It was only a minor incident with no immediate policy implications, a small crack in the friendship, swiftly repaired with the aid of Jefferson’s well-intentioned duplicity and John’s eager gullibility. But it turned out to be a premonition of the looming chasm in both the Adams-Jefferson friendship and, more significantly, the political division between warring camps within the infant American republic. This little flurry was a preview of the debate between two revolutionary veterans over nothing less than the true meaning of the American Revolution, the first skirmish in the battle between self-styled Federalists and Republicans over the proper shape of a republic that also aspired to be a nation.
MIDLIFE
In November 1790, when John and Abigail moved to the temporary capital at Philadelphia, he was fifty-five and she was forty-six. The euphemistic term middle-aged had yet to be coined, but they both felt that they were closer to the end than the beginning. At one point Abigail seemed to suggest that the running biological clock had, albeit gradually, transformed the very character of their relationship: “Years subdue the ardour of passion,” she observed, “but in lieu thereof a Friendship and affection deep Rooted persists which defies the Ravages of Time, and will survive whilst the vital Flame persists.”32
To the extent that Abigail’s observation suggested that the sexual dimension of their marriage was finished, both of them furnished evidence that the “vital Flame” remained at least partially physical. For example, when John ended a letter with “I am impatiently yours,” Abigail confessed that the phrase prompted her “to be a little Rhoguish and ask a Question.” Or when she referred to his advancing age in one letter, he reprimanded her in a suggestively jesting way: “But how dare you hint or Lisp a Word about Sixty Years of Age. If I were Here, I would soon convince you that I am not above Forty.” One can never be sure about such long-ago intimacies, but the bulk of the evidence indicates that John and Abigail remained lovers in the physical sense of the term well into middle age.33
Although she was nine years younger than John, the inevitable ravages of time struck Abigail sooner and more dramatically. The first symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis appeared during her London years, but the chronic and degenerative disease advanced to new levels of intensity in the 1790s. “I have been so weakened & debilitated as to be unable to walk alone,” she reported in 1791, “and my Nerves so affected as to oblige me to seclude myself from all company except my most intimate companions.” Her rheumatic symptoms, chiefly swelling of the joints, ebbed and flowed in waves of pain and paralysis, often exacerbated by cold weather and the rigors of travel. During one especially acute attack she was confined to her bed for six weeks. Even writing letters became difficult, because she could not hold a pen.34
By 1792, the end of John’s first term as vice president, the extra weight she had put on in Paris and London was gone. “I have scarcely any flesh left in comparison of what I was,” she reported, probably a function of not being able to eat for prolonged periods. The trip from Braintree to Philadelphia became an excruciating ordeal, limited to only a few hours of travel each day. This was the major reason for her decision to remain at Braintree for John’s entire second term. (Actually, Braintree’s north precinct was incorporated into the town of Quincy in February 1792, so her letters to John ever after reflected the new postmark.) During her last season in Philadelphia she found her social obligations “an Egyptian task” because of her chronic condition, and she was forced to decline about half the invitations for health reasons. Better to remain at home, she decided, than become a burden.35
John’s health problems at midlife were less debilitating. His hair continued to fall out, but that was nothing new, and the practice of wearing wigs on all officiai occasions, though a dying tradition, conveniently covered his naked skull. His teeth went the way of his hair—for whatever reason he never replaced them with a false set—but his speech had not yet become slurred as a consequence. He periodically experienced a feverish condition accompanied by violent chills, what he called an “ague,” malaria-like symptoms that were probably latent remnants of his illness in Amsterdam ten years earlier. But he always recovered quickly and fully.
His most troubling ailments were failing eyesight and persistent tremors in his hands that affected his ability to read and write. When several long letters from John Quincy received only brief responses, he offered his physical degeneration as an excuse: “It is painful to the Vanity of an Old Man to acknowledge the decays of Nature,” he explained, “but I have lost the habit of Writing … from weak Eyes and from a trembling hand to such a degree that a Pen is as terrible to me, as a Sword to a Coward, or as a rod to a child.”36
The tremors, however, came and went, and when in remission allowed him to toss off ten pages without pause. The bloodshot eyes he attributed to a lifetime of reading without proper light, but he stubbornly refused to change his reading habits, declaring in full bravado mode his determination “to sacrifice my Eyes like Milton [i.e., go blind] rather than give up the Amusement without which I should despair.” When Abigail urged him to cut back on his nightly reading, he refused to comply. “The more one reads,” he protested, “the more one sees.”37
In part because he was older, John took these annoying biological reminders of his aging more seriously. He began to fear that he was approaching some chronological line beyond which lay only a downhill slide into senility and death: “How soon will my Sands be run out of the Glass?” he asked Abigail, adding that once you crossed an invisible line “the Days and Hours have additional Wings which then waive and beat with increasingly rapidity.”38
He was especially worried about what he called “dying at the top,” meaning a loss of mental coherence because of dementia or senility. Samuel Adams, then governor of Massachusetts, was apparently suffering from the early stages of dementia, and John cringed when he witnessed “the debilitating Power of Age” during a speech in which the old man made a fool of himself. He had the same reaction when one of his old acquaintances in the Senate lost his train of thought and stumbled his way into complete confusion before his colleagues. The scene, John reported, “moved the tender feeling of any heart for a Friend advanced in years, not many however beyond my own.” Most disconcerting was the alarming realization that neither man was aware of how pitiful he had become, a fate that John vowed to avoid at all costs.39
Abigail was the designated truth teller if such a senior moment arrived, but she herself was having foreboding thoughts about her own final chapters. They were prompted by caring for John’s mother, who was in her mid-eighties and undergoing all the painful tribulations of physical decline, including constant coughing, sleepless nights, an emaciated body, and a listless mind: “My constant attendance upon her has very much lessened my desire of long life,” Abigail confessed to John. “Her fear lest she should recover and become useless, her appearing to have lived out every enjoyment, shows that life is at best a poor play, and the best that can come of it is a miserable Benediction.” Abigail’s chronic battle with rheumatism made her especially sensitive about becoming a hopeless invalid like her mother-in-law, a premonition that paralleled John’s fear of becoming a mindless embarrassment on the public stage. Abigail tended to sustain a stoic stance about the morbid uncertainties of aging, while John veered toward more melodramatic predictions of imminent decline: “My forces of Mind and Body are nearly spent,” he warned. “Few Years remain for me, if any.” At the time, in 1795, he had thirty-one years to go.40
Midlife also required them to renegotiate the relationship with their children, all of whom were now adults out of the nest and no longer mere receptacles into which they could pour their parental wisdom with impunity. Both Abigail and John were accustomed to being hands-on parents, presuming and assuming an authority over their children that verged on the absolute. Now that had to change.
Nabby, after all, was a mother of her own. Abigail relished her new role as grandmother, and when Nabby became pregnant for the third time, she
volunteered to take the two young boys for several weeks. She quickly discovered that Nabby’s parenting style was more permissive than her own, since John Adams Smith, a mere toddler, presumed he had the run of the house. “One great mistake in the education of youth,” she apprised Nabby, “is gratifying every wish of their hearts.” All young children, she thought, “should know how to suffer want.” Eventually, however, she acknowledged that her own views “are so old fashioned that … they are illsuited to modern style and fashion.” Her disciplinary standards continued to melt away as she watched her grandson persuade John to pull him around the room in a chair, “which is generally done for half an hour, to the derangement of my carpet and the amusement of his grandpa.”41
Both Abigail and John developed a growing concern for the career choices that Nabby’s husband was making. William Stephens Smith had presumed that he would be offered a prominent post in the new government. He even had the temerity to propose himself for the ambassadorial vacancy in London based on his previous experience as John’s secretary there. This was considered a quite flagrant act of arrogance by all concerned and was summarily rejected; Smith reacted huffily, vowing to prove his critics wrong by making a private fortune in the lucrative but highly speculative market in western lands. Initially, he enjoyed a measure of success, though John did not approve of his new career or his inflated sense of importance: “He boasts too much of having made his fortune.”42
After Smith spent two weeks with him in Philadelphia, John confided to Abigail that their daughter’s husband “is tormented by his Ambitions, but has taken unsagacious measures to remove his Pains. I know not what he is in Pursuit of.” They both felt that their daughter and grandchildren were dependent on a man whose future depended on winning a high-stakes game of speculation in western lands. But they kept their concern to themselves. Nabby’s fate was no longer within their control.43
At least to a slight extent, John Quincy’s was. As the designated protégé, he was the recipient of the same kind of educational injunctions from his father at twenty-five as he was at five: make yourself a master of the classics, to include Cicero, Livy, Polybius, and Sallust; moreover, you must “read them all in Latin—Nor would I by any means consent that you forget your Greek.” In truth, however, John Quincy was now a young man with an emotional and professional agenda of his own. He had become infatuated with a sixteen-year-old girl named Mary Frazier while setting up his law practice in Newburyport—an entanglement that exposed how his emotional immaturity rested uncomfortably alongside his intellectual precociousness. The love affair—his first—ended when he moved to Boston in search of clients. But they failed to show up. John Quincy was humiliated when he had to inform his father that he could not support himself.44
John rose to the occasion. His son was, he told everyone who would listen, “as great a Scholar as this Country has produced at his Age.” He was not one of those “flashing Insects [who] glitter and glow for a moment and then disappear.” A bit later he claimed that his son “has more Prudence at 27, than his father at 58.” The boy simply needed some help over this temporary hump before soaring to the heights that were his destiny.45
John offered to provide an annual stipend of $100, plus free use of one of his Boston properties as an office and home, until John Quincy could support himself. This was a violation of all his earlier pronouncements against providing financial support beyond college for his children. But once decided, John extended the same level of assistance to Charles and Thomas, presumably as a statement of equity. John Quincy was mortified at the fact of his abiding dependence but was in no position to refuse his father’s offer. John preferred to regard it as a safe and shrewd investment in an extraordinarily talented young man whom he had personally groomed for greatness.46
This investment earned dividends in 1794, when John Quincy was nominated by Washington to serve as American minister to The Hague. The vote in the Senate, which John oversaw, was unanimous, despite John Quincy’s tender age, and despite the inevitable whisperings about nepotism. (But who else could claim fluency in Dutch, French, and Russian?) Washington, who had demonstrated over his long career a true genius at spotting talent, assured John that the choice was based entirely on merit and was likely to be merely the first step in John Quincy’s brilliant career. “I shall be much mistaken,” wrote Washington, “if, in as short a Period as can well be expected, he is not found at the head of the Diplomatic Corps.” Like so many of Washington’s judgments, this proved prescient.47
With John Quincy now launched as an erstwhile American statesman—his brother Thomas was appointed as his secretary, so both of John’s boys would be treading the same paths in The Hague that he had walked a decade earlier—John acknowledged that the torch had been passed to the next generation. John Quincy’s official correspondence from his listening post in the middle of Europe, currently aflame with the political and military conflagration generated by the French Revolution, was immediately recognized for the brilliance of its panoramic scope and mastery of detail. At the height of his own powers, John observed, he could never have duplicated his son’s sagacity. “Go on, my son, in your glorious Career,” he wrote, “and may the Blessings of God crown you with success.” He was an extremely proud parent, who fully recognized that his boy had become his own man.48
The same was not true of Charles, the spoiled son in the Adams family, whom John decided to make his special project. Because the etiquette of the era forbade direct discussion of private domestic problems, the family correspondence makes only elliptical references to the rumors that Charles was drinking heavily. He had apparently fallen in with a rowdy crew at Harvard, been disciplined by the college for running naked while drunk through Harvard Yard, and persisted in his bad habits and bad associations after graduation. John Quincy claimed that he had warned his brother that his behavior, if ever discovered by their father, would produce massive explosions: “I wrote him a very serious letter three weeks ago,” he confided to his uncle, “upon the subject in such a manner as must, I think, lead him to be more cautious.” Abigail took the view that Charles had sowed some wild oats at Harvard, but would recover once removed from the influence of his college companions.49
Nevertheless, the decision that Charles should read law in New York reflected the recognition that he required parental supervision, which could best occur if he lived with Abigail and John at Richmond Hill. By all accounts, Charles was a model law student. “I sometimes think his application too intense,” Abigail observed, “but better so, than too remis.” After his parents moved to Philadelphia, Charles opened his law office just off Wall Street and, unlike John Quincy, was flooded with clients based on his growing reputation as one of the brightest and most personable young lawyers in the city.50
John decided to initiate what became a voluminous correspondence with Charles in 1792, not so much because he still harbored fears of his son’s addiction to alcohol, but mostly because he wanted to carve out a more mature adult-to-adult relationship based on their mutual interests in politics and the law. He sold his own horses in order to purchase the most up-to-date law books for Charles.
During a four-month period in the spring of 1794, John wrote thirty long letters to Charles, asking his legal opinion on America’s treaty obligations to France; bombarding him with lengthy discourses on the misleading doctrine of equality as promulgated by the French philosophes; urging him to broaden his base of knowledge by reading Confucius, Socrates, Plutarch, Seneca, and Epictetus; asking his advice about the convoluted politics of New York; and answering his questions about the existence of any thoroughly democratic societies in world history (“Yes, my son, there are many Such Societies in the Forests of America, called Indian Tribes”).51
He invited Charles to visit him for a week in Philadelphia (offering to pay all expenses), join him to observe the Senate, attend a levee, mingle with the prominent players, let a proud father show him off. Charles did visit, and after he left John described his fav
orite scene: father and son sitting together after attending a dinner, smoking cigars, sharing their reactions to the political gossip, bantering as friends into the night.52
Once back in New York, Charles received a letter from John in the parental mode: “You appeared to me, when you were here,” wrote John, “to be too plethorick,” meaning bloated. “There are innumerable Disorders which originate in Fulness, especially in a sedentary and studious life. You must rouse yourself from your Lethargy and take your Walk every Day.” Only with the advantage of hindsight, knowing as we do that Charles would die of complications from alcoholism five years later, is it possible to recognize that his bloated condition was most probably not the result of inadequate exercise. He had become an alcoholic who was extremely adroit at concealing his addiction from his father and, for that matter, from everyone else, except his wife.53
PARTISAN POLITICS
When John returned to his post in the Senate in December 1792, the first order of business was to oversee the official counting of the electoral votes for president and vice president. Washington’s reelection was assured, and the tally revealed that, once again, he was a unanimous choice with 132 electoral votes. John’s reelection was less foreordained, creating the awkward prospect of certifying his own rejection by the electorate. Despite opposition from New York and several southern states, which rallied behind Governor George Clinton of New York, John was comfortably reelected with 77 votes to 50 for Clinton. “It does not appear,” he wrote Abigail, “that I am born to so good Fortune as to be a mere Farmer in my old Age.”54
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