likely to produce in the country,” he wrote to Louisa Catherine. He imagined horrible massacres of blacks killing whites, and in their turn, whites slaughtering blacks until “at last the whites exasperated to madness shall be wicked enough to exterminate the Negroes.”

All possible humanity should be shown the blacks, he told another correspondent. And while he did not know what the solution to the presence of slavery should be, he was certain it should not be allowed to expand. He was “utterly adverse” to the admission of slavery into Missouri, which was in exact opposition to Jefferson, who favored it. Slavery, he now told Jefferson, was the black cloud over the nation. He had a vision of “armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in armor.” Yet he knew not what to do.

I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the southern gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments. What we are to see God knows, and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity. I have none of the genius of Franklin, to invent a rod to draw from the cloud its thunder and lightning.

Jefferson, who believed that slavery was a “moral and political depravity,” nonetheless refused to free his own slaves and gave no public support to emancipation. “This enterprise is for the young,” he wrote to a young Albemarle County neighbor who was freeing his slaves and urged Jefferson to “become a Hercules against slavery.”

In response to Adams's impassioned letter of foreboding, Jefferson said nothing. To others, however, he wrote privately at some length. He favored gradual emancipation and eventual colonization for the slaves. Should they ever be set free all at once, Jefferson wrote to Albert Gallatin, “all whites south of the Potomac and the Ohio must evacuate their states, and most fortunate those who can do it first.” But with Adams he avoided any discussion of the subject.

When, in his next letter, Adams suggested that in addition to the military academy at West Point, which had been established during Jefferson's presidency, there ought to be a naval academy, Jefferson replied at once in agreement.

Jefferson's own great preoccupation, his all-consuming interest for several years now, was the establishment of a new university for Virginia at Charlottesville. It was one of the proudest efforts of his life, and he was involved in every aspect, organizing the curriculum, choosing the site, and designing the buildings. Once construction was under way, he kept watch from his mountaintop by telescope. The full complex, when finished, would be his architectural masterpiece. The faculty, as he told Adams proudly, would be drawn from the great seats of learning in Europe.

Adams, who had no project to keep him occupied, said Jefferson's university was surely “noble employment.” He did not, however, approve of sending abroad for professors when, as he told Jefferson, there were a sufficient number of American scholars with more active, independent minds than to be found in Europe.

The two old correspondents continued to write of their declining health and persistent ailments, of old memories and the death of friends, but the letters grew fewer in number, and there was much about each of their lives that they kept to themselves.

Jefferson told Adams nothing of the new house he had built at his other plantation, Poplar Forest, or that Monticello, as visitors noted, was going to decay. He made no mention of his worsening financial straits and said not a word ever on the subject of Sally Hemings and her children. Indeed, he never referred to his slaves or the fact that his entire way of life was no less dependent on them than ever. Nor did he say anything of the dreadful turmoil within his own household—of the erratic behavior of his son-in-law, Martha's husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, or of the grandson-in-law, Charles Bankhead, who was subject to violent alcoholic rages.

But then neither did Adams write of his own increasing worry and sorrow over his son Thomas, who, having failed in the law, was drinking heavily and employed now primarily as a caretaker for his father and the farm. John Quincy's son Charles Francis, writing of his uncle Thomas, described him as “one of the most unpleasant characters in this world... a brute in manners and a bully in his family.”

The question of how two of his sons, Charles and Thomas, could have so sadly fallen by the wayside, while John Quincy so conspicuously excelled could only have weighed heavily on Adams's mind. But of this, for all that he wrote on nearly everything else, he wrote nothing. The closest he seems to have come in blaming himself was in a letter to John Quincy admonishing him that “children must not be wholly forgotten in the midst of public duties.”

*   *   *

VISITORS CONTINUED to call out of curiosity or genuine friendship, and Adams took pleasure in nearly all. Only occasionally would some leave him feeling low and more alone than before. Of one couple he wrote to Louisa Catherine, “They had eyes and ears to perceive the external person, but not feelings to sympathize with the internal griefs, pains, anxieties, solitudes, and inquietudes within.” But he refused to complain.

The morning of August 14, 1821, 200 West Point cadets, an entire corps, who were touring New England, marched out from Boston to parade past the Adams house, colors flying and band playing. Half the town turned out for the excitement. Adams, who stood watching from the porch, had provided breakfast for the cadets at his own expense. Tables were set up under an open tent. When they had stacked their arms and lined up before him, Adams made a brief speech, his voice faint at first but growing stronger as he went on. It was the example of the character of George Washington that they should keep before them, he said.

His remarks finished, the band played a tune called “Adams and Liberty,” while he beat time to the music. At the last, when all 200 cadets came up onto the porch one by one, Adams shook hands with each. “President Adams seemed highly gratified,” recorded Eliza Susan Quincy.

*   *   *

IF ADAMS'S LIFE—indeed, Adams himself—could be defined by what was left to him that he loved, there was still a great deal to the life and to the man, and he was extremely grateful. “No man has more cause for gratitude,” he assured Louisa Catherine.

He had his library room, where he slept now among his treasured books. On the table beside his reading chair were the latest novels of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, the sermons of Bishop Joseph Butler, along with Pascal's
Provincial Letters
.

He had almost continuous company and thrived on it. “In the evening I ...
[went]
to the President's and found the old gentleman well and lively,” reads one entry in Josiah Quincy's diary. “I scarcely ever saw him look better or converse with more spirit,” reads another. One June evening at the Quincys', having talked more than anyone, Adams declared happily, “If I was to come here once a day, I should live half a year longer,” to which the family said he must therefore come twice a day and live a year longer. The next day he was back again.

His pride in John Quincy knew no bounds. If he was writing to him less frequently, Adams explained, it was for good reason. “I know that you would answer every scratch of a pen from me, but I know the importance of your occupations and your indefatigable attentions to them, and no trifling letter from me should divert your mind.” The weeks in summer when John Quincy and Louisa Catherine returned home were invariably the summit of the year for the old man.

He wrote regularly to his grandsons on all manner of subjects, from books to the therapeutic benefits of riding horseback to the importance of maintaining one's independence through life. To Charles Francis he issued a summons to make of himself all that was possible. “Arouse your courage, be determined to be something in the world,” Adams wrote. “You have a fine capacity, my dear boy, if you will exert it. You are responsible to God and man for a fine genius, a talent which is not to be buried in the earth.”

In the spring of 1823, when John was expelled from Harvard, along with fifty others of the senior class for taking part in a student riot, Adams, in an effort to intercede in his behalf, explained to his mother that he could not find it in his own heart to reproach the boy, since he “did no more than all the rest, nor so much as many,” and urged Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him kindly.”

The affection Adams felt for Jefferson was expressed repeatedly and often with touching candor. When an old private letter of Adams's attacking Jefferson turned up in print, to Adams's extreme embarrassment, Jefferson proved that the friendship meant no less to him. “It would be strange indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “if, at our years, we were to go an age back to hunt up imaginary, or forgotten facts, to disturb the repose of affections so sweetening to the evening of our lives.”

Physically, Adams was declining rapidly. He suffered severe pains in his back. In cold weather his rheumatism was such that he could get about only with a cane. His teeth were gone. His hearing was going. Sadly, he had to admit he could mount a horse no longer. Yet he insisted, “I am not weary of life. I still enjoy it.”

*   *   *

IN 1824, with James Monroe due to retire from the presidency, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was nominated as a candidate to replace him, exactly as long predicted. With three others also nominated, and all, like John Quincy, avowed Republicans—William Crawford of Georgia, Henry Clay of Kentucky, and General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee—it became a crowded contest of “increasing heat.” John Adams was a great admirer of Andrew Jackson, but the prospect of his adored son winning the highest office was thrilling and a strong reason to stay alive.

To compound the excitement of the summer of 1824, the Marquis de Lafayette returned for a triumphal tour of America, causing a sensation. Landing at New York, he proceeded northward to Boston, accompanied by his son George Washington Lafayette, and on August 29 arrived at Quincy to pay an afternoon call on Adams.

As a crowd gathered outside the Adams house, numbers of the family filled the room where the two old heroes sat reminiscing, Adams hugely enjoying the occasion. “Grandfather exerted himself more than usual, and as to conversation, appeared exactly as he ever was,” recorded Charles Francis. “I think he is rather more striking now than ever, certainly more agreeable, as his asperity of temper is worn away.”

Afterward, Adams is said to have remarked, “That was not the Lafayette I knew,” while Lafayette, saddened by the visit, reportedly remarked, “That was not the John Adams I knew.”

John Quincy, when he arrived in September for a holiday of several weeks, was shocked by his father's drastically deteriorating condition.

His sight is so dim that he can neither write nor read. He cannot walk without aid.... He bears his condition with fortitude, but is sensible to all its helplessness.... He receives some letters, and dictates answers to them. In general the most remarkable circumstance of his present state is the total prostration of his physical powers, leaving his mental faculties scarcely impaired at all.

Such was the change in his father that John Quincy decided that one last portrait must be done and persuaded Gilbert Stuart, who was himself nearly seventy and seriously ill, “to paint a picture of affection, and of curiosity for future times.”

Adams agreed to sit, but only because of his regard for Stuart. Adams had little faith in portraits of himself. “Speaking generally,” he said, “no penance is like having one's picture done.” When a French sculptor, J. B. Binon, had been commissioned a few years earlier to render a marble bust for Faneuil Hall, Adams had posed most reluctantly—“I let them do what they please with my old head,” he had told Jefferson. Stuart, however, was a famously entertaining talker, and thus another matter. “I should like to sit to Stuart from the first of January to the thirty-first of December,” Adams said, “for he lets me do just as I please, and keeps me constantly amused by his conversation.”