The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  One day in the spring of 1759, John found himself in the drawing room of the Quincy home, alone with Hannah. With her usual skill, she turned the conversation to the intricacies of love and marriage. She began talking about her cousin Esther Quincy’s engagement to Jonathan Sewall, murmuring in her sibilant, knowing way about how much love had changed Esther.

  All semblance of resistance collapsed in John’s tormented psyche. Alone in the silent house, the entire world seemed to shrink to the dimensions of the couch on which they were sitting. John leaned toward Hannah, breathing her delicate perfume, lost in the liquid depths of her tantalizing eyes. The words of love and commitment were on his lips…

  The door crashed open and upon them burst Hannah’s cousin, Esther, and her fiancé, Jonathan Sewall. The almost lovers recoiled to opposite ends of the couch, and John rode back to his family’s farm in Braintree feeling as if he had narrowly escaped falling off the edge of the earth. For the next month he avoided Hannah’s company.

  To his astonishment, John next heard that Hannah was engaged to one Bela Lincoln, a handsome militia captain who had begun calling on her in his uniform. Adams found himself incapable of looking at a law book without seeing Hannah’s face on the page. He spent half his nights awake thinking about her and the other half asleep dreaming about her. Less amusing were the “chagrin and fretfulness and rage” this highly emotional man struggled to contain. He began to wonder whether he was going mad.

  IV

  John Adams slowly recovered from his heartbreak over Hannah Quincy and found new preoccupations for his restless mind and unruly imagination. One diversion was the beginning of a serious quarrel between the province of Massachusetts and the rulers of the British Empire over their assumed right to raise revenue from import duties and taxes. He was also slowly advancing up the ladder as a lawyer, winning cases and admittance to the Superior Court as a barrister.

  A Harvard friend, Richard Cranch, was courting Mary Smith, the oldest daughter of the Reverend William Smith in nearby Weymouth. Like many other suitors, Cranch felt more comfortable with a friend for support, and he inveigled John into several visits to the Smith parsonage. Here he encountered slim, dark-haired Abigail Smith, age seventeen. Two years earlier, he had met her and her two sisters and had disliked them all. They were “wits,” he conceded, but he doubted whether they were “frank or fond or even candid.”4

  John was surprised to find what a difference two years had made in his impression of Abigail Smith. He liked her because she was direct and frank, unlike the fond but devious (in retrospect) Hannah Quincy. Moreover, Abigail was interested in politics and philosophy as well as the arts. She could even read French, a remarkable achievement for someone who had received little formal education. She was not shy about telling him and other people that she considered this failure to educate women a great mistake. She argued that women had an important role to play in the “theater of life” and it was folly not to prepare them for this “trust.”

  John Adams found himself thinking more and more about Abigail Smith and paying repeated visits to her father’s Weymouth parsonage. Sickly Abigail, barely five feet tall, had been a semi-invalid for much of her life. She had despaired of ever having a “spark”—a boyfriend. She found herself unexpectedly attracted to this stocky, somewhat pompous lawyer who treated her numerous strong opinions with remarkable respect. Did she divine how badly he needed someone with whom he could share his perpetual inner agitation? Perhaps.

  The courtship was powered by mounting ardor—especially on John’s part. One day he showed up at the Weymouth parsonage with a letter written in solemn legalese, ordering Abigail “to give the bearer as many kisses and as many hours of your company after six o’clock as he shall please to demand and charge them to my account.” More than once they came close to abandoning their puritan restraint. When a violent rainstorm prevented John from making the trip from Braintree to Weymouth, he told Abigail that it was “a cruel but perhaps blessed” downpour, because it forced him to “keep my distance.”5

  They were often separated by the demands of John’s growing law practice. In the fashion of the time, they adopted pen names. She was Diana, the virgin huntress; he was Lysander, a Spartan general who scored a famous victory over Athens and was also a noted diplomat and politician. As her confidence in their love grew, Abigail went to work on reshaping Lysander into a more sociable creature. She told him he was much too intimidating in company, with a haughty, oaklike reserve—“an intolerable forbidding expecting silence which lays such a restraint upon moderate modesty that ’tis impossible for a stranger to be tranquil in your presence.”

  John replied by sending Abigail a list of her faults: 1. She did not play cards well, holding the deck in a very “uncourtly” way. 2. She was too bashful. 3. She refused to sing. 4. She had a bad habit of hanging her head like a bulrush—undoubtedly caused by another fault that was all but inexcusable in a lady—“reading writing and thinking.” 5. She sat with her legs crossed, a habit that would broaden her hips. This, too, was caused by too much thinking. 6. She walked with her toes turned inward. He wanted to see her with a “stately strut and divine deportment.” These were all the faults he could find after three weeks of deep thought while they were separated by his inoculation against smallpox—a complicated procedure in their day. “All the rest is bright and luminous.”6

  Abigail’s reply was saucy. She told him she was “so hardened as to read over most of my faults with as much pleasure as another person would have read their perfections.” This was hardly surprising. All of them demonstrated that Lysander spent most of his time scrutinizing Diana with an intensity that could only be the product of love. She defended her failure to sing by warning him that her voice was as harsh as the screech of a peacock. She promised to stop crossing her legs, though she tartly suggested “a gentleman has no business to concern himself about the legs of a lady.” As for her parrot toes, they could be cured only by a dancing master.7

  Their wedding was set for October 25, 1764. As the date approached and Abigail vanished in a whirl of shopping and visits to friends and relations, John’s yearning spilled out in his letters, along with his growing sense that he had found a woman who would gave him the inner balance he needed. “My soul and body have both been thrown into turmoil by your absence,” he told her. “A month or two more [of bachelorhood] would make me the most insufferable cynic in the world—I see nothing but faults, follies, frailties and defects in anybody lately…But you who have always softened and warmed my heart shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind.”8

  Perhaps this daunting task caused Abigail to recoil. As the date loomed, she took to her bed under doctor’s orders. She was “extremely weak…low spirited…hardly myself,” she told John. He was not much better, reporting from Braintree a catalogue of hypochondriacal complaints. But they both underwent miraculous cures, and the wedding took place on schedule in the Reverend Smith’s parsonage in Weymouth.9

  V

  Without Abigail to listen to his explosions of self-pity, one shudders at what might have happened to John Adams. By 1775, the couple had abandoned the nicknames of their courtship days, Diana and Lysander. Abigail had begun signing her letters “Portia”—a name John had chosen, in tribute to her similarity to the heroine of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Abigail wrote to John as “My Dearest Friend.” There is little doubt that both partners knew the significance of the word “friend” as proof of ultimate intimacy between a man and wife.

  No other founding father was as tormented by a hunger for fame as John Adams. It was a subject he never stopped discussing with himself in his diary and in his letters to Abigail. At one point, he pondered the dilemma of this desire and the high standards he inflicted on himself in pursuit of it. “If virtue was to be rewarded with wealth,” he wrote, “it would not be virtue. If virtue were to be rewarded with fame, it would not be virtue of the sublimist kind.”

  Adams was in
the grip of an ideology that often drove George Washington and other realists to near distraction and frequently complicated the struggle for independence. There were, according to this doctrine, many kinds of revolutionary patriotism. But the only men that deserved admiration were the “True Whigs”—those who were patriots without a smidgen of self-interest in their motivation. Almost everything John Adams said and did had to meet this impossibly exalted standard. As a result, he was in a constant state of inner turmoil. Without Portia to assure him that he was an admirable but unappreciated man, he would have inevitably slipped into permanent depression and despair.10

  VI

  There was much more to Abigail’s role in their marriage than psychological nursemaid. Thanks to John’s encouragement, she soon emerged as a thinking woman in her own right. Her most remarkable moment came in 1776, the year when John’s leadership in Congress won him his chief claim to fame. Portia wrote to her dearest friend soon after General Washington drove the British army from Boston, restoring a sense of safety and tranquility to Massachusetts. She began by telling him how lighthearted she felt but swiftly moved to a subject that troubled her almost as much as the departed redcoats.

  I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

  That your sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.

  Abigail’s letter is justly famous today. John’s reply two weeks later is much less well known. Basically, he told her: Equality for women? Forget about it:

  As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told our struggle has loosened the bands of government every where. That children and apprentices were disobedient—that schools and colleges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their guardians and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented.—This is rather too coarse a compliment but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out.

  Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Altho they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair, and softly, and in practice you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would compleatly subject us to the despotism of the peticoat, I hope General Washington, and all our brave Heroes would fight….11

  Abigail was less than pleased with this reply. She wrote to her friend Mercy Otis Warren, whose protofeminist views were even more advanced, and told her about John’s flippant dismissal. “I will tell him I have only been making trial of the disinterestedness of his virtue, and when weigh’d in the balance have found it wanting,” she vowed.12

  If Abigail embarked on such an exchange of verbal barbs, we have no record of it. The larger drama of whether “independency” would be declared in spite of stubborn resistance among the congressional delegates of several colonies, notably New York and Pennsylvania, soon absorbed both letter writers. John was at the center of the struggle but even here, in the midst of the greatest achievement of his life, he found time to let Abigail know how important she was to him. On May 22, while others were orating on the floor of Congress, John told Portia he was seated “in the midst of forty people, some of whom are talking, and others whispering.” He told her that the news from England made it look as though all-out war would erupt this summer, which meant there was no hope of him getting home.

  He was thinking of asking permission to bring her and their four children (Abigail, called “Nabby,” John Quincy, Charles, and Thomas) to Philadelphia, saying, “I am a lonely forlorn creature here.” He yearned to see her and “those babes, whose education and welfare lies so near my heart.” But he could not let anything divert him from “superior duties.” In a previous letter, Portia had told him how much she yearned for him. But “all domestick pleasures and injoyments are absorbed in the great and important duty you owe your country.”

  Those words drew from John another confession of the central role Abigail played in his life: “Among all the disappointments and perplexities, which have fallen to my share…nothing has contributed so much to support my mind, as the choice blessing of a wife whose capacity enabled her to comprehend and whose pure virtue obliged her to approve the views of her husband. This has been the cheering consolation of my heart, in my most solitary and most disconsolate hours.”13

  What could Portia—or any other woman—say in response to such a compliment? Abigail reduced her planned assault on Honest John’s disinterested virtue to a mild rebuke. She wondered why he and his cohorts were “proclaiming peace and good will to men [and] emancipating all nations, [but] you insist on retaining an absolute power over wives.”

  V

  Soon, Abigail had the immense pleasure of reading John’s July 3, 1776, letter which has become one of the most famous documents in the nation’s history. “Yesterday the greatest question was decided, which ever was decided in America, and a greater perhaps never was or will be decided among men.” A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony “that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states.” A full-fledged “Declaration of Independency” would be forthcoming in a few days.

  John thought July second, when independence was voted, would be the day everyone would remember. But Thomas Jefferson’s blazing prose made July fourth, when the Declaration was approved, the nation’s birthday. Nonetheless, John’s letter should be read as a companion piece to the great document. No other founding father had his special blend of wary hope and stubborn faith. It was a philosophy he shared wholeheartedly with Abigail. Flowing from their New England heritage, with its pessimistic view of human nature, it has a surprising relevance in twenty-first-century America:

  It may be the will of heaven that America shall suffer calamities still more wasting and distresses, yet more dreadful. If this be the case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us with many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies and vices, which threaten to disturb, dishon-our and destroy us. The furnace of affliction produces refinements, in states as well as in individuals….14

  VI

  Throughout these letters that chart the nation’s zigzag progress toward independence are heart-wrenching cries of endearment. “I read and read again your charming letters, and they serve me in some faint degree as a substitute for the company and comfort of the writer,” John wrote. “I want to take a walk with you in the garden…I want to take Tom in one hand and Charles in the other and walk with you, Nabby on your right hand and John [Quincy] on your left, to view the cornfields, the orchards…”

  From Abigail came: “I long earnestly for a Saturday evening and experience a similar pleasure to that which I used to find in the return of my friend upon that day after a week’s absence.” She told John she was doing her best with “our little ones whom you so often recommend to my care.” But the “precepts” of virtue and probity she preached to them would be “doubly inforced” if there w
as “a father constantly before them.”15

  In spite of these endearing sentiments, John Adams stayed in Congress for thirteen months after independence was declared, with only one visit home in the fall of 1776. In August 1777, Abigail was wistfully telling him it was “eight months since you left me.” She reported a dream in which John returned but treated her “so coldly that my heart ackd [ached] for a half hour after I awoke.” Portia was revealing that she had begun to wonder about her dearest friend’s perpetual absence. Was there some less noble motive besides patriotism involved? Even if patriotism was his motive, why was he bearing so much of the burden? Other lawyers in Boston were making fortunes while he debated in Congress about how to win—or to not lose—the war. Why didn’t he ask them to spend some time in Congress?

  John’s salary fell laughably short of meeting his expenses, and the money issued by Congress was depreciating rapidly, sending prices soaring. Abigail had to deal with no less than six tenants on the Adams farm, all of whom owed John money when he went to Congress in 1774. He huffed and puffed about forcing them to pay up, but he left the job of collecting the cash to Abigail. She coped—and then some. She was soon telling John: “I hope in time to have the reputation of being as good a farmeress as my partner has of being a good statesman.”

  As the months passed, however, the multiplicity of details and the recalcitrance of some of her tenants drained Abigail’s patience and pride. She needed to hire laborers, but there were none to be found. Many young men were being lured into the army with $100 enlistment bounties and others into privateering by the hope of bigger but far more risky money. She finally hired one of her tenants, named Belcher, because he was a hard worker, even if he might occasionally “purloin a little.”16

  VI

  Complicating matters for the first seven months of 1777 was Abigail’s pregnancy. The child had been conceived during John’s visit, and his almost immediate return to Congress had left her feeling doubly bereft and morose. All her pregnancies had been difficult, but this one proved to be especially traumatic. “I am cut off,” she wrote with uncharacteristic gloom, “from the privilege which some of the brute creation enjoy, that of having their mate sit beside them with anxious care during their…confinement.” She was tormented by premonitions of death for herself or the baby in her womb. Political quarrels in Massachusetts added to her discouragement. The countryside had rediscovered its longstanding animosity to Boston, and people were insulting and accusing each other of every fault imaginable. “Avarice, venality, pride, dissipation” prevail, she told her absent friend.