by James Traub
And then life determined Adams’ course. Thomas Jefferson defeated his father in a bitterly fought and very close contest. That John Adams had, in effect, sacrificed the presidency in order to avoid a needless war with France would quickly become unquestioned Adams family wisdom, though Jefferson was more popular than Adams, drawing on votes not only in the South but also the West, the most rapidly growing part of the country. President Adams then terminated his son’s appointment in order to avoid the embarrassment of having Jefferson do so.
On July 17, Louisa, George, and John Quincy left the port of Hamburg on the America, sailed into a dense fog, and came very near to running aground. The metaphor seemed all too apt. Though now America’s leading diplomat at the tender age of thirty-four, a husband, and a father, Adams was returning home with absolutely no idea of his future.
PART II
WAR AND PEACE
CHAPTER 9
I Feel Strong Temptations to Plunge into Political Controversy
(1801–1803)
THE JOHN QUINCY ADAMS WHO ARRIVED IN PHILADELPHIA with his wife and infant son on September 4, 1801, was a man with a brilliant reputation and no obvious prospects. He could not make a living as a diplomat, since America had no professional diplomatic or foreign service. He was a lawyer by training, but he had not been a very effective one when he had last practiced. He had begged his father to limit his diplomatic service to three years so that he wouldn’t fall too far behind his peers, but first President Washington and then President Adams had found him too valuable to permit a return to private life. Surely, with patience, he could reestablish his practice in Boston. But Adams wasn’t patient. He was restless and ambitious, like his father. John Adams had discovered his calling in politics; John Quincy had inherited that calling. He was a man born to and for controversy. In the years to come, Adams would discover that the solution to his life lay in politics. He had a gift not for avoiding the storms of partisanship, but for weathering them.
Adams’ first thought when he disembarked the America was of home and family. He wanted to leave for Quincy right away. But Louisa, who was desperately worried about her father, felt as great a sense of urgency about seeing her own family in Maryland. Philadelphia was much closer to Fredericksburg than it was to Quincy; Adams could have accompanied Louisa home and then left for Massachusetts. Moreover, his wife had never been to the United States and had not been parted from him since they had married. The ocean voyage had left her ill and quite weak. She had a baby to care for. Simple decency would have dictated that Adams escort her home before continuing northward. But he could not see Louisa’s needs as equal to his own. He peremptorily decreed that they would go their separate ways; he told Louisa that he would retrieve her and George before the winter. He saw them into a coach heading south, while he went to New York and then Boston.
Adams reached Quincy on September 21. He was, he recorded, filled with “inexpressible delight” at the joyous reunion with his parents, as well as with aunts and uncles and cousins. His return marked a moment of ingathering for the widely dispersed Adams clan. The elder Adamses had taken in Charles’ widow, Sally, and her two daughters as well as Louisa Smith, the twenty-eight-year-old unmarried daughter of Abigail’s ne’er-do-well brother William, who had died in 1787. Nabby and her three children had come for the summer as well, so Adamses were crammed into the fine new home John and Abigail had purchased years before but rarely occupied, as well as the two old houses on the farm. Perhaps the only discordant note came from John Adams’ reaction to his son’s decision to name his firstborn after the father of his country rather than his own father. Abigail had even imaginatively rechristened the boy John George in a letter to her son. To Tom she wrote, “I am sure your brother had not any intention of wounding the feelings of his father, but he has done it—had he called him Joshua”—after Louisa’s father—“he would not have taken it amiss.” John Adams was not an easy man; in his eyes nothing, including reverence for the nation’s founder, superseded filial obligation.
Adams spent the next few weeks seeing old friends. He had dinner in Boston with the members of the Saturday Club, which he had frequented before leaving for Europe; they included Daniel Sargent, Nathaniel Frazier, Harrison Gray Otis, and some of his former law clerks from Newburyport. Adams began to make arrangements to resume his life as a Boston lawyer. He spent $6,000 to buy a house at 13 Hanover Square in Boston from Isaac Smith, one of his mother’s relations. He bought shares in the company building a canal to connect Boston Harbor to the Merrimack River to the north.
Louisa had returned to a far more melancholy household. Soon after reaching home, she had written to her husband begging him to come as soon as possible. She wrote again two weeks later. Her father, she wrote, is “very, very much broke.” But Adams stuck to his schedule. He boarded a coach for Washington in mid-October. Adams made good time through Rhode Island and Connecticut. But yellow fever, which plagued the Eastern Seaboard cities in the summer months, was raging in New York City, and Adams had to circumvent New York by taking a ferry to Elizabeth in New Jersey. He reached the Johnson household in Washington October 21.
Whatever hopes Adams had entertained about his father-in-law’s ability to restore his former status were now dashed. President Adams had found a sinecure for Johnson as postmaster for the District of Columbia, but President Jefferson had removed him in the course of a wholesale purge of Federalist officeholders. Now Johnson asked his son-in-law to look over his finances. “He has been unfortunate in his trusts,” Adams concluded, “and considered as a prey by every man with whom he has dealt. I am strongly apprehensive of the issue of his principal causes now depending.” The proud former consul and merchant was practically destitute.
With Johnson in tow, Adams paid calls on President Jefferson, as well as James Madison, the secretary of state; Albert Gallatin, the secretary of the treasury, and the secretaries of war and the navy—that is, the entire cabinet. He had known most of these men before, but his standing with them was very much changed: he was no longer a promising young man and the son of John Adams, but America’s most polished diplomat. He took the elder Johnsons and Louisa to dinner at the president’s, along with Madison and his wife, Dolly. He then brought them on a courtesy visit to George Washington’s widow, Martha, at Mount Vernon. He did so, of course, after he had learned the truth of his father-in-law’s finances; perhaps he hoped that someone would take pity on the ruined merchant and offer him another sinecure. Or perhaps he felt that honor required him to overcome his sense of mortification and introduce Mr. Johnson to America’s leading figures.
The time had come to head back to Quincy. On November 1, Adams and Louisa, along with Joshua and Catherine Johnson and three of Louisa’s sisters, took the stagecoach to Frederickstown, Maryland, the Johnson family seat. Joshua grew more and more ill on the way. It was plain that he would not live long. Louisa, who had lived for the first twenty years of her life like a happily caged songbird, had learned a great deal about suffering in recent years. Now she was to suffer the worst blow of all. As Louisa prepared to leave Frederickstown on November 11, Catherine advised her not to tell her father she was going, for the shock could have shattered him; it would have shattered her as well. She would never see him again.
Stagecoach travel at the time was extremely unpleasant for those not accustomed to it. The post roads, more like cleared paths in the woods, were deeply rutted. The pace averaged about four miles a hour. Of course there were no lights along the way, and the lanterns hanging from the coachman’s seat barely pierced the surrounding gloom. The coach could be jammed full of as many as twelve people, who would be jostled into one another as the coach jounced over rocks and holes. Nothing save leather flaps on either side kept out the dust and the wind or the rain and snow. As the Adams party headed north, the weather grew ever colder; at New Jersey they crossed the Hudson in an open boat, with a freezing rain lashing down. It was November 24 by the time the Adams party reached Boston—two
awful weeks from the time they had left Frederickstown. Louisa arrived half-frozen, exhausted, ill, reeling from the grief of parting with her father—and terrified of the prospect of finally meeting her supremely formidable in-laws, with their strange New England ways.
With her own family decimated, Louisa was, she knew, meeting the family into which she was to be inducted. She knew that her husband regarded his parents with reverence and also that he was not the kind of man to spare her from whatever judgments they might form of her. Even when healthy, Louisa was small, slim, and pale, happiest in a cozy parlor rather than in a kitchen, much less in the out of doors. She felt feeble and insignificant next to these oaken New Englanders. And she was meeting them not in an urban setting, where she might at least feel comfortable, but in the ancient, rustic village of Quincy. Louisa recorded her first impressions decades later with a horror that had lost nothing with the passage of time. “Had I stepped into Noah’s Ark I do not think I could have been more utterly astonished—Dr. Tufts! Deacon French! Mr. Cranch! Old Uncle Peter! And Captain Beale!!! It was lucky for me that I was so much depressed, and so ill, or else I should certinly have given mortal Offence.”
The Adams clan treated Louisa as if she were a hothouse plant in danger of expiring in the hardy atmosphere of country life. “I had,” she recalled, “a separate dish set by me of which no one was to partake, and every delicate preserve was brought out to treat me in the kindest manner.” The fuss and solicitude only made Louisa withdraw yet further into herself, and she became, she wrote, “cold and reserved.” Louisa’s idea of running a household consisted of telling the servants what to do, and she felt ashamed before Abigail, a woman more than twenty years her senior who woke before dawn every morning to skim the milk and who seemed equal to all of life’s vicissitudes.
And Louisa was quite right about the way she was seen. Abigail wrote to Tom that her new daughter-in-law was “so slender and her frame is so delicate that I have many fears she will be of short duration.” As for her son, she wrote, “The constant state of anxiety which has harassed his mind upon her account has added a weight of years to his brow, which time alone could not have affected in double the Space.” Abigail, that is, blamed Louisa for her son’s loss of vitality. This may have been unfair: Adams worried about everything and not just his wife’s health. Louisa did, however, have one staunch supporter in the family: John Adams took an immediate liking to his pretty, refined, and acutely observant daughter-in-law, and forever after would treat her kindly and look forward to her amusing letters.
The Adamses settled into their new life as a prominent young couple in Boston. The city still lagged far behind Philadelphia, America’s foremost city, which had proper drainage and lighting and well-paved thoroughfares. Henry Adams compared the Boston of 1800 to an old English market town, writing, “The footways or sidewalks were paved, like the crooked and narrow streets, with round cobblestones, and were divided from the carriageway only by posts and a gutter. The streets were almost unlighted at night, save for a few oil-lamps rendering the darkness more visible and the rough pavement rougher.”
Nevertheless, Boston was in the midst of transforming itself from a provincial town to a mercantile capital. Boston’s population had sunk to six thousand during the British occupation in the 1770s. In less than a quarter of a century that number had quadrupled, to twenty-five thousand. Developers began buying up the city’s swamps and pasture lands. In 1795, the painter John Singleton Copley sold much of Beacon Hill to a group of speculators led by Harrison Gray Otis. The group flattened the hill, at the top of which a lighthouse—a beacon—had long stood, and used the landfill to extend the city out into Boston Harbor. Filling out, the city lost both its hilly topography and its peculiar outline, which resembled a hermit crab with a long, narrow tail at Roxbury connecting it to the mainland. The space within its confines became urbanized. In the winter of 1801, Adams went skating on the old mill pond at the eastern tip of the city; by 1803 the pond had been filled with earth from Beacon Hill.
The staid, brick-fronted Boston we know today was rising across the city’s finer precincts, very much including Beacon Hill. Otis and his team commissioned the architect Charles Bulfinch to build a London-style arc of connected town houses called Tontine Crescent on Franklin Street. Bulfinch built a fine new home for Otis in 1796 and then two others, in and around Beacon Hill, a decade later. In 1795 the town bought a plot of land on a rise above the Boston Commons from the heirs of John Hancock, and it commissioned Bulfinch to build a new statehouse there. Once completed three years later, this splendid, gold-domed building, and its surrounding neighborhood of Beacon Hill, became the center of the city’s commercial life, displacing the ancient district around Faneuil Hall.
Adams, characteristically, clung to the old Boston; his home and office lay in the area around Faneuil Hall, in what is today North Boston, rather than in the fashionable district rising near the Commons. Still, Adams hopped on the investment carousel, though perhaps more out of fear for his future than out of hope for great wealth, which he never sought to amass. In January 1802, he added to his inventory of real estate by purchasing a home at 13 Franklin Place for $6,500 and then used it as a rental property. He bought stock in the Middlesex Canal project and another scheme to build a bridge over the Neponset River, which separated Boston from Quincy to the south. He owned bank stock as well, though he sold $3,600 worth to furnish the house on Hanover Square. An 1802 list of his property valued the total at $43,702.54. It would have been more, had Charles not frittered away somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000 of his assets. This was a remarkable sum for someone who had been barely surviving on a government salary, testifying to Adams’ astute and conscientious management of his funds.
Adams was doing quite well, but his peer group, as he had feared, was outdistancing him. Harrison Gray Otis had grown rich on his real estate investments. The Boston bar teemed with gifted and eloquent men like Otis and Josiah Quincy, both the same age as Adams, and older figures like Fisher Ames and Theophilus Parsons, Adams’ own law teacher, who had moved from Newburyport. He was far behind where he would have been had he stayed home. Adams haunted the Court of Common Pleas and the Supreme Court and did what he could to dig up work, but breaking into the first ranks of Boston lawyers would be a long struggle. And Adams, who had grown accustomed to the dignity and deference accorded to a minister in a great European capital, had no appetite for that grim fight.
His ambitions lay elsewhere. In late February 1802, Adams admitted to himself that “I feel strong temptation and have great provocation to plunge into political controversy. But I hope to preserve myself from it. . . . A politician in this country must be the man of a party. I would fain be the man of my whole country.” Adams would have heard a tirade against the rampant spirit of party every time he went back to Quincy, which he did most weekends. His father was filled with prophetic wrath against Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who had broken with President Adams and urged party members to support Vice President Thomas Pinckney instead of Adams in the election of 1800. The elder Adams was writing his Autobiography, in which he planned to expose all those who had crossed him.
Still, politics, and above all controversy, was the Adams family business. The only way to have a career in politics was to rise through a party, and the Adamses were Federalists, even if apostate Federalists. In March 1802, the younger Adams agreed to stand for the state senate, and two months later he won election in a town meeting. He wrote to Tom with some embarrassment: “Thus you see what has become of my resolutions to renounce the career of politics.” At one of the first sessions of the senate he attended, Adams proposed to form a bipartisan group “by way of conciliatory procedure.” The suggestion was spurned—an introduction to political reality.
For all his alleged reluctance, Adams immediately began looking for the next rung up the ladder. That fall, he began receiving feelers from the Federalists to stand for Congress. The party had trouble recruiting talented men f
rom around Boston; most preferred to make money than to make laws, and in any case they insisted on doing the first before chancing the second. Otis had stepped down from Congress in 1800 in order to cultivate his law practice and his business interests, as he had promised his wife he would. Josiah Quincy, a Braintree neighbor and distant relation of Adams, was slated to run against the Republican incumbent, William Eustis, but backed out. Adams agreed to stand. He carried Boston but lost in the outlying districts; the final tally was Eustis 1,899, Adams 1,840. It had rained heavily that morning, and Adams’ friends blamed his loss on the weather. “This is one of a thousand proofs,” he sourly reflected, “how large a portion of federalism is a mere fair-weather principle, too weak to overcome a shower of rain.”
Adams attended to his work as a state legislator: paying down the state debt, debating legislation to prohibit horse racing, chartering banks and insurance companies. This last function made state legislators a crucial target for the new class of entrepreneurs and served as a potential source of wealth for the lawmakers themselves. In early 1803, Adams was quietly approached by Otis for help with a project. Otis was developing a bank, and he understood that Adams might well cast the deciding vote on the application for a charter. Otis worried that Adams would oppose the charter. He explained that “all the respectable men” of the town had joined him as investors. Adams answered that he opposed only the bank’s plan to reserve some shares for the legislators themselves, which he plainly regarded as a corrupt bargain. That was not the answer the investors wanted to hear. A few days later James Lloyd, another of the investors, repeated the request, and Adams explained again that he favored a “general subscription” of shares. These men were Adams’ friends; he and Louisa spent many of their evenings with them. Nevertheless, Adams had made perfectly plain that his principles were not available for rent or purchase.
