Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams

by Joseph J. Ellis

  From his side of the father-son relationship, John Quincy posted many long and detailed letters from Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Ghent, Washington, and most of the diplomatic stops in between, full of textured descriptions of sights and sounds that he knew his father would remember from his own travels, periodically laden with personal convictions that he knew his father would share. “Have traversed the Kingdom of Sweden and the sovereign princedom of the Netherlands,” he wrote from Ghent in 1814 just before the peace negotiations began, “and here I am in the city of Charles the 5th waiting with my four colleagues, until it pleases the mistress of the world, as She now fancies herself, to send deputies for the purpose, as she imagines, of receiving our submission.” He knew that his father, sitting home at Quincy, would smile at the caustic reference to England. And he concluded on an ironic note calculated to join together their mutual toilings in the same long-term cause: “I am well assured that the work to which we have been called, that of conciliating American and British pretensions, will be found more unnatural than your and my wandering life.”28

  In addition to the exchanges of diplomatic information and the expressions of self-satisfaction that the Adams line was continuing to conduct the foreign policy of the United States, the extensive correspondence between father and son also had playful moments. In 1819, for example, when John Quincy was negotiating the terms of the Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, which established expanded borders for the United States in the huge territory west of the Mississippi River, Adams wrote his son to empathize with the diplomatic difficulties, claiming he could share the sense of accomplishment because he was himself “now involved in a controversy about a half a dozen acres of land and a hundred cord of wood” in Quincy. Or when John Quincy asked several questions about family genealogy, the patriarch chided his son for caring about such things; it was a sign, he joked, that even his son was “growing old.” Genealogical charts were wholly unnecessary and silly, Adams explained, since a walk through “Quincy Church Yard will furnish you with proof that your blood has not run through scoundrels, and that is all I desire.”29

  John Quincy was also capable of good-natured chidings; in fact, he was more capable of unreserved and playful verbal joustings with his father than with any other human being. After the senior Adams wrote him a lecture-of-a-letter on the abiding values of Christianity, John Quincy retorted with a defense of his different version of the same elemental principles: “As for you, my dear father…although you have been all your life doing as you would be done by, yet your theory and practice do not always coincide…. If after sixty years of assiduous study and profound meditation you have only come to the result of trusting the Ruler with the skies, and adhering to the sermon upon the mount, I may be permitted to adopt the same conclusions by a shorter and more compendious process.”30

  But beneath the expressions of paternal advice and affection, and the corresponding expressions of filial loyalty and respect, lay a more troubled refrain. Although Adams was extremely proud of his son, although he often basked in the reflected glory of John Quincy’s remarkable accomplishments as Secretary of State and his eventual ascension to the presidency, his protective parental instincts were stronger than his ambitions for the family name. “For my personal part,” Adams wrote in 1813, “I should not much care if, like Mr. Jay, you should retire and study prophecies or translate Demosthenes, provided that you are so near me that I would see you once a day or even once a week.” This became the dominant message in his letters to John Quincy:

  One thing is clear in my mind and that is, that you ought to be at home; if there, you should be obliged to live on Turnips, Potatoes, and Cabbage as I am. My sphere is reduced to my Garden and so must yours be. The wandering life that you have lived, as I have done before you, is not compatible with human nature. It was not made for it.31

  In the midst of John Quincy’s diplomatic maneuverings at Ghent, alongside the strategic advice about American naval power and the effects of the war on the British economy, he advised his son “to retire to Quincy, as I have done, ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot’” there he would be able to “dedicate the rest of your days to your children, to Literature, to Science & let the Dogs bark as they will.” And when President Monroe was considering John Quincy for the job of Secretary of State, Adams told his son that he would “rather have you retire to Montizillo, renounce all public employment forever, and lay your bones here with your Ancestors than remain where you are [in Washington], annihilating yourself and ruining your children.”32

  As Adams himself acknowledged, his motives were partially selfish. John Quincy was, as he often put it, “the greatest comfort of my life,” and he wanted his favorite son near him during his few remaining years. But, in addition to his craving for company, Adams understood the internal demons that were driving his son’s pursuit of political distinction. He understood them intuitively because they were very much like his own vanities and ambitions. And he understood them historically because, as a father, he had helped to instill them in John Quincy, along with an almost other-worldly sense of duty: “You come into life with advantages which will disgrace you if your success is mediocre,” he had written to his then young son in a typically fierce Adams injunction. “And if you do not rise to the head not only of your Profession, but of your country, it will be owing to your own Lasiness, Slovenliness, and Obstinacy.”33

  Now the son was rising, achieving a level of political success far from mediocre, living out his father’s fondest hopes. Of course, Adams did share vicariously in John Quincy’s fame; but he also felt compelled—he could not help himself—to protect his son from suffering the same kind of pain and disappointment he had experienced in public life. On several occasions, after offering political or diplomatic advice on the specific issues John Quincy was handling, Adams concluded letters with a plea for personal reserve and a cool, enigmatic style that would leave his son less exposed to criticism or recrimination. But then he often added: “I believe your nature is as incapable of it as mine” or, “I know your nature, like mine, will find this posture impossible.” In short, he saw himself in John Quincy: an extraordinarily erudite and learned young man whose boundless ambition was harnessed to a life of public service by a deeply internalized and equally boundless sense of duty. The new nation obviously needed such talented public servants, who were prepared—in John Quincy’s case one might even say conditioned since childhood—to spend themselves in a worthy cause. Eventually, however, they would be used up and discarded, especially if they were disposed to cling tenaciously to personal principles rather than adapt to shifting political realities. If, then, there was an irreconcilable tension between public success and private happiness, the elder Adams kept urging his son to choose the latter. Even as John Quincy’s name began to be bandied about in official circles as a candidate for the presidency, his father fretted more than he approved. “What a rattling & cackling and clattering there is about the future presidency,” he noted in 1823; “it seems like a Conclave of Cardinals intriguing for the Election of a Pope.” His persistent message to John Quincy was cautionary and protective: “Political calms cannot be of long duration in this Country,” he warned. “My advice…is to be always prepared & ready to retire at a moments warning.”34

  There was never any realistic prospect that John Quincy would comply. Whether it was the severity of his early training and education as the eldest Adams son; or some biologically based proclivity inherited along with the color of his eyes and shape of his head; or, most likely, some seamless combination of nurture and nature, John Quincy derived his deepest emotional satisfaction from his work. He never felt the tension between public success and personal happiness that his father kept worrying about, because immersion in the hurly-burly of politics had become his life. He was like his father in so many respects—learned in the classics, fiercely combative whenever challenged, magisterial in his sense of where history was headed, suspicious of popularity, the epitom
e of the virtuous public servant. But he lacked altogether his father’s human dimension, his capacity to love and be loved. “Of all the men whom it was my lot to accost and waste civilities upon,” wrote one English diplomat, “he [John Quincy] was the most doggedly and systematically repulsive,” adding that John Quincy sat in diplomatic assemblies “like a bull-dog among spaniels.” This was a prejudiced view from one of the spaniels, but it accorded with most contemporary accounts and, most sadly, with John Quincy’s own account of himself as “a cold, austere, and forboding character.” He was his father’s son in mind and will, but lacked altogether the redemptive qualities of the old man’s personal warmth and heart. He was almost an intellectual caricature or clone of his father, but without his soul, without his irrepressible instinct for intimacy, for closing the distance with other people.35

  One would like to believe that Adams kept trying, without success, to lure his son back home in order to complete his emotional education. More likely, and more in accord with the available evidence, he was motivated less by a sense of guilt or responsibility than by an elemental parental urge to help his son be happy.

  John Quincy’s wife, Louisa Catherine, tended to concur with the judgment of the senior Adams: “If Mr. A [John Quincy] could bring his mind to it, I believe the best thing he could do would be to resign his place altogether.” But Louisa Catherine cautioned her father-in-law not to be sanguine that his beloved son was capable of thinking clearly, especially after he became smitten with the prospect of the presidency. “A man who is ambitious to become President of the United States, must make his Wife visit the Ladies of the Members of Congress first,” she complained caustically, “otherwise he is totally inefficient to fill so high an office.” She did her best to turn John Quincy’s preoccupation with political success into a humorous, all-in-the-family story of misguided dedication. “You would laugh could you see Mr. A,” she explained to Adams, “every morning preparing a set of cards [i.e., calling cards] with as much formality as if he was drawing up some very important articles to negotiate in a commercial treaty….”36

  For his part, the senior Adams played along with the joke. The vision of his super-serious son trying to win political support from the members of Congress by staging elegant dinner parties, he observed, was “very interesting and entertaining to me, but I am afraid Mr. A is rather too profuse in replenishing his Decanters,” which would have the unintended result of making “the grave Legislators unsteady” and thereby threatening the stability of the very republic that the next president must try to lead. In a more serious vein, he commiserated with Louisa Catherine’s lot as wife of a highly visible public figure: “You will find in no department of public life any exemption from frequent twinges,” he warned, concluding with the familiar plea that “You must retire to Montezillo or Mount Wollaston for perfect serenity.”37

  The reinvigorated correspondence with Louisa Catherine coincided with John Quincy’s ascendancy toward the highest political office in the land. From her point of view, the need for a trusted outlet for her secret worries about her ambitious husband and her mounting insecurities about intensified public expectations explained her decision to reach out to the family patriarch at Quincy. “The old gentleman took a fancy to me,” she recalled in her autobiography, “and was the only one [to whom] I was literally and without knowing it [more than] a fine Lady.”38

  From Adam’s point of view, however, the closer relationship with Louisa Catherine helped to fill an emotional gap in his own life that, in the end, would never be completely closed until his death. “Now Sir, for my Griefs!” he had written to Jefferson in 1818: “The dear Partner of my Life for fifty four Years and for many Years more as a Lover, now lyes in extremis, forbidden to speak or be spoken to.” Abigail had come down with typhoid fever. When she died the following week, Adams was the one member of the household to remain composed. He had simply stood alongside her bed and said: “I wish I could lay down beside her and die too.”

  She had been the emotional center of his mature life—his friend, partner, lover, and accomplice in living a full life. Ironically, the record of their remarkable relationship is fullest for the years when they were separated, since separation generated letters that preserved an account of their closeness. During the retirement years at Quincy, however, there was no need to correspond, so the intimacies of their most prolonged time together are almost invisible. She remained without question his closest confidante, stoutest defender, and most candid critic throughout this time, as well as the supremely competent manager of the ever-buzzing brood of relatives, visitors, and servants at the homestead. When she went, Adams acknowledged that a part of himself died too, and that “the grim spectre so terrible to human nature has no sting for me.” Nothing ever seemed quite the same again in the household or in the deepest pockets of his personality. “My House is a Region of Sorrow,” he moaned to Vanderkemp almost a year after Abigail’s death, “Inhabited by a sorrowful Widower…[who is] burdened with Multitudes of Letters from total Strangers, teazing me with impertinent inquiries—and overloading me with newspapers which I cannot read.” He suddenly felt tired and old, complaining to a granddaughter that he had finally succumbed to “my distemper, Old Age, which I will not say with Franklin is incurable, because the ground will soon cure it.”39

  Louisa Catherine could never replace Abigail—no one could ever do that—but Adams focused his affectionate energies on her in the period after Abigail’s death. If Louisa Catherine found him to be a convenient outlet for her frustrations and fears as the wife of John Quincy, Adams found her to be a helpful depository for the ordinary effusions that would otherwise have been shared with Abigail. He seemed to require—a lifetime with Abigail had rendered the requirement a necessity—regular communication with a strong and intelligent woman. Louisa Catherine may have appeared frail; in fact, when Abigail first met her, she worried that “her frame is so slender and constitution so delicate that I have many fears that she will be of short duration.” And Henry Adams, Louisa Catherine’s grandson, remembered her as the epitome of charming delicacy, “like a Romney portrait…an exotic, like her Sèvres china, an object of deference….” But after Abigail’s death, Adams saw no reason to treat her daintily or delicately. Instead, he made her his most trusted and regular correspondent and confidante.40

  “Wonderful woman,” he exclaimed in a typical letter, “how is it possible for you…to go through such a hurry of visits, dinners and parties, converse with such a variety of Characters, Masculine and Feminine, and at the same time keep so particular a journal[?]” Louisa Catherine had been sending him long segments of her private record of political life among the powers-that-be in Washington. When she apologized for her prejudiced accounts of the debates over slavery in Missouri or John Quincy’s dinner table conversation with Andrew Jackson, the patriarch of the Adams family told her not to worry: “I am myself too much under the influence of prejudices to have ever reproached you seriously with yours.” Besides, she was positioned at the center of political life in the capital of the emerging world power, while he was imprisoned by old age in a “part of the World [where] nothing occurs but Morning, Noon and Night, New Moons and full moons, Spring, Summer and Winter.” Without her regular reports he would be forced, as he put it, “to vegetate in solitude.” The snatches from her journal had become “a kind of necessary life to me, I long for it the whole week.” In short, he put the ever insecure Louisa Catherine at ease by assuming the posture of student to her teacher, provincial to her cosmopolitan, sensing instinctively that her impressive intelligence could flow fully only when nurtured and reassured.41

  She proclaimed him to be the one member of the Adams family—and this pointedly included her husband in the list of the ignorant—who knew how to unlock her secret thoughts and feelings. She sent him her translations of Plato, copies of her poetry, worried motherly reactions to son George’s poor grades at Harvard, extensive descriptions of the Senate debates over the Missouri qu
estion. Adams wondered admiringly how “amidst all the ceremonies, frivolities and gravities of a Court and of a Legislature [you] can find time to write so many and so excellent letters to me.” And he speculated approvingly that “Two such Industrious honey Bees as John Quincy Adams and his Wife were never connected together before….”42

  When George was expelled from Harvard for flagrant misbehavior and loss of temper, Adams tried to intercede on the boy’s behalf. He asked Louisa Catherine to “receive him tenderly, and forgive him.” She was also to inform John Quincy that the senior Adams expected his son to treat his grandson kindly and listen with an open mind to George’s side of the story. In effect, the patriarch was throwing his considerable weight behind his recalcitrant grandson, supporting Louisa Catherine’s instinct for forgiveness against John Quincy’s instinct for severity. It was a small but symbolic gesture that Louisa Catherine always cherished; the missing link in her husband’s personality providentially provided, as it were, by the one man in the world John Quincy dared not defy, the one man in the world with the emotional range to match her moods with his own sturdier sentimentalism, the one man in the world temperamentally equipped to encompass her husband’s moral standards and her own powers of forgiveness.43