by James Traub
After a delightful spring semester, Adams returned to Braintree to spend the summer reading and tramping around the farm.
BY THE TIME JOHN QUINCY ADAMS HAD RETURNED HOME, THE common enemy that had united the colonies was long gone, and divisions of class and geography among Americans had begun, inevitably, to surface. The late summer and fall of 1786 proved to be a period of turmoil and social disorder, above all in New England. A serious recession led to both rising unemployment and a credit squeeze. Merchants who could no longer pay off their debts called in loans they had made, setting off a cascade of credit demands that ended with farmers who had financed purchases through debt. With commodity prices depressed, many farmers found themselves insolvent; creditors took them to court. Some farmers were thrown off their land; others were jailed. Farmers and artisans began to petition state legislatures to loosen credit by issuing paper money. Most states refused, and protestors, especially in Massachusetts, thronged around courthouses to prevent cases from going forward.
In late August, 1,500 farmers blocked the Court of Common Pleas in Northampton, and then moved on to Worcester, Taunton, Concord, and Great Barrington. In several cases, militia conscripts refused a direct order from Governor Nathaniel Bowdoin to disperse the protestors. The populist insurgency, know as Shays’ Rebellion, seemed to threaten the legitimacy of government itself, and turned even the most fiery revolutionaries into defenders of the established order. Samuel Adams, hero of the Boston Tea Party, helped sponsor the Riot Act, which authorized the suspension of habeas corpus.
Harvard knew very well where it stood in a battle between merchants and farmers with pitchforks. Harrison Gray Otis recruited a light infantry from among his friends to be put at the disposal of the governor. John Quincy Adams had no fortune to protect and no intention of joining a militia, but in this, the first serious political conflict of his adult life, he immediately arrayed himself with the forces of duly constituted order. He had no sympathy for the protestors’ complaints. “Citizens,” he wrote in his journal, “must look to themselves, their idleness, their dissipation and extravagance, for their grievances.”
To Adams, the Shaysites were not a democratic force but an insurrectionary one; unchecked, the protest would lead to anarchy and civil war. Order must be protected from popular passion. In a forensic over the question of equality, he took the view that the laws could offer no protection if every citizen felt free to change them. Government must be entrusted to those who understood best how to govern—a sentiment difficult to square with the American faith that all are created equal. “In arguing against equality,” he acknowledged, “I am combating against the sentiments of perhaps a large majority of the inhabitants of this Commonwealth.” But nature itself had created inequality among men, and it was not for anyone to seek to make it otherwise.
This conservatism, which feared the mob more than those who ruled them, was very much the Adams family credo. When the news of Shays’ Rebellion reached London, in November, Abigail wrote to say that “a popular Tyranny never fails to be followed by the arbitrary government of a Single person.” She reported that her husband was working on a new treatise on “the different forms of government, both ancient and modern.” This was to become A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, a massive tract that constituted Adams’ chief contribution to the debate over the organization of government in the new nation. Adams argued, then and later, that a republic could not preserve people’s liberties without a strong executive, independent from the legislature. “The people,” he wrote, “can be as tyrannical as any king.” In fact, he told Abigail, he would be perfectly happy to establish a constitutional monarchy, so long as it was constrained by the legislature and the judiciary. John Adams viewed the utopian optimism about the American people that resounded through the works of Thomas Paine—and Thomas Jefferson—as dangerous fantasy. Shays’ Rebellion turned what had been an abstract question of political philosophy into an urgent matter on which men took sides. And John Quincy Adams, an acorn from the family oak, could scarcely have differed from his father on this great question.
The rebellion burned through New England in the last months of 1786. The rioters organized into regiments, hoping to overthrow the state government. In late November, rumors spread through Harvard that 1,500 Shaysites had gathered four miles from Cambridge, prepared to march on the town. For months, Adams wrote, no one spoke of anything else: the American experiment in self-government seemed to be in danger of collapsing from within. In January the Shaysites launched an attack on the Springfield armory, only to be repulsed by cannon fire and grapeshot. Several weeks later, Governor Bowdoin was authorized to declare martial law and to wipe out the rebels. By June, the first domestic insurgency in American history had been crushed. And John Quincy Adams had come down forcefully on the side of the state’s right to enforce its authority—its legitimate authority—in the face of a popular uprising.
Adams had never been happier than he was at Harvard. He was no longer a hybrid creature, half-European, half-American. And he was staying in one place. For the first time, he had been able to make dear friends. He had been reunited with his brothers, Tom and Charles, and took very much to heart his parents’ admonitions that he watch over them. He sought to prepare Tom for Harvard with the same sentiments he had heard from his own father: “I could wish you to be upon good terms with all your classmates, but intimate with few, endeavour to have no Enemies, and you can have but few real friends.” Never permit popularity to overcome the dictates of your conscience, study six hours a day, and, all in all, ensure that “both your moral and your Literary character be set as an example for your own classmates, and the succeeding classes to imitate.” At age nineteen, this moralistic and unironic language came quite naturally to Adams.
As the spring semester wound to a close, and graduation loomed, Adams was assailed by fears about his future and gloom about his coming departure. “It is not without many melancholy reflections that I bid a last adieu to the walls of Harvard,” he wrote in his journal. “I have never once regretted but I have frequently rejoiced that I left Europe to pass a twelvemonth here.” Harvard, he wrote, “has been productive of good effects, particularly in reducing my opinion of myself.” He had entered Harvard as the Adams family prodigy and emerged as just another bright young man hoping to make his way in the world. He understood that life would not be easy. That, in fact, was what worried him and haunted his last days at school. He didn’t want to study law, but how else could he earn a living? There was no family business to enter and certainly no family fortune to batten upon. And his father had decreed that the Adams boys would be lawyers.
What, then, was next? Both the Reverend Shaw and Cotton Tufts, the family lawyer, suggested Adams read law under Theophilus Parsons, a scholarly attorney in the town of Newburyport who had served with John Adams in the convention that wrote the Massachusetts state constitution in 1780. In late June, it was agreed that Adams would spend the next two years of his life studying for the law with Parsons. It felt to the young man like a prison sentence. On July 11, his twenty-first birthday, he wrote, in a tone of self-flagellation that would become increasingly common, “I am good for nothing. Three long years I have yet to study in order to qualify for business, and then!—oh, and then, how many years am I to plod along mechanically, if I should live, before I shall really get into the world?” For Adams, as for so many recent graduates before and since, leaving college felt like being expelled from Eden.
The Harvard commencement of the day was an elaborate public ritual in which students were expected to demonstrate their mastery through performance, including orations in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and English; forensics; and syllogisms, an exercise assigned to the academic also-rans. Adams’ graduating class had spent months deliberating on the all-important parceling out of these assignments. Adams had graduated second in the class; as one of the intellectual stars he was assigned to deliver an English oration. His topic
would be “the necessity of public faith to the well-being of a community.” This was a distinction, and a performance, that mattered a great deal to him.
Commencement was held July 18. A procession formed up at eleven A.M. at the door of Harvard Hall. First came last year’s graduating class, then President Willard, then the Harvard Corporation, the Governor, and the Overseers, which then meant the Commonwealth legislature. The participants proceeded to the Cambridge meetinghouse, where they were met by a company of light horse. It was in Adams’ nature to overprepare; he had spent long hours honing his oration. His theme was the stark contrast between the “austere republican virtues” of the revolutionary generation and the “selfish and contracted principles” now in ascendancy. The fear of being corrupted by luxury—as, it was believed, England had been—was a common New England theme of the day. This was also the way older men talked about the younger generation, and young though he was, Adams was very much inclined to cry, “o tempora, o mores.”
Adams called for moral regeneration—“a rekindling of the patriotic spark.” He expressed sublime hopes for the nation’s future. This young man who had been raised on the heroic siege at Bunker Hill and the epic debate at the Continental Congress expressed a poignant sense of living in the aftermath of greatness. “Nature,” he told his classmates, “has not formed you, it is true, to tread the rugged path of an active life. But yours is the nobler influence of the mind. . . . When the warrior returns from the field of battle with the laurel in his hand, ’tis yours to twine it round his head.” This sounds very much like what today we would call “greatest generation syndrome.” For Adams, it was intensely personal. How could he ever live up to the glory of his own father, or of the likes of George Washington? Only through the nobler influence of the mind.
Adams worried that he would be outshone by his friend Nathaniel Freeman, who was delivering the other English oration. The family consensus—for of course the Shaws and the Cranches came to commencement and threw him a party afterwards—was that while Freeman was the more elegant and had the more musical voice, Adams had more of pith. Both his aunts were struck by how vividly, and transparently, Adams’ emotions expressed themselves on his face—a sign not of artfulness but of intensity of feeling. His address was deemed important enough to be reprinted in a leading Philadelphia newspaper. He was, he conceded, “complimented and flattered on every side.” It was a last burst of ego gratification before years of legal drudgery.
CHAPTER 5
Friend of the People
(1788–1794)
THE NEWBURYPORT TO WHICH JOHN QUINCY ADAMS TRANSPLANTED himself in early September of 1788 was a city of five thousand or so, a thriving port and manufacturing center located on the south bank of the Merrimack a few miles from the ocean. The city sloped steeply downward from the High Street to the river, where a great commercial armada of fishing smacks and whaling ships lay at anchor. Schooners from the world’s great port cities disgorged fine textiles and wine and gunpowder as well as sugar and molasses from the West Indies. The broad avenues running down from the High Street were lined with the fine homes, of brick as well as wood-frame, owned by the town’s shipbuilders and merchants. Newburyport was a provincial town but a busy and prosperous one, with a multitude of contract and other work for lawyers like Theophilus Parsons.
In his first months in town, John Quincy Adams barely had time to look up from the deadening mass of legal texts he was obliged to master—William Blackstone’s four-volume Commentaries surveying English law, Sir Edward Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England, Sir Michael Foster’s Crown Law, and the like. Fortunately for Adams, Theophilus Parsons was an unusually erudite attorney, a serious dabbler in botany, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics, as well as a master of the classics. He assigned his charges works of history and ethics in order to ward off the “universal skepticism” that comes of “defending indiscriminately the good and the bad.”
Most days, Adams would arrive at Parsons’ law office at nine, chat with his fellow law clerks, read until lunch time, and then read again until dark. At times this wearying round would be interrupted when Parsons would call the clerks together to discuss a case then in the courts. Parson was “himself a law library,” Adams wrote, with a genius for legal disputation. Adams’ happiest moments came when the clerks, some of them former Harvard classmates, sat up at night talking about history, poetry, religion, and politics. For a moment, he could imagine he was back at Hollis Hall. But then Blackstone would beckon once again.
Throughout this period, for reasons mysterious to himself, Adams was sinking into a very dark depression. He first recorded this affliction in December 1787, the very same night when he had stayed up with his friends talking about life. “I felt a depression of spirits to which I have hitherto been entirely a stranger,” he wrote. He lay awake for hours and then suffered from strange and troubling dreams. The experience may not, in fact, have been entirely novel, for several months later he would write to Billy Cranch that the feeling was “similar to what affected me about two years since.” Adams felt overcome with despair about his future; he saw nothing before him but an awful nullity. He filled his diary with his most abject thoughts and feelings. “If I continue this trifling away my time, I shall become an object of charity, if not of pity.” “Indolency I fear will be my ruin.” “I have no fortune to expect from any part, and the profession is so much crowded, that I have no prospect of securing myself by it for several years after I begin.”
Though John Adams, too, had suffered from what he called “the blue devils,” he had never been paralyzed as his son now was. A self-made man, John Adams had been the agent of his own success and the author of his own ambition. The situation with his son was almost the opposite. John Quincy had known since the earliest childhood that he had a destiny to fulfill. It was not for him to choose a path through life. And since he had been given everything he needed to succeed, failure would be unforgiveable. Worse still, should he fall short, he would be failing not himself, but his parents, his nation, his Christian obligations. Is it any wonder that, with youth and college behind him, and the future for which he had long been prepared before him, he gave way to despair? On the contrary: the wonder is that he didn’t buckle altogether beneath the weight of expectations. His brothers would do so, as would, in turn, his own sons. Unlike them, John Quincy was able to summon the will to become the person his parents had told him that he must be.
John and Abigail Adams had returned home after their years in England in June 1788. John Quincy had joyfully ridden to see them at their new house, known after its former owners as “the Vassall-Borland place,” about a mile and a half from the ancestral farm. He helped his parents unpack and then rode back to Newburyport. He returned home again in early September in order to deliver an address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, an early sign that he was being singled out for special distinction. These orations attracted the leading political and intellectual figures of the day. Governor John Hancock attended Adams’ talk, as did John and Abigail. His topic: the prospects before “a youth about to enter the scenes of active life.”
Adams never referred to his own prospects, but the address was transparently personal. The young man contemplating career shuttles between a “fantastic dream” of fame and glory and a nightmare of mediocrity. At times he will feel that the obstacles he faces are so intractable that he will be “almost ready to settle into a state of fallen despondency.” The prudent young man will therefore “circumscribe” his wishes “within rational bounds,” selecting one of the “intermediate stations” of law, medicine, trade, or ministry in which he can be useful to his fellow man. Perhaps Adams was rationalizing his growing fear that he would never achieve his father’s greatness. In his commencement address, after all, he had said that it was not for his generation to earn the laurels of heroism.
Yet there was, Adams went on, one exception to the middling destiny: “the walks of Literature & Science,” which offer t
he possibility of great achievement in the service of humane ends. Here, too, lay the opportunity for the rising generation to demonstrate its patriotism, for America’s modest attainments in these arts had led many mocking Europeans to “assign us a station among the inferior animals of creation.” How often the young Adams must have seethed at that condescension. But for an American of Adams’ day, scholarship was not a profession but an avocation. What’s more, Adams concluded, in an “infant country” such as the United States, men must enter the “active professions.” The life of the mind could serve only as a “secondary object”—a hobby. So it would remain for the rest of Adams’ life.
Adams returned to Newburyport, but his depression immediately rendered him unable to work or sleep. Desperate to recover his health, he went not to Braintree, but to Aunt Elizabeth Shaw in Haverhill. Elizabeth knew how this would look, and she wrote to Abigail to say that John Quincy hadn’t gone to Braintree only because “it was too far—& if he can get what he wants, (a little kind attention) nearer, it would not be worth his while.” But she added that the young man hadn’t been well since he left Braintree and asked, perhaps only half-jokingly, what Abigail had done to him. Elizabeth knew no more how to cure depression than her sister did—she gave him valerian tea and quinine—but Adams rallied. He overcame his insomnia and began to feel calmer. Elizabeth reported, “He thinks he is half Curred because he has got somebody to care for him.”
Perhaps Adams did go to Haverhill because it was closer. But he may have needed a place where he didn’t have to be John Quincy Adams, future leader of the Republic. Elizabeth Shaw doted on all of the Adams boys and admired John Quincy almost without reservation. When he had first arrived on her doorstep, in September 1785, Elizabeth had barely been able to contain her joy. In his looks, and even in his gestures, she said in a letter to Abigail, the boy reminded her of his father, before he “had assumed the Austerity, and dignity of the Statesman, and the Republican.” (Others noticed that he laid his head against his shoulder and closed one eye just as his father did.) John Quincy could talk to Aunt Elizabeth about anything—even about the girls he liked, a topic that came with solemn assurances that his experience of womanhood in Europe had taught him to curb his passions. Elizabeth believed that her talented nephew had worried himself sick. She wrote Abigail that he was “so avaritious in coveting the best Gifts” that he had injured his health through study. Lucy Cranch, John Quincy’s cousin, made the same observation in her own letter to Abigail: “He is determined to be great in every particular.” The ambition his parents had instilled in him was eating him up.
