John’s letters to John Quincy were full of diplomatic news, as if he were a junior colleague as much as a son. Once he began his courses at Harvard, John urged him to take full advantage of the educational opportunities: “You are breathing now in the Atmosphere of Science and Literature,” he observed, “the floating particles of which will mix with your whole Mass of Blood and Juices.” John Quincy’s senior oration was a variation of the Adams family mantra on virtue and public service, almost calculated to make his father swoon: “It seems to me, making allowance for a fathers’ Partiality, to be full of manly Sense and Spirit,” John wrote. “By the sentiments and Principles of that oration, I hope you will live and die, and if you do, I don’t care a farthing how many are preferred to you.” The paternal pride was palpable.51
Despite the dramatic difference in attention paid their three sons, it was clear that Abigail and John presumed they had a responsibility to see them all through childhood and adolescence under their demanding parental gaze—most demanding for John Quincy—and then make sure that they all received a college education, an expectation then uncommon, except among elite New England families. Abigail worried that the expensive lifestyle John’s position required had prevented them from saving enough money to cover the looming educational expenses. “We will return poor,” she informed John Quincy, “but if we can get you all through college, the World is all before you, and providence your guide.” In other words, there would be no Adams trust fund. Once launched into the world after Harvard, they were on their own.52
For two elemental reasons, Nabby was a different matter: first, she was a young woman, which meant that educational expectations did not include college; second, she was living with her parents in London, which in practice meant that she spent a good deal of time in the company of her mother. Abigail was, without question, one of the most intelligent and independent women of her time, but she harbored a realistic recognition that the liberation of women from the sexist assumptions of the day—a liberation she correctly considered to be a latent implication of the American Revolution—lay somewhere in the distant future. As she saw it, her maternal obligation was to prepare her daughter to function in the world that was rather than the world that ought to be. When all was said and done, this meant that Nabby needed to become a literate lady who married well.53
For a time, Nabby’s suitor in Braintree, Royall Tyler, remained steadfast, promising to wait for her and formally propose upon her return from Europe. He and Nabby had exchanged miniatures (locket-size portraits) upon her departure and had promised to correspond regularly. Tyler’s prospects ascended when Abigail learned upon meeting John in London that he would bless any decision that Nabby made with her whole heart.
But Tyler failed the distance test. His letters became increasingly infrequent, and the local gossip reported by Abigail’s sisters suggested, albeit in highly elliptical language, that he was seeing other women on the side. This was enough to convince Abigail that her high estimate of Tyler’s character had been misguided. In August 1785, Nabby returned Tyler’s miniature and letters, effectively breaking off the engagement. Abigail’s comment had a terminal tone: “A woman may forgive the man she loves an indiscretion, but never a neglect.”54
A new suitor was already waiting in the wings. In person and on paper, he appeared nothing short of perfect. William Stephens Smith was a dashingly handsome young man appointed by the Continental Congress to serve as John’s private secretary in London. Abigail described him as “a Gentleman in every thought, word and action, domestic in his attachments, quick as lightening in his feelings, but softened in an instant.” His résumé was equally impressive. A graduate of the College of New Jersey, now Princeton, he had served as an officer in the Continental Army with distinction throughout the war, including a stint on Washington’s staff. He was almost too good to be true. And best of all, he was obviously infatuated with Nabby.55
At first, Abigail played her accustomed managerial role. She drafted letters to family and friends in New England, singing the praises of this young man whom no one back home had ever met. And she most probably convinced Smith to give Nabby some space to recover fully from the Tyler affair, which he then did by arranging a somewhat sudden trip to Europe to witness military maneuvers of the Prussian Army. But upon his return, Abigail lost control of the courtship. “What shall I do with my young soldier,” she complained. “I wish he would not be in such a hurry.” Apparently, Nabby and Smith took matters into their own hands and insisted on an accelerated schedule aligned with their own hearts. On June 12, 1786, John gave his only daughter away in a small ceremony at their home on Grosvenor Square. The night before the wedding Abigail confided that she had dreamed of Royall Tyler, and felt emotions toward him that defied description.56
Finally, on another front, it bears notice that John experienced no emotional excesses of the sort that caused him such trouble with Vergennes and the French court, or damaged his reputation back in the Continental Congress with vain statements about his beleaguered sense of self-importance. Given the frustrations he was feeling at the intransigence of the British ministry, one might have expected at least a few Vesuvian moments that defied diplomatic decorum and enhanced his image as a man who was sometimes slightly out of control.
But no such incidents occurred in either Paris or London after Abigail joined him. While it is possible that John suffered from a thyroid imbalance, which provides a physical explanation for his severe mood swings, Abigail’s presence reduced the stress that triggered the emotional reactions. She was his most effective medicine. With her constantly at his side, the explosive energies were drained off before they could build up. Their sense of mutual trust made it more difficult for him to feel isolated and alone, and she could tell him, like no one else, when he was on the verge of making a fool of himself.
CONSTITUTIONS
“Tis true I enjoy good Health,” Abigail informed her sister, “but am larger than both my sisters compounded! Mr. Adams keeps pace with me, and if one horse had to carry us, I pity the poor Beast.” This was her way of warning her relatives that when they eventually saw her after her European sojourn, she was going to be much heavier. She was at pains to assure them, however, that any change in her physical constitution—mostly a function of multiple servants who performed all the household tasks, plus required attendance at lavish dinners—should not be regarded as evidence of her conversion to aristocratic habits. “I shall quit Europe with more pleasure than I came to it,” she insisted, “uncontaminated I hope with its Manners and vices.” The longer she remained in London, the greater was her desire to return to “my little cottage … which has more charms for me than the drawing rooms of St. James, where studied civility, and disguised coldness, cover malignant Hearts.”57
Abigail’s frequent references to her humble Braintree abode, while heartfelt, masked the fact that John had already requested Cotton Tufts, Abigail’s uncle, to begin searching for a larger house, an implicit acknowledgment that a mere cottage, no matter how symbolically resonant, could no longer satisfy their more expansive household requirements, which had grown like Abigail’s girth. Eventually, Tufts arranged for the purchase of the Vassall-Borland house in Braintree, a quite modest country estate by the standards of any French or British aristocrat, but by American standards a handsome home. (Ironically, Royall Tyler was a previous owner.) Later dubbed Peacefield, it became the domestic centerpiece for the Adams family over four generations. Once the purchase was completed, John claimed that knowing it was there, awaiting his return, allowed him to envision the remainder of his life with newfound clarity: “My view is to lay fast of the Town of Braintree,” he wrote Tufts, “and embrace it, with both my Arms and all my might. There to live and there to die—there to lay my Bones.”58
In August 1786 both John and Abigail traveled to the Netherlands, where John completed the negotiations for a commercial treaty with Prussia. Abigail described the Dutch countryside as a monotonous series of “me
adows, Trees, Canals, then more Canals, Trees, and meadows” so boring that she found herself almost hoping to be waylaid by a roadside robber in order to break the spell. Once back in London, John barricaded himself in his study and refused to see official visitors or maintain his diplomatic correspondence. He entered one of those all-consuming zones where, as Abigail described him, “he was as much engaged upon the Subject of Government as Plato was when he wrote his Laws and Republic.”59
He had decided to write a major treatise on the proper shape of constitutions. Given the paralysis on the diplomatic front, it seemed a more productive way to spend his time. And given the reports from Jay back home, which described a mounting recognition that the Articles of Confederation were proving inadequate as the basis for American union, it seemed more important to make a contribution to that looming political debate than to continue his futile conversations with the British ministry.60 Moreover, his own frustrations in Paris and London with an American government unable to speak with one voice on foreign policy predisposed John to accept Jay’s view that reform of the Articles was long overdue. In 1776, he had stepped forward to offer his Thoughts on Government at a crucial political moment. Now he intended to do the same thing at the next stage of the American experiment with republicanism.61
The result was a massive three-volume treatise entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. The title conveyed the main argument, which was a defense of the tripartite arrangement—executive, legislative, judiciary—John had proposed in Thoughts on Government and then implemented in the Massachusetts Constitution. In that sense, Defence was an elaborate recapitulation of his case for three separate branches of government, balanced and counterpoised to check one another, that had become the model for most of the state constitutions. (Pennsylvania and Georgia were the only exceptions.) It was also a lengthy legal brief against the simpler framework of a single-house legislature favored by the French philosophes and currently embodied in the Articles of Confederation; it was an argument for making the state constitutions the model for a revised federal constitution. There was nothing particularly original in this proposal. Jay informed him that most advocates for reform of the Articles were already thinking along the same lines.62
The ostentatious display of learning in Defence—lengthy citations from Machiavelli, Plato, Aristotle, Milton, Hume, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Cicero, to name just a few—exposed John’s need to brandish his credentials as a constitutional authority. One London reviewer described the whole work as a pathetic case of posturing, which he likened to a college essay “written by a youth with a view to obtain some academic prize.” In John’s case, the prize he sought was recognition of his standing as one of America’s premier political thinkers. But the conspicuous erudition of Defence, plus its swollen size—it ran on for nearly a thousand pages—only seemed to reinforce John’s reputation for vanity.63
For those with the stamina to plow through Defence, it was clear that John had inadvertently provided evidence that seemed almost calculated to have a negative impact on his own reputation. His discussion of executive power, for example, reiterated his conviction, first articulated in his draft of the Massachusetts Constitution, that the executive should be empowered to veto a decision by the legislature, a right of veto that could not be overturned by a two-thirds majority. The delegates at the Massachusetts Convention had found this excessive, indeed smacking of monarchy, and had revised his draft so as to restore the legislature’s authority to override. Undeterred, John went back to his original formulation in Defence, claiming that unfettered executive power was essential to ensure balance by offsetting the more dangerous ambitions of political elites sure to dominate the legislature. He argued that the American aversion to a strong executive, while a plausible response to George Ill’s travesties in the prerevolutionary years, had become anachronistic in the postrevolutionary era, when all the state constitutions required that governors be selected by some form of direct or indirect election.
Abigail, who was reading drafts at the end of each day, tried to warn John that his warm embrace of executive power, no matter how republicanized by the American electorate, effectively invited misunderstanding back home. “I tell him,” she informed John Quincy, “that they will think in America that he is setting up a king.” Her instincts on this score proved impeccable, but John was not listening. The only voices he heard came from inside his own head. For Defence had become his all-consuming obsession, the pages pouring out in torrents that defied Abigail’s editorial suggestions much in the way that a catharsis defied correction.
Another theme, also sure to alienate American readers, was his insistence that in all societies, to include the United States, “an aristocracy has risen up in a course of time, consisting of a few rich and honorable families, who have united with each other against both the people and the first magistrate.” Whether this was a hereditary aristocracy, as in Europe, or a natural aristocracy or meritocracy, as in America, was less important than the fact that wealth and talent were never evenly distributed, that elites were an abiding presence in all societies, and one of the main tasks of government was to manage them so as to make use of their talent while preventing their outright domination. His somewhat simplistic solution was the Senate, which would serve as a podium from which to project their power and a prison that confined their ambitions.64
None of this translated very well into the American context, where an all-powerful executive sounded suspiciously like a king, and where the rhetoric of republican equality left no room for an embedded aristocracy, whether hereditary or natural. Abigail was torn between her duties as a wife and as a political partner. As a wife she encouraged John’s emotional investment in Defence, which lent some sense of purpose to their London exile and kept her husband so preoccupied that he did not even look up from his papers when she served him tea. As a political partner, however, she feared that Defence would turn out to be a lengthy political death warrant.
She reconciled these roles by reverting to her “little cottage” refrain, which visualized a life of bucolic splendor in retirement upon their return to America. The damage John was doing, in effect, was irrelevant, because he had no intention of resuming his public career after leaving London. This was a convenient illusion, but Abigail embraced it with all her might. She asked her uncle to spread the word that John was no threat to other aspiring political candidates in Massachusetts, because “he has always dealt too openly and candidly with his Countrymen to be popular.” This was simultaneously a shrewd analysis and a classic case of wishful thinking.65
GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT
In December 1787 news arrived from Philadelphia that John’s resignation, which he had submitted a year earlier, was finally approved. Abigail was overjoyed. She immediately began writing friends and relatives back home to expect her the following spring. Jefferson received the news with mixed feelings: “I learn with real pain the resolution you have taken of quitting Europe,” he apprised John. “Your presence on this side of the Atlantic gave me a confidence that if any difficulties should arise within my department, I should always have one to advise with on whose counsels I could rely. I now feel widowed.”66
As it turned out, fate in the form of the Dutch bankers brought Jefferson and John together for a final joint venture, which proved to be the last time they would work together on public business in perfect harmony. In March 1788 John had decided, without official authorization from the congress, to make a quick trip to The Hague to negotiate an extension of the American loan and a new timetable for the interest payments. Jefferson decided to join him in order to familiarize himself with the financial details, since he would become the responsible American minister upon John’s departure. As he prepared to dash up from Paris, Jefferson alerted John to his plans: “I hope to shake your hand within 24 hours after you receive this.”67
The Dutch bankers, notoriously hard bargainers, had demanded a substantial increase in i
nterest payments because the American government wanted to delay its obligations for two years, when a new federal government would presumably be up and running. John, instead, persuaded them to float several bonds to cover the gap. Jefferson acknowledged that he was a complete innocent on all matters of high finance—indeed, throughout his life he found it impossible to balance his books or to comprehend the impact of compound interest on his debts. John’s deft handling of such details struck him as a kind of magic.
John worried about Jefferson’s competence once he was senior minister in Europe, warning him to be on guard “against the immeasurable avarice of Amsterdam.” He knew he was leaving America’s financial fate in inexperienced hands: “I pity you, in your situation, dunned and teased as you will be, all your philosophy will be wanting to support you. But be not discouraged … Depend upon it, the Amsterdammers love Money too well to execute their threats.”68
Back in London, Abigail relayed the American news reported in the British press. Seven states had ratified the new Constitution, Massachusetts by a narrow margin of 19 votes out of 340 cast: “Thus my dear Friend,” she observed, “I think we shall return to our country at a very important period and with more pleasing prospects opening before her.” This did not quite sound like someone poised for her husband’s retirement.69
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